t Moe’s Hair Hut in Harlem, Raven Johnson, 24, wants to look good for her upcoming baby shower. She’s used to paying as much as $500 for a weave. That includes $250 for long, silky human-hair extensions and another $250 for the stylist who sews them into the tight braids of Johnson’s own hair.
Before Mayvenn launched, black women bought their hair mostly from Korean-controlled beauty-supply stores. “All the money was flowing outside the black community,” says Imira, who’s dressed in a dark gray T-shirt, gray sweatpants and spotless gray Nikes with no socks. He’s sitting in front of a Mac laptop and a 27-inch monitor in his office in downtown Oakland, California. Aside from two cases of Hennessy VSOP stacked by the door, a gift from a friend, the gray-carpeted office is bare.
He enrolled in an international business program at Georgia State University, studying in Brazil and at the Sorbonne in Paris and doing internships in China and at Ernst & Young’s office in Addis Ababa. In 2010, M.B.A. in hand, he wanted to start a business but didn’t know what kind. He moved in with his mother in Oakland, working menial jobs, like parking cars, and mulling his next move. He describes the succeeding two years as “pretty rough for me psychologically.
In Silicon Valley, 35 miles from Oakland, he knew that venture capitalists were “writing multimillion-dollar checks to startup founders in hoodies and flip-flops, but I didn’t know a single person there, and I didn’t know how to get there.” To find his way in, beginning in late 2012, he went to panel discussions hosted by venture firms and to Wednesday-night gatherings of a group called Black Founders at a San Francisco bar.
Learning to shoot for big checks was a process. “For many African American founders, it’s not natural to ask for $10 million,” Imira says. It helped that Ben Horowitz, whose wife is black, understood Mayvenn’s market. “I knew the problem he was solving,” says Horowitz, who sits on Mayvenn’s board. Though stylists have to accept a discount for their services, they benefit by gaining customers with little effort. Oakland stylist Ariahnn Turner, 25, has gotten 26 new clients since she joined the Mayvenn program in January. “It’s a win for me,” she says.
ha ha, very funny (t iii/iii/iii)
👏🏽
Hairbnb?