Founders. Visionaries. Industry Leaders.
Discover the people building enduring companies and shaping the future of business. Through in-depth interviews, founder stories, business playbooks, and behind-the-scenes insights, Black Elites Profiles explores the journeys, strategies, and lessons of entrepreneurs and executives creating the next generation of category-defining brands.
In Profile
Clock ticking. Two minutes, four seconds left on the arena board in Milan, and gold was walking right out the door. Down 1–0 against Canada in the championship round, Team USA pulled their goalie...
Here’s the thing about Fenty Beauty: it’s not really a celebrity-brand story, even though everyone wants to file it under that. Sure, celebrity got people to look. But looking...
Kendrick Lamar grew up on welfare, food stamps, and Section 8 housing. His mom actually sat him down as a kid to explain how the Housing Authority worked. But here’s what sets Kendrick apart: he...
In the mid-1990s, there was a fairly standard route into the music business: get signed, let a record label fund and distribute your music, and hope it could get you in front of a national audience...
June 1996. Don Peebles is standing in front of a 417-room ruin at the dead end of Ocean Drive, and he’s about to bid on it with money he doesn’t fully have secured, in a city where...
Jessica O. Matthews had a celebrated invention, media attention, and a compelling social-impact story. Then she spent $150,000 raised from friends and family on an effectively unusable prototype: a...
Raising capital nearly broke Jewel Burks Solomon. She was a Black founder trying to get into rooms that weren’t built for her, watching good companies get passed over because investors...
Reinventing a legacy business starts with figuring out what people actually loved about it. When David Rawlinson took over Qurate Retail in 2021, he inherited QVC and HSN, two brands built around...
Three weeks after Anok Yai stood on the stage at London’s Royal Albert Hall and was finally, after two prior losses, crowned Model of the Year, she was lying in a hospital bed at NYU Langone...