“Hello, Darling!!!”

Emma Grede sings as she glides into the room, and though it’s the first time I’m hearing her voice in person, it lands as familiar as a friend’s. For the past year, her podcast Aspire has turned out interview after interview that Ambitious Material Girls everywhere have hung on to, me at the front of that line. She’s let us witness the glamour and the grit of the spectacular life she’s built, honest about all of it, even when the truth came with criticism.

Emma has been one of my north stars for years, living proof that a girl with big dreams and no safety net can build an empire and still sound exactly like herself.

For those of us who climbed out of poverty into heights our families have never seen, that proof runs even deeper. Every step up arrives with its own cocktail of pride, guilt, wonder, and loneliness. Nobody quite gets it, and I wouldn’t want you to have to. It’s also exactly why I feel so connected to her.

In this conversation and in person, she beams with generosity, clearly there to over-give to the women she came to serve. Women like Emma, whose standards for themselves and for everyone around them set a bar that dares the rest of us to rise, are the ones who change this world. Her skin is also insane and she is even more beautiful in person, so don’t worry, I asked for every single product rec at the end.

P.S. Give it up for who redesigned TSFT for us under the wire — say hello to our amazing new branding <3 I LOVE U TO THE MOON N BACK ESSENCE!

Here’s my conversation with Patron Saint of Ambitious Material Girls: Emma Grede.

Let’s check the resumé:

• Cofounded Good American with Khloé Kardashian in 2016, a size-inclusive denim brand that did a reported $1 million in sales on its first day. She’s the CEO, and she owns 46% of it.

• Founding Partner of SKIMS, where she’s also chief product officer. The company was valued at $5 billion in a Goldman Sachs-led round late last year.

• Built and sold a company before any of that. ITB Worldwide, the brand partnership agency she started in London at twenty-six and sold in 2018. Safely and Off Season came later, because why stop.

• Made history on Shark Tank as the first Black woman to sit in a Shark’s chair, and has since been named one of Forbes’s America’s Richest Self-Made Women.

• Wrote Start With Yourself, hosts Aspire, chairs the 15 Percent Pledge, and runs all of it from Los Angeles with her husband, Jens, and their four children.

The Anger We Swallow

AB: You write candidly about anger in your book, mostly the louder version. I’ve tended toward the opposite: fear of the “angry Black girl” archetype taught me to repress mine. Has there been a quieter moment when swallowed anger cost you something?

EG: For me, the quieter version of anger was actually the more damaging one. I carried unresolved anger from childhood for years, convincing myself that staying silent was the same thing as moving on. It wasn’t.

What I eventually learned is that healing isn’t about pretending you’re not angry. It’s about acknowledging it, processing it, and then deciding what you want to do with it. Once I stopped carrying old anger around, I had a lot more energy for the life I wanted to build.

AB: Was there a moment you stopped building your life as a reaction to your past, running from pain and poverty, and started architecting your future on purpose?

EG: I had to learn early to stop blaming my circumstances, and where I was from, for the lack of opportunity around me. I was surrounded by all these guys who had talent and got out: footballers, MCs, rappers. I didn’t have that type of obvious talent, but I did know how to work hard and say yes to anything that presented itself.

I don’t know that I could boil it down to a specific moment in time, but I had a close friend who went to jail for a very long time. He believed in me so much, it gave me a sense that I owed it to him to do something with the trust and belief he had in me, seeing as his opportunities were no longer his own.

AB: I’d love specifics from the anger management course. What did they teach you that you still use every day?

EG: I went into anger management assuming the goal was to stop feeling angry, but that wasn’t it at all. The focus was on learning how to respond to anger instead of being controlled by it.

The practices I still use are surprisingly simple: pause, breathe, come back into my body, and give myself enough space to respond intentionally instead of reacting automatically.

The other big thing I learned is that not every moment requires an in-the-moment response. Where I grew up, not having an immediate rebuttal at the ready felt like backing down. With age, I learned that time is a tool. How I feel about something in that exact moment usually changes with time, so I owe myself that time.

Deciding What Deserves an Answer

AB: You recently responded to people crediting your success to your husband, and I admired that you defended the life you built. Privilege can be real, and there’s a difference between acknowledging it and letting someone rewrite your story. What made that moment worth answering, and how did you turn the anger into something useful?

EG: It’s vital to acknowledge privilege and the people who’ve helped me along the way. Nobody builds anything alone. Acknowledging support shouldn’t require erasing my own agency.

Too often, women are taught to attribute their success to everyone except themselves. I’m proud of what I’ve built, and I think more women should feel comfortable saying that. We spend too much time diminishing our own contributions before anyone else gets the chance.

AB: As you’ve become more successful, how have you kept relationships with people whose ambition or lifestyle looks very different from yours? Have you had to redefine them?

EG: Success changes your relationships because it changes you, and I don’t think we should pretend otherwise. I’ve learned that not everyone is meant to come with you into every chapter of your life, and that’s okay.

The friendships I’ve held onto are built on trust, honesty, and genuine love, not whether we’re on the same career path. I don’t need everyone to understand my ambition, but I do need the people closest to me to respect it.

Family is the exception. No matter what my career demands, they’ve always come first. Work changes, success comes and goes, but those relationships don’t.

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Agency, Applied

AB: You’ve managed and mentored thousands of people. What separates the ones who execute well from the ones who consistently rise into leadership?

The people who become leaders stop waiting to be told what to do. They don’t just execute the plan; they challenge it, improve it, and take responsibility for the outcome.

Too many people, especially women, have been conditioned to believe that if they work hard enough, someone will eventually notice. That’s an employee mindset. Leadership begins the moment you decide you’re responsible, before anyone gives you the title.

EG: On the founder side, what’s the first sign someone is still operating with an employee mindset, the one that makes you pass on working with them?

The biggest tell is that they’re still looking for permission. They’re waiting for the perfect investor, the perfect introduction, the perfect timing, or someone else to validate that their idea is good enough.

Building a business requires agency. There is no passive way to succeed. You have to make decisions before you have all the answers and trust yourself to figure out the rest.

AB: Once someone realizes she’s still thinking like an employee, how does she retrain herself to think bigger? What habits helped you expand your own ambition?

EG: Start by writing your own vision instead of borrowing someone else’s definition of success.

Every year, I map out where I’m going, and then I work backwards into the habits, relationships, and decisions that will get me there.

I also challenge every “Old Thought” that tells me to wait, play small, or soften my ambition. Most of the limitations women experience aren’t capability problems. They’re conditioning.

AB: Imagine someone is bootstrapping her first company today. What’s your order of operations for creating leverage? Who do you hire first, and what do founders wait too long to delegate?

EG: Your first hire should buy back your time so you can spend more of it creating value. Founders wait far too long to delegate administration and operations because they confuse being busy with being productive.

Your job isn’t to do everything. It’s to spend your energy on the work that only you can do: selling, building relationships, making decisions, and creating the vision for where the business is going next.

AB: Building a business is one thing. Building a life that can sustain it is another. Outside of work, what was the first thing you outsourced, and what gives you the biggest return?

EG: I realized very early that time was my most valuable asset. One of the first things I wanted was a housekeeper every two weeks, not because I wanted luxury, but because I wanted leverage.

Every hour I can buy back is an hour I can spend building my business, being present with my family, or simply thinking.

The biggest return doesn’t come from outsourcing one task. It comes from protecting your energy for the work that only you can do. That’s one of the highest-return investments I’ve ever made.

The Last Word

AB: At what point did you realize your own perspective had become an asset worth building alongside your companies?

EG: I never set out to build a personal brand. I set out to build businesses. Over time, I realized people weren’t just interested in what I’d built; they wanted to understand how I think.

That shifted my focus from building companies alone to sharing the mindset behind them, and it was one of the main drivers for writing Start With Yourself and for my podcast, Aspire with Emma Grede.

AB: You’ve built businesses, invested in founders, and become one of the most respected operators in the world. What chapter are you building toward now?

I started Aspire to make sure we see and hear from more models of possibility (incredible women actually doing shit), and to put a spotlight on where we’re limiting our thinking, and therefore our potential. I only really care that I do what I set out to do.

AB: We ask every guest to finish this sentence: “You are too smart for...”

EG: ...absorbing other people’s thoughts.

Tools of the Trade: Emma’s systems

• The annual vision map. Every year she writes down where she’s going, then works backwards into the habits, relationships, and decisions that will get her there.

• The Old Thoughts audit. Any thought telling her to wait, play small, or soften her ambition gets challenged.

• The pause. Pause, breathe, come back into the body, then respond on purpose.

• Time as a tool. Not every moment requires an in-the-moment response. The feeling in the moment usually changes.

• The first-hire rule. Hire to buy back your own time, starting with administration and operations.

• The biweekly housekeeper. Her first outsourced task, and one of her highest-return investments.

Alexis’ Annotations

What I underlined, and how I’m putting it to work.

1. Swallowed anger still costs you. I’m treating my frustration as information now, writing down what set it off and what it’s asking me to build before I decide what to do with it.

2. Time is a tool. When something stings, I’m giving myself a full day before I respond, since I owe myself that time.

3. Sort the irritating from the wholly incorrect. Before I answer anything this season, I’m asking whether it’s merely annoying or actually untrue, and only responding to the second.

4. Belief is a debt worth honoring. I’m keeping a list of everyone who bet on me before I had proof, starting with my grandmother, and rereading it on the hard days.

5. Stop waiting for permission. I’m mapping my next three years on paper this month and working backwards into the decisions I’ve been waiting for someone else to approve.

6. Leverage starts small. I’m handing off one more task this quarter so my hours go to the work only I can do.

7. Ask for respect, even where you can’t get understanding. I’m asking the people closest to me to respect my ambition, and making peace with the ones who may never fully understand it.

Tell me in the comments: which annotation hit hardest, and what story about you has been circulating unanswered?

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If this issue meant something to you, subscribe so the next Annotated lands in your inbox, and forward it to the woman in your life who’s building something bigger than anyone around her can see yet.

Alexis xx

One more thing before you go. Emma spent years letting her work speak while other people wrote the story around it, and most of us are doing some version of that right now. CREDIBLE is my free workshop on building the kind of visibility that makes your expertise undeniable. October 4 at 11am ET. Register here.

Hello stars,

It should come as no surprise that I talk a lot of sh*t.

“Strong opinions, loosely held,” I like to say. As a triple fire sign, I love to complain, judge, pile on, make conversation, etc. Gossip is an art, okay? It’s FUN, not usually serious!! But while I’m generally hard to impress, I am always open to changing my mind.

I’ve talked a LOT of sh*t about the Hamptons (expensive, lack of diversity, played out). I’ve talked even more sh*t about creator economy tools (unsophisticated, cash grabs, irrelevant). And yet, at 9 a.m. on a random Tuesday in August, I found myself on the Long Island Rail Road heading out east for lunch with a creator economy startup.

There were a myriad of brand events taking place in the Hamptons, and I thought maybe, if just I dressed the trip up with a color-coded calendar, I could call it an intentional business excursion!

But truthfully, I still had low expectations for the ROI. I had deadlines, admin, writing to finish and absolutely no guarantee that this lunch would be worth the money or the hours spent commuting, but stepping off the train to fresh air and actual silence had me in the mood to make the most of it.

I had no idea that YouPop’s lead investor, Kate McAndrew, was hosting a dinner the next night. I had no idea I would end up at that dinner seated next to the founder. I definitely did not know that less than three weeks later I would be back in a tech office with a new role and a new team, but here we are.

I don’t believe in most creator tools

The creator economy is growing quickly, which means it attracts the exact type of person who’s ready to exploit a promising CAGR and raise a million dollars for a “brand-creator connector tool,” or “better affiliate linking!” and starts building before ever speaking to a real influencer or bothering to download CapCut.

Meanwhile, actual creator businesses are held together with 17 spreadsheets, disappearing email threads, scattered contracts, six revenue streams on 10 platforms and the increasingly questionable memory of the creator who is also the talent, strategist, salesperson, finance department and creative director.

I KNOW this because I have been DOING IT for six years. I have missed revenue because something was disorganized. I have lost hours re-editing because I filmed the wrong concept. I have watched these flashy creator “tools” solve one tiny part of a marketer’s job while creating three more tabs I have to keep open.

So when I arrived at the YouPop lunch, I was prepared to be skeptical. Soon, I became irritated.

YouPop’s founder, Sarina Virk Torrendell, was employee number 12 at Postmates and went on to work across verticals at Apple Pay, Meta and Amazon. She understood both how hard it is to build consumer technology and the exact problem creators were living with.

Then Kate McAndrew, YouPop’s lead investor (who you’ve probably seen on your TikTok feed), explained the diligence behind her conviction in Sarina—not only as someone with the idea, but as an operator who could actually ship it.

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That mattered because the concept itself made total sense. I had thought endlessly about the problem too: creators need one place to run businesses that have outgrown the systems we stitched together ourselves. But I didn’t trust many people to build that until I heard Kate’s conviction.

A good founder is one thing, but the engineering power is what really sold me. From working on YouTube Shorts, I know how difficult it is to build something that looks simple to the person using it. The more I understood what they had already built—and how much real creator context was imperative to make it better—the more irritated I became.

Following Your Frustration

One thing I have learned about myself in the last year is that my frustration is exceptionally useful information.

I used to suppress it—being called an angry Black girl one too many times growing up will do that to you—but now I realize that frustration is typically the first evidence that something matters to me.

Like, when I get upset that someone does not understand something, it often means two things: I have the capacity to explain it, and I care enough to want them to understand.

I could immediately see how necessary this product was. I could also see how much context from a real creator business it would need in order to become truly indispensable.

I sat on the couch quietly bubbling. My mind was flooded with opinions, ideas, and extremely specific thoughts about how creators actually operate once our businesses become bigger than a Notes app, a prayer and one very stressed assistant (sorry Martina!)

Something switched on.

While lunch was a gathering of creators who were also angel investors, and YouPop was primarily looking for creator advisors, I knew I wanted to contribute more deeply, so I quickly made a beeline for the team to tell them I wanted to be more involved.

It reminded me of how I felt when I moved into YouTube Shorts. I had spent years developing instincts about content, creators and audiences, and suddenly there was somewhere useful for all of that knowledge to go. (And yes, my manager did say he hired me because I talked sh*t about YouTube in the interview.)

That feeling does not mean every annoying situation is your calling: maybe you don’t need to become the Chief Operating Officer of your workout studio because the booking system isn’t advanced enough!!!

But when frustration comes with clarity—when you can see the missing piece and know exactly what you could contribute—it is worth paying attention.

The details of what happened next do not really matter to you, but what does matter is that I found myself at dinner with Sarina the next night, and less than three weeks later I arrived at the office for my first day as Head of Creator Growth and Product at a pre-seed startup. LOL.

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Chaos begets connection

My creator business has made more money this year than ever before. I just hit 50,000 followers on Instagram. The brand deals are getting bigger, better and more aligned. This summer alone, I was featured in People, Vogue Business, and Byrdie. I have a newsletter, a podcast, speaking, education products, advisory work and a book that I am actively working to bring into the world.

So why would I add this role to something that’s already working?

I talk constantly about going from chaotic to intentional, but I do not think becoming intentional means eliminating every impulsive decision from your life. Sometimes stepping outside your perfectly rational plan is how you expand the opportunities available to you. The intentional work begins when you decide what to do with what you found there.

Lord knows I didn’t need another job, but I have been craving a challenge and some structure for a LONG time now. I was getting that with book writing and courses, but it is still pretty lonely, and I feel my best when I’m in community.

I’ve been teaching, but I’ve been desperate to learn. At 27, I know I don’t know everything, and I know that I want to have so much potential that I wanted to get closer to.

I knew my strongest skills. I knew which problems I wanted to solve. I knew what I wanted to learn, where I could make a distinctive contribution and what I was unwilling to give up.

I had also spent the last year building more structure and team support across my business, meaning I had the space to meet my current obligations while also taking on a new role.

The opportunity had to make the entire system stronger. Because I had spent years reflecting on what I’m good at, what I want and how I work best, I could identify pretty quickly that it did.

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Unfortunately, I’m About to Bring Up Business School

In Strategic Management, I learned about Michael Porter’s activity systems: the idea that a company’s advantage does not come from one impressive activity that they may be known for, but from a set of choices and activities that fit together and reinforce one another.

The point is that every part of the business and every decision helps the others deliver the same strategy. That fit is what makes the whole business stronger—and much harder to copy—than any individual tactic.

The example we studied was Zara.

Zara’s advantage was not simply “fast fashion.” There are PLENTY of fast-fashion retailers. For Zara, speed was the outcome of a system. Store teams gathered information about what customers wanted. A wide variety of styles and frequent product changes created urgency and gave customers a reason to return. Flexible production and close coordination with factories allowed the company to respond quickly. Prime store locations built visibility, while frequent visits and word of mouth reduced its dependence on traditional advertising.

Each activity made the others more valuable. The store information mattered because production could respond. Fast production mattered because products could reach stores frequently. Frequent newness mattered because customers had learned that waiting might mean missing the item.

So when Zara decides what to invest in, it prioritizes things that make information move faster, stores that meaningfully add visibility and elevated artistic direction that keeps the brand adjacent to high-end fashion.

You can copy a Zara design or store layout. You cannot easily copy the entire business that allowed Zara to notice, produce, distribute and sell it before everyone was tired of the trend.

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Over the past year and a half, I have built my own portfolio career almost accidentally.

I keep coming back to the activity system because it helps me understand why I do everything I do: content, writing, teaching creators, advising, speaking, podcasting, working with brands and writing a book. That list explains what I do, but it does not explain why those things belong together.

So I mapped it.

Below, I’m sharing the actual Alexis Barber activity system: how each part of my business produces the ideas, relationships, revenue, authority and information that make the other parts stronger—and why going back to the office is not a departure from the business I’ve built.

If you’re building your own portfolio career—or even trying to understand where a side hustle belongs—an activity system can show you whether the pieces of your business actually strengthen one another.

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Hello, stars.

I crawled into bed last night already nostalgic for the tail end of Summer 2026, both mind boggled by the transformations August brought and eager for my favorite season to start.

Smart Girls LOVE September; we get permission from the seasonal shift to indulge in big new plans, crisp notebooks, hot lattes, and new boots. In New York, the sec…

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What a treat to see so many of you tune into my live this morning! Anyone who couldn’t make it, catch the recording here and on my YouTube.

My biggest pet peeve with building “personal brands” is that most people compare themselves to the wrong person.

You’ve been holding yourself to some invisible content standard: a podcast a week, a YouTube a week, three TikToks a day, two Instagram posts, a LinkedIn. I did this too, when I had maybe four hours a week to actually spend on content. It’s a setup for shame!

When you create a content strategy without a vision, goals, or capacity constraints, you will BURN OUT and resent it. But then you’ll miss out on the good parts, too!

SCALE is the framework I use to help busy professionals, founders, and creatives get clear on what they want to do and what they CAN do to show up online without getting a second personal job. Here’s the refresher, catch the live or the YouTube for the full breakdown:

Skills — what you’re actually good at. Mine is live, workshops, writing. Not short-form trends, so I stopped forcing them.

Capacity — your real hours in a bad week and a good week. Set an honest floor and ceiling so falling off doesn’t spiral into quitting.

Affinities — what you genuinely like making and watching. Everyone can tell when you’re posting out of obligation. Nobody cares. You’re more interesting than that.

Lifestyle — what your days actually hold. A doctor in the office all day has to batch. A freelancer can film anytime. Build content into your life, don’t bolt it on.

Energy — the way you show up. Teacher, curator, operator with receipts. Stop comparing yourself to the metrics of a niche that was never yours.

A dermatologist and a B2B founder should not have the same content plan. One posts once a week, one posts fifty times. SCALE is what makes it yours!

But none of it works without the step WAY TOO MANY people skip: a vision.

Where are you on a random Tuesday three years from now? What are you doing, who are you talking to, how are you making money? Get specific. If you don’t know why you’re building this or who it’s for, you won’t stick with it.

Creator Essentials is the program for moving through all of this with support, frameworks, and other women doing it just like you. We start Tuesday and there’s still room to join!

The opportunities don’t come until the clarity does. Believe me, I’ve been there!

xx

Alexis

Thank you , , , , , and many others for tuning into my live video! Join me for my next live video in the app.

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"As a marketer, I was confident telling stories for the companies I worked for, but I never realized how hard it would be to tell my own stories. Creator Essentials cha…

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Cue the tears! In the most romantic bar, in the most romantic city in the world, on my very first trip to Paris, sobbing while the person I loved most explained, so gently, that he didn’t believe in me. If you’re new here: I cry often, and I’ve made peace with it. That night, I had not.

Cut to three years later, on my (current) seventh trip to Paris. I’ve just come off the most magical week at Cannes Lions, and was walking home from a long, glorious lunch with a few ambitious material girls I’d met at the club in the South of France. In the middle of listening to Olivia Rodrigo’s drop dead for the 117th time, I looked up: the Ritz Paris entrance stood before me. I chuckled.

Time to rewrite this one, I thought.

So I walked in for only the second time ever, took the last seat at the bar, and ordered a French 75 to toast a first half of the year that included multi-six figures across 25+ brand partnerships, 50+ women coached into building their own brands, one book published, and a second one begun, and a budding speaking career.

The gentleman next to me asked about my work. Turns out he was a Silicon Valley heavyweight, a fellow Northwestern alum, on the board no less, with a daughter starting there in the fall. He gave me genuinely great advice, told me my career was impressive — that it’s even what his daughter aspired to — and we traded contacts. Lovely man.

The validation was nice. I just didn’t need it anymore.

I’d already given it to myself.

For most of the past three years, some small part of me believed my ex.

Every time I grew slower than I wanted, made less than the quarter before, or watched a plan fall apart, that part whispered, see, he was right. I even developed a habit of handing my worth to men, successful or not, as a form of self-protection. But all my bad choices with the wrong guys or the wrong advisers have actually just reflected back to me that I can actually trust my own intuition.

To be clear, this is not a perfectly clean comeback story. I scaled a robe company and then closed it. I almost walked away from content entirely, then doubled my audience in a year. I’ve had six-figure quarters and I’ve had quarters with nothing in my account.

But every single time something went well or went to shit, I got back up, found the creativity again, trusted my vision, and took another step towards my own dreams.

Every version of me that made it through the last few years made it because she moved before she felt prepared.

I hired my assistant before the money was allocated, because I decided the year was happening and the money always comes. I opened office hours before I felt qualified to charge, and they sold out from a single Instagram story. Every one of those was an action I took while scared (VERY!!SCARED!!!), and every one of them left a receipt, a piece of data that has turned into undeniable proof that, well, I’m an excellent entrepreneur.

Resilience, the exact thing he said I didn’t have, is what these reps compounded into (btw I’ve always had it — I did grow up in the projects for God’s sake!) You aren’t born with grit. You move before you feel ready, over and over, and each time a little more evidence lands, until one day you notice you can handle anything, which is the only definition of the word that has ever mattered.

The peace I felt at that bar was earned the boring way. One action at a time, most of them taken while I had no idea how any of it would work. I have enough proof for myself that I can make anything happen, and I’m only at the beginning of my arc. That’s what made me cry on the way out this time — gratitude.

And to be crystal clear, I’m not someone who is motivated by spite.

(if I was, I’d be a billionaire by now lol y’all STAY underestimating me!) I didn’t walk back into that room to ‘win’ and I have no time to have ill will towards my exes or even my ops. I walked in because I’d become a woman the old story doesn’t fit anymore AND I WANT TO ENJOY THE RITZ PARIS.

So if you’re waiting to feel ready, to feel resilient, to feel sure, stop waiting. Readiness is the reward for starting, and it shows up after. Do the thing badly. Show back up. Let the receipts pile so high that nobody’s opinion of your ambition can move you an inch. Not your mentor. Not the man at the bar. Not even the man you love the most.

It’s none of your business what other people think you’re capable of. Somewhere across three years and seven trips to Paris, it became none of mine.

A few of you might be feeling this in your chest - and you know why.

If you’re a high achiever with real traction, building your brand around the skills or the business you already have, I’m right there with you. We have enough well-documented women on the internet. We need more well-rounded ones, the kind building their content around an actual skill set instead of a camera roll.

The Authority Edit, my small-group advisory, is for girls ready to take advantage of this moment and scale fast. You already have traction. You have receipts. You’re staring down multiple six figures, or seven, and the only thing standing between you and it is a positioning problem you cannot solve from inside your own head.

Over the six months, I’ve helped women gain hundreds of thousands of followers and make multiple six figures from their content, the same thing I’ve built for myself, and I want to do it with more of you who are TRULY serious about scaling your impact. If you want a pep talk, or permission to start, or to get comfortable with creating content for the first time, I love you, and this is the wrong room.

If that’s you, you knew by the second paragraph. My inbox is open — respond to this and tell me what you’re stuck on to see if it’s the right fit.

Until next time,

Alexis xx

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Where else does a work trip involve dancing on boats with CMOs, getting interviewed by a Love Islander, and yapping in the club with Flava Flav and Miguel?

Welcome to Cannes Lions, the biggest advertising festival in the world. Underneath the movie of it all, something very real is happening — and the opportunity for Smart Girls to take advantage of it is ripe.

Here’s everything I saw, what I did, and what I’m changing in my business because of it.

Also - this one’s for the DMs that keep coming in. So many of you have asked me how I “manifested” Cannes. How I got there, how I pulled it off, how the last six months of my career have transformed. So I’m going to go live tomorrow, July 3, at 8am EST for an H2 planning featuring how I got through the hardest year of my life and created…well…a dream career.

First, AMG Rule #1: I never look like my problems. But I’ll tell you the truth….

Seven days. Barely any food — every restaurant on the Croisette is bought out by a brand, no wristband no entry, and inside they’re serving hors d’oeuvres instead of anything you could call a meal (IYKYK).

One real bout of food poisoning (like, can I Live??). Home at 6am more than once, running on almost no sleep, closing deals in the early hours of the morning. And five nights dancing on my bestie’s company yacht with Babyface, Fat Joe, and Wyclef Jean, among MANY others.

It was…a movie, I fear! Not all champagne and golden hour — but a lot of it was. I’d do every bit of it again, and very much plan to.

What I Learned: My takes have been right all along. Welcome to the Credibility Economy.

Too Smart For This.

Welcome To The Credibility Economy

Hello Stars…

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5 months ago · 58 likes · 2 comments · Alexis Barber

A year ago, 0% of my deals were B2B, today, that number is closer to 70%. My highest paid deals prior to this were from big Pharma or beauty brands, and today, b2b has entered the chat.

That B2B number above is a market telling you exactly what it values. Brands are reaching for substance over aesthetics, because UGC and AI already handle “pretty.” Entertaining content? Solved. Meaningful content? That’s the opportunity, and it’s why I’m so bullish on more Smart Girls On The Internet.

What’s scarce is a real point of view, real expertise, a real reason to trust you.

Think about it this way: smart (successful) brands are putting actual dermatologists in ambassador seats over girls who are simply beautiful. (Both can be true at once, obviously; this is an AMG newsletter.) But the credential is why the Derm with 10k followers gets paid the same as the cutie with 100k. You get it

The take I’m most sure about: the creator economy isn’t a vertical. It’s horizontal. We touch everything.

That’s why Sports had a bigger footprint this year. Why beauty was everywhere. Why B2B brands were competing for creator clout. Creators aren’t a little category sitting off to the side of the “real” industries — we run THROUGH all of them. Finance, sports, beauty, tech, fashion: every one of those rooms needs someone who can make people feel something and move them to act. That’s us.

The industry just hasn’t caught up to that yet. It’s still SO fragmented — too many agencies, too many silos, nobody drawing the through-line. And normally I’d complain about that (I did, out loud, to some very nice brand people at LinkedIn). But fragmentation is just opportunity: when no one has claimed the space, you get to.

The brands already figured this out — half of them are quietly becoming production companies (hello Coach x Spotify), hiring creators outright, building studios in-house. The smart ones stopped renting our attention and started building with us!

And because the space is this wide open, there’s no longer one “right” way to be a creator. From what I can see, it’s splitting into a few lanes:

• The ones who make great content and get paid well for it — they want a good life and a couple hundred thousand a year, and TBH? Respect. That’s a real, beautiful career, I’ve been enjoying it for half a decade now!

• The ones who turn the audience into a multi-pronged business — thought leaders, founders, owners, investing in startups. (Hi, it's me.)

• Career creators — those with a body of work in a certain industry who use their followers to help them differentiate themselves in their niche

• And the ones pushing into the celebrity lane — full-on talent, entertainment, fame.

None of these is better than the others. The mistake is drifting between them by accident. Pick your lane on purpose and drive.

One thing surprised even me: there weren’t enough creators there.

“SO MaNy CrEaToRs At CaNnEs” — yeah, no.

It was the same group I saw at the Chase for Business dinner in NYC the week before: the classic B2B set (or any creator who’s also running a business), all of us posting from JT Barnett’s Signals house party like it was THEE function (it was — but I had to scurry to the Afties, probably the most star-studded and lit event I’ve ever attended) and believe me, we all had a TIME. All I see are heartfelt stories and LinkedIn posts from this set of about 100–200 creators.

But my beauty/lifestyle/fashion girls? Nowhere to be found. And the “influencers” who did come had mostly been flown in by brands, hit one or two contracted activations, posted their deliverables, and left. They came for the contract and skipped the conference — which is wild to me, because the conference is the entire point!!!

There was a creator group there bigger than last year, but… it wasn’t a diverse one, or one that I PERSONALLY believe represents the breadth of the creator economy.

SMART GIRLS WERE PRESENT THOUGH: I got to meet so many mutuals that I LOVE like , , , , and so many MORE! It was so lovely to connect with the cool brainy girls IRL.

But to recap: the rooms where the real business happens were being worked by the B2B set, opening doors for us that follower count and ShopMy status just can’t. If you’re a creator with an actual POV in any niche, there’s an opening for you, sisters!

A few more things I clocked on the ground:

• IRL activations are the real marker of influence now. Getting butts in seats matters more than your follower count, PERIOD. If you can move people into a room, you have something no dashboard can measure and every brand wants. And being there — being FUN, being someone people actually want to keep talking to at 1am — is what put me top of mind for the brands I want. Not (just) my numbers. The energy. They can get numbers anywhere!

• Serendipity beat every meeting I scheduled in advance. The best invitations and most important conversations came together last minute, late at night, off a run-in I could never have planned. Worth saying though: that only works if your pitch is reflexive — if you can say what you do and what you want in one clean breath at 1am. Charm without a pitch? Wasted potential.

• Horizontal networking was a genuine highlight. We talk so much about getting close to the C-suite, and yes, that’s incredible (my interviews with C-suite execs will be in your inbox shortly, thank you very much). But finally meeting the mutuals I’ve been obsessed with online — some of YOU, working on your own brands and hustling — did just as much for me. Meet the people at your level. You’re going to rise together.

• To my corporate girls: learn to make content. It’s a skill, not a career, and your career needs it. The faster you stop hating on creators and start making your own stuff, the faster you’ll both respect the craft AND create more economic opportunity for yourself. Dakota, mentioned above, does a WONDERFUL job of this!

• The brand teams are internally fragmented on creator marketing. Even with brands I genuinely love, the way they interact with creators felt disconnected: too many agencies, no through-line. (I said this to Microsoft and LinkedIn’s faces, lovingly.) EXAMPLE: I’m on a first-name basis with the LinkedIn CEO but wasn’t on the list for half their activations for some reason…. simply a mess.

• Live shopping still isn’t landing in the US. They were trying this at YouTube back in 2022 and… no. Maybe 2030. Not yet.

• And brands spent MILLIONS on this festival and still can’t pay creators on time. lol. ok. (crying in overdue payments rn)

Quick clarification, because I say “follower count doesn’t matter” a lot and I don’t want it misheard: I don’t mean you don’t need an audience. I mean numbers are just ONE kind of value. Some creators bring impressions. Some bring conversions. Some bring clout. Some bring genuinely stunning creative. Some bring credibility — the brand gets to borrow your trust. When you can do all five at once, you’re not a creator anymore, you’re a company, and you get paid like one. But every single one of those is worth something. So figure out what YOU bring, get great at it, and keep it moving.

And because so many of you want to do this WITH me: I’m opening The Authority Edit. It’s a group advisory cohort where I help you turn your traction into an actual, monetizable business — alongside a room of other ambitious material girls. I know a lot of you want me 1:1, and I love you for it, but ask anyone from Creator Essentials: the group is what makes it magic. Spots are limited and I want the right girls in the room — if that’s you, reply to this email and I’ll tell you everything.

And the moment that meant the most: more than 30 people came up to me about my newsletter. I have 12k followers. Thirty-plus humans, all of them real AMGs, sought me out because of stuff I shared on Substack. That kind of reader doesn’t come from chasing reach — it came from connection with all of you <3

Where I’m taking this.

Cannes didn’t just confirm my theories; it gave me paths to take and people to connect with who get it.

Keep reading for a peek into my H2 business strategy and the play-by-play of every event I attended at Cannes - with pictures that only made it to my close friends.

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Hey stars,

I had a genuinely terrible time in Los Angeles last month, to the point that I couldn’t even enjoy my fresh Sugarfish! Let’s unpack:

Having lived and worked in West Hollywood for awhile, I’d popped in expecting to hit my usual spots before heading to interview the CEO of LinkedIn in Newport Beach. Despite my outstanding productivity on the 6h f…

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Hello stars,

Ever since I was a little girl, I just knew I wanted to dress cute and talk for a living.

“How’d you get so good at public speaking? Did you take a class or something?” Big eyes stared across the table — a 30-something executive at LinkedIn, with a sliiightly skeptical curiosity.

“Oh, well, I always say it’s just my God-given gift! I don’t know. I’m never nervous, it just kinda flows out of me.” My default answer. I fired it back and relaxed into my lawn chair outside the Waldorf Astoria Dana Point, where 300 of the company’s top product leaders had gathered to decide the future of the platform and its 1.3 billion users. I’d just stepped off stage from delivering creator-led insights about how to design the product for the future of work. Which obviously, I can predict perfectly.

As I was whisked off the stage to interview the CEO (????), the 17th person complimented my skills, (YES I lowkey felt like a celebrity… but remember, engineers are not known for their communication no shade!!!), and this guy was the 20th. Flattery, I thought, but then I actually sat with the question. How did I get so comfortable on stage — so comfortable I’ve bet on making it a main focus in my career?

“Well,” I sheepishly reflected live to the table, “I guess…I’ve done 200 podcast episodes, had to take speaking and pitching classes at Wharton, have made, like, thousands of videos—”

“You’ve done your 10,000 hours.”

Oh.

Crystal clear the second she said it, though completely invisible to me until then.

Maybe not TEN THOUSAND hours, but I’d successfully trekked up a mountain without realizing how far up I’d gotten.

For years I treated speaking like something I’d be allowed to do eventually. Once I had the credentials. Once I had a million followers (or maybe 10!) and made Forbes 30 Under 30, of course. Once someone Official tapped me on the shoulder and said, “okay, now you’re a speaker!”

This week’s episode is a live chat with you about how I stopped waiting for that tap. Listen on the Substack app if you have it or just press play on this post’s LIVE recording.

Desire = Destiny

Let me be honest about the wanting, because we’re very much trained to shrink it.

I shrugged off being a good speaker like it was nothing, never sitting with what it actually does for people. For something that comes so naturally to me, it’s almost comical that I couldn’t see it was a gift.

When I let myself believe I could be a big speaker — the real deal — that’s when the desire to actually dig in started to grow.

I didn’t want to “try out speaking.” I wanted to be a speaker. Real stages, paid like it. When I was a kid, I aspired to be a journalist like Oprah or Mary Jane Paul (lol) because sure, I’d get to talk all day, but also because I REALLY want people to appreciate my outfits! DAILY!

The single shift was saying that out loud instead of diminishing it as some random “God-given talent.” (Yeah, doing the Artist’s Way 3x helps with this!)

Because the way you talk about your work tells everyone exactly how seriously to take it.

If I walk in as “just an influencer trying out a panel,” people undercharge me and underestimate me and like, why wouldn’t they? But when I show up as an Expert Who’s Doing The Reps (200 episodes, 50-plus events, otw to the 10,000 hours), people fall in line.

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Building the Proof

First, I stopped waiting for stages altogether and built my own. I started running The Alignment Edit workshops for high-achieving women who are brilliant but can’t name their lane, which is where I saw the magic. I was moved — truly — by facilitating brilliant women who’d previously felt alone in their hunger as they soothed each other through the sacrifices we share in and emerged stronger.

I knew a) we needed to do more of them, bigger, longer, intimate but scaled and b) I had to dream bigger if I was going to keep preaching about it.

In addition to my own workshops, I did a lot of panels for free, but PLEASE notice I didn’t say yes to every stage, I said yes to the ones whose audiences were already aligned with mine. Clarity on your brand helps which rooms to walk into. I used to be Associated with brands that are simply not aligned, and now I’m careful about while I work on growing my skills and exposure.

Last month I spoke at Million Dollar Personal Brand on the same lineup as industry leaders Jaclyn Johnson and Jen Sincero, and the exposure was so meaningful I was glad to show up.

But that doesn’t mean I’m not ecstatic about how I’m consistently getting PAID for it, and no Agency or Official tap needed.

On Wednesday, I moderated a panel with Phia’s founder and Coach’s former CEO because I’d made it obvious this is what I do: on LinkedIn, on Substack, in every interview. Now I introduce myself as a speaker (in addition to Entrepreneur & Author). It’s allllwayyyysss funny how opportunities find the woman who just won’t shut up about what she wants.

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LinkedIn’s CEO interviewed me about my portfolio career. Not because I have the biggest audience in the world (though my Ambitious Material Girls are LOYAL) — but because I have a point of view you simply can’t get anywhere else. A sharp lane beats a big audience every single time!

Over fifty women have now trusted me to help build their personal brand without losing the credibility they worked so hard for. Now that there’s traction, I’m ready for more, and I know I‘m not the only one.

The method, since you’re going to ask: I didn’t pitch a single one of those rooms. I got loud and clear about what I wanted, built my own table, and then said yes to aligned opportunities — sometimes the lowball ones — and delivered every time like it was already my job. Next, I’m expanding my table!

Now, For You

If you’ve met me in real life, you know how IRRITATED I get when I meet a woman who isn’t aware of her full potential.

Whether you’re my high school best friend or the SUPER cute and talented sales associate I met at Alice + Olivia last weekend (shoutout kirstin for showing me those show-stopping capris) — I AM GOING TO YELL AT YOU TO BUILD YOUR BRAND!!!!!!! There’s so much money out there. Freedom. Opportunity! And, I’ve come to realize, real connection — the girls with the fire that no one around you can quite mirror — is possible, too!

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I’m baffled at the women with real credentials and a genuinely important skill set, sitting under-positioned and scattered online, waiting for a permission slip that is never, ever coming. And I now know how to fix it, mostly because I just did it for myself, in real time, in front of you (not for the first time, mind you, so you get to learn from my mistakes too).

For my girls who have some traction and are looking to turn this into a credible personal brand, I’m creating a small advisory to help you scale. Respond to this email with what you’re building for more information.

Anyway, you already have the authority.

You’re just still waiting for someone to hand it to you instead of architecting it yourself.

See ya next time! Inbox is open if this is something that resonated <3

Alexis

Thank you , , , , , and many others for tuning into my live video! Join me for my next live video in the app.

Get more from Alexis Barber in the Substack app

Available for iOS and Android

Get the app

Things I’m disgusted by:

• men dancing on tables

• the color orange (sorry knicks/this excludes hermès)

• leftovers

• warm white wine

• slow walkers

• boring people

• and my own mediocrity.

This is just a start, of course. Visceral disgust — the kind that makes you shudder on the street, trying to physically fling the feeling off your body — has been following me around la…

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it’s officially been a year since i walked across the wharton stage, and i can honestly say i had no clue what life would look like today. LEGIT couldn’t think about anything past May 18 this time last year! and of course the question everyone loves to ask is:

was it worth it?

who knows? what’s for certain is that everything has changed: i never saw myself in a media-focused portfolio career, and neither did my Wharton friends and , both of whom are also building brands completely outside the path we were sold.

we technically went to b-school to learn how to build empires. a year out (two for Hannah!) none of us are doing it the way we were taught.

on Sunday, the three of us went live here on substack to talk about what it looks like now. over a hundred of you came (!!!!) and stayed the whole hour. THANK YOUUU! It was so fun. I’ll be going live again soon, so stay tuned!

a few things we got into:

• why you need to budget for double what you think you will spend

• the best moments and the worst moments (HONESTLY)

• whether entrepreneurship is actually useful in business school

• who should get an mba, and who absolutely shouldn’t

• the univesal flaw all MBA students have

we don’t actually get to the classes until about minute 51, which should tell you a lot about what we think matters from those two years.

consider every question you’ve sent me about wharton, the mba, the timing, the roi, answered in this one.

make sure you check out Simi’s incredible work with and follow her on Instagram and LinkedIn.

if you’re looking for tangible tips on navigating your nonlinear career, you’ll love Hannah’s and her content on Instagram and Linkedin.

my reflections right after graduation live here — interesting if you want to compare :)

a programming note before you go. this thursday, may 21st, i’m in brooklyn at jess williamson’s million dollar personal brand workshop, sitting on the empire builders panel at 1pm to talk about the marketing, sales, and socials behind seven-figure brands. if you’ve been thinking about how to actually turn a personal brand into a business, this is the room. ticket link is here. come find me after!

xx, alexis

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Thank you , , , , , and many others for tuning into my live video with and ! Join me for my next live video in the app.

Get more from Alexis Barber in the Substack app

Available for iOS and Android

Get the app

The spring I moved to New York, a girl I may or may not still be friends with was blowing up my phone with a Partiful for a skincare brand’s launch party. But this one wasn’t squeezed into a 6 to 8pm slot at a Soho boutique like the rest of them. The company was already in Vogue, the party was at a nightclub, and the brand was 4AM Skin.

I didn’t go. At t…

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If it hasn’t become increasingly obvious over the past few years, let this be your reminder: You can buy spectacle, but you cannot buy substance.

So do you have any?

I’ve been pondering this for the better part of a few months, and have started to notice it everywhere I go. Not just in Lauren Sanchez’s mid Met Gala look and overall trashy au…

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Hello stars!

Last Thursday, I emceed the AI for Social Good Hackathon with HearstLab and Ruth.AI, expecting it to be a classic speaking engagement. I left rearranged, with the kind of bubbling, full-body urgency that shows up when you realize you’ve been falling behind on something that’s bigger than you thought.

Some noticings:

• In eight hours, a team of young women built a full database to help people actually participate in local politics. It scraped government websites, let users track bills, find polling centers, and show up for the civic stuff most of us have quietly written off as too annoying to bother with. Everything that usually makes civic participation impossible (the logistics, the information buried on terrible government websites, the sheer friction of it) they dismantled. In eight hours.

• Another woman built an AI-powered platform to help people with ADHD run their daily lives. Hello! Real solutions to real problems, focused on helping our communities. Useful. Fundable. Built by women, in a single day, with tools that are already accessible to all of us.

• On the hackathon: of the 100+ women in the room, there wasn’t a single Black woman on a hackathon team, and there were fewer than three in the audience.

AI’s sheer power is dumbfounding, sure. But watching it be used for GOOD in real time is what put a battery in my back: our world is fundamentally shifting, and it is not waiting for us to feel ready.

The wealth transfer nobody’s warning you about

There is a wealth transfer taking place right now, and it looks nothing like the Boomer/millennial one you’ve heard about. This one is technological, and the stakes for women, specifically for Black women, are genuinely alarming.

McKinsey ran the numbers: by 2045, the racially disparate distribution of new wealth created by AI could widen the wealth gap between Black and White households by $43 billion annually.

Makes me SICK to my stomach to think about!!! We know why that number exists: access and fluency with new technology always follow existing power. The people closest to the tools accumulate the advantage. Everyone else watches it happen until it’s too late.

And right now, women are watching it happen.

The numbers back this up. Women make up less than a third of AI professionals and only 18% of AI researchers globally. In the same job, women are 16 percentage points less likely than men to even use the tools. And here is the part that should make you furious: when women do push past the initial hesitation, they frequently outperform their male counterparts. The barrier was always access, training, and the confidence to start.

AI is set to bring an estimated $70B in wealth to the US in the next 20 years. That’s a HUGE opportunity for women and people of color to actually close our wealth gap…nothing to be scoffed at!

I understand why!!! I was in the same place: to AI or not to AI. The concerns are legitimate: what this means for jobs, for creativity, intelligence, for the communities we care about. I get the hesitation around something that feels like it was built by and for a very specific kind of person, in a very specific kind of room, with a very specific agenda.

The wake up call for me was that if men run this, massive power gets concentrated in rooms that have historically excluded us and have no intention to reduce bias against us, potentially destroying our society in ways we don’t really fathom at this point.

The women I watched build at that hackathon understood that. They didn’t wait until they felt fluent or until it felt safe or fully vetted or ideologically clean. They got in the room and built something that could change people’s lives.

I say this with so much love, and I say it because I am challenging myself to look at this, too: we have to stop getting caught up. The discourse, the debates, the moral purity olympics around who is allowed to use what tool and when. We can care deeply about the ethics and still build our wealth. We can hold real concerns and still show up to learn. We have to. Because the alternative is watching another generation of tools, platforms, and industries get built without us and then wondering, again, why the gap got wider.

What I was actually afraid of

The environmental critique was the respectable version of my fear. But for a few years there, I was just repeating what I’d heard other people say, not really researching AI for myself.

The real fear was scrutiny. Being the Black woman on the internet who publicly endorsed a technology that some people are going to look back very unfavorably. Ending up on the wrong side of an argument I hadn’t fully worked out yet. I still consider myself a novice, I feel behind every day, but I can see the economics of the situation and that’s enough to get me to take a second look.

Here’s what I worked through:

1. The environmental concern is real, and it is more complicated than that

I read a piece in Undark that reframed this entirely for me. The water and energy footprint of AI data centers is real and it varies wildly by location, technology, and season. In water-stressed areas, a single facility can strain an entire region’s supply. That deserves anger, and the lack of transparency from tech companies about their actual consumption is a legitimate scandal.

And then there’s context. A single burger takes more than 400 gallons of water to produce. A cotton T-shirt takes more than 700. The country’s 16,000 golf courses each use between 100,000 and 2 million gallons of water per day. Nobody interrogates those daily decisions with the same intensity.

But here’s what the article nailed: “A societal mass value judgement on AI is, fairly or unfairly, playing out in real time in the uproar around data centers. Part of the visceral environmental shame that folks like Masley feel from others about their AI use is probably less about the specific water footprint of a ChatGPT search than about the acceptance of a culture where AI is woven into everyday life, regardless of its environmental impact.”

AI deserves scrutiny. It is not going to be solved by the women who opted out. And practically speaking, it is here. The “should this exist” debate is closed. We are in the “who builds it, who profits, and who pays” phase now, and those questions are answered by the people in the room.

2. The threats to art, creativity, and politics are the actual thing I’m scared of.

This amazing carousel from Steph The Founder directs us to recent research about the real concerns of AI and how it is primed to do massive damage to our society. Creative jobs disappearing. Election manipulation. Deepfakes of real women. The hollowing out of entire industries that generations of women fought their way into. I am not rolling my eyes at any of it.

What I am saying is that every single one of those threats gets worse if the women who care about ethics, art, culture, politics, and the next generation of girls are not fluent enough to see the damage coming, call it out with precision, or build the alternative.

“I refuse to engage” is not a protective stance. It is a quiet one. And quiet has never saved any of us!

3. Scrutiny is the point. You cannot scrutinize what you do not understand.

The most useful critics of AI right now are the people who use it every day. They’ve seen what it can and cannot do. They know where the teeth are. The vague, outside-in criticism is losing to the specific, hands-on building, because you cannot meaningfully push back on a system you’ve never actually touched. If we want the critique to land, the critique has to come from women who’ve been inside the thing.

I get it. I also don’t know everything, and maybe this will blow up the world, but we can’t change that it’s here, so the smart thing to do is to learn how to engage with discernment and critical thinking!

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I was you.

For two years I was “using AI” the same way most people are. Copy-pasting into ChatGPT, getting things maybe 20% faster, feeling vaguely ahead of the curve.

I was NOT ahead of the curve! I was dabbling. And dabbling is a sophisticated way of procrastinating!

About two months ago, I got sick of pushing this off and set a timer for 90 minutes to dive into Claude.

Since, my productivity and therefore impact have grown tremendously. What actually changed for me was building a real system around how my brain actually works instead of how I keep pretending it should: my ADHD, my creative energy patterns, my very specific and complicated business. Once the scaffolding was there, the part of my brain I actually want to be using (the creative, visionary, strategic part) finally had time to…think!

The shame spiral of not being able to perform got quieter, and my scattered, frantic energy has begun to subside.

That’s what’s available to you, and it starts with one 90-minute session!

Here is what I know. All of this is scary and confusing and I am not pretending otherwise. But I watched women at that hackathon build things that could genuinely change people’s lives, in a single day, and I cannot unsee that. AI can be used for good. If we let ourselves believe that, even cautiously, even with one eye on the risks, think about what we could actually do with it. So I am choosing to focus. Here is how I am doing that in my own life.

You don’t need to become an AI expert. You don’t need to build an app or learn to vibe code. You need to get familiar. Try something real. Stop waiting until it feels perfectly safe to engage with the thing that is already shaping your world whether you engage with it or not.

Ninety intentional minutes beats three years of passive skepticism. Every single time.

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What’s coming this month

AI April is a three-part series for paid subscribers of TSFT. Here’s exactly what we’re covering:

This week (paid): The setup. How to audit your workflow, and the three things to take off your plate first.

Week 2: How I run my entire content business with Claude. The real system, the actual tools, what it replaced, and what it didn’t.

Week 3: Using AI to build and protect your personal brand. The frameworks I use to stay on voice, on brand, and on track without outsourcing my brain.

The machine is already here. The question is whether you’re going to understand it, or be understood by it.

I’ll see you on the other side!

Subscribe now

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⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️Hello stars!!! ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

It feels like just yesterday we were bracing for winter, and now New York teases us by drawing out Fool’s Spring every day... I’m dreaming about putting my Superpuffs in storage, but I don’t want to jinx any sunny days!

The seasons are changing. Now, as an eldest d…

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If you're trying to figure out how to start something when you don't have a business degree, if you're bootstrapping and wondering when or if funding will come, or if you're afraid of what people will say when you make moves they don't understand, this conversation is for you. Monique shares about the grief that catalyzed her pivot to entrepreneurship, the unglamorous reality of building without resources, how she finally secured investment after constant rejection, and why the P&G acquisition wasn't selling out, it was selling up.

What You'll Learn:

• How Monique went from registered nurse to founder with no business background

• Why grief and loss became the catalyst for starting Mielle Organics

• How to bootstrap a business and the unglamorous reality of it all 

• How she raised investment after getting rejected by dozens of investors

• What the 9-figure P&G acquisition actually means for Black founders

• How to deal with criticism from your community when you "sell up"

• How she uses social listening to develop products her customers actually need

• Why setting boundaries with social media is essential for mental health

EPISODE CHAPTERS

[00:35] - From registered nurse to 9-figure founder with no business background

[04:30] - Why she chose nursing over her real passion

[08:15] - How grief became the catalyst for starting her business

[12:45] - How do you know when to quit your job and go full-time?

[16:20] - How to bootstrap a product business

[19:30] - What bootstrapping actually looks like 

[23:15] - How do you raise investment for your business?

[27:40] - What happens when investors keep saying no

[31:20] - How the 9-figure P&G acquisition happened (how to 

[35:50] - How do you deal with criticism from your community?

[39:15] - What's the difference between selling out and selling up?

[43:30] - How to use social listening for product development

[47:20] - How do you protect your mental health as a founder?

[50:45] - Why she limits social media and avoids doom scrolling

[53:30] - What's next: longevity science and health equity

WHERE TO FIND ALEXIS & TOO COLLECTIVE

Instagram:

@alexisbarber: https://www.instagram.com/alexisbarber/?hl=en

@toocollective: https://www.instagram.com/toocollective/?hl=en

Substack:

Too Smart For This Newsletter: https://toocollective.substack.com/

TikTok:

@alexisbarber_: https://www.tiktok.com/@alexisbarber_

YouTube:

Subscribe here: http://www.youtube.com/@alexis_barber

Shop the Episode: https://shopmy.us/shop?Curator_id=250549

Book Office Hours: Work with Alexis Here:

https://app.acuityscheduling.com/schedule.php?owner=22112790&appointmentType=79833937

Get the Journal: Too Smart For This: A Guided Journal Here:

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/761193/too-smart-for-this-by-alexis-barber/

Questions, thoughts, or want to collaborate? Email Alexis at alexis@alexisbarber.com

This show is supported by Other Kind Media — otherkindmedia.com

Is anyone else having the craziest month?? I know mercury was retrograde (or “in microbraids,” as my friends say) but it’s just been… wild.

The best kind of crazy, though! I’ve spoken at Airbnb and SERHANT, interviewed two major CEOs, been on two other podcasts — opportunities have been coming in, the foundation I’m building is actually st…

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The truth is, power isn't something you build from scratch. It's not waiting for you at the next job title, the next salary bump, or the next milestone. The power is already within you — you just need to stop giving it away to circumstances, external validation, and the need to be chosen.

In this episode, Alexis walks through 6 frameworks for standing in your power: taking inventory of resources you already have, using capability transfer to unlock new areas of your life, first principles thinking to find creative solutions, building alter egos to activate powerful energy, dressing like the woman you want to be, and metabolizing chaos instead of letting it derail you.

If you've been playing small, waiting for permission, or giving your power away without realizing it — this one's for you.

What You'll Learn:

• Why power isn't something you build from scratch

• How to take inventory of your actual resources instead of focusing on what you lack

• The capability transfer technique: how to apply your natural strengths to new areas

• What first principles thinking is and how it unlocks creative solutions

• How to use alter egos and music to activate powerful energy on demand

• Why metabolizing chaos – not avoiding it – is the key to staying grounded

EPISODE CHAPTERS

[00:00] - Why you're already powerful, you just don't realize it yet

[04:15] - How to stop waiting for external validation to feel worthy

[08:30] - The resource inventory: what you already have that you're not using

[12:45] - Capability transfer: how to apply your strengths to new areas of life

[16:20] - What is first principles thinking 

[20:10] - How to build an alter ego and use music to activate power

[23:40] - Why powerful women dress however they want (enclothed cognition)

[26:50] - How to metabolize chaos instead of reacting to it

[30:15] - Your bounce back rate matters more than never getting triggered

WHERE TO FIND ALEXIS & TOO COLLECTIVE

Instagram:

@alexisbarber: https://www.instagram.com/alexisbarber/?hl=en

@toocollective: https://www.instagram.com/toocollective/?hl=en

Substack:

Too Smart For This Newsletter: https://toocollective.substack.com/

TikTok:

@alexisbarber_: https://www.tiktok.com/@alexisbarber_

YouTube:

Subscribe here: http://www.youtube.com/@alexis_barber

Shop the Episode: https://shopmy.us/shop?Curator_id=250549

Book Office Hours: Work with Alexis Here:

https://app.acuityscheduling.com/schedule.php?owner=22112790&appointmentType=79833937

Get the Journal: Too Smart For This: A Guided Journal Here:

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/761193/too-smart-for-this-by-alexis-barber/

Questions, thoughts, or want to collaborate? Email Alexis at alexis@alexisbarber.com

ABOUT TOO SMART FOR THIS

You're ambitious. You're overwhelmed. And you're definitely too smart to keep sacrificing your well-being for someone else's definition of success.

Too Smart For This is the show for ambitious material girls just like you who are learning how to channel their chaotic energy into a more intentional and fun life.

Join your host, Alexis Barber (author, Wharton MBA, former Google/YouTube strategist, and certified ambitious material girl), every Monday for the frameworks, authentic conversations, and tangible tools you need to build a life that's both driven and deeply enjoyable. Because self-care is part of the business plan—and you're too smart to settle for anything less.

Subscribe now and follow @alexisbarber and @toocollective for more.

ABOUT YOUR HOST

Hello, love!

I'm an ambitious material girl obsessed with wellness, business, consumer culture, and the creator economy. I write from New York City, where I'm busy enjoying being young, gifted, and Black, oversharing online, and remembering that self-care is part of the business plan.

This show is supported by Other Kind Media — otherkindmedia.com

When I first came up with the identity around this show — the ambitious material girl — she was largely fictional. She was the woman I consumed on screen and in the pages of every book I could get my hands on. Olivia Pope running the country, armed with a Prada tote and white coat. The women of Sex and the City who treated New York City like their personal playground and their careers like their greatest love stories. Women with this specific combination of taste, intellect, drive, and unapologetic desire for a beautiful life. I was constructing an archetype from imagination because I hadn’t met enough of her in real life yet.

Over time, I started to recognize her spark in the wild. She never looks like her problems. She’s serious about her work and silly with her friends. She’s always drawn to the most expensive thing in the room — but swears by some hyper-niche $3 hack to stay chic. She knows meaning comes from the life she builds, not just the man she dates.

I’ve interviewed a lot of remarkable women on this show. And every now and then, I sit across from someone and feel that spark — that unmistakable quality that tells me: she is one of us. But I have never, in all the years I’ve been building this show, sat across from someone who is the full, final, completely realized version of everything the ambitious material girl was always reaching toward.

I had the extraordinary privilege of interviewing Pauline Brown at her home last month. And yes — it is exactly what you would expect from a woman who has spent her career studying and practicing taste as a discipline. Beauty, life, intention in every corner (her pink Smeg collection was a material girl giveaway!)

Ambitious barely does her justice. Few people in business—men or women—have a résumé like hers: former Chairman of LVMH North America, partner at The Carlyle Group, senior executive at Estée Lauder where she worked on the acquisitions of brands like Jo Malone and Bobbi Brown, earlier leadership roles at Bain & Company, and a graduate of Wharton. Today, Pauline leads Aesthetic Intelligence, hosts the show Aesthetic Intelligence on SiriusXM, and advises some of the world’s most influential companies and founders.

Sitting across from her didn’t feel as stuffy or intimidating as you’d expect when talking to a billion-dollar leader: she was forthcoming, generous, funny, and most of all, centered. A first-generation American raised by strong women with flair, she developed an appreciation for beauty and growth early on. She didn’t decode other people’s standards. She decided her own. And as she says in this episode: “The only thing I can do better than anyone else is be myself.”

Pauline and I both went to Wharton — thirty years apart. And sitting across from her, I kept thinking: this is what it looks like when an ambitious material girl builds it all the way out. No gatekeeping, no vagueness, no performing. Just razor-sharp intelligence and a genuine desire to hand over everything she knows so you can take it somewhere.

Here is what we cover:

— What it was actually like to be an ambitious woman at Wharton in the 90s (chaotic)

— The 100 cards exercise she used 30 years ago to get ruthlessly clear on her non-negotiables

— Why she walked away from millions in private equity to work entirely on her own terms

— Her honest takes on the brands getting taste right right now, including The Row, Jacquemus, and why Rhode is her current favorite beauty brand

— What she believes every ambitious woman needs to understand about aesthetics before AI makes it non-negotiable

You’ll be smarter if you follow Pauline’s work, so check out her riveting Substack here and pick up her book Aesthetic Intelligence if you want to cultivate your relationship with your own taste and values!

One of my favorite things about this community is that you love to learn.

Getting to sit with someone like Pauline, who has actually built a magical, impactful life and is genuinely willing to pass the map back? That is a treat. And she gives us so much in these 90 minutes, though it feels like we’ve barely scratched the surface!

The ambitious material girl finds the women who already built what she’s dreaming about — and she listens. This is the kind of conversation I want to keep having. Consider this the first installment!

And speaking of conversations worth showing up for — if this episode lit something up in you, I want you at The Alignment Edit on March 22nd. We are spending the day doing exactly what Pauline would approve of: getting ruthlessly clear on your Q2 goals and what it actually looks like to spring forward in your career with intention. No vague vision boarding. Past attendees said:

• “From the moment I arrived, the room was filled with diverse, high-vibration women who were open, welcoming, and deeply present. I found myself wishing we had more time together—I would have loved to connect more deeply with each of them. We all felt it. We wanted more: more joy, more fulfillment, more life. My heart left this experience feeling full”

• “This was a group of amazing ambitious women and it was such an inspiration to hear what everyone was doing and how we were able to be vulnerable but also realize that we were not alone in our experiences. I hope Alexis realizes what she did today. She made an impact and I can't wait to see where this goes!”

Grab your spot here — I would love to see you there.

With love,

Alexis 🖤