From Stanford to Beauty School
I left the comfort and privilege of the Stanford brand, walking away from my cushy tech job to enroll in a local beauty school and learn how to do hair. This is my story.
Written by: Roxy Reaves
Photography: Briana Greenidge
In June 2016, I graduated from Stanford University with a B.A. in Communication. I was hyper-confident and ready to make my name in the world as a boundary-pushing journalist — one that would infiltrate tech bro-culture and expose the shadowy underpinnings of the venture world. During that summer the startup ecosystem was still thriving, so I instead accepted my first full-time job offer working for a food tech startup that was run less like a corporation and more like a Burning Man camp. For a while I felt like I was living out my ancestor's dreams — I was by far the youngest and Blackest woman at the company, and I was getting overpaid to go on retreats to Tahoe, eat catered restaurant meals and write marketing emails.
Fast forward to 2020, and my life looks nothing like it did four years ago. Today I make minimum wage, cook all my own meals and spend most of my hours hustling on my feet. In my spare time, I cut hair in my living room and shampoo folks in my shower. Most nights I inhale leftovers while watching YouTube videos about porosity and hygral fatigue.
““As a Black woman, the idea of exacerbating the problem of gentrification in the Bay Area as opposed to becoming part of the solution was intolerable to me. I became resolved that I had to go do something I truly loved and believed in, even if that meant giving up the cushy tech lifestyle.” ”
How I ended up in my first start-up job was more of a happy accident than a conscious decision to follow the money. I learned the hard way during my senior year of college the cost of being too Black to acceptably call things like you see them (a.k.a. I got fired from my campus job for being “too sassy” on an email thread). Frustrated and strapped for cash, one night I decided to impulsively start cold-emailing local CEOs, asking if they’d like to hire a Stanford undergrad to help them part-time with sales and marketing. This bold tactic was shockingly effective — three-quarters of the CEOs responded the next day and within a week I had been hired as a paid intern at a new delivery start-up, aptly named Zesty. My hourly rate would be triple what I made working on campus.
To my elation, my new workplace was more zestful than I could have ever imagined. Their bustling San Francisco office was so much more lively (and haphazardly organized) than the utopian rows of modern cubicles and Macbooks that I had previously pictured in my head. Trailing my new boss, I admired the cultural diversity — the constant flow of delivery drivers on the first floor — but then silently noted the stark contrast as we glided upstairs and I saw the chipper faces of the mostly white full-time team. This was my own personal The Devil Wears Prada moment, just with slightly more hammocks and hoodies.
“Welcome to the family!” they said. I beamed at the words, and at the notion that I was now one of them. Though lingering behind all this inner bliss of being part of the “upstairs” crowd was the subtle coo of imposter syndrome, and the knowledge that the only thing that separated me from the bustling ecosystem downstairs was the privileged reputation of the Stanford brand.
Working at Zesty for nearly two years taught me a lot about the contradictions of Silicon Valley. It was as if you were walking into a really luxuriously decorated house made of cans of La Croix. The lack of structure at a Series A start-up is the ideal place for a worker like me, who thrives in ambiguity and loves to be told the words “just figure it out.” I had an inordinate amount of agency over my day for a new grad, and the license to problem-solve how I saw fit. During my time there I grew from a lowly sales development rep to a full-stack marketing department of one, weathering storms like the mysterious overnight disappearance of our CEO, or waking up to hear that half of our company had been laid off overnight. And while at times I felt isolated and unheard as the only Black woman on my team, all of the uncertainty seemed like a very small price to pay for the privilege of daily catered restaurant meals, extravagant off-sites and a $5k annual wellness budget. Face down on our in-office massage table, I felt like the living incarnation of the last stanza of Maya Angelou’s “Still I Rise.” This is, like, reparations, I rationalized. But truthfully, it was just the path of least resistance.
Yet as time passed, I began to tire of the entitlement of our clients — resenting their at-times dehumanizing treatment of our catering staff and ivory tower detachment from the local community. The dissonance and disconnect I felt while working at Zesty grew each day as I walked past the line of homeless tent encampments to our office space. By mid-2017, a few months into the Trump presidency, I finally decided to change directions to be more intentional about who I was working for, more specifically the communities I was serving with my talents. As a Black woman, the idea of exacerbating the problem of gentrification in the Bay Area as opposed to becoming part of the solution was intolerable to me. I became resolved that I had to go do something I truly loved and believed in, even if that meant giving up the cushy tech lifestyle.
See Morgan DeBaun and more stories like this in The Money & Power Issue of our Journal
From learning when to scale back your budget to visualizing federal reparations, The Money & Power Issue tells the real story of Black wealth (or lack thereof) and reimagines a Black existence in America that imbues us with agency and perspective.
Just days after putting in my two-weeks notice at Zesty, I had an experience that rekindled an idea. Truthfully, it wasn’t a novel experience but one I had lived many times before while trying to get my hair done in the Bay. I had shown up to an early morning hair appointment with a new stylist, only to see that I was one of three clients waiting for her to arrive at the shop. Now the question was — do I wait to get my hair done by this triple-booked stylist, or do I forfeit my deposit and go on with my day with my bed-head wrapped up in a bonnet? I chose the former, which unfortunately resulted in spending five hours in the chair for a partial curly weave. I left that shop feeling hangry and tired as hell. Sadly, this day was no worse than the time I spent 9 hours sweating in Oakland for Marley twists, or got my car towed in pursuit of a silk press in the Tenderloin. In fact, this may have been my most fruitful hair disaster yet...because this time, my fury gave way to a radical daydream about what it would be like to build my own hair salon enterprise, founded upon the principles of self-love, respect, inclusion and sustainability.
What I didn’t realize was that this was the beginning of a years-long journey of inching closer towards materializing that dream.
To be clear: I never actually expected my obsession with managing my unruly multicultural hair as one that would lead me down a professional path into the beauty industry. I had been on a self-love journey for many years, and transitioning to natural hair was a large part of learning how to become more confident in my own skin. Yet, I felt consistently held back in that pursuit by the lack of salon options available to me in the Bay Area. I thought of all the other kinky curl folks in my same position who were having the same disrespected and disheartening experiences as I was, and it became clear to me that I needed to step up and do something about it.
Testing the waters, I began to inch myself closer to my desired community demographic. I went back to my old collegiate ways and I emailed the CEO of another company I really admired — Morgan Debaun. The Blavity co-founder had been an idol of mine for some time, and it felt revolutionary to be part of a workplace where not only I wouldn’t be tokenized, but my Black voice would be amplified. I moved to LA and joined the company to work on helping grow incredible brands such as TravelNoire and 21Ninety, which specifically caters to empowering Black womxn. My time at Blavity taught me how to feel comfortable showing up as my full self — how my Blackness was not contradictory to being professional. This further encouraged me to commit to my passion of becoming a beauty founder.
I transitioned into beauty school from Blavity because it was important to me when deciding to become a founder to build empathy for every stakeholder in my future salon business. Unlike the dispassionate leaders I found in the tech industry, I wanted to understand the experience of both my clients AND my employees. The journalist still within me needed to expose the root of the issue of why it was so difficult to find stylists that could provide timely, high-quality textured hair services. So, I knew I had to go to the birthplace of the industry itself: cosmetology school.
While in school, I have learned that the rampant inequality, or feeling of disservice that one experiences as a client, actually begins in the classroom, where eurocentric standards of beauty are the explicit norm and the needs of people of color are fully ignored. It is as if the curriculum of cosmetology schools haven’t been updated since the 80’s (so far I’ve spent ten times the amount of hours learning about spiral perms than how to properly condition naturally coily hair). I’m still looking for the chapter on even the simplest braiding techniques. So, like many of us, I spend most nights watching curl tutorials on Youtube! But the sad truth is Black and brown folks are being underserved because their professionals, despite having paid thousands of dollars for their education and license, are underequipped.
Eager to fix the flaws I saw in the beauty world, last year I took my biggest step away from tech and officially started Coastal Curl — a clean beauty community for people with textured hair. With enough elbow grease and ancestral luck, one day it will become a multicultural salon brand that is known for being the absolute leader in eco-friendly natural hair care.
As I start to build my business from the ground up, I work part-time in the service industry to make connections and ends meet. The hours are grueling and the work is physically exhausting — I spend much of my time washing dishes and scrubbing floors. There are days where it takes every ounce of my patience to not snap back at a demeaning customer. Yet when I look back on my cushy start-up days, I do not look back nostalgically, longing for those midday massage breaks. Rather, I become more reminded of a guiding truth; from the person who scrubs the floors, to the leader that sits at the helm — each one of us deserves to be seen and respected, equally.
Silicon Valley and Stanford University are notorious for selling stories of exceptionalism. We’ve been taught to worship the tale of the whiz-kid who drops out of college to build the most data-driven app ever invented — a company where genius flows from the top down and scales so quickly and boldly that it changes the world forever. But after seeing that kind of ego-fueled venture crumble more than once, I plan to do things quite differently. My hope is to grow my nascent community of curl enthusiasts into a worker-owned beauty cooperative that puts people and the planet first; a space where folks walk out feeling more nurtured than when they walked in. When I wake up each morning, I know I am one step closer to turning that dream into a reality. And I think if my ancestors are watching me today, they’re more proud than ever before.
