By Kimberly Wilson ·Updated April 7, 2026 < /> Getting your Trinity Audio player ready… Talk to Emma Grede for even just 5 minutes, and it will instantly make you want to go back and audit every excuse you’ve ever made.
It’s a Monday and she’s at home in LA, which, for her, almost never happens. For someone who is a founding partner of SKIMS, co-founder and CEO of Good American, chairwoman of The Fifteen Percent Pledge, a board member of The Obama Foundation, and a mother of four, a quiet Monday doesn’t really exist. She’s been on the road for Start With Yourself, which is her debut book out April 14th, and look, if we’re being honest, the book could sell itself. She is, by any measure, one of the most powerful women in business right now.
But the book actually starts way before any of that. We get her backstory before SKIMS, before Shark Tank, or before whatever entry point you may know of who Emma Grede has come to be. It starts with a girl in East London, who is the eldest of four kids raised by a single mom, and who figured out pretty early that staying where she was wasn’t going to get her anywhere. There was love in her neighborhood. Opportunity on the other hand? Now that was a whole ‘nother story. At the time, making the decision to leave, to want more, to bet on herself when nobody around her was doing the same thing, felt selfish at the time, like she was choosing herself over everyone else. She’s spent a lot of years since then unpacking why that is, and more importantly, what it costs women when they never give themselves permission to get past it.
She went into this book thinking she knew exactly what she was writing. Turns out, she didn’t. “It was easy to write about building a brand and a business, about leadership, about career,” she tells ESSENCE. “But when I kind of went a little bit deeper, I was like, ‘Well, why is it that I’ve been able to do those things?'”
There’s a whole section on what she calls old thoughts, which are basically the stories we’ve been telling ourselves forever, and probably feel true because at some point they were. And for Black women, those “old thoughts” don’t look the same as everyone else’s. “We have to reckon with ourselves around what is useful,” she says. “What is a behavior that I’ve developed, be it protective or otherwise, that is actually taking me in the direction that is useful for myself.”
And for Black women, that’s where it gets tricky, because a lot of those behaviors were built from watching what happened to the women around you when they wanted too much, moved too fast, or trusted the wrong room. She’s not here to tell you that was wrong. What she is saying is that at some point you have to figure out what those same behaviors are costing you now, especially when it comes to money.
Nobody talks about money the way Emma Grede does. She’s watched founders, Black women especially, walk into capital raises without understanding what they are actually agreeing to. “The conversation in your head should be, ‘Oh my goodness. Now the expectation is to 4X this, to 10X this, to 20X this,'” she says. “And I think that people think about money entirely wrongly because we imagine it’s there to make our dreams and our ambitions come true. And that’s just not the truth of it.” It’s not that she’s against raising money. It’s that she thinks too many women walk into those rooms completely unprepared for what comes next. Meanwhile, the information they need has always been in rooms they weren’t invited into. She knows those rooms well. She’s been building in them for years, quietly, and without needing anyone to validate it.
“I never felt this big need to prove anything to anyone,” she says. “I’ve been really focused on making stuff work for me, creating wealth for myself, creating wealth for my family.”
She has failed. More than once, and more than she probably gets credit for publicly.
And as someone who has shut down a company herself, the failure section of this book hit close to home. “You are not bad in business,” she says. “You had a business that didn’t work.” I’ve needed someone to say that out loud for a while.
“Far too often we are the first to point at ourselves and say, ‘I’m just not leadership material. I’m not CEO material.’ It’s like, ‘Yeah, you are. You just had a shit business,'” she says.
This book isn’t for the woman who already has it all figured out. She wrote it for the version of herself that didn’t. “A million little Emmas,” she calls them. Girls who aren’t good at math, who have learning differences, who came from places where entrepreneurship wasn’t even a concept people entertained. She kept the chapters short on purpose, because she knows her reader is juggling everything and doesn’t have time to sit with a 400 page book. “Read it and do it and read it and do it,” she says.Start With Yourself is out April 14th.
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