The Hustler's Guide to the Hair Business

with @bhorowitz @shakasenghor @diishanimira @therealritabee Hustlin’ Tech is a new show (part of the a16z Podcast) that introduces the technology platforms -- and mindsets -- for everybody and anybody who has the desire, the talent, and the hustle t...

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:13Ben Horowitz?

  All right. Welcome to The Hustler's Guide to Tech where people who have the passion, the heart, the desire and the talent to go do it and make their dreams happen, but just need a connect. This is a show for you. And today we are joined by Deshan, founder and CEO of Maven, the king of the hair business.

• 0:38Speaker 01

  He ain't got a hair business, you know, that's heavyweight right there. Bundle God. Yeah, that's the bundle God. I like that. And then we got Sheri here. What's up Sheri?

• 0:47Ben Horowitz?

  We're our hustler who has hustled, Deshan's platform Maven.

• 0:52Speaker 02

  Most definitely.

• 0:53Ben Horowitz?

  And then I'm joined by my co-host, Shaka Sangor.

• 0:56Speaker 01

  What up, Doh?

• 0:57Ben Horowitz?

  Who, as you frequently listeners know, came out of the joint, hustled his way selling books that he wrote himself and published himself out of his car.

• 1:07Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 1:08Ben Horowitz?

  And is now bestselling author and big time Hollywood screenwriter. So let's go.

• 1:16Speaker 01

  Bundle God. I like that, man. That's hot. That's hot. Somebody said that to me a few weeks ago. So it might, maybe it'll stick. I just want to be clear with the audience, like exactly what a bundle is. Cause like in the street culture, bundles mean something totally different. I don't want them to be confused.

• 1:31Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 1:31Speaker 01

  Just want to be real clear about, you know, the bundles is.

• 1:35Speaker 02

  Bundle God.

• 1:35Ben Horowitz?

  I guess bundle got a whole new meaning.

• 1:39Speaker 02

  So a bundle is a weft of hair. And what that looks like is if you imagined a long, thick string with hair draping down from it, that would be a bundle.

• 1:50Speaker 01

  So how how many bundles does it take to do like a full hairstyle like a the average?

• 1:56Ben Horowitz?

  Like like the big Beyonce hair.

• 1:58Speaker 02

  Okay, see, come on, that's what I was looking for. It depends on, you know, how glamorous you want to be. For a regular install is going to be probably two to three bundles. But for a Beyonce install, it's probably going to be closer to four or five.

• 2:14Speaker 01

  And then how much how much how much do bundles cost per bundle like? Yeah, what's what's the bundle?

• 2:18Speaker 02

  The super, super cheap ones can be like thirty bucks or thirty five bucks for like super cheap. And then they can go upwards to like two hundred and fifty dollars a bundle.

• 2:28Speaker 01

  So thirty to two hundred dollars.

• 2:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, but a Maven bundle.

• 2:30Speaker 03

  I think they're about they're about eighty eighty bucks a bundle right now. There's there's a lot of lengths.

• 2:36Speaker 02

  It just depends.

• 2:37Speaker 03

  That changes the price, but maybe on average eighty or so, you know, but you're probably gonna, if you buy three bundles, you're probably gonna walk out of there paying two fifty.

• 2:47Speaker 01

  So so quick question about about the bundle. So I got like four sisters, right? So I grew up with like a lot of hair conversations and it's always popping on social media. You know, the new styles. Interestingly enough, they got this new challenge called the DMX challenge.

• 3:01Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 3:02Speaker 01

  And then you're seeing all the sisters with all the different hairstyles, it's kind of fly. So like what was what was your entry point into to the bundle game, man?

• 3:10Speaker 03

  I mean, you know, okay, so I never ever would have thought that I was gonna be selling bundles. I had hairstylists in my family and I I saw them doing hair growing up. So I understood I understood the relationship between stylists, customers, you know, black women and their hair. I understood culturally what that was. I never thought I was gonna be a part of it at all. I ended up on the other side of the bundle game, which was in China, where they were being manufactured. And I lived in China for almost two years.

• 3:44Ben Horowitz?

  Now, you lived in China to learn the hair game or like where are we living in China?

• 3:48Speaker 03

  So I moved to China after college. I just wanted to travel. And I had a mentor at the time in college who she ran the international studies department. That was like oh, three. This is before everybody was really like like China was like in the news, in the news, in the news. She was like, no, China is about to do something. Go over there, it might be some opportunities.

• 4:11Speaker 01

  So what college were you coming out of?

• 4:12Speaker 03

  I went to Hampton University, HBCU. HBCU is a historically black college or university. And I was a sociology major. I never actually never thought of myself as a business person. I didn't, I didn't understand that I was a business person until later.

• 4:27Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah, well, you know, entrepreneur and business person are two different things. A businessman could be anybody who like puts on a suit and goes, works for a company. And an entrepreneur is somebody who tries to make something from nothing.

• 4:39Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 4:39Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah, that's why Jeezy's new album is so relevant, man, entrepreneur.

• 4:43Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 4:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 4:44Speaker 03

  I mean, I always thought of the word business, like as a, as a young person, I thought of it as like this stuffy thing with like a briefcase in a building. And then I just realized, wait, I had to create my own vision and I like to do things how I want to do them. And that's what an entrepreneur is going to do is just find the resources around him to do the things the way he or she wants to do them. So I got to China. I didn't know anybody, didn't speak a word of, of Mandarin. And they stuck me in the school, teaching English. I started playing hangman with them. So I just found all kinds of ways to get them to talk. But anyway, when you get to China, the first thing that hits you is like, oh shit. Every single person here is hustling.

• 5:28Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah.

• 5:28Speaker 03

  It's the most hustling, enterprising place on planet earth. Every single person around you is hustling something. And China being like the manufacturing, you know, center of the world, everybody was selling some sort of product. Like everyone was, everyone had some sort of relationship to supply chain somewhere. So interestingly enough, though, the first hustle that I had when I got to China was not exporting stuff. It was selling English.

• 5:59Speaker 01

  So that's a, that's a great way to really kind of set up how you make the pivot. I want to talk a little bit to Sheri though and get her perspective of her hustle and just how you became entrepreneur. Like what was that pathway and where, where did you grow up at?

• 6:12Speaker 02

  Uh, I actually grew up between Berkeley and Oakland.

• 6:14Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 6:15Ben Horowitz?

  All right.

• 6:15Speaker 01

  So you're Cali, you're Cali girl.

• 6:16Ben Horowitz?

  That's my hometown.

• 6:17Speaker 02

  Oh, hey.

• 6:18Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah, yeah, like where, whereabouts Berkeley and Oakland?

• 6:21Speaker 02

  South Berkeley, South Berkeley. I was on Russell Street and off of Fairview.

• 6:25Ben Horowitz?

  Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah. I went to Berkeley High.

• 6:27Speaker 02

  I went to Berkeley High.

• 6:28Speaker 03

  Uh-oh, okay.

• 6:29Speaker 02

  Hey.

• 6:31Ben Horowitz?

  Okay.

• 6:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 6:32Ben Horowitz?

  All right.

• 6:33Speaker 02

  And then I was in East Oakland, so that's where I came from.

• 6:36Speaker 01

  I mean Oakland is a hustling town. I know they get forty water up there.

• 6:40Speaker 02

  I was born to a mom who she was with my dad, but then he got caught up in the crack era and went to jail and dealing with, you know, that having that addiction for the rest of his life. I think still currently even battling cancer right now.

• 6:55Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah, man.

• 6:56Speaker 02

  It's bad. So she was raising four of us by herself. And so my mom, a single mom with four children is a hustler. And I had three older brothers and then me. And so three black boys in the bay. She was a hustler. She had to be, you know, you gotta be up at the school, making sure that they're not, you know, tracking your kid, that they're, you know, putting them in the right classes. And she was doing all those things and um, would do all that, have a job and still come home and make dinner. On top of that, my grandmother, same thing, was a hustler. But that's kind of what I was born into, um, how I got into cosmetology. Uh, when I was 10 years old, my mom decided to go to school to become a manicurist.

• 7:39Speaker 02

  And the reason why she did this was because it was a way that she could have a business, but be able to dictate her own hours and still be able to raise all her kids.

• 7:48Ben Horowitz?

  Yep, yep, yeah, that's a hard puzzle.

• 7:50Speaker 02

  So I was going to the school with her and watching the people do hair. And I was like, that's really cool.

• 7:54Ben Horowitz?

  And was she, did she become a manicurist out of the house or she had her own shop or how did that work?

• 8:00Speaker 02

  So she went to school, I helped her like study for a test. She passed her license, actually her license is on my birthday every year. She did start doing that over house and then pivoted that, got a business. Now she's been doing it for over 20 years and now she's like five stars on Yelp. She has all these companies coming her. She's like the number one person, I think in California for natural nail care. She decided that she didn't like acrylic or the, the harsh chemicals. Um, but how I got into doing hair was, um, I was actually jumping around. I was in college and I didn't finish and then I got into, to hotel management on accident. And I was like 20 and there was like this emergency that happened and. Maybe just being the youngest and having brothers, I don't know, I can think really quick on my feet.

• 8:45Speaker 02

  And so they saw my skills and how I handled this situation. So like with so much just poise and and just like an expert, and they're like, so if you want to be a assistant operations manager, you know, you got this position, you want to come in? I was like, what? A salary? Oh, yeah. So I got into that, did sales with Comcast, then got back into management. And then I was managing multiple properties. And it seems like a good job, but I wasn't happy. For the first time in my life, I found myself starting to deal with like some anxiety. And I had like my first like little, I don't know if it was a panic attack or anxiety attack.

• 9:26Speaker 02

  And so I went to the doctor and they're like, oh, that was a little anxiety attack, a little panic attack, honey. I was like, what? The person I was dating at the time, keep people around you that love the crap out of you. Because they sometimes pay more attention to you than you pay attention to yourself.

• 9:40Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 9:41Speaker 02

  Okay?

• 9:41Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 9:41Speaker 02

  And so this person was like, you know, every time you get off of work, you're talking about, you caught a YouTube video about some hair or some makeup. Like, why don't you look into doing that? And so I went towards some cosmetology schools and I fell in love. So I gave a notice of like two months out. And I didn't know that, like, when you give a notice, they could be like, Ashley, in two weeks, you gotta go. And so that's what happened. I had planned for two months, I was like, hey, I could save up some money. I was a parent at this time, a single mom, I had a three year old. And I was just like, this is what I'm gonna do. No, two weeks. And I was out.

• 10:19Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 10:19Speaker 02

  And I was like, oh, shoot. And then I put a notice, you can't get unemployment. So it was just, that's when I think all of my hustle, entrepreneurship, everything I had in me just came out. Yeah, when you don't, when you have to, when your back is against the wall. The things that you didn't know were in you, they all come out. And it did. I got on welfare because I had to find a way to provide for my daughter. And I moved back in with my mom, which was super uncomfortable because since like 18, I was out. It was literally like being a fish out of water. When I was in cosmetology school, people said, oh, you know, Sheri Ann, she's going to be in Hollywood. Like, we just know, we're going to see her name. And I think that's really important.

• 11:02Speaker 02

  I think words have so much power and a lot of people say it, but I don't think enough people really believe it. And I've seen it. That changed everything. Literally, I was in cosmetology school, went for this award, went for this competition. And in this competition, it was, they were only going to pick the top 100 in the country to go get this advanced training in Vegas. I worked with these photographers, just, just acting around. Hey, do you know anybody who were also in school at the Art Institute? Didn't know that these photographers were on the shortlist, which is like the world's 250 up and coming photographers that everyone's looking at. So literally after that, I got published in Vogue while I was in cosmetology school. Five times.

• 11:45Speaker 01

  That's dope. That's, that's really great because I think, you know, these are the things that we talk about all the time, right? Like the belief system and a lot of times when it comes to entrepreneurship, like taking that risk, betting on yourself and really doing it when you're going against the title, what you've been taught for so long, right? Just go to school, get the education, get the degree, get the job, become a business person as opposed to entrepreneur. And, you know, even your trajectory is just like imagining things. Because in my life, it was kind of the same thing, thing, writing it down. This is what I want to happen. And then when it, when it began to manifest. And so I, I love like just hearing like this different perspective, right? And one of the things I was really interested in is how did you like kind of figure the pathway out in terms of technology?

• 12:28Speaker 01

  Because that's the thing that, that's always been interesting to me is the people who take that leap of faith versus the people who come from the culture where it's the big fear that we talk about. It's like, oh, you can't, that's too hard, it's too complicated, it's too nerdy. But you done made this look kind of flat, so.

• 12:42Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah, and on that point, what a lot of people, I think, don't understand about. About that journey is if you knew what was involved before you started, you would never have done it. Right? Like, and everybody's ever been through it knows that.

• 12:55Speaker 03

  Birds.

• 12:55Ben Horowitz?

  And so, like, you know, it's not that bad things don't happen. It's just that, once you jump into the water, you gotta swim.

• 13:04Speaker 03

  I mean, just for me, that was, uh, you know, I'm not, I wasn't a technical founder. And before I ever linked up with Taylor, I had to, I had to demonstrate that this thing could work on the internet.

• 13:15Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah.

• 13:16Speaker 03

  So, I used one of those like, you know, in 07, it was like the first versions of the Shopify. It was, this was like something that some like, Eastern European dudes had made. It was called like eswid.com. And you could make some little janky little like, yeah, it wasn't even a, I didn't even know what Shopify was, but I was like, I found this thing. And it's like, oh, you can have a store. And I could just drag and drop and make it myself. And I just made five of them for five stylists. And it was completely janky, but it was, it was the internet version of what I was doing out the trunk of my car. And it demonstrated that we could do it on the internet. And we just needed to do it better and with more stylists and with more infrastructure. But if I gave these stylists a tool, they would sell.

• 14:01Speaker 03

  I mean, I think probably like spirit wise, I'm always been like an adventurer. And I, and I came from like, my family is, you know, they're, they're like hippies. I don't even have my mom or my dad's last name. My mom and my dad, like my dad, he was like super black power and he was like, I don't want to give you the slave name. And so, my mom took a word from Russian and he took a word from Swahili and they put them together and made my last name. And this is like my own last name. And it was like, you're gonna do, you're gonna be your own thing. And then I was also like in a single parent household, like my father also got swept up in the crack era. He was gone by the time I was five. My mother was working constantly. She's a doctor.

• 14:44Speaker 03

  And so she was like doing med school and then have a lot of people telling me what to do and when to do it. I think when it came to this, this like tech thing, I had spent all this time in China. You know, the first hustle I got into over there was like, or like export hustle was, I saw Jordans for sale in China. And I was like, oh shit. And they were $20.

• 15:10Speaker 03

  Jordans. Right. Right? I talked to some guys out there who were in that game. I had met some people. They showed me how to ship them. They were like these little Chinese shippers and all, where are you going to get them? Figured that out. Next thing you know, I wanted to move bigger things. And so like, I saw, I, I saw containers. You know, I was driving over this bridge in Hong Kong and I, I seen these ships with these huge containers. I was like, I want to move one of those across the whole world. Like, and that was sort of my, I had no real big vision. Just like, I want to figure out how to do that. And got into like furniture and shipping stuff. Eventually that kind of led me to delivering couches myself in Miami. Right.

• 15:53Speaker 03

  In old ass buildings, like walking up steps with shit. And I was like, this is not the most efficient way to do all this stuff. And there's gotta be a better way. And that was like around oh seven. All this Facebook stuff was like popping up. And that's when Silicon Valley got on my radar. Even though I'm from here, I'm from Oakland. But I didn't know that.

• 16:14Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah, it's a long ways from Oakland to Silicon Valley.

• 16:17Speaker 03

  Yeah, I didn't know that the valley was like right here. And I started learning on, you know, the internet and, and I want to know how to do that stuff. I'm the sucker if I don't get in. Right? If I don't figure out the game. But I did look at it like it was a whole different culture. Living in China, like the way I thought about all problems was as a cultural problem. I, I thought about all problems as a matter of how do I communicate with a group of people? Who have a different set of codes and cultures and language in order to get my point across and to understand what they need to be comfortable here and for us to cooperate with each other.

• 16:57Speaker 03

  And so I looked at Silicon Valley like, like it was China. I looked at it like, I just gotta figure out how people move out here. And, you know, the same principles of business that I was already doing of selling things. They're still the same principles of business, but it's just a different language around it. Like, you gotta learn what the CAC and the LTV are. You know what I mean? Before, it was just like, this what I buy it for, and this is how much I sell it for. And then, you know, if they come back, I'm gonna make another eighty dollars and make another eighty. Describing that same thing in the language of the culture in which you're now trying to be a part of.

• 17:31Speaker 01

  So that's, that's what I love, just hearing you say that in that language, like, that's easily, uh, transferable to any, any culture. Because when you were talking earlier about looking at the, the big shipping containers, running, you're like, I just wanna move big things, I wanna move big weight, right? Same language of the streets, you know? How do you translate the culture and translate the language in a way where people who may feel like, okay, this is my only route is hustling in the streets, can see another pathway, right? And like, you saw it intuitively, your experience in China, kinda awakens your mind to like, yo, I just gotta get in and figure it out.

• 18:06Speaker 03

  I got a lot of game from Oakland, but I got a lot of hustle from the Chinese. Like, I learned a lot about the, the ethic of working from the Chinese. They, they don't have no excuses. They don't care. There's no excuses. They're like, no one feels like they were like entitled to anything. They're just like, this is where I'm at, and I gotta figure out how to make more. And they just try to figure out any way they can do that.

• 18:35Ben Horowitz?

  That's so important, cuz that mentality cuts through so much stuff that people get caught up in, yeah.

• 18:40Speaker 03

  Culture, yeah.

• 18:41Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah. All right, so Sheri Ann, like, how'd you get on the Maven platform?

• 18:46Speaker 02

  Well, back when I was in cosmetology school, I had a friend, and my friend told me about this guy who, who she would get hair from, cuz she was also a hairdresser, and she was also in school. So we rode to El Cerrito, California. We, uh, pull up into a parking lot, and I'm like, okay, where is he? She's like, oh, he's gonna meet me over here. And I was like, like, what do you mean, meet you over here? And, uh, this guy, this gentleman, rolls up in his car, and I think it was like a little Honda or something, I don't know, it's like a little commuter car.

• 19:17Speaker 03

  It was a Toyota Corolla.

• 19:18Speaker 02

  And he got out his car, and he popped his trunk, and he got some hair out. That's how I met the shine. And so, um, while I was in cosmetology school... He had launched the Maven platform online. And at the time, he had it where if you referred your friend, if you referred someone, and they, and they went ahead and set up their Maven profile, and they got a website, they got money. They got a hundred and fifty dollars for you setting it up. So my friend was like, don't you want to get this? Cause I'll get some money and you know, they'll hook you up too. I was like, cool. So I started telling people too. So that's how he got the word out. Cause cash incentive to people who don't have a lot of cash is amazing. And I was a student, a struggling student, okay?

• 20:03Speaker 02

  And I was like, ah, yes. And so I got on the platform, started ordering hair. And from there, I was called in, uh, because I was a local stylist, uh, from someone at his office. And at this point now, they have, they have grown and they actually had an office space now in Oakland, in downtown Oakland, okay? They had me come in.

• 20:25Speaker 03

  We were doing like some focus groups, I think at the time. We were bringing some stylists in.

• 20:29Speaker 02

  My biggest concern at the time, and um, even though I had the platform, I was still side eyeing. I think as hairstylists, we're very suspicious. We're always very suspicious, you know, especially if someone's trying to give you something. And that's the other thing that sold me on it. It was that we're gonna do all the work. I am not the technical person, okay? I'm with my hands, I could do some amazing things. But you want me to get on a computer, I'm gonna freak out.

• 20:51Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 20:51Speaker 02

  And so they said, we'll set you up an entire website. It's gonna have your name, here's your link, you just put it on your Instagram. And the, the people are going to buy hair. So it's like, you have your own hair, but you don't have to worry about the inventory. You don't have to worry about the startup costs. We're gonna do everything. All you gotta do is just tell people to buy from there. And then we're gonna kick you back fifteen percent off every sale. I told you I had a background in sales. I was like, that's not a bad percentage. And then on top of that, for every single time you meet this certain sales goal, we're gonna give you a hundred dollars of free credit towards hair. So I was like, so wait, I could take that hundred dollars and buy the hair, but then sell it for like whatever I want? Then the number one thing, cause I'd never heard of this.

• 21:36Speaker 02

  They had a thirty day money back guarantee.

• 21:39Ben Horowitz?

  On hair?

• 21:40Speaker 02

  On hair!

• 21:42Speaker 03

  That's crazy, man.

• 21:43Speaker 02

  What? Who, who does that? I don't know, I still don't know.

• 21:47Speaker 03

  Well, the way I looked at it was, that's crazy that there is no guarantees on a product that costs

• 21:53Speaker 02

  So much money.

• 21:53Speaker 03

  Two hundred and fifty dollars. Yeah. Like that does like in other communities, that's not really the norm. But the way like the way our products have been sold for so long, the people who have been selling them have had no incentive to to be customer friendly. Korean owned beauty supply stores supplied ninety plus percent of all of the black beauty products. Connection between the supplier and the customer.

• 22:20Speaker 02

  You buy it, but if you have a problem, they go final sale, says it on the receipt. And that's it. And that's all. So the so this was the first time that I had heard of this type of interaction and someone like actually being like, no, we'll be accountable like like we would just want to make sure you're happy.

• 22:37Speaker 03

  And that was one of the that was one of the fundamental things that like I saw also as like an innovation here was like not just adding all this technology, but also the technology can enable me to provide a customer experience and like customer service level that this my customer is not used to. Like that is, but to me, it's just like a right, like you should, this is just a right. So take us through the concept of the business. So honestly, it's really why did I stick with Maven? Because I started all kinds of things to just make money and hustle. Maven became different for me because it actually had more purpose to it.

• 23:18Speaker 03

  To me, I was just like as a as an entrepreneur and as a hustler, and I looked at the stylists like they are also entrepreneurs and they're being blocked out of a category. Because there's no infrastructure for them to get into it. And the distributors who supply those stores, who own these brands, they wouldn't even sell to you if you went to them and said, I want to carry your brands in my hair salon. So all of the black hair salons were devoid of any retail. You couldn't, you didn't buy products in the salon. So all the dollars for all the retail were flowing out of the community. And the stylists and the the salons weren't able to capture any of that value.

• 24:01Speaker 03

  Uh, which typically in like mainstream hair salons, that can be like forty percent of your of the revenue that flows through that salon could be from retail and selling products. So I didn't like that. And then I saw.

• 24:16Speaker 03

  That there could be a technological solution that leveraged the power that the hairstylist had. Because what I also saw was that these stylists have got all these customers.

• 24:26Speaker 01

  Man, that's amazing.

• 24:28Speaker 03

  They got a relationship with them. If I just give them this tool, maybe they can distribute these products. And so that's what I saw, and then that's what I kind of set out to to build. I called it Maven because the word Maven, the word Maven, M A V E, and it means an expert. Someone who's skilled in their craft or an expert. And that's the way that I looked at the hairstylist. That they're actually at the center of influencing this entire beauty world. And the products that people buy and what styles they get, everything, they're at the center of it. I could build a tool that put them back in the center of it.

• 25:10Speaker 01

  So, you know, Chicago, Indiana, Detroit, you know, where hair, they had like hair wars and all those crazy things popping. They're really serious about it. So somebody's in the salon and they're like hearing about it.

• 25:24Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 25:25Speaker 01

  Like, what is, what does it take to to transition them from just the old model that doesn't really honor them into getting on the platform?

• 25:32Speaker 03

  It was actually really, really simple. If you heard about Maven, you could, you know, come to our website and just put your phone number in there. Somebody would call you and over the phone, collect your information and you'd be on the phone for about 10 minutes. And by the time you're off the phone, you would have a website. Fully functional website for your customers to come to and buy. And when they bought, that product would ship out that same day. Customer would get it in about two to three business days and you would get a commission. So it was actually really, really simple.

• 26:09Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 26:10Speaker 03

  And we signed up a lot, a lot of hairstylists.

• 26:12Speaker 02

  Easy sell.

• 26:13Speaker 01

  And is, is that how it still works now? What's, what's the, been the iterations of it?

• 26:17Speaker 03

  Oh, man. Over the past three years, there's been a flood of cheap hair that has come from China. So the old brands that were the Korean brands sold through the beauty supply stores that they basically own the whole market. They bought all their hair from these Chinese manufacturers.

• 26:39Speaker 03

  Alibaba came along, which is like the Amazon of China. And those factories now had a way to get online and start selling products all over the world, and even direct to consumer. And so you have both direct to consumer factories selling directly from China to customers here, and you've got factories just selling supply of hair to entrepreneurs here who want to start small hair companies. And so there's been an explosion of cheap hair here, which started to threaten our business model because now prices are like coming down. And that started to make it harder for our stylists to sell. So what we did was completely transform our business.

• 27:24Speaker 03

  We basically said, okay, if this is the world, if hair margins are going to go down, what do we need to do to survive? What do we have that no one else has? And how can we use that to compete and survive? And so what we did was, again, going back to the power that was in our community is our hairstylist. That was the asset. That's the thing that Maven had built up over the past four and a half years. We partnered with the stylists in a different way, and we bundled the hair and the service together for one price. And then we went to stylists and said, I'm going to fill your book of business with new clients. So we shifted the model to customer buys now directly from Maven.

• 28:06Speaker 03

  If they buy from us at the same cost, they don't have to pay for service. They can go put in their zip code, find any stylist, Maven stylist in their area, book that stylist, and Maven will pay for the service directly to the stylist. But we work out a special rate with our stylists, and so we're still able to make some money. It's a brand new model. The industry doesn't even, there is no model for it. And we've delivered like three X the value now to customers. The stylists now that are on this platform are now making five times the amount of money that we used to pay out to stylists. And now we're, now we're competitive with, with AliExpress. They can't do what we're doing. They don't have the stylist network.

• 28:49Speaker 03

  Amazon has a stylist network of black stylists, you know, across America.

• 28:54Ben Horowitz?

  Now you're, you're providing a different kind of service.

• 28:57Speaker 03

  Well, what it, what it also does is what we, what we basically said, there's this other market here right next to it that's three times bigger than even this product. And we can sell these services, right? And there's so much value that needs to be created on that side and things we can help to fix on that side. We're going to use the, the product that we've been selling to leverage our way into that side. But now, we can do bookings, we can do, you know, you know, we can do the credit card processing for the, for all the transactions that go through there. We can fill these stylists' book of business, like fill their seats with, with customers. We can add all the menu of services that they provide, not just weave services. That's, you know, that's coming next.

• 29:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, I was just about to ask about that, considering I got locks and I'm like, I travel a lot. And so it's not always easy to get, like, somebody to take care of my hair. And there's a phone app that you can use.

• 29:51Speaker 03

  So we actually don't, we don't even have a, a, a mobile app. It's always just been web, web-based. It's a website. Everything's built very for, like, mobile.

• 29:59Speaker 01

  Friendly.

• 30:00Speaker 03

  Friendly.

• 30:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 30:01Speaker 03

  You know, but also, you know, like, with this technology thing, everyone always thinks they gotta go make an app.

• 30:08Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 30:09Speaker 03

  Right, like, like, I gotta make it really super technological. No, like, you need, just try to find the minimum amount of technology you need to just solve a very specific problem. And you don't have to overdo it. So there never was a specific reason you needed an app for this, so we didn't build one. I think a lot of people get that, yeah, get that wrong.

• 30:30Ben Horowitz?

  And you need to refer people into it from all kinds of sources. That actually technically worked better for you with a, with a web-based interface, yeah.

• 30:37Speaker 03

  And apps can have a lot of friction.

• 30:39Speaker 01

  So Sheri Ann, when you made that lead with, with Maven, like, how did that impact your business?

• 30:43Speaker 02

  Well, I think, I think the first thing for any hustle is you gotta have the passion behind it, right? That's, that's number one. When I went in for them to give us the survey and ask us questions afterwards, Deshaun came in and just told us about it and told us more about the company and why he created it and what his vision was. And at the time, I kind of turned my nose up and other stylists that, that were there did too, because Maven is not a platform that is only for professional stylists. Maven is a platform that's for all stylists. And as a professional and as someone that took out school loans, I was like, why do I want to be on a platform with other people who didn't do all the things that I did?

• 31:26Speaker 02

  I felt like I should be on a different platform. And when Deshaun broke down that, you know, it's bigger than just being a professional. This is about giving back to the community. This is about people who are, you know, in small cities, somewhere in Indiana, and are doing hair in their kitchen. But mind you, that's what our grandmothers used to do, was they were doing hair in their kitchen. And so who are we to put ourselves, you know, on this platform saying, no, I'm not them because that's who I come from? And so as soon as he put it like that, I was like, I want to be a part of whatever you're doing. And so since then, I've worked as a Maven stylist. I've helped with YouTube videos. I've helped with how-tos. This is something that'll be rated.

• 32:11Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah.

• 32:11Speaker 02

  And, you know, they want to make sure that the customer is going to be getting a quality and consistent service. But not only just for hair weaving services, it'll also be for cut. It'll also be for color. It'll also be for natural hair. It's still, you know, it gets me a little excited because I'll get a text message going, you just got paid. And I'll be like, what? Because people just go to your site and they just can buy. You don't, you don't have to do anything.

• 32:39Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah, it's way easier than doing somebody's hair.

• 32:41Speaker 02

  You just get a notification, ding, you got paid. And so since then, my trajectory completely took off. Now I work in Hollywood. I've worked on the last two seasons of HBO Insecure. I'm working on a new show called Little Fires Everywhere that stars Kerry Washington and Reese Witherspoon. And every time I get a chance and I need some hair, I still go back to Maven because the hair is good. They're always on top of everything. And that's really hard to find, especially like in a hair company. And I, and I think it's, I honestly would have thought before and now that would have been too much to ask for. It's also something that'll be beneficial to me because again, I don't want to deal with the technical side. But it's so important to have that technical component.

• 33:25Speaker 02

  I don't care if you don't want to deal with it. You get with another company that'll do the work for you and you're still able to reap the benefits. Sometimes, some people get caught up in the... Well, how much am I gonna get? What am I getting back for my service? The truth is, is that if you are a stylist and you are not fully booked, then you need to be on it. I have friends who work in LA and travel, and they have clients that pay a lot of money for hair, right? To get their hair done. Yet they're still taking part-time gigs. You know, they're like, "Oh, but it's gonna be thirty bucks an hour." I'm like, "Why are you going somewhere for thirty bucks an hour when you can go in the salon? And you telling me they're gonna give you, you know, anywhere from a hundred to three hundred bucks for this one client?

• 34:09Speaker 02

  It's only gonna take you two to three hours." The math's not working out. And so we have to change our mindset. Because sometimes, some of us hustlers, especially as a cosmetologist, we're so used to having to do things and, and, you know, constantly be having our hands in something that sometimes we don't see opportunities that are right in front of our face.

• 34:29Speaker 01

  So one of the, one of the things I was thinking about is just like, you know, going back to, to earlier conversation about how hair, you know, the hair industry itself, you know, from the mom and pops in the house. So how do, how do people sign up and make payments and get paid? Like if they don't have credit cards or debit cards?

• 34:47Speaker 03

  That's a really interesting question because this was one of the unfore, the unforeseen challenges that we had after getting into this business was the first version of how we paid people was by check. And we found out very fast that when we tried to go pay people by PayPal or pay them, you know, ACH or something, that like half of the stylists didn't have bank accounts. And then that opened up this whole other world of the unbanked. Some enormous percentage of the population doesn't have bank accounts. So we would send out checks and they'd get lost in the mail.

• 35:31Speaker 03

  Or there's all over the country, we would get stylists calling us saying, "I brought my check into a bank." And they wouldn't let me cash it, right? And we're talking like checks like 15 bucks or something like that. But they wouldn't even let them cash a $15 check. They had to go to a check cashing place, which they charged, you know, what they charge like 15% or something of the check or whatever it is. In the past couple of years, we created a solution actually in partnership with Green Dot. So they're the technical infrastructure for how this payment system works. But we can now pay to any routing number. So you don't have to have a bank account, but if you have like a prepaid card and it's

• 36:14Speaker 03

  got the 16 digits on it, we can drop money on that thing and we can drop it instantaneously. For the new thing that we have, we sell the hair and you get free service with it. Instapay is now triggered through a QR code. So after you buy the hair and you book your stylist, we text you a QR code. When you go into the salon, the stylist just scans your QR code with her phone and she's instantaneously paid to her, either her bank account or her prepaid card.

• 36:45Speaker 01

  Three things that popped up to me when you were talking, the importance of being able to serve a community that is underserved and then quality. Cause from a hustling perspective, you know, a lot of times you just get what you can when you in that mindset of being easily distracted and in these different directions. And then the third thing was partnership. And so like, do you intuitively think of it from those three lenses? Or did it just something that organically shows up in the way that you do business?

• 37:11Speaker 03

  You know, I had a mentor before. His name was Mike Bush and he was an executive out here in Oakland. And he gave me some advice one time. He said, before I had started Mave and he was like, Deshaun, you're not gonna make any money until you stop trying to make money and think about how you can make other people money. And it changed the way I thought about my relationships with people. And what you want to try to do is be valuable to people, not extract value from people. If you are valuable to society.

• 37:49Speaker 03

  The money flows to where the value is, where the value creator is. If the other person doesn't win, this thing ain't gonna last. It ain't gonna work if we both don't win. It it won't be sustainable. So partnership is always like how I look at it. You know, and like the new model that we've created, what is the right number so that this works for stylists? And what's the number that works so that it works for customers? And then honestly, the number that we get to keep at Maven is the last number that I think about. But it starts with, let me make my partner's money.

• 38:26Speaker 01

  Well, it's definitely showing up in a way that Sheri Ann expressed it.

• 38:31Speaker 02

  When I was in cosmetology school, they were like, okay, you guys are cosmetologists. So you guys get to pick whatever name you want. You can have a Cosmo name. And I was like, I can be someone else. What? I never thought about that ever in life. I was just, I've always been Sherita. My name is Sherita Ann, but I go by Sheri Ann. And I didn't know that was my grandmother's middle name. I just knew she was Sheri. I didn't know she was Sheri Ann. And so it just came out of me. I I don't even know where it came from, or I thought I don't. Went on through cosmetology school. Like I said, back was against the wall. Had to make it happen. Did great by the grace of God. And I graduated and it was all the tears because for the first time in life,

• 39:15Speaker 02

  I had done something where the most important thing of all of it was me. It wasn't about, when I worked with a company, it was about always about like what you can do for that company. Can you fit in this box? You always have to fit in a box. And for the first time in life, it was like, I didn't have to fit in anyone's box and I could create my own box. Maybe it's not a box, maybe it's a star shape. And so what I learned at my graduation was my mom told me that before my grandma passed, she passed of cancer. While she had cancer, she didn't tell any of us. She went to cosmetology school and she got her cosmetology license.

• 39:52Speaker 02

  She went and took the state board test. I, I went back and taught cosmetology school. It is hard for people to pass that test. Yeah. And we got it. Yes, so we got her cosmetology license posthumously in the mail. And that's how we found out. Wow. That's Grandma Sheri Ann. Sheri Ann. I think she wanted to be able to have a business with my mom was her dream. Yeah. And so my beauty studio is with my mom. Dope. And I'm Sheri Ann. And just like my grandma did it through terminal cancer. You can do whatever you want. You pick your shape and you, you live in your truth. And, um, and you hustle. And that's how we gonna do it.

• 40:31Speaker 01

  Drop the mic from Sheri Ann, salute.