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Nintendo’s hard-line approach to piracy has shut down a streamer who seemingly specialized in unauthorized content. Jesse Keighin has been ordered to pay Nintendo $17,500 in damages after livestreaming gameplay footage of at least 10 different games on at least 50 occasions before the games were released to the public. Included among those were Super Mario Party Jamboree, Mario & Luigi: Brothership, The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom, and Pikmin 4. Keighin was served with takedown notices by Nintendo dozens of times for those streams. Yet he continued to air himself playing the games, encouraging viewers to support him on loco.gg, an Indian live-streaming and esports platform, if his other accounts were banned. Platforms would take the account down following Nintendo’s complaints. But after that happened, Keighin sent emails to Nintendo saying I have a thousand burner channels and [w]e can do this all day, according to the recommendation of the U.S. magistrate judge who oversaw the case. Nintendo also says Keighin had released links to repositories of ROMs (digital pirated games), including several that were Switch-specific. Those pirated copies are played via emulators, such as Yuzu. Yuzu was a target of Nintendo’s anti-piracy campaign last year. The video game company shut down the emulator, saying the team behind it had enabled piracy at a colossal scale. The Yuzu team agreed to pay $2.4 million and ended all operations. But in an email to Nintendo, Keighin vowed to actively help people find newer and updated copies of the software, which he said was still being developed underground, according to the judge’s recommendation. That cavalier attitude also led Keighin to ignore Nintendo’s repeated attempts to serve him with the lawsuit. His refusal to engage resulted in the case proceeding without him, which led to the default judgment. Nintendo has long taken an aggressive stance against piracy of its games, including emulator programs. Dolphin, an open-source emulator for the Nintendo Wii and GameCube, was a target of the gaming giant in 2023 when Dolphin’s developers announced plans to put its emulator on the Steam game distribution platform. Nintendo sent a cease-and-desist order to Valve, which pulled the listing. Days later, Dolphins developers announced: It is with much disappointment that we have to announce that the Dolphin on Steam release has been indefinitely postponed. A $17,500 judgment isnt pocket change, but it’s a drop in the bucket compared to the $4.5 million Nintendo is seeking against a now-former moderator on Reddit, after accusing him of facilitating a network of online websites that offered pirated Nintendo Switch games. Nintendo says in the filing that it could easily have demanded more, alleging that the defendant, James C. Williams, “not only copied and distributed Nintendo game files without authorization; he actively promoted their distribution and copying to thousands of others across a variety of websites and online ‘communities,’ and knowingly trafficked in unlawful software products aimed at circumventing Nintendos technological measures protecting against unauthorized access.” While the Switch remains important to Nintendo, the Switch 2 is driving more and more of the company’s revenue. On November 1, the company reported its fiscal Q2 earnings, noting it had sold 10.36 million Switch 2 units between June 5 and September 30 and was raising its sales estimate for the year. Thats twice the rate the Switch sold in the same time period. Nintendo now expects to sell 19 million Switch 2s before the end of March 2026. The original Switch has thus far sold 154.01 million units.
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E-Commerce
During an annual condominium meeting, at the end, the leader asked if anyone had any suggestions or questions. I spoke up: How about we convert a portion of our common storage into a small gym? My idea was met with uncomfortable silence, and eventually the leader responded hesitantly: I honestly dont know how to address that, before promptly closing the meeting. In that moment, I began doubting myself, wondering, Was my idea really that bad? Was it stupid? Years later, small gyms in condominiums became a popular trend, adding real value to properties. My idea wasnt rejected because it lacked merit. It was dismissed because the environment wasnt open to new suggestions. The silence in that room wasnt personal. It was systemic. And that same silence echoes through boardrooms, project teams, and innovation labs worldwide. History is filled with organizations that silenced ideas before the market did: Kodak dismissing digital photography, Nokia resisting smartphones, Volkswagens culture muting concerns about CO emissions. Their failure wasnt a lack of intelligence or resources; it was a lack of psychological safety. Every innovation process, from idea generation to prototyping and implementation, depends on people talking to each other, challenging assumptions, and learning together. When psychological safety is low, people hold back, stay silent, or play it safe. When its high, they question, debate, and experiment. Thats why psychological safety is the oxygen of innovation. Innovations invisible condition In innovation, fear works like carbon monoxideodorless, invisible, but deadly. It seeps into meetings, decisions, and projects, making people stop breathing out ideas. Lets look at high-risk industries or R&D projects. They are filled with uncertainty, time pressure, and costly mistakes. In such environments, psychological safety becomes even more critical. High autonomy combined with high uncertainty often leads to psychological isolation, where people hesitate to share concerns or collaborate openly. Pressure to deliver results discourages experimentation, unclear authority structures create confusion about decision-making, and fear of criticism drives risk-averse behavior. These are all symptoms of low psychological safety and they quietly suffocate innovation. Organizations like Pixar or Toyota show that when leaders build environments where errors are seen as learning opportunities rather than liabilities, innovation flourishes even under intense pressure. Its not about removing accountability but about balancing it with openness and trust. The leader sets the tone Its tempting to think psychological safety is a company-wide culture that HR can build. But in reality, psychological safety is a property of a leader, not of an organization. Every teams climate is a reflection of its leaders behavior. People will only speak up if they believe theyll be heard and that their voice will lead to change. If, in the past, speaking up led nowhere, silence becomes the safer option. I often remind leaders: silence is not laziness, its learned futility. I once ran a workshop for a company whose CEO proudly announced, We have strong psychological safety here. At the end, I asked a quiet participant, one of the sales directors, what he thought about the issues we had discussed. He sighed and said, What does it matter? They never listen anyway. That single sentence said more about the company culture than any engagement survey ever could. Building psychological safety means walking the talk. Its not what you declare in values statements, but what you do consistently: how you listen, how you respond, how you follow through. Consistency builds trust, and trust keeps dialogue alive. Trust builds performance At Sparebanken Norge, a 200-year-old Norwegian bank, leaders decided to make psychological safety measurable. Employees were encouraged to lift each other up, even across departments, and mistakes were treated as learning opportunities. Directors were evaluated on how they spoke about peers, both publicly and privately. That shift helped the bank become one of Norways top performers. Their lesson: innovation isnt about tools or technology, its about trust. Many companies celebrate diversity, but few realize that diversity without psychological safety leads to fragmentation. Having different perspectives in the room doesnt help if people dont feel safe enough to share them. Diversity brings sunlight and rain, but psychological safety is the fertile soil where ideas grow. What leaders can do To create that fertile ground, leaders must replace fear with curiosity and control with clarity. Model vulnerability. Admit when you dont know. When leaders say I might be wrong, others start contributing. Encourage open dialogue. Ask for dissenting opinions. Silence in a meeting is never a sign of alignment. Its a sign of fear. Empower and clarify. Give people autonomy but clear expectations: freedom with direction builds confidence. Celebrate learning, not perfection. Reward smart risks and small experiments, not just flawless results. Remember: psychological safety isnt about comfort. Its about courage. The best teams pair high trust with high accountability: they debate, disagree, and still leave meetings energized rather than exhausted. If I could go back to that condominium meeting, Id still suggest the gym. Innovation doesnt die from bad ideas. It dies from silence.
Category:
E-Commerce
Many entrepreneurs launch beauty startups because they see a glaring gap in the market. It’s only after they’ve formulated their products and launched them that they learn how incredibly difficult it is to turn a profit as a beauty business. That wasn’t the case for Tisha Thompson, founder of LYS (short for Love Yourself), a clean cosmetics brand that is inclusive to all skin tones. Since launching the line in 2021, Thompson has grown LYS’s sales to upward of $10 million. And she did so in a counterintuitive way: by building a bootstrapped brand that launched immediately into Sephora with just $500,000 in startup capital. Thompson’s success is remarkable, particularly because many other Black founders in the beauty industry are struggling. This summer, the popular makeup brand Ami Colé shuttered after three years in business. Founder Diarrha NDiaye-Mbaye says she wasn’t able to find enough capital to stay afloat. Many other Black-owned beauty brands, including Beauty Bakerie, Ceylon, and Koils by Nature, have also been forced to close. For Thompson, it’s important to offer a counterpoint to these stories, and to show retailers and investors that it is possible to succeed as a Black-owned brand that targets Black consumers. “There’s this narrative that Black-owned businesses are failing, and that’s really unfair because there are many white-owned businesses that are also failing,” she says. “Every brand has its own story, and I just want to show that a Black-owned business can be profitable. I want to tell the industry: Don’t give up on us.” [Photo: LYS Beauty] Identifying A Gap In The Market Thompson has always loved makeup. As a teenager, she would spend gym class doing makeovers for her friends instead of running laps. But when she started her career in the beauty industry, she began to see that many companies did not seem to value her as a consumer. “For so long, makeup has left people who look like meplus-size black womenout of the conversation,” she says. “They were not marketing to us at all.” As she was coming up in her career, the clean beauty industry was taking off, and she got a job at Pür, a brand that formulates products without toxic ingredients. Brands like Beautycounter and retailers like Credo highlighted how unregulated the beauty industry is, and how many questionable ingredients are in our products. But it always struck her that the clean beauty industry was not targeting Black women. [Photo: LYS Beauty] “They didn’t prioritize women of color in their strategy,” Thompson says. “They were predominantly marketing around an older white woman and selling products at a higher price point.” Thompson realized there was a gap in the market for a more inclusive clean makeup brand. But knowing how expensive it is to launch a beauty company, she didn’t think she was in a position to start one. “I don’t come from money, and I don’t have access to money,” she says. “It seemed like an impossible dream.” Then in 2019, Thompson’s father died, and this changed her calculation. She decided to take the plunge and began writing up a business plan. “Sometimes when something traumatic happens, you lose your rational thinking,” she says. “I realized life is short and I might not be here tomorrow. So I decided I would try to be the change I wanted to see in the world.” Getting to 8-Figure Revenue Before launching LYS, Thompson had spent 15 years in the trenches of the beauty industry. She was a makeup artist at MAC, ran marketing for Pür Cosmetics, and handled finances at the beauty conglomerate Astral Brands, which owns Butter London. “My superpower today is understanding the finances of the beauty industry,” she says. “Beauty is a very expensive business, and to run a company you need to understand all the detailsfrom the cost of goods to sales to operations.” Launching a beauty brand requires spending money on formulation, packaging, and inventory, as well as on marketing to get the word out. Many beauty founders start to raise money as soon as they have an idea. But Thompson was a lot more conservative about taking money because she knew that investors tended to prioritize growth and scale, which could make it hard to become profitable. Thompson poured the small inheritance her father left her into this startup. She also found an angel investor who was willing to put some money into the business. But this amounted to less than half a million dollars, far less than many other beauty brands. [Photo: LYS Beauty] Then she did something a little crazy. To get the brand out into the world, Thompson realized she needed the help of a retailer like Sephora. Since she didn’t know anybody at the company, she decided to reach out cold. “I basically drunk-texted ephora,” she says. “I had a glass of wine one night, went on LinkedIn to find a merchant, and sent them my deck of slides about the brand. I thought it would go into a deep dark hole, but 10 days later, I got an email back from Sephora saying they’d love to talk.” Like Thompson, Sephora’s merchants identified that most clean brands weren’t targeting the Black consumer, and they thought her business idea was smart. So they signed her up to sell her products on the Sephora website as a test to see if it had the potential to do well in-store. Thompson used her startup capital strategically, mostly to meet Sephora’s inventory needs. She poured money into formulating products, designing packaging, and manufacturing. [Photo: LYS Beauty] What she didn’t do was spend money on hiring staff or on marketing, which are often major expenses for beauty startups. Instead of spending money on social media marketing, Thompson reached out to 300 influencers who might be willing to promote her brand for free because they believed in her mission. “I had a lot of relationships with creators from my former life,” she says. “I reached out to the most impactful creators who could help me get this brand off the ground, and almost all of them posted a video at launch. YouTube filled up with people promoting the launch of the first Black-owned clean makeup brand at Sephora.” On launch day, LYS blew through four months’ worth of inventory in 24 hours. Sephora quickly decided to launch the brand in its stores. Saying No To Black Lives Matter Money Thompson’s approach was different from many other Black-owned beauty brands that launched during this period. After the murder of George Floyd in 2020 and the growth of the Black Lives Matter movement, many investors began to realize that they had failed to support Black founders and set aside funds to invest in Black-owned businesses. Retailers like Target and Sephora made commitments to devoting more shelf space to Black-owned brands. Many Black founders benefited from this sudden support. Ami Colé’s founder received $1 million in investment very quickly, allowing her to launch in Sephora. Ceylon Beauty, a skincare brand for men of color, received a $50,000 grant from Glossier as part of a program for Black founders. Koils by Nature, a haircare brand, was picked up by Target. But when Donald Trump entered office at the start of this year, waging an assault on companies that were committed to diversity, equity, and inclusion, many investors and retailers changed their tune. All of these brands relied on continued funding for working capital, but investors were unwilling to keep supporting them. They’ve all since shut down. During the Black Lives Matter movement, Thompson started receiving calls from investors wanting to fund her business. But she decided to turn them down. She could not possibly have predicted that money would later dry up for Black foundersher reason for rejecting this capital was more practical. She wanted to maintain more equity in her company. “Without scale as a Black-owned business, I knew that you would have to give up more equity than the average brand,” Thompson says. “I looked around and saw these brands giving up a lot more of their company for small chunks of money.” And besides, she didn’t need the money because she had found a way to remain cash positive, without any investment, by keeping her expenses low and pouring all profits back into the business. “I was the only employee for the first two years of the business,” she says. “This was an extremely lean operation.” This year, Thompson realized she couldn’t continue to scale without investment. The brand was already generating upward of $10 million in annual revenue, thanks to its partnership with Sephora. The next frontier was to go international. In March, LYS announced it had received eight figures of funding led by Encore Consumer Capital. While this is a lot of capital, Thompson says the point of raising this money was to find a strategic investor who had connections in international markets. [Photo: LYS Beauty] “This investor has backed Tarte and Supergoop, which are brands that have reached a scale beyond what I am capable of,” she says. “The international market is uncharted territory for LYS, but these investors are able to just pick up the phone and make an introduction to a retailer in Europe or Asia.” Thompson is excited for LYS’s next chapter, as it begins to announce partnerships with department stores and retailers overseas. But just as important, she wants to inspire other Black entrepreneurs to not give up, even though it seems like a bleak time to be a founder of color. “When I was coming up in the industry, I didn’t see a lot of founders like me, and that made me doubt whether I could really do this,” she says. “I want other Black founders to realize that running a successful company is attainable.”
Category:
E-Commerce
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