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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.
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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.”
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E-Commerce
If the three years since the release of ChatGPT have signaled OpenAIs dominance of generative artificial intelligence, its worth recalling that the company’s rapid rise would have been impossible without another Big Tech backer. In 2019, Microsoft agreed to supply OpenAI all the compute it needed, with near exclusivity. In exchange, Microsoft retained the right to use OpenAIs tech until the arrival of artificial general intelligence, or AGI: the point at which AI systems are able to act like humans and respond to whatever task theyre given, regardless of whether theyve been trained to solve it. As generative AIs capabilities blew past initial expectations, the question of when AGI will arrive became a major point of contention in OpenAI and Microsofts agreement. In addition, Microsoft feared that OpenAI’s plans to restructure toward a public benefit corporation and open its platform could dilute its influence. Then, in late October, the companies announced a new arrangement, one that looks like a win for Microsoft. Microsofts IP rights for both models and products are extended through 2032 and now include models post-AGI, with appropriate safety guardrails, according to a company blog post announcing the renegotiation. The AGI clause, then, is no more. So what does it tell us about both companies beliefs about the path to AGIand how long it could take? In many ways, the announcement felt inevitable. Microsoft had reportedly spent months trying to remove the AGI clause, for fear that AGIs arrivalor OpenAIs claim of its arrivalcould threaten its access to the most advanced generative AI models on the planet, just as such technologies become commercially invaluable. After investing more than $13 billion, Microsoft wanted to ensure it could maintain access. Michael Veale, a researcher at University College London, wonders whether the world is reading too much into the change in agreement. He reckons that the firms have planned to scrap it because its too gameableor too easy for OpenAI to declare when it has been reached, at its own convenienceto provide the commercial certainty they want from a contract, he says. Veale believes that AGI is too woolly a concept on which to base a long-term agreement with such high financial stakes. Its hard to say what the decision means on the basis of the reporting around the terms changes, he adds. Alessandra Russo, a professor in applied computational logic at Imperial College London, is also uncertain about what to make of the changed terms of the agreement and how it interacts with both companies timeline for AGI. One thing she is confident about is her belief that AGI isn’t on the horizon. People are always moving the posts a little bit further back, because of the realization that this technology is not as was initially expected, she explains. Catherine Flick, professor of AI ethics at the University of Staffordshire, shares this take, noting that the shift is more an indication of both companies trying to sustain the hype around AGI to justify their investments in the tech, rather than a deep-seated belief that AGI truly is around the corner. The practical snag with an AGI trigger is verification. Theres no agreed test or arbiter, which makes any clause gameable for the commercial certainty both sides want. As Flick puts it: How do you even verify AGI? One way the two companies have tried to solve this is by agreeing to remove the unilateral declaration of AGI that has previously given Microsoft pause. The companies say that once AGI is declared by OpenAI, that declaration will now be verified by an independent expert panelbroadening the number of people who can or would declare it to be so. Even if that point arrives, Flick argues declaring AGI is a mutually sustaining confidence boost designed to steady nerves across the wider AI supply chain and to keep capital flowing while capabilities progress slowly, rather than leaping. Its also part of the perpetuation of this hype cycle, she says, at a moment when definitions blur and milestones remain mobile. That said, at least publicly, those in charge of the companies are accelerating their timeframes for when AGI might arrive. In January, Sam Altman published a blog post declaring that the world is getting closer to AGI, and that his company was making preparations for how to deal with its imminent arrival. Mustafa Suleyman, CEO of Microsofts AI division, isnt as bullish about the timescale. In a December 2024 interview, he pegged the arrival of AGI within the next five to seven years. Not everyone agrees. The fact that theyre still talking about AGI, says Flick, its cloud cuckoo land.
Category:
E-Commerce
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