The Audacity To Build: Ingrid Best, Ria Graham And Necole Kane On Ownership, Purpose And Legacy

It takes audacity for a woman to decide that something should exist simply because she can envision it. Before the idea is made tangible, she has to believe in something other people cannot yet see. She has to risk being told the market is crowded, the timing is wrong, the idea is too ambitious or that someone else already does something close enough. For Black women, that leap can come with another set of realities. Access to capital has historically been more difficult, and even recent data show how persistent that divide remains. In 2025, companies with a Black founder or co-founder received just 0.32% of U.S. venture funding, according to Crunchbase. Still, women build.

We build because there is a bottle we want to see on a shelf, a room we want our community to experience, a health problem we believe deserves more attention. We build because somebody has to challenge the status quo, and sometimes waiting for an existing institution to do it means waiting forever. Eventually, though, the question changes. It is no longer simply, Can I build this? It becomes: What am I building, who benefits from it, what will it demand from me, and can it become bigger than my own name?

Those questions sit beneath the work of IBest Wines founder Ingrid Best, Kokomo co-founder Ria Graham and My Happy Flo founder Necole Kane, three entrepreneurs whose paths to ownership look markedly different but whose ideas about success increasingly stretch beyond simply having their names attached to something impressive. In conversations with HelloBeautiful ahead of Renae Bluitt’s She Did That. Founder Forum, all three women returned, in different ways, to a larger idea. The boldest thing about building a legacy is that it will ultimately be bigger than just you.

Ownership Is More Than Having Your Name On It

Ingrid Best knows what it means to build somebody else’s vision well.

Before launching IBest Wines in 2023, Best spent roughly 20 years in the wine and spirits industry, working with companies including Diageo, Moët Hennessy and Bacardi. IBest now produces South African wines from Stellenbosch, has been selected for American Airlines’ international wine program and has expanded into Costco. These accomplishments are especially notable for a company only a few years old. Yet when Best finally began building something she owned, the revelation was not that she suddenly became entrepreneurial. It was realizing she had been operating that way all along.

“I discovered that I had always been pouring an entrepreneurial spirit into building in my previous work,” Best told HelloBeautiful. “There was this really interesting, ‘Wow, I’ve always been building in a way as if it was my own, but now it really is my own.’ The level of passion and focus and excitement and creativity that’s been unleashed is unbelievable.”

Ownership, however, could not stop with her. Best deliberately gave equity to five Black and brown women who helped build IBest in its early stages. When the company later opened a funding round, she said its first five investors were also Black women. The decision was informed by what she had not understood early enough in her own career.

“I wanted to rewrite a portion of my story by making sure that what I was building was a pathway for equity,” she said. “Really creating an ecosystem of opportunity for those of us who are usually left out of those deal conversations, those of us who have usually been building things and never have any ownership in them.” That is legacy in real time–not merely becoming the exception, but changing who gets included in the opportunity behind you.

It also requires enough humility to ask for what the business needs. Best said entrepreneurship has forced her to develop a “muscle” for asking for help, but she draws a distinction between community and transaction. “It’s not transactional,” she said. “It really comes from a place of relationship, network.” The other requirement, she added, is readiness. “Be ready for what you’re asking for. Because I think the worst is to ask for something you’re not ready for.”

Building A Business Without Giving It Your Entire Life

Ria Graham learned entrepreneurship under conditions nobody would have willingly selected from a business textbook. She and her husband, Kevol Graham, opened Kokomo in Brooklyn, in 2020, during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic and just after welcoming their second child. The first-time restaurateurs had backgrounds in hospitality — Ria in restaurant marketing and sales, Kevol in curated dining experiences — but neither had previously opened a restaurant. Kokomo nevertheless became a destination for an elevated, pan-Caribbean dining experience rooted in the breadth of Caribbean culture rather than reducing the cuisine to a handful of familiar dishes. The impossible timing taught Graham a lesson that extended beyond restaurants.

“You have to be nimble,” she shared with HelloBeautiful. “That was a huge one for our survival.” Because she and Kevol did not know the restaurant business before COVID, there was no normal they were desperately trying to recreate. “We had trial by fire,” she explained. “The rules were changing constantly, and we had to do nonstop problem-solving.”

What began as a vision for Caribbean food also became a visible example of a young Black family building together. “Everyone would come because they wanted to support this Black family,” she said. Customers began telling the Grahams that watching them had inspired them to consider building something with their own partners. “It helped people to wrap their minds around the unity within Black culture, within Black family, and the fact that it’s just possible.”

However, possible does not mean easy. Asked about running a company with her husband while raising their children, Graham rejected one of the favorite words lobbed at women with full lives: balance. “Balance doesn’t exist,” she said. “It was more important for us to get on that rhythm versus seeking balance, because there are going to be moments when the business is going to need more of our attention than our children. And that’s the hard reality. There are going to be moments when our children need more of us than our business.”

Today, Graham said, they are in a season in which their relationship and children require more attention, and the business is not receiving the same intensity it once did. She is learning to let that be enough. “There isn’t going to be a season where everything is receiving the equal parts of love that we would want to give it,” she said. “You have to understand what that season is so that you can go forward without driving yourself crazy.”

Perhaps, another mark of a sustainable business is whether or not she has built something strong enough to survive when she cannot.

The Courage To Let Your Baby Grow Up

Necole Kane knows what happens when the business becomes inseparable from the woman who made it. Long before My Happy Flo, Kane built her name in media, first with celebrity blog Necole Bitchie and later with women’s lifestyle platform xoNecole. The latter was acquired, and Kane eventually left the company in 2022. There was an obvious complication. Even after Kane was gone, her name was still on it. Things can be tricky when the public has spent years understanding a brand as an extension of its founder.

Kane recalled an old xoNecole post resurfacing after she had left the company and readers contacting her to criticize it, unaware she no longer controlled the site or its social media. “That’s when I learned the biggest lesson,” she said. “I can’t have my name on anything else I do in the future.”

Detaching had already been difficult for another reason. xoNecole was not just a media website to Kane. It had become a community. “When you let go of the reins as a founder, you feel like you’re leaving your community behind,” she told HelloBeautiful. “I’m not just walking away from a brand. It felt like I was walking away from a community. And I think that was the hardest part.”

That experience changed the architecture of what came next. Kane founded My Happy Flo, a menstrual health supplement company inspired in part by her own health journey and the loss of her mother to breast cancer at 41. The product was formulated with Black women and women who experience issues including fibroids and heavy menstrual bleeding in mind.

That work exists within the larger health landscape. In 2024, the U.S. maternal mortality rate for non-Hispanic Black women was 44.8 deaths per 100,000 live births, compared with 14.2 for non-Hispanic White women, according to the National Center for Health Statistics.

Kane said a large portion of My Happy Flo’s customers are women with fibroids and that serving women who have historically felt overlooked by the wellness industry is central to the company’s purpose. “We formulated this supplement because we knew there was not anything else on the aisles that spoke to that woman,” she said. She points to customer stories about changes in their menstrual and reproductive health as some of the most meaningful feedback she receives, even as she is careful not to position the supplement as a cure. For Kane, those stories have made the work feel “so much bigger than yourself.”

My Happy Flo is also built differently because Kane now understands that a founder who makes herself indispensable can inadvertently make her company more fragile. “If the founder is too embedded in a business, it’s like, will it be successful without this founder?” Kane said. “If I don’t feel like it’s going to be successful without this founder constantly showing up, it’s not a good investment for me.”

She has deliberately resisted making herself the product. Customers, rather than Kane, are often the people publicly discussing My Happy Flo. Meanwhile, she has built recurring revenue into the model. Kane said subscriptions now account for about 70% of the company’s monthly revenue.

After spending years tied to the relentless pace of media, there is another return on that strategy that does not appear on a balance sheet. Kane gets to live. “Before this interview, I was outside playing tennis,” she said. “I could never if I was still in [the] media [industry], because you’re always having to be plugged into social media, to the news. You’re always having to look for a story.” Her earlier career, she stressed, gave her extraordinary experiences she would never erase. But the work she is doing now feels more aligned with the woman she has become.

That may be the throughline between three women building in entirely different industries. Best is creating pathways to ownership that she did not recognize early in her career. Graham is refusing to measure entrepreneurial success by how completely she can exhaust herself maintaining everything at once. Kane is building with an eventual future beyond her own constant presence already in mind. Each woman is interrogating an old idea of power that says the person who builds something must remain visibly perched atop it forever.

Best offered another definition. “I am grateful for the power of influence. I’m grateful for the power of vision and creativity,” she said. “The part of power that’s important to me is really measured by: Am I a good leader? Am I someone who inspires folks? Am I someone who is leaving behind something that will impact future leaders?”

“I’m not interested,” she added, “in the power that’s governed by ego.”

The real audacity of womanhood and legacy is daring to make something the world did not have before you arrived, pouring enough of yourself into it to make it real, and then building it well enough that one day, it no longer needs all of you to remain that way.