Founded On Purpose · Renew Venture Capital

Raised in Purpose, Built in Community: Khadijah Robinson's Journey

December 8, 2025·51 min·5 clips

Khadijah's mother had a thriving t-shirt business selling out before reaching her table, until breast cancer at age 31 derailed her entrepreneurial life.

The thread here is responsibility, and it gets heavy fast. Katie starts with Khadijah Robinson's first company, the Nile list, as a practical answer to the irritation of trying to find and support Black-owned businesses online. Khadijah says the work started in 2019, then became an early spreadsheet version in March 2020. From there, the conversation follows a full-time attorney building toward an exit while trying to choose substance over hype and stewardship over extraction. The episode has warmth, but it does not sand down the harder parts. Khadijah moves from founder to post-acquisition marketplace leader to GP at Fictive Ventures, and the sharper question is what leadership cost her along the way. After exiting, she was running a company with millions in funding, a team, and celebrity attention. That would be enough pressure on its own. For her, it also carried the feeling that the outcome might be read as bigger than one company. She is blunt about how that pressure changed her management. Khadijah describes being self-critical, Type A, and hard on herself in ways that spilled into what she expected from the team. The reflection is a little uncomfortable in a useful way. She can now say she was hard to work with, even though at the time it felt like urgency, duty, and care. The context matters. As a Black woman founder with what she calls a good exit, Khadijah worried that failure could become evidence against people who looked like her. She did not want investors hesitating before backing the next hundred Black women founders. Later, meeting more founders with similar post-acquisition experiences helped her see that the loneliness was not as strange as it felt. Katie closes by thanking her for making a gated field feel more open, kind, purposeful, and tied to action instead of performance.

As heard by us

A candid founder conversation about purpose, pressure, and what comes after an exit.

Khadijah Robinson's story reads as a founder conversation about discipline in work that is messy, lonely, and under scrutiny. Katie McBratney starts with the Nile list, the spreadsheet that became a way to keep dollars moving through Black communities, and then moves into the…

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Why you'd press play

Hear how a spreadsheet grew into an engine for Black-owned businesses, and how the next chapter came with heavier stakes.

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