There’s a term going around social media right now: Emma Grede disease. It describes the compulsion to mimic the glossy, jet-setting confidence of a billionaire CEO without showing the slow, incredibly unglamorous work of actually building a business. Founder Jaclyn Johnson broke it down in a video that’s been doing the rounds.
It hit a nerve because as founders (who have had perhaps the most unsexy life behind the scenes while building The Curve), we know it doesn’t at all represent the reality of start up life. In this week’s episode with newly published author Emma-Louise Boynton we went deep on it. We unpacked Emma Grede’s book Start With Yourself, the creator economy’s biggest earners, and why women get punished for failing publicly in a way men never do. Here are the takeaways.
Alix Earle has 8.5 million followers on TikTok and earns around $12M USD a year, built from stakes she owns in brands like Poppi (sold to PepsiCo for close to $2BN) and her own skincare line, which made $1M in sales in its first five minutes.
The key takeaway here is that follower count isn’t necessarily what drives these creators revenue numbers. It’s how many separate businesses sit behind the scenes.
A 2026 Oxford study found entrepreneurship is now the most popular career choice among UK teenagers. Business studies has overtaken history as a subject choice in schools. But are we setting people up to think entrepreneurship is the easy option? Across the entire history of the UK startup scene, only 199 businesses have ever reached unicorn status (making $1B or more). To put that into perspective, there were more than 300,000 businesses started in just 2023 alone, and 61% of businesses started in 2019 stopped operating within five years!
The Emma Grede Disease (aka everyone performing high flying founder life online) is influencing what we all think is possible. In this episode we talk about whether or not that’s a bad thing.
These business success stats aren’t to try and deter ANYONE from starting a business. We’re all for more women thinking about getting into business, we just want to make sure everyone knows what they’re getting into, and get clear on what your version of success actually looks like before chasing someone else’s.
The Cut recently called this out: social media’s one rule is you’re never allowed to admit you’re struggling while you’re actually struggling. Sophia Amoruso built Nasty Gal into a $100M business by 27, then filed for bankruptcy. Adam Neumann mismanaged WeWork into a $47BN valuation collapse, then raised $350M for his next venture from the same investor. Same shape of story, very different amount of grace extended.
Is the last taboo we need to dismantle the idea that we need to talk more about failure publicly? And also reframe what ‘failure’ actually looks like? In our eyes growing a business like NastyGal which at one point was turning over $100M in a year isn’t exactly a failure. PLUS think about how many male founders start 10x businesses before they create the one that changes their life.
Full conversation, book takeaways, and more in this week’s episode.
As always, we’d love your thoughts! xx
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