Happy Friday.
Let’s end the week with a dose of inspiration, one that I hope carries over to the next four weeks.
More on that in a moment.
Today, I bring you the story of Pinky Cole, 35, founder of the $100 million, Atlanta-based, fast-casual chain Slutty Vegan. Cole, an irrepressibly charismatic presence, has created a cult and celebrity following for her vegan burgers and sides. Now, every new store opening becomes a block party. “I didn’t know there were that many vegans in Brooklyn!” noted a new fan of the miles-wide gathering with a DJ that shut down a stretch of Fort Greene, Brooklyn, when the first New York store opened last September.
Cole is the focus of Fortune’s inaugural The Ground Up video series, which chronicles successful entrepreneurs who have built their businesses from scratch. The short video is well worth your time, if only for a hefty dose of Pinky power, who built herself from scratch, too. “I was a hustler at a very young age,” she says.
Cole has a background in television production, which gave her the confidence she needed to lean into her proclivity for spectacle.
“I know what people want when they watch TV,” she says. “They want something that’s in your face, racy, raunchy, that’s going to make them pay attention.” It was time, she thought, to reframe the deadly earnestness of veganism. “The two most pleasurable experiences in life are sex and food,” she says. Get people to think about both, and you’ve got yourself a new kind of veganism. “I can peel back the layer and educate you about veganism in a way you’ve never seen before.”
Fun is baked into the cooking, the merchandise, and the packaging: I’ll take a One Night Stand (the chain’s most popular burger with a vegan patty, bacon, cheese, and caramelized onions on a Hawaiian bun) and a side of community uplift, please.
Cole’s personal story is one of familiar hardships. She is the daughter of a hard-working single mother and a father who stayed in close touch with her, despite his 22-year incarceration. She had few prospects other than Teach for America when she graduated from college. (She lasted only five days on the job.) But what she did have was more good than bad luck, great ideas, a hustler’s work ethic, and an ability to attract enthusiastic investment—and not just the financial kind, like the $25 million Series A funding she raised in 2022. She's emerged from the entrepreneurial gauntlet with a fully authentic product that reflects her vision, people, and unique sense of joy.
I’ll let her tell you all about it.
Cole’s story is a good one to note as we enter Black History Month, with a theme this year of resistance. As I’ve been collecting your ideas about how to best mark this unusual year, one thing keeps popping up: There’s no doing the work without embracing the joy.
“The lack of joy is my biggest gripe with BHM,” raceAhead reader Erica Nunnally told me by email. “Instead, it's an entire month that rehashes themes of struggle, injustice, trauma, and grief that begins with slavery and is only briefly interrupted by success stories within sports or entertainment.”
Point taken.
Next week, we’ll be publishing raceAhead’s guide to Black History Month, so please continue to send me your expectations, gripes, ideas, and best practices.
And prepare to be joyful.
Ellen McGirt
@ellmcgirt
Ellen.McGirt@fortune.com
This edition of raceAhead was edited by Ruth Umoh.
