Introduction and Growing Up Nigerian
Taryell Simmons: Good morning, good evening, good afternoon, everybody. This is your host, Taryell Simmons, and welcome to another episode of Rise Urban Nation. My sister Chloé is in the building, and we've got a million stories about growing up Nigerian. That should actually be a show.
N. Chloé Nwangwu: Everyone would watch that show. Every Nigerian child's story is the same: you grow up to be a doctor, a lawyer or an engineer. But if you're a rebel child, you go off into something weird like entrepreneurship, and they say, "Beg your pardon, madame, where are you going? Come back!"
Taryell Simmons: I was that rebel child. I took art in high school, and it was, "How are you going to pay your bills with a picture? Go to your books!" They got me out of art.
N. Chloé Nwangwu: This will come full circle, but if you're going to do something that's not one of the three, make sure it's something you love. When I said I wanted to study social science and humanities, it was, "Will social science feed you and care for my grandchildren?" Fresh immigrant parents start from the bottom, so they want you to shortcut to success. I get it. But I will never not make fun of my Nigerian family.
Taryell Simmons: Bless their hearts, they want the best for us. But once you become successful, suddenly it's, "My son, the director of diversity and inclusion. Big chief!"
N. Chloé Nwangwu: Big chief, the chosen one! I'm the oldest of three, and my kid brother is on the typical path: biomedical engineering, a fellowship at NIH, now an MD-PhD at Stanford. On a family prayer call I mentioned a contract that came through for twenty, thirty thousand for about a month of work, and my brother said, "That's more than I make in a year." Ever since, it's been, "Have you seen my daughter? She's doing extremely well." That's how you know you've arrived.
N. Chloé Nwangwu: My mom runs her own medical practice. I once told her, "Mom, you're an entrepreneur. It's not a surprise I ended up being one too." She just went, "Huh." Now I'm advising my parents, and that makes me real proud, because this is a thing I created out of all my weird interests.
Who Is Chloé: Brand Science and Equity
Taryell Simmons: For the people who don't know you, tell them who Chloé is.
N. Chloé Nwangwu: Chloé is a nerd, philosopher and Renaissance woman. I advise people and organizations pursuing social progress, and my job is to make sure their brands are impossible to ignore. I do that scientifically and through an equity lens. I developed a proprietary diagnostic tool that assesses brands and shows what you specifically need to refine to get there. You, not the brand over there.
Taryell Simmons: I tell people: men lie, women lie, numbers don't.
N. Chloé Nwangwu: Man after my own heart! The science matters because of who I work with, especially folks from historically underestimated communities. The tools of branding, marketing and advertising were developed for a very specific kind of enterprise. They didn't consider implicit bias, or that social change is a completely different beast from the pursuit of profit. The only credible way around that I've found is understanding how human brains and behavior work.
Taryell Simmons: I do equity, diversity and inclusion work from a different lens. Whatever the audience, I found that for change to come, I had to help them think, feel or see something differently, with an emotional connection that moves them to action. So I read the room: with parents, I tell a parent's story; without them, I tell it from a student's perspective.
N. Chloé Nwangwu: That's brilliant. The person a message comes from affects how it's perceived, and the audience's cognitive biases shape how they translate it. The genius is in picking which story to tell. I help people do that digitally, but the dynamics are very similar. Making sure your message is received and remembered is a soapbox I will die on.
From Tech Nerd to Conflict Resolution
Taryell Simmons: Tell me the journey. I know this is not how you started.
N. Chloé Nwangwu: I've been a tech nerd since birth. I built my first computer at around eight or ten, and not because I was a genius: there was a video game my computer couldn't handle. My parents wouldn't buy a new one, so I asked for the materials, and they said, "Sounds educational, sure." That obsession got me through all the trial and error.
N. Chloé Nwangwu: Tech ran parallel to school. In undergrad I studied what people now call neurophilosophy, plus political theology and, of all things, Japanese, while working as a student IT technician to pay for books and food. And every time I studied abroad, a conflict happened: Russia after the conflict with Georgia, Japan after the Fukushima meltdown, Cairo the week of the Arab Spring. Those experiences awakened me: I wanted to help push the world toward a place less poisonous for others.
N. Chloé Nwangwu: I got my master's in international conflict resolution and mediation in Israel, and while I was there, Israel had its conflict with Gaza. Very on brand for me. I worked in tech to support myself, and those connections led to a job at Time Out magazine in Israel, helping people shape what they said: copywriting, copy editing, layouts. Using tech to help people communicate better became my main thing.
Burnout and the Birth of Nobi Works
N. Chloé Nwangwu: Back in the States, I joined a giant nonprofit doing anti-bias and anti-discrimination work. After the 2016 election, my job became crisis management for bias incidents across the state, advising schools when a noose, the n-word or swastikas showed up. Being on the front lines without a system of care took its toll. I burnt out and left with no plan, for my mental health. But a friend knew I was building websites and marketing systems for nonprofits for free and said, "You could just charge people for that." That's how Nobi Works was born.
Taryell Simmons: I can see how that growth made you the baby Yoda you are.
N. Chloé Nwangwu: All my friends call me Baby Yoda. Now I advise people on making choices, but that period forced me to develop a theory of practice. I'd tell my younger self: starting a business is not easy. Focus on your theory of practice, the tools and strategies in your own head, because those will set you apart. I'd have reached brand science sooner, but I was focused on paying rent and feeding myself.
Taryell Simmons: It's a tough balance. I have a day job, but this podcast is an actual business, and I need income to pay the people I bring aboard.
Patience, Privilege and Mental Health
N. Chloé Nwangwu: When COVID happened, I moved back home at my father's request. He's a consultant for the World Health Organization and was sent with a team to Wuhan. He's like a professorial koala, real mellow, but when he came back I saw him legitimately afraid for the first time. Since then I haven't paid rent, and I've reinvested that money into my business. That has helped so much, and it's not fair, because many founders don't have that luxury. But the Amazons and Apples started in their parents' garages too. So if you feel you're not where you should be, be patient with yourself. The folks where you want to be had advantages that account for their pace.
Taryell Simmons: I'll echo that. And especially as Black people, Africans, Nigerians, we don't emphasize mental health enough. On a plane, when the oxygen mask comes down, what do they tell you?
N. Chloé Nwangwu: Put your mask on first, then put it on the kid.
Taryell Simmons: It can seem selfish, but if you pass out while helping, you're no good for anybody.
N. Chloé Nwangwu: As immigrant kids we grow up thinking you grind and grind and then you die. But your mind is the soil from which your success springs. If the soil is dry and busted, you're going nowhere. I'm being literal, from a scientific perspective. Care for your mind and your body, because that's how you survive the climb.
Taryell Simmons: What was your first job?
N. Chloé Nwangwu: Unofficially, the unpaid tech for my mom's office. My first paid job was college IT: sitting in the library fixing people's computers.
Taryell Simmons: Y'all see that? From IT helper to brand scientist.
Generosity, Open Doors and Shaping the Future
N. Chloé Nwangwu: I've had enough self-trust to take unexpected detours. Years ago a fellow alum I didn't know reached out on LinkedIn, and I figured ten minutes wouldn't cost me anything. She connected me to an organization I'd had my eye on since college, and they brought me on as a fellow. Because of that, I advised the first refugee delegation to the UN, advised the High Ambition Coalition of the world's most climate-ambitious nations, and advised parties in the middle of a civil war. Applying social psychology and branding where lives are on the line is why people trust me with their business. None of it happens without those ten minutes.
Taryell Simmons: If you can give five minutes to learn somebody's story, give it. It costs you nothing.
N. Chloé Nwangwu: Everybody is somebody. Every crazy, unimaginable thing I've done, including my job at Time Out, was preceded by being generous and kind to the people around me.
Taryell Simmons: What is one good lesson life has taught you?
N. Chloé Nwangwu: Don't be satisfied with disrupting the present. Look toward shaping the future. It pulls me out of the resource game, the narrow focus on revenue and getting clients in the media right now. Instead: how do I make a future my great-grandkids want to live in, and help my clients into the room where it happens, if I'm going to quote Hamilton? What work cements your legacy?
Taryell Simmons: People see this podcast as a now thing, but I see it as a future thing. I told my team, this is Black history in the making, and we need to turn it into a book.
N. Chloé Nwangwu: A thousand percent. When do we get Black Futures Month? We get it by documenting the Black present. Without documentation, we can't understand and replicate the journey. We're friends now.
Brand Science, Diversity Theater and the Invisibility Tax
Taryell Simmons: What industry are you in, and what advice would you give someone starting out?
N. Chloé Nwangwu: I sit at the intersection of brand strategy and marketing science. I've combined branding, equity and science, things that don't usually go together, into what I call brand science, drawing on creative direction, behavioral science, neuroscience and social justice theory. My advice comes full circle: make sure it's something you'll be obsessed with, whether that's the people, the research or getting literally paid to learn. Being a small business owner is hard out here in these streets. What keeps me going is my obsession with behavioral science and using it to push social progress. Pick an obsession and let that guide you.
Taryell Simmons: What does the future hold for your industry?
N. Chloé Nwangwu: I have to temper my pessimism. We'll see more of what I call diversity theater: large organizations saying they care about people of color. That's frustrating, but it's also an opportunity for folks like us to get into those rooms and see weaknesses that people who've been there a while can't. For me, that's the invisibility tax: the difficulty we have positioning ourselves as authorities in our fields. I'm researching its root cause with behavioral science.
Taryell Simmons: I watched the documentary Coded Bias. If tech is the solution, we have to look at who's making it, because tech can have bias.
N. Chloé Nwangwu: It literally has bias written into it. The internet's divisiveness and how it isn't optimized for people with different abilities come from the blind spots of the people who built it. The same is happening with big data and algorithms we'll use for the next hundred years. That's why we need to get into those rooms and try to right the ship.
Current Projects, Nigerian Names and Final Words
Taryell Simmons: What are you working on, and where can people find you?
N. Chloé Nwangwu: I'm continuing qualitative interviews on the invisibility tax so I can describe it and share strategies to navigate it. And every month we run a workshop; this month it's something like "Three Simple Science-Backed Ways to Make Your Brand Impossible to Ignore." Follow us on Instagram at Nobiworks, on LinkedIn, or visit our website.
Taryell Simmons: We'll put it all in the show notes. Big shout out to Pam, who introduced us. Taryell isn't my Nigerian name, by the way. Adekunle is, and it means wealth is around me.
N. Chloé Nwangwu: My mom gave us vaguely French-sounding English names, so with strangers I'm Chloé. Friends and family call me Nobi, short for my Nigerian name, and that's where Nobi Works gets its name. It means beauty in the heart.
Taryell Simmons: We started as family and we end as family. Any last words of wisdom?
N. Chloé Nwangwu: It is not a small truth that the world has been set up to exploit people like us. That's not fake news. But I personally refuse to be terrorized by what society refuses to give me. The deck is stacked against you, and also, you can't let that stop you. You can hold both of those things without being double-minded. Hold both, and sprinkle in a bit of self-care, because that's how you'll carry them on your journey.
Taryell Simmons: Words of wisdom, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you.
N. Chloé Nwangwu: Thank you for having me. I'm really flattered and pleased to be here.
