Raphael Stevens

Startup low-fare carrier Play will connect Baltimore, Boston and New Windsor, New York, with 23 European destinations, including its Reykjavik, Iceland, hub, starting this spring.
CEO Birgir Jonsson says Play can succeed where predecessors like Wow Air and Norwegian failed thanks to better capitalization and a focus on staying lean and low-cost.
The airline launched amid the height of Covid last June with Europe flights. Jonsson says the pandemic pause was baked into launch plans and offered Iceland a glimpse at how important tourism is to its economy.

Passengers board an Airbus passenger jet operated by Icelandic low-fare carrier Play.

Startup low-fare Icelandic airline Play announced new transatlantic service out of a third U.S. airport, Stewart International in New Windsor, New York, to begin June 9. (Stewart lies about 65 miles north of New York City.)
Play, which launched last July with nonstops from Reykjavik, Iceland, to London’s Stansted Airport, is the latest low-fare airline to attempt to make heavily discounted service across the Atlantic work.

Play’s immediate Icelandic forebear, Wow Air, went bankrupt in 2019 after starting long-haul services to the U.S. West Coast and India. Denmark’s Primera Air faced a similar fate in 2018. Low-cost Norway-based competitor Norwegian, meanwhile, abandoned long-haul intercontinental operations in January 2021 in order to focus on European and Middle Eastern routes.
More from Personal Finance:Here are 22 destinations it will be cheaper to fly to in 2022Where Americans want to travel, and not so muchBus lines look to attract wary passengers with premium services
Now, Play will debut flights from the U.S. to Reykjavik — and onward from there to 22 other European cities — on April 20 with flights from Baltimore/Washington International Airport, followed by Boston Logan starting May 11 using narrow-body Airbus A320neo and A321neo planes. The carrier is promoting the new connecting services to Europe with fares as low as $109 one-way. CNBC.com associate editor Kenneth Kiesnoski spoke with Play CEO Birgir Jonsson — formerly with Wow Air himself — on what it’s like to start an airline amid a pandemic and how Play plans to succeed where others have failed.
(Editor’s note: This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.)
Kenneth Kiesnoski: Sustaining a low-fare service across the Atlantic has proven tricky, as the failures of airlines like Iceland’s own Wow Air show. How will Play succeed where others have stumbled?

Birgir Jonsson: Play and Wow are actually closely related, so to speak. Many on our key management team are ex-Wow employees, as are a lot of our flight crew. I myself was a deputy CEO at Wow for a period.
So we know that story quite well. And, in fact, Wow was a great company and was doing really well operating the business model that we are [now] operating. It was only when Wow started operating wide-bodied jets like Airbus 330s and flying to the [U.S.] West Coast and basically doing the long-haul [and] low-cost thing — which is a hill that many good soldiers have fallen on many times.

Birgir Jonsson, CEO of Reykjavik, Iceland-based low-fare airline Play.

KK: Not only Wow but Primera Air and even Norwegian, which has ceased flying long-haul routes.
BJ: Right. But [Play was] was founded with, or managed to raise, around $90 million and proceeded to execute a business model of creating a hub-and-spoke system connecting the U.S. to Europe with a stop in Iceland [mixed] with point-to-point traffic to and from Iceland. We launched the European side of the network-in June and ran that for six months until we launched commercial sales to the U.S.
The reason I think Play will work out better than Wow is simply that the company’s better funded, [whereas] Wow was owned by one guy. And, it was way too big, grew too fast and the foundation was just too weak. We are a listed company. All the governance things around that kind of venture are completely different, more disciplined, more focused. Also we now know the pitfalls. We are just going to focus on the proven concept, the market that we know that exists.
KK: The pandemic hit travel hard, but probably business travel hardest, as work and meetings migrated online. Since you’re low-cost, are you targeting leisure only or will you also court business flyers?
BJ: In a pure marketing sense, we are targeting the VFR [visiting friends and relatives] and leisure markets. Having said that, I always have a pretty difficult time defining what business travel is because when someone says “business travel,” most people think of someone flying business class, drinking champagne — some premium service.
But there are a lot of people traveling for reasons other than going on holiday or visiting friends. Going to conferences [or] training, for example — these kinds of things. It’s not only high-powered CEOs going to Davos, you know. We just want to offer a no-frills, very economical product that’s very simple to use. We don’t have a business class; it’s an all-economy product. But for anyone, be it a company or individual, that wants just a simple approach, a good ticket price and safe, timely service, we are the right choice.

KK: Would you say Play is ultra-low-cost, like Ryanair, Frontier or Spirit? How do you differ from flag carrier Icelandair apart from price?
BJ: In Ryanair’s case, they fly relatively shorter legs. If I’m going to fly to New York, it takes five hours. You need to be able to recline your seat and to be able to have some leg space and such. So we’re not going hardcore like that. If there’s a distinction between a low-cost and an ultra-low-cost product, I would say that we are some type of low-cost.
If you compare us to Icelandair, I would say the product is nearly identical. Okay, we don’t have a business class as such. But in terms of the general experience onboard, on both airlines you have to pay for your meals, drinks and luggage and all that stuff. Legacy airlines are transforming themselves into a low-cost products anyway. If I made a list of 10 things that would justify that, the first five on that list are “price.”
KK: How did Covid affect your launch plans? I know around 10 new carriers debuted last year during the pandemic. Did you slow things down and use the opportunity to fine-tune or something?
BJ: We started operations with the general view Covid would end in the next 12 to 18 months, and that seems to be happening. In order to start an airline, especially a transatlantic one, you need runway. You need to hire crew, you need to train them. You need to position yourself on the market.
We would always have needed some kind of a ramp-up period. So we have never been focused on financial performance in the first six to eight— or even 12 — months. The demand was more to build an airline, have everything working and basically be prepared for when the whole business model is realized, which will be in spring when we launch the U.S. [flights].
Would I have liked Covid to end sooner, or would I have liked more passengers? Of course. But we managed to get a 53% load factor and 100,000 passengers — in a country of 400,000 people, in the middle of Covid. We are extremely happy about that. We would have liked to have 80%, of course, yes. But this was acceptable.

Icelandic airlines have long offered transatlantic passengers free stopovers at the international hub at Keflavik, Iceland, to promote tourism to places like the Landmannalaugar Valley.
Anastasiia Shavshyna | E+ | Getty Images

KK: Low-cost carriers often serve secondary urban airports. But you’re flying into BWI and Boston Logan, so why Stewart for the New York metro market?
BJ: New York is one of the most competitive markets in the world. Our position is to win passengers with low fares. And you can offer low fares [only] if you have low costs. Stewart offers that, for sure. It’s a lean airport to use. You cannot be low-fare if you have the same cost base as everyone else; then you’re subsidizing tickets. And that’s basically what happened in Wow’s case.
The other side is that there’s also very little competition out of upstate New York; there are no international flights at the moment. [But] there are a lot of attractions and businesses, and real estate prices have been rocketing. It’s almost a completely different market than New York City. I’m completely in love with Stewart. Baltimore’s a similar story, because in Europe we don’t talk about Baltimore. We’d say, “Washington.” BWI is a fair way out of the city but there’s a customer there in Maryland.
KK: Like Icelandair, Play offers a free stopover stay in Reykjavik for passengers, which helps local tourism. But pre-Covid, there was pushback in many popular destinations about over-tourism. What’s your take?
BJ: [The stopover] is a tradition that has been built over decades and we, for sure, offer that. In terms of Icelandic tourism, it’s interesting. It’s becoming one of the biggest industries in Iceland, apart from fisheries. We have so much nature and so much to see. But visitors tend to gather around the same spots, whereas if you drove for 20 minutes you’d see the same thing — but you’re completely alone.
It’s a discussion that’s going on in all popular destinations. Locals can’t get a table at the restaurants and all that. But the fact is that we couldn’t sustain those high-quality restaurants, clubs and bars and such in Iceland if it weren’t for tourists. In that sense, Covid was a good thing — if you can call a pandemic a good thing. One day, everything just stopped. And you don’t really know what you have until you lose it.

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EV start-up Polestar used its first-ever Super Bowl ad to indirectly take shots at its competitors, including Tesla and Volkswagen.
The 30-second spot, called “No Compromises,” is simple and to the point. It features shots of the company’s Polestar 2 electric vehicle with the word “No.”
Words following “No” during the ad range from general terms to “dieselgate” and “conquering Mars”

Electric vehicle start-up Polestar, which is expected to go public this year, used its first-ever Super Bowl ad to indirectly take shots at its competitors, including Tesla and Volkswagen.
The 30-second spot, called “No Compromises,” is simple and to the point. It features shots of the company’s Polestar 2 electric vehicle with the word “No,” followed by words and phrases directed at other traditional Super Bowl commercials and car companies.

Words following “No” during the ad range from general terms such as “epic voiceovers” and “dirty secrets” to “dieselgate” – referring to a former diesel emissions scandal with Volkswagen – and “conquering Mars” – a critique on Tesla and its CEO Elon Musk, who has plans to land humans on Mars by 2026.
The commercial ends at “No. 2” and then “Polestar 2,” the company’s all-electric performance car.

“The Super Bowl is an iconic event and I’m excited to bring Polestar’s message to such a wide audience,” Polestar CEO Thomas Ingenlath said in a statement. “We are a young and ambitious brand. We believe in ‘no compromises’, for our design language, our sustainability efforts, and the performance of our cars, and we wanted to share that philosophy with this ad. This is the perfect place to further raise awareness of our brand in the US, and beyond.”
Polestar is controlled by Volvo Car AB and its owner Zhejiang Geely Holding Group Co. In September, the company announced a deal to go public during the first half of this year by merging with a U.S.-listed blank-check firm backed by billionaire Alec Gores and investment bank Guggenheim Partners at an enterprise value of $20 billion.
Here’s the ad:

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Peloton founder John Foley stepped down from his CEO role on Feb. 8 following a tumultuous period for the connected fitness company.
The departure of Foley, who led the company since its iteration in 2012, resurfaces the question of how long a company needs to be “founder-led.”
A recent study suggests that while founder-CEOs increase the value of a company before and during an IPO, that boost starts to diminish compared to a non-founder CEO.

John Foley, co-founder and chief executive officer of Peloton Interactive Inc., stands for a photograph during the company’s initial public offering (IPO) in front of the Nasdaq MarketSite in New York, U.S., on Thursday, Sept. 26, 2019.
Michael Nagle | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Roughly two months after Peloton’s IPO, founder John Foley appeared on CNBC’s “Closing Bell” where he touted the “predictability of the revenue” of the connected fitness company.
“We know how to grow and stick the landings on what we tell the Street, what we tell our board and our investors [about] how we’re going to grow,” Foley said in that Nov. 5, 2019 interview.

That’s a very different tone from what Foley said on the company’s second-quarter fiscal 2022 conference call on Feb. 8, where he acknowledged that the company had “made missteps along the way,” that it was “holding ourselves accountable,” and he was going to “own” that — which included his departure as CEO, several executive and board changes, and a wide range of cost-saving measures, including cutting roughly 20% of its corporate workforce.
Peloton, a two-time CNBC Disruptor 50 company, had been led by Foley since it was founded in 2012, and his fellow founders Tom Cortese, Yony Feng, and Hisao Kushi have remained as senior executives. The other co-founder, Graham Stanton, left in March 2020 but has stayed on as an advisor, per his LinkedIn.
Peloton’s bumpy road that has seen its stock price drop more than 73% over the last year has raised the question of how long a founder-CEO like Foley should hang on post-IPO, especially if that journey starts to look more like a HIIT and hills ride than an easy one.
The track record is very varied. On one side, you have a founder like Jeff Bezos who stayed on as CEO for more than 20 years after Amazon’s IPO with massive growth along the way. Of course, there’s Steve Jobs, who ended up leaving Apple amid board tensions after he hired “professional CEO” John Sculley, only to ultimately return to oversee one of the most remarkable business turnarounds in market history. On the other side, you have Groupon founder Andrew Mason, who was fired as CEO in 2013, roughly 18 months after the company went public, following a series of Wall Street misses, a declining stock price and very-public mishaps.
Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, senior associate dean for leadership studies at Yale School of Management, said that 20 to 30 years ago, the trend from many venture capitalists would be to push out founding management at a critical change in the life stage of a company, “then the quote-unquote ‘professional management’ came in,” he said.

That’s happening less now, and Sonnenfeld said that some of that is for good reasons, like having a more experienced leadership group in place that has experience leading companies through various lifecycles. Foley did, with Barnes & Noble and other start-ups. But there are bad reasons, such as “founder shares that secure your leader-for-life status in the empire,” he said. In the case of Peloton, where Foley will remain chairman, he and other company insiders still control about 60% of the company’s voting stock.
Peloton did respond to a request for comment by press time.

When is it time for a founder to step aside?

More founders, especially in tech, are replacing themselves. Manish Sood, who founded cloud data management company Reltio, wrote in a 2020 CNBC op-ed that the reason he replaced himself as CEO after nearly a decade in charge is that he “recognized that to sustain predictable hyper-growth requires a special set of skills, and Reltio would require a CEO with experience leading public companies.”
“Preparing for growth takes courage at all phases,” Sood wrote. “In the beginning, entrepreneurs often risk everything to start companies because they believe in a new or different vision. They often face seemingly insurmountable obstacles. It takes a great deal of insight to recognize when an emerging growth company needs to pivot or change direction as it grows.”
Jack Dorsey shared a similar sentiment when he suddenly stepped down as Twitter CEO in November.
“There’s a lot of talk about the importance of a company being ‘founder-led.’ Ultimately I believe that’s severely limiting and a single point of failure…I believe it’s critical a company can stand on its own, free of its founder’s influence or direction,” Dorsey wrote in a memo to Twitter employees.
There have been some efforts to try to figure out exactly what that founder-CEO shelf life is. A recent Harvard Business Review study of the financial performance of more than 2,000 publicly traded companies found that on average, founder-led companies outperform those with non-founder CEOs.
However, that difference essentially drops to zero three years after the company’s IPO, and at that point, the founder-CEOs “actually start detracting from firm value.”
“Our data shows that the presence of a founder-CEO increases firm value before and during IPO, suggesting that a founder-friendly approach actually makes a lot of sense for VCs, who typically invest while companies are still in their earlier stages and cash out shortly after they IPO,” the authors wrote. “However, given our finding that on average, post-IPO performance is lower for firms with founder-CEOs, investors looking to get in after a company has already gone public would be wise to take a less founder-friendly approach — and investors, board members, and executive teams alike will benefit from proactively encouraging founder-CEOs to move on before they reach their expiration dates.”
It’s unclear what the future holds for Peloton and if it can regain the momentum that saw it disrupt the fitness industry.
The company’s new CEO, Barry McCarthy, cited his experience working with two “visionary founders” in Reed Hastings and Daniel Ek at Netflix and Spotify, respectively, in his first email to Peloton staff, which was obtained by CNBC, saying that he is “now partnering with John [Foley] to create the same kind of magic.”
“Finding product/market fit is incredibly hard to do. It’s extremely rare. And I believe we have it,” McCarthy wrote. “The challenge for us now is to figure out the rest of the business model so that we can win in the marketplace and on Wall Street.”
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The FDA and Pfizer dashed parents’ hopes this week when they delayed the authorization of the Covid vaccine for children under 5 years old.
The FDA and Pfizer said they are waiting on data about the effectiveness and safety of a third dose, which won’t come until April.
Dr. Paul Offit said the fast-track plan was based on the assumption that the third dose would prove safe and effective, but there’s no guarantee that will be the case.
“I’m glad that we’re going to wait until we have all of the data to make that decision,” Offit said.

A vaccinator draws a Pfizer-BioNTech coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pediatric vaccine in Lansdale, Pennsylvania, U.S., December 5, 2021.
Hannah Beier | Reuters

Parents of children under 5 will have to wait until at least April to get their kids vaccinated against Covid-19, after the Food and Drug Administration and Pfizer this week abruptly delayed plans to get the shots authorized on a fast-track basis.
The FDA had originally planned to authorize the first two doses of what will ultimately be a three-dose vaccine as soon as this month. However, Dr. Peter Marks, head of the FDA’s vaccine division, said updated data submitted by Pfizer and BioNTech did not support the plan to get the first two doses out early. Marks acknowledged that the decision was abrupt, but said the FDA was following the science.

“The data that we saw made us realize that we needed to see data from a third dose in the ongoing trial in order to make a determination that we could proceed with doing an authorization,” Marks told reporters during a call Friday, without providing specifics on the data. 
Acting FDA Commissioner Janet Woodcock said the drug regulator had sought to act swiftly  to protect children against omicron as Covid hospitalizations among the youngest rose to record levels in recent weeks. However, the FDA’s safety and efficacy standards required the agency to wait for more information on the third dose, Woodcock said. 
“The goal was to understand if two doses would provide sufficient protection to move forward with authorizing the use of the vaccine in this age group,” Woodcock said in a statement. “Our approach has always been to conduct a regulatory review that’s responsive to the urgent public health needs created by the pandemic, while adhering to our rigorous standards for safety and effectiveness,” she said.
“Being able to begin evaluating initial data has been useful in our review of these vaccines, but at this time, we believe additional information regarding the ongoing evaluation of a third dose should be considered,” Woodcock said.
Dr. Paul Offit, a member of the FDA’s vaccine advisory committee, said the fast-track plan was based on the assumption that the third dose was safe and effective, but there’s no guarantee that will be the case once the final data is submitted.

“Imagine us approving it after two doses and then finding out later that the third dose was unsafe and then having to pull back,” said Offit, a pediatrician and director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. “I’m glad that we’re going to wait until we have all of the data to make that decision.”
The FDA had come under pressure in recent weeks from some parents and physicians to quickly expand eligibility to protect toddlers through 4-year-olds as the omicron variant swept the country. Children under 5-years-old are the only age group left in the U.S. that is not eligible for vaccination. 
Nearly 5,200 children were hospitalized with Covid on Jan. 18, according to a seven-day average of data from the Department of Health and Human Services, twice as many as the prior peak during the fall of 2021. That figure has since fallen to about 3,000 as of Friday, HHS data shows. 
The American Academy of Pediatrics, in a statement Friday, said although the news was frustrating to many parents, it’s important to have a rigorous review process to ensure a safe and effective vaccine.
“A careful, robust and transparent process to evaluate the evidence for the vaccine in this age group is essential in order for parents to have confidence in offering the vaccine to their children,” the AAP said.
The problem is that two doses of Pfizer and BioNTech’s vaccine did not produce an adequate immune response in children aged 2 through 4 during clinical trials. The companies are evaluating a lower, 3-microgram dose level in kids under 5, compared to older children and adults who get 30-microgram shots.
Pfizer and BioNTech amended their clinical trial in December to study a third dose to determine whether that would produce the immune response needed to protect against Covid. The companies had said all along that data would not be ready until April.
However, the rapid rise of omicron over the holidays and through January created what Pfizer called an “urgent public health need” to get kids in this age group vaccinated. Marks said the FDA’s sudden decision to delay authorization should not impact parents’ confidence in the vaccine. He said the shift shows that the FDA takes its responsibility seriously and makes decisions based on the data as it emerges.
“I hope this reassures people that the process has a standard, that the process is one that we follow,” Marks said. “And we follow the science in making sure that anything that we authorize has the safety and efficacy that people have come to expect from our regulatory review of medical products.”
Wayne Koff, CEO of the Human Vaccines Project and a professor of epidemiology at Harvard, said there’s good reason to expect the third dose will improve the effectiveness of the vaccine in children under 5-years-old. Booster doses have proven effective at preventing severe illness in other age groups, Koff said, and the vaccine should really be considered a three-dose regimen in general across age groups at this point.
Offit said the Covid shot will likely become a routine childhood vaccine in the future, like immunization against polio. The U.S. eliminated polio in the 1970s, but it still vaccinates kids because the virus continues to circulate in some corners of the world. Public health experts largely agree that the eradication of Covid is unlikely at this point.
“The fact remains, we’re going to need to have a highly protected population for years and decades. I suspect this will become a routine childhood vaccination,” Offit said.
Though some parents may feel that it has taken too long to expand access to the vaccine, Koff said the FDA has accelerated the process as much as possible by progressively lowering the eligibility age while adhering to safety and efficacy standards.
“In the beginning you have to show the vaccine is safe and effective in the adult population,” Koff said. “Once you have shown that, then you’re able to go down in terms of the age of the adolescents and then eventually the younger kids and then eventually the infants.”
Offit said children under the age of 18 get infected less frequently and less severely, which is why vaccination has focused on the older populations first. As parents wait for the vaccine, they should build a “moat” around their kids who aren’t eligible by making sure everyone who is in contact with them has gotten their shots, he said. 
While about 75% of U.S. adults are fully vaccinated with two doses of the Pfizer or Moderna shots or one dose of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine as of Thursday, that figure is lower for kids. Roughly 57% of those aged 12 to 17 are fully vaccinated, according to the CDC, and 24% of those 5 to 11.
— CNBC’s Nate Rattner contributed to this report.

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Deborah Gladney, 34, and Angela Muhwezi-Hall, 32, are part of a small but growing club of million-dollar Black female founders.
The sisters are the creators behind QuickHire, a hiring platform that connects workers to service and skilled-trade jobs. In November, QuickHire raised $1.41 million in an oversubscribed round of funding, making Gladney and Muhwezi-Hall the first Black women in Kansas to raise over $1 million for a startup, according to AfroTech.

It’s a feat for any entrepreneur, but especially when you consider that Black female startup founders received just 0.34% of the total $147 billion in venture capital invested in U.S. startups through the first half of 2021, according to Crunchbase.
When the sisters started their venture in March 2020, Gladney was pregnant with her third child, and Muhwezi-Hall ended up in the hospital after contracting Covid-19. They weathered uncertainties of the pandemic, saw racial unrest during the George Floyd protests, penny-pinched to invest $50,000 of their own savings, and experienced microaggressions while fundraising. A beta version of QuickHire launched in the fall of 2020, and they released a finished product to the public in April 2021.
Today, QuickHire matches more than 11,000 job seekers with jobs at 60 mid- to large-size service industry companies in the Wichita, Kansas, and Kansas City metro areas. During the Great Resignation, QuickHire data is also proving how businesses must provide better jobs to the working class — jobs with good pay, stable hours, health insurance and future careers — if they ever hope to fill openings.
CNBC Make It spoke with the two sisters for their best career advice, and how it helped them launch their very first $1 million business.

‘Don’t ever let anybody see you sweat’

The biggest piece of career advice Gladney takes to heart comes from a former boss: “Don’t ever let anybody see you sweat.”

“There’s just so much power in not giving other people the power in knowing that they won any situation over you,” Gladney says.
Gladney says the experience of pitching QuickHire and raising money hasn’t been without experiencing bias and microaggressions — situations “where people have said or done something where, if we’d shown them they got to us, I think they would have succeeded in stopping us.”
Gladney remembers pitching to investors and feeling like they had “every card stacked against us.” They applied to but got turned away from accelerator programs, “and it left a bad taste in our mouths. The reasons for why we were turned down just weren’t very clear. And it made us wonder, is it because we’re Black women doing this?”
It’s an all-too-common scenario for women and founders of color in the VC world, where the majority of investors are white men. “We felt like we had to come to the table with more revenue or more validation than our counterparts, because we knew that we weren’t going to be able to raise if we didn’t make it even more comfortable for [investors] to take a chance on us,” Gladney says.
Gladney and Muhwezi-Hall nearly gave up on trying to get into an accelerator program until they had one motivating meeting with a managing director with the accelerator TechStars Iowa. They got into the accelerator, and their growth took off.
Gladney says she relies on a few core people, including her sister, her husband and her father, to manage the frustrations that come with being a Black female founder in the tech space.
“They get it all from me,” she says, “but it helps me go out there and fight the world.”

‘You’ve got to go to grow’

Muhwezi-Hall says the best advice she’s ever gotten was that you have to “go to grow.”
“Sometimes in life, and especially in careers, for you to find those opportunities of advancement and to widen your horizon, you have to get out of your comfort zone,” she says. “You have to take a chance on yourself.”
For Muhwezi-Hall’s part, the seeds for QuickHire were actually planted back in 2017, when she was a college and career counselor at a Los Angeles high school. She had plenty of resources to offer to those bound for college, but few for students headed to service or skilled trade jobs. Roughly 108 million people, or 71% of the labor force, work in the service sector — why weren’t there better ways to connect them with stable careers other than filling out paper job applications?
“This was an idea that we sat on for so many years,” Muhwezi-Hall says, adding that Gladney often encouraged her to bring it to life. The urgency of the pandemic, when she saw tens of millions of service workers losing their jobs, caused her to reprioritize her idea.
Muhwezi-Hall and Gladney got to work on building QuickHire in March 2020. By August, Muhwezi-Hall moved with her husband from L.A. into Gladney’s basement in Wichita, Kansas, for seven months to continue building. Muhwezi-Hall and her husband have since relocated to Chicago, and the sisters work together remotely and during in-person visits.
“At some point, you have to move,” she says. “And if you are afraid to move, you’ll never grow. So that’s something that I apply to everything: You’ve got to go to grow.”
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