I almost said no.
When Alix Earle’s publicist called to ask whether she could come to Harvard Business School—to sit in on my class, be the subject of a case study, and speak to some of the sharpest young minds in business—my first instinct was to decline. I pulled up her TikTok. I saw someone having fun, looking glamorous, going to parties. I hung up and called my daughters, and they didn’t hesitate: “Dad, you want her there.”
They were right, and I was wrong. And the fact that I was wrong is itself a lesson worth examining.
Every year, I ask my students at Harvard Business School a version of the same question: what does it actually take to be a founder? Many of them say some version of “know your customer.” Alix Earle, at 25, said something on my podcast, The Founder Mindset, that landed differently: I am the customer. My students understand that concept analytically. She understood it in her deeply—in years of bad skin days, of products that stung, of feeling like the skincare industry was speaking a language designed to exclude her.
That’s not a trivial insight. One of the most persistent mistakes ambitious people make when they’re standing at the edge of a new idea is to defer to someone with more credentials, more years, more institutional weight. They assume that if something were worth doing, someone more qualified would already be doing it. What I’ve seen in truly great entrepreneurs—and what I saw in Alix—is the capacity to resist that logic. Tesla exists because Elon Musk didn’t believe the engineers at GM would electrify the car. Amazon exists because Jeff Bezos didn’t trust that Barnes & Noble would figure out the internet. Founders imagine a world that hasn’t happened yet and refuse to be talked out of it.
But there’s something else Alix had that I think gets underappreciated: she’d already built a track record of trusting her judgment under pressure. When she posted that unfiltered video—face covered in acne, neck broken out, deeply self-conscious—she didn’t post it because she was fearless. She posted it because something in her said this is true. The following month, she went from one million to two million followers. That kind of exponential learning compounds. Every time you make a hard call, and it works out, you carry more confidence into the next one. By the time she was deciding whether to launch a brand, or go on Dancing With the Stars, or turn down lucrative, safer partnerships, she had already trained herself to trust that internal signal.
What struck me most, though, was the seriousness underneath the lightness. She told me she decided at 22 that she’d launch a brand in three years—not when the momentum was hot, but when the products were genuinely ready. She interviewed CEOs as a 23-year-old who admitted she had no idea what she was looking for, then chose one based on a Saturday phone call. She wants Reale Actives to outlive her: she’d love to walk into a store one day and hear someone ask, “Who’s Alix Earle?”
That’s the founder mindset in action. That’s someone building something bigger than herself
I completely misjudged her when I scrolled through her page looking for signs of seriousness. I was looking in the wrong place. The seriousness was always there—in the long stretches of rejection, the years of going nowhere on TikTok, the decision to be honest when the easier thing was to perform.
She just wasn’t advertising it the way I expected. Ultimately, that’s the thing about great founders: they will trust their judgment and rarely fit a historical mold.
The Founder Mindset—the Harvard Business School Foundry podcast—is now streaming on YouTube.
The opinions expressed in Fortune.com commentary pieces are solely the views of their authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and beliefs of Fortune.
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