Built to Fly: Esosa Ighodaro-Johnson on Purpose and the Power of Relationships

There's a moment in every great origin story where the person realizes the room they're standing in doesn't have enough chairs for people who look like them, so they build a bigger room. That's Esosa Ighodaro-Johnson's story. And after sitting down with her for this year's Dope Thinkers to Watch series, I walked away certain of one thing: Esosa isn't just building rooms. She's building infrastructure.

From Banking to Building

Esosa didn't start in tech. She spent her first seven years in financial services and by her own account, she was bored out of her mind and knew she didn't belong there. That restlessness is a common one that I hear from founders. It wasn't ambition in the abstract. It was a gut-level recognition that the room she was in wasn't the room she was built for.

The pivot came the way a lot of the best ones do, not from a plan but through community. A friend at Microsoft quit a $200K job to chase this new frontier called "app companies." Esosa didn't even know what that meant. So she asked him to teach her. That's it. That's the whole hinge point of the story: she asked a question instead of staying comfortable.

By 2012, she'd co-founded an image recognition company and was raising capital in an ecosystem that, in her words, was so hard to navigate that she decided to go find out who else was trying to figure it out too. Her instinct of if I'm lost, who else is lost with me, and how do we get found together is the seed of everything she's built since

"Who else is building, that's a Black woman in technology, that's building for massive change, impact, and money? So I decided to create with two other Black women who were building technology companies, Black Women Talk Tech, to help us navigate what it's like to build and grow in the technology space."

The Birth of Black Women Talk Tech

In 2017, Esosa co-founded Black Women Talk Tech with two other Black women building technology companies. The idea wasn't grand at the start. There were thirty people in a room who wanted to know they weren't the only ones trying to build billion-dollar technology companies as Black women in America. Three hundred people tried to get into that first gathering.

Nine years later, that "itty-bitty group" is a global community of roughly 150,000 people, with a dozen U.S. chapters and two international, running conferences and convenings around the world.

I said this to her directly in our conversation, and I'll say it here too: what I heard in her story was community, pivot, and purpose. At Kulur Group, we talk constantly about the fact that community drives reputation, reputation forms relationships, and relationships drive revenue. But none of that happens without connection first. Esosa didn't set out to build an institution. She set out to find people who understood what she was going through. The institution was the byproduct of her honesty and vulnerability.

That doesn't mean it was easy. She was honest about the operational scar tissue, the realities of people management at scale, the challenge of building a "double bottom line" organization that has to be profitable and mission-driven, and learning to produce events for thousands of people when none of the founders were event producers.

"Nobody, for whatever reason, believes that it just runs on hugs and kisses. There's real money. There's real teams that are making sure you show up and get all the things you asked for, or we promised you."

That's the weight every builder signs up for the moment people start believing in the mission. It’s a privilege to carry, and a responsibility to honor. 

Her Superpower: Relationship Building

I asked Esosa the question I ask nearly every Dope Thinker: who are you, and what's your superpower? Her answer was relationship building, the ability to take her "crazy ideas" and persuade people to walk a vision alongside her.

She told me a story she'd picked up from a video online, about the difference between an airplane and a bird. A plane is engineered, piece by piece, to perform the act of flying. A bird was designed to fly, it's not performing an action, it's living its nature.

"A bird was literally created and designed — it's in its nature to fly. It is what it was created to do. It can't do anything else but that one thing incredibly well without trying. That comparison is so powerful because I often wonder: am I doing my purpose here?"

Esosa's takeaway: when you're operating in your purpose, you're not assembling parts to force an outcome. You're just being what you were built to be, and it works without the strain. That's Esosa in a sentence. Every big technology company, every stage, every deal all comes down to people. Her gift is finding what moves someone and meeting them there.

On Mentorship, Patience, and Choosing Partners Wisely

Esosa didn't romanticize mentorship, she quantified it. People with mentors are roughly 33% more likely to earn more money and 25% more likely to be successful, by her account. But more than the stats, she described mentorship as someone investing in your growth with no return required for themselves.

"They don't have any reason to invest in you, but to see you succeed. That's the one and only thing that community provides so naturally for you to win."

She was equally direct about her own growing edges. If she could tell her 25-year-old self one thing, it would be to have more patience, to sit with why something didn't work instead of moving straight to the next attempt. And she'd tell herself to choose partners more wisely, because more than half of startup ideas die not from bad ideas but from broken founder relationships.

"More than 50% of ideas become broken ideas because the founder relationships break up and they're not on the same page. I had a mindset around 'I can work with anybody.' That's not always the right thing to have."

That's the kind of self-awareness that separates the founders who build something durable from the ones who burn bright and flame out.

Why She's a Dope Thinker to Watch

Esosa Ighodaro-Johnson built an institution out of loneliness, turned nine years of trial and error into a 150,000-person global community, and never stopped being honest about what it cost her to get there. She is proof that access, once you have it, is meant to be handed backward to the next person still looking for the room.

That's the whole spirit of Dope Thinkers to Watch. Not just people doing dope things but people who understand that the doing is never really about them.

Esosa Ighodaro-Johnson is a co-founder of Black Women Talk Tech and a member of the 25 Dope Thinkers to Watch, Class of 2026.