President & CEO of Essence Ventures Caroline Wanga Talks Essence Festival 2023

Name: President & CEO of Essence Ventures Caroline Wanga Talks Essence Festival 2023
Uploaded: 2025-11-07T04:42:17-08:00
Duration: 33 min 18 s
Channel: SWAY'S UNIVERSE
Description: Caroline Wanger, CEO of Essence Ventures, discusses her transition from Target to leading Essence, emphasizing the repositioning of Black women as CEOs…

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About this episode Caroline Wanger, CEO of Essence Ventures, discusses her transition from Target to leading Essence, emphasizing… AI summary

Caroline Wanger, CEO of Essence Ventures, discusses her transition from Target to leading Essence, emphasizing the repositioning of Black women as CEOs of home, culture, and community. She shares a personal framework for discovering one's purpose through external feedback and offers a practical strategy for overcoming the burden of perfection by normalizing failure. The conversation also highlights the 2023 Essence Festival's focus on hip-hop's 50th anniversary and its expansion into a multi-cultural celebration.

Key takeaways 5

Purpose Discovery Method: To identify one's natural gifts and purpose, ask five people who know you differently two specific questions: 1) What is the thing you won't do until you find me because I'm the best at it? 2) What is the thing you would rather die than ask me to do? Look for consistency across answers to identify the 90% of time to spend on strengths.
Repositioning Black Women: The next era of Essence focuses on recognizing Black women not just as a demographic but as the 'CEOs of Home, Culture, and Community.' The goal is to force ecosystems to engage with them at full value without discounts or charity narratives.
Failure Threshold Strategy: Wanger operates on a 'five fails a day' rule. By setting a realistic threshold for failure, she prevents a single mistake from defining her entire day, allowing her to become an expert in failure recovery and maintain momentum.
Festival Scale Metrics: The Essence Festival is the largest festival in the US by per-day attendance (167,000 people over 3 days), surpassing Coachella (125,000 over 6 days) and SXSW (27,800 over 10 days).
Personal Growth Phases: Wanger describes her parenting journey through four phases: initial defiance/rebellion against stereotypes, obsession with finding a father figure for her daughter, guilt over work-life balance, and finally rebuilding a friendship with her now-adult daughter after both did inner work.

Notable quotes 4 AI-generated: wording and quote attribution may be wrong. Use the play link to verify.

“I don't trust institutions anymore... I trust people and I trust people who know who they are so I need us to activate who we are and step into our individual purpose so the world for the Next Generation looks different than the one we're handing on.”

▶ 3:49 Wanger explains why she believes individual purpose activation is more critical than institutional trust for societal healing.
“The burden of perfection especially for us as black women is just as self-inflicted as it is externally inflicted.”

▶ 14:26 Discussing the pressure Black women face to be perfect and how this hinders their humanity and progress.
“I give myself five fails a day... until I fail the sixth time it's not a bad day.”

▶ 15:48 Wanger shares her personal rule for managing failure and maintaining productivity without being paralyzed by mistakes.
“A black woman says something things change... A black woman does something things change not just for the black woman but for every part of the ecosystem that she interacts with.”

▶ 10:50 Defining the strategic value of Black women in culture and business for the next 50 years of Essence.