'Ambitious girl': How Kamala Harris’ niece turned political proximity into a budding business empire

Last month, minutes after President Joe Biden endorsed his running mate to succeed him, chants of “Ka-ma-la” rang out from the audience at Broadway’s Music Box Theatre.

They were there for a matinee performance of “Suffs,” a musical about women’s suffrage co-produced by the vice president’s niece, Meena Harris, who promptly posted a video of the moment for her 700,000 Instagram followers.

For Meena Harris, who has spent the last seven years building a for-profit business branded on the empowerment of “women and underrepresented communities,” it was another fortuitous crossover between her private ventures and her family’s political endeavors.

During the early stages of Kamala Harris’ political rise, Meena Harris advised her aunt while moving between elite legal jobs and some of Silicon Valley’s hottest companies, before branching out into a T-shirt line that began as a charitable endeavor.

Meena Harris is not the first daughter of a political family to hawk fashion wares in the proximity of power. Ivanka Trump encouraged followers to buy the personally branded outfit she wore for a 2016 RNC speech. Ashley Biden launched her own “socially conscious” sweatshirt line . And the vice president’s stepdaughter, Ella Emhoff, parlayed a viral Inauguration look into a contract with the modeling agency IMG.

But Meena Harris has leveraged political adjacency to create a sprawling personal brand from scratch, then has taken it in inventive new directions.

In addition to her media production company, she’s authored a best-selling children's book about her aunt, sold sweatshirts bearing the vice president’s face, and recently launched a venture capital arm whose investments include an anti-‛patriarchal' personal finance app.

Now, her aunt’s sudden elevation to the top of the Democratic ticket offers a once-in-a-lifetime branding opportunity. It also promises to bring renewed scrutiny to a 39-year-old entrepreneur whose outspoken social media presence and efforts to profit from her association with her aunt have caused criticism from Washington to Delhi.

In the early days of her aunt’s second presidential campaign, the would-be first niece is striking a more cautious pose.

Meena Harris did not respond to interview requests. Her PR representative, to whom POLITICO was referred by the vice president’s office, did not respond to a large portion of emailed questions.

“The Vice President’s family members have independent, professional careers,” said the vice president’s government press secretary, Ernie Apreza, in a statement for this story. “There is no involvement between the Vice President and any of the professional endeavors her family members pursue, nor do any of the Vice President’s family members use her name in connection with any commercial activities that could reasonably be understood to imply an endorsement or support.”

Behind the bond

Born in 1984 to a single, teenage mother, Maya Harris, Meena Harris formed an especially strong bond with her mother’s two-years-older sister, Kamala Harris. People close to the family describe the three Harris women as inseparable.

“In the nuclear apocalypse, those are the three that are going in the bunker together,” said one former Kamala Harris aide, who was granted anonymity to discuss the internal dynamics within the vice president’s inner circle.

In 1998, Tony West — a lawyer active in Democratic politics — married Maya Harris and became Meena Harris’s stepfather. Around that time, Kamala Harris began to rise through the ranks of California Democrats, while Maya Harris became active in national progressive circles.

And Tony West went on to serve as the third highest-ranking official in former President Barack Obama’s Justice Department, under Eric Holder.

Meena Harris, meanwhile, dove into the worlds of Silicon Valley, the legal profession and progressive politics.

After graduating from Stanford in 2006, she went to work at Facebook. According to the former Kamala Harris aide, her family helped arrange the job through California entrepreneur Chris Kelly, who was Facebook’s first in-house attorney.

“Meena was a recent Stanford grad who fit in very well with the many other recent graduates we hired for user operations in the early days of Facebook,” Kelly, who went on to lose a 2010 Democratic primary for state attorney general to Kamala Harris, said in an email.

Kelly, who has endorsed Kamala Harris for president, did not directly address the question of whether the Harris family played a role in the hiring. Meena Harris’ PR representative, Joanna Rosholm, disputed that Kelly was involved in the hiring, and said that Meena Harris was recruited by a Stanford classmate.

In 2009, she enrolled at Harvard Law School and then went on to clerk for the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals. After that, she worked at the law firm Covington & Burling, the private sector professional home of her stepfather’s then-boss at DOJ, Eric Holder.

Moving into politics

As Kamala Harris’ political career picked up steam, Meena Harris jumped in alongside her mother Maya, taking on various roles in her aunt’s campaigns, including deputy campaign manager and adviser. People who worked with her described her as a go-getter and consummate networker who helped her aunt connect both with new technology and a younger generation of Obama-aligned, tech-savvy political talent.

“Meena was very involved in helping Kamala get a big presence on Facebook and social media and making her online presence shine,” said Jim Stearns, a political consultant who steered Kamala Harris through her earliest campaigns. “She seemed to have a natural talent for it.”

At the same time, Meena Harris’ dual roles as an assertive campaign hand and the candidate’s beloved niece have also caused clashes with the professional operatives in Harris’ circle.

“You have to be able to separate yourself as the campaign operative from family love,” said the former aide, who said the candidate’s niece exhibited a domineering style out of sync with her formal campaign titles. “Are you an extension of the candidate as a family member or are you campaign staff? That’s something that she wasn't always able to navigate well.”

Eventually, that assertiveness went from an open secret in Harris world to a brash public declaration.

Provocative T-shirts

In 2013 while at Covington, she took on a side gig printing and selling a run of T-shirts emblazoned with “I’m an entrepreneur, bitch.” The phrase — an homage to Mark Zuckerberg, who famously printed business cards that said “I’m CEO, bitch” — channeled the unapologetic ethos of a Silicon Valley startup scene that at the time was still a darling of Washington and public opinion.

The shirts took off when model Tyra Banks — a longtime friend of Kamala Harris, who visited Banks’ new Washington ice cream shop just last month — was photographed wearing one.

A representative for Banks, Nicole Dukoff, declined to comment. Rosholm, the PR rep for Meena Harris, said her client enlisted Banks to wear the shirt through a professional connection unrelated to her aunt.

The success of the shirt led to another T-shirt series, Phenomenal Woman, inspired by a Maya Angelou poem and the outpouring of feminist sentiment in response to Donald Trump’s 2016 victory.

Launched on International Women’s Day in March 2017, the Phenomenal Woman concept soon morphed into a series of in-person events. They included several that Meena Harris conducted in conjunction with Uber. At the time, the ride-sharing app was in the process of shifting its corporate culture in response to complaints about workplace harassment and discrimination.

The company, on its way to amassing a $100 billion-plus market cap, was also facing several federal investigations related to its business practices. In February of that year, Uber commissioned Holder, then back at Covington, to investigate its workplace environment, leading to a June report that called for sweeping corporate changes . That fall, Tony West came aboard as Uber’s chief legal officer .

In this period, Meena Harris’ involvement with Uber rapidly escalated from an event series to a position in the executive ranks of the fast-growing tech juggernaut.

“Meena was inspired by the kindness, quality of work, and, most of all, the enthusiasm and dedication of employees to making Uber better,” according to a blog post published by the ride-sharing company. “Before she knew it, Meena was interviewing with Uber and soon became Head of Strategy and Leadership.”

Rosholm did not address a question about the exact timing of Meena Harris’s hiring but said it was not related to her step-father’s role at the company. Rosholm cited Meena Harris’ previous work in the industry — which in addition to Facebook included a stint at LinkedIn — and the fact that “this was Tony’s first job in tech.”

Matt Stoller, an antitrust reform advocate and critic of large tech companies, said that hiring the daughter of a powerful Democratic family — along with a former attorney general and a former associate attorney general — was a logical move for a company whose business model depends on political leverage.

”Their value add is political,” he said. “Uber was always a political operation. It was never really a business. The whole point of Uber was to break taxi cab commissions.”

Uber did not respond to requests for comment.

A string of powerful endorsements

While serving as Uber’s head of strategy and leadership, she continued her Phenomenal Woman sideline. It took off thanks to the scores of prominent women — from Valerie Jarrett to Wendy Davis to Jessica Alba — who were photographed wearing them and listed as ambassadors on the Phenomenal website.

The T-shirt morphed into the Phenomenal Woman Action campaign, which, among other initiatives, called on “male allies” to donate a portion of their salary in recognition of the gender pay gap. It listed dozens of partners from the corporate and nonprofit worlds, as well as one government agency, the San Francisco Department on the Status of Women. The department, where Meena Harris once served as a mayoral appointee , did not respond to a request for comment.

As recently as June 2019 , the Phenomenal Woman Action Campaign’s website stated that all net proceeds from T-shirt sales went to non-profits, but the brand was quickly evolving into a multi-pronged business empire.

In May 2018, Meena Harris registered Phenomenal Woman Action Campaign, LLC, in California. And the following March she changed the name to Phenomenal, LLC, according to public records. The fashion brand branched out into clothing and merchandise lines with taglines like “Phenomenally Black,” “Phenomenally Asian,” “Ambitious,” and “Childfree.”

“I could've put out this one shirt, and I could've said, ‘alright I reached my goal—in fact, I exceeded my goal, I'm done with this thing,’” she later said of the transformation. “I think in part because of those values that I was raised with and having been somebody who's done community organizing, instead, my thought was, "Oh my god, I can't stop now. This is literally something that is resonating with people, so how can I grow it? How can I do more? How can I make it better? How can I reach more people?"

As the proprietor of a full-fledged fashion brand, Meena Harris saw her profile continue to rise alongside that of her aunt, who launched her first presidential bid in early 2019.

In June 2020, Meena Harris published a children’s book about her aunt and her mother, “Kamala and Maya’s Big Idea.” And after President Joe Biden selected Harris as his running mate, Phenomenal began selling “ Vice President Aunty” sweatshirts .

Around the time of Kamala Harris’ inauguration as vice president, Meena Harris launched a collaboration with Beats by Dre. They sold headphones emblazoned with the phrase “The First but Not the Last,” a line her aunt has famously deployed to describe trailblazing women .

She also published a second children’s book, “Ambitious Girl,” which she told NPR was conceived in response to criticisms that her aunt is too ambitious.

'Behavior needs to change'

The activities drew a slew of negative press coverage at the outset of the new administration about the appearance of profiting off of her aunt’s office, with one unnamed Biden White House official telling the Los Angeles Times, “Behavior needs to change.”

“The Vice President and her family have always upheld and continue to uphold the highest ethical standards,” Apreza said.

Meena Harris’ social media posts ignited a whole other series of controversies.

A March 2021 tweet that “violent white men are the greatest terrorist threat to our country” — in response to a mass shooting conducted by a Syrian-born man — drew criticism from conservative outlets . And her condemnation of a crackdown on protesters in her maternal grandmother’s homeland of India prompted a minor international incident when it inspired pro-government demonstrators in New Delhi to burn an oversized portrait of her face.

While the vice president’s niece did not exactly lower her profile, she has taken a subtler tack over the remainder of the Biden administration, while growing a Phenomenal brand that remains anchored in many of the identity-based empowerment themes that have also powered her aunt’s political career.

From her base in the Bay Area — where she lives with her husband, Facebook executive Nik Ajagu, and two daughters — she launched Phenomenal Media, in late 2021.

The company describes its purpose as elevating “the stories of women and underrepresented communities through entertainment, digital content, brand partnerships, book clubs, and more.”

The venture, along with an associated nonprofit, has won four Tony awards for Suffs and another musical, a Strange Loop, which explores Black queer identity, according to Rosholm.

A new VC fund

The next year, Meena Harris launched Phenomenal Ventures, which has raised a $6 million fund focused on consumer products.

Rosholm did not respond to questions about the fund’s investors or its portfolio companies. The fund’s investments include Plenty, an app that is designed to allow couples to collaboratively manage their finances and, according to Fortune magazine, has positioned itself as a competitor to “ patriarchal fintech apps .”

In 2022, she also became CEO of Reductress, a website that lightly satirizes feminist media with headlines like “How to Come Even Though Kamala Told You Not To.”

That headline predates Meena Harris’s stint as CEO, and on the whole, Phenomenal’s appeals to Kamala Harris have grown less direct.

In one interview posted by the clothing retailer Nordstrom, Meena Harris explains her fashion brand by saying, “Women in charge — and powerful women making a difference — as a kid, that's all I knew!” She refers to her “family of social justice lawyers,” but does not name them.

It remains to be seen how this dynamic will play out with Kamala Harris at the top of a presidential ticket and potentially in the Oval Office.

Rosholm confirmed that Meena Harris has been encouraging her personal contacts to join her aunt’s presidential campaign, but neither Rosholm nor the Harris campaign responded to other questions about Meena Harris’s relationship with her aunt or with the campaign.

One thing, though, is clear: Even as Meena Harris has steered away from using her aunt’s name on her brand, she has managed to ensure it remains well-positioned to capitalize on the vice president’s rise.

In one recent box office recap video, prolific theater commentator Andres Lafrazia noted the Kamala chants at “Suffs” and pondered the business implications of the shakeup that prompted them.

“That,” he said, “could help this show significantly.”