Khadijah Robinson on Building and Selling The Nile List

By ButterATL · May 1, 2025 · Updated September 21, 2026

Who this is

Khadijah Robinson is an attorney and entrepreneur based in Atlanta. She earned a bachelor's degree in English from Spelman College, a master's in international public policy from University College London, and a law degree from Harvard Law School, then practiced at Covington & Burling in Washington, D.C. She founded The Nile List, an online platform connecting shoppers with Black-owned brands, while clerking for a federal judge, and later sold it to Empower Global. She now works with the Center for Black Entrepreneurship's Lyft Incubator at Morehouse College and runs The Pit, a co-working space for Black founders. This episode published May 1, 2025.

What the conversation covers

This is an edited summary, not a transcript.

Robinson tells Brandon Butler that The Nile List started as a personal habit, not a business plan: a Google spreadsheet she kept while clerking to track Black-owned brands she wanted to buy from herself. Friends started asking if she had recommendations for specific products, the list grew, and she eventually built it into a website and app. It launched March 1, 2020, days before pandemic lockdowns pushed shopping online and months before a surge of interest in Black-owned businesses that summer.

She built and sold the company while still working full time at her law firm, a detail she's blunt about: it meant sleeping roughly four and a half hours a night and working every single day, not the balanced founder life she says social media tends to sell. She resigned from the firm the day after signing her acquisition deal.

The back half of the conversation is Robinson's advice to other founders, drawn directly from what she'd do differently. She's specific about acquisition mechanics that catch first-time founders off guard: equity from a sale typically vests over several years with a cliff period, meaning a founder who leaves early can walk away with far less than the deal's headline value. She says she'll never again sell a company and agree to keep working inside the acquirer, having watched most founders she knows leave value on the table trying to make it to their full vesting schedule. She also pushes founders to know their number, the actual amount they'd need to walk away from a company for good, before they start negotiating a sale, and to keep real bookkeeping in place from the beginning rather than discovering their financials are a mess right before a deal.

Takeaways

• Robinson started The Nile List as a personal spreadsheet of Black-owned brands while clerking for a federal judge, before it grew into a company (00:20:44).
• The platform launched March 1, 2020, positioning it for both the shift to online shopping during lockdowns and the summer surge in interest in Black-owned businesses (00:23:53).
• She built and sold her first company while still working full time at her law firm, and resigned the day after signing the acquisition deal (00:26:28).
• She says acquisition equity typically vests over several years with a cliff period, so a founder who leaves early can lose value they assumed they already had (00:35:44).
• Her advice to founders considering a sale: know your exact number before negotiating, because investors who own a large share of the company can leave a founder with far less than the headline sale price (00:37:36).
• She treats a bookkeeper as a non-negotiable early hire, reviewing a profit-and-loss statement and balance sheet every month rather than discovering cash flow problems late (00:39:34).

In their words

"I built and sold my first company while still working at my law firm." (00:26:28-00:26:29)

"I'm not coming to work for you." (00:34:58-00:35:01)

"A lot of people who are making money still go out of business… because they don't know what their cash flow is like." (00:40:24-00:40:29)

Why it matters for brands working in Atlanta

This is our take, not Robinson's. Her account of building The Nile List while still billing hours at a law firm is a useful correction to the version of entrepreneurship that gets marketed online, the one where a founder quits a stable job on day one and works from a laptop on a beach. She kept the income and the structure of her legal career going while she proved the idea worked, then made the jump once there was something real to jump to.

Her advice on vesting and equity is also a direct warning for any brand or investor courting a Black-owned business for acquisition or partnership. The headline number in an acquisition rarely matches what a founder actually walks away with, and Robinson's insistence on knowing your number before negotiating is advice any brand should expect a sophisticated founder to hold them to.

Watch the full episode on YouTube: https://youtu.be/21nf8sufnKc. Butternomics is hosted by Brandon Butler.