Having trashed the royal family, flopped on Netflix and been terminated by Spotify for the poor performance of her last podcast, Archetypes, Meghan Markle has reinvented herself as an entrepreneur (pronounced “entreprenoor”). Her new company, As Ever, sells jam and “flower sprinkles” — to morons, presumably. Undaunted by the seeming blank lack of audience interest in Archetypes, she has started a new podcast to go along with her business. Confessions of a Female Founder aims to “inspire anyone who’s interested in turning their own entrepreneurial dreams into a reality”. Given that Meghan only launched her first products earlier this month, it will strike some listeners as rather early in her entrepreneurial career for her to start dispensing business advice. But she gives the impression of having never been much troubled by self-doubt.
Predictably, she has nothing to say about real business issues such as logistics, management techniques or supply chain issues. Equally predictably, there is lots of guff about how to love yourself and spread positive energy through the world. I suspect that this is not the sort of thing most small business people spend much time fretting over. But then Meghan’s business isn’t really a business. It’s a bit like the corporate equivalent of Marie Antoinette’s dairy farm — a pleasant game of make-believe for an idle rich woman. Receiving business advice from a Californian multimillionaire who owes a significant part of her fortune to marrying a prince is about as enjoyable and as illuminating as you would expect.
Meghan’s first guest is “wildly successful female entreprenoor” Whitney Wolfe Herd, founder of the dating app Bumble and at one point the youngest female billionaire in the world. Meghan says of Wolfe Herd: “We have such a deep personal connection and relationship of love.” Wolfe Herd launches into a superlative fawning courtier routine, telling Meghan that she and Harry are an “iconic, elegant, classy couple” and that when she visits their home she feels “engulfed in love and cosiness”. She is astonished by how famous and how hard done by Meghan is. She tells her that when she went to Ireland “you were on the cover of every single magazine and newspaper in Ireland”. “My jaw hit the floor,” she says. “I know,” Meghan agrees self-pityingly.
Meghan takes up a remarkable amount of airtime on the podcast, given that she sells jam as a hobby and her guest is the billionaire founder of a global technology company. She is constantly congratulating herself on her attention to detail, evidently imagining she is a Steve Jobs-style visionary perfectionist. “I was absolutely consumed with packaging,” she boasts of the anxious months before her company launched. “Boxes! It’s all I could think about.” She was ruthlessly focused on such questions as “where does the sticker go” and “what size is the box going to be”. Often she found herself awake at 3am “overthinking” what “I want the packaging to look like”. She confesses that in her darkest moments she would find herself fretting, “That’s not the unboxing experience I had in mind.” “How,” she would wonder, “are we going to pivot?” All this was terribly important because her company is an “extension of my essence”.
Wolfe Herd can give as good as she gets in terms of spouting business clichés (or perhaps she knows this is what Meghan wants to hear). Being an entrepreneur is about how “you move through the world”. It’s about “thinking outside the box”. Surely it’s more complicated than that?
Along with everyone else in California, Wolfe Herd has recently been on a “journey of self-love and self-discovery”, which resulted in her decision that “I’m going to foundationally re-architect the way people date and the way people love”. By this point I was seized by an urge to beat my head against the wall and foundationally re-architect my skull. Wolfe Herd tells Meghan that she wants to reinvent Bumble as a business that is about self-love. “In a world that capitalizes on your self-doubt,” Meghan tells her smugly, “loving yourself is a revolutionary act.” “You need to swipe right on yourself first before you swipe right on others,” Wolfe Herd adds inanely. Perhaps this is why she agreed to appear on Confessions of a Female Founder. It’s a research exercise for her new app. Meghan, after all, is a world expert in self-love.
James Marriott is a columnist at The Times of London, covering society, ideas, and culture