Bozoma Saint John has run marketing at PepsiCo, Apple Music, Uber, Endeavor, and Netflix, a run of houses so demanding that most executives never see the inside of two of them, let alone five. She topped Forbes’ list of the world’s most influential CMOs in 2021, entered the Marketing Hall of Fame in 2022, and now owns Eve by Boz, a luxury haircare brand she funded with her own money. She built the biggest stretch of that career as a widowed single mom.
Her solo-mom status, stated plainly: Saint John was widowed in December 2013, when her husband Peter died of Burkitt lymphoma at 44, months after his diagnosis. She has raised their daughter Lael, who was four years old at the time, on her own ever since (background on Peter).
Before
Born in Ghana and raised in Colorado, Saint John spent 2005 to 2014 at PepsiCo, rising to head of music and entertainment marketing (career history). The years that made her professionally were also the years that tested her personally. In 2009 she and Peter lost their first daughter, Eve, born prematurely. In 2013 came Peter’s diagnosis, and by December he was gone.
The turn
What she did next was never a retreat. She kept the career, kept the household, and rebuilt her operating system around one principle she now calls living urgently. Urgency, in her definition, means deciding what matters ahead of time and spending the calendar on that, because she has seen exactly how finite the calendar is. She wrote the whole arc down a decade later in her memoir, The Urgent Life (Viking, 2023).
Notice the order of events. The Apple job, the Uber job, the Netflix job, the Hall of Fame, the book, the brand: every one of them came after December 2013. The résumé that magazines now profile was built by a woman who was also handling school pickups, birthdays, and bedtime as the only adult in the house. She did not wait for her life to feel stable before she moved. She moved, and built the stability as she went.
The build
The decade after Peter’s death reads like a case study in compounding:
- 2014 to 2017: she joins Beats Music, arrives at Apple through the acquisition, and becomes one of Apple Music’s most visible marketing leaders (source).
- 2017 to 2022: Chief Brand Officer at Uber, then CMO of Endeavor, then Global CMO of Netflix from August 2020 to March 2022 (source).
- 2021 and 2022: named the most influential CMO in the world by Forbes, then inducted into the Marketing Hall of Fame (Marketing Hall of Fame).
- 2023 to now: publishes The Urgent Life and launches Eve by Boz with a couple million dollars of her own money rather than raising venture capital (Fortune, November 2024; Forbes, April 2025).
The Eve by Boz decision deserves its own line for our readers. After two decades of making other companies famous, she funded her own brand herself, keeping full ownership instead of trading it for investor money. The name pays homage to the daughter she lost (WWD), which makes the company both a business and a statement about whose name goes on the door.
Through all of it she was the only parent at home. She has been open about what that stacking of roles costs, and just as open about what it built in her.
“I’m a better executive because I’m a widow and a single mom and because I have dealt with the tragedy of losing a child. I’m much more empathetic in my work.”
Bozoma Saint John, EBONY interview, February 2023
Read that again. The hardest facts of her life appear in that sentence as professional assets. Not because she pretends the grief away, she has never done that, but because she decided the experience would count for something in every room she walks into. Empathy, in her telling, is a commercial skill: she understands the pressures on the people she leads and the customers she markets to, because she has carried heavier ones herself.
What you can take from this
- Your experience is a qualification. Saint John names widowhood and solo parenting as reasons she leads better. When you write an offer, a resume, or a pitch, the years you have run a household alone are evidence of operating skill: logistics, budgets, decisions under pressure. The Business toolkit shows you how to package what you already know how to do.
- Decide by values, then spend the calendar. Living urgently is a scheduling discipline anyone can copy. Pick the two things that matter most this season, one for your income and one for your kids, and put them on the calendar before anything else claims the space.
- Small rituals hold big weeks together. Saint John raised Lael through five of the most demanding jobs in American marketing. Connection did not wait for a free weekend; it happened in the minutes she protected on purpose. Our Fun with Kids toolkit is built around exactly those minutes.
More stories, more tools
Bozoma Saint John’s story is one of a growing shelf. Read the rest on our Stories of Success page, and join the weekly SoloMom email from the homepage to get each new story in your inbox with the tools to use it.
Verification note: solo-mom status, career facts, and the quote above were checked against the linked sources in July 2026. Quotes are reproduced verbatim.
