Issue No. 01 May 2026 A Private Letter
For Jerrie Johnson · From Desirée Mayon · A Founding Brand Ambassador Invitation

You imagined
her. I am
her. Let's go.

An invitation to join She & HER as founding brand ambassador — the sapphic dating app you almost built, brought to life by the founder you played.
  • NYC Pride 2026 · Confirmed Partner
  • Structure · Equity, not transaction
  • Story · Prime & New York Times
01
The Feature

This story is already half-written.

Four beats. Each one already filed. The chapter the reporters haven't written is the one we hand them.

Chapter One
2021
DecemberAmazon Prime · Harlem
Jerrie plays Tye, a Black sapphic founder building a dating app for queer POC
Read more

In press for the role, Jerrie tells reporters she wants to build a real version. She names the four-percent statistic on Black women in tech as the reason it matters.

Chapter Two
2025
FebruarySeries Finale
Tye proposes. A Black sapphic woman gets her ending on prestige TV
Read more

The character who built the app for sapphic love finds her own. The frame culture had not previously delivered, delivered.

Chapter Three
2025
AprilThe New York Times
Two brides at Bridal Week. Jerrie and Dria, covered.
Read more

The Style desk extends a beat it had not historically covered the way it covered them. The bridal-week piece becomes a kind of cultural marker.

The present chapter
Chapter Four
2026
June · NYC Pride 2026She & HER, on the float
The real founder steps in. A real product, with you on its arm.
Read more

Desirée Mayon — Black sapphic CEO, 15+ years FAANG/ML, plaintiff in Curley v. Google, AfroTech Field Partner, confirmed official partner of NYC Pride 2026 with float and brand activation — ships She & HER. The closing beat is not symbolic. It's a parade, a product, and a press story.

02
The Subject

A sapphic dating app. Redefined.

Built by a Black sapphic founder, for the women television keeps almost showing us.

She & HER is a sapphic — women who love women — dating app, redefined, built by a Black sapphic founder. We launch at NYC Pride 2026 with a confirmed float and brand activation. Beta begins September 2026 through Rice, the HBCUs, Columbia and NYU MBA networks.

Our product thesis is pedagogy, not pairing. We teach reciprocity, needs, and desire-reading before romantic matching arrives. The order matters: community → self → someone.

Underneath is a technical moat — FAANG, AI, behavioral economics, sustainability — that we lead with for funders and brand partners. Queer leadership is the credential. The thesis goes further.

"There is a need for this character to show that a Black queer woman can not only work in the tech field, but can also successfully run their own company."
Jerrie Johnson · AfroTech · 2021

She said this five years ago about a fictional character. We'd like to introduce you to the real one.

03
The Offer

Founding ambassador. Equity, not transaction.

We are pre-seed. We do not have the cash to hire Jerrie for a campaign. We have something better: a seat in what she imagined.

i. What we offer

A founding equity grant in She & HER, Inc.

A Delaware C-corp. Terms structured the way founding advisor grants are: vesting over the launch arc, with cliff and acceleration mapped to milestones we name together.

A seat in the room on how the brand tells its story. Not a face for hire. A co-author of the moment.

ii. What we ask

A twelve-month creative engagement.

Anchored on NYC Pride 2026 in June — where She & HER is a confirmed official partner with a float and brand activation already on the books — with right of refusal on a longer engagement after.

Press participation on the joint story, and creative latitude in how we tell it — voice over veto.

04
The Press Play

The next chapter, filed by the right desks.

Earned-media targets, ranked by tightness of the existing thread.

Tier 1 — Anchor
Amazon Prime & MGM
Their show. Their talent. Harlem's afterlife as cultural lineage. A "Tye, in real life" feature lets Prime extend the show's legacy and re-engage its sapphic audience — for free.
Tier 1 — Anchor
The New York Times
Direct extension of the 2025 bridal-week beat that already covered Jerrie and Dria. "The founder she could have been" reads as a natural follow-up filed by the same desk.
Tier 2 — Sapphic press
Autostraddle · them. · Out
All three already covered Jerrie's Tye arc on its own merits. The closing-the-loop frame writes itself; cover features available across the slate.
Tier 2 — Black queer
xoNecole · Essence · AfroTech
All three on file with Jerrie. AfroTech is especially clean — She & HER is a confirmed Field Partner for AfroTech 2026 in Houston, main-stage and workshop slots already pitched.
About the Founder
Desirée Yvonne Mayon
CEO & Founder · She & HER, Inc.
  • Fifteen-plus years in machine learning & data science
  • Google, Microsoft / Xbox, Etsy, Nordstrom, Cambridge
  • Plaintiff, Curley v. Google class action representing Black women in tech — with civil rights counsel Ben Crump & Linda Friedman
  • MS Bioinformatics, Texas A&M
  • Founder, She & HER — sapphic dating app launching at NYC Pride 2026
  • Confirmed partner, NYC Pride 2026 — with float & brand activation
  • Confirmed Field Partner, AfroTech 2026, Houston
From the record
Desirée Mayon, left, with the civil rights attorney Ben Crump and a fellow plaintiff in Curley v. Google, outside the United States Courthouse.
Desirée Mayon, left, with the civil rights attorney Ben Crump and a fellow plaintiff in Curley v. Google, outside the United States Courthouse.
What I stand for
  • Black sapphic women as the rule in technology, not the exception — in the cap table, in the codebase, in the press release.
  • Sapphic community as ancestral lineage, not a new category — built on, not announced.
  • Dating taught, not transacted — reciprocity, needs, desire-reading, before the romantic match arrives.
  • Partners chosen for fit, not for transaction — equity-forward, voice over veto, no extraction.
A Personal Letter

The first time I watched Harlem,
I cried at Tye.

Not because the character was sad. Because she was a Black sapphic woman with a tech company, on television, treated as the rule and not the exception. I had spent fifteen years inside Google, Microsoft, and Etsy doing machine learning and data science. I was, at that moment, also suing Google alongside Black women across the company — the case you may know by name as Curley v. Google. The thing that broke me open was a fictional founder I recognized while the real one was still being told she was the problem.

Jerrie went on the record about the four-percent statistic. I lived it — and then I built the lawsuit, and then I built the company. She & HER is what comes after the litigation. It's the affirmative answer. The thing we get to build because we refused to be the four percent.

I'm not asking Jerrie to be a face for She & HER. I'm asking her to be a co-author of the closing chapter — the one where the founder she imagined exists, the app she described is real, and we get to introduce the two of them to the world together.

This is a story I think the Times wants to write. I think Prime wants to tell. I'd like to make it easier for them by being ready, on the record, together.

— Desirée
Desirée Yvonne Mayon · CEO and founder, She & HER
What Happens Next

Thirty minutes. For tone, not negotiation.

If this lands, I'd love thirty minutes with you, or with Jerrie directly — whichever you prefer. Numbers and grant structure are for after. The first conversation is whether the story feels right.

Sooner is better — right is best — one to two weeks works
Reply to start a call See She & HER