Women at Work

Toni Ko was born in the year 1973 in Daegu, South Korea. In 1986 at the age of 13, her and her family immigrated to the United States. When she first arrived, she spoke no English and was placed directly in the seventh grade. She spent most of her teenage years working for her parents, who worked in the cosmetics industry as wholesalers. She attended Glendale Community College in Arizona on the weekends but eventually dropped out to work for her parents as a manager of their wholesale business full-time. In 1999, she founded the business “NYX Cosmetics”. Then in 2014 she sold NYX to L’Oréal for $500 million. She currently lives in Los Angeles with her husband, while also running two new businesses; a venture capital firm focused on funding female entrepreneurs and a beauty brand accelerator.

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