Hala Taha

Everybody kind of like underestimated me, even though I was actually doing really cool stuff.

I was building a blog site.

I was running an events company.

I was hacking social media and becoming an influencer on Twitter and things like that.

But they couldn't see any of that.

It wasn't like credentialed.

I wasn't making a lot of money yet.

And so I really had nobody in my corner, literally nobody, except for my father.

My father would always tell me like, oh, don't worry, you're a star.

Like you're going to be their boss.

When you're older, you know, and my father always believed in me and helped me a lot.

Like, you know, he would, you know, financially help me when I needed it in those moments in my life and was really the only one who believed in me.

It was like, no, just keep following your dreams as much as you can and never talk down to me.

But everybody else really looked down on me.

And I remember.

There was a period of time.

So I started this blog site and it became very popular.

We were one of the most popular hip hop and entertainment sites in the world.

And there was a point in time where we got so big where MTV wanted us to have our own reality TV show.

And it was like right after Jersey Shore.