The Monday Media Diet with Mufaro Mutowembwa

On Bistro Moncur in Sydney, Founders by David Senra, and the magic of Cape Town

Mufaro is building Rolodex Media, an interesting company that just came on our radar. Happy to have her with us this week. -Colin (CJN)

Tell us about yourself.

My name is Mufaro. I like to say it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy — it means Joy in Shona, my mother tongue and the language of Zimbabwe, where I’m from — and I’ve found that joy tends to follow me into rooms whether I invite it or not.

I’m the eldest daughter of three, the child of first-generation immigrant parents, and a Virgo. I’d argue those three facts explain most of what you need to know about me — the responsibility, the ambition, and the colour-coded spreadsheets.

I’ve spent four years in big law as a corporate strategist and recently moved into fashion tech. Alongside that I run Rolodex Media, a media company that translates culture into business helping curious readers see brands, behaviours and cultural shifts through an investor’s lens — and translating finance and strategy back into something human. We do it through The Investment Committee (profiles of emerging consumer businesses) and Brand Breakdowns (deep dives into the history, financials and non-obvious insights of today’s most interesting companies).

I also write The Index, my personal Substack — where I do the same translation in the first person: taste, ambition, and the occasional strong opinion I can’t fit into a Rolodex piece, written for women building something of their own.

Outside of all that, I’m a serious restaurant person — I do a lot of my thinking, and most of my catching-up, across a table. If you only had one dinner in Sydney, I’d send you to Bistro Moncur — order the O’Connor fillet steak frites, the best steak in the city. Go on a Friday night: it’s cosy, not remotely scene-y, mostly families, and somehow all the more charming for it. The staff make it feel special.

Describe your media diet.

I consume a lot, and not particularly neatly – institutional publications and Substack and TikTok and, yes, Reddit, often within the same ten minutes. It sounds counterintuitive, but I think being chronically online is the price of having a distinct point of view: to know where the tailwinds are going, you have to have a real sense of where they are now. People DM me all the time asking me to write about something, or asking for my take, and my answer is always the same — I won’t write about a thing unless I have a genuinely distinct take on it. Otherwise you’re just adding to the noise. So the volume isn’t restlessness; it’s the raw material. You can’t make sense of the world without first being immersed enough in it to see it clearly.

Substack is my favourite place on the internet. No one does the algorithm quite like it. Nothing else is as good at putting your work in front of the right person, the reader genuinely most interested in what you do.

Emily Sundberg’s Feed Me is the one everyone seems to land on, and what I find telling is how many people pay for it who don’t even live in New York — that says something real about what she’s built. A few others I religiously read: Screenshot This by Zara Wong, for the sharpest writing on fashion and the industry behind it; Trademarked by Tariro Makoni, for the brand and consumer stories before they go mainstream; House Journal, Joanna Masiyiwa’s newsletter from AMAYI — a record from inside the atelier, tracing the choices and contradictions of building a fashion house in real time, which is rarer and more honest than most brand storytelling; and The Stanza, a weekly read on hospitality and culture written from an investor’s perspective — which, given that’s the exact lens Rolodex runs on, is a little like reading a sharper version of my own interests.

For podcasts, it depends what I need. When I want to think, it’s Acquired — there’s nothing better for a long drive or a long flight; you go in knowing nothing about a company and come out feeling like you could brief someone on it — Founders by David Senra, and the Business of Fashion podcast. For the industry read, the stuff that keeps me current on my actual work, it’s TBPN and Emma Grede’s Aspire and The Gstaad Guy . And then there’s the company listening — Shameless, After Work Drinks, NewlyParents — the ones I put on not to learn anything but because they’re genuinely good company.

Then the institutions, each with its own slot. The NYT and the AFR are the morning read — overnight in the world, then what’s happening at home before the day starts. The Daily Aus is the phone-in-a-queue read, the quick scan. The WSJ and The Cut sit somewhere in between, picked up across the day. And The New Yorker is the one I actually sit with and save for the weekend, read properly.

What’s the last great book you read?

What It Takes by Stephen Schwarzman. The idea that stuck with me wasn’t a finance one, it was his rule that the size of a problem and the difficulty of solving it are roughly the same, so you may as well take on the big one. I’m aware of how it looks like a 24-year-old in Sydney building a media company, reading a Blackstone memoir — but I don’t read it as a finance book. I read it as a book about ambition, and about the discipline it takes to build something enduring. That part is universal.

What are you reading now?

I’m usually three books deep at any time. Right now: Start with Yourself, Emma Grede’s new one. The idea I keep coming back to is that working out what actually gives you energy is worth real time and attention. It sounds obvious until you try it; most of us are far better at naming what we should do than what genuinely lights us up.

Also reading The Heir Apparent on the fiction side, which is the wind-down read which is the one I pick up at the end of the day when I want a story rather than a lesson.

What’s your reading strategy when you pick up a print copy of your favorite publication?

I underline and highlight my physical books, which I used to be far too precious to do. I gave it up because I kept losing lines I wanted to return to. The unexpected gift of it: when you come back to a book a year (or two, or three) later, the old marks show you who you were the last time you read it. It’s like a record of how your thinking has moved. It happens to me most with Sally Rooney’s novels - I’ve reread them all, and each time a completely different set of lines catches me, which tells me more about where I am than about the book.

Who should everyone be reading that they’re not?

The Bible. I don’t think you need to come to it as a religious text to get something out of it — you can be as agnostic as you like and still find one of the richest bodies of writing there is on stewardship, on how to handle money and ambition, and on what we owe the people who come after us. I read it slowly, a little at a time, less for answers than for the questions it keeps putting back to me.

What is the best non-famous app you love on your phone?

Confession: I’m the wrong person for this question. I almost never download apps. My phone is all famous, all functional, so I have no hidden gem to offer, just a slightly suspicious lack of clutter.

Plane or train?

Plane, without hesitation. A non-negotiable of living in Australia, where getting anywhere means committing to it. I’ve turned the long-haul into a routine: champagne on boarding, never the wifi (the whole appeal is being unreachable), Crazy Rich Asians at some point because it simply has to be, and then the great pleasure of doom-scrolling my own camera roll — there’s something very funny about landing on what you were doing in May of 2020. There’s always a physical book in the bag too, even if it loses every time to the camera roll.

What is one place everyone should visit?

Cape Town. I’ll happily call it the most beautiful place on earth and not feel I’m exaggerating. In the morning you’re at Boulders Beach watching African penguins waddle around like they own the place, and that evening you’re at The Bungalow in Clifton, drink in hand, watching the sun go down over the Atlantic. Go in December or January. Yes, it’s busy — but the weather is extraordinary and you catch the city at its most alive.

Tell us the story of a rabbit hole you fell deep into.

I finished Strangers by Belle Burton — whose grandmother, as it happens, is Babe Paley — and fell straight down a Capote’s-swans-sized hole. That world fascinates me: a circle of women who were powerful and adored and yet almost entirely defined by proximity to men and money, and who then watched one of their own turn their confidences into copy. It’s a story about taste, betrayal, and how precarious a certain kind of status really was. The timing was almost too neat ...I’d just been in New York for the first time, so I was reading about a world I’d quite literally just walked through.