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I try to work with people the way they prefer.
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As a female founder and CEO, it is important to me to support other women as they build their businesses.
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If your work isn't mission-driven or emotionally resonant to you, it will be very hard to maintain passion and focus over a long period of time, which is critical in entrepreneurship.
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All early entrepreneurs fall prey to the same problem, which is everyone believes that if you are super intense in the beginning, work long hours, that you can create something quickly and that entrepreneurship is almost something that happens overnight.
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I didn't wake up one day and want to become an entrepreneur. I had the idea for Rent the Runway and thought it would be fun to work on and also thought if it was successful, it would make women feel great about themselves.
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When I traveled around the country visiting women in their own homes and talking to them about their closets, every woman lamented about 'settling' for many of the pieces in her closet.
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As women and men, we're not primed and taught to feel that women are as inspirational as men.
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I think that life is difficult. People have challenges. Family members get sick, people get older, you don't always get the job or the promotion that you want. You have conflicts in your life. And really, life is about your resilience and your ability to go through your life and all of the ups and downs with a positive attitude.
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While it can be challenging for women with disruptive, technology-based ideas to acquire significant funding, in my experience, once I was able to raise that funding, I was met with droves of people offering to help me fulfill my dreams.
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You need to fail quickly and learn from those failures to continue to build along the way.
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Because entrepreneurship is so hard and does take so long to build something great, you do have to build an environment that you yourself as an entrepreneur want to work in for the next 20 years.
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Every single person around the world has this storage facility in their bedroom, and we call it a closet, and 80 percent of the stuff in that storage facility is worn three times or less in its lifetime.
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I had this thesis that we had entered the experience economy. People were getting married later and starting to value experiences like travel over owning things.
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As opposed to thinking about ourselves as disrupting the fashion industry, we're thinking about ourselves more broadly - about disrupting the closet and how you get dressed.
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In the early years of Rent the Runway, our challenge was twofold: getting investors to buy into our vision for how the world was changing and getting women to understand that renting was a viable - let alone a smarter - alternative to spending hundreds of dollars on dresses they would wear just once.
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In many cases, women are being harassed by people who are on their board or who are associated with one of their venture capitalists.
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Every single day, entrepreneurship has highs and lows, and you need to feel like you have a community around you. That is insanely important - to have a community of people around you lifting you up and who really know you.
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Real-time feedback and coaching promotes learning. When feedback is connected to compensation, feedback is muted, distorted, and given less frequently.
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When you buy something for $9.99, and you know that it'll fall apart after you wear it once... you're going into the shopping experience knowing that you're renting. So all I'm doing is making the rental process more efficient.
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What's interesting about the transportation market is that you're often dabbling in multiple categories. The same person who might own a car is still using Uber, is still using a taxi, still might go to Avis on a business trip and rent a car.
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We're in the '100 percent return' business. This is driving millions of new customers into brands; most of our customers are wearing brands they've never tried before.
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As leaders, we've all seen the painful effects of team members not keeping pace with company growth - it's called up-leveling, and it's all too common when a company goes from zero to something to hopefully an IPO.
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I'm obsessed with 'New York' magazine.
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I kick off every monthly team meeting with 'core value stories' - team members stand up and recognize how another team member exemplified a core value.