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.
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.
I have the most eclectic music taste out there. I can be listening to an indie pop song just as easily as I could be listening to a Carly Simon song from the '70s to a country song.
If you spend your time away from work looking at emails and making sure your inbox went down to zero, that's not an effective way to spend your time as a CEO or an entrepreneur. Often times, those emails aren't that important.
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.
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.
I dream of democratizing the fashion industry by giving everyone access to feeling their most beautiful and powerful every day and, at the same time, using technology to modernize how we get dressed.
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.
I dream of a not-so-distant future in which every woman can wake up, decide what she'll wear from the millions of styles in her digital dream closet, and have her outfit magically delivered to her before she finishes her coffee.
As a female founder and CEO, it is important to me to support other women as they build their businesses.
When choosing vendors for my wedding, I intentionally searched for women who were at the beginning of their own founder journeys.
Founders are often great storytellers because they're in the business of constantly selling a dream against all odds.
I actually think that self-expression comes, sometimes, from what you wear, and having the freedom to be able to wear whatever you want for whatever mood you want to wear it, but to not feel frivolous that all of those things that help you self-express have to be things that you're committing to forever.
I don't think of careers from a functional perspective or from a subject matter perspective. I think of careers as, how do you like spending the time in your day? What makes you happiest? What are you most passionate about?
I want to have an 'Eat, Pray, Love' experience where I drop off the face of the planet and move to Greece.
I was sexually harassed while building Rent the Runway - propositioned, sent sexual text messages, harassed and threatened in person.
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.
I've been humbled by the amount of people who have gone out of their way to reach out, mentor me on an ongoing basis, and devote time to help solve the problems Rent the Runway faces as a company - simply out of their own interest and kindness.
Taking the time to identify and infuse values certainly does affect outcomes and is one of the most important things to get right as the CEO.
It's amazing how much misinformation there is about pregnancy and how many myths are still ingrained into our culture.
