Industries that are chaotic are ripe for innovation. They are open to anyone who has an idea.
— Jennifer Hyman
We've found that employees who live full, happy lives tend to be the most effective contributors.
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.
I'm constantly running to meetings outside of the office, and I think that you can't go wrong with a great pair of Lanvin pumps.
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?
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.
When we launched, we had to figure out every problem - big or small - on our own.
Real-time feedback and coaching promotes learning. When feedback is connected to compensation, feedback is muted, distorted, and given less frequently.
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.
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.
Mentors don't just have to be people who are older or more experienced than you are. Mentors are people who really care about you, know you, and want to offer feedback and advice to help you grow.
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.
In order to really believe in an idea being revolutionary, you have to truly understand how it's going to revolutionize life.
My parents are both massive feminists and always led me to believe that I could dream big and do anything that I wanted in my life, almost to a delusional degree.
Clothing enables people to self-express, and that's why variety, when it comes to our wardrobe, has become more and more important over time.
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.
The way I inspire loyalty in my team is for them to see me more casually, to have lunch with members of my team, for them to see me with my family, my fiance, to see the real me.
I can dance to Beyonce, sing karaoke, create strategy, go on dates, and build a multi-billion company and show the world that women can build big businesses.
As a leader, you have to have a vision that inspires people around you.
I think layering is key for fall along with a really colorful scarf to bring spiciness to the outfit.
I think if more people actually pursued what they loved, we'd have a lot more innovation and creativity.
I'm obsessed with 'New York' magazine.
You need to fail quickly and learn from those failures to continue to build along the way.
One of Rent the Runway's core values is 'Trust in Everyone's Best of Intentions.' We trust our team.
Startups, by their nature, are entrepreneurial - testing new things, launching new products, and disrupting themselves. That's why you join a startup in the first place - to create, to stretch beyond your current capabilities, and to make an outsized impact.
Almost every one of us interacts with the experience or sharing economy every day, and I'm proud that Rent the Runway has helped to popularize and normalize this behavior.
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.
I'm a very social person, and I like being in different kinds of environments.
I'm a magazine junkie. I have 30 different subscriptions to various magazines, and I like old-school, real magazines.
I think sales is the most important skill set young people can learn. Understanding how to pitch an idea with confidence and secure a client are valuable skills that apply to every single aspect of business.
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.
We derive confidence as women from what we wear.
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.
As women and men, we're not primed and taught to feel that women are as inspirational as men.
We're giving our customer access to things she wouldn't have otherwise purchased, either because it wasn't smart to buy it, or she couldn't afford it.
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.
If I am looking to impress people, I'll be in a Rent the Runway dress and great accessories.
If you're passionate about something, go for it, because people are great at what they love and when they're the happiest.
I think it's extremely important to think of your company as a series of chapters.
Think about all of the non-entrepreneurial advice and resources you need when building a company. You need lawyers, accountants, financial experts.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
We are helping women express themselves and feel awesome about themselves, and I think that does change the course of your day.
I studied social studies at Harvard, which makes it sound like I was in seventh grade. It was a choose-your-own-adventure major, where you could decide what you were going to focus on.
I've always felt the connection between clothing and confidence, which is why I probably was such a shopaholic.
In early 2011, I had the opportunity to meet and spend significant time with Alfred Lin, a partner at Sequoia Capital and co-founder of Zappos.
We learn about MLK's 'I Have a Dream' speech. Take that same speech and put it in the voice of a woman. Would it be as inspirational? Would it have as much gravitas to it?
