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In the morning at home, I'm not functioning as an entrepreneur - I completely limit technology and any work-think - I'm functioning as a mom and a wife.
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.
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.
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.
I have no desire to sell Rent the Runway. I have a 50-year vision for Rent the Runway, at least, to change consumer behavior and actually put the closet in the cloud.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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 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.
All that Rent the Runway has really done is we've opened up the technology and logistics to make it possible to have the customer decide how long she needs an article of clothing for.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The more time goes by, the more things will happen to you in your life. And the ability to be positive throughout and look for the good in people, look for the good in situations - it's so important.
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.
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 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.
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.
My contribution to Rent the Runway as the CEO is higher than the contribution of someone on my warehouse team, but my pregnancy is not any more important than the pregnancy of any single person who works at my company.
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.
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 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?
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.
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.
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.
The first core value we have is that everyone deserves a Cinderella experience. And I have experienced a Cinderella experience. And I really believe that most people who've come to Rent the Runway have had a Cinderella experience.
At Rent the Runway, we rent designer clothes. We have a belief set that half of the closet over time is going to move into the cloud, and a portion of what we wear every single day will be comprised of things that we don't own forever.
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've always loved artists - creative, spontaneous, laid-back people - but I wasn't meeting these types in real life. So I figured that, given I run a technology company, I should also trust technology to help me find the love of my life.
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.
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.
Our company wouldn't exist and wouldn't be around without our warehouse employees and our call center employees. And these employees - not just at Rent the Runway but at tens of thousands of other companies throughout the country - are treated unequally.
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.
People should think about their closets like they think about a stock portfolio. There are things you want to invest in; you make those investments, and those are your blue chips. So you should invest in a great pair of jeans, in a great cashmere sweater.
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.
The most important thing to Ben and me was starting a family, so as soon as we got engaged, we booked Gurney's in Montauk - which is just a few miles down the beach from our summer home - as our wedding venue a full year and a half out, and then we immediately started trying to get pregnant.
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 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.
There are a lot of subtle things that are harder to stamp out of a culture in terms of male entrepreneurs being mentored more than female entrepreneurs... male entrepreneurs getting several strikes against them before they're kind of let go, whereas female entrepreneurs, it's kind of one strike and you're out.
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.