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.
Jennifer Hyman
I think layering is key for fall along with a really colorful scarf to bring spiciness to the outfit.
When I feel like the day is great? Pasta. When I feel like I want the day to be great? Pasta. It's just awesome.
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.
You need to fail quickly and learn from those failures to continue to build along the way.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I've found that entrepreneurship only gets harder every year, and as your team gets bigger, the stakes get higher.
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.
I want to have an 'Eat, Pray, Love' experience where I drop off the face of the planet and move to Greece.
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.
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.
I want to put H&M and Zara out of business.
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.
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.
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.
Our goal is to teach young women who were brought up on H&M and Forever 21 that designer clothes are expensive for a reason. They're works of art.
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.
When you don't have to buy something, it allows you to try new things.
We are helping women express themselves and feel awesome about themselves, and I think that does change the course of your day.
I'm totally obsessed with Italian food and Mexican food.
Building followership and inspiration around female leadership is quite difficult to do.
I've always felt the connection between clothing and confidence, which is why I probably was such a shopaholic.
I think if more people actually pursued what they loved, we'd have a lot more innovation and creativity.
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.
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.
Like any startup in hyper-growth mode, growth often brings change, and with it, evolution in the executive team.
If I am looking to impress people, I'll be in a Rent the Runway dress and great accessories.
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 think, so often, female cofounders are positioned in this competitive, catty way. It's just awful. It's not reality.
I think a lot of people might've and probably did have the idea of renting clothes before me. I was the only one who was crazy enough to attempt it.
As women and men, we're not primed and taught to feel that women are as inspirational as men.
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?
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 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.
Be brave and take accountability for your thoughts and beliefs.
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.
As a female founder and CEO, it is important to me to support other women as they build their businesses.
As a leader, you have to have a vision that inspires people around you.
When we launched, we had to figure out every problem - big or small - on our own.
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.
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.
Founders are often great storytellers because they're in the business of constantly selling a dream against all odds.
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.
If you're passionate about something, go for it, because people are great at what they love and when they're the happiest.
I'm an auditory learner, and if you put something into a song, I'll remember it forever.
