Girls Who Run the World: 31 CEOs Who Mean Business

By Diana Kapp and Bijou Karman

The perfect gift for future entrepreneurs! Part biography, part business how-to, and fully empowering, this book shows that you're never too young to dream BIG! With colorful portraits, fun interviews and DIY tips, Girls Who Run the World features the success stories of 31 leading ladies today of companies like Rent the Runway, PopSugar, and Soul Cycle.

Girls run biotech companies.
Girls run online fashion sites.
Girls run environmental enterprises.
They are creative. They are inventive. They mean business.
Girls run the world.
This collection gives girls of all ages the tools they need to follow their passions, turn ideas into reality and break barriers in the business world.

INCLUDES:
Jenn Hyman, Rent the Runway
Sara Blakely, Spanx
Emma Mcilroy, Wildfang
Katrina Lake, Stitch Fix
Natasha Case, Coolhaus
Diane Campbell, The Candy Store
Kara Goldin, Hint Water
Anne Wojcicki, 23andMe
Rachel Haurwitz, Caribou Bioscience
Nina Tandon, EpiBone
Jessica Matthews, Uncharted Power
Jane Chen, Embrace
Emily Núñez Cavness, Sword & Plough
Hannah Lavon, Pals
Leslie Blodgett, Bare Escentuals/Bare Minerals
Katia Beauchamp, Birchbox
Emily Weiss, Glossier
Christina Stembel, Farmgirl Flowers
Mariam Naficy, Minted
Maci Peterson, On Second Thought
Stephanie Lampkin, Blendoor
Sarah Leary, Nextdoor
Amber Venz, RewardStyle
Lisa Sugar, Pop Sugar
Beatriz Acevedo, MiTu network
Julie Rice and Elizabeth Cutler, Soul Cycle
Suzy Batiz, Poo-Pourri
Tina Sharkey, Brandless
Jesse Genet, Lumi
Tracy Young, Plan Grid

• Language: English
• Publisher: Random House Children's Books
• Release date: Oct 15, 2019
• ISBN: 9781984893062

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

Although often neglected in history books, girls have been running things behind the scenes forever. The first solar-heated home? Developed by a woman. The daily-appreciated dishwasher? Woman. The creator of the Brooklyn Bridge? Woman again. That clever mistake-cover-upper, Liquid Paper? A woman concocted it in her kitchen blender. The list goes on: windshield wipers, the board game Monopoly, the ice cream maker, even the trusty basic brown bag. All invented by women.

But forget history—there are women out there today who most people have never heard of, breaking barriers this very second.

Back at the beginning of my career, I attended Stanford Graduate School of Business, where I went to learn about turning big ideas into companies to better our world. Sitting in those lecture halls studying the business greats, I kept wondering: Where are the women? Almost all the companies we were being taught to admire were founded by men.

When I graduated, I became a journalist in San Francisco, the beating heart of the tech revolution, covering the truly transformative ideas all around me—stem cells, virtual reality, 3-D printing, driverless cars. Again, I found myself asking: Where are the women? Sure, there are female-founded companies with name recognition, but the few out there succeeding are not visible enough. Not even close.

You may have heard the troubling stats before. There are still so few women at the top. (And it’s getting worse—in 2018 the number of female CEOs at top companies fell 25 percent from 2017!) Women in business start out equal to men in terms of jobs and pay, but the drop-off begins with the first promotion to management. And businesses founded exclusively by women snag only 2.7 percent of venture capital dollars.

These statistics are begging to be altered. And now is the moment—your moment—to defy them. Venture capitalists (VCs) are desperate to fund females—they need the missing half of our nation’s brain cells—but in order for a woman to start the next Apple or Amazon, she needs to believe it is possible. To see herself in that role.

And when girls do land businesses, guess what? Substantial research finds that they outperform the guys, which is why venture capitalists are frantic to bring women entrepreneurs into their investment portfolios. A 2013 study of privately held technology companies found those with at least one woman founder have a 35 percent higher return on investment. A 2018 Boston Consulting Group study found that companies led or co-led by women generate 10 percent more in cumulative revenue over a five-year period than those led by all-male teams. They use investment money more efficiently, too: for every dollar of funding, these start-ups generated 78 cents, while male-founded start-ups generated just 31 cents. Why wouldn’t you bet on female CEOs?

Girls Who Run the World features thirty-one women who defied the statistics and founded awesome businesses, becoming emblems of what is possible. They mastered the art of speaking up and loud, they took big risks with big money, they overreached and made mistakes, and ultimately they believed in their own brains, persisted, and hit it big.

In the pages that follow, you’ll find real trade secrets from the front lines of CEO life and insider stories that reveal what it’s really like to be a woman in business, with millions of dollars at stake.

It’s rare to gain this level of access to entrepreneurs, to see how the money and deals get made. I was lucky enough to interview twenty-eight of these thirty-one darn busy ladies, so all this comes straight from them. You will find no candy coating here, no glossing over of trip-ups. The I-wish-I-could-do-that-over moments are on full display. You will learn that there is no straight line to making bank. Every successful business takes a zigzag course to the top, and every start-up journey is rough, a twenty-four-hour-a-day sprint on a tightrope. Over a fire. In a lightning storm. Just maintaining confidence, let alone a balance in the bank, is a battle. The idea known as Murphy’s Law applies: whatever can go wrong, will go wrong. Competitors come out of nowhere. Delivery trucks break down. Checks bounce and employees flake. And yet, as you’ll see, all that chaos is what makes being CEO so darn satisfying. You’re in the hot seat, solving problems every hour of that daily sprint so that you can say, "I made something, and it matters. I matter."

This book is a strong yes, please to moneymaking, an idea that has been pretty taboo for girls for, oh, forever. But until we matter financially, our voices won’t be heard. And until we understand money—know how much we have, how much we need, how to invest it, account for it, pay taxes on it, and feel comfortable dealing with it—we are going to finish second, behind the boys. Money is tied to power. Money is tied to everything. It just is.

So cozy up with these thirty-one hotshots, and you’ll start absorbing their can-do spirit. Their wisdom and ways will supercharge you far beyond business, too. Need a confidence boost as you power through your history report? Having trouble believing you can put together a successful election campaign for student council? Revisit the against-all-odds stories gathered here; they will inspire you to go for it, double down, recommit. After all, the tools you need to invent world-changing things are the tools you need for life: doggedness, heart, community, faith, and a candy stash for emergencies.

Girls, you are inventive and powerful. You are the sharpest tacks around. No doubt the next Apple or Amazon will come from someone who looks just like you (it might even be you). A girl is going to invent a machine that sucks all the plastic out of the oceans. Another one will mastermind a tiny pill with every critical nutrient, eliminating world hunger. One more will pioneer ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ 

(fill in the blank).

So here you go, clever girl, natural-born leader. Don’t wait. Go run the world.

Fashion/ApparelJenn Hyman: Cofounder and Ceo of: Rent the Runway

Business 101: Tap into the zeitgeist. Ownership is out, and the sharing/renting economy is in.

HER BUSINESS: A massive clothes closet for rent, from special-occasion outfits to maternity dresses to work wear to jeans. Pick your duds, pay your money, and the latest fashions arrive on your doorstep.

AN EARLY INSPIRATION: Sara Blakely of Spanx (this page).

THE THEATRICAL TYPE: As a kid, she wanted to be a singer in a Motown band, a Knicks City Dancer, or a Broadway star. Jenn considers her biggest talent to be remembering lyrics to any song she’s heard more than once, and spends (almost) all her waking hours listening to Spotify playlists and singing!

SOME FIGHTING WORDS: Nothing ever happens by accident or luck—we all have to make it happen by our own energy and assertiveness!

BOARD MEMBER: In addition to leading the Rent the Runway board, she helps guide the makeup giant Estée Lauder after having been appointed to their board in 2018.

GUINNESS BOOK OF WORLD RECORDS–WORTHY: It is rumored that Rent the Runway has the world’s largest dry cleaner! (The smudge of shrimp cocktail sauce or hot fudge drip on that dress has to disappear before the next gal wears it, right?)

FIRST BUSINESS: Selling homemade friendship bracelets on the beach in Hawaii. She put her cutie-pie little sis in front as salesgirl. When making all those bracelets became a pain, they ordered a pile online from Oriental Trading and sold those.

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Buy less stuff is Jenn’s mantra. For a CEO with zillions of designer garments in her New Jersey warehouse, this isn’t exactly the retail philosophy you’d expect. But her business is shaking up the old way of buying clothes. Her idea is for women to stop dropping $495 on that cool Reformation trumpet-sleeve cocktail number or lots more for that classy Versace gown, to definitely quit stockpiling fast fashion at Topshop and Zara—and rent instead. Stop shopping at cheap stores that are producing things with cheap labor that are just going to sit in the back of your closet, she said at a Recode (techie news) event.

The concept hit Jenn in 2008 while she was visiting her younger sis, Becky, who had just plunked down more than a month’s rent on a cocktail dress, badly boosting her credit-card debt. Her sister insisted that it’s the social media age, where photos are zapped everywhere, so you always need a new outfit. That was the light-bulb moment. Why own that dress you’ll wear once? She went back to Harvard Business School and told her friend Jenny Fleiss her idea. Jenny’s response: This sounds fun!

Their next move was to reach out to the famous dress designer Diane von Furstenberg, to see if she’d partner with them in some way. They didn’t know her, so to contact her they just started typing every possible permutation of her name, hoping to guess her email address. [e-mail]…? No. [e-mail]…? No. [e-mail]…? No.

Tip: A great trick when you don’t know someone’s email—try guessing. Oftentimes the format is whatever is most obvious. Or call the company and ask for their email address format and plug in the name.

After many error messages, one email went through, and shockingly, Diane pinged right back. She invited the pair to her New York office. Driving from Boston in a rental car, they made up their company name. They donned DVF dresses, reached out a hand, and introduced themselves as the cofounders of Rent the Runway.

A second meeting was scheduled. But driving there, forty blocks from the office, Diane’s assistant called to say Diane was canceling. Jenn said, Well, we’re just around the corner. We’ll pop in briefly. The assistant firmly repeated that Diane didn’t want to see them. At that moment, Jenn slyly pretended she didn’t hear her. What? What? You’re cutting out, she said. We’ll be there in five minutes. And in they went. Now, that’s gutsy! And skillful! Jenn thought, What’s the worst that can happen? If we get escorted out, we’ll have a hysterical story! But the best thing happened: It worked.

Tip: Don’t leave the first meeting without scheduling the second meeting. No I’ll be in touch about dates shortly. Have your calendars out and nail down a date.

At the second meeting, Diane decided she wasn’t going to sign on right then as a partner, but if they could sign up lots of other designers, she might participate. Then she gave them a few contacts who might help. To launch, Jenn and Jenny used most of their savings and bought a hundred dresses at Bloomingdale’s. They bought in their own sizes, so if all else failed, at least they’d have a killer wardrobe. They set up a pop-up store on the Harvard campus as a test. It was a runaway hit! Because they needed tons of inventory to open online, they initially raised $1.75 million from investors. (They have raised much more to date.) They were clever about marketing Rent the Runway from the start. The Sex and the City film had opened that summer, and they walked the movie lines at every theater around town, collecting emails.

Tip: When leaving a meeting, ask for two names of people who might be helpful and their contact info. This can turn into a big web of helpfulness.

Rent the Runway is no longer just for party outfits. The company has over 11 million members, and most of the company’s subscribers are working women. Jenn’s thought: What they need is career clothes! In 2016, Jenn started a monthly subscription service offering a regular supply of work duds and everyday clothing in addition to outfits for special occasions. She keeps adding clothing categories, like maternity wear, bridesmaid dresses, resort wear, even jeans! Rent the Runway’s operation is so efficient that they can process one woman’s return and have it shipping to someone else in twelve hours. Of the 1,800 employees, hundreds work in logistics! Ninety-eight percent of renters try brands they’ve never worn. Maybe they’ll fall for Tibi, Vince, Lilly Pulitzer, Rag & Bone, or one of the six hundred plus brands stocked.

Her sister insisted that it’s the social media age, where photos are zapped everywhere, so you always need a new outfit.

Being a cheerleader for women is a major priority for Jenn. Her passion stems from formative early experiences. At her first job out of college, working for a hotel and travel company, her boss told her to act sweet and not to speak much in meetings. Jenn’s boldness was coming across the wrong way. Her initial reaction was to dissolve into tears. But then she heeded a senior colleague who told her, Keep doing what you’re doing. Your boss is going to be working for you one day! Just after she launched Rent the Runway and appeared on the front page of the New York Times business section, Jenn’s boyfriend broke up with her, saying he didn’t want to be with a powerful career gal. There have been ups and downs learning to be a CEO, but Jenn feels that these are unavoidable growing pains in a rapidly expanding company, and her goal is to keep learning. Her trick is to just keep believing in herself and being who she is, as her coworker advised her so long ago. Had I decided to listen to [my boss] at that point, we wouldn’t be where we are today, she told a HuffPost reporter.

Rent the Runway is heavily female and diverse—93 percent of employees are female and/or people of color, 80 percent of leaders are women, and over half of the board of directors are women. Almost half of the engineering team is female—that’s right, 50 percent! Jenn made waves this year when she equalized benefits—things like bereavement leave, parental leave, family sick leave, and sabbatical packages—for all employees. As she wrote in a New York Times opinion piece, I had inadvertently created classes of employees—and by doing so, had done my part to contribute to America’s inequality problem…. This has to change. As a founder of a company that has grown over the last eight years, I implicitly understand that Rent the Runway would not exist without the dedication and loyalty of our team. Don’t I owe it to the team that got me here to take care of them? Now the CEO and the warehouse workers all get the same benefits, which is practically unheard of.

Jenn and Jenny used most of their savings and bought a hundred dresses at Bloomingdale’s. They bought in their own sizes, so if all else failed, at least they’d have a killer wardrobe.

Even for her 2017 wedding on a beach in the Hamptons, she made a conscious effort to elevate women. She used almost all female vendors—the DJ and her event planner, among many others, were gals. To further promote women entrepreneurs, she launched Project Entrepreneur, a competition and incubator previously housed inside Rent the Runway.

Jenn met her husband while doing online dating for the first time, on the app Hinge. They fell in love fast. She was thirty-four, and they both wanted kids, so after they got engaged, she got pregnant immediately. Their daughter, Aurora, at age five months, was at the wedding (of course), wearing a custom-made party dress. Unfortunately, she couldn’t rent it from Rent the Runway—no toddler dresses at that point!

SARA BLAKELY founder and ceo of SPANX

Business 101: Fake it till you make it.

HER BUSINESS: Spanx makes every type of shapewear for under your clothes, from boy briefs to bodysuits and sports bras to arm tights, all making people feel and look dynamite.

VERY FIRST JOB: A kiddie camp. I walked the beach in my town of Clearwater, Florida, and offered parents a break from their kids. The price: $8 an hour.

AS A KID, WHAT I WANTED TO BE WHEN I GREW UP: I wanted to be a lawyer, like my dad. He would get me out of school to watch his closing arguments in court.

MY BEDTIME: Eight-thirty—but I fall asleep by ten. Sometimes we have a masseuse come. My husband is an avid runner, and he got us hooked on getting leg and foot massages.

ON MY BUCKET LIST: Travel the world and live like a local in a different place each month. For the twelfth month, spin the globe and go wherever my finger lands!

A GUILTY PLEASURE: Cheez-Its. (I’m a nervous flyer and always eat them in-flight to calm down!)

FAVORITE CHILDHOOD BOOK: The Wayne Dyer How to Be a No-Limit Person cassette series. I had all ten cassettes and listened over and over until I had them all memorized. Literally.

ADVICE I’D GIVE TO MY THIRTEEN-YEAR-OLD SELF: Don’t invest a lot of energy or time on being upset about a boy who doesn’t like you. If I could go back and take the time I invested in stressing about whether a guy did or didn’t dig me, and do something more creative, more positive, that’d be something.

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Sara Blakely has always had little patience for constricting, hot pantyhose that stick to her skin. Worse still are those same hose under dress pants. But when she was just starting out in business, sometimes she had to sport the dreaded combo. It was the only way she could wear her fave off-white dress pants, which she’d spent $99 on—a major splurge! Worn alone, the pants revealed terrible panty lines—definitely not professional-looking.

That all changed when she turned twenty-seven. She was out selling fax machines door-to-door to Atlanta offices. Fax salesgirl was no dream job, but she had struck out with law school (bombed the LSAT) and a roving character job at Disneyland (she didn’t get cast as Goofy; they offered chipmunk). Lucky for Sara, her cool dad always promoted failure. "Fail! Fail!