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5 Women Entrepreneurs Share Their Secrets To Success | Refinery29 - YouTube
Channel: Refinery29
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Inspiration can come from any direction.
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But how do you take that new concept
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and make it a reality?
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In advance of the Inc. Womenâs Summit,
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Iâm meeting up with some of my favorite entrepreneurs
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to talk about what empowers them on a daily basis.
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You have all created businesses
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from out-of-the-box thinking.
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What made you veer left
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when everybody else was going right?
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Bobbi.
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When I moved to New York, it was the â80s.
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And everyone was doing the over made up contour look.
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I know itâs back.
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I still donât like contour.
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So I would make up the models to make them
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look like they werenât wearing makeup.
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And that was my calling card.
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But there was no makeup
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available that allowed you to do that.
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I met a chemist one day at a shoot
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and I said I canât find a lipstick that didnât smell,
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wasnât greasy, and I wanted to match lips.
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Then I realized, âWow.
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This is something.â
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For me,
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entrepreneurship, it wasnât something that I aspired to.
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I always wanted to be an inventor.
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If I can be the perfect balance between
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BeyoncĂ© and Bill Nye the Science Guy every single dayâŠ
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Now weâre installing our technologies around
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different countries in emerging markets.
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Turning everything from floors and roads to
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baby strollers into energy-generating solutions.
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You guys both touched on this idea of
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identifying problems that existed in your life and looking
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at ways that you could shape an industry,
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rather than looking at the industry itself.
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I started a fashion technology company
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with my co-founder.
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We had no fashion or technology experience.
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We knew what it meant to buy a dress for $1,000,
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wear it once, and then be photographed on
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social media.
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And feel like you could never wear it again.
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So we were like, âWell, that doesnât make sense.â
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Renting dresses made sense.
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If you thought too far down the road,
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it could be easy to find all the why notâs versus
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the how can you make this happen.
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I want to hear Angelaâs story talking about
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how you are helping young entrepreneurs.
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So I started NewME,
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which is an accelerator for minorities in 2011.
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We focus only on the technology industry,
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which at the time, it was a young, technical,
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white guysâ club.
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I did not really start NewME as a business.
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It was a problem that I wanted to solve.
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And I thought it was going to be like a one-time project.
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What do you see is standing in between
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these women and the dollars that you know they need
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to succeed?
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When I work with men,
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they are not scared to ask for money
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even if what theyâre working
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on is mediocre.
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But women can have something phenomenal
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but itâs like we hold ourselves back.
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So a lot of the work that I do in particular
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with women is confidence building,
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is getting them comfortable with asking for the money.
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Priya, I want to talk about the impact you
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are having on actual people:
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helping them create wealth in the way that they've
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never even thought of before.
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Historically, financial planning has been
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reserved for the wealthy.
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And when I was working on Wall Street,
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my clients were old and rich.
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And all of my friends at the same time were
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wondering where do we go for the answers.
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Thereâs this completely underserved kind of ignored
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demographic that we call Henrys,
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high earners not rich yet.
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I so often hear young women say,
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âI just want to be paid what Iâm worth.â
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I donât even know what that means.
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And I very rarely hear young women say,
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âI want to make a lot of money.â
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Right? Itâs as if we all sort of internalize
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this idea that the budgetâs not there.
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Research show that men are four times more likely
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than women to ask.
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So at Stash Wealth, salary negotiations come up.
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Set it as a goal though and it has
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to be a very concrete goal.
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Like I want to buy a $250,000 house
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in three years so I want to get a raise
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and letâs back into what you need to do today
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to be on track.
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The flipside that millennials have to be very careful of is
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entitlement.
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For example, one kid said,
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âI feel like I really need to make x.â
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Iâm like, âOh, thatâs interesting.
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For this job, if you do all of this research,
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this is the highest you could get paid.â
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And heâs like,
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âYeah, I didnât really think about what the job was.
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I just kind of thought New York.â
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What are you saying to me?
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I donât think women talk about comp
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and salaries in the same way men do.
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Women I advise, some of the most valuable
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help I give them is actually talking in a
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real way about what you should be making.
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But getting the data out thereâ
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thatâs hard especially amongst women because theyâre
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fewer women who are in leadership roles.
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I find younger women are much more transparent
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with their salary.
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For them itâs not TMI, itâs cocktail talk.
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And I think that that lifting the veil
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âis going to get us closer to equality.
âI think thatâs really important.
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In âThe Big Life,â I have an entire chapter
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devoted to the side hustle secret to success.
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How do you know when itâs time to make your
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side hustle your main hustle?
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I fully believe in the side hustle and
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in fact, when I worked in finance,
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because I was not passionate about finance,
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I would spend whatever time I had doing college essay
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editing, which I kind of made all the business around.
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But ultimately went to business school and
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co-founded Rent the Runway in business school.
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So I was kind of side hustling it.
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I was taking classes but Iâm
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a pretty risk averse entrepreneur so the whole way,
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I had a timeline of milestones we had to meet.
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And I think it was helpful for me and my co-founder,
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kept us honest.
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Ultimately one of those milestones was raising money.
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And for me, raising money was another way
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of checking myself on.
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Was this a good concept that VCâs
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would put their name behind?
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So I very much believe that parallel processing,
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kind of always having a little bit of a safety net,
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and just being honest with yourself
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if somethingâs not working.
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And forcing that brutal honesty, itâs hard.
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You need to be able to sell something
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or itâs not a business.
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Donât quit your job.
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Donât do anything until you figure that out.
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And then even after you figure that out,
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you got to do a deeper dive into the customer
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and try to find more customers like the ones
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who gave you a dollar.
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When Iâm talking to young women,
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they will ask me,
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âHow do you get ahead in a male-dominated industry
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if youâre a woman?â
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The advice I always give
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is to forget youâre a woman, right?
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You are a person with a good idea.
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Just say it.
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That was exactly the advice that I gave myself
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was just to remember that youâre there like
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any other employee
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and to speak up when you have a great idea.
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I did get called in once.
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My boss told me that my attitude with
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my colleagues was abrasive.
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And I wasnât sure if it was because
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I was a female.
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Iâve been in rooms with investors who are
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supposed to be investing in women and people
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of color and have the investor say,
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âSo whoâs the tech lead on this?â
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Iâm like, âItâs me.â
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âWell, who came up with this?â
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Iâm like, âAsk me a question first
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and see if I donât have the answer.â
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And then all of a sudden theyâre just like,
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âSo did your father help youâŠâ
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âDid my father, what?â
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I actually disagree that you should forget
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that youâre a woman.
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Every single day I get up being like,
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âJessica, you are a black woman.
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Youâre going to have to do three times as much
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to get half as far.â
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Is anyone besides me been called difficult?
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Oh yeah.
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I love it though.
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Me too. Itâs a compliment.
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When I was younger, I didnât like it.
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Maybe I should not say stuff back as much.
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But the older I got, Iâm like
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I kind of like that about me.
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We all know that we canât just be like
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one of the boys thatâbut the good news is that
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we have our special perspective.
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You embrace the difference, right?
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I donât think a man could have started Rent the Runway.
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Thereâs this old idea
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that women are in competition with each other.
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That thereâs backstabbing.
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That thereâs only room at the table for one woman.
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But Iâve been so inspired by how
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millennial women have replaced competition
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with collaboration.
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Being someone who has been in the industry
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for a long time, when I was first starting
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my company especially with other makeup artists,
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you would never give any advice.
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Never would they ever tell you
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âbecause everyone was aâright.
âI was about to say.
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Everyone was in competition.
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And now as Iâm reinventing myself and
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need some different things, theyâre here.
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Call this person. Do this.
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This is where you get this.
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Itâs an amazing change.
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It is.
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This year I turned 60 and I started a new lifestyle brand.
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Thereâs more and more opportunity.
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And thereâs a million things youâre going
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to end up doing.
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On your own terms.
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On your own terms.
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Be the entrepreneur of your life.
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