As an individual, you know what you are good at and what you're not good at, so over time as you are hiring, you should be hiring for the skill requirements as the rule, but you should also be thinking, "What am I less good at?" and knowing you need to hire those people to create a stronger team. Different personalities are good at different things, but as a leader and and entrepreneur, it often has to start with you and building around your shortcomings.

When I came right out of college I remember someone pulling me aside and telling me how to exactly fit in. How to wear my hair, what clothes I should wear, even how I should talk and wave or not wave or hold my hands. I wish I never had that conversation. It held me back for like two years and it took me a while to learn this myself, but the idea that you are your own brand, and you are your own person.

One of the most important things you can do is build an ecosystem of people around you who want to see you do well. That might be making appropriate introductions or providing mentorship or introducing others to key hires over time. It's not just what you can learn at your job before you set out on your own, but also thinking about how you're cultivating that ecosystem and keeping in touch with that group around you.

A lot of people want to be an entrepreneur, so it's important to know that there's a lot of ways to be an entrepreneur. One of the ways is to go about and start your own business. There are also ways that you can gain experience in the context of a larger business, like raising your hand to helm a new office. As you are gaining your skills to run your own business successfully, the first way is to think about how you can do so based on where you already are.

As an individual, you know what you are good at and what you're not good at, so over time as you are hiring, you should be hiring for the skill requirements as the rule, but you should also be thinking, "What am I less good at?" and knowing you need to hire those people to create a stronger team. Different personalities are good at different things, but as a leader and and entrepreneur, it often has to start with you and building around your shortcomings.

I have had lots of men on my team and I have had lots of women on my team, and men are asking constantly. That's one thing to just know as woman: by general rule, men are more generally asking than women.

Eventually that's where you want to be really scrappy as an entrepreneur when you're first getting your business up and running: hiring the right people, partnering the right way, getting feedback on what you're doing.