I always tell people, don't worry about the haters, you are not a jackass whisperer. You have to be enough. You have to be your own validation.

As a woman leader, I try to take every opportunity I can to do what my mentors did for me - engaging with young women and take them seriously.

In my safe corporate job, I might have made one decision of real significance a year. As an entrepreneur, it feels like I'm making a decision every minute - I have lots of balls in the air, and so yes, sometimes I drop one or two. And for the most part, the balls are made of rubber and they bounce. So instead of carrying one ball very carefully, being worried that I might not be holding it at exactly the right angle, I am juggling hundreds, and I have to remind myself to appreciate all the balls I keep up in the air for every one that gets dropped.

Whether I'm traveling or at home in Seattle, my days rarely play out as it looks on my Outlook calendar - there's almost always something unexpected that comes up. But when I'm in town, my day usually starts at about 6 a.m., which is brutal for me because I'm really a night owl at heart.

The world is more flexible than you might think.

When I think about work-life balance, I don't imagine it as a perfect day where I got to spend the exact right amount of time having an impact at work and snuggling with my kids at home. I never achieve that. But over the course of a month, or a quarter, or a year, I try to make time for the people and experiences I value.

My family immigrated from Korea when I was four years old, and when I started school, I didn't speak English. I remember that other kids would blame everything bad that happened in kindergarten on me - I spent a lot of time "in the corner" because I literally didn't have the words to explain that it wasn't me!