A Higher Standard

In an everyday sense, on a more pragmatic level, has it changed the way that you run the company as a leader? Are you more conservative with the runway, how you use funds, for example? Because during the dotcom boom, companies spent so lavishly on so many things, right, parties left and right.

Well, we never did that! We ran a commercial, but so what? Pets.com was incredibly well run. It really was a timing issue. We did not burn two billion dollars of cash or throw wild parties or in the case that we were having a spa in the office full of ice if I needed my muscles to cool off after my workout in my private gym, nor did I buy a corporate jet or buy a car and a driver. So, you know, and honestly, I am not that person anyway. I would never spend corporate money that way and I would never actually do that when you have employees. We have a lot of hourly employees. Can you imagine me pulling up with my big driver and going in and seeing what's going on instead of pulling up in my really crappy electric Fiat, which is what I drive when it's working? That really is more me. I just can't imagine it and I can't imagine the board allowing that to happen, either. I had a good board with pets. But you're right. Bad things happen. Outside of Theranos, I don't know of one female VC or female entrepreneur that would ever do those bad boy things because women are held to different standards. If anything, what I did do is point out to my board how they were treated like a very similar to a study that had come out at Harvard and the Harvard Business Review about how female entrepreneurs were held to getting to profitability quickly, not growth, but men were held to growth. So then if you want to know one thing I did, I probably was more emboldened with my board, pointed out where I felt I was being treated differently, and put a focus on what we needed to do to grow the business.