“If there is a WILL then there is a WAY!”
– Nicole Quinn
Nicole Quinn is an investor at Lightspeed Venture Partners (http://lsvp.com), focused on early-stage consumer technology companies, having invested in companies such as Girlboss, Goop, Zola; the largest online wedding registry, Rothy’s; the most comfortable stylish shoes made of plastic recycled bottles and Dote; the virtual mall. She spent 8 years at Morgan Stanley covering the European and US e-commerce, retail and consumer companies. Nicole is passionate about the trends in human behavior, especially consumer technology, and also helping entrepreneurs who have the ability to improve our every day lives. She holds a degree in math and economics from the University of York, England and an MBA from Stanford Business School.
In short, Nicole has a lot of expertise in entrepreneurship, and female entrepreneurship in particular. She encourages more females to believe in themselves and never give up their ideas. Here are her top 3 pieces of advice on how to become a successful female entrepreneur:
- 1. Never Settle Down – When Nicole meets new entrepreneurs one of the key things she evaluates is their motivation level, she expresses; “they have to believe anything is possible, and having the solutions to make these things done no matter how challenging it is.” She is looking for people who do not take “no” for an answer and who doesn’t settle down. As she explains; “if there is a WILL then there is a WAY!”, so it’s important to be stubborn. These are the type of entrepreneurs that will go far. A good example of this type of persons is one of her biggest role models: Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon. Nicole refers to him as someone who just gets things done, everything he touches turns into gold only because he is trying so hard. If it doesn’t work, he tries again and again and again. Bezos doesn’t stop until he gets it done! Nicole wants more female entrepreneurs to do exactly that, to not give up because they hit the wall. No matter how difficult and challenging it is, you got to go through that wall. You owe it to yourself; to figure out where your idea can take you!
- 2. Diversity When Building Your Team – Men and women working together in a startup have a higher success rate than a group of men starting a business together. Nicole thinks that diversity is the key to success, in the perspective of the difference in age, gender, background, and religion. It’s important because it gives you different angles on your business idea, from brainstorming to problem-solving. So have that in mind when you are building up your team for your startup!
- 3. Turn off Netflix – Most people who get home from their daily job eat dinner and then turn on the TV and they watch Netflix through the end of the evening. If you are one of them, then you need to change that behavior. Instead, start going to networking events, read more about your specific industry and learn more about things that will take you further with your entrepreneurship journey. You can’t live like the other 99% of the population, you need to take action to get somewhere. The more you are educated, the more you know and the more you are going to know what step you need to take and in what direction.
To learn more about female entrepreneurship, listen to her discussion with Brian Mac Mahon in the third episode of Expert Dojo’s startup podcast “The Art of Startup War”;
For more startup podcast episodes, please visit http://www.expertdojo.com/investor-podcast/