Sallie Krawcheck

One thing I never thought about in my big-company job? Cash flow. When your business has billions of dollars in revenue, you can make a lot of mistakes and still have a viable business. But in a startup, make a few hiring mistakes, and you can find yourself in real jeopardy fast.

If you aren't committed to diversity of thought, you have no business launching a startup.

If you don't share information among your startup's team, then it'll be just about a coincidence if product, marketing, and engineering are ever aligned. Those odds are too low to succeed.

A dysfunctional team means a dysfunctional - and likely doomed - company.

Networking has been cited as the number one unwritten rule of success in business. Who you know really impacts what you know.

If you are a senior woman in business, you intuitively know two things: If a white man promotes a woman or a person of color, he gets credit for it. If a woman says great things about a woman, you get dinged for it. Research is clear on this.

We just haven't had enough women in senior roles on Wall Street overall - fewer women in the investment banking function overall as well.

In terms of challenges, I think finding the right people to maximize the chances the business will succeed is the hardest thing. You can crunch the numbers any way you want, but at the end of the day, you really need good employees and investors - and they aren't always easy to find.

You may find it more relaxing to work with people just like you, but entrepreneurship is about finding new approaches to problems, and discomfort can be an important part of that process.

My advice for folks on networking is give, give, give. You will later receive. But you are really planting these seeds. Some of them will die, and they won't become anything. Many of them will take many, many years before they pay off for you if at all.

As a society, we have this perception that women are emotional. The research, however, tells us that, on trading floors, that poor risk rises and falls with testosterone levels, and these trading floors are 85 percent, 90 percent male, and these gentlemen tend, under periods of stress, to show off for each other. That's dangerous.

Somehow, there is this feeling that women require remedial financial education, and so everything must be dumbed down. The reality is that we all need a lot more education, but guys just go ahead and invest anyway.