Aileen Lee

Top creative and innovative talent wants to live in a vibrant, transit-friendly, global city that offers access to not only great jobs but also great food, entertainment and culture.

When I go visit my mom in the retirement community where my parents live, she has a bunch of friends, and she will say, 'These neighbors I play bridge with have a son with an idea,' and it goes from there.

Relative to all the start-ups out there, getting a valuation of $1 billion is rarely accomplished.

I did not grow up thinking that I wanted to be an engineer. I had read some articles about girls becoming increasingly scientifically illiterate and that girls lacked confidence in their capabilities when it came to quantitative skills. And I just thought that was kind of wrong.

Women are the routers and amplifiers of the social web. And they are the rocket fuel of ecommerce.

Comscore, Nielsen, MediaMetrix and Quantcast studies all show women are the driving force of the most important net trend of the decade, the social web.

We're in this incredible age where new brands are making people's lives easier, more convenient, more personalized.

You have to get under the hood and spend some quality time with someone to understand what they're really good at.

From a pretty early age, I developed an interest in travel. I told my parents I wanted to live abroad, and they said, 'Well, you have to have money to do those things.'

Especially when it comes to social and shopping, women rule the Internet.

If you're a digital startup, building and highlighting your social proof is the best way for new users to learn about you.

Consider the social proof of a line of people standing behind a velvet rope, waiting to get into a club. The line makes most people walking by want to find out what's worth the wait. The digital equivalent of the velvet rope helped build viral growth for initially invite-only launches like Gmail, Gilt Groupe, Spotify, and Turntable.fm.