Timing, so some say, is everything. In your case, this began when as a child you fled Iran with your family on the eve of revolution. Then, while in business school, you wrote a best-selling guide for a generation newly hungry for careers in finance. With two hundred thousand dollars of seed money you then co-founded Eve.com, raised another twenty-six million, did ten million in sales in the first year, and sold the company a year later for more than a hundred million, just as the needle approached the dot-com bubble. But your reputation as a pioneer of consumer Internet models rests not just on a sense of timing. There is also your uncanny ability to see ways, invisible to others, of harnessing the broadly dispersed power of online communities. No one believed that cosmetics could be sold that way before Eve.com. People doubted the future of video on demand until you helped start Movielink. And before you launched Minted.com, who would have thought it possible to use the Internet not only to sell printed stationery but also to crowd source the development of independent designers around the world in providing products that are individualized by consumers. Yes, it most certainly takes more than mere timing to be named to Forbes’ list of the world’s most powerful female entrepreneurs.
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