Who you are defines how you build. This is Thought Leaders Revisited, a special summer

2020 edition of our Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders series. During this summer of uncertainty,

we're inviting some of the most influential past ETL speakers to join us for a series of new conversations

about innovation, leadership, and especially finding opportunities in the midst of a crisis.

On this episode, we're joined by Debbie Sterling. Debbie is the founder and CEO of Goldie Blacks,

a children's toy and multimedia company that's working to close

the gender gap in engineering through storytelling and female characters. Welcome, Debbie.

Thank you so much for having me, Tina. It's so great to virtually be back on campus. Well, it is

such a pleasure for me.

I loved, loved, loved your talk, and I essentially assign it to lots of students that I work

with.

It was so powerful that it actually moved me to tears three times during the talk.

And this is very unusual.

The emotion came from the way that you tapped into your entrepreneurial spirit to bring your really big ideas to life.

And most importantly, how you overcame obstacles along the way, turning problems into really big opportunities.

Now, these are all things that we teach in our classes.

And so it just was so meaningful to me.

So I'd like to start out, Debbie, by playing a short clip about what you thought was going to happen when you started your venture and compared to what really happened.

So let's play the first clip to get sort of a snapshot of how you were feeling when you began.

I came up with this plan, right?

This is my grand master plan where I've got this original prototype

that I know is just this breakthrough idea,

...