I'm trying to have an exceptional career.

I'm trying to create exceptional things, invent new things.

Like, of course it's going to be exceptionally hard.

And so I expect that I'm going to have to get like punched in the face and in the gut and push down and that that is my job.

Of course, and that I would have to be able to get up

and rebuild from that.

It's been more than eight years since Gatia Beauchamp co-founded Birchbox.

In that time, the subscription company has grown to millions of loyal customers and disrupted

the multi-billion dollar beauty industry.

When Gatia and I spoke, she was fresh off maternity leave for her fourth child.

By the way, that experience includes running a multi-million dollar company from a hospital bed for 100 days.

As impressed as I was by that, I was even more impressed by her candor about how hard it can be to build an exceptional career.

Katya, thank you so much for being here.

Thanks for having me.

Tell me about the aha moment behind Birchbox.

Sure.

My co-founder and I initially were just planning on writing a business plan. And we were in business school, surrounded by people writing business

plans, and starting to be kind of surrounded by entrepreneurs coming to campus. And what happened was

basically we were listening to basically consumers talking about the epiphany they had to

start a business and it was finally a lot of women talking about building businesses for women

and initially we just said what would we want as a consumer what is this thing that we can

understand where we have an insight and honestly beauty just kind of like hit us because we were business school students,

...