Who you are defines how you build. This is the entrepreneurial thought leader series.

Brought you by Stanford E-Corner. On this episode, we're joined by Sylvia Acevedo.

Sylvia is an entrepreneur, investor, business leader, and a literal rocket scientist.

She is the author of the book Path to the Stars, My Journey from Girl Scout to Rocket Scientist,

and she most recently served as the CEO of Girl Scouts of the USA. Here's host and Stanford professor,

Tina Selegg. So I want to start out by talking about your remarkable career path.

You were one of the first Latina students at Stanford to earn a graduate degree in engineering

and then went on to careers at NASA and Apple and Dell and Autodesk and then the White House.

And of course, you also started a couple of companies yourself.

To what do you attribute your drive and success? Well, you know, thanks. And it's really a pleasure

to be here. You know, I'm really grateful. I had amazing teachers. I was a product of Head Start.

I was in one of the first pilot programs for Head Start. So I'm so

grateful for that. So early childhood literacy, getting me off on the right step. Libraries,

love those public libraries. Before the days of search engines, you know, public libraries were

it. And I was so curious about the world. And I read as many of the books as I could. It was in a small

library. So I think I read every book in the children's section. And then I'm really grateful for

my teachers. I had teachers who were really supportive of me and believed in me. And then also

that Girl Scout experience that really taught me how to

create opportunity and also one of the greatest sales techniques that I learned from the iconic

cooking program as well. Oh, that's so great. What did you learn about sales from selling cookies?

Oh, you know, so first is, you know, when I grew up, my family, we really lived paycheck to paycheck, and sometimes

we didn't even have money, and we had to go live with family members. So it was kind of tough,

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