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Rent The Runway CEO Shares Best Advice She's Received: 'Just Do It'

Jennifer Hyman, co-founder and CEO of Rent the Runway, says her company’s mission is “delivering a Cinderella moment.”

Forget magic wands and pumpkins — these days, it takes tech to do it.

“Technology is the lifeblood of our company,” said Hyman. “Since we don’t have retail locations, the only way we’re delivering this customer experience is online. Technology facilitates that entire experience.”

Dubbed the “Netflix for couture,” the online mail-order service Rent the Runway rents designer dresses and accessories for a fraction of their original price. Women order the outfits online, paying between $40 and $350 to rent them for up to 8 days at a time.

Hyman launched the company in 2009 with Jennifer Fleiss, a classmate from Harvard Business School, which Hyman attended after working at Starwood Hotels, the Wedding Channel and IMG. Hyman credits these varied career experiences with giving her the insight into sales, fashion, e-commerce, and entrepreneurship necessary to launch Rent the Runway.

“I think we’re often trained and prepped in our culture to always try to get to the top and advance to the top, but I realized that's not it," said Hyman. "I just have to be surrounded by people all day long, be in a social environment, and doing innovative, creative things.”

In an exclusive interview for The Huffington Post's Women in Tech series, Hyman shared what she’s learned as an entrepreneur, how she approaches her career, her favorite apps and more.

What attracted you to a career in tech?

I never was attracted to a career in tech, just as I wasn’t attracted to a career in fashion, or a career in marketing. I don’t think of careers from a functional perspective, or from a subject matter perspective. I think of careers as, how do you like spending the time in your day? What makes you happiest? What are you most passionate about?

I think that I’m doing something with my co-founder that is extremely innovative, and in order to be innovative, you have to have a grounding and a laser focus on technology.

What’s been the most important thing you’ve learned from launching Rent the Runway?

The technology has been the biggest learning curve. I didn’t have a technology background, nor did my co-founder.

What advice do you have for people in similar situations who have an idea for a web company, but don’t have a tech background? How can they bring themselves up-to-speed in the way they need to?

Develop a network of mentors, ask a huge number of questions, start building a team at any level and have them teach you -- sit with them. Jenny [Fleiss] and I have taken to sitting with our engineers to understand how they spend their day and how they’re motivated.

What’s the best advice you’ve received personally?

Just do it. There’s no benefit to saying, “I’m just doing this because it will get me to this new place,” or “I’m just going to go into this analyst program because it will prep me for X.” If you’re passionate about something, go for it, because people are great at what they love and when they’re the happiest.

We’ve been brought up into a culture which is very much about preparedness: you go to the right middle school to get into the right high school to get into the right college, to get the right job after college. At a certain point, you need to turn around and say to yourself, do I love how I spend my day every single day? Is this the most effective use of my heart and my mind?

The downside to starting a company is having it fail, but in the process of potential failure, there’s the fun of doing what you love every single day, which to me means there’s absolutely no downside. I think if more people actually pursued what they loved, we’d have a lot more innovation and creativity.

SOUND BYTES: Jennifer Hyman on... 

Her indispensable gadget: Her iPhone 4 

Her favorite app: Instagram, Path and Hotel Tonight 

Her favorite account to follow on Twitter: Steve Kolb, executive director of Council of Fashion Designers of America (@SteveKolb) 

Her "required reading" recommendation (which is actually "required listening"): Carole King, "Beautiful" ("I derive all my inspiration from music," said Hyman. "I also don't have a long attention span, so a book for me at this point is just way too much of an effort.")

Where do you get your news?

I read NYTimes.com every day and I watch Anderson Cooper every night -- that’s how I relax and go to sleep. I like news with an opinion, so I also read a huge amount of pop culture every day. I’m obsessed with New York magazine.

I think that working in such an open office, the news is just funneled to me. If something happens, someone in the office will scream it out loud. It’s part of the culture at Rent the Runway: we’re never going to have walls and we’re never going to have offices because information is diffused so quickly and so effectively in this type of environment.

Why there aren’t more women in tech?

First of all, technology is an intimidating industry -- and it’s especially intimidating to come into as a woman because it is so heavily oriented toward men. There’s that initial hurdle of being the only woman in the room to get over, which is something that will resonate whether you go into venture capital, or whether you go into technology, or whether you go and play football.

The second factor is that technology is presented to the general population [as] the two guys in a garage, sitting in front of a computer all day long with their glasses on, coding. That’s one element of technology, but it certainly doesn’t encompass the gamut of all of the roles within a technology organization.

I think we need to be cognizant of broadening the brand of what technology actually means, and highlighting for women that there are many different areas where you can shine in a technology organization.

What’s the next big idea in tech?

I’d say Rent the Runway is an example of what I think the next big idea in tech is: bringing organic social behaviors online. I think “Social 1.0” on the web was about massive communities and letting you share. The next phase of “Social 2.0” is about differentiating the people you trust from those you don’t trust as much and having people you trust help you comb through the massive selection we have on the web.

We don’t have a search problem anymore. What we have now is a browsing problem. We think that this is going to be fixed through organic social communities.

What development in tech do you think is most concerning?

I definitely think the decrease in email open rates from companies, especially in e-commerce, is something to pay attention to. There are more and more members-only, flash-sale, email-once-a-day businesses, and not just in retail anymore. At a certain point, there’s fatigue in your inbox of how are you going to spend your share of mind online.

Should You Buy An iPhone Now, Or Wait For The Next One?

The most common thing I get asked whenever I tell anyone I'm a tech writer is some version of the question: "Should I get a new iPhone now, or should I wait until the next one comes out?" It is as though my business card should read not "Technology Writer," and instead "iPhone Psychic"

Not that I am not happy to prognosticate! And in that spirit, here's a look at the questions on everyone's mind: Should I buy an iPhone now? And if not now, when?

First, let me say that I am fascinated by the peculiar kind of panic that I encounter in people I meet who are deciding on a purchase date for their next Apple phone. I call it the iSenberg Uncertainty Principle: Potential iPhone buyers exist in a constant state of anxiety, perpetually worrying that purchasing an iPhone on any given day will mean that they will miss out on the inevitably cooler version with the mind-blowing new features soon down the road. The Cupertino Sword of Damocles constantly dangles over their heads, threatening to pierce them with unhipness and iShame.

Here is one solid piece of advice I can offer to help you avoid the Sword: Do not buy any new iPhone until September. Apple has an annual media conference each September, and every blog with the word 'Mac' in the title is reporting that Steve Jobs is going to do his black turtleneck thing and introduce some kind of new iPhone there. The September Media conference is generally used to present the new iPods, but as All Things Digital reports, Apple plans to "commandeer" the conference for its official iPhone announcement.

Apple is long overdue to release its new iPhone anyway, if history is any indication. Look at this handy little timeline:

June 2007: original iPhone released

June 2008: iPhone 3G released

June 2009: iPhone 3Gs released

June 2010: iPhone 4 released

June 2011: Nothing!

In other words, the 5th generation iPhone is already a month late, so it makes sense that the rumors are swirling. Apple's tardiness can be explained by the fact they've actually already released two iPhones in 2011 -- the Verizon iPhone in February and the unlocked iPhone 4 in June. Their schedule is all screwy, like a traveler trying to get over jet lag. But all signs point to them getting right with a September Apple iPhone release.

So what jaw-dropping new feature will this iPhone boast? We're hearing that the "iPhone 4S," as it is rumored to be called, won't be the dramatic re-imagining that many of us have come to expect with each new iPhone release. Tech blogThis Is My Next thinks that it will be thinner and lighter, and that it will run on a new chip; the New York Times thinks that it will be the same dimensions as the iPhone 4 but that it will be cheaper. Bloomberg agrees with This Is My Next on the chip and addsthat the rear-facing camera will upgrade to 8 megapixels from 5 megapixels.

Now, even if you're just a normal, non-geek iPhone user, who doesn't care if the rear-facing camera doubles its megapixel count, or if Apple has changed the manufacturer of its data processors, or whatever, you still need to at least wait for the alleged iPhone announcement, and here's why: if history is any indicator, the introduction of a newer iPhone model is accompanied by a drop in price of older iPhone models. When the iPhone 3GS was announced, the price of the iPhone 3G dropped by $100; when the iPhone 4 was announced, the price of an iPhone 3GS also dropped by $100. Even if you know that you're not going to drop $400 on whatever iPhone Apple begins peddling in September, there is no sense in paying more money for an iPhone 4 or 3Gs now when the base price of both seem like locks to drop in two months.

But before we start fantasizing, how can we be so certain that Jobs is even going to announce an iPhone in September if Apple hasn't so much as indicated such a thing? How do we know that all of these rumors weren't just started by lonely nerds like me and my co-workers emailing each other from our mother's basements, inciting iPhone rumors all on our own?

Well, first of all, I don't live with my mother; and second of all, the new iPhone rumors have sprung forth from two reliable sources held in high journalistic regard.

The first is esteemed, award-winning tech journalist John Paczkowski of All Things Digital, who blazed iPhone prognostication trails by predicting back in April that an updated iPhone 4 would be unveiled at the September Apple music Conference and has steadfastly maintained the claim is true through June and into July. In fact, he confirmed as recently as July 5 that a shiny new iPhone looked to be in the early stages of supply chain production, and that people close to the company still believe that the new iPhone would be ready for the Jobs treatment in September.

So there is Reliable Source One.

Reliable Source Number Two is the Wall Street Journal, not exactly a one-laptop operation. The paper gives "the end of September" as a target launch date, which squares up with both Paczkowski's prediction of a September announcement and release. This doesn't even mention This Is My Next's separate prediction of a September release, nor 9to5Mac reporting that there are going to be two new iPhones in September, one low-end and high-end. But now we're falling down the rabbit hole and into the basement again, so let's focus:

There is likely to be a new iPhone in September. It will likely affect the price of all the other iPhones. The iPhones available now -- the iPhone 4 and the iPhone 3Gs -- will probably be cheaper in two months. Unless you drop your current iPhone in a pool, a bathtub or a volcano, do not buy an iPhone until Steve Jobs opens his beautiful brilliant mouth at the Apple conference in early September. When the post-turtleneckian dust settles, we'll have a clearer picture of whether or not this rumored new iPhone is worth the money. And then we can talk about--well, whether or not you should buy an iPhone now, or wait until the next one comes out.

UK Authorities Brace For 'Cyber Jihad' By Al Qaeda After Bin Laden Death

British authorities are bracing for an increase in cyberterrorism as al Qaeda calls for "cyber jihad" following the death of Osama bin Laden, according toa report released Tuesday.

"There will be more cyber terrorism," said the report, released by the British Home Office to outline the country's counter-terrorism strategy. "We must increase our understanding of how terrorists use the Internet."

Since the death of Osama bin Laden, al Qaeda has "explicitly called not only for acts of lone or individual terrorism but also for 'cyber jihad,'" according to the report. Government officials are pushing for heightened security measures in response, as London prepares to host the 2012 Olympic Games.

While authorities maintain that the overall threat of cyberattack is low and say they have not seen evidence of "systematic cyber terrorism," they predict more Internet-based terrorist threats "as the tools and techniques needed for cyber attack become more widely available and the success of criminal cyber operations becomes more widely known," according to the report.

"Groups will continue to benefit from off-the-shelf technology in planning and conducting attacks, making operations more secure and potentially more lethal," the report said.

As an example of the type of threat authorities are trying to prevent, the report cited a a virus that spread to several companies around the world including Proctor & Gamble, AIG, Google and NASA. The virus sent users spam emails with the subject line "Here you have" and an attachment containing malware.

A group of hackers called "Brigades of Tariq ibn Ziyad" claimed responsibility for that attack, which the report said was "relatively unsophisticated but a likely indicator of a future trend."

Since material for a cyberattack can be hosted on foreign servers, British authorities must work together with authorities in other countries, particularly the United States, which "is by far the biggest provider of Internet hosting services in the world," according to the report.

But authorities in both countries can't prevent cyberterrorism on their own, the report noted.

"Action against terrorist use of the Internet will only be effective if the public understand the nature of the threat online and act to protect themselves," the report said. "Our role will be to encourage and facilitate public involvement in making the Internet a more hostile environment for terrorists."

OUT: Apple Losing Key Staffer

Richard Lutton Junior, Apple Chief Patent Lawyer, Reportedly To Leave The Company

By Dan Levine and Poornima Gupta

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Apple Inc's chief patent counsel will soon leave the company, at a time when the iPhone maker is fighting numerous legal battles around the world, according to a source familiar with the situation.

Apple is engaged in an expanding web of litigation concerning smartphone patents, mostly with phonemakers using Google's rival Android software.

It was unclear why Richard "Chip" Lutton Junior, who manages the iPhone maker's patent portfolio, is leaving the company.

However, BJ Watrous, a former deputy general counsel with Hewlett Packard, is now listed as Apple's chief IP counsel on Watrous's LinkedIn web page.

Legal battles have become common in the cellphone industry since Google entered the market with its free Android operating system, grabbing a big chunk of the lucrative and fast-growing smartphone market.

Android has become the world's No. 1 mobile software platform this year.

Many ongoing legal fights include software patents, and can be seen as indirect attacks against Google's Android, but Apple is attacking Samsung Electronics also for copying its design.

BATTLES

Last month, Apple joined with Microsoft Corp, Blackberry maker Research In Motion Ltd and three other tech companies to outbid Google in a $4.5 billion deal to acquire a huge portfolio of some 6,000 technology patents from failed telecoms group Nortel Networks.

Last week, Apple filed a second patent complaint against fast-growing rival HTC, a Taiwanese smartphone maker, with a U.S. trade panel.

"I believe Apple's leadership wants to see results now, especially in connection with Google's Android system," said Germany-based intellectual property analyst and blogger Florian Mueller.

"The second complaint against HTC shows that Apple feels it did not handle its patent litigation perfectly in the past."

Last month, Apple lost a major legal battle against Nokia, agreeing to pay royalties and an undisclosed lump sum to the struggling Finnish cellphone maker.

But Apple and Samsung Electronics are also battling over patents in courts around the world, despite the fact Samsung is one of Apple's key suppliers.

Lutton did not respond to requests for comment, and an Apple representative declined to comment.

Lutton's voicemail was still set up at Apple on Monday, but he will be leaving Apple soon, perhaps in the next month, said the source familiar with the situation.

Watrous was deputy general counsel at Hewlett-Packard in charge of IP licensing. An HP spokesman declined to comment.

Apple's intellectual property team has been on a hiring spree lately, snapping up litigation specialist Noreen Krall from Sun Microsystems.

(Writing by Tarmo Virki in Helsinki, Editing by Edwin Chan, Greg Mahlich and David Hulmes)

California Sexting Law, SB919, Would Allow Schools To Expel Students

A controversial bill that makes student sexting an expellable offense was approved last week by the California Assembly Education Committee.

SB919, a proposed amendment to the California Education Code, defines sexting as "the sending or receiving of sexually explicit pictures or video by means of an electronic act." According to the AVN, the bill would only allow schools to expel students caught sexting:

• On school grounds
• Going to or from school
• During lunch period regardless of whether on or off campus
• During or in transit to or from a school sponsored activity.

The bill will expand upon previous powers granted to schools to prevent bullying.

The measure is just the latest in a series of anti-sexting measures that have caught on in several states. The AP previously reported that under another proposed bill, "New Jersey teenagers caught texting or posting sexually explicit photos online could avoid prosecution under a measure that would give first-time offenders the chance to complete a diversionary program."

Rhode Island, Florida and about 20 other states have also reviewed and considered bills that would tweak penalties for teen sexting. Florida's legislators decided to charge teens for a $60 fine and community service if caught sexting.

Data from a 2008 National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy survey reveals that 21 percent of teenagers admitted to sending or posting nude or semi-nude photos to someone else, as did 33 percent of all young adults. Sexually explicit text messages are even more widespread, with 39 percent of all teens reporting sending them and 48 percent reporting receiving them. The numbers are even higher among young adults: 59 percent report sending and 64 percent report receiving. For teenagers, 15 percent admitted to sending sexually explicit images to people they only knew online, and 44% of teens admitted to sharing explicit materials they had been sent with others.

SB919's sponsor and author Sen. Ted Lieu (D-Torrance) decried the current state of affairs in Education Week, stating: "Sexting is now a form of relationship currency for many youths and goes far beyond what passing of notes was when I was in school."

The transmission or possession of explicit pictures of an underage individual, even by a minor, is in violation of current child pornography laws.

SB919 still needs the approval of the Assembly Appropriations Committee, agreement on amendments in the Senate and the signature of Gov. Jerry Brown to become law.

Crackdown Sought For Phone Bill Mystery Fees

FCC Seeks To Crack Down On Cellphone Bill 'Cramming'

The Federal Communications Commission voted Tuesday to seek public comments on the proposed rules, which are intended to crack down on the practice of "cramming." Cramming is the illegal placement of unauthorized fees on a consumer's phone bill – either by the phone company or an outside party.

WASHINGTON -- Federal regulators are proposing new rules to make it easier for consumers to detect and challenge mystery fees on their phone bills.

These fraudulent charges are usually buried inside phone bills and generally appear under generic descriptions such as minute use fee, activation, member fee, voice mail or Web hosting. Often just a few dollars, they can be easy to overlook.

The FCC vote came a day before a Senate hearing on the issue.

The proposed FCC rules would require landline phone companies to place third-party charges in a separate section of phone bills and to notify consumers whether they offer the option of blocking such charges. The notification must be given when consumers sign up for service, and must appear online and on their bills.

The proposed rules also would require both landline and wireless carriers to notify consumers that they can file complaints about cramming with the FCC. Phone companies must provide the agency's contact information.

In addition, the FCC will consider whether to require landline phone companies to offer services that block third-party fees and whether to prohibit them from charging for such services. It also will consider whether to require landline phone companies to automatically block third-party fees from consumer bills altogether.

The agency will consider whether to extend cramming rules that apply to landline companies to wireless carriers and Internet calling services as well.

The commission estimates that as many as 15 million to 20 million American households have mystery fees on their monthly landline phone bills every year. Cramming is also an emerging problem for wireless customers, the agency said.

Tuesday's vote is part of a broader effort by the FCC to combat mystery fees.

Last year, the agency reached a record settlement with Verizon Wireless over $1.99-a-megabyte data access fees that appeared on the bills of customers who didn't have data plans but accidentally initiated data or Internet sessions by pressing a button on their phones. Verizon Wireless agreed to pay $25 million to the government and at least $52.8 million in customer refunds under the settlement.