When Falguni Nayar left her role as Managing Director at Kotak Mahindra Bank in 2012 to found Nykaa at age 49, she had spent nearly two decades as one of India's leading investment bankers — taking other companies public, not running them.

In her second year at Harvard Business School in early 2011, Katrina Lake launched a class-project startup originally named Rack Habit, later renamed Stitch Fix.

Schuler had an idea for a team management tool.

Tina Brown took over as editor-in-chief of Vanity Fair in early 1984 with a mandate from Condé Nast that was at once expansive and unspecified: relaunch a magazine the publisher had been failing to revive for two years, hire her own contract writers, find the editorial register the relaunched title would run in.