Women Entrepreneurs: “Turn Your Difference into an Advantage”

At the Stanford Graduate School of Business, the class Entrepreneurship from the Perspective of Women began as a short seminar about a decade ago. Since then, it has been taken by hundreds of people, most of them women. Lecturer, entrepreneur, and venture capitalist Fern Mandelbaum began teaching the class last year, and this year helped expand it into a full-quarter course. While she hopes to change the name — “Would you call a class Entrepreneurship from the Perspective of Men? Of course not,” she says — the core principles remain the same: Confidence is key, diversity is an asset, and an entrepreneur’s psyche can be just as important as her business plan.