Women Entrepreneurs Who Are Changing the Game: Ruzwana Bashir

Young, beautiful and enterprising, una interview conducted by Clinique with women entrepreneurs who are “changing the game“.

Name: Ruzwana Bashir, Founder of Peek.com

Your background: 29 years old, born in Yorkshire, England to Pakistani immigrant parents.

His passion: “I was always the explorer, the person who has no limits – I still don’t know. I’ve always had a passion and I knew I wanted to be an entrepreneur and build something from scratch.”

His trajectory: studied philosophy, politics and economics at Oxford, became president of the prestigious Oxford Union debating society. He worked at startups (Gilt Groupe and Art.sy) before founding his company Peek.com in 2012.

A woman in a man’s world: Bashir was the first woman to be hired on his team at Blackstone Group. “In a lot of areas of the business – whether it’s finance or technology – the trend is to have more men. I think I felt like I had to act like everyone else around me, so I definitely took a more confident attitude. and I set out to be more aggressive while I was there.

As the first woman to be hired in a condition like this, you desperately want to make sure people don’t think, “Oh well she’s a girl, she sure isn’t going to be that good.” You’re there, going the extra mile to prove yourself. ”

Your company: “The big idea for Peek came when I was planning a weekend in Istanbul with my friends for my birthday. I’ve had trouble understanding what to do, so I ask my friends, surf the web, buy all kinds of Finally, I came up with a big list of things we might want to do, and from that, I had to figure out who and where we could do it with: find a guide, call and see if they were available to help me schedule some of the experiences I had in mind.

The whole process took more than 20 hours. I thought, “That’s ridiculous! I’m just going away for a weekend. It can’t take me that long to plan.” And then I thought, “Wouldn’t it be great if I could have a single platform where you can discover everything there is to do? do when you take a trip and then actually just book it? ” and that’s Peek.com

The balance in the life: “The last few years have certainly been very focused work, and that’s only because it provides me with a lot of joy and passion to build my company. But I also have a lot of people on my team who are trusting me to help me develop something that is going to be truly shocking and world-changing.

The reality of a startup is that you have an incredible team, who have taken money from fantastic investors, so you owe it to yourself to give absolutely everything you can into it, within reason.

Yes, I work sixteen hours a day, six days a week, but I take a day off to go out and just do nothing, or whatever I want to do. And every once in a while, I try to take a couple of days off to completely tune out, because I think that’s important to my creativity, and my perspective. Right now, I’m probably sacrificing the social elements of “life” and focusing heavily on work, but I know this is going to change over time. ”

His advice: “I absolutely believe that it is important to hire people who are smarter than you. And ‘smart’ is not just ‘intellectually’ speaking, which is very different. They have to be particularly creative, or you know, persistent enough and ability to make things work. ”

His lesson: “You have to accept that there are things that you are good at and others that you are not. In this way, you can go and seek the help you need, you will never build a company entirely on your own. My training is in economics and I am very good at financial analysis, but I have never studied computer science, and if you are building a technology company, you better make sure you have someone expert working on it.

That is why I have a co-founder, Oskar Bruening, who is our CTO. [director de tecnología]. One of the most important lessons I have learned is that the company is a group of people, and that group of people – the team is the one who does everything. At the end of the day, you may have a vision of where you want to go, but without them, you wouldn’t be able to. So you are finally helping your team to be better and giving them the resources they may need to get where they want to go. ”

Your routine: “I have had the same beauty routine for five years, it makes my life so much easier. I use the same cleansing every morning, the same SPF sun protection, and I put my makeup on while commuting. It takes me no more than three. or four minutes: a touch of mascara and eyeliner, a little bronzer on the cheeks and lipstick. That’s it. ”