Quotes from Reshma Saujani

There's no better way of learning from your experiences than having an open and honest conversation with yourself about why you fell short.

I'm a feminist with a capital 'F' and have always had a passion for policy.

'Fail hard, fail fast, fail often. It's the key to success.' This one I learned from experience!

Girls Who Code is all about providing role models. You can't be what you can't see.

Every day, no matter how tired my father was, he'd put me in the car and drive me to Schaumburg Public Library, and he'd read to me from books about Dr. King, Mahatma Gandhi, Eleanor Roosevelt.

While I've had so many different jobs - I've worked in law, I've worked in government, I've run for office - there's a common theme. The theme for my entire life has been about giving back.

If you haven't failed you haven't tried anything new...

I believe in the power of peer mentorship. When I learned how to ask for a raise, how to fire someone, how to deal with a board challenge - I didn't get that from mentors like Hillary Clinton. I got that from women who were my friends and who had already done the thing that I was doing.

When I was 33 years old, I ran for United States Congress in New York City. I lost miserably.

I was in my 30s when I quit my job and ran for Congress. So often, we're told it's OK to take these big career leaps when we're in our 20s, but we cast such an unfavorable light on those who take big risks later on in their careers or when they start families. There's enormous pressure to have it all figured out.

When I first ran for office in 2010, I was 32 years old. The average age in Congress was 69. I was a brown woman whose name was Reshma Saujani - a name most people couldn't pronounce. And there was never a South Asian woman who had ever run for United States Congress before.

The culture of tech companies cannot change if women aren't in the room.

I'm the daughter of refugees. The immigrant mentality is to work hard, be brave, and never give up in your pursuit of achieving the American dream.

I think that feeling of being thrown into the deep end and doing something you never thought you would accomplish is really powerful.

As women, we're presented this false choice that is either our children or our work. But I don't think I fully understood the paradox until I had a child. I bring my son to work and let other parents do the same. I am very intentional about the workplace that I create, and my son is a big part of that.

In the workplace, we're taught to worry about what happens if we don't have full, complete knowledge of every detail. But if you create a culture and an environment that rewards people for taking risks, even if they don't succeed, you can start changing behavior.

Most girls are taught to avoid risk and failure. We're taught to smile pretty, play it safe, get all A's. Boys, on the other hand, are taught to play rough, swing high, crawl to the top of the monkey bars, and then just jump off headfirst.

Too many times we just think about our ideas, and we let people convince us not to do it.

My family was one of the few South Asian families in my community in Illinois. Growing up in the '80s, I remember going to the K-Mart with my mom, when she was wearing her sari, and she'd get made fun of. People would ask my mother, 'Were you born with that dot on your head?'

I want women to be comfortable with being imperfect. I immediately see how girls are afraid to try things that they won't be good in. And women stay with the things they're good at even if that's not what they're put on this earth to do.

I'm glad I didn't know how much patience entrepreneurship required. It took some time to turn that into a strength of mine, so that would've presented an obstacle when I was younger.

Being brave is what led to three rejections from Yale Law School before being accepted. It led to losing my 2010 race for U.S. Congress, and another failed bid for public office in 2013, this time for public advocate of New York City.

All that time I spent chasing Yale was time I could have been using to actually make a difference in the world. Bravery, not perfection, was the key that unlocked all the doors I've walked through since.

I think for a certain demographic of American families that are not living below the poverty line, what is now becoming the working poor, I think they realize that their young daughters - and their sons, quite frankly - need to learn a skill set that is going to never go away, and I think that they see that in technology.