When I reflect on these past three years--during which my
sectionmate from business school, Jenn Hyman, and I started Rent
the Runway--I could never have imagined that our business would
reach the scale and success it has today. It's been an exciting,
challenging, and crazy journey, and I had the following pieces
of advice to guide me through from the onset.  1. Ditch the
business plan.  Jenn and I had a rule from the very beginning to
never write a business plan. We found that starting a business
is more about executing a series of iterative tests, each test
eliminating some of the risks entrepreneurs face when launching
a company. Instead of sitting around and putting together a
business plan based on a hypothesis, we knew we needed to test
our idea on the ground to see if we could actually promote
"renting" as a new consumer behavior.  We had to get scrappy,
and we first tested out our idea by going to Harvard with a
trunk full of dresses that we let girls try on and rent. Next,
we went to Yale and rented