Superwomen With Rebecca Minkoff

On SUPERWOMEN, I talked to Shirah Benarde, the 22-year-old CEO and co-founder of NightCap. When she was just 16, Shirah found out that one of her friends had been roofied. Not long after, she got to work, taping together a pair of pantyhose and a scrunchie to make a prototype of a device that can help protect people from drink-spiking. Cut to one year later: Shirah and her brother Michael pitched the product on “Shark Tank” and secured a deal. But launching her business as a Gen Z founder was far from easy. “I knew deep down that I had no idea what I was doing, and that made it really hard for other people to see me in a professional way,” she told me. Shirah pushed herself to really understand her business, making costly mistakes along her journey.“We definitely spent a lot of money on things that we didn’t know that worked,” she said, “but it was a huge learning lesson.” In the process of building her company, she discovered how to get people to trust her vision: “You have to take yourself seriously.” Night