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Failing into Entrepreneurship

Jane Park

Presenter: Jane Park, CEO and Founder, Tokki
Topics: Fundamentals for Startups, Training
Posted: 02/4/2022

Description

This Fundamentals for Startups featured Jane Park, CEO and Founder of Tokki (http://shop.tokki.com), a social & sustainable gifting technology company. Jane shared her experiences and discussed how entrepreneurship is all about learning, which means it’s all about failing. Learning how to fail is a skill that can be practiced – it takes preparation before, during, and after the “failure.” Turning a “failure” into a “lesson” doesn’t happen automatically just by renaming the experience. It is hard work and takes focus and practice.

Presenter Bio

Jane Park is the CEO and Founder of Tokki, a social & sustainable gifting technology company. Merging reusable physical giftwrap with a digital social experience, Tokki is reinventing gift giving to make the experience unforgettable. Ms. Park is also CEO and Co-Founder of Athena Consumer, an all women’s special purpose acquisition company (SPAC), and was the first Korean-American woman to ring the bell on the New York Stock Exchange.

Prior to these roles, Ms. Park was the CEO and Founder of Julep, an on-line first beauty brand now distributed nationally at Ulta stores as well as on QVC and Nordstrom. A disruptor in the beauty space, Julep innovated rapidly by co-creating with its customers through social media and personalizing offerings to each subscriber. Ms. Park successfully raised over $50MM in venture capital financing from Sillicon Valley firms including Andreessen Horowitz, and led Julep to a private equity exit in 2016 to beauty rollup funded by Warburg Pincus.

Ms. Park was also an executive at Starbucks in the New Ventures division where she launched new consumer businesses. She was also a leader at the Boston Consulting Group in the Retail and Consumer Goods practice group, and a founding director of the CEO Forum for Education and Technology with luminaires such as Steve Jobs (CEO Apple) and Eckhard Pfeiffer (CEO Compaq).  Ms. Park holds a JD from Yale Law School and an AB in Public and International Affairs from Princeton University.

A nationally recognized expert in consumer brand building and social commerce, Ms. Park regularly appears on television as well as consumer, technology, and women’s leadership conferences. 

Jane Park immigrated from Korea with her parents when she was four years old.  

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