Long

The most traditionally successful people I know were divorced and they told me sacrificing their families wasn't worth it. Hold your children up high as your greatest inventions because they are.

Not everything in Silicon Valley or any industry or life for that matter need be portrayed as home runs or strike-outs — success or failure — it's just what you hear about so often because it's what sells newspapers.

I wish someone had told me at my own commencement that the one and only requirement for graduation was that I had to emerge out of the closed, cordoned-off space of my own head. I had to learn to listen.

We are the only species that can learn to think like another of our own species; the only one that records and remembers its history; the only one that tries to decipher the laws of the universe.

Hold your children up high as your greatest inventions because they are. I invented something many of you use every day and it doesn't compare to any day with a happy, healthy child.

I was not someone who should have the life I have now, and yet I do. I was sitting in the chair you are literally sitting in right now and I just whispered, 'Why not me?' And I kept whispering it for seventeen years.

Don't be scared if you don't do things in the right order, or if you don't do some things at all. If you have a checklist, good for you. Structured ambition can sometimes be motivating. But also, feel free to let it go.

You have to have insane confidence in yourself, even if it's not real. You need to be your own cheerleader now, because there isn't a room full of people waiting with pom-poms to tell you you did it.

Failure is not something to be ashamed of, it's something to be powered by. Failure is the highest octane fuel your life can run on. You gotta learn to make failure your fuel.

If I could go back and tell my younger self one thing it would be this: Abby, you were never Little Red Riding Hood. You were always the wolf.

Real success requires step after step after step after step. It requires choice after choice.

Imagine the possibilities when women are not held back. Your generation is unraveling deeply entrenched laws, principles and misguided values that have held women back for far too long and therefore, have held us all back — the human race.