I'm not good at vacationing. I've repeatedly failed at palapas and mai-tais.

The things I'm good at are building communities, participatory media, places where people contribute things of their own making.

I love Hunch, the awesome team, my brilliant cofounders - we're doing great work and building a great company.

Rob Kalin, Etsy's founder, never finished college. Evan Williams, Biz Stone, Jack Dorsey - the founders of Twitter - are not college graduates. Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook founder, is another dropout. And, of course, Steve Jobs and Bill Gates.

College works on the factory model and is, in many ways, not suited to training entrepreneurs. You put in a student, and out comes a scholar.

Entrepreneurship works on the apprenticeship model. The best way to learn how to be an entrepreneur is to start a company and seek the advice of a successful entrepreneur in the area in which you are interested. Or work at a startup for a few years to learn the ropes.

I spent many years in college studying English literature. I was on the verge of attending grad school to get a Ph.D. in Renaissance poetry - my lost careers were being a writer, artist, or academic. Do I regret spending all that time poring over Shakespeare when I could have been getting a jump start on the competition? Not at all.

When I was a kid, I really wanted to be a writer and an artist when I grew up. So in college, I was an English major, and then I became a fine artist. But when I arrived in San Francisco in 1995, I figured I could leverage my artistic skills by becoming a Web designer and programmer.

I worked at a Web development shop and other start-ups and eventually started a project called Ludicorp, which built an online game. We soon ran out of money, and Flickr was the last-ditch effort to save the company. It quickly became a very unstoppable juggernaut.

I can't tell you how many times I've booked an air ticket only to get to the airport and find out they killed my ticket because it goes into the system, and the program tosses a ticket that says 'fake' on it. Twice I've gone to the counter for a KLM flight through Northwest and have been rejected.

For a while, I couldn't join Facebook because of my last name. During the registration process, I was asked for my real name, and when I wrote 'Fake,' it rejected me. Finally, a friend working for Facebook took care of me.

My background isn't in social software; it's in online community, social networks, personal publishing, blogging, self-expression on the Web. I got on the Internet in the 1980s, and the magic moment for me arose from my being a literature geek, especially Dante and Shakespeare.

'Game Never Ending' came out of an earlier game called 'NeoPets,' a children's game that adults also played. It was a series of mini-games where you accrue points and can acquire objects - houses and all kinds of stuff.

When we were making Flickr, we called it the 'Eyes of the World.' The idea was that everybody, everywhere, is looking. It was this sense of being able to penetrate worlds that you had never been able to access before - of global, universal travel.

The computers people have are no longer on their desks but in their hands, and that is probably the transformative feature of the technology. These computers are with you, in the world.

My background is in art. I was a painter and an occasional sculptor, and I really like materials - you know, stuff. Physical objects. The world and the trees and the sunshine and the flowers. And all of that doesn't seem to really exist out in the ether of the Internet.

My life project is humanizing technology: making technology more real and bringing it back into human interactions.

I was an eccentric teenager in suburban New Jersey, in a town mostly interested in sports, popularity, and clothes. A fan of Jorge Luis Borges, I found a group of Borges scholars from Aarhus, Denmark - perfect strangers - whom I connected to online and immediately became enthralled by the idea of virtual communities.

My favorite online communities are characterized by their incredible generosity.

The Well taught us how to create a civilized space for debate, speak in our own voices, use our real names, mediate flame wars, and boot trolls. Brand's mantra was, 'You own your own words,' meaning you have the right to say your piece but must also take responsibility for what you say.

Etsy helps work be more human - you can stay at home and work alongside your kids - and it makes commerce more personal.

Etsy radically simplified and amended their policies. Sellers of handmade goods can now hire as much help as they need to run their shops. They can apply to sell designs they produce with the help of outside businesses.

Etsy is fundamentally a creative community. On eBay, or Amazon for that matter, practically anyone can sell practically anything. On Etsy, you can only sell handmade goods, vintage goods over 20 years old, and craft supplies for making.

On Etsy, you can't resell new goods you weren't involved in making, whereas on eBay and Amazon, that is more than welcome - everything from dishwashers to XBoxes, curling irons, espresso machines, and metal detectors.

I love participatory media, collective knowledge systems, user-generated content and the like, and spent much of my life and career participating in them and making them.

Being pregnant has all kinds of advantages. People keep telling you how beautiful you look. They do it over and over. Very sweet of them, but it is just not true. I've seen myself before, and I've definitely looked better.

Behind every great athlete is a masterful coach that inspires the athlete to evolve into the strongest performer they can become.

I didn't aspire to be the CEO of Deloitte, but I aspired to be a leader in Deloitte.

Our goal is to set the gold standard when it comes to compliance.

That is the culture at Deloitte: To make sure we are all maximizing the capabilities that we have.

Accelerating technology innovations such as ubiquitous sensors, cheap computing power, and 5G networks will open entirely new opportunities and challenges.

The innovation of our workplace is key to the development of innovative solutions that address the evolving complex challenges of our clients.

When people are your greatest asset, like at Deloitte, investments in human capital should be considered in the same way other companies might invest significantly in product R&D.

The fundamentals of your business are like free throws: emphasize and practice them to perfection.

You cannot be insightful if you're deluged with information.

The advice I give, no matter male or female, is not being afraid to step outside your comfort zone and think more long-term about your career than maybe the next year.

The simple truth is that every veteran has his or her own unique story, and there's no single narrative about the issue of veterans finding civilian employment. And no single solution.

I prioritize people over tasks.

There is a premium on innovation and commercializing new ideas.

In an age of exponential change, we need the power of diverse thinking, and we cannot afford to leave any talent untapped.

Seek out a personal coach or mentor in the workplace. He/she should push you when you need it by encouraging and motivating you. Don't be afraid of their honesty.

Young professionals shouldn't have to let a fear of failure hold them back; they should feel emboldened to take on challenges in creative ways.

We were sent outside to our backyard to play sports together all the time - no boy and girl differentiation, just two teams playing.

From my early days of playing 2:2 in basketball against my three older brothers to my years playing Division 1 college basketball and lacrosse, sports have played a big role in my leadership development.

You never know where your career will take you. A competitor in the market could suddenly become an unlikely partner. Be flexible, keep your slate clean, and stay open to unlikely collaborations.

I believe that 20-somethings would be more likely to embrace experimentation - and provide additional value - if they felt safe to do so.

In addition to encouraging failure, I would also encourage companies to broadly create a culture of innovation. That should mean more than just technology and invention; it should mean something millennials know well: Ingenuity.

Being able to see and recombine existing assets and know-how in new ways allows us to take an 'ingenious approach to innovation' - one that creates even more value from what we already have and know.

At Deloitte, our programs for veterans are bringing new approaches to the table. For instance, we're helping veterans' organizations use data analytics to sift through streams of information about veteran needs.

As companies deal with the impact of technology and the incredible pace of change, they are fundamentally rethinking talent and family leave programs.