Goyal: At Depop, leading a sustainable, circular fashion marketplace. (Photo by Jon Enoch)

My parents were in the hospitality business. They owned a motel, so we grew up working at the business as well as living at the business.

I remember vividly some moments of really intense stress. And it was because my parents took a lot of risk to build the business. My mom always said risk is required to be able to achieve greater goals.

The first big risk that I took was graduating from business school without a full-time job. I took an internship to get a foot in the door in the media industry.

Four or five years later, my husband and I bought around-the-world tickets and traveled for six months. I really got the space and the time to reflect on what was important to me and what direction I wanted to take next in my career.

When I came back, people were actually more interested in the travel than they were about my career up until that point. The choice to take that time to travel and reflect told people how I thought and how I made decisions.

When you talk about career growth, people often say, “What’s the next level that I can unlock?” My mindset was a little bit different. I was really focused on, How can I serve? How can I solve the biggest problem that’s facing us?

At Depop, it’s our mission to make fashion circular with a platform that allows anyone to sell what’s in their closet. It’s really amazing to work at a company where the social mission and the business impact are 100 percent aligned, because that means the bigger we grow, the more positive the impact we have on the world.

If I look at my career at Etsy, the critical thing was deeply understanding our customers; at Depop, it’s buyers and sellers. If you understand the role your product plays in their life, what they need, what their motivations are—it allows you to identify the next areas of investment.

When you look for that next opportunity, there might be 10 things that are really important to you. And the critical step is understanding, of those 10 things, which is the single most important? Having that clarity makes it possible to make trade-offs with confidence and then figure out how to make it work.

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