Sallie Krawcheck has run Smith Barney, Merrill Lynch Wealth Management, US Trust, and Citi Private Bank, and was Citi’s CFO before that. Now she runs Ellevest, an investment firm that helps women create wealth. She may have been regularly referred to in the media as “the most powerful woman on Wall Street,” but that brought its own challenges. Krawcheck tells us what she learned from navigating the boys club of finance, working through the financial crisis, and dealing with two highly publicized firings. She also explains why she hates the phrase “empowering women,” and why she’s found a better alternative.

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Sam Yagan knows he’s been lucky. He tells us that one of the luckiest moments of his life was meeting his college roommates. Together, they built a study guide website called SparkNotes. Then, they built an online dating empire. They started the site OKCupid while Yagan was getting his MBA at Stanford. Yagan is now the CEO of ShopRunner, but he’s best known for his 7-year tenure as the head of the Match Group, which includes OkCupid, Match.com, and Tinder. He says it was his Syrian immigrant parents who inspired his drive to be an entrepreneur.

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For Jocko Willink, becoming a Navy SEAL was just like any other career. Willink was the commander of SEAL Team 3, Task Unit Bruiser. It was the most highly decorated US special operations unit of the Iraq War — and the one where Chris Kyle, of “American Sniper,” served. Willink retired from the SEALs in 2010 and started a consulting company called Echelon Front, which he founded with another SEAL named Leif Babin. He and Babin co-wrote the bestselling book “Extreme Ownership” in 2014. He’s also got a hit podcast, a line of jiu jitsu products, and even two bestselling children’s books. Willink says that passing on leadership lessons, whether to executives or kids, is just a continuation of what he did in the SEALs.

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Business Insider's US Editor-in-Chief Alyson Shontell was in Berlin last week for the 3rd annual Axel Springer Award, which was an evening honoring Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos. Bezos sat down with Axel Springer CEO Dr. Mathias Dopfner to talk about his career and future ambitions. (Axel Springer is Business Insider's parent company.) After an intro from Fiat Chrysler chairman John Elkann, Jeff and Mathias spoke about Amazon, and Jeff's investments in journalism and space exploration. This week's episode of "Success! How I Did It" features that conversation in full.

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If you’ve verified you’re not a robot online, you’ve used something Luis von Ahn has created. He tells "Success! How I Did It," that he doesn’t read stories about himself, and he’s probably the only CEO our host, Rich Feloni, has ever interviewed who believably says he doesn’t care about money. Von Ahn is the CEO of Duolingo, a popular language learning app. He’s also one of the guys who developed CAPTCHA, those online tests that ask you to type in a word or series of letters when you buy tickets or set up an email account. Von Ahn grew up in Guatemala and he came to the US to be part of the tech scene. He was driven by a goal of getting millions of people to work together online. It made him a pioneer of the now ubiquitous crowdsourcing movement.

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Don Katz sounds more like a college English professor than a tech CEO: he’s obsessed with literature and writing. And it’s why he started Audible, the audiobook company now owned by Amazon, in 1995. It was all about the stories, and it was all about the voice of the stories. Katz certainly knows how to run a tech company well, but his passion above all else is storytelling. He was one of the earliest writers for Rolling Stone, where he covered terrorism and revolutions around the world. He then had a long career as a writer. But in his 40s, he decided to take a giant leap into another direction.

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Tina Brown gets things done. She’s been a leader since her mid-20s, and she’s built the teams that transformed Vanity Fair and the New Yorker. She also created The Daily Beast. Brown grew up in England and became a media mogul in New York. Editors and writers have often questioned her most ambitious plans, but her resume is marked by major successes. A huge exception is a short-lived media brand called Talk that she launched with, of all people, Harvey Weinstein. Today she runs the Women in the World Summit, which highlights the stories of people fighting for women’s rights around the world. It’s allowed her to inspire a new generation of leaders.

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Cecile Richards has never shied away from controversy. In seventh grade, she got sent to the principal’s office for protesting the Vietnam War. As President of Planned Parenthood, she defended the organization in a heated 2015 congressional hearing. Planned Parenthood is a healthcare provider that offers a long list of services, including cancer screenings and STI treatment. It also provides abortions and birth control services, which has made it one of the most controversial institutions in the country. In her memoir ‘Make Trouble,’ Richards discusses leading the organization for the past 12 years, what she learned from being raised by two activist parents, and the value of being 'trouble maker.'

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Anjali Sud has always sought opportunities that seem intimidating. That inspired her to leave Flint, Michigan at 14 for the elite Massachusetts boarding school Phillips Academy on a scholarship. And it led her to become the CEO of Vimeo at 34. Vimeo is an ad-free video platform for filmmakers, and the videos on Vimeo are generally more highly produced than those on YouTube. Sud worked at Vimeo for three years before getting the CEO job in July 2017. It was an opportunity she told me she wasn’t expecting -- and so that’s why she had to take it. Sud told us how she had a new vision for Vimeo as she led its creators team.

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Tariq Farid was only 13 when his family moved from Pakistan to Connecticut. He started working at a flower shop to make money, and he opened his own at 17. Farid is the founder and CEO of Edible Arrangements. He cornered a market that no one knew even existed: baskets of fruits cut up and carved to look like giant flower bouquets. Today, his business has 900 franchises across 9 countries, bringing in more than half a billion dollars in sales each year. It hasn’t all been easy. He’s had to contend with everything from disgruntled franchisees to conspiracy theories and racist online trolling. But his unwavering optimism has pushed him through struggles from the very beginning.

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