Rita Gurevich started SPHERE, a cybersecurity company, when she was twenty-five, an age not that far away from most of the participants in this year’s International Conference. When I asked what she wished she would have known when she was just starting out, her answer surprised me with its simplicity and subtlety.

“Fear of failure holds you back!” declared the current President of Cadillac, Johan de Nysschen, gesturing widely to a crowd made up of the best and brightest of the next generation of entrepreneurs. In his Speaker Series talk, de Nysschen stressed the importance of perfection and the importance of “sweating the small stuff.”