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Like many entrepreneurs, Maria Hatzistefanis began her journey when she got fired from a good job she couldn’t stand. The Greek-born Hatzistefanis had studied business at Columbia University and, after graduation, taken a job in banking. It went well until it didn’t — “My passion wasn’t there,” she says. She soon found herself out of work.

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“I was devastated, but it was actually the best thing that ever happened to me,” Hatzi­stefanis says, “because it made me think harder about what I wanted to become.”

Hatzistefanis had previously worked as a beauty writer for Seventeen magazine. Looking back, she realized that was closer to her real passion. So she set out to launch her own beauty brand, . Investors weren’t interested, so she bootstrapped it. “I put all my savings into the business and started it from a bathroom at home, doing everything from going to the manufacturers to coming up with the product to selling my products to stores,” she says. “I was a one-woman show from the beginning.”

In those days, Hatzistefanis held her meetings in a coffee shop by her apartment in London. On the way there every day, she’d walk by a small gallery’s window display of Terry O’Neil’s iconic photo of actress Faye Dunaway, taken the morning after she won an Oscar for Network in 1977. Hatzistefanis loved it.

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