It’s a Monday morning in Manhattan and Sophia Amoruso is wearing a plunging jet-black gown and choker. That’s not unusual for the founder of online retailer Nasty Gal, a brand known for a certain ‘70s chic. But in this Fifth Avenue hotel lounge where nearby a sea of foreign officials in fine tailored suits pile into motorcades for a session at the U.N. Global Summit, Amoruso stands out.

Thankfully, Amoruso’s not afraid of the attention. The 31-year old made headlines in 2012 for nabbing more than $40 million in funding for a rapidly growing e-commerce business racking up hundreds of millions in sales. By 2014, her bestseller #Girlboss was lauded as a Lean In for millennial women, tracking Amoruso’s journey from dumpster-diving youth to e-Bay seller to CEO.

“Once you put yourself on the cover of a book with your hands on your hips in a power pose, you become another thing,” Amoruso tellsEntrepreneur.

To be sure, not all the attention has been easy. Last year, revenues flattened and the company laid off 10% of its staff. Amoruso stepped down as CEO months later and by last March, the company had been slapped with a discrimination suit from former employees who say the company unlawfully fired them after they became pregnant or took parental leave. (Nasty Gal has maintained the lawsuit is “false, defamatory and taken completely out of context.”)

Amoruso, for her part, is forging ahead with her role as a leader and mentor, embarking on a nationwide bus tour (#GirlBuss, naturally) to celebrate her book’s paperback release. She’s also launched afoundation awarding grants to young women entrepreneurs, a career column for Marie Claire and a podcast in partnership with Slate.

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