By: Lisa Falzone, CEO & Co-Founder, Revel Systems

The pop culture news cycle continues to explode around the most recent Taylor Swift breakup, with analysis of every minute detail connected to the deleted Instagram posts, the rescinded amicable breakup tweet by Calvin Harris, her meeting with Tom Hiddleston’s mom, and more. It’s an old plot line with new characters and one that I’m tired of seeing play out in the media.

I’ve watched Taylor’s career path over the past ten years as both a fan and a woman in business. As my company has passed a half billion dollar valuation, the notes I’ve been taking in the back of my mind about how she conducts herself as an entrepreneur and businesswoman have become more and more relevant.

When Taylor Swift first burst onto the awards scenes in 2007, winning New Female Vocalist of the Year at the CMAs, I was graduating from Stanford undergrad and still figuring out my future career path. Almost a decade later, T-Swift has won 271 awards and it’s been almost six years since I founded my tech company, Revel Systems.

Women working in business—especially those here in San Francisco—often talk about the great examples we have like Sheryl Sandberg and Marissa Mayer. But there’s also a lot to be learned from businesswomen outside Silicon Valley and outside of what we might think of as traditional business. Here’s why we should all be emulating Taylor in business, rather than speculating about her love life.

She follows her intuition
Now that 1989 was the best-selling album of 2014 in the US and won the Album of the Year Grammy, it’s easy to forget that Taylor was originally an established country music star when she released this pop album. Even her own label was urging her not to break the mold and to put at least a few country songs on the album to appeal to her original fan base. There are always outside voices pressuring you one way or the other in business. Advice is helpful to a point, but ultimately it’s our job to know our business best, and to use our own intuition to anticipate how customers and in Taylor’s case, her fans, will react to changes in our brand.

She’s a true innovator
I believe that the best entrepreneurs are iconoclasts breaking the mold of what came before them. Like Steve Jobs transformed consumer technology, Taylor has raised the bar for top artists in her industry. Taylor writes her own music, a commitment to songwriting that’s unusual in today’s music industry. She’s so talented that skeptics didn’t believe that she wrote her own songs as a teenager until she solo authored all of the songs on her third album, Speak Now. She was also the first to come out with doing a smaller number of stadium concerts but making the shows she did do extremely impactful. Her self-reliance is a great reminder that the best entrepreneurs have serious skin in the game and are deeply engaged in creating their own product.

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