The panel featured Carley Roney, co-founder of the XO Group; Jeff Housenbold, CEO Shutterfly; and Steve Kaufer, CEO and co-founder of TripAdvisor. 

Roney, whose company manages popular women’s lifestyle web properties like The Knot, The Nest and The Bump highlighted the importance of having girls involved in technology and coding.

“The number one thing that will make more female entrepreneurship is more female engineers,” she said. “Eighty-five percent of buying decisions are made by women … Women should be the ones making these things. … They don’t have that best friend that they can sit down and jam on some code with. To me, this is all about middle school and making it cool to be in to these types of things.”

Housenbold said customer feedback has been crucial to his company’s ability to evolve. He said his employees also supply the company with ideas for innovation, but the key is to strike a balance.

“You can’t just listen to your customers, but you have to take [their feedback] as input,” Housenbold said.

Kaufer said the mobile platform is ripe for innovation. He said his company is working to provide a rich user experience through mobile devices. The focus, he said, needs to be on perfecting how people interact with their mobile devices.

“The beauty is I actually believe the technology is already there,” Kaufer said. “You have the camera, you have the GPS, you have the wireless connectivity.”

Dell, who took his company private in 2013 after being publicly owned for 25 years, answered a question from the crowd about what private ownership has allowed his company.

“We can embrace the risk that entrepreneurs and founders love,” Dell said. “We can change our time horizon focus to be more medium and long term focused. Our values don’t change.”