Nair Flores, the head of intellectual property at Lyft, built the company's IP function from scratch, grew its patent portfolio by 500 percent and supported Lyft's largest joint development agreement to date.

Name an important opportunity you got early in your career and what you did with it.

I got a job as a patent agent during law school. That allowed me to explore early on whether or not I wanted to pursue a career in IP and learn what I liked (and didn't). This allowed me to focus on future opportunities and gain experience.