Before Good Face Project became software for cosmetics teams, Iva Yovchev Teixeira was listening to shoppers. Her career has turned on a deceptively useful habit: moving the question to the moment when the answer can still change things.

She arrived in America at 19 with $3,000, learned how large companies make decisions, and found an industry still keeping formulas in Excel. Her answer was to turn cosmetic chemistry into connected software.