I was enjoying a Seinfeld rerun the other evening and came across this classic quote:

“According to most studies, people’s number one fear is public speaking. Number two is death. Death is number two. Does that sound right? This means to the average person, if you go to a funeral, you’re better off in the casket than doing the eulogy.”

This is particularly relevant to me as, although completely confident in business, I sometimes suffer from slight nerves when up on a podium. I’d much rather take 100 questions without notice than stand in front of a group of people and talk continuously without interruption. I like interaction. I like getting to the root of what people really want to know. I liked to take this approach when heading up my teams at Cisco and Microsoft, and in several ways, the understanding I gleaned from this approach led me to begin my own ventures, Joyo.com (now amazon.com.cn) and Dhgate.com.

So when Google approached me to take part in their inaugural Women@Google event, I was pleased to hear that this would be in an interactive forum.

As part of their global Women in Leadership program, I was asked to take to the stage and participate in a live interview and open Q&A session with Googlers (the in-house term for Google staff). I found the session hugely rewarding as I had the opportunity to speak openly and discuss issues with some of China’s most active online developers. In turn, they were hugely interested in international ecommerce, and had a lot of questions about the future and China’s role in it.

Across the world, other women leaders to take part in these sessions include U.S. Senator Hillary Clinton, activist and author Eve Ensler, parasitologist Jane Goodall and former HP CEO Carly Fiorina. What questions would you ask these women leaders?