After overseeing one of the biggest blow-ups in Internet history, Julie Wainwright was a Silicon Valley pariah. Now at 64, she's the founder of The Real Real, and has learned that failure can bring the freedom to pursue a second act without fear.
n November 8, 2000, Julie Wainwright awoke at 4:00am to a declaration from her then-husband: he wanted a divorce. Later that day, Wainwright—who, at the time, was the CEO of Pets.com—drove into work to begin laying off staff and shutting the company down.
In the months that followed, Wainwright was focused on the details of the fallout of both events, securing employee exit packages and going through each step of the divorce process. She did so under intense public scrutiny, with reporters following her every move and bloggers calling her the “dumbest” person in Silicon Valley.
about her journey as an entrepreneur, how failure freed her from fear, and the moment she knew she had to create her own dream job rather than depend on someone else to give it to her:he seeds for The RealReal were planted early on in Wainwright’s life: both of her parents were artists who believed in “upcycling” and rescuing clothes and household decor from the trash bin.
“They really loved beautiful things. And that didn't necessarily mean beautiful new things,” Wainwright says. “My mother would go to people's homes and, if for example they had a nice rug, she'd say, ‘when you're ready to sell it, I'll buy it from you.’” This background, paired with time spent in boutiques around San Francisco and watching customers beeline for the “consignment” section in these posh stores, gave Wainwright the idea for the company. She started The RealReal in 2011, working from her home in Marin county. Two years later, she’d expanded operations into a warehouse in Sausalito; by 2015,
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