Latest / Success Story with Scott Clary / Julie Wainwright - The RealReal Founder | How She Rebuilt After Pets.com Failed and Built a Billion-Dollar Empire

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Julie Wainwright - The RealReal Founder | How She Rebuilt After Pets.com Failed and Built a Billion-Dollar Empire · Success Story with Scott Clary

• 0:00
  Beginning of my career, great training, which I got at the Clorox Company and brand management.
• 0:05
  After that, I'm a risk taker. I've embraced technology from an early age.
• 0:10
  Julie Wainwright, she was the CEO of one of the first comms to go public,
• 0:14
  and the next day, her entire life collapsed.
• 0:17
  Pets.com shut down, her husband filed for divorce, and the world watched her fall alone.
• 0:22
  For me, the key thing was I knew the world had changed.
• 0:26
  Now it's 2011, and the only big player was Amazon.
• 0:31
  I need to map out what Amazon can't and can do.
• 0:34
  And one of those opportunities was the luxury market.
• 0:37
  Then I moved really, really fast.
• 0:39
  And then at 53, she came back with no funding, no team, and no second chances.
• 0:44
  She built the real, real luxury resale empire that reshaped e-commerce.
• 0:48
  She was told she was too old to prove them all wrong.
• 0:51
  This is the most brutally honest conversation she's ever had.
• 0:54
  AI tools, we outsource our thinking, and we outsource our writing.
• 0:58
  What do you think is going to happen in 30 years from now?
• 1:01
  Entry-level jobs are ready,
• 1:03
  uncertain areas are being replaced by chat GPT.
• 1:07
  Means people on a senior level have to know where you're going.
• 1:12
  Operating out of fear is always losing.
• 1:15
  You have to trust in yourself because fear-based decisions
• 1:19
  have failure written all over them.
• 1:25
  So Julie, thank you for coming on.
• 1:34
  If you had to describe your career, how would you describe your career?
• 1:40
  Oh, you know, I was lucky.
• 1:42
  I was thinking about that the other day.
• 1:44
  I would say two things, and they're a little conflicting.
• 1:50
  I've always wanted to understand how business operates from multi-functions.
• 1:58
  So I've, number one, when I was very young right out of college,
• 2:06
  I wanted to get great training.
• 2:09
  All right, beginning of my career, great training, which I got at the Clorox
• 2:13
  Company and Brand Management, and then I would say after that, I love,
• 2:20
  I'm a risk taker in my career, and I've embraced technology from an early age.
• 2:27
  So I understood that what I was seeing in early software development was the future,
• 2:34
  and I was willing to take risks and companies that were incredibly nascent.
• 2:40
  Those are, first of all, I don't even expect you to go right into like lessons for the audience,
• 2:44
  but I appreciate you for doing that.
• 2:46
  I think that those three ideas alone are probably some of the most useful ideas for somebody
• 2:54
  that's definitely getting started in their career, just trying to figure out what to do, right?
• 3:00
  Risk-taking, which is very important at any stage, but definitely early on.
• 3:05
  The fact that you embrace technology, of course, that's something that will never go away.
• 3:08
  But also you mentioned something that's interesting.
• 3:11
  You mentioned that you got the training.
• 3:12
  Now, why is that interesting to me?
• 3:15
  That is interesting to me, because I think that too many people, especially in 2025,
• 3:23
  they glorify entrepreneurship and they jump into entrepreneurship and they skip the training part.
• 3:29
  So they love technology, they love risk, but I feel like everybody just wants to fast forward
• 3:35
  their life so quickly that they skip all the training, they skip putting in the reps and I think
• 3:40
  that's the wrong way to do it. When you started and you sort of first jumped into the workforce
• 3:47
  or lack of a better description, how important were some of the things that you learned then
• 3:53
  that allowed you to succeed multiple times later on in your career?
• 3:58
  Oh my gosh, all right, so first of all, I did, I mean, look, I really wanted to get good training,
• 4:06
  so I knew I wanted to go into brand management at a package goods company because I wanted to run
• 4:13
  a P&L, all right? So I knew that for various reasons, including people I knew doing the work,
• 4:21
  so that it became, well, let's go to a company that has the best training.
• 4:25
  Here's what I didn't know that has served me like crazy. One of the things that Clorox did, it was,
• 4:33
  it probably had the, by the way, looking back, probably had the wrong model for where that company was
• 4:38
  because it wasn't even a billion dollars. It had been spun off by Procter & Gamble and it
• 4:43
  had to find its own diversification outside the bleach world, but they had structures the size
• 4:50
  of a Procter & Gamble company because it was all their management. They didn't rethink how they
• 4:55
  needed to operate, but I got the benefits of PG Procter & Gamble training and everything moved
• 5:04
  by the written word at Clorox. Yes, you had to meet people and explain it, the doc, but in fact,
• 5:11
  almost everything you did moved by the written word, which meant you're arguing, and they had a very
• 5:18
  highly stylized way of writing, which also meant when someone looked at it, they understood if it
• 5:24
  was an analysis paper right away or a recommendation or a research paper. They understood the difference
• 5:30
  just on the format, and the formats were pretty much baked in so that people knew where to look like
• 5:38
  here's, but what they taught everyone was, I call it the Wall Street Journal, where I write them,
• 5:44
  you tell them what you're going to tell them right away, you have a top line sentence,
• 5:48
  then you support that, so you're like, here's the findings, here's the support for the findings,
• 5:56
  here are the conclusions, here's the next steps, very clear. Now, what that did is it structures
• 6:04
  your thinking, and by the way, you had to write it in order of priority. So you didn't get this
• 6:11
  dump, you know, you didn't get this dump of information, what you got is, here are the five top
• 6:16
  things you need to think about, and by nature, they had to be on priority. Here's what it means for
• 6:22
  the business, and here's what I'm recommending as next steps. They trained you from day one to write
• 6:29
  like that, and what I didn't realize until I left, all right, and I left young, because I started
• 6:36
  young, I was one of the youngest people they ever hired, one of the, I was the second undergraduate,
• 6:41
  they ever hired, but what I didn't realize is they were training my thinking, they were giving me
• 6:47
  a lens, an analytical lens for everything I did, and to this day, that's how I think, I would say,
• 6:57
  one of my strengths is I'm incredibly good at distilling a lot of information down to the key
• 7:05
  findings of what we need to do and what the implications are, and understanding the high order bit,
• 7:11
  and it all started with Chlorox. Now, interestingly enough, I'm sorry, this is interestingly enough,
• 7:17
  when I read about how Bezos runs his company, now he required a lot of pages of work, but he was also
• 7:24
  required everything to move by written word, and then you have to defend it. I don't think he
• 7:29
  would train that way, but the truth is, if you can't write well, you probably aren't thinking well,
• 7:37
  and I believe that wholeheartedly, so if you can't construct an argument in business and
• 7:44
  understand analyze things, you're most likely not thinking properly about the business.
• 7:51
  Now, that training was invaluable, and I brought it forward, I trained my execs, even my,
• 8:01
  all the way up till my last execs, they could have 20 years of experience, and they still were a
• 8:05
  mess, to be honest, their thinking was not that they were, their thoughts weren't as organized as
• 8:13
  they should have been, all right, so they needed to organize their thoughts in order to move forward
• 8:19
  in the business, especially when you have high growth business, and that all started at Clorox,
• 8:26
  that was, I don't think, I don't even know if they do it anymore, it was brilliant training,
• 8:31
  it was brilliant. You know, this is definitely an aside, but I know you'll have an opinion on this.
• 8:37
  Have you thought of the repercussions of everybody, you know, I just mentioned when we first
• 8:44
  kicked this off about how I think people jump into entrepreneurship and they don't take the training
• 8:48
  seriously, and I think that's already a mistake, but that compounded with the fact that now,
• 8:53
  with AI tools, we outsource our thinking, and we outsource our writing, what do you think is
• 9:00
  going to happen in 30 years from now? Well, all right, so here's the problem. I have opinions about
• 9:05
  this because I find myself getting dumber when I use chat GPT to write for me as opposed to me
• 9:11
  writing myself once or twice or three times a week. So there's multiple ways to look at this,
• 9:16
  when I thought about it in terms of what's happening now, all right, in terms of
• 9:23
  entry-level jobs already in certain areas, customer service, public relations,
• 9:32
  marketing communications in general are being replaced by chat GPT, some form of it,
• 9:40
  which means that the people on a senior level have to direct that and have to know where you're
• 9:47
  going, and then you combine that with still many people working remotely, and what used to be
• 9:55
  a platform for learning, meaning that you would write, you know, you get assignments as a junior
• 10:00
  employee and your boss then critiques that and moves it forward, and you watch how your boss
• 10:06
  interacts with other people to move your ideas forward or to get feedback, that is going to be
• 10:12
  lost. So I'm worried about this band of younger employees not having the training. So what that
• 10:21
  means is there's going to have to be really good structured training for them because they aren't
• 10:27
  going to be able to learn it on the job. Number one, number two, chat GPT any kind of AI is only
• 10:34
  going to be as good as the brains directing it, and if you don't have the rigor in thinking,
• 10:42
  it's going to lead to a whole new level of mediocrity, and that is ultimately going to consolidate
• 10:51
  power in those who can't think, and that's a little scary. It's going to create lots of opportunities
• 10:57
  for people who maybe were held back through structure or either a societal structure or corporate
• 11:04
  structure or both, but it also is going to allow, it's going to consolidate power. Now it's already,
• 11:12
  I mean, it's sort of happening anyway when you look at people that understand how to interpret data
• 11:17
  and move forward or actually moving forward faster than people that are actually cranking the data
• 11:23
  or showing people the data. But it is scary. I think about the same thing in banking, a lot of the
• 11:31
  banking jobs, the entry level, a lot of these entry level jobs can be done better with AI tools, but then
• 11:40
  without having an ability to train people up to the next level, people are going to get the
• 11:47
  displacements going to be scary. So tell me about, tell me about, I know, at one point in your career,
• 11:53
  somebody told you you were unemployable. That was a lot was after 20 years. Yeah. Yes. So
• 11:59
  why so it's just, you know, looking back, obviously, that's hilarious. Why at one point in your
• 12:04
  life were you unemployable based on what they said? It was a combination of having a failure. I had
• 12:12
  one failure. Again, I'm a risk staker. That was pets.com. It was very, so it was a very public failure.
• 12:21
  I wasn't the founder, but I was the CEO and I took it on in a very early stage of the company's
• 12:27
  formation and then took it public and then shut it down because I couldn't close the next round
• 12:35
  and gave money back to shareholders. And it was incredibly public. And people, then it was like
• 12:44
  2000, 2001, so the world was sort of in a slump. I would say after that, I did other jobs that weren't
• 12:53
  that compelling and that person basically. He didn't say because you're age, but it was also my age
• 12:59
  and I had a big failure. And I was pretty much unemployable. And he was right, to be honest. I mean,
• 13:08
  it was like, you know, he was right. And no one, I think no one had been that honest with me before.
• 13:15
  And so that was true. I didn't want to hear it, but that's why I made a decision I had to start
• 13:22
  my own company or do something come up with a radical plan B that was incredibly unattractive
• 13:30
  to me at the time. Was there, was there, you know, when you think about how successful you've been
• 13:36
  now, obviously, it's true, actually, that you weren't employed. Maybe you are unemployable.
• 13:43
  Maybe that's a, maybe that's a blessing. Maybe it is a blessing when you're unemployed,
• 13:46
  because I almost all entrepreneurs that I speak to, they all say I could never have a job.
• 13:50
  I could never have a job. Well, but I had been, I had worked my way up and had been a CEO of a
• 13:57
  company called Berkeley Systems that the founder wanted to sell and made money off of that,
• 14:02
  and a company called Real.com, which was the first site to sell movies online and had run that
• 14:08
  and the founder then wanted to sell it and that was sold and made money off of that. And so this is
• 14:12
  my third CEO gig and it imploded. And after that, it's like, sorry, failure, you're done. And I'm
• 14:18
  like, and up until then, I've done pretty well, but you know, it was like enough that it didn't
• 14:25
  matter. It didn't matter. And what's worse though, it's not even worse when he said to me,
• 14:31
  that was honest and true. What was worse is I bought into it. You know, so I bought into this
• 14:40
  failure mentality. So that was, I had to shake that before I could move forward, but I bought it,
• 14:48
  man. And so, you know, I ate what the, you know, what the populace was was pushing down my throat.
• 14:53
  I took it. And it's because I felt terrible after that for multiple reasons. But I'm like,
• 15:00
  you know, and at some point, which is, you know, do you ever see, I know this maybe isn't your
• 15:04
  favorite movie and it's an older one, but do you ever see Moon struck? No, I haven't. Tell me
• 15:10
  it's so, oh, it's such a good movie. You need to see it, but shares in it and Nicholas Cage,
• 15:16
  isn't it? And at some point, she or just turns around and slaps Nick, her character turns on the
• 15:22
  slaps Nicholas Cage on the face and says, get over it. And that's like, I had to do that to myself.
• 15:29
  I had to slap myself in the face and say, get over it. Come on, life is for living, not sitting
• 15:36
  or living in the past and in my head about what a failure I was. I literally had to walk myself
• 15:42
  through all the successes I'd had and was I really a failure or was it timing and it's like,
• 15:50
  am I going to just live in that space? So I would say my biggest problem was I bought the narrative
• 15:58
  until I didn't, but I did buy it. I bought that narrative. I have to bet on myself and I have to,
• 16:05
  I can't, I'm not done yet. So what does that point? Because I mean, when you started real,
• 16:09
  real, and this is what your whole book is about. So I'll just time to get real. That's the name of the
• 16:13
  book. You can get that anywhere you get books. I think starting June 10th and beyond going
• 16:18
  Amazon, wherever you want to get it will put some links in the show notes as well. But this is
• 16:23
  this is sort of your, this is your story about how you, you career success, career success, career
• 16:29
  success, career not so much of success. But then you make yourself back up and you bet on yourself
• 16:37
  again. I think there's a lesson in there because that's not easy. After a failure like that,
• 16:40
  I think a lot of people would have a really hard time saying, I'm going to trust myself to build
• 16:45
  something significant, but you did. So how did you do that? What was the mental model that you went
• 16:48
  to the exercise? Well, a couple of things happened. One is I went inside to a venture
• 16:55
  capital firm after that dissolved for a while just to help with some of their businesses,
• 17:01
  which by the way, none of their businesses really wanted my help. But they wanted me to help them
• 17:08
  and they believed in me, but their business are like, well, she just failed. So why are we talking
• 17:11
  to her? But then I saw the companies they were investing in and that entrepreneurs they were
• 17:18
  investing in and you know, they were fine. They weren't. And I mean, they're fine, but were they
• 17:24
  brilliant? Were they any smarter than me? No. All right. Now, in fact, if anything, their lack of
• 17:30
  experience was going to make them less capable. So seeing what people were rewarding made me take
• 17:38
  a look at myself. And now this is going to sound nuts, but I'm going to put it out there because
• 17:43
  it's true. I grew up in South Bend, Indiana. And if you grew up in Indiana when I did, and I think
• 17:48
  still now, you really had to love sports because either that you had to get another day
• 17:53
  is there, which is the major university, but Indiana's when I was there is known for great basketball
• 18:00
  teams and great football teams. All right. I'm at the college level. So when you look at basketball
• 18:08
  or you look at baseball, they weren't as much known for baseball. Those guys lose almost more
• 18:14
  than they win. And they play so many games that if they brought that failure mentality into the
• 18:21
  next game, they would fail again. And then even something simple, I remember sitting at a giant
• 18:27
  game with a friend in San Francisco and on the guy gets and she was a real stat hedge. Like, I don't
• 18:34
  for what end? I don't know. I don't know why she had to write down the stat because like,
• 18:38
  but she would write the stats down and like she kept all the bat like maybe she's on the spectrum.
• 18:43
  Who knows? But anyway, she was down there recording the stats. And I thought, you know what?
• 18:48
  That great batter with a 0.375 batting ratio who's great fails 63% of the time. And you're like, okay,
• 19:00
  I got it. I mean, all this information was coming. And then also, I just got sick of living in a
• 19:07
  bad state of mind. I'm like, this isn't my personality. I got sick of myself. I took stock. I looked
• 19:15
  outside myself. I looked to sports. And I thought, I'm going to do it one more time. And give my
• 19:23
  side. I only had two years with the cap at all before I was going to be in trouble. And I mean,
• 19:31
  really bad trouble, but I had a house. So I was going to put that on the market just in case I
• 19:36
  ran out of money. And I was going to like, okay, I, you know what? I've had, I'm the oldest of four.
• 19:42
  My mother was almost all my life. And so I've had to figure stuff out on my life. And I'm like,
• 19:48
  I got to figure this out. And it worked out. But I would say I let it go too long with a negative
• 19:59
  thought of myself and my success. It also didn't help that when I, when hats failed, I also was
• 20:07
  my husband asked me for a divorce the very same day. So it's like, are you serious? We had both.
• 20:12
  Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It was sad. I mean, it was horrible. Was there a reason? Was it what
• 20:18
  that's insane? Well, I mean, was there a reason? I would say the marriage was under stress anyway. But
• 20:28
  that's horrible. That's horrible time. Yeah, it was horrible. But later on when he came back,
• 20:34
  when he came back much later to talk about it with me, he said he became fearful. There's
• 20:41
  that word again fear and felt like all he could do was run away. So me going through my trauma
• 20:47
  created fear in him. And he did not a deal with it. And my trauma of shutting down the company.
• 20:53
  And he did not a deal with it. So he decided to run away. And he said, and by the way, he's a
• 20:59
  therapist by training. And he said it was a horrific thing to see in himself that he never thought
• 21:06
  he could get over, which to me is ultimately much sadder and harder than me going through it
• 21:11
  and getting through it, being stuck in that space where you don't trust yourself to be
• 21:19
  to do the right thing when things are tough. That's a that's a bad trade. Honestly, to not
• 21:26
  you have, I mean, yes, friends are important and people you love are important what they say to
• 21:34
  you. But at the end of the day, if you don't trust yourself to make the right decision,
• 21:39
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  if you're hiring indeed is all you need. When you decide to build something yourself,
• 23:44
  what is the idea? Because at that point, you were not an entrepreneur. So now I wasn't.
• 23:52
  So you know what I did. I had been an employee yet. So I think for me, the key thing was I knew
• 24:01
  the world had changed. Now it's 2011 and 2010. And e-commerce no longer took. I loved e-commerce,
• 24:09
  by the way. I real.com was one of the first e-commerce companies ever. That was the site
• 24:15
  that sold movies online. Pets.com was also incredibly early. Real.com had a good outcome. In fact,
• 24:22
  it's sort of funny. Hollywood. Real.com sold movies. They sold cassette tapes. And then they sold
• 24:30
  DVDs. And we couldn't switch to rental because it was a different. We'd have to build a new type
• 24:38
  of software. So even though there were rumors that Netflix was forming out there,
• 24:44
  we couldn't have competed with them because the platforms were so expensive to code then.
• 24:51
  Because you had to code everything. There was no plug and play. And you had to have servers in
• 24:56
  a server farm. And you had to have warm servers. And it's just huge capital expenditure, both on
• 25:03
  human capital and physical hardware. And there was no cloud. So anyway,
• 25:11
  what a war was I go with that. So all of that was so exciting though. And it was exciting to
• 25:18
  create a consumer brand and make it easy to transact. When I decided I was going to do something
• 25:25
  again, everything had gotten easier. You know, you didn't have to build every line. You didn't
• 25:29
  have to write every line of code to create a commerce site. The cloud wasn't really going
• 25:34
  them. But even the cost of servers and coming. It wasn't like you needed a $5 million server
• 25:39
  farm to, you know, to handle 10,000 people. I mean, when I was doing it in those days,
• 25:46
  you still had a little badge that said you were safe to transact. And half the people wanted to
• 25:51
  call you on the phone and give you your credit card. Like that's more secure. You know, it was
• 25:55
  that world. And I thought I love commerce. It's very exciting. I want to get into e-commerce.
• 26:02
  And the only big player really was Amazon. So it's like, okay, I need to map out what Amazon can't
• 26:10
  and can do. And that was my, and I did a whole matrix. I ran it past a couple bankers and they're
• 26:18
  like, yeah, we agree. And then I had this beautiful four quadrant thing. Like here's what they're
• 26:25
  good at. Here's what they're not. Here's where their holes are. Here's where the opportunities.
• 26:30
  And I had no ideas that mapped to those opportunities. And one of those opportunities was the luxury
• 26:36
  market that Amazon would never be able to make a dent in the luxury market. It just wasn't in
• 26:43
  their DNA. And that's not how luxury markets, luxury market customers shopped. So that was,
• 26:51
  so that was going along. And then I did see a friend in a goat. We were shopping. Most people,
• 26:59
  most women I know have good shopping buddies. And I was shopping with one of my good friends. And
• 27:05
  she and we were in one of her favorite boutiques that had a little bit of consignment in the back.
• 27:10
  And that's where she spent her money. And she bought brands that weren't normally in that
• 27:15
  store. She brought product Gucci Louis Vuitton. And I was shocked because she had a lot of money.
• 27:21
  She was a venture capitalist. She I'd never seen her go into a consignment store. She said she never
• 27:28
  would. And yet she was buying consignment. And I'm like, that's it. That's the luxury market that's
• 27:35
  untapped. So then I looked at what eBay was doing. I'm like, and I'm like, they aren't doing it
• 27:40
  right. They're like Amazon. They're like Amazon for everything, not, you know, for previously on
• 27:46
  things. And size the luxury market once again. And that was it. As soon as I got it, I ran as fast
• 27:54
  I could. The owner of the shop was a former tech person. So I called her to set up a meeting,
• 28:00
  talk about doing it together, you know, because she was a tech person. She already had sources of
• 28:05
  product coming in. By the time she called back, I had a name. I had raised a little bit of money.
• 28:12
  I had my first employee identified who had enjoyed the company at. And I was on a roll. So
• 28:20
  and then she wasn't that interested anyway. She's like, oh, I don't know. And I'm like,
• 28:24
  oh, this is right for the internet. And so then I moved really, really fast because here's the
• 28:30
  other thing. And maybe you've seen this in your life. But I've seen it time and time again in Silicon
• 28:35
  Valley. When, which has been most of my, almost all of my career, when you have a good idea,
• 28:44
  you can bet on it. Someone else is channeling. It's almost like you're tapping into something
• 28:50
  bigger than you. Someone else is channeling that idea too. And I mean, just like when pets.com,
• 28:57
  there were seven other companies being formed that were in the pet space back in 1998. But it's,
• 29:03
  it happens time and time again. So right when I was doing that, I'm like, I better execute,
• 29:09
  I better move and execute fast because somebody else has this idea because ideas are great,
• 29:15
  but they're really nothing if you don't execute. And it's how you execute that can make the
• 29:20
  difference between an idea moving forward and being a phenomenal success or not. There was one
• 29:26
  company called Thread Flip that actually raised more money than I did that came out when I did
• 29:34
  and raised more money at a better valuation than I was getting. That could have been a real
• 29:40
  competitor, but the guy did not execute. And I was thrilled. I was just thrilled, put a lot of
• 29:46
  money into building the platform, not building the supply and the supply it's all about supply.
• 29:52
  So again, what's your high order bit, right? You know, and honestly, when you're in a competitive
• 29:59
  race like that, you don't have time to learn that on the job, you have to think that way.
• 30:05
  You have to think that way from the beginning because if you aren't, somebody else is going to
• 30:10
  eat your lunch. Let's say you get something out there that is half baked, but it's directly sound.
• 30:16
  It's just not on the mark. You don't have that long in a competitive world to get it right on the
• 30:23
  mark because someone else might be able to do it better and faster. I see it over and over again.
• 30:29
  What was the activity or the thing that moved the needle the most towards that competitive
• 30:35
  mark that allowed you to? Oh, it was the structure of the business. So I set it up from the beginning.
• 30:41
  So from the beginning where we were going to do all the work for the consigner, we were going to do,
• 30:47
  we were going to price the goods, not allow people to price because at the beginning we didn't
• 30:52
  have this advantage, but I knew very shortly when you have tens of thousands of people and now there's
• 30:57
  millions of people looking at items. You will know the prices, they will tell you the price,
• 31:05
  because it'll sell or won't sell. So, all right, so service, go to people's homes to pick up the
• 31:10
  goods. You don't want all goods, you only want luxury goods. So what you pick up is important.
• 31:14
  Number one, number two, we had to control the pricing because people would never price their
• 31:20
  things to market. Number three, we weren't going for the best price. We were going for our price
• 31:26
  within a 90-day window where that item would move because I already knew that I didn't want to
• 31:31
  keep building all these warehouses to house goods. We were a waste station, not a warehouse. So
• 31:37
  the last thing you wanted were goods piling up and you have to keep running space because things
• 31:44
  weren't moving. That means you have a pricing problem. And then the last thing was to have excellent
• 31:52
  authentication to build trust with the consumer. So all of those things were the premise of the build,
• 31:59
  oh, and put a big umbrella across all of that structure, supply and consigners matter more
• 32:08
  than consumers. The consumers will follow the supply. It's all about the products you have in.
• 32:14
  So if you pick up the right product, it'll be so easy to sell it through. And if you pick up
• 32:20
  the wrong product, it's going to sit there and and you've got a big problem. It won't be just
• 32:25
  a pricing problem, which meant that we weren't going in the overstock mode because if it didn't
• 32:30
  sell the first time, it's probably not going to sell easily the second time. So all of those things
• 32:37
  were the premises of the building at business and it came to me very quick. Now, look, I have been
• 32:43
  working for years. So I already knew I didn't want to build up inventory. I didn't know I didn't
• 32:47
  want a big warehouse. I already understood the consumer dynamics and the consigner dynamics. And
• 32:53
  I already talked a little at the beginning that Clorex trained me on how to focus on the high order
• 32:59
  bit. So I knew it was all about supply and getting the best supply in and the consumers would follow.
• 33:06
  I thread flip guy think raised their second round and went out of business then after that.
• 33:12
  And the real real it was never easy to raise money. But I mean, the business just went 10 million,
• 33:17
  25 million, 50 million, 100 million, 250 million, 500 million, 750 billion. I mean, we just kept
• 33:24
  growing, growing, growing and raising capital to support it. And it really was getting it set up.
• 33:32
  So at that time, thread flip was gone, which could have been a real competitor. They had a hybrid
• 33:37
  model you can post or we'll pick up, but they never really it was too messy. They couldn't figure it
• 33:43
  out. I don't know what went wrong. My from my perspective as an outside viewer, it looked like he
• 33:49
  the CEO was focused on building a great platform, not getting the right product and everything
• 33:55
  about product, everything about it's all about your product always. Then there was thread up
• 34:02
  who was the low end doing everything we were for like $39 sale, which didn't make sense to me.
• 34:08
  It was in the I figured at some point they're going to want to say they're going to move up,
• 34:12
  but I knew they couldn't. If you start low, you can't go high. If you start high,
• 34:16
  sometimes you can go low, but you better be careful. But you can definitely not go high if you
• 34:21
  start low. So I knew that was going to fail. And then there was a couple other sort of weird ones
• 34:27
  that people like they did one with the tagline was everyone wants there wants to be a star in
• 34:36
  their closet to be a star. And it's like nobody none of this people that we dealt with wanted
• 34:41
  people to know they were consigning. And they didn't want to, but it was an influencer model.
• 34:47
  And I remember meeting with the one of VCs like, no, this woman's brilliant. And this is her
• 34:53
  model. And look, she's already at like three million. I'm like, oh my god. So I met with her.
• 34:57
  I'm like, this won't work. But she would they were convinced that that was, you know, it was the
• 35:02
  me generation that would work. And then there were others that came and went, but you know, the truth is
• 35:08
  by the time they were going, we already had a huge moat around the business that actually got
• 35:14
  better and better because as the company matured machine learning and already AI, which is not new,
• 35:23
  right? But our own using our own install base, we're getting more efficient on identifying product
• 35:31
  and putting product right through the right swing line and make and authenticating it and
• 35:36
  doing other things in the ops centers to make it more and more efficient. So it,
• 35:42
  but honestly, it's all about the choices you make. And it's hard when you raise VC money because
• 35:50
  venture capitalists are a unique group of people. They see a lot. They're great at early stage
• 35:56
  businesses better than anyone else. You should never have a PE guy on your board when you're
• 36:01
  when you're growing like that because they don't know. They know how taking value out. Not,
• 36:06
  we have one exception. A guy named Mike Cuman from Great Hill, who's brilliant, but other PE people
• 36:13
  are kind of nightmares. And they understand value of extraction, that value creation. But VC
• 36:20
  people are really, really good at what they know. But I would say, in this case, my vision was so
• 36:26
  clear that they would say, oh, try this. I'd be like, no. And so I would shut them down, which kind
• 36:32
  of pissed them off. That conviction is what it takes sometimes. You need that. Well, I know, but
• 36:36
  you know, they're also used to being the smartest people in the room. And so that, you know, I could
• 36:40
  piss them off. But at the end of the day, the early investors weren't really pissed off that much
• 36:44
  because I went public and they got their money out. But, but, you know, it was so clear. It was so,
• 36:51
  it was the weirdest thing. Scott, I saw that business. I saw all the ways we needed to compete.
• 36:58
  I saw really what was in a flash. I went home after that meeting, after that shopping meeting,
• 37:03
  even though it was a pure shopping experience, I wrote the whole plan out, the whole structure.
• 37:10
  And it was like I was, and it was, and I just knew it was going to work. Even though it was always
• 37:16
  hard, it was always, always hard. I'm like, no, it's going to work. I never wavered. Now, that didn't
• 37:21
  mean that I didn't have to take in new information. But, you know, venture capitalists say more
• 37:28
  knows than they say, yes, it's for a reason. And I got so many knows and so many people saying,
• 37:34
  oh, no, no, I'm like, oh, this is going to work. Don't, don't even come back. I'm like, don't
• 37:37
  worry. It's going to work. I'm going to figure it out. It's going to work so many. So, but all
• 37:42
  entrepreneurs have obstacles. You know, they also have an incredible amount of self belief.
• 37:46
  I think that is the extra. I know it is. It is. But it's also, it could be, it could be
• 37:53
  crazy thinking too. It could be a name. You have to know. It's a hard line, you know, because I
• 38:00
  do think I love entrepreneurs, but I think we're kind of flawed people. But, which in a good way,
• 38:07
  but I love them. I love their conviction. I love their rigor. The really good ones are really
• 38:12
  rigorous thinkers. I love their bravado. I love their bullshit. You know, all those things
• 38:19
  that are really important, you know, but they could be delusional too. I'm sure you've met,
• 38:24
  I've met them. I've met a lot of them recently. I have. I've met a lot of them recently.
• 38:30
  I have, but, but at the same time, that delusion, listen, it will be misguided for a period of time,
• 38:39
  but if they stick with that delusion long enough, eventually, they'll figure it out. Not delusion,
• 38:45
  not delusion in the sense, like a, you know, like a, like a, like a San Bankman-free to an F-T-X,
• 38:51
  or like an Elizabeth Holmes in Theranos, not that kind of delusion. Delusion in the sense that you
• 38:57
  are building something ethically and you're building something real, but the dream and the vision
• 39:03
  is so audacious that only you can see it and everyone else thinks you're nuts. That's what I know.
• 39:08
  But it's a hard, it's a fine line. So, you know, you know, I'm sure Elizabeth Holmes
• 39:12
  board members thought, well, we know from what we have. Anyway, if you've read the story and you
• 39:16
  believe the story, they believed her for a long, long time. But, you know, when I, and I didn't know him
• 39:23
  by any means, but I was around him at different conferences and I, and some of my friends knew him
• 39:28
  very, very well. Steve Jobs really believed he could bend reality. And you know what? He did.
• 39:35
  He did. I love that. The reality, the story in the field. Everything about that I fully believe.
• 39:41
  And Dresa, Mike and Dresan, he speaks about the world being very malleable, being able to bend
• 39:51
  to your will. And I believe that. Well, I think, yes. And I think that's where, that's where evil
• 40:01
  can come in. You have to be careful about it. But I agree with that. I mean, we're seeing it
• 40:06
  sort of what's going on right now in politics. I mean, things are happening that we never thought
• 40:10
  was possible and that wouldn't have happened without a person that's strong willed and what they're
• 40:16
  doing. But I do, let's just take that from on business side though. If you think about it and you
• 40:22
  see it all the time. And I saw it even with the friend of mine, you had a co-director on a project.
• 40:27
  And I'm like, you can't have a co-director because you don't have the same vision.
• 40:32
  If you don't have a clean vision. And if you don't know where you're going, other people will come
• 40:40
  in and influence you on where you're going. Absolutely where you're going. And you need that vision
• 40:49
  for a company, for a movie, for a play, for anything you're writing. If you don't know, if you
• 40:56
  don't have a point of view, you will fail. You will absolutely fail. And let's, you know, we are
• 41:02
  talking about people that are impacted by social media. It's the same thing. If you're just following
• 41:09
  other people's point of view and being like, oh, I'll try this because this included, right? This
• 41:13
  it's like, you're just going to be like, you don't know yourself. If you don't know yourself
• 41:18
  and what you're working on and what your values are, you're at some point that structure,
• 41:25
  you don't have a structure to build on. It's so important to know yourself, know your values,
• 41:32
  know what you're building, know why you're building it, and to have that clear vision.
• 41:37
  It is so important. I don't care what project it is. And that is, that's the other thing. I mean,
• 41:43
  I did not have a co-founder when I did the real real. And I'm honestly, I think it made it
• 41:51
  easier, maybe harder because I was a woman, a woman trying to raise capital and women
• 41:56
  only get about 2% of funding. And I was also a woman who started a business at the age of 52.
• 42:02
  So that was almost unheard of. But, I mean, I did it. So that means other people can do it.
• 42:08
  But I think my vision was so clear that if I would have tried, and I always think about this,
• 42:14
  let's just put this way. Maybe you don't. Women always think about, do I need a male co-founder
• 42:22
  to raise money? Because the stats go in your favor. It goes up from 2% funding to maybe if you
• 42:31
  have a male co-founder, 15%. So your success rate goes up if you have a male co-founder. And I
• 42:39
  thought about it. And I thought, you know what? I can't. Because it would be in name only. And you
• 42:44
  give someone the title co-founder at some point. They're going to think they are the co-founder.
• 42:48
  And they're going to have to have equal shares. And you're going to be doing all the work. And
• 42:53
  it's going to fall apart. But I thought about it. I thought it might make funding easier. And for a
• 42:57
  while women, women's groups were going around telling women that, you know, it's a lot easier. If
• 43:03
  you have a male by your side when you're out raising money. And don't be surprised if all the
• 43:08
  questions are directed toward the man and not you. And don't let take it personally.
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  inbound.com slash register to get your ticket today. When you think about building a billion dollar
• 45:11
  company versus just building a successful company, what are some things that are different? What are
• 45:18
  some things that people miss that don't understand about building nine-figure, or 10-figure
• 45:26
  excuse me, 10-figure company, billion dollar company? It really comes down to putting processes
• 45:31
  in place that are scalable. In order to do that, you have to break them down into smaller pieces
• 45:41
  and make sure that you can automate as much as possible. But it really becomes process drives
• 45:47
  the scalability, and it also on a weird way drives the innovation at some level. Because, you know,
• 45:57
  humans, I haven't seen, and I'm obviously that isn't necessarily true because, you know,
• 46:04
  you have McDonald's franchises that are all powered by humans. But when you think about what
• 46:11
  we were trying to do, it had to be, and there's still, I think, even now there's about 3,000
• 46:16
  employees at the real real, but you needed processes to drive the scaling, and that had to be
• 46:23
  technology driven with human oversight for the processes, otherwise it could never have scaled.
• 46:30
  And then it became tricky because here's the interesting thing when you do something that's never
• 46:37
  been done before, is you need people that have experience, but those people have to think differently,
• 46:45
  and there's very few people I've met in my life that have deep experience in one area,
• 46:53
  and you move them over to a high growth technology business that still needs that experience,
• 47:00
  but needs them to think differently, and it's hard for them to make that shift in thinking.
• 47:07
  Because what they know, and what they've, especially when you get into ops centers,
• 47:12
  and operations centers, what they're scaled in, let's say it's 70% transferable, and they can
• 47:19
  make a big difference, but the 30% is where you're going to get innovation and probably further
• 47:26
  scalability, and that's a creative problem solving mindset that isn't necessarily found in people
• 47:36
  who came from organizations that didn't require that. And so that's where it becomes,
• 47:45
  when you get to that certain size, you want people that are good thinkers, they're still scrappy,
• 47:51
  they're creative problem solvers, but they have to have, you don't want them learning how to run
• 47:57
  an ops center on your dollar. You want them to know how to run it, but still have these other skill
• 48:03
  sets, and that's where it becomes tricky, finding people that are sort of extraordinary
• 48:10
  thinkers in their field that also still want to join an organization that they can make a big
• 48:17
  impact on, but isn't maybe in their mind secure. So that's the tricky bit, the people become,
• 48:24
  you always have to have the processes set up to scale, and it's broken down in smaller bits that
• 48:30
  can be further scaled, and you need to know what can scale in the future too. So here's where we are
• 48:35
  now, here's what we can do later, and build toward that, but then the humans driving that are the
• 48:41
  trickiest part, because there aren't that many people that have 20 years of experience that are
• 48:48
  still great creative problem solvers, because they haven't had to be, or if they're in a company
• 48:53
  for a long time, in order for them to succeed, they developed other skill sets, and those skill
• 48:59
  sets are more political in nature than job in nature. And that political skill set doesn't work
• 49:07
  in a fast growth business that requires, and what I mean, you know, because if you're in a lower
• 49:13
  growth business, but you're still ambitious, you don't, you get ahead by doing your job, but you
• 49:18
  get ahead on who you know and how you network and who you suck up and who you suck up to, how good
• 49:23
  you look up, maybe not how good you're doing down, and you see at time and time again, people
• 49:29
  become the hardest challenge always at that point. And you know, you see it in a lot of turnover,
• 49:36
  I used to have big debates with my board, and they'd be like, well, what that company does,
• 49:41
  should, I'm like, look, we're in the, we're solving hard problems. I'll give you an example.
• 49:46
  I had a board member that was, who was an investor, the company was also an investor in another
• 49:51
  e-commerce company that was big, slightly ahead of us in size and doing very well though.
• 49:56
  And they were having the same challenges we were with having ops people run it, getting a new
• 50:01
  great, I said, well, they're having, I'm talking to them, they're having the same problem. He goes,
• 50:06
  well, that doesn't mean you can't solve it. No, I'm just saying it's a hard problem to solve. So
• 50:11
  that, that when you get to that, because you know, you're not coming into a steady state business,
• 50:18
  you know, you're coming into a dynamic business. Now all business, you know, every business,
• 50:23
  I've met people like, I'm an, how do they call them? Anyway, there's a word corporate people use
• 50:29
  to say they're an entrepreneur in their business. And you know what? There you go. That is so bullshit,
• 50:35
  because it's because if they fail, that company's going to be fine. And they may even be fine.
• 50:41
  You know, but it's sort of like, no, if you fail as an entrepreneur, you are screwed, baby,
• 50:47
  because you've got it, like, who's going to pay your rent? Who's going to pay your mortgage?
• 50:51
  Who's going to put gas in your car, let alone, you know, buy your next meal, especially
• 50:56
  you have people depending on you. That's not an, an, an entrepreneur. I'm not saying there's
• 51:01
  nothing, I mean, it's great for innovation. But if their whole life was thinner around that
• 51:07
  company, getting successful or not, they, they, it's a different level of stress and pressure.
• 51:13
  You know, they're building something, maybe they're building something great. That's fabulous.
• 51:19
  But if they do an okay job, they're still going to be fine. If you do an okay job as an entrepreneur,
• 51:26
  you will not be fine. You know, you are, so I learned this. You are one of 23 women in history
• 51:33
  that they can company public as a founder CEO, which is incredible. Like, congratulations.
• 51:38
  It's phenomenal. Wait, there's been more now. I think there's been eight more after me,
• 51:42
  but thank you. So, but not a lot. Not a lot. So we're still, we are still under 40. Just to be
• 51:48
  safe for under 40 in history. Right. So I just want you to tell that, I want you to tell,
• 51:55
  it's sort of as like a last story, I think it's an incredible story. I want you to, I'll tell you
• 52:01
  what I think the audience would appreciate. If you can unpack first the importance of planning
• 52:08
  the exit when you first start building the company, what do you think about then? And then secondly,
• 52:13
  how do you actually execute? How did you actually execute? How did you decide when it was time to go
• 52:18
  public? How did you, how did you navigate that process? And then why did you personally leave
• 52:25
  after the company was public? So that's a lot. I know that I know that I know that listen,
• 52:32
  I know that that could be a whole hour, but but let's just start why when you take people's money,
• 52:38
  you have to give them an exit. Number one, number two, the real world had no natural buyer.
• 52:45
  All right. So that meant we had to IPO. There was no natural buyer for the company. All right. So
• 52:51
  that was already mine. When we decided to get ready, I knew my magic number for going public was we
• 52:59
  had to be getting toward a billion dollars in top line revenue. You have to discount that quite a
• 53:05
  bit because you only report, you report that number, but you report 35% of it. And the business had
• 53:11
  to be repeatable and predictable. Both things had to be true. It was looking really good
• 53:18
  around 500 million. All right. At that time, I also knew that men would never get our business.
• 53:25
  They didn't. They never got it. Wall Street wouldn't get it. Most of investors are men.
• 53:30
  You'd have to go on the road show, most bankers are men, although they're exceptions. But you know,
• 53:35
  so what does that mean? We're going to have to show what that business is. That was the
• 53:40
  impetus behind the first store in Soho. First, we ran a pop up to see what we didn't know and see
• 53:49
  if it made it was a good idea. Once we gleaned information from that pop up again in Soho. Soho's
• 53:56
  close to the financial district. We figured people could experience the real real and the value of
• 54:02
  the products were so good in the ops centers. We wanted to bring that forward for consumers to
• 54:08
  experience it to enhance the brand. But we also wanted bankers to see what happens in the store
• 54:14
  because then it would be undeniable. New York City was important by financial by the financial
• 54:21
  part of New York City was also important. Hence the store in Soho. Then it was talking to the board
• 54:27
  getting agreement on what the triggers would be. And then I mean, the markets can be very volatile.
• 54:33
  So also being keenly aware of other things going on. And everyone sort of just like now was worried
• 54:41
  that Trump would do a tweet and close the window. Now it's sort of, you know, now it's created his
• 54:46
  own chaos and churn. The other thing bankers were worried about was we work. And first of all,
• 54:53
  when I took the company public, we were still losing money. But we had a plan to get to profitability
• 54:58
  in the business was highly predictable. Put COVID aside. COVID wasn't even in our headset that
• 55:03
  that was going to put a big dink change in everything. But we are going to do that. And so then
• 55:12
  it became, well, we work is losing so much money and companies that aren't profitable are going
• 55:17
  to lose complete credibility if they go public. So you've got to get out ahead of the curve of them.
• 55:24
  And everyone was really worried about that because they were losing so much money. And they just
• 55:30
  thought they could actually close the window. All you need is one company that can't get out or
• 55:37
  gets out and then really fails. Either of those things happening and the window will shut. It's a
• 55:42
  very volatile. It's very hard for companies that aren't profitable. So we said, okay. All right. So
• 55:48
  then we rushed to go out now. What I wish we would have done, which we didn't do. And I went back
• 55:53
  to the, then everyone the board, then you go through the process. But what I wanted to do and the
• 55:58
  board was against me. And I still think I was right. And I should have pushed harder. I really,
• 56:04
  even though I had taken a company public before, it was a long time ago in the world had changed.
• 56:08
  So I would say I was a relatively inexperienced CEO for a public company. We had a CFO that had
• 56:14
  never taken a company public. And he hired an investor relations guy that had never done it either.
• 56:19
  So I wanted this, I wanted a new CFO and a better IR person. And they're like, no, because he's been,
• 56:27
  and you know, we don't have time for that. They didn't even disagree that I needed someone
• 56:32
  more qualified. They just said, we don't have time to bring someone up speed. The business is not
• 56:36
  intuitive. And that wasn't I should I should I knew that a long time ago that I probably should have
• 56:44
  made that move. And I didn't and it did cause some problems in the on the path to profit of path
• 56:52
  to going public. Anyway, then we go public. And I mean, I'm not going to go into what happened with
• 56:58
  in the book, put a lot of drama and sued with weird stuff happening with the company could have
• 57:05
  been Chanel could have been anyone, but like police invading our luxury consignment off as all
• 57:11
  this stuff like boom, boom, boom, all right. So I reported the first quarter better than expected.
• 57:18
  And by the way, here's how it works. This is always good because I always hear people say,
• 57:22
  oh, they beat their first quarter. Well, of course, you beat your first quarter. Because first of
• 57:27
  all, every analyst sees your first quarter numbers and all the assumptions before you go public.
• 57:34
  So you're not going to blow that. Otherwise, you don't know what you're doing. You're going to
• 57:38
  make sure they're conservative, but not so conservative that you look like you're low-balling.
• 57:43
  And your business better be predictable anyway. So we hit anyway, we hit our first quarter. That
• 57:47
  was good. We're going to have we ended the year well. But the stock was floating all around because
• 57:51
  of a lot of interaction that lot of shenanigans going on behind the scenes that were perpetrated by
• 57:57
  others outside of our control, which are in the book, a lot of shenanigans. And anyway,
• 58:04
  which I enjoyed writing about because I did get to name names. Then we're all excited going into
• 58:11
  2020 and the business is up 40% versus year ago. And then COVID hits complete shutdown. The
• 58:20
  business goes down 40 points. And the real real is a company that went to your house and picked up
• 58:26
  things. We are not that company is not a self-posting site. And guess what? Could not pick up anything.
• 58:34
  At all. And again, I think I explained, I don't know, we talked ahead of time. But we had optimal
• 58:41
  pricing for optimal product movement so you didn't build up tons of inventory. So most 90% of
• 58:47
  all products moved in the first 90 days, which meant that when demand picked back up, which it
• 58:55
  did oddly enough for shoes jewelry and handbags, which is kind of nuts on the shoe side. And a
• 59:01
  little bit of clothes, but it picked back up about six weeks into COVID. But we couldn't pick up
• 59:06
  product. So all of a sudden, you've got product selling through and no product coming in.
• 59:13
  So it created it anyway, it's a longer story. I can go on and on about that how we solved it. We
• 59:19
  at anyway. Then so we've come out of COVID got a new CFO. I'm thrilled about, by the way, I love
• 59:25
  this guy. And he comes on and he's like, I mean, things are looking up. So I think we did a billion,
• 59:34
  like a billion in something in just in 2019. We went over a billion dollars. We shrunk. We ended
• 59:42
  2020 like 965 million top line. But we were back on top by 2021. We're feeling like, okay. And a
• 59:51
  lot of management, it was sort of a mess with my team and my CTO was from Sweden, wanted to go
• 59:57
  back to Sweden during it. And it was like kind of a nightmare that former CFO who was going to
• 1:00:04
  be let go tried to get a coup against me. It was a nightmare. This is entrepreneurship. This is
• 1:00:10
  a nightmare. So then I, but listen, I have the last investor in the company never got off the
• 1:00:16
  board. I had a whole new board because they had gotten off once we went public to sell their stock.
• 1:00:20
  So I had a whole new board made a big mistake on recommending those board members because I didn't
• 1:00:26
  consider values. I consider. And I have to tell you, here's the fascinating thing about this.
• 1:00:33
  This is going to sound sexist, but I think it's true. And someone told me this way too late.
• 1:00:39
  Women tend to hire board members that they believe will benefit the company in their area they
• 1:00:46
  need help or they area they could actually an expertise. Men tend to hire board members that
• 1:00:52
  support them. And we'll give them the vote and take care of them. All right. So when I give advice,
• 1:01:01
  now I go think like a man not dead because they're like, I think I know, just get board members
• 1:01:05
  on the support you, you know what you're doing, screw the other things. I didn't do that. But I
• 1:01:09
  didn't hire, I didn't hire, I didn't recommend board members that had a shared value with the company
• 1:01:15
  values are my values. And I had one guy last guy in who was the PE guy who didn't get his money out.
• 1:01:23
  So I get the new CFO in. And he's like, and he's was great. Name was Robert, Robert's like,
• 1:01:29
  Julie, something's going on. I think that guy is out to get you. I'm telling you something's
• 1:01:34
  going on. There's a truck. There's a truck. And I'm thinking the guy's paranoid. I don't know
• 1:01:38
  on that. Well, I'm like, oh, man. And I never think like that. Like someone's out to get me. So
• 1:01:43
  I'm thinking, oh, my God, he must be real. And I'm, but he's getting in my head. He's talking
• 1:01:47
  about it. He's like, no, no, no, because you know, he's out selling the new budget. And I didn't
• 1:01:52
  wasn't in all of the six of nothing, something's going on. And he wasn't paranoid. He was astute.
• 1:01:58
  So my theory is, so the net of it is I got fired. I was told I was fired because I didn't hit
• 1:02:06
  my numbers during COVID. I did tell the one PE guy who I'm sure was out to get me that let a
• 1:02:14
  campaign against me, but I have no proof. But I, you know, you know, you know, when you know,
• 1:02:18
  even though I have no proof, I, but I know proof, I did tell him to f off in a board meeting because
• 1:02:23
  he was lying, which caused the other people the word going, you can't talk to a board member
• 1:02:28
  like that. I go, well, I can't when he's lying. And that didn't go over well. And let's just say
• 1:02:35
  it didn't go over well. Oh my goodness. So it ended up being, I don't have a political bone in
• 1:02:42
  my body. And honestly, I was just working my butt off to keep the company, keep the, the, the wheels
• 1:02:49
  on the guy who I thought was paranoid was astute. He ended up leaving a year later. And I'm
• 1:02:57
  according to him did something similar to what I did because he didn't believe in the new CEO
• 1:03:03
  and told him off. I don't know if he did or not. I wasn't there. The new guy they brought on
• 1:03:07
  had never been a CEO before had worked with the former board member was unemployed. And
• 1:03:14
  anyway, he was fired. And the person who was my parent who I would have loved to have helped
• 1:03:22
  her move forward, they promoted to CEO in October and the company's a good hands. But here's the
• 1:03:28
  interesting thing about the real real. If I left a company that had tremendous potential, a great
• 1:03:38
  committed a competitive mode that had a path to profitability and the only thing that could have
• 1:03:44
  ruined it was bad management. And it looked like that was what was going to happen. But now the
• 1:03:50
  wheels are back on good. So there is a good ending to the story. Even if it was a stressful, you
• 1:03:57
  don't do easy. You do not do easy stuff. You do not do easy stuff. And nothing has nothing has
• 1:04:03
  come easy. But at the end of the day, it's all worked out. You know what? I should put that when I'm
• 1:04:07
  looking back, I don't do easy things. And it has all worked out. And here's the other thing is like
• 1:04:14
  a more political person would have played the game and one, you know, really done it. And I'm
• 1:04:20
  and I've thought about that because getting fired from your own company was horrible. And I thought
• 1:04:25
  you know what? I can't. I still I couldn't because I know what I said was honest. And I can't, you
• 1:04:31
  know, and people that were in the room with me said if it would have been a man, men in the room
• 1:04:36
  with me on my team, when that happened, said if it was a man, no one would have reacted that way.
• 1:04:42
  But the truth is I was always about making the company great. And I thought there were competing
• 1:04:50
  interests in the room based on that guy not getting his money out. And it could have gone that way.
• 1:04:56
  But luckily, then luckily it all worked out, Scott. It all worked out.
• 1:05:03
  Where, where can people, where can people connect with you? Where can people get your book?
• 1:05:10
  Your story is fascinating. I mean, in all seriousness, we could probably talk for another three hours.
• 1:05:16
  And just like, you know, just just start to unpack all the crazy shit that you've gone through over
• 1:05:21
  your career. But there's so many lessons, there's so much wisdom. So I really want people to get
• 1:05:27
  an opportunity to read through the story to sort of consume more of your content. So where do you
• 1:05:30
  want to send them? So it really, Amazon or Barnes and Noble, time to get real audio version.
• 1:05:37
  If you hate my voice, don't download it. I audition to read my own voice and do my own story.
• 1:05:44
  And I won my audition with, oh, that's funny too, because Amazon's audio company picked up
• 1:05:51
  the rights for the audio version. And I had to audition. And they basically said, she'll do,
• 1:05:58
  but we think an actor would be better. And they might have been right, but I read it.
• 1:06:05
  So if you don't like my voice, buy the real book. You have a fine book reading voice, you're good.
• 1:06:09
  Oh, anyway, I had a great director. The audio version will be ready. I also am helping
• 1:06:16
  entrepreneurs with two other women called the Armchair Entrepreneurs. We're starting to podcast.
• 1:06:20
  We're trying to get at least 10 of them in the can that we feel good about before we release it.
• 1:06:26
  But the Armchair Entrepreneurs, where we're helping entrepreneurs, there's three of us.
• 1:06:30
  I'm in the tech person. There's a fashion person and a package goods person.
• 1:06:35
  So it's sort of fun. And I'm on LinkedIn. But you're right. So now when I look back,
• 1:06:41
  I'm going to say, I don't do anything easy. But it, but it all works out, but it all works out.
• 1:06:49
  If you wanted to, first of all, good luck on the podcast. I'm excited to watch it. You're
• 1:06:54
  going to be a lot of fun. You're going to be an excellent podcaster just because you have so many
• 1:06:58
  stories and so many experience, but you're a fun person to chat with. So I think it's going to go
• 1:07:01
  very, very well. I will, I will be a subscriber. I'll be, I'll be a listener because I'll learn.
• 1:07:08
  But outside of that, I want you to, you know, you've given over a lot of wisdom based on just your
• 1:07:13
  career, some great stories. And I hope that people in the audience that are listening that are
• 1:07:17
  entrepreneurs, woman entrepreneurs, founders, people that are just highly ambitious can sort of
• 1:07:21
  learn from a lot of the things that you've gone through so that, you know, they can emulate
• 1:07:26
  some of your success, but also hopefully not go through as much tough stuff as you did because
• 1:07:32
  honestly, you know, it's I'm so glad I'm still learning, but it's not easy. It's not easy.
• 1:07:38
  Last question, I ask everyone the same question, you know, you've had an incredible career,
• 1:07:43
  taught a lot already. If you wanted to leave the audience with some words of wisdom. And I
• 1:07:48
  always frame it from the perspective of if you could only pass on one piece of advice to your kids,
• 1:07:54
  but just think about the most important piece of advice that you've learned over your life,
• 1:07:59
  be it for business, for entrepreneurship, for just life in general, what would that piece of
• 1:08:04
  advice be and why? Operating out of fear is always losing. It's always losing. So I'd say whatever
• 1:08:13
  you can do to understand yourself, to understand why you're not doing something or why you're doing
• 1:08:19
  it. And if you're doing it because you're afraid of something, it will, it will never work. Even if
• 1:08:25
  it looks like it's going to work, it will never work. And that's good advice for every part of your
• 1:08:32
  relationship. You have to go forward trusting yourself and trusting the process because fear-based
• 1:08:40
  decisions have failure written all over them.