Julie Wainwright
speaker
189 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard Dec 2024
Julie Wainwright’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Oh, hi, Tracy. It's good to see you.
I don't know if that's true. I think so. It depends on how you measure it. But yes, I've had success.
I could ask you the same thing, but I honestly think it's first of all, you have to propensity to take risks. You have to be able to operate in gray areas. You have to come in with a very strong point of view and execute and then right away iterate if it's not going to work. So you have to come in strong and hot and then say, okay, I was wrong moving over this way.
I think you have to recognize what talent is in other people because no one does it by themselves. You have to have the ability to raise capital if you're in the venture capital world. And certainly that's the world I know, which means taking a lot of rejections and not taking it personally and learning from the interactions.
Even if you learn, I never want to be that person who you just talked to. You have to have a lot of energy. Yes. You also have to decide that's what you want to do. And what I mean by that is there is no work life balance when you're an entrepreneur. If you're doing it, you're doing it. You have to be in. You have to be committed. And you have to see it through.
And what I find fascinating, because I'm just talking to entrepreneurs all the time, if they bring up, I want to work-life balance, I'm just like, why would I give you my money to make your life better? I'm going to give you my money to make more money. So you also have to recognize if you take money, you have an obligation to the investors. Right.
Sure. I think the first thing is I started my career. I'm going to go way back. So I started my career in brand management at Clorox and I was the second undergraduate they ever hired. And I was there three years and I got promoted to Once about ready to get promoted again. And when I looked above me, I didn't want to be those people.
It wasn't even that. I don't think I was that savvy. I was young. I think it was more about every woman in the brand organization tended to go into HR when they left brand. So none of them were general managers. They just looked like old... grumpy men to me. Think of it, though. I'm like 25 years old, not even 25, because I started early. Remember, I'm the second undergraduate they ever hired.
I'm living in California. In the meantime, my former boss's wife, former boss at Clorox's wife, calls me and says, why don't you join the tech world? I'm I know this is the future because the guy in finance had smuggled in an Apple II and run VisiCalc, the predecessor to all spreadsheets, and did what I was doing by hand in seconds. I'm like, this is the world. This is where I should be.
It was exciting. It was the future. And when I looked above me, I just saw men that were most likely going to, as I got promoted, put me in HR. And I'm like, that's great for people in HR. I didn't see myself in that. I saw myself creating something. And that comes from my childhood because my dad ran his own art and design studio.
Both my parents were artists and they created products for other people. He did Flintstone vitamins, bottles and packaging, promotional materials, Chevrolet ads, Kohler annual reports, Midwest type of big brand. But we made our own product. So we had this really bad wine called the J&S Wine Line because...
And then my dad threw a tennis tournament every year and it was called the Wainwright Invitational and he printed up shirts before it was hard when you had a silk screen and it had a big brand, it had a family brand. So I just came from a place where you were creating And then when I saw that I had an opportunity to create in the future, which for me was tech, I felt I have to go there.
That's the future. And by the way, the people when I joined that company were sort of my age. So we were inexperienced. We didn't know what we didn't know. And we really wanted to be part of whatever was going to happen in the future with the personal computer. So I saw that early on.
I know that was a lot, but I would say my nature is toward taking risks and creating and not being held back by someone else's idea of my success.
Just think about this. You're starting a job and every time you say, oh, I'm going to get promoted to that, but then they're going to want me to go here, but I'm really this person. Do you think it's changed since then?
Oh, I think Clorox is better, but do I think it's changed? Look, the numbers say it has. Let's just talk about change. It's not linear, all right? It's not linear, but I would say that there is a positive arc, and I'm not at Clorox now, but I would say, in general, change in corporations, change in our laws. Big changes are not a linear thing, but there's more laws to protect women.
There's more laws to protect women's wages. When I was there, there wasn't even a sexual harassment law yet. It was a long time ago and women were getting sexually harassed and we talked to each other about it and knew who to avoid. But if you went to H.R., nothing was going to happen.
Well, not just me.
But we knew who the problem people were and we knew how to stay away from them. And we also knew that H.R. wouldn't do anything. So if you just think about the world I entered into, it hasn't changed. Yes, I think it has. Has it been linear? No, it has not.
I would say two steps forward, one step backwards. When I think naively, I thought it would be linear. And when I started, I didn't really realize that women were second class citizens and it was new for us to be in the workforce because I thought, oh, Of course we can do it. We're smart. We're ambitious.
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