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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There's a couple of different things that happened. In my world, the board of directors I grew up with were the venture capitalists. When I say grew up with the company, the venture capitalists and all early investors except one actually left. And I had to rebuild the board and make recommendations to rebuild the board.
Except for one. And that one never sold.
And the price had gone down. But I would say a couple of different things. And this is really good advice for anyone choosing a board. When you get money from people, and let's say you only have one term sheet or two, the investors sit on the board. So you don't choose your board to choose your money source. Later on, you can make recommendations.
And I always thought it would be great to have key areas of subject matter expertise on the board. It turns out that that's one criteria, but the overriding criteria should have been shared values. And it also should have been more entrepreneurial-focused because The RealReal was still an entrepreneurial-led company and was still a very baby company.
Yeah, for a board member. And I didn't go that way. And I would say that I had one disgruntled board member who didn't sell his stock... who, in my opinion, believed he knew more than anybody else about how to run a company. I also had new members on the board, and there was a huge disconnect, and I was busy running the company, and I would say lack of shared values.
And yeah, they came after me and they fired me. And the rationale was I didn't hit my numbers during COVID. It could have been also because I told one key board member who I believe was out to get me, who had a plan for the company to basically in the board meeting to F off and he wasn't going to ruin the company. And then one of the female board members who they were almost all females and
stood up and said, you're not a good leader. You can't talk to a board member that way. And I said, I can't when that board member's lying. And it went downhill from that. So that's what happened. Now, I have to say it was sad. It was very sad. I think the key lesson is values matter.
And it's also a way of operating. So let's just talk about the difference between a corporate citizen who grew up in the corporate world versus an entrepreneur.
So corporate citizens tend to work on politics. If you're a woman, there tends to be room for one woman at the top. So they really aren't necessarily people that you would even want to have a drink with. Politics matters more than results. Let's just say you're working in a multi-billion dollar company and it could be great training for you.
Are you, what you do going to make the biggest difference in that company or who you know? And maybe who you suck up to or whose team you get on is going to make the biggest difference. It is very hard to turn. So politics matter. In a startup, it's much more of a meritocracy. You can't hide politics. Your results matter. And hopefully the management recognizes it is a meritocracy.
But at the end of the day, the data doesn't lie. And every person in a startup is so important. And getting the right way to measure their performance is important. And making sure that you get out any bias in the way they're paid. All of that's important. I'm not saying meritocracy doesn't exist in a corporation. It's much harder to find because it's much harder to measure.
If you have people that grew up in a political world, meritocracy doesn't matter. If you have people that knew structure and they weren't big risk takers and they like things rolling along in a methodical way, that's not what a startup looks like. It's messy. It's meaty. It's risk-taking.
If you have people that grew up in a world where they wanted to be the smartest person in the room instead of a collaborative person, which my board was collaborative, most successful venture capital businesses are collaborative. It's a hierarchical model in the corporate world. In a great startup, it's a collaborative world. Collaboration makes better ideas.
So think about what I said at the beginning. I didn't want to be the people at Clorox and all of a sudden I have people like them on my board who think they know and they're hierarchical. And it's the same thing. You can't talk to a board member like that because what they're saying is wrong and will hurt the company. And it was a lie.
It's a huge disconnect. And I would say there's two problems. One is it was all corporate except this one person. And I just think it's the wrong thing. I think that we need to look at choosing board members differently. Okay. And I think it's really critical. But if you're raising capital, you get that board member. And that board member may also be toxic. But I didn't have that experience prior.
The board members, the original investors, except for one, were pretty remarkable. So you had a great board.
And I think that person would have supported. He wouldn't have messed up and gotten off the board. He blew it. Everybody answers to somebody. So I'm sure he messed up. He should have gotten his money out. He didn't.
Well, it's your story, so you can always talk. I don't think it benefits me to talk that publicly about it. It's in the book, though, of course. How do you think the company is doing now? If you follow the financial results, they're not in a growth mode. Their customer base shrunk by over 9%. Their average order size went way up, which I know they're very proud of.
I think it's dangerous, especially in a bad economy. I'm not there day to day. I would say I really can't comment beyond that. But the stories I know are the stories I know. I still people call me. And I will just go on record, Rati does not call me, but they've fired the CFO who also was the new CFO in the company. And look, I'm not there. So I'm not going to say anything good.
I hope it goes on. It was a labor of love. And honestly, it's a great service. We really changed the fashion world. We got people thinking about recirculating goods. We raised awareness of the issue of unused clothing or really poorly made clothing going to landfills, which is for microplastics. which goes right into your drinking water.
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