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
One of them was Microsoft, and one of them was Netflix.
Just by the way, if you do take a company public, start actually selling your stock. You need diversity in your assets. Yes. And I did that right away. So even though the stock has never been as high as when I was CEO, they've never brought it back to that level. Luckily, I had diversified enough that it feels very, very good.
You know what? I'm glad we became friends.
Well, that's nice. That was a generous thing for her to say. It's great.
How do I feel about that? Well, it was a little bigger for me. First of all, let's just go forward. Chewy.com, multibillion-dollar company. Chewy.com is nothing but Pets.com. They don't do anything that Pets.com didn't do. We just did it 20 years. So I would say, how do I think about timings? Everything. So timing's really important. So it was a timing issue.
And I did shut the company down and gave shareholders back their money. I didn't run it to bankruptcy. And sadly, that same day I was shutting down, my husband asked me for a divorce. So it's very emotionally charged for me. But it really is time means everything. And I also think, you know, Webvan was the precursor to Instacart.
They went through a billion dollars worth of capital, a lot more than Pets.com did. And you never heard about that, did you? Do you think there might have been a little bit of women bashing going on in there? I don't want to say that. I have been told that from other press people that if I was a man, you know, I don't know. I'm not a man. I don't know what it would have happened.
But look, Pets.com was ahead of its time. And it was not pretty. And I had reporters showing up at my house, showing up at my door. You know, knocking to get, and I luckily, after my husband moved out, a good friend moved in and he would answer the door and say, she's not talking to you. And I can call the police because you're on private property now. And how did you come back from that?
I gave myself two years to either start a company myself. I didn't start pets.com. I was brought in to run it. To start a company myself and make it successful. Or I was going to have to leave town and do something else. Put my house in the market. Sell something. I don't know. Go into real estate in Arizona. I didn't know what I was going to do.
It was Arizona real estate or become a yoga instructor. And I wouldn't have been good at either of those things. It would have been a nightmare. So that was my plan B. And, you know, when you get older and you start a business and you recognize that a lot of successful businesses started by mostly men that got funding in Silicon Valley. they're no smarter than you are.
There's nothing, there's nothing more that they're doing except they're doing it and taking the risk and they're persistent. And so, you know, and I figured, well, if I start a great business, I'll get the money. And that's why I waited also for a year. I was afraid before I took VC money, I was really convinced that with pets.com was still looming large in my past and,
And no one was going to give me money unless I proved it in the first year. We did $10 million in revenue for the RealReal. So I knew I had to prove it. And then I would, you know, it's pretty hard to deny a $10 million going toward $25 million the second year. Most companies don't do that, you know, ever. So, yeah, so it had a... It was a massive milestone in my life.
And, you know, you're happy. Is it first show? Second? All right. So also he asked me for a divorce and I was 41. And it was we had sort of been trying to have kids, but hadn't really. And then so then I had to go through and make that decision. Like, am I going to be? I'm going to be a single mom. What should I do?
So it sort of hit at one of those critical, Nazi men don't think this way, but women have to. You really have to plan out if you really want kids. I had raised my brother in my head. And in reality, I did pretty much have to. My mom had MS when I was a kid. So I was the oldest. So I had a lot of responsibility and felt like
In my 20s, I just wanted to have fun because I didn't, you know, I had a lot of responsibility from the age of eight until I, you know, went out on my own. And so I didn't have this burning need like a lot of people because I felt like I've raised my kids. But then when you're faced with that decision... Like, oh, my God, I'm 41, I'm 42, going to be 42 soon, not married. What am I going to do?
Then you're really up against it. Like, I did check. I saw a few good eggs running around there, checked with the gynecologist, and I had to make a big decision, and I decided not to. consciously be a single mother. And so I made that decision. I would say that was harder than any decision probably ever to really know. And if I'm really honest, has it made me sad? Sure.
It's made me sad, but it hasn't made me depressed. It's sort of like it wasn't It was a hard decision to make. It was the right one for me at the time, but it didn't come without consequences. Regret? No, not regret. I would just say, you know, you don't live that long and having children is one of those life experiences. And so it's not regret.
It's just a little sad, but it's not like, you know, because I know I made the right decision at the right time, but it's a little sad. But, you know, you always have to, When you're choosing a road, you have to leave something behind. And I wouldn't have probably started the rail rail. I wouldn't have done other things I've done in life if I would have had kids.
And to be honest, it's hard having kids now.
It's hard. Close your ears little baby. You may have a perfect child and have no problems, but you're going to have, you know, you know, you've got, there are more challenges with social media. There's more, there's just more challenges now.
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