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The RealReal founder Julie Wainwright has a startling new memoir


Julie Wainwright has taken two companies public, a pretty incredible feat by any standard. Yet in her new memoir, Time to Get Real, she offers readers

Wainwright shares the kinds of tough truths that many high-achieving CEOs can relate to but rarely discuss publicly, including the aftermath of what many would consider her first major setback, which was shutting down Pets.com during the 2000 market crash. Like a lot of founders, Wainwright first set up the company out of her own home, but it soon outgrew her living room, and today, it processes many hundreds of thousands of different luxury items each month that it aims to sell within 90 days out of its more than 1.2 million square feet of warehouse space and operations centers. She walks readers through her decision to bonus her sales staff a certain way, and shares her learnings about leadership-evaluation quadrant she gleaned from McKinsey executives, including the realization she had hired one of the worst types: a “dumb aggressive” exec, meaning, in her words, someone whose “need to bully and coerce and to be on top supersede their abilities.”

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Julie Wainwright

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startling new memoir