Julie Wainwright
| Julie Wainwright | |
|---|---|
| Nationality | United States |
| Alma mater | Purdue University |
Julie Wainwright is most notable as the former CEO of the defunct online retial business Pets.com, and is the current CEO of The RealReal, a consignment website that sells luxury items, deals and recycling. In the late 1990s Wainwright was named "one of the 50 Most Influential Business women in the Bay Area by San Francisco Business Times, and was one of Microtimes' Top 100 Technology Executives for 1997". She authored ReBoot: My Five Life-Changing Mistakes and How I Have Moved On, a book chronicling her experiences at Pets.com and SmartNow.
Early in her career she began working for The Clorox Company in brand management and computer software. By age 30, she replaced Wes Boyd as CEO of Berkeley Systems where she was instrumental by changing the company's strategy by making it a leading interactive entertainment entity. As president and CEO of the company, she had reduced a two year decline in productivity. She was among one third of the employees that were laid off from Berkeley when the company was sold to CUC in late 1996.
She then became President and CEO of Reel.com, replacing founder, Stuart Skorman. After 27 months, Hollywood Video purchased Reel.com for $100,000,000 and Wainwright left the organization to be replaced by Jeff Jordan. At this time she had almost 20 years of experience with software, technology and consumer-product industries. She was immediately approached by John Hummer of HummerWinblad Ventures to run Pets.com.
Wainwright was CEO of Pets.com when it ceased operations 268 days after its initial stock offering - "one of the shortest-lived public companies on record" according to Kirk Cheyfitz, author of Thinking Inside the Box: The 12 Timeless Rules for Managing a Successful Business. After shutting Pets.com in November 2000, her husband sought a divorce. Wainwright said that this was a very difficult time in her life: "I had two major life crises in the same week, one public and one private, that sent me on a journey of self-discovery and healing I couldn’t have anticipated."
When Pets.com closed, Wainwright controversially received $50,000 as a "performance bonus" from the board members in addition to her normal $165,000 bonus and a severance package of $165,000. She then founded SmartNow.com, a website centered around an application that enables an economy for knowledge sharing, in 2008.
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