Some questions about The RealReal’s IPO, from a woman who remembers Pets.com
Perhaps you have heard that The RealReal, an online consignment shop for luxury goods, has filed for an initial public offering under the ticker “REAL.” Ok, fine, so far so what? Well, the company’s founder and CEO is Julie Wainwright.
For those of you who did not immediately emit an ultrasonic shriek, Wainwright was the CEO of Pets.com, which went bust less than a year after its IPO in 2000. Pets.com’s infamous failure is still used as a synecdoche for the collapse of the 1990s Silicon Valley bubble. “It failed, and I became sort of a pariah,” Wainwright said, according to a CNBC report in 2017. “I was the dumbest person in the Valley. It was a little tough.”
Wainwright insists that Pets.com was a good idea that was ahead of its time,...