Time to Get Real : How I Built a Billion-dollar Business That Rocked the Fashion Industry

Part tell-all memoir and part entrepreneur crash course, the founder of The RealReal offers an emboldening story of perspective and triumph

When she was 52, a recruiter told Julie Wainwright that her failure as CEO of Pets.com made her unemployable. But she proved him—and Silicon Valley—wrong and built her company from an idea into the world’s largest resource for authenticated luxury resale. Since its launch in 2011, The RealReal has changed the world of fashion forever, making luxury items more accessible and sustainable.

Time to Get Real spills the tea on the entrepreneurial journey from a woman’s perspective and includes all the lessons learned and mistakes made along the way to a billion-dollar business and public company. This is the book Julie wished she had when she was in the trenches—one that shares the whole exhilarating, stressful, glorious, messy truth about success.

Time to Get Real isn’t just about Julie’s wild ride through Silicon Valley; it will also show you how to:

• Build a business from the ground up
• Hire for startups while avoiding common oversights
• Overcome workplace bias and adversity
• Be a shark—and create a unicorn

With Julie’s inspirational story and hard-earned wisdom, this is the perfect read for anyone who has ever imagined starting a company, loves fashion, or wants an uncensored glimpse behind the scenes from a woman who succeeded in spite of it all.

Julie Wainwright is the CEO and cofounder of AHARA, the only food-first personalized nutrition company that translates clinically validated science into practical and precise nutrition for optimal health. She founded The RealReal in June 2011, bringing luxury consignment online and changing the way people buy and sell high-end luxury across all categories. Wainwright raised sizable venture capital, built a membership of millions, sold millions of items to date, and then in 2019, took the company public as one of only 20 women in history to found and lead a company to an IPO. In addition to sustainability partnerships with Gucci, Burberry, and Stella McCartney, The RealReal is the first luxury member of the Ellen MacArthur Foundation’s CE100 USA and the first resale member of the UN Climate Change's Fashion Industry Charter for Climate Action.

Wainwright was the 23rd woman to take a company public. She has received several prestigious industry awards and accolades including as one of Entrepreneur’s 50 Most Daring Entrepreneurs, Fast Company’s Most Creative People, CNBC’s Disruptor 50, Inc. Magazine’s 100 Female Founders List, and Forbes’s inaugural 50 Successful Women Over 50 list.