Coaching Yourself Through Adversity

Pets.com was my first big first failure, and boy, was it a big one. So at some point, I sort of kicked myself in the rear and said get over yourself, get over it. This isn't who you are and let's move forward. But in all honesty, it took a long time and too long. And so sports helped me and part of it was like, I've got to be objective about this. I can't take another's input because their input really isn't reflective of me. It's reflective of their own point of view and a point in time. And then I just get a little tougher.

I have always admired that about you. I admire many things about you. But you are... You're so strong and you're so tenacious. And I'm curious, what were some of the ways and what were some of the lessons that you learned from the Pets.com collapse that inform or change the way that you lead now at The RealReal?

Well, let's go back a little further, and you brought this up at the beginning of the interview, when you're eight years old and the oldest of four kids and you're told your mother is dying. That's pretty remarkable. It's a remarkable thing to do as a child. And it builds up a whole different set of characteristics that most people... You don't want people to go through it, but it builds up a resilience and in our sense it ended up building up sort of a dark sense of humor because first of all, they misdiagnosed her. At first they said she had Encephalitis. And then later I was MS. But she went through so many experimental treatments. So you never.... You always have this feeling like your mother's going to die. So at that point, as a kid, you just get on with it. But I was the oldest kid, so I took on a lot of responsibility. And I think that served me well when even though, horrible thing. But that adversity serves me well when things happen. When I started this company, The RealReal I felt like, even if I failed, nothing... I'd already failed so publicly and so big that it didn't matter anymore. And I lived through it.

All your fears were gone! What is there to be scared of?

Well, you shouldn't be afraid anyway, because what are you going to do? You're going to get up and do it again. People fail all the time. And who cares what other people think of you as long as you're ethical and you're doing the right thing and you didn't do anything that's horrific. So you just look at it. And I think in a weird way, Pets.com was liberating because I think one of the biggest things that stops people from succeeding is the fear of failure. Well, once you fail so big, so publicly, you're like, OK, I did that and I'm here and I'm alive and it's fine and it took a long time for it to be fine, but now it's fine. But having that big failure frees you up. You're like, OK, I may fail again. And if I do, I'll get up again. So it really did free me up.