Technology

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 something even more valuable: a blunt look at the messy realities of leadership. 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.

If you’re of a certain age, you definitely remember it. The online pet supplies startup had become instantly recognizable thanks to its memorable sock puppet mascot and catchy slogan, “Because pets can’t drive.” But what seemed like just a fleeting moment in the dot-com bubble’s burst would cast a shadow over Wainwright’s career for nearly a decade. “When I would talk to recruiters, it was like, ‘No one’s going to hire you anymore,’” Wainwright said in an interview with this editor earlier this week.

It came as a shock, given that Wainwright’s career trajectory initially seemed unstoppable. After cutting her teeth at Clorox, she rose through tech companies in the ‘90s when female leadership in the sector was exceedingly rare. As CEO of Berkeley Systems and later the online video store Reel.com, she worked “tons of hours” but was happy and, by her telling, succeeding, including growing Reel.com’s revenue from $3 million to $25 million — a time during which the company was sold to Hollywood Video. “I just operated better without a boss,” she said.

Then came the collapse that would have permanently derailed many careers. In 2000, Wainwright took Pets.com public, only to shut it down later that same year during the dot-com bubble burst. The professional blow was exacerbated by a personal one: she says that on the very same day she informed employees of the company’s closure, her husband asked for a divorce.

“My work is gone, I’m getting a divorce, and I don’t have children,” Wainwright, then 42, recalls thinking as she faced what felt like total life collapse. Making matters worse, the media coverage was “incredibly negative and intrusive,” to the point that she says days after the company’s closure, reporters showed up at her doorstep.

Wainwright describes what followed as a kind of long winter, where she was only offered roles leading turnaround efforts at failing companies. But that crossroads led to a remarkable second act. In 2010, she founded The RealReal, helping in the process to pioneer the luxury consignment market online. 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. It’s also a publicly traded company; in her second trip to Wall Street, in 2019, Wainwright took the outfit through the traditional IPO process.

Unfortunately, this triumphant comeback has its own harsh chapter. In 2022, Wainwright was abruptly pushed out of The RealReal by board members she had recommended – another twist she doesn’t shy away from sharing. Instead, she names names in the book, and earlier this week, she described the move as a “power play” by an investor who “didn’t get his money out of the company and thought he could run the company better.”

Wainwright — who fully supports the company’s current CEO (she was the company’s first hire) — is still pissed off. She noted in conversation that “no founder is ever going to say they need to be shot and removed,” and it’s that honestly that makes the book – and Wainwright herself — so refreshing. In the corporate world, where people often spin narratives to make themselves look bulletproof, Wainwright is a straight shooter; if she doesn’t like something, she isn’t going to hold back her punches. If someone spins the story differently than she sees it, she’ll call it out. Where she messes up, she says so.

Even better about this memoir — in this reader’s opinion — is Wainwright’s ability to offer not just personal revelations but practical wisdom. She walks readers through her decision to bonus her sales staff a certain way, and shares her learnings about a 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.”

There’s also an interesting new chapter unfolding. Wainwright is continuing her entrepreneurial journey with Ahara, a nutrition company that’s developing personalized dietary recommendations based on genetics and individual needs.

You can find our full conversation here, via TechCrunch’s StrictlyVC Download podcast. In the meantime, if you’re interested in a compelling read that’s both memoir and manual, offering founders something far more valuable than idealized success stories, you can pick up the book here.

Said Wainwright when we spoke, “I personally wrote it for entrepreneurs to give them a realistic view and hopefully inspire them and, you know, maybe they’ll think twice and not make the mistakes I made.”

Technology

Pintarnya raises $16.7M to power jobs and financial services in Indonesia

Pintarnya, an Indonesian employment platform that goes beyond job matching by offering financial services along with full-time and side-gig opportunities, said it has raised a $16.7 million Series A round.

The funding was led by Square Peg with participation from existing investors Vertex Venture Southeast Asia & India and East Ventures.

Ghirish Pokardas, Nelly Nurmalasari, and Henry Hendrawan founded Pintarnya in 2022 to tackle two of the biggest challenges Indonesians face daily: earning enough and borrowing responsibly.

“Traditionally, mass workers in Indonesia find jobs offline through job fairs or word of mouth, with employers buried in paper applications and candidates rarely hearing back. For borrowing, their options are often limited to family/friend or predatory lenders with harsh collection practices,” Henry Hendrawan, co-founder of Pintarnya, told TechCrunch. “We digitize job matching with AI to make hiring faster and we provide workers with safer, healthier lending options — designed around what they can reasonably afford, rather than pushing them deeper into debt.”

Around 59% of Indonesia’s 150 million workforce is employed in the informal sector, highlighting the difficulties these workers encounter in accessing formal financial services because they lack verifiable income and official employment documentation.

Pintarnya tackles this challenge by partnering with asset-backed lenders to offer secured loans, using collateral such as gold, electronics, or vehicles, Hendrawan added.

Since its seed funding in 2022, the platform currently serves over 10 million job seeker users and 40,000 employers nationwide. Its revenue has increased almost fivefold year-over-year and expects to reach break-even by the end of the year, Hendrawn noted. Pintarnya primarily serves users aged 21 to 40, most of whom have a high school education or a diploma below university level. The startup aims to focus on this underserved segment, given the large population of blue-collar and informal workers in Indonesia.

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“Through the journey of building employment services, we discovered that our users needed more than just jobs — they needed access to financial services that traditional banks couldn’t provide,” said Hendrawan. “We digitize job matching with AI to make hiring faster and we provide workers with safer, healthier lending options — designed around what they can reasonably afford, rather than pushing them deeper into debt.”

Pintarnya Founders Press Kit — image credits: Pintarnya (Founders of Pintarnya Ghirish Pokardas, Nelly Nurmalasari, and Henry Hendrawan)

While Indonesia already has job platforms like JobStreet, Kalibrr, and Glints, these primarily cater to white-collar roles, which represent only a small portion of the workforce, according to Hendrawan. Pintarnya’s platform is designed specifically for blue-collar workers, offering tailored experiences such as quick-apply options for walk-in interviews, affordable e-learning on relevant skills, in-app opportunities for supplemental income, and seamless connections to financial services like loans.

The same trend is evident in Indonesia’s fintech sector, which similarly caters to white-collar or upper-middle-class consumers. Conventional credit scoring models for loans, which rely on steady monthly income and bank account activity, often leave blue-collar workers overlooked by existing fintech providers, Hendrawan explained.

When asked about which fintech services are most in demand, Hendrawan mentioned, “Given their employment status, lending is the most in-demand financial service for Pintarnya’s users today. We are planning to ‘graduate’ them to micro-savings and investments down the road through innovative products with our partners.”

The new funding will enable Pintarnya to strengthen its platform technology and broaden its financial service offerings through strategic partnerships. With most Indonesian workers employed in blue-collar and informal sectors, the co-founders see substantial growth opportunities in the local market. Leveraging their extensive experience in managing businesses across Southeast Asia, they are also open to exploring regional expansion when the timing is right.

“Our vision is for Pintarnya to be the everyday companion that empowers Indonesians to not only make ends meet today, but also plan, grow, and upgrade their lives tomorrow … In five years, we see Pintarnya as the go-to super app for Indonesia’s workers, not just for earning income, but as a trusted partner throughout their life journey,” Hendrawan said. “We want to be the first stop when someone is looking for work, a place that helps them upgrade their skills, and a reliable guide as they make financial decisions.”

Technology

OpenAI warns against SPVs and other ‘unauthorized’ investments

In a new blog post, OpenAI warns against “unauthorized opportunities to gain exposure to OpenAI through a variety of means,” including special purpose vehicles, known as SPVs.

“We urge you to be careful if you are contacted by a firm that purports to have access to OpenAI, including through the sale of an SPV interest with exposure to OpenAI equity,” the company writes. The blog post acknowledges that “not every offer of OpenAI equity […] is problematic” but says firms may be “attempting to circumvent our transfer restrictions.”

“If so, the sale will not be recognized and carry no economic value to you,” OpenAI says.

Investors have increasingly used SPVs (which pool money for one-off investments) as a way to buy into hot AI startups, prompting other VCs to criticize them as a vehicle for “tourist chumps.”

Business Insider reports that OpenAI isn’t the only major AI company looking to crack down on SPVs, with Anthropic reportedly telling Menlo Ventures it must use its own capital, not an SPV, to invest in an upcoming round.

Technology

Meta partners with Midjourney on AI image and video models

Meta is partnering with Midjourney to license the startup’s AI image and video generation technology, Meta Chief AI Officer Alexandr Wang announced Friday in a post on Threads. Wang says Meta’s research teams will collaborate with Midjourney to bring its technology into future AI models and products.

“To ensure Meta is able to deliver the best possible products for people it will require taking an all-of-the-above approach,” Wang said. “This means world-class talent, ambitious compute roadmap, and working with the best players across the industry.”

The Midjourney partnership could help Meta develop products that compete with industry-leading AI image and video models, such as OpenAI’s Sora, Black Forest Lab’s Flux, and Google’s Veo. Last year, Meta rolled out its own AI image generation tool, Imagine, into several of its products, including Facebook, Instagram, and Messenger. Meta also has an AI video generation tool, Movie Gen, that allows users to create videos from prompts.

The licensing agreement with Midjourney marks Meta’s latest deal to get ahead in the AI race. Earlier this year, CEO Mark Zuckerberg went on a hiring spree for AI talent, offering some researchers compensation packages worth upwards of $100 million. The social media giant also invested $14 billion in Scale AI, and acquired the AI voice startup Play AI.

Meta has held talks with several other leading AI labs about other acquisitions, and Zuckerberg even spoke with Elon Musk about joining his $97 billion takeover bid of OpenAI (Meta ultimately did not join the offer, and OpenAI denied Musk’s bid).

While the terms of Meta’s deal with Midjourney remain unknown, the startup’s CEO, David Holz, said in a post on X that his company remains independent with no investors; Midjourney is one of the few leading AI model developers that has never taken on outside funding. At one point, Meta talked with Midjourney about acquiring the startup, according to Upstarts Media.

Midjourney was founded in 2022 and quickly became a leader in the AI image generation space for its realistic, unique style. By 2023, the startup was reportedly on pace to generate $200 million in revenue. The startup sells subscriptions starting at $10 per month. It offers pricier tiers, which offer more AI image generations, that cost as much as $120 per month. In June, the startup released its first AI video model, V1.

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Meta’s partnership with Midjourney comes just two months after the startup was sued by Disney and Universal, alleging that it trained AI image models on copyrighted works. Several AI model developers — including Meta — face similar allegations from copyright holders, however, recent court cases pertaining to AI training data have sided with tech companies.

Got a sensitive tip or confidential documents? We’re reporting on the inner workings of the AI industry — from the companies shaping its future to the people impacted by their decisions. Reach out to Rebecca Bellan at [email protected] and Maxwell Zeff at [email protected]. For secure communication, you can contact us via Signal at @rebeccabellan.491 and @mzeff.88.

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