It’s never too late to succeed: How this 60-year-old founder took her business from zero to $500 million in 6 years

One ter­ri­ble day in Novem­ber 2000, Julie Wain­wright’s hus­band asked her for a divorce. That same day, Wain­wright, then the CEO of Pets​.com, deter­mined she would have to shut down the com­pa­ny. She had led the e‑commerce busi­ness through its mete­oric rise and IPO, and now it was crashing.

“It failed, and I became sort of a pari­ah,” says Wain­wright, speak­ing at the Van­i­ty Fair Founders Fair in New York City. “I was the dumb­est per­son in the Val­ley. It was a lit­tle tough.”

Wain­wright says she was 17 years too ear­ly with Pets​.com (this year PetS­mart bought pet food and prod­uct site Chewy​.com for $3.35 bil­lion). Though she was­n’t the founder, Wain­wright had been with the com­pa­ny since Pets​.com was only two peo­ple and a germ of an idea.

Between the demise of Pets​.com and her divorce, “it was just a dark cloud descend­ed,” she says. For a while Wain­wright did­n’t do much besides paint and work out. She took a job work­ing in ven­ture cap­i­tal and field­ed a num­ber of lame (by her own account) CEO job offers. But she was­n’t inspired.

After sev­er­al years Wain­wright real­ized that her sit­u­a­tion was­n’t going to improve unless she took action.

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