Sara Blakely

It's I went through this thing, and then I took a long time to figure it out, and now that I have figured it out, I wanna help other people who are like me figure it out.

Sara Blakely was like, "Man, none of these underwear, like, you know, hide the, hide the bad and show the good." And so then she created Spanx, and then Spanx went on to sell for a billion dollars to Blackstone, I think, earlier last year.

And so you can absolutely build a massive business just trying to solve a very personal problem to yourself.

Differently, Zuck started in his dorm room to make some sort of platform for horny college kids that eventually would become Facebook.

Mm-hmm.

And you know, my heroes in business are Sara Blakely and Joanna Nix and, uh-

Yeah

...

That's what happens.

Sarah Blakely tells the same fucking story about Spanx because that's the story.

This is the story about who I became, how I became, who I am.

So I've got to keep reliving it and keep talking about it.

And I was like, OK.

And at the time, it was really only Sarah Blakely who was like and maybe Ali Webb was just kind of exiting some of her company at the time.

And there wasn't a whole lot of people, which is so crazy to say just a little while ago.

And so I, my husband was like, he came home from a few of these dinners with some guys that he went to dinner with who were like guys who were ahead of him.

The thing that I wanna share is that I really didn't know what I was getting into with Running Man.

I knew that I wanted to go because I follow Jesse Itzler and love his wife, Sara Blakely, CEO of Spanx.

And I'll tell you, there is nothing more raw than being out in the middle of nowhere.

This was about an hour and a half north of Atlanta, Georgia, near Rome, Georgia, and it was a lot of dirt, [laughs] a lot of grass, and the track is actually grass as well.

And that was really, really cool to see.

I personally got to have a very fun personal dream fulfilled.

I met my girl crush of over seven years now that I've been following religiously, [laughs] and that is Sara Blakely, the CEO of Spanx.

And I happen to know her brother through a company that I consult for, and it was so fun because his name is Ford Blakely.

And I do recommend if you can to pause this episode and go back and listen to episode one of this series, if you have not had a chance to quite yet.

Now, When I think of somebody who really doesn't play small in their life, their career, and how they show up, I think about people like Sara Blakely.

Sara Blakely cut the feet off of a pair of pantyhose, filed her own patent, got rejected by factory after factory, and tried on her prototype, in a Neiman Marcus bathroom before she ever had a dollar of outside funding or even more so ever had another person in the hosiery industry tell her that her idea was even good.

She actually called herself a billion dollar founder.

before the evidence existed to back it up.

Now, I've never sold, obviously.

I like to think I would be like Sarah Blakely with Spanx, where she sold her company and gave everybody, every employee got a bonus.

I think that's nice.

I'm sure it was contingent upon sticking around.