Female Founders Are Crashing The Billionaire Club
Source: Fortune, Maria Aspan and Emma Hinchliffe
Photo: SHAPE-SHIFTER: Spanx founder Sara Blakely bootstrapped for 21 years— before selling in a November deal that valued the company at $1.2 billion. (Celeste Sloman)
As the women who created Bumble, Spanx, and 23andMe achieve new levels of wealth and success, can they open the door for the female entrepreneurs coming behind them?
There’s a certain confidence that comes with being a billionaire.
Spanx founder Sara Blakely has it. On this November morning she’s at her Atlanta office, lounging on a red, white, and black paint-splatter-patterned couch and dressed, appropriately enough, in Spanx’s new loungewear. “Mick Jagger just asked me to send him these,” she says by way of introduction, gesturing at the cozy-looking set.
In just two days, after 21 years of owning and running Spanx, Blakely would close on a deal that sold a majority stake in her company to Blackstone, a transaction that values the shapewear maker at $1.2 billion. It launched Blakely, already wealthy from her years of operating the booming business, into a new realm: “The difference now is, I’ve monetized the value,” she says.
Blakely, 50, built that billion-plus value largely on her own—no VC backers, no cofounders sharing the load. And she went about it her own way, making business decisions via “intuition,” operating far from the apparel industry hotspots of New York and L.A., and conceiving of herself as more inventor than CEO. She even wrote the original patent for Spanx’s shapewear herself, rather than shell out for an expensive lawyer: It hangs in a red frame in the company’s lobby. Her path has had many benefits, but it’s also been one that “can be lonely,” she says. “I’ve been on my own island.”
Beyond her penchant for bootstrapping, part of what has separated Blakely from the larger startup world has been her status as a female founder—the rare woman to start and run a company of Spanx’s size. But on that front at least, her island just got a bit more crowded.
The past year has been a turning point for female founders, with not just Blakely, but also Whitney Wolfe Herd of dating app company Bumble, and Anne Wojcicki of genetics startup 23andMe crossing a rare threshold: female founders and CEOs who have sold or taken their company public—and achieved billionaire status in the process.