Rati Sahi Levesque never wants to forget the "really hard" times she experienced while working at The RealReal , she says. After all, they taught her how to lead a company worth north of $1 billion.
Levesque, 45, started working at the luxury resale marketplace in 2011 as its first employee and remembers struggling to get old-school fashion houses to understand its online business model. Later, as The RealReal's chief operating officer during the Covid-19 pandemic, she keenly felt the company's loss of "hundreds of millions of dollars," she says.
Now, she's The RealReal's CEO, credited with overseeing one of the retail industry's more successful post-Covid turnaround stories. Since her appointment in October 2024, Levesque has helped add nearly $1 billion to The RealReal's market value, which sits at nearly $1.3 billion as of Thursday afternoon. The company brought in more than $692 million in 2025 revenue , according to its annual report. In September, Levesque landed on the 2026 Time100 Next List of the "world's most influential rising stars."
The rise from founding employee to chief executive gave Levesque firsthand experience in many of the roles at her company, and empathy for the 3,000-plus employees who work those jobs, she says. The No. 1 lesson she learned from her 15 years at the company, she says: Never lose your " growth mindset ," stay open to reevaluating your preconceived notions and be willing to accept when your strategy isn't working.
"One of the biggest lessons I've learned is not to get too attached to being right," says Levesque, 45. "We've made plenty of decisions over the years that we thought were the right ones at the time, only to learn there was a better way. You have to be able to laugh at yourself, acknowledge what isn't working and move forward."
The RealReal's post-Covid success revolves around an acknowledgment of being wrong, Levesque says.
Like many venture-backed startups, The RealReal's leadership team spent much of its first decade focused on growth at all costs, absorbing annual losses to prioritize acquiring new customers. Levesque was part of the team behind that strategy. But when the pandemic sent sales plummeting, the company's leaders realized the need to "pare back" from less profitable categories, like home goods and children's apparel, that they had previously added in the name of growing revenue, then-CEO John Koryl told The New York Times in August 2023.
The RealReal's pandemic lows pushed the company to experiment and grow in other ways too, Levesque says. At the time, The RealReal ran several large, expensive brick-and-mortar retail locations — including a 6,000-square-foot store in New York City and a 12,000-square-foot one in Los Angeles — meant to allow shoppers to interact with some luxury items and staff in person before making a purchase. Depressed consumer foot traffic pushed the company's leadership into taking "big bets" on closing those large stores in favor of a more efficient and economical approach, says Levesque.
The RealReal now manages a larger number of smaller stores, aiming for efficiency over spectacle, the company told The Wall Street Journal in 2024.
Analysts have credited The RealReal's recent growth to Levesque and Koryl's strategy, which included other cost-cutting measures such as layoffs and the introduction of artificial intelligence-powered tools meant to help authenticate large numbers of luxury goods efficiently. The moves helped give The RealReal "one of the best turnarounds" in the retail industry, Wells Fargo senior analyst Ike Boruchow wrote in an October 2025 research note.
The pandemic, of course, gave plenty of business leaders reason to change strategic course. Realizing you're wrong and reacting with humility isn't always so easy to do in regular day-to-day life, Levesque says.
As CEO, she observes how employees respond to setbacks to get a sense of their growth mindset, she says: Do they try to dodge responsibility or spin a loss as a win? Do they take accountability and show a willingness to learn something that will make them more effective in the future?
Levesque also suggests practicing being wrong, so you're familiar with the feeling of knowing when your original idea is still worth pursuing and when to change course. She got a lot of practice by working in a whole host of different environments during her first 15 years at The RealReal, she notes.
"You're going to fail. Like, it's going to happen," she says. "You're going to get things wrong. But taking accountability for it really helps."
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