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Billionaire Sara Blakely says she launched Spanx with just $5,000 from selling fax machines

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Imagine knocking on doors to sell fax machines—then, years later, becoming a billionaire. That’s exactly what Sara Blakely did. The 54-year-old founder of Spanx recently spoke with The School of Hard Knocks, a YouTube channel focused on financial literacy and entrepreneurial content, where she talked about how she built her own company—with money she saved up from years of selling fax machines, and with no outside investors.

“I started it with five grand from selling fax machines and self-funded the entire 21 years,” Blakely, currently worth an estimated $1.3 billion, said. “I sat down with myself and I was like, you wanna spend your five grand on a vacation? Or do you wanna try to bet on yourself?”

Blakely’s journey with Spanx began in 2000 when she was 29 years old, working as a national sales trainer for Danka, an office-supply company, after spending seven years selling fax machines door-to-door. Her breakthrough moment came from personal frustration: She wanted to wear white pants but couldn’t find the right undergarment to create smooth lines beneath them. Her solution—cutting the feet off control-top pantyhose—became the foundation for what would eventually become a $1.2 billion company.

Building an empire without investors

What sets Blakely apart from most entrepreneurs was her refusal to accept outside investment.

“I never had a single investor in Spanx other than me,” she said.

The Florida State University grad started Spanx while still working her day job at Danka, spending nights researching fabrics, patents, and trademark designs. She wrote her own patent application, secured the Spanx trademark for $150, and found a hosiery mill willing to produce her prototype after multiple rejections. But by disallowing outside investment, she maintained total control over her company, and its profits.

A breakthrough at Neiman Marcus

When asked about the craziest thing she did as a business owner when just starting out, Blakely said she had just secured placement for Spanx in Neiman Marcus, but after noticing she was put in a “pocket” in the store’s expansive hosiery department, she bought bins at Office Depot and placed them at every cash register throughout the store—”which is so, so not okay,” she admitted.

“Neiman Marcus has a very strict visual department, but everybody thought somebody else approved it,” she said. “So I was trying to get the product out of the sleepiest corner of the store and move it around to where the customers actually were … You do whatever it takes.”

Blakely said her unauthorized gamble paid off: Customers began buying the product “like crazy,” and by the time management discovered the placement, the CEO reportedly said, “whatever this girl is doing, let her keep doing it.”

“I always say, ask for forgiveness, not permission,” she added.

Thanks to Blakely’s efforts—and a timely inclusion on Oprah Winfrey’s “Favorite Things” list in November 2000—Spanx achieved $4 million in sales in its first year, and $10 million in its second year.

Strategic entrances and exits

In 2021, Blakely sold a majority stake in Spanx to private equity firm Blackstone at a $1.2 billion valuation, while retaining a significant equity position and becoming executive chairwoman. The deal marked the end of her 21-year run as sole owner, but bestowed her with billionaire status. (She had become a billionaire years earlier, but her net worth had dropped below $1 billion in 2020 during the pandemic).

When asked about her advice for young people aspiring to become billionaires, Blakely said it’s important to motivate yourself and not get discouraged by outside opinions and intrusive thoughts.

“In today’s world, ideas are the most vulnerable in the moment you have them,” she said. “I waited a year before I told any friends or family what I was working on, and that’s because I didn’t want ego to have to get involved too early. My family was like, ‘Sara, if it’s such a good idea, why hasn’t anybody already done it? Even if this is a good idea, the big guys will knock you off in six months, and you’ve spent your life savings on it.’ Had I heard those things the moment that I had the idea, I would probably still be selling fax machines.”

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‘I had to take 60 meetings’: Jeff Bezos says ‘the hardest thing I’ve ever done’ was raising the first million dollars of seed capital for Amazon

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December 15, 2025

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Today, Amazon’s market cap is hovering around $2.38 trillion, and founder Jeff Bezos is one of the world’s richest men, worth $236.1 billion. But three decades ago, in 1995, getting the first million dollars in seed capital for Amazon was more grueling than any challenge that would follow. One year ago, at New York’s Dealbook Summit, Bezos told Andrew Ross Sorkin those early fundraising efforts were an absolute slog, with dozens of meetings with angel investors—the vast majority of which were “hard-earned no’s.”

“I had to take 60 meetings,” Bezos said, in reference to the effort required to convince angel investors to sink tens of thousands of dollars into his company. “It was the hardest thing I’ve ever done, basically.”

The structure was straightforward: Bezos said he offered 20% of Amazon for a $5 million valuation. He eventually got around 20 investors to each invest around $50,000. But out of those 60 meetings he took around that time, 40 investors said no—and those 40 “no’s” were particularly soul-crushing because before getting an answer, each back-and-forth required “multiple meetings” and substantial effort.

Bezos said he had a hard time convincing investors selling books over the internet was a good idea. “The first question was what’s the internet? Everybody wanted to know what the internet was,” Bezos recalled. Few investors had heard of the World Wide Web, let alone grasped its commercial potential.

That said, Bezos admitted brutal honesty with his potential investors may have played a role in getting so many rejections.

“I would always tell people I thought there was a 70% chance they would lose their investment,” he said. “In retrospect, I think that might have been a little naive. But I think it was true. In fact, if anything, I think I was giving myself better odds than the real odds.”

Bezos said getting those investors on board in the mid-90s was absolutely critical. “The whole enterprise could have been extinguished then,” he said.

You can watch Bezos’ full interview with Andrew Ross Sorkin below. He starts talking about this interview gauntlet for seed capital around the 33-minute mark.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com



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Google cofounder Sergey Brin said he was ‘spiraling’ before returning to work on Gemini

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December 15, 2025

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Google cofounder Sergey Brin thought retiring from Google in 2019 would mean quietly studying physics for days on end in cafés. 

But when COVID hit soon after, he realized he may have made a mistake.

“That didn’t work because there were no more cafés,” he told students at Stanford University’s School of Engineering centennial celebration last week, Business Insider reported.

The transition from president of Google parent company Alphabet to a 40-something retiree ended up not being as smooth as he imagined, and soon after he said he was “spiraling” and “kind of not being sharp” as he stepped away from busy corporate life.

Therefore, when Google began allowing small numbers of employees back into the office, Brin tagged along and put his efforts into what would become Google’s AI model, Gemini. Despite being the world’s fourth-richest man with a net worth of $247 billion, retirement wasn’t for him, he said.

“To be able to have that technical creative outlet, I think that’s very rewarding,” Brin said. “If I’d stayed retired, I think that would’ve been a big mistake.”

By 2023, Brin was back to work in a big way, visiting the company’s office three to four times a week, the Wall Street Journalreported, working with researchers and holding weekly discussions with Google employees about new AI research. He also reportedly had a hand in some personnel decisions, like hiring. 

Skip forward to 2025 and Brin’s plans for a peaceful retirement of quiet study are out the window. In February, he made waves for an internal memo in which, despite Google’s three-day in-office policy, he recommended Google employees go into the company’s Mountain View, Calif. offices at least every weekday, and that 60 hours a week was the “sweet spot” of productivity.

Brin’s newfound efforts at work may have been necessary as OpenAI’s release of ChatGPT in 2022 caught the tech giant off guard, after it had led the field of AI research with DeepMind and Google Brain for years.

To be sure, Google for its part has been rising in the AI race. Analysts raved last month about Gemini 3, the company’s latest update to its LLM, and Google’s stock is up about 8% since its release. Meanwhile, OpenAI earlier this month declared a “code red,” its highest alert level, to improve ChatGPT. 

Brin added in the talk at Stanford that Google has an advantage in the AI arms race precisely because of the foundation it laid over years through its neural network research, its custom AI chips, and its data center infrastructure.

“Very few have that scale,” he said.



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Gen Z grads are now being given ‘resilience’ training at PwC U.K. to toughen up for the job

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December 15, 2025

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Gen Z is often branded a “lazy” generation of workers with no ambition to climb the corporate ladder. But PwC U.K. says the real challenge isn’t motivation—it’s resilience. These young professionals are eager to succeed in their own way, but the pandemic may have left them with gaps in essential skills. So the “Big Four” consulting firm is taking matters into its own hands with “resilience” training for fresh-faced hires. 

“Quite often we are struck that the graduates [who] join us—who are meeting all the cognitive tests we’ve set—they don’t always have the resilience,” Phillippa O’Connor, chief people officer at PwC U.K., recently toldThe Sunday Times. “They don’t always have the human skills that we want to deploy onto the client work we pass them towards.”

“We’ve really doubled down, particularly [with] this year’s graduates,” O’Connor continued. “We’re doing a whole load of separate training in their first six months with us, really about resilience, really about some of those communication skills.”

The executive described resilience as the ability to handle day-to-day work dynamics—especially pressure, criticism, or sticky situations. That skill, she said, is particularly crucial in a deal-making environment, where managing challenges is a “core” part of the job.

According to O’Connor, many younger workers simply didn’t get the chance to build that muscle during the pandemic, when lockdowns disrupted education and early workplace experiences that would normally help develop it.

But by offering this special training, PwC is ensuring the talent that fills its 1,300 open U.K. graduate jobs this year—which received around 47,000 applications—are well-equipped to succeed. 

Fortune reached out to PwC for comment. 

Companies are offering Gen Z special training 

PwC’s “resilience” training is just one example of how employers have been stepping up to ensure Gen Z is primed to succeed in the workforce. 

In 2023, fellow “Big Four” consulting giant KPMGsupplied extra instruction to its Gen Z hires. The business provided training for its graduate talent, out of concern they were struggling to adapt to professional life—particualry when it came to “soft skills,” how to give presentations, work in a team, and manage projects. 

The chief people officer of $1.5 billion data protection start-up Cohesity, Rebecca Adams, has also pushed for inter-generational cohesiveness. 

Earlier this year the executive led the charge to skill bosses in managing the young professionals, citing that Gen Z responds to feedback differently: “They want to know why, how—they want constant feedback.” On the flipside, she described having to teach “basic things” to young staffers that would mind-boggle their Gen X counterparts. 

“How do I manage my calendar? You actually have to accept the meeting request,” Adams explained toFortune in September. “You can’t just walk out of the meeting that you’re in because you have another one while it’s still going on.”

Charitable organizations are also stepping up to solve Gen Z’s professional pitfalls. Radical Hope is a nonprofit helping equip college students with essential skills including communication, interpersonal dexterity, and emotional intelligence. It began as a pilot program at New York University back in 2020, after experts noted “elevated anxiety, stress, and depression” among students within the previous years—and has spread to 75 college campuses so far.  

Liz Feld, the CEO of Radical Hope, hopes the Gen Z trainees will become adept in the skills “we all got growing up at the kitchen table.” Even the little things, like small talk, can be a challenge for the young hopefuls striving to one day succeed in the workplace. 

“They won’t ask someone, ‘Do you want to go to the dining hall and grab dinner, you want to go grab a beer, you want to go for a walk, you want to get a coffee?’” Feld told Fortune, adding that if someone says “no,” their confidence is crushed. “They internalize the whole thing. The face-to-face rejection is what they’re afraid of.”



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