Alli Webb didn’t need a college degree to build a blowout business. Webb, the 48-year-old founder of blowout empire Drybar and author of The Messy Truth, went straight from high school to New York, where she jumped from job to job until she landed on styling hair, a career she never left.
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00:00 I really struggled for a long time figuring out what I wanted to do with my life.
00:03 And, you know, I also grew up in a generation where my parents were like,
00:06 "We hope you marry well," kind of mentality.
00:09 And I did want to have kids really badly, and I was excited to be a mom.
00:13 And I loved the opportunity of, you know, being able to stay home with my boys,
00:18 but, you know, ultimately found that I wanted to do something for myself.
00:21 My name is Ali Webb, and I'm the founder of Drybar.
00:24 I am 48 years old, and here's how I made my first million.
00:27 I am a long-time hairstylist. I've been doing hair for, gosh, a million years now.
00:31 I started a mobile blowout business called Straighted Home,
00:34 and I was only charging 40 bucks to go to a women's house and blow-dry their hair,
00:37 which is pretty inexpensive for any city, especially L.A.
00:41 So, you know, I saw this, like, small opportunity,
00:44 and that very much came from my mobile blowout business.
00:47 We didn't really make any money in the beginning, and, you know,
00:50 I was taking such a small salary.
00:52 And I'll never forget once we made one of our biggest hires.
00:56 We hired a president of retail, and her salary requirement was so bananas to me,
01:01 and especially because I wasn't making any money.
01:04 But that would lead to us raising our first big tranche of money,
01:07 which was about 26 million from private equity.
01:11 And when we did that, my brother and I both took money off the table,
01:13 and that was when we first made our first millions,
01:17 was when we took a sliver of that 26 million towards the company for ourselves.
01:22 That was something they wanted us to do,
01:23 to get to have some of the fruits of our labor.