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could you do me a quick favor if you're listening to this please hit the follow
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or subscribe button it helps more than you know and we invite subscribers in every month to watch the show in person
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i think society goes success is get this job get married get a house what does that do to you it just really makes your
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life feel small the founder of kloss boss monthly fitness program a billion dollar founder wild scanacchio when i
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would watch my parents not really fit in it sort of made me realize maybe i don't
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fit in and then be told i smelled or i didn't belong somewhere everyone wanted
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to box me into something and i just refused to be boxed we spent half a million dollars building a product that
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didn't work was i exhausted yes was i lonely yeah i missed family things i missed weddings i i was just not around
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i have learned at this point like time means more to me than money i want to make sure my priorities are more
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reflective of the human i want to be in my life if you go towards purpose i guarantee
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your life will be more fulfilling do you believe that everybody has a purpose beyond the nine to five i do how do you
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find it so first of all so without further ado i'm stephen bartlett and this is the
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diary of a ceo usa edition i hope nobody's listening but if you are then please keep this to yourself
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[Music] when i read someone's story one of the first questions i try and answer when
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i'm reading through that especially the early years is i'm trying to identify
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what it is that made them either an anomaly or hungry i have a kind of a thesis that
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much of people's drive and their ambition especially the people that i sit here with comes from kind of some
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kind of pain or trauma or early experience that molded them so my question to you
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is what made you hungry you know when i was younger i got to taste something that was so magical
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which was dance and it was this place in my life that it wasn't about the physicality of actually
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dancing it was the ability to make other people feel through something that i did and to be
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able to realize that as a human being you can have that type of influence power connection
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to other people and to feel that when you are four or five years old was just this magical experience for me
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that honestly nothing else in my life could compare to it and once i uncovered that i always wanted to feel that
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in anything i did and i strived in all the work i did and all of you know the different careers i've
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had in my life and the different you know art i've done i've strived always to go back to that
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intention of how do i give to others and make them feel something in their life and that's
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really been this anchor for me and its purpose at the end of the day and that started at five years old yeah
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when i was really young with a don't set a wedding yeah it was just a random
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dance performance that for some reason i started dancing and everyone started watching me and i it
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wasn't anything that was a structured performance by any means it was very much just this organic thing
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that came out of me and i really just loved it and i realized actually in a deeper way that the other
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part of the hunger came from when i danced and felt that feeling i felt like the most authentic version of
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me and i realized that i was in so many settings where i didn't always feel like
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i could be me whether that was you know being an indian girl in the middle of a town
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where no one looked like me or sometimes being with my indian community but being
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in a town that where i was a cheerleader and i didn't fit in there i realized
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that so many parts of me never felt whole and i was always showing up with one little strand of me one little
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strand of me there here and i felt when i performed and danced especially indian dance i felt like the
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most whole version of who i was the resistance you felt and the struggle you felt of bit trying to
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i guess conform to two different communities at the same time so tell me about trying to be an
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american in in a town where there's you know 300 people at your school and you're the only
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people of indian heritage how is that i think one of the most interesting parts of it is so much of this comes from the
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parents not really from the kids and when i would watch my parents not really fit in it sort of made me realize
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maybe i don't fit in it was sort of this interesting way to look at my parents and know that they
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felt uncomfortable and then look at myself and be in different settings and realize wait i don't look like everyone
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else and then be told i smelled or my food smelled or i didn't belong somewhere because
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my hair color was different was just a very interesting place to be kids said that she yeah i
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remember like i mean i talk about it in my book but there were some some really harsh moments you know and when you're
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young you're you're impressionable right things can scar you for a very long time
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and i think for me the the goodness was that i did have this place of dance that
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made me feel grounded and made me feel whole because if i didn't have that i think the trauma
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that i was probably going through by not fitting in would have just burned a hole
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so deep in me that i'm not sure how i would have been able to recover but i had this light right
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and i think that's you know going back to what you were asking it was the light
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that i saw that there is something beautiful out there for me to go and do for the world if i can just hang on to
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it and fight for it and it was a fight for me to even hang on to whatever my identity was right when we talk about
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our identities and in all these labels which i really don't love like whether
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it's indian american ceo whatever all these labels are it was really just i think my whole journey in my life
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was a fight to be myself in any setting and not have people tell me what to do right i think we all struggle with that
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in our whole lives and probably why i had to be a ceo because i don't like anyone telling me what to do but it
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really stemmed because i think throughout my life everyone wanted to box me into something
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and i just refused to be boxed did your parents want to box you into something of course i mean my parents you know
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they sacrificed everything to come to america they obviously wanted my sister and i
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to have successful careers which you know amounted to a few different industries like be a doctor a lawyer
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engineer or you know and then the other part of it was get married you know obviously at like a normal age where you
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could cook for your family and be a good wife right these were sort of the these were the expectations that were
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set in my life and i think that's really the hardest part is when you are constantly
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brought in your life in saying that you need to live by the expectations of others you
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end up either rebelling or you conform and i always wanted to make my parents proud
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so i knew i did what i felt was at the core part of the value so for example if it
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was getting education i thought that was important too i wasn't going to sit
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there and rebel from getting education but there came a point in my career trajectory where i had to say okay like
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i have checked every box in this now i have to do it my way with the way i really want to feel and not conform and
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rebel and i think that's really the whole formula of people knowing when to rebel and when to conform
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you referenced that um you were looking for a different feeling after checking those boxes what was the
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feeling you had when you were doing that job i had trained myself my entire life to
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do well when people told me to hit this mark in my life right and that's like in a way that's like how i
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developed the skills in my life to to always propel myself and execute and make sure that um i was able to you know
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be responsible and move forward in everything i did but i felt no deep fire or passion or love towards it right
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i wasn't jumping out of my bed to go to my office to go and work for my clients right i was doing what i had to
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because you know i knew it was once again expected of me when you you must have friends that are living a life
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that is expected of them and you can start to see as the the years go on the consequence of living a
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life that is expected of you absolutely what would you say to those people and what lessons have you learned about
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living a life expected of you i mean that's not the way to have a fulfilled life you can have a life and you can
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probably check all the boxes and make your people proud in your life but you're going to
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be on the other side of it and feel empty and that feeling of emptiness is the worst feeling anyone can ever have and i
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think people come to it at different points in their life they either come to it when they're 20 or they come to it
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when they're 50. and that's because they haven't done the work to actually ask themselves
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what are the expectations you want for your own life and that's the problem i
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think we're never taught that right no one's ever asked us what we want for our own lives and i
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think society goes and tells us okay success is get this job successes get married get a house have kids you know
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and especially for women it's even i think even a bit more of a closed road and that what does that do to you it
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just really it makes your life feel small right because it makes you feel like you can't
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get past it to go and live for your dreams and ultimately you know i've been
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there in my life where i have felt like the road has closed in and it's left me feeling hopeless
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and that's the worst place in the world to be is feeling hopeless the best thing
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you could do is feel like you can go and do anything change the world and i think
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the more you taste it the more you want more of it in your life at that phase in your life were you
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battling somewhat with your north star that light you referenced earlier which was dancing
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but also you're i guess you're nine to five yeah and what tell me about that
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battle in how dance ultimately ended up winning i remember always having this bounce in my
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step like i would walk to work in the middle of new york city choreographing in my head listening to
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the song i was performing like i in a weird way was like embodying this life that of what i wanted to be
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and then i would get to the office and i would do my work and you know once again
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like i i love the steve martin quote be so good they can't ignore you like whatever work i do in my life i will do
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150 if i say yes but i knew that something was wrong i never i didn't want to live like that i didn't
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want to feel like i was hiding so much of who i was and as my 95 which by the way in consulting isn't a nine to five
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you work like 80 hours a week i mean that was my life and i as i realized that if i wanted to commit to that
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career path that that 80 was probably going to go to 90 it was going to go to 100 was going to be traveling and i was
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going to have to say no more and more to the thing i loved i just realized i wasn't willing to make
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that trade-off and i think that's sometimes the hardest thing people have to think about is what are you
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sacrificing what's the trade-off in your life that you're making and i just wasn't willing to make it at
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that point and i i had done so much in my life at that point where um i felt like i had achieved
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according to everyone else enough to start taking a little bit of a path to being
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rebellious right and i think that's really when i started to do a lot of work to say
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what can i do to bring all parts of me to the table when you make that decision to leave
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bain and company yeah the managing management consultant firm in new york was there like a series of catalystic
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sort of moments or pivotal moments near the end of your time there that made you
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think i [ __ ] this you know like i i read about a meeting you had yeah yeah so it's literally the opening um of
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my book but you know a few a few things happen i would say so first of all most people stay in
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consulting like at this this job for about three years then you go off to business school it's sort of the usual
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route people take so i was in my third year there and a few people can kind of stay on and just continue there i really
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wasn't interested in going to business school at the time i wanted to live i wanted to like be in
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new york city and feel the energy of it and so my third in my third year i had a
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performance at um in the middle of times square for the for this big uh unveiling of ushuayarai's madame
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tussauds statue which was an important thing and australia rai is one of my icons especially as a dancer she's a
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huge bollywood actress and the week before a client meeting gets scheduled at the same time as my
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performance and i'm you know my clients are big clients these aren't these are fortune
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500 companies these aren't small clients by any means and and we're meeting like
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the ceos you know cfos of the company and um i remember talking to my boss saying hey you know
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what i really want to go to the performance i'm not like a big part of this meeting is it okay if i miss it and
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we talked about it really briefly it wasn't a big deal i didn't feel bad
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about it i went to the performance it went well a few months later we're sitting down talking about you know
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review and she's like giving me feedback and she says this thing to me which just
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triggered me and it was is this the job you really want like i don't think that you want to be a
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consultant and i took that in my heart as oh my gosh she doesn't think i'm good
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enough right and i just kind of went through how throughout my life i've been taught to be type a everyone
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tell me i've done a good job and so my initial reaction to her saying that to me was i'm going to prove to you
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how good i am right that's like the natural type a reaction is to say no what do you mean like i love this job i
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really want to be here and the more i started thinking about that the more i realized she was right i
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didn't want to be there it was not the life i wanted it was not the career i
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wanted and that's when i decided to start looking at other jobs that would give me a bit more of the
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flexibility i wanted in my day to day but still pay the bills and that's when
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you move over to mtv i went to warner music right now we warner right okay and there's this really interesting balance
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that i see in you like which clearly shifts in your life where you you feel like you're a um and correct me where
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i'm wrong here but you're quite a good like conformist in terms of expectation
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and then slowly rebellion starts to creep in and it was just just had me thinking about like the probably if
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there is a right balance of conformity and rebellion in our life because conformity makes sense
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you know in some regards you can't just be a total robot right we'd all be living out
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in the desert or something right but just the interesting balance i see in people like you that i meet of
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i mean a lot of them start as kind of conformist or a little bit more people-pleasing especially
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first-generation immigrant families right and then that fails them yeah in terms of fulfillment happiness mental
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health and then that's where the rebellion starts to i think that's the key it's it's
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rebelling for the right reason if that makes sense i always believe that i was rebelling for purpose
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right right and if you're rebelling for purpose i think it's exactly yeah it's
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justifiable right dance wasn't something that was just okay pile go and do this because it's a hobby like it it
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was this place for me to bring together so much of my trauma actually from when i was younger it was this place for me
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and and you know my dance company was this indian american dance experience and it was about me bringing together the
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pile who got made fun of with the pile who danced at her indian festivals and bringing all of me together to say
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when the world doesn't want to accept the different parts of who i am i'm
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going to show you what it can look like right like that's really a big part of
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what i've realized in my journey is when people have told me parts don't fit
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together i find a way to put them together and show you even a more beautiful experience right and i i
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believe even class pass was really the epitome of that too in my life is bringing parts of me together that
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i would never have been able to bring together in any other way and you know i think so much of when
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we're rebelling it's about fighting for something i wasn't i wasn't trying to
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rebel i was fighting for my passion i was fighting for my purpose and i mean isn't that what life should be
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about is fighting for something like that amen when you leave bain and company though
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is there a part of you because that expectation is it's never really yeah they really fully
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shake it right is there a part of you that whispers in your ear and goes you failed
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oh i mean what was hard was all my colleagues right that at that point who had gone to harvard gone to stanford you
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know i was comparing myself to them and i felt like i was taking a step back compared
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to what they were doing but one of the other important things i learned during this time and i think this is an
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important part and for all of us at any phase especially when we're going through these transitional times
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is i also embraced a new community right so i obviously didn't just define myself
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by my bain and mit friends i had this huge artistic dance community that was sort of like growing this indian
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american community that was sort of coming around me and that made me feel whole in a
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different way so instead of constantly being around people i felt less than i went and found a community i
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belonged in even though it wasn't the one that i would have you know naturally
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feel felt inclined to go to and i think that's another important thing especially when we're exploring these
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decisions and identities it's you know back to the light thing it's sometimes
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it's not the people we think are going to give us the light who give us the light so find that new community that
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makes you shine it's such an appreciated point of resistance for people that are
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trying to make an adjustment in their life i hear it so much people say i want to levex situation but i'm scared of
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losing the community that comes with that situation that could be a city it could be a job it could be a partner
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sometimes your lives become so intertwined that you think well if i lose this partner if i lose this job or
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whatever then i'm going to lose all of these people and that really keeps people trapped i
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agree with that that's right that's a really good point yeah i mean and you can find new communities you
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know and i think you have to remember that the people you surround yourself with are your choice yeah right and i've
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had different communities show up for me at different times in my life right for
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me it was the different communities that made me the entrepreneur i was it was my
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business community that helped me build class bus but it was also this girl who was going to ballet classes every single
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day with my with my dancer friends who also was thinking about the classes that they people need to
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take in their life and it was that unique combination of my traits combined with the different experiences i was
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having that enabled me to build what i did ultimately you talk about so you managed to get a now a job you consider
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to be more of a nine to five where you've got time in the evenings to dance and you end up setting up your own sort
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of dance company um how did you get to from there to that pivotal trip to san francisco
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that introduced you to the world of tech yeah so in those two years when i was at
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warner music group i started tasting leadership and entrepreneurship right i started tasting
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this idea of what life could look like when i was living to my own drumbeat right and we
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put on a few shows in new york city during that time that honestly like just were so well received from people the
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the momentum of that the the feeling i felt for of my community support it made me just start feeling confidence and my
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ability to go after my dreams right and i think this is an important part of the
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journey that we also forget is that it's the confidence and the small stuff that actually builds the confidence
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towards the big stuff right because it's not it wasn't okay pile just decided to
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go quit her job one day and start a company it was this series of small steps right it was putting on a show for
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150 people that went well then putting on a show for a thousand people that went well then saying oh wait let me
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think about my life in a bigger way and that's sort of where i was at that moment so i wanted to explore new career
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paths that i could take and that's why i decided to go out to san francisco and
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it changed my life the point you made about the way confidence is built i think is
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so so important because i think a lot of people think they see people like you now sat here um after all this all
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you've achieved and they think how do i get from where i am sat on the sofa in
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this job that i'm in that i hate to being her it seems like such a huge canyon i
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have to cross that it feels like you must be from another planet so that when people see you at the finish line it can
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sometimes be quite demotivating but what you've just said there is in fact there's these small it's a
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staircase small one tiny step at a time building like subjective evidence in yourself that you you can do a little
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bit more than you thought and i'm curious as to what makes people like you take
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take that small step and it sounds like it's you're just driven this purpose is
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dragging purpose 100 if if i wasn't driven to make an impact in the world i wouldn't do it i mean you know you know
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yes like i could go and get a good job and do all of that and live like the expected life and
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be fine but that's not fire right that's not me taking my hours of 5 to 10 pm after work
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and reserving studio space and getting girls together or you know working till two three in the morning to
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make reservations for people to get to class like that's a very different why right and i think that's why i go
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back always to how do you find that why like what is that light that your life is always
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about and i think you know and i feel very blessed that i found something that made me feel a sense of service so young
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because nothing compares to it you know no amount of money no amount of like you
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know whatever press or you know any of that is ever going to compare to the feeling of touching somebody's
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life so many people might like again my dm's are like how do i find my why yeah and
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it feels almost like a privilege doesn't it for people that have figured that out and there's people i
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don't know that will be listening to this in the morning washing the dishes driving up and down the country in a
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delivery van whatever it is thinking i know i'm capable and deserving of more
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but i just don't know what it is do you do you believe that everybody has a oh
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a purpose beyond the nine to five i do yeah but how do we find it yeah i think at the end of the day
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it's it's already inside you it's usually ourselves that are unwilling to listen to it right
00:23:26
to ask yourself what did you love when you were younger right what when did you light up what it who are your role
00:23:33
models and inspirations what's that what's that thing you look at for a second longer right who's that person
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you want to talk to for a few minutes more and why there is something pulling you
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there and you have to be willing to go down the path of exploring it and trying trying it right and i think
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that's really the hardest thing is we put so many blocks on ourselves right and and i get it i mean our society
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tells us this is the way to live that it does not tell you to live purposefully and to go and chase
00:24:05
your dreams i mean that's not i mean yes we do in the instagram world of life and
00:24:10
quotes i get that but the structure of our life is not actually built that way right and and
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like you just said i mean you compared it to the nine to five which is about making
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money right and i think actually and i have a whole chapter where i talk about money because
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money is the most trapping thing that's the reason people are are aren't
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willing to do it usually you know it i and i always ask people this when they're like i don't
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know if you had all the money in the world how would you spend your day tomorrow that's like a very good way to
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start exploring what would i do without one of the biggest constraints right that is probably on my mind what would
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truly make you light you up right and it's not about like buying stuff right at the end
00:24:51
of the day like i mean anyone who wins the lottery like you know that they can go buy stuff but that's not fulfillment
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at the end of the day it's it's a sense of purpose right and i think people have
00:25:00
to just get themselves in a place where they're trying new things and it does
00:25:04
honestly feel like a privilege and that's part of also why i started class pass was because i wanted people to
00:25:10
in a way live a life that i knew i was i was sitting there when i was in my early
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20s and i would spend my you know weeks performing for a show i'd perform on
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saturday night invite people to come and watch me dance and i remember i felt like i had like i
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said like this pep to my life and my step and all of that and i want everyone to have that and i
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remember thinking wait a second like you used to be an athlete like you were training for the olympics like you were
00:25:36
this amazing singer and would you now just show up and go to work all day and don't think about finding time to even
00:25:43
explore these things so my contribution to that was honestly creating class that
00:25:48
was like part of my very big inspiration for it was how can i give some of that to other people to go
00:25:54
and try something and potentially have that same enlightenment in their life so you kind of get out of your
00:26:00
path and your routine and meet a teacher right that will inspire the growth in you and that
00:26:07
reflection in you because most of the times the hardest thing to do is to ask yourself what you love in your own life
00:26:13
and how did you when was the moment because i i read in i read in your book you know there's certain pain points we
00:26:18
encounter where we realize okay i can solve this problem and the sort of my manifestation of the solution is
00:26:25
um this app or this website what was the problem that you encountered and when that made you think class pass is the
00:26:32
solution yeah so i was once again training in ballet at the time i you know i had my nine to five but every day
00:26:38
after work i would go and train in ballet and i'd have my ballet clothes with me and i'd been going to the same
00:26:44
teacher for about six months at the time and i wanted to try a new class it was just like a very
00:26:49
simple thing i wanted to do i get onto you know my computer i start browsing for this
00:26:55
class two hours go by it was just this terrible experience from a information standpoint from you know not knowing
00:27:02
what class to take if it was if it's you know close enough to me what time it
00:27:06
starts how do i register and that's when i started looking at other models that existed so there were
00:27:11
things you know in the us like opentable seamless web that just made this type of
00:27:16
information so accessible and so easy and convenient for a customer that i started thinking what if i could
00:27:22
do this for classes and therefore get people to get an hour out of their life that was out of their routine to go and
00:27:28
do something fun and exciting so that was really where it started even that you kind of glossed over that
00:27:34
but that's pretty extraordinary because a lot of people encounter a problem the
00:27:38
issue you encounter trying to book that class and they go [ __ ] the world is not
00:27:42
not good enough or they think they'll just think uh this is broken and then they'll carry on with it oh let me
00:27:46
caveat that so i had come back from san francisco 36 hours before that and when i was in san francisco i had met a bunch
00:27:53
of entrepreneurs and this was my first time ever meeting entrepreneurs right so going back to even the whole trying new
00:27:58
things conversation it was really important for me to take that trip to sf i had been sort of stuck
00:28:03
in new york city i had been living this the crazy dance life the crazy you know nine-to-five life and i had no time for
00:28:10
anything else so i was not trying new things and i needed an epiphany i needed something to change because the two
00:28:16
roads i was on like they were going to crash at some point and it wasn't going
00:28:19
to work and i decided to go on this trip and meet a bunch of entrepreneurs and i come
00:28:24
back thinking what if i could be an entrepreneur let me give myself two weeks to think of an idea that's
00:28:30
literally the mindset i was in when i encountered that so 36 hours later i happened to be searching for this
00:28:37
ballet class and that's it was just like during this perfect period in my life
00:28:41
and honestly like this is when i sometimes think like does the universe make us do these things because what are
00:28:47
the chances of all that happening at the same time but it did and i really remember in that moment
00:28:53
thinking i know i'm the right person to build this because of this background i have the communities
00:28:59
i've been around the experiences i have there's probably no one else who cares
00:29:03
as much about dance who then also went to mit and payne mit which is an amazing college for those that don't know right
00:29:09
and it was sort of this perfect combination of things that made me say i got to do this and i went
00:29:15
for it but that is extraordinary because a lot of people will encounter things i'll encounter things today i might sit
00:29:20
on a chair and be like this chair could be better but then i'll carry on with my
00:29:22
day you know what i mean and then i'll open the fridge and go this fridge could
00:29:25
be yeah that's true i know that yeah that's that feels like the pivotal moment which a lot of people listening
00:29:31
to this they'll all they'll notice things maybe they don't even notice them
00:29:34
because there's something in when you start looking you know in your case you're actually kind of looking for a
00:29:39
problem to solve yeah yeah but it takes a certain character makeup to say i can be the one to solve this
00:29:47
also a little bit of delusion if you look at the stats it's fair that's a
00:29:49
very good point um i was definitely delusional at the time in thinking that but you know what it was it was more of
00:29:56
i want to try to solve this problem regardless yeah because it felt so tied to everything i had done
00:30:04
in my life i had literally fought to dance up and ever for every year of my life up until that point why not bring
00:30:09
the fight to everyone else right like that's how i felt i was like i've already been doing this
00:30:14
let's just go and you know make this happen and and by the way like i'm also
00:30:18
used my you know my left brain which is you know my analytical side to go and do
00:30:22
the market research and i was able to raise money like i i definitely did this in the practical way too and i was
00:30:29
making sure that it wasn't just some crazy dream i there was there was substance to it for sure i mean i
00:30:35
wouldn't have been able to raise the capital i did i got into an incubator it
00:30:39
was a good idea right in the way and it was once again it stemmed from a really deep why in me and that was the most
00:30:46
important thing i think that's you know when you know we can talk a little bit
00:30:49
about the failures and the points where the product didn't work but i was never obsessed with getting a
00:30:55
product to work i was obsessed with solving a problem from day one it's how do i get people to class and not make it
00:31:00
so hard for people to get to class why is it important for people to go to class because then they can feel what i
00:31:06
have in dance in their life it was just such a like an important mission for me that i could just never
00:31:12
stop on it and every day it fueled me because it was just so real for me to say i gave this to someone and even today
00:31:20
like you know and we've booked like 100 million hours of workouts at this point you know and when someone
00:31:26
comes to me and is and says to me like i just went and worked out because of class past it brings me joy because
00:31:32
that's an hour of their life that was like what dances to me right that i gave them out of their
00:31:39
routine or expectations or the way society wants them to live that they did for themselves and that is such a gift
00:31:45
and i think in my life i knew fighting for that was always a win whether it worked or
00:31:51
not right but what if it didn't work if it didn't work i had a back-up plan i
00:31:55
mean when i say i had a back-up plan i mean i went through my finances and my dad and i were very clear about
00:32:01
how much money i had received at that point to say i had three years to build this i had three years before i ran out
00:32:07
of my own cash and you've because you've been a saver as it says in the business
00:32:12
and so that's the other thing is you know because money can be the biggest hurdle in going after our dreams
00:32:19
and if you know you're a dreamer and i think i always knew i was a dreamer whether i was going to spend my money to
00:32:24
build a company or built or put on a dan show i knew i was always dreamer and so
00:32:29
i didn't care to spend money on the smaller things in my life right like i just didn't i didn't like i said i
00:32:35
didn't travel i barely went shopping and by the way these are decisions i made
00:32:38
right i think it's so important i'm not saying that because i want other people
00:32:42
to do the same it's it's about you knowing and thinking about it in a very
00:32:46
deliberate way of how you're spending your money right and i was building up a savings i
00:32:51
didn't know what i was going to spend it on but then when this idea came and i
00:32:54
got to sit down i had three years to go after running towards something were you
00:32:59
scared um i was excited i i mean it was an adrenaline rush you know i mean there
00:33:06
were times where it was terrible and challenging and sucked and um but i wasn't scared if i was scared i
00:33:13
wouldn't have done it you know i think if my fear trumped my my my confidence i wouldn't have i don't
00:33:22
think i would have been able to to uh quit my job and go for it when you quit your job and go for it at warner right
00:33:29
you have a meeting with the cham and the chairman you're 28 years old he says something interesting to you
00:33:34
right and i think this is this is actually a people said people will say to your other luck but actually it's
00:33:39
very much the opposite because he said that he would invest in yeah so i mean this goes perfectly with what we were
00:33:45
talking about is it's really the reason i didn't get scared is because more and more opportunities and
00:33:51
doors just kept opening for me it was almost like the universe just started guiding me in the most beautiful way
00:33:57
towards towards the mission towards the purpose towards the answer in a way that
00:34:01
i felt before i was blocking it right so the second i decided to go after building this company one of the biggest
00:34:07
things i had to do was quit my job and on the day i quit i decided to write an email to people i had worked with my
00:34:12
company some executives and the vice chairman of warner music group says hey come to my office i'd love to hear what
00:34:17
you're building go up to his office probably the second or third time i've
00:34:22
ever met him in the two three years i was there tell him about my idea he says great i
00:34:26
want to invest literally writes me a check for ten thousand dollars and gives me an introduction into a big incubator
00:34:32
that was in new york city and i just remember thinking in my head this is this was the scariest
00:34:38
door i'd ever closed my life quitting my job but i'm literally walking out out of
00:34:43
here with a ten thousand dollar check towards my next thing why did why did he give you that check in your opinion
00:34:51
a few things one so he was a former bani so once again reputation does follow you right like
00:34:58
this goes back to like everything i was talking about in the sense of it's always important to do good work because
00:35:04
if he had ever heard you know pyle is not good i mean he knew that i was a good worker no matter what i did even
00:35:09
though i didn't once again love my job i always did good good work and i know
00:35:12
that i i that reputation followed me and he knew that and we call that invisible
00:35:18
peel around here yeah there you go right it's so important it shows up it shows
00:35:22
up yeah right exactly and i think that was one of the big things and then i mean two this was also like an ecosystem
00:35:29
where entrepreneurship was the thing but i mean at the end of the day he believed
00:35:32
in me right and it was also because you know actually this is one of my favorite things that happened on the day
00:35:38
i quit is i would go and tell people right especially people i had worked with who were much older than me that i
00:35:43
was quitting my job and here i was 10 15 years younger than most of them and i remember everyone looking at me
00:35:49
almost thinking to themselves like i wish i had the courage to do that so i think you
00:35:56
forget like me quitting that day was such a sign of courage in my capability and i didn't even realize it at the
00:36:03
moment but being able to make such a bold decision at that age 28 yeah it was a huge thing for even my vice terminacy
00:36:12
to say wow like this girl is gonna go for it right and i mean that was probably one of the first
00:36:17
hard decisions i had to make in my life i had to make so many more but to sort of have that control over your life
00:36:24
your thoughts your dreams is such an important way to live and honestly at the end of the day to be a
00:36:29
good leader a good ceo like you need to be in control of your ship and in control of your life i asked that
00:36:36
question about why he invested because in my time in my company probably had just over a thousand employees and there
00:36:42
was two occasions where someone said they were quitting and they were leaving to start a business and i went i'm gonna
00:36:48
invest in your business and it was purely based on one thing which is exactly what you've described which was
00:36:54
in their invisible pr they might not even have known that i knew right but they were great right they always did
00:37:00
great work that's why you have to always do good work and yeah like i mean it's
00:37:04
it's such a i and i think in this day and age people don't feel it as much yeah even though
00:37:11
it might be a job you don't love we all have to kind of in a way like you have
00:37:14
to earn your or your what does it call like earn your marks your own strengths earn your stripes you know and i think i
00:37:22
remember earning my stripes to to take the leap for my dreams whether that was in money or skills or and i don't regret
00:37:30
any of that you know and i think when people ask me how did you do it i spent i mean it goes back to the whole
00:37:36
conformity rebellious thing i was earning my stripes so then when i felt like i could leap i had built the
00:37:42
parachute in the plane you know like i i wasn't taking a leap without anything
00:37:46
around me like i had built a great structure that was going to then let me take the
00:37:51
most rebellious of leaps what that came towards the mission right i didn't have to like rebuild all the
00:37:57
stuff that was about my life and like worrying about money and this is also an important thing is like when you are
00:38:03
starting a company if i'm worrying about paying my bills right and if i'm
00:38:06
worrying about like do i have the skills then i'm not worried or i'm not worrying
00:38:10
about the most important thing which is can i get someone to class right like the number one thing for me to focus on
00:38:14
was my business not anything that was going on outside of that and that's why
00:38:18
i think it's setting ourselves up to succeed when we are leaders when we are
00:38:22
entrepreneurs to be in a place where we're not worried about the peripheral constraints in our life we're able to
00:38:29
focus on the most important thing at hand is so important for us to do it's what's going to make us more impactful
00:38:36
in being able to actually solve the most important thing i had a few words to say
00:38:40
about one of my sponsors on this podcast we're now playing in a world where the
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let's go to the start then of this the class pass journey because i'm really
00:40:21
compelled by you know much of the reason i started this podcast was because i wanted to
00:40:27
shine a light on the tough times in business and i know when you're starting
00:40:31
a business especially a business and tech it can be really really difficult because you're
00:40:36
sort of jockeying and pivoting to find product market fit and to figure out like what your customers want
00:40:41
how to deliver it and i read that when i was reading about your journey when you
00:40:45
started um you quit your job in 2011 and then you go through a long phase of trying to figure out how to get people
00:40:52
to use this thing how to market it and all that nightmare talk to me about that nightmare
00:40:58
so we went into the market with a very clear product idea and it was a replica of
00:41:05
what had worked in another industry so opentable which allows you to book restaurant reservations it seemed like
00:41:12
the right parallel to what we were doing go on search for classes but what i didn't realize was that there
00:41:20
was a very big missing part in it and i mean i'll spare everyone like the little
00:41:23
details of it but everyone has to eat everyone does not have to work out right it was and working out usually is
00:41:29
something scary for people and it's more of an aspirational thing it's not
00:41:34
something that you have to do every single day so they were sort of on different planes of people's psychology
00:41:39
which really became the biggest bottleneck to what ended up happening because we spent a year we spent
00:41:46
half a million dollars building a product that didn't work and um even though i had all this momentum
00:41:52
like i was saying all these beautiful doors were opening for me and they were and i had a lot of great you know what i
00:41:58
now call false signals of success like followers press we ended up on the cover of ink magazine without launching a
00:42:04
product and all these things made me feel like i was succeeding right because this is
00:42:08
what success looked like to everyone else and then i launched my product and no one went to class it was like it
00:42:16
was and no one bought a class no one was transacting it was crickets it was just a really
00:42:22
it was this was the hardest probably a few months of the entire trajectory because
00:42:28
i i had never really faced failure in my life i mean going back to everything i just told you i had i'd
00:42:35
sort of done things well and i tried to make sure that this would go well right by doing everything that i
00:42:41
knew how how to which was let's get the press let's build a beautiful product
00:42:44
let's you know get as many email addresses as possible those are like the obvious things that seem you know you
00:42:50
would do when you're building a company but i forgot to really ask myself if i was solving the problem
00:42:56
i set out to and i really think back to that moment and even though it was the hardest
00:43:05
that moment is the reason i became a real entrepreneur like i don't think i was an entrepreneur before
00:43:11
that day i was excited about solving something but the day i failed was the day i became an
00:43:15
entrepreneur because that was the day i really had to think deeper about creating something in the
00:43:21
world that didn't exist and i think it's so easy to follow the blueprints of everyone
00:43:25
else and realize that entrepreneurship is actually about having no plan and having you know not following anyone
00:43:32
else's ideas of what success is it's about figuring out what you know what is it to
00:43:36
solve your mission or your you know your business model that you're going after
00:43:41
and that woke me up and it was a a month or two period where we were trying to be comfortable like it was
00:43:48
this comfortable place we were in because we had raised money we had just come out of techstars
00:43:53
but i mean it was not going well and i knew we were going to run out of cash if like
00:43:57
we didn't you know figure out something in the next few months and um we just i remember like after a few
00:44:04
few weeks of it we sent this email literally telling people to go to class for free
00:44:10
thinking you know okay like this is gonna work we're literally paying for the classes
00:44:14
people have to go and still no one went and that's when i realized we had just gone the wrong
00:44:18
direction and i needed to like circle back up i needed to break what we had built
00:44:24
just think a whole new way re-energize my team around going up about solving this problem
00:44:30
in a completely new way not worrying about what we had done but worrying about where we're going to
00:44:35
go and that flipped everything and i have been there now so many times where i've been okay with throwing away our
00:44:41
past i mean people don't know this um but class pass has changed its name three times
00:44:47
it wasn't called class pass i mean even with this time i'm talking about it was
00:44:50
called something else and i've thrown away names like i've thrown away product
00:44:54
ideas like we've thrown we've thrown away a lot of stuff we've changed our
00:44:57
pricing our plans and it's because it's not about that right it's about solving
00:45:04
the problem in the world and moving towards that and your mission so many entrepreneurs though and this is
00:45:09
probably the mistake i made when i was 18 and started my first little tech company was um they get romantic about
00:45:15
that initial hypothesis being correct exactly so it's like you've got this
00:45:19
square shape thing and you're just trying to force it into this triangle because like your ego
00:45:24
and there's so much relying on it and you know the runway you know you're
00:45:27
running out of cash and you just maybe i just push harder and then all these vanity metrics can be
00:45:32
kind of confusing oh we've got some false signals of success yes no one's
00:45:36
buying anything but we've got traffic absolutely and as you just said like i'm
00:45:38
on a magazine but then certain entrepreneurs i think that have the humility to say in fact
00:45:44
it's not about being me my hypothesis being right it's about creating a product market fit yeah you
00:45:50
know and what was the moment when you started to get closer to that product market yeah and and to you know one of
00:45:55
the things i love saying about that is to be uh mission obsessed not product obsessed and i learned that through that
00:46:01
journey but um you know we started then putting this discovery pass out there so
00:46:06
what we did learn is that you know we started finally actually going and talking to a lot of the studio owners
00:46:10
and talking to customers i think one of the things that happens in tech sometimes is you sit behind the tech
00:46:16
that you you don't like go and talk to real people right and it was funny because i was in a tech incubator
00:46:23
so we showed up we were working from like 6 a.m to 10 p.m every night but sitting in an office we weren't actually
00:46:30
going to class and talking to studio owners and all of that so once we started flipping that we started
00:46:35
realizing that you know a lot of the studio owners they were offering a free class for people who were new they
00:46:40
wanted new people in the door and then customers you know knew about all these places but they had fears we were like
00:46:46
how do we break the fear and so we started building this product our second product which also doesn't exist anymore
00:46:51
it was called the passport and it was a discovery pass where you could go and try uh 10 different classes for 30 days
00:46:58
so you could go to like a spin class monday pole dance class tuesday dance class wednesday you can kind of you know
00:47:03
it was like sort of this way for people for 50 to go and explore this is sort of
00:47:08
when we started realizing the whole love of variety that people had when it came
00:47:12
to working out in classes which was the magic of what we actually discovered in our second mistake of a product is that
00:47:18
people loved variety they wanted to really go and try new things it's what motivated them they didn't want to do
00:47:24
the same workout every single day how did you learn that the variety point well people started going and like they
00:47:29
started loving this past right they started loving the 30-day pass and then they start they try to actually buy it
00:47:35
over and over again for the next month and you weren't allowed to because it
00:47:39
was like a one-month product and we had literally gotten these classes for no money it was very much uh
00:47:45
do this for a month and then you're gonna go find your favorite studio and buy a pass there we thought it was
00:47:50
legion for the studio owners but it ended up not being that at all people literally were
00:47:55
obsessed with the variety wanted to do it every single month and not stop and that's when we started thinking about
00:48:01
what if we become a subscription we weren't a subscription at the time it was just this one month product and we
00:48:06
then started experimenting with this idea of a class past it wasn't even class past at the
00:48:12
time it was a class pass and we launched it to about 50 customers in june of 2013
00:48:19
and um they loved it the next month it just kind of kept doubling and then it was exponential growth and it just i
00:48:25
mean the sales of that took over our other products and we just knew that the monthly subscription was the way to go
00:48:31
and that that was the way that this model was going to work and that's two years in right three years three isn't
00:48:37
three years of stumbling around i mean i went to san francisco in uh in july of 2010 and this is june of 2013. so three
00:48:46
years wow one of the quotes from your book is that um about failure being a data point
00:48:51
not an endpoint and i really think that is i wish someone said that to me when i
00:48:54
was 18 because um i saw failure as a testament of my inadequacy or something as opposed to
00:49:00
something i should be listening to right and that's a sort of testament to your
00:49:04
journey and then you know throughout throughout that period though i think we've
00:49:07
how was your as a founder something again founders don't talk about like how
00:49:10
is your mental health because i know there's sacrifice there um let's see
00:49:16
a few things i would say um i mean i sacrificed a lot especially in those three years where we were trying
00:49:23
to get the product right and it wasn't working i mean i missed i missed family things i missed weddings
00:49:29
i i was just not around right i mean i was literally at work all day long and if
00:49:36
someone on my team needed me i i gave my 150 percent to my company so i felt fulfilled because i was doing
00:49:44
something i loved was i exhausted yes was i lonely yeah i mean i thankfully like
00:49:51
lived with a roommate who is one of my like closest dearest friends till today but
00:49:57
she was the only person i would see outside of people at work you know it was i was living in this like closed
00:50:02
circuit world and i don't i don't mind that like as somebody who has been on a mission before like has
00:50:08
created dan shows where they're you know you there's this like intensity that
00:50:12
happens for two weeks and you go really really intense you know the thing that with the dan show is
00:50:17
though it ends at some point like you have the show and it's over the thing i didn't know didn't realize
00:50:23
about this one is you know it's it's a marathon not a sprint like the dance
00:50:27
shows can be a sprint and that definitely got to me and i you know one of the reasons i even developed
00:50:32
this entire goal setting method was because three years in so right when i was at this point where i realized class
00:50:37
was going to take off i mean it felt like amazing right it spent like three years i was so focused
00:50:42
i had literally like probably not talked to anyone in my life and i found myself alone for the
00:50:47
holidays my sister was away my parents were in india and i was about to like literally be by myself on christmas and
00:50:54
it was one of those moments for me i always hated the holidays as an entrepreneur because
00:51:00
it was the one like it was the time in my life where i couldn't work through my
00:51:04
like my loneliness or through work through any of my issues it was like the one time where everyone
00:51:09
would go and do things with other people and i would be that person who would finally have to realize that i was on
00:51:15
myself right because i wasn't cultivating relationships at that point in my life i didn't have time to
00:51:20
and so it was a wake-up call and kind of going back to you know my mom may have been pestering me about
00:51:26
it for the years before at that point in my life i just started realizing wait a second like
00:51:31
i knew class was going to take off like i just knew we i mean we only had we had
00:51:34
less than a thousand customers but i had i had caught lightning in a bottle like it was there it was so magical i
00:51:40
knew it was going to take over the world like it was one of those moments as an entrepreneur i could breathe but i
00:51:45
looked at everything else and i'm like everything else is a mess my health was
00:51:48
a mess i could barely work out which was crazy for me i wasn't dancing i was like
00:51:52
i was single i you know i had a few good friends but i felt like i i like hadn't
00:51:56
been there for them and that's when i started really doing the school setting
00:51:59
because i'm like i need to have a bit more i want to make sure my priorities are more reflective of the
00:52:04
human i want to be in my life and how in like a practical sense in terms of a time allocation sense did you
00:52:10
get from that place to living more in line with those values of connection community love and health so i you know
00:52:18
i'll the details of like what i did on that session the first time i did it are
00:52:22
in the book but i will say this so in the next six months uh after i started doing that i literally met my husband a
00:52:29
month later really yes i decided to do a huge dance show at alvin ailey six months later and i
00:52:37
sold out a thousand uh a thousand seats at that so i got to do a huge performance you're gonna sell so many
00:52:43
books just by saying you found a husband buy something it's really crazy but i
00:52:47
literally changed my perspective around love and what i wanted and i met my husband a month
00:52:54
later which was crazy and i also you know i set goals around what i wanted to do with class pass i set goals around my
00:52:59
health and how i wanted to live and work out on a daily basis and i did all those things and i
00:53:06
remember this is always my favorite moment six months later i was flying home on a plane
00:53:12
and when i first did this goal setting method i had written it on a post-it note because i was on a plane and i was
00:53:17
i was on another plane ride because i was always traveling and i took it out and i looked
00:53:22
at it and i had done everything on my dream list you know and sometimes just writing down
00:53:28
those dreams is the most important thing but it was just such an important moment
00:53:33
because i felt more i don't i don't want to say the word balance because that has so many
00:53:39
you know wrong intentions with it but i felt that i was very clear about my priorities and i went towards them and i
00:53:48
missed things too but i didn't feel guilty about them and i just felt so proud of myself for
00:53:54
saying here's what i want to do in my life and i'm going to go and do it and
00:53:56
accomplishing it not just obviously professionally but personally as well there's like an overarching theme here
00:54:02
in your in your journey where the minute you become intentional about something yeah the door's open
00:54:09
it's true do you believe in that manifestation 100 and it goes back to the you saying you
00:54:15
know we were talking about having a why i think when you don't have a why you go
00:54:20
aimlessly and you you know i think you start living life thinking that you want money thinking you want to be famous
00:54:28
thinking you want power and instead of thinking about like love and passion and purpose and
00:54:35
whenever i have made decisions that are about the former and not the latter i've
00:54:39
never been led in the right in the right direction and you know if that's something people can take away from this
00:54:44
like i think is one of it's one of the most important points is if you go towards purpose even if you
00:54:50
are rebelling right and even if you might be pissing a few people off i guarantee your life will be more
00:54:56
fulfilling what were you like as an entrepreneur as a leader and as a manager of people
00:55:01
i would say i was very much i had a lot of positive energy i'm i'm a small human but i
00:55:10
i show up with all of me um i am i expect a lot of people i think because people have always expected a
00:55:17
lot for me so i'm sort of uh when you start working with me i can very quickly tell if someone's
00:55:23
going to like sink or swim you know because i don't tell you a lot but i like let you go because i think to me
00:55:29
that's what i've had to do is just kind of i don't want to put a lot of boxes on
00:55:33
you i want you to just show me what you can be at your highest potential and i think like that sort of i liked giving
00:55:39
people that room to be free and then allowing me to see what their capability is versus me saying you need to be your
00:55:45
best in this box that i'm giving you and i've i've found really great talent in
00:55:50
that way um [Music] i've had to learn how to like hire for my strengths and weaknesses you know i
00:55:57
think um that's probably the hardest the hardest parts when your company grows is you do
00:56:02
everything in the beginning and then you have to learn to let go and um i've
00:56:06
definitely learned that building a tribe around you of great people is the only way to succeed you struggle to delegate
00:56:13
right in the early days um i've gotten better at i've got i've i've realized
00:56:18
that there is no other way to success and to build big things and great things in the world without being able to
00:56:24
delegate so i've become much better at it in my life and it's the only way i i
00:56:30
can do what is my magical thing right and i've i think i've put a lot of
00:56:34
thought into that is what part of this company is is something that only i know i can do
00:56:40
right everything else that i know someone else can do i shouldn't be doing is that why you delegated the role of
00:56:45
ceo yes absolutely at some point a ceo title becomes a lot of you know managing investors managing team
00:56:54
doing press and i was like this is not what i want to be doing with my time i want to be solving the problem i want to
00:56:59
be in with my customers working on like interesting concepts not spending my day
00:57:04
in a bunch of meetings that you know didn't feel inspiring so i think like you know and everyone's set up
00:57:09
differently you have to know how you work that's another big thing is is learning the insights of what motivates
00:57:15
you like it's it's the work you do and why you do it that ends up really
00:57:20
mattering right in any job you're in and i remember there was a point where i
00:57:23
remember being so just disheartened and not wanting to show up to build my own company and i'm
00:57:30
like what is going on it was because i hated the work i was doing and i loved obviously my company but i hated the
00:57:36
actual work that i had to do and so i had to figure out a way to get past that it was like 20 like 16 17. i mean we
00:57:44
were launching like around the world it was so intense it was you know i mean it
00:57:48
was magical like i said it was incredible to build that but i remember like i said i was showing up every day
00:57:53
dealing with like hr issues legal issues like needing to talk to my investors i wasn't like around my customers and i
00:58:00
wasn't going to class and around my product you know and that's what really
00:58:04
fuels me as an entrepreneur and a founder did you have email dread like i used to at one point i remember when my
00:58:10
company was getting big because there was lots of chaos in my company there's
00:58:12
all kinds of cash flow issues i used to like dread opening my emails i was like it's going to be some other [ __ ]
00:58:17
from like an investor or something yeah i mean i definitely i wanted to make sure that
00:58:23
i had more to look forward to and i think there came a point where i was looking forward to less and less right
00:58:29
and i think it goes back to what i was saying about i didn't want my whole day to be like
00:58:33
ugh okay there's like another competitor okay we need to worry about this now i
00:58:37
didn't want my days to be about worrying i wanted my days to be about dreaming
00:58:41
right and by the way you have to obviously as a leader of any of this it comes with a responsibility right so
00:58:47
it's not that it's not that i didn't have to worry about those things there were certain
00:58:51
parts of it that i knew i had to worry about i needed to be on my radar but i knew there were certain things where i'm
00:58:55
like i could hire someone to really work on this and fix this it doesn't need to
00:58:59
take up my time and energy and that's really where where the combination is or
00:59:03
where that decision lies so all of that passion all of that love driven by this really deep intrinsic why
00:59:09
why did you step away from class pass you know i think at some point and this happens i think for so many
00:59:16
founders i mean it had been a decade of my life solving this problem which of course i'm so
00:59:22
deeply passionate about and you know i think the earliest days were when we did the most leg work and actually like
00:59:28
figuring out the product you know the product nuances that were going to actually like unleash the behavior i
00:59:34
think it just got bigger you know for me i think there are other things i want to
00:59:38
do in the world and there's probably other problems in the world i still need
00:59:41
to go and solve and it's on me to unleash myself to be able to face them so i can move forward towards them and
00:59:48
have them even come into my periphery i think if you're kind of stuck in the
00:59:52
past you don't even welcome the doors right that are that you need to go through to reach your future and
00:59:58
i know for me my my future is waiting for me you know and it's on me to sit there and walk through the
01:00:05
door and go towards it and was there was there a feeling of like a loss of love yeah i mean it's a bittersweet moment
01:00:12
you know it was um it's super bittersweet right i always say this like the the hardest
01:00:17
day was when i stopped getting my my class pass email i mean like it was insane i've had this
01:00:23
email for for years it was like my main inbox and um [Music] you know it was it was definitely a
01:00:31
sense of loss i mean i think it's you know for it's like having a child and
01:00:36
watching your child get married right but it's also being able to say like they're okay i i did all i could
01:00:44
to get them to this point and being proud of that and that's really where i'm at i remember the
01:00:49
when i resigned from my company went public and i said to the company i said i'm going to resign but i have one
01:00:53
caveat they're like what is it i was like i want to keep my email oh you didn't use that
01:00:58
my email i still have my you know it's funny that you say that i think i did it going back
01:01:04
to the whole uh it was just been more noise right for me i just think it was it was a nice break
01:01:17
for me i actually remember creating a new email address and it was like no mail what you know and it was it was
01:01:24
interesting because it started making me realize like what do i want to fill that
01:01:27
part of my life up with what's the answer what's the answer to that i'm
01:01:31
sort of in the middle of it still but you know obviously lots of dance you know i think i
01:01:36
probably have a few more big problems in the world to solve you know i'm i'm only
01:01:40
39 you know it's interesting because i'm young you know my mom and i always
01:01:45
talk about this too and she's like it's interesting because yeah like i could retire them no there's
01:01:51
no part of me that would ever think about that you know but it's an interesting it's a great place
01:01:57
to be the valuation of class pass at sale is probably confidential as it tends to be but um i know that in 2020
01:02:04
in the series he rounded was valued at over a billion it's a lot of money how does that change things for you
01:02:11
um well you know we haven't exited so like the company hasn't been been sold yet so
01:02:16
it's still private but um is your stake acquired or your stake is still in the
01:02:20
company my stake is still in the company yeah so it's not fully you know fully
01:02:23
there but you know i think these and here's the thing the reason why that was
01:02:27
such an important moment was because of what it really the message it sent for women especially and me being you know
01:02:34
an indian woman like that was actually the most important part of it i don't
01:02:38
think as an entrepreneur you should run towards numbers like that because what you should run towards is making an
01:02:43
impact right the 100 million hours of people's lives is actually much more impactful to
01:02:48
my business and society than hitting that billion dollar evaluation but in my case i think it's different because i
01:02:55
know what that represents to so many other girls out there who can look at something and say wow if she can do it
01:03:03
maybe i can too and that to me is a really important part of it and that wave of press
01:03:08
whenever whenever someone becomes a unicorn is tremendous right and that will reach so so many young women all
01:03:13
over the world and entrepreneurs your partner your son completely other part of your
01:03:18
life nick zane yep nick and zayn how's that been you know you talk about the obsession you've had
01:03:25
building class pass um entrepreneurs always struggle and tend to struggle in managing their
01:03:30
romantic relationships in the other part of their life what advice have you got for me on maintaining a good romantic
01:03:35
relationship and family whilst also striving to build big dreams yeah and i i'll be honest i think we're always
01:03:42
still learning in the process of it but i think one of the biggest things i learned is and this goes along with a
01:03:48
lot of the advice i have with my parents is bringing them along the journey nick was
01:03:53
with me through so much of it i mean when we went to go launch london um i always actually love this story is
01:03:59
me one of uh my co-founder and one of my uh sales sales girls cam came with me and so did nick and we had to go
01:04:07
try out about 30 studios in in london in about five days and nick just went and did some of them too like it was amazing
01:04:15
we all just went and worked out and he was sort of like checking out studios because we before we put anything on the
01:04:20
platform we wanted to make sure they were vetted studios and this was like i said it was like six seven years ago so
01:04:25
it wasn't that much that many reviews on studios and um yeah like i mean he would come to
01:04:30
australia with me come to london with me and he was just a big part of the process you know and i think that's so
01:04:37
awesome that we got to live like he got to live the dream with me and i think that was a really nice part
01:04:43
of it i think as we've had a kid we've just had to become very clear on priorities right and he is and he's a
01:04:50
partner at a law firm he's you know one of the youngest partners at his law firm
01:04:54
it's insane what he's been able to accomplish in his career so we have to just always be very
01:04:59
very communicative on what we both want right in setting goals and hey like what
01:05:04
do we want to accomplish this year in terms of our lives right the same way i think about it personally we have to
01:05:09
think about it in terms of what our family wants to do whether it's like school whether it's traveling right what
01:05:16
do we want to make sure we both do as a family unit combined with you know our jobs and our ambition you know and i
01:05:23
think it's so important especially for women to surround themselves with partners and
01:05:28
people who will constantly help them stay ambitious in their life because it's one of the hardest things what if
01:05:34
there's conflict between when you think about what the family wants to do and
01:05:37
what pile wants to do as in terms of your ambitions and then his ambitions with his career do you
01:05:43
have to talk it out and come up with a plan you know i to me a plan is the most important thing and
01:05:48
sometimes there is conflict but you have to try new things similar to pivoting right and iterating like on a company
01:05:54
you sometimes both people have to be flexible to be like okay well like if this current situation isn't working
01:05:59
we're gonna try something new right okay like you want this i want this what if
01:06:03
we try a combination of this for six months what if we you just have to be flexible and adaptable i think the
01:06:08
biggest mistake is not doing anything and staying sort of stagnant in a place where someone's uncomfortable or
01:06:15
someone's not happy and not helping the other person right at the end of the day
01:06:21
nick being happy in his life is going to make him the best husband to me and the
01:06:25
best dad and me being happy in my life is going to make me the best mom and best wife to him right and we both know
01:06:30
that so it's about saying what does happiness look like to both to us individually but then us
01:06:36
together as a family your journey has weaved and up down left right all of it it's been a tremendous roller coaster
01:06:45
with so many highs and lows and everything in between you spoke earlier about the importance mentorship has
01:06:50
played in your life have you ever been to therapy have i ever been to therapy um i did a
01:06:56
little bit of therapy actually at the beginning of last year um you know it was i had a baby by the way
01:07:03
six weeks before the pandemic and then like my company came to a hall it was just a really crazy time so i had
01:07:10
just gone to therapy to just start talking to somebody because i didn't even know how
01:07:16
to make sense of so much of where my mental state was at that point i hadn't
01:07:19
seen people i'd literally been a mom for a year living at home right it was just
01:07:26
my life was so different than what it looked like pre-pandemic at that point and so i yeah i have and i i mean i
01:07:32
recommend it to anyone it's it's sort of like a fitness instructor who works on
01:07:36
your body you need to work on your mind sometimes and see you know what your roadblocks are right we know them like
01:07:41
oh my god i feel i don't feel strong with my left arm like how do you get that stronger we sometimes have blocks
01:07:46
like that too and it's sometimes for me it's been like sometimes there'll
01:07:50
be a feeling which i can't but you just know you're out of orientation or
01:07:54
something's not right i think the pandemic did that to a lot of us which was yeah destabilized our us in many
01:07:59
many ways um your journey is phenomenal it's really really phenomenal and you're
01:08:03
a really phenomenal person for so many reasons one of the reasons why is just you're just this from like the minute
01:08:07
you walked into this room you're just this like ray of sunshine oh thank you
01:08:12
and that's why i think i asked the question about like therapy and your hard moments in particular because
01:08:16
you have you have just an unbelievable smile and you have such an it you i'm
01:08:20
like is this person always this this this you know but it goes down to i always believe there's the light right like i
01:08:27
think it's the question you we started with it was i just believe there's like goodness to give
01:08:36
and service and and purpose and when i'm not aligned with my purpose i do feel
01:08:43
sad right those are my like hardest moments where you know if i didn't care about sharing
01:08:48
you know my insights and stuff like i could be you know somebody who wasn't happy but i i do things intentionally
01:08:55
and therefore how can you not be happy doing the things that you love in your life
01:09:00
so beautiful we have a closing tradition okay the previous guest writes a question for
01:09:05
the next guest oh okay and they don't know who they're writing it for what is one thing
01:09:12
you would do if you weren't afraid at all you know it's interesting i'm i like
01:09:21
mentally i don't have many things that i don't feel like i could solve so it's
01:09:28
like not mental i i probably have more physical things because i'm such a small
01:09:32
per like i'm 411 right it's like it's an interesting thing because i feel more physically fearful of things
01:09:39
than i do actually you know what i would do i would do i would run a marathon interesting
01:09:47
i love running i just have never run that you're afraid i'm not probably not afraid but
01:09:55
potentially i'd have to work through what's holding me back from it but maybe
01:09:58
there is some fear i'm gonna pay attention see if you end up running a marathon thank you so much
01:10:03
for your time and your wisdom it's so you're such a breath of fresh air for so
01:10:06
many reasons but you're a real source of inspiration and what you've um what
01:10:10
you've accomplished with with class past is just astounding it really is astounding and yours like humility and
01:10:15
openness to share the truth about that not just in the book but but here today is i'm going to be liberating for a lot
01:10:20
of people and that the whole you know one of the key lessons i come away with even though i feel like i
01:10:28
i might have said this if you'd asked me it's just the unbelievable importance of
01:10:33
having and following that voice inside of us which is there and all the reasons we suppress it because of external
01:10:38
whatever whatever but you know um as as you i was sitting there as you're talking i was thinking you know what as
01:10:44
well the other thing is like even if you you try and do something else whether it's
01:10:49
management consulting whatever you're never actually going to master it yeah
01:10:52
because it's always going to be a tedious job when you ended up mastering the thing that was in line with your
01:10:57
passion and i think that's a really important lesson to everybody who feels like they're in a situation now that
01:11:01
might not be in line with that voice inside right thank you be the master of you a man
01:11:06
yeah you're brilliant thank you so much for your thank you thanks for having me
01:11:09
stephen i had a few words to say about one of my sponsors on this podcast as the seasons have begun to change so
01:11:14
how's my diet and um right now i'm going to be completely honest with you i'm starting to think a
01:11:19
lot about slimming down a little bit because over the last couple of probably the last
01:11:24
four or five months my diet has been pretty bad um and it started to show a little bit really over the last two
01:11:29
months i go to the gym about 80 of the time so i track it with 10 of my friends in a whatsapp group and this tracker
01:11:34
online that we all use together we call it fitness blockchain and i'm currently
01:11:39
at 81 percent um so 81 of the days i've done a workout in the last 150 days right so i'm going to the gym about six
01:11:48
times a week that's been a little bit impacted by the derivative live tour but i'm trying to
01:11:53
stick to it and so one of the things i'm doing now to reduce my calorie intake and trying
01:11:58
to get back to being nutritionally complete and all i eat is i'm having the heel protein shake thank you hill for
01:12:04
making a product that i actually like the salted caramel is my favorite i've
01:12:07
got the banana one here which is the one my girlfriend likes but for me salted caramel is
01:12:12
the one [Music] foreign [Music] [Music]