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Cofounder and CEO John Foley was in his 40s when he came up with the idea that eventually became Peloton.
- Peloton cofounder and CEO John Foley worries about finding and retaining great talent, he said on NPR's "How I Built This with Guy Raz" in April.
- Foley struggled with anxiety during Peloton's early years, telling NPR he was "a shell of a human being for several years" because of it.
- Peloton released the paperwork for its hotly anticipated IPO on Tuesday, revealing that the home fitness company had net losses of $245.7 million in fiscal year 2019, Business Insider previously reported.
- Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.
Potential investors were shocked to see home fitness giant Peloton (which sells $2,000 exercise bikes) reveal that it had sustained a $245.7 million net loss in fiscal year 2019 when the company released its IPO paperwork on Tuesday. But there has been another aspect of the company bugging CEO and cofounder John Foley, he said during an April episode of NPR's "How I Built This with Guy Raz."
"What keeps me up at night is how do we scale our culture?" Foley told NPR. "How do you go from 2,000 people to 50,000 people in the next five to six years and still have the fun, .com energy, the trust, the transparency? Having a fantastic culture where you're able to recruit and retain the best people in the world is what keeps me up at night."
Foley also revealed that he'd struggled with anxiety throughout Peloton's early days, telling NPR he was "a shell of a human being for several years, for two years in particular."
At the time, Peloton was burdened by financial problems so severe that Foley cleaned their office's bathrooms himself because the company could not afford to hire both office support staff and the engineers needed to work on its Wifi-connected exercise equipment.
"I was masquerading as running a great company and we were trying to put on a happy face and you know, sell to the team and the investors' optimism," Foley told NPR, "and the truth be told, for two or three years we were about to collapse and we didn't have the money and it was stressful. I'm not the first entrepreneur to have gone through it, but it was the first time I've gone through it. It was very tough."
Foley was in his 40s when he got the idea to build a stationary bike that offered in-home spin classes on demand, he told NPR. A graduate of Harvard Business School, he had previously been an executive at both Mars Inc. and Barnes and Noble's e-commerce division, according to the Peloton website. Foley and his wife both loved boutique fitness classes, but Foley couldn't get into classes taught by his favorite instructors at the most convenient times because he didn't like to book in advance.
Thus, his multimillion-dollar business idea was born - thought it hasn't been an easy road from there.
"I used to be a jolly guy," Foley told Business Insider in 2018 about the toll the company had on his mental health. "I'm still a happy-go-lucky guy, but after the years and the scars of the early days at Peloton, I've become slightly more cynical, more callous. It was rough."