this founder couldn't find a dance class so she built a billion dollar company around it.

this founder couldn't find a dance class so she built a billion dollar company around it. Welcome back to my series Founder Files where I dive into founders and their stories. Payal Kadakia grew up doing Indian classical dance, earned a degree in operational research from MIT and then started her career at Bain and Company before moving into digital strategy at Warner Music Group. But in 2009 she wanted to tap into more of her creative side, so she founded the Sa Dance Company to showcase South Asian dance styles. She realized that there was no centralized platform to discover fitness classes, so in 2011 she quit her job and began working on what she thought was going to be the Open Table for fitness. Her first product called Classtivity launched in 2012 as a search engine for fitness classes, but she found that people were browsing but not really booking. Classtivity also tried something called a passport which was a one month trial for people to try different classes, but there was little to no retention. So by 2013 she and her team pivoted. They swapped search and trial for access and E, which became what ClassPass is known for today. ClassPass expanded rapidly and by 2015 they even went international. In 2017 Payal transitioned from CEO to executive chairwoman, choosing to focus more on the creative strategy rather than the day to day operations. Over the years ClassPass has raised over $500 million from venture capital and in 2020 after operating in over 2500 cities across 28 different countries and having over 30,000 studio partnerships, ClassPass hit unicorn status with a valuation of over $1 billion. In October 2021 ClassPass was acquired by Mindbody in an all stock deal which is one of the biggest exits in the wellness space. And now Payal is an author, public speaker and advisor. Comment who I should do next.