Classpass Founder: Quitting My 9-5 Led To A $1 Billion Business: Payal Kadakia | E141

Payal Kadakia traces her journey from a young Indian-American girl who found identity through dance to building ClassPass, valued at over a billion dollars. She explains how dissatisfaction in management consulting at Bain pushed her toward entrepreneurship and how a frustrating attempt to book a ballet class sparked the idea. The conversation covers three years of stumbling, a half-million-dollar product that failed, and the pivot to a subscription model after discovering customers craved variety. She shares lessons on purpose over money, building confidence through small steps, delegating, and a goal-setting method that reshaped her personal life. The episode closes on relationships, motherhood, therapy, and her view that following your inner voice leads to fulfillment.

• ClassPass spent a year and half a million dollars building a first product that completely failed, with no one transacting.
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• The company changed its name three times and threw away multiple product ideas, pricing, and plans before finding fit.
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• The pivot came from finally talking to studio owners and customers, leading to the 'passport' discovery product that revealed people loved variety.
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• The monthly subscription ClassPass launched to about 50 customers in June 2013 and grew exponentially, taking three years total from her 2010 SF trip.
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• After creating her goal-setting method, she met her husband a month later and sold out a 1,000-seat dance show at Alvin Ailey six months later.
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• She eventually delegated the CEO role because the job had become managing investors, team, and press instead of solving the problem.
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• When she resigned, her one caveat to the company was that she be allowed to keep her ClassPass email address.
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• Payal discovered the power of dance to make others feel something at four or five years old, performing spontaneously at a wedding.
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• As a child she was told she smelled or didn't belong because her food, hair, and heritage were different from her town.
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• A trigger moment came when she chose a Times Square dance performance over a client meeting, then her boss asked if consulting was really the job she wanted.
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• On the day she quit Warner Music, the vice chairman wrote her a $10,000 check and gave her an introduction to a New York incubator.
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• She realized fitness differs from food: everyone has to eat, but working out is aspirational and often scary, breaking her OpenTable parallel.
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• She says the day her first product failed was the day she truly became an entrepreneur.
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• Payal noted she was only 39 and her mother joked she could retire, which she rejected outright.
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• She started therapy at the beginning of the prior year after having a baby six weeks before the pandemic and her company halting.
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• She is 4 foot 11 and says her fears are physical rather than mental; her dream-if-unafraid answer was to run a marathon.
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