SoulCycle Founder Spins a New Story with Peoplehood
Elizabeth Cutler
Serial Entrepreneur, Founder SoulCycle and Peoplehood, Wife, Mom
Who or what is your G.O.A.T.?
Michelle Obama. She’s a national treasure.
Best gift you gave or received?
The best gift I received was in my early twenties. There was a guy called Daniel Tucker based in Telluride and he taught me about something called Jin Shin Jyutsu, which restores the energetic pathways in the body. And I have been practicing it on myself every day since I was 22. It allowed me to do things that I wouldn't have had the energy to do. And it's made me feel optimistic and unburdened. Even with life’s burdens and stresses this has taken the edge off consistently for me.
What do you refuse to give an F about?
Good question.
We had some crazy situation at SoulCycle and a crisis PR person said to us “high road, long view”. Whenever I begin to get heated about something I think about that…allows me to remember I actually don’t want to spend useless energy.
Spinning a New Story
When you were in your 20s, how did you envision your career?
When I was in high school I thought I had the drive to be a leader, a CEO. By the time I got to college, another part of my personality came out, more spiritual, and curious about exploring my inner world.
I remember my first day of college, the Dean of the University of Colorado said, study what you're interested in because the jobs that you're going to do haven't been invented yet. That was true for me. It’s been a journey to get here that’s for sure.
Did you ever envision starting something new and being an entrepreneur?
After I got my first job, I realized I was not employable—like it’s a personality defect or benefit. But I am actually not employable. And I don't know why, because I like people. But I had to really invent my own jobs in order to become employable. My parents were self-employed so at least I had that model.
What was the hardest thing about building SoulCycle in the beginning?
Explaining to people why they should pay for something that they got for free at their gyms, especially to New Yorkers who were so cynical anyway. And they're like, "How dumb do you think I am?”
Quite honestly, the experience, in the beginning, was not terrific. But it was good enough. And we knew what we wanted it to be. We knew what it needed to feel like and that we would eventually get it there, which we did. And in a large way, at a big scale. But in the beginning, it was a challenge to both talk people into why they should do it and then deliver on the product that they deserved to have.
What was the first moment when you thought "Wow, this is really something?”
There were so many tiny moments that just started to kind of build on each other. Julie (Rice) and I reflect on this a lot—the thing we always come back to is our first anniversary of opening the West Hollywood location. It was on a different coast so it was something we couldn't touch every day. And we had focused on training for that location because friends of ours in the restaurant business had scared us, telling us we weren’t going to be able to recreate it if we weren’t there every day.
We leaned into training and hospitality in a major, major way. And a year later in West Hollywood, people would come up to us and they were into it. It was super busy. People would come up to us and give us what we call the "That's not what really happened" line. They'd say, "I’ve (fill in the blank)—gotten stronger, lost 15 pounds,” etcetera. But what really happened was they could show up for their sister who's sick with cancer and be strong for her because they found strength in these rooms.
We all have those moments where things just change. A lot of people found those moments inside those rooms because they were able to be alone together, in a rhythm with other human beings. One of the things I think is incumbent on all of us as we get a bit older, is to look at what are those things that allow us to reconnect with this very primal, powerful aspect of our beings? All the things that make us truly human. Because we strip so much of that out of the culture. It's understandable that it happened the way that it did, but now we just have to bend the light back this way so that everybody can feel like they have a home.
What was it like to step away from day-to-day responsibilities for SoulCycle? Was it a big adjustment?
We sold the majority of our company four years in, and somebody had said to me, they said, "You have two kids, SoulCycle’s your business.” And I realized that it was, of course, our business, but it was like a child. So I felt like I sold a kid.
It was totally brutal. But on the other hand, the fact that we think that we're all in control is just such a joke. And if we can just show up and bring our best selves to most of it, that's the most that anybody can really ask for when you get right down to it.
After SoulCycle wrapped up, both of my parents got really critically ill at the same time. I had the bandwidth to work and deal with one, but two was like you’ve got to be kidding me. I had made money and I just thought this was absurd. I need to just step away and let my parents have some of my time and effort, and get them set up for their next phase of being or not being.
In the end, it was really beautiful how that all worked out, because I don't think I would've been able mentally to just leave the team and not show up for people. So it's funny how things work out. Even the grueling parts of it.
We know it's still in stealth mode, but how did the idea of Peoplehood, a guided group conversation practice, come about? What made it rise to the level of "OK, I am ready to do this again?”
I think being an entrepreneur is a calling. And you’ve got to answer the call.
Julie and I used a lot of the tools at work to train in hospitality. People would come in really hot to those front desks at SoulCycle—they were not at all bringing their best selves there. We had to find a way to reach them so they felt like they could come back. We were not in the business of losing customers. And that higher listening required to really get into someone else’s world—we’ve used that in our personal lives too.
We spent two years iterating other things too, but in that two-year period, we had conversations with anybody who was doing research or was an authority on the connective tissue that makes for a real dose of human connection. What is that? And the one through-line is higher listening—actively listening and being able to get into someone else's world. That is it. It’s pretty simple, but no one does it. I'm terrible at it.
I just felt like we need to start building tools and experiences. So the why of it came from noticing that there are no environments that foster this kind of experience. And we really want people to be able to feel one way when they walk in and feel better when they leave.
Little by little, we started working on putting this together, playing with it and testing it. And we're getting ready to bring it out. When we started SoulCycle, we were two moms in a rear lobby of an old funeral home on the Upper West Side. Nobody gave a shit. Now we put something out on Instagram to just try to test this new idea and The New York Times calls.
The basic idea is there is no secular place where we can just all go and be a person with other people and remember that with a stranger, you can feel a connection. You see yourself in other people. And frankly, the other thing that really happens is that you, in these gathers (what we call our sessions), is you get to hear yourself think.
I hope to God we can get people to want to do this thing. I honestly hope people give a shit to want to come. Because if we can all get there, I think it will have an enormous tipping point on how we are as people. But I'm not sure. You know? That's where we are with it. There's nothing that is happening like this. It's peer to peer, it's not therapy. This is totally different. We all need this. Everyone needs this.
What advice would you have for anyone thinking about starting something new?
I think it's so important to do something you like to do. A lot of people do things because they think they should do them. But if, at the core, if there's like a seed or a strong thread of doing something you really enjoy, or some kind of emotional benefit, or connection with others, or something that you place high value on—that, to me, would seem the best starting point for sure. I always think about the boxes that things check and things have to check a lot of boxes to really matter. So it’s just figuring out what your boxes are and how many boxes get checked with what you're considering doing.
