Tom Digan

So Ladder started as a side hustle for me, I guess.

A high school classmate that I went to school with up in Boston had pitched me on a fitness startup.

The product didn't exist yet.

I think it was a pitch that I was just looking to swing at at the time, was very interested in startups and technology.

And he asked me to put some money into the business, which I did.

I then raised the rest of the money, ended up joining him as co-founder and president of the business.

And my condition for joining the business was to move the company to Austin, Texas.

For me, that was less about warm weather and changing lifestyle.

It was about separating myself from safety nets and putting distance between New York and my Bloomberg terminal on the easy way out because I assumed it would get hard.

I didn't know it would get quite as hard as it did.

But there's really two Ladders or two different companies here, same name.

I would call Ladder 1.0 as everything pre-2020 and after 2020.

The name's Ladder and we're in the fitness space, but it was a different team.

It was a different product.

What we were originally building was more of a managed marketplace for personal training.

There was heavy emphasis on personalization and a relationship with another human.

We thought that was really the opportunity.

What we'd come to find out is that business would be very operationally complex, difficult to scale.

Ultimately, as you scale that business, it starts to look more like a call center and you'd be inclined to start to automate away the very human you were selling in order to build anything that had margins worthy of venture type economics and scale.

So uninteresting, but what we were seeing