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

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I think society goes, success is get this job, get married, get a house. What does that do to you? It just really makes your life feel small. The founder of ClassPass.

A monthly fitness program. A billion-dollar founder. Payal Idarkia.

When I would watch my parents not really fit in, it sort of made me realize, maybe I don't fit in, and then be told I smelled or I didn't belong somewhere. Everyone wanted to box me into something, and I just refused to be boxed. I spent half a million dollars building a product that didn't work. Was I exhausted? Yes. Was I lonely? Yeah. I missed family things, I missed weddings. I- I was just not around. I have learned at this point, like, time means more to me than money. I want to make sure my priorities are more reflective of the human I want to be in my life. If you go towards purpose, I guarantee your life will be more fulfilling.

Do you believe that everybody has a purpose beyond the nine to five?

I do.

How do you find it?

So first of all ...

So without further ado, I'm Steven Bartlett, and this is The Diary of a CEO: USA Edition. I hope nobody's listening, but if you are, then please keep this to yourself. Payal, when I read someone's story, one of the first questions I try and answer when I'm reading through their, especially their early years, is I'm trying to identify what it is that made them either an anomaly or hungry. I have a kind of a thesis that much of people's drive and their ambition, especially the people that I sit here with, comes from kind of, some kind of pain or trauma or early experience that molded them.

Right.

So my question to you is, what made you hungry?

You know, when I was younger, I got to taste something that was so magical, which was dance. And it was this place in my life that it wasn't about the physicality of actually dancing. It was the ability to make other people feel through something that I did, and to be able to realize that as a human being, you can have that type of influence, power, connection to other people, and to feel that when you are four or five years old was just this magical experience for me that honestly nothing else in my life could compare to it, and once I uncovered that, I always wanted to feel that in anything I did, and I strived in all the work I did and all of, you know, the different careers I've had in my life and the different, you know, art I've done, I've strived always to go back to that intention of how do I give to others and make them feel something in their life? And that's really been this anchor for me and its purpose at the end of the day.