Selina Tobaccowala
Selina Tobaccowala is a Co-Founder at Gixo, the live, personalized fitness app that turns phones into virtual gyms.
You started your first company, Evite, while you were in college at Stanford. How did you decide to take the leap?
My co-founder Al lived two doors down from me in my freshmen dorm. We were friends from the start. When he told me he was thinking about starting a company, I was actually in Germany for a study abroad program. I was supposed to stick around afterwards for a quarter-long internship. But I saw that all the action and innovation was happening in Silicon Valley.
The bigger inflection point from a risk perspective was the Stanford Job Fair. I couldn’t decide whether to go and I called my dad for advice. He asked me three questions: 1) Do you enjoy working with Al? 2) Are you excited about what you’re working on? 3) Do you feel that you’re learning? I said yes, yes and yes. He said, then just put your whole heart into it. I still use that framework today.
What was your inspiration for Gixo?
I used to work at SurveyMonkey. I was extremely close to our CEO Dave Goldberg, and when he passed, it was heartbreaking on a personal level. It was also a massive wake up call. He was 47 years old with two young kids. I hadn’t done any exercise for five and a half years and I also had two young kids. I knew then that I wanted to do something in health and wellness. We did a whole bunch of consumer research and saw that there was a lot of investment flowing into three categories: chronic disease management, fitness, and weight loss. The fitness category was the most exciting because of the magnitude of its effect. If you could get people to move just 30 minutes a day, you could save up to $117 billion in healthcare costs. Meanwhile, there’s $28 billion being spent on gyms and the gyms are incentivized for you to not show up. Our question was: can we get technology to have an impact, either on price disruption or on access disruption? As good entrepreneurs, we put on our sweatpants and headed to a group fitness class. We realized that the key elements were the coach, the amazing music, and the participant community. And we knew that we could take those elements and deliver them to an entirely new consumer.
He asked me three questions: 1) Do you enjoy working with Al? 2) Are you excited about what you’re working on? 3) Do you feel that you’re learning? I said yes, yes and yes. He said, then just put your whole heart into it. I still use that framework to this day.
Are there higher barriers to attending fitness classes for women in particular?
Michelle Segar has a great book about this called “No Sweat.” With women, one of the main issues is that women are more likely to feel that exercise is a selfish thing to do. I used to feel that I couldn’t give even 20 minutes in a day. One of the biggest things Gixo can do is to change that mindset. The more you move, the more energy you actually have to dole out on your work and your family.
What are the parts of your job that give you the most energy?
Coming from SurveyMonkey, I’m a huge advocate of customer feedback. I love hearing our customer stories. The parts of my job that are less fun are the things I haven’t done before: thinking about how to build a brand, speaking at external events, and fundraising. But all of these things are learning opportunities for me. Every December I make a list of what I want to learn that year. No one else is going to own your learning journey for you, so you have to take hold of it yourself.
Most recent Gixo class you took? I took Cardio Speed Work yesterday with my daughter, and she’s faster than me.
Total number of miles you’ve run on Gixo? 132.2 miles, and that’s up from zero the year prior.
Most recent Gixo charity fundraiser? In May, we ran a virtual 5K and 10K on Gixo to benefit our good friends at Crisis Text Line.
Founder you yourself admire? Katrina Lake.
