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Exclusive: The founders of SoulCycle built a startup for relationships, then pivoted to GLP-1 support groups. Now its assets are being acquired by WeightWatchers

7 August 2025 at 13:34

In today’s edition: Jane Fraser’s meeting with Trump, some dark horse candidates for Fed chair, and a startup pivot that led it to WeightWatchers.

– Peoplehood pivot. Two years ago, SoulCycle cofounders Julie Rice and Elizabeth Cutler launched another business. It was called Peoplehood, and it was billed as a way for people to work on their relationships—a kind of unofficial group therapy that captured the spirituality that drew people to SoulCycle classes with an element of leadership coaching and self-reflection.

Over the past several months, Peoplehood quietly pivoted to a new model: support groups for people taking GLP-1 medications.

Now, Peoplehood is shutting down and the company’s assets have a buyer: WeightWatchers. The original, 62-year-old weight-loss community network, WeightWatchers itself recently came out of bankruptcy under a new CEO, lightened its long-burdensome debt load, and unveiled its strategic direction. Two years ago it acquired Sequence, a telehealth platform for prescribing GLP-1s. Now WeightWatchers plans to offer new options like menopause support.

WeightWatchers didn’t disclose the financial details of the transaction, but it’s acquiring Peoplehood’s tech and platforms and bringing on Rice as chief experience officer (Rice was a longtime member of the WeightWatchers board). She’s bringing three employees with her (at one point, Peoplehood had as many as 60 but slimmed down to a sixth of that); Cutler isn’t joining WeightWatchers. (“She’s happy to send this baby off,” Rice says.) Peoplehood had raised funding from the venture firm Maveron.

“Community is what has underpinned this business throughout and it is as important, if not more important today than it’s ever been,” says WeightWatchers CEO Tara Comonte.

Peoplehood’s GLP-1 pivot, while surprising to some, came out of finding product-market fit, Rice says. People enjoyed coming to the community for other reasons—”We tried Peoplehood, we tried couplehood, we tried motherhood, we tried singlehood,” Rice says—but they stuck around longer when it was about weight loss. “It was just stickier. It just was,” Rice says. Community was at its most powerful as a tool to support “habitual change.”

SoulCycle cofounder Julie Rice is selling the assets of her latest startup Peoplehood to WeightWatchers.

As chief experience officer, Rice will lead WeightWatchers’ expansion of its longtime support groups into a virtual model. In 2024, WeightWatchers had $786 million in annual revenue and ended the year with 3.3 million subscribers. WeightWatchers will continue to offer a mix of groups, some focused purely on GLP-1 users, a place to discuss topics like understanding the science of the medications, dealing with side effects, eating while taking the therapies, and supporting weight loss through exercise and strength training. As WeightWatchers attempts to keep up with fast changes in this category—an oral weight loss medication is on the way—Rice will steer efforts to evolve communities. She says her biggest lesson from her years building Peoplehood is that “people just want to be together.”

“This is a really new category. It is really hard to find information. Your best friends won’t tell you that they are taking these medications,” Rice says. “What I’ve seen in these rooms is that people want a teacher. They want a best friend who will tell them where they’re buying their protein and which brands they like the best. And they want a cheerleader. They want somebody who’s saying, ‘You’re doing it right, you’re doing a great job.’ I think these rooms can be all of those things for people. They can be a classroom, a support system, a confidant.”

Emma Hinchliffe
emma.hinchliffe@fortune.com

The Most Powerful Women Daily newsletter is Fortune’s daily briefing for and about the women leading the business world. Subscribe here.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

SoulCycle cofounder Julie Rice is selling the assets of her latest startup Peoplehood to WeightWatchers.
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Female founders from brands like Outdoor Voices and the Wing are ready for a comeback. We should be too

6 August 2025 at 13:59

In today’s edition: Linda Yaccarino’s new job, a business opportunity in sports, and female founders are trying again—and that’s a good thing.

– Take two. Over the past few weeks, some of the names that defined 2010s female-founded startups have been back in the headlines. Audrey Gelman, known for founding the Wing, opened her new hotel the Six Bells in upstate New York. Ty Haney came back to revitalize the struggling, now private equity-owned athleisure brand she founded, Outdoor Voices. Yael Aflalo, who founded the still-popular fashion brand Reformation, has a new label.

All of these women not only built companies in the 2010s—about five years ago, they were part of a wave of female founders who were forced out or lost control of their businesses.

There were a lot of factors at play during that time: lofty promises made by brands that pledged to change the world and achieve equality—and were then confronted with the realities of capitalism; the tensions of the months that followed George Floyd’s murder; the difficulties of the early pandemic; employee and investor pressure; and, yes, genuine leadership issues. Media coverage built these founders up—but then contributed to their fall. I should know; I was writing about these founders through all of it. Besides the three founders who have launched new ventures in recent months, Away’s Steph Korey and Refinery29’s Christene Barberich were some of the others to be swept up in this trend.

But it’s been five years, and I think it’s time to say: these founders deserve another shot.

One reason female founders lost control of their businesses more easily than men did is that their employees and customers both held them to higher standards. Their stakeholders cared more about social justice (and their investors were less likely to have their backs through a crisis).

But the solution isn’t for these women to disappear from public life forever. “The wave of women founders who resigned in 2020—I think it satisfied a cultural appetite, but it sort of left a vacuum,” Gelman told me when I reached out for her thoughts last week. “Particularly these women who were great at building product, creative, and doing things no one had ever done.”

People enjoyed poking fun at the “girlboss,” but the jabs added up. “That period of time, five years ago, certainly turned off many women or girls that I knew that initially had interest [in building companies],” Haney told me when we caught up about her return to OV. Since departing the recreation brand, she has been more quietly building a blockchain-based consumer-loyalty platform called TYB, for which she recently raised $11 million—but her return to her firstborn brand is different. She’s not running the business itself this time and is instead focused on creative, but it’s “on [her] terms,” she says. “I hope it creates a wake of interest from young women in pursuing business aspirations and brand-building aspirations,” she says of her return and others’.

These founders, though, had to be ready to come back too. For now, Gelman’s endeavor (which started with a store in Brooklyn) resembles a traditional small business more than a globally expanding venture-backed startup, although she’s hinted at the potential for more hotels. She calls the through-line between the Wing and the “country kitsch” Six Bells a form of “world-building,” the creative side that originally set the Wing apart from other co-working spaces and private clubs. “Getting to build something new with more maturity and self-awareness—it takes time to properly absorb the lessons from a first company,” Gelman says.

And the question is: will things be different this time? Personally, I think they will. Structurally, some things haven’t changed. Women-only founding teams still get around 2% of VC dollars, and that stat has actually shrunk in recent years.

But culturally, a lot has. With the rise of TikTok, social media has become less glossy—allowing founders to share a more authentic view of their experience from the start, rather than a picture-perfect version that then gets torn down. Founders have more resources to respond quickly to any scandals and speak directly to their audiences. There are more ways to build a brand than fully depending on the founder as the face of it. Five years later, there’s an entire generation of Gen Z consumers that wasn’t really paying attention last time around and doesn’t carry millennials’ 2010s startup baggage.

Within the startup world, there’s less pressure to achieve growth at all costs—which led to some of the challenges for this era of companies. The Wing raised more than $100 million during its life, and Outdoor Voices had raised about $60 million by 2020. More disciplined running of businesses, with an eye to profitability, yields more responsible leadership.

And, of course, there’s a growing frustration with the reality that men have been forgiven by the public for much, much worse than needing some management coaching—just take a look at the White House. The rise of the manosphere has made women hungry to see other women’s success again.

There will still be challenges. Founders aren’t perfect, and female founders are no exception. Consumers will get mad about something, employees will have complaints, and things will go off the rails sometimes. “I’m hopeful that … we can normalize challenges, and ideally, these challenges that come up and people may feel sensitivity around are things that can be worked through, versus causing founders to have to depart the company,” Haney says.

On the whole, it can only be a good thing for women to be building, without fear, in public again. This generation of founders deserve another chance—and all women deserve to see that one failure isn’t the end.

Emma Hinchliffe
emma.hinchliffe@fortune.com

The Most Powerful Women Daily newsletter is Fortune’s daily briefing for and about the women leading the business world. Subscribe here.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

The Wing's founder Audrey Gelman is back with the Six Bells, five years after she and other female founders lost control of their companies.

The Most Powerful People in Business list doesn’t include female founders—yet

5 August 2025 at 14:04

In today’s edition: the impact of BLS turmoil, Martha Stewart gets into skincare, and this year’s Most Powerful People in Business.

– Power moves. For the second year in a row, Fortune has ranked the 100 Most Powerful People in Business. This list runs alongside our longstanding Most Powerful Women franchise—and once again shows why it’s still important to cover business’s Most Powerful Women on their own.

Of 105 people on the Most Powerful People list (there are some ties), 19 are women. They’re woven into the ranking in the same order they appear on our 2025 Most Powerful Women list, published in May. The top woman on the MPW list, GM chief Mary Barra, comes in at No. 10 on the Most Powerful People list. She’s preceded by today’s business titans—Jamie Dimon, Sam Altman, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Satya Nadella, and, at No. 1 this year, Nvidia’s Jensen Huang.

While Silicon Valley founders like Zuckerberg and Altman appear high on the ranking, the top women in business are mostly career executives. (After Barra, there’s Accenture’s Julie Sweet, Citi’s Jane Fraser, and AMD’s Lisa Su.) The only female founder who makes the MPP list is Anthropic’s Daniela Amodei, who appears alongside her brother and co-founder Dario Amodei.

The female founders like Mira Murati, Fei-Fei Li, and Canva’s Melanie Perkins who have become mainstays on the MPW list are poised to build generational companies like OpenAI and Meta—but are still on the way there. A few years from now, perhaps they’ll dominate the top of the ranking, too.

Emma Hinchliffe
emma.hinchliffe@fortune.com

The Most Powerful Women Daily newsletter is Fortune’s daily briefing for and about the women leading the business world. Subscribe here.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

GM chief Mary Barra is the top woman on Fortune's 2025 Most Powerful People list. Like most women who made the list, she's a career executive—not a founder.

What to know about Erika McEntarfer, the BLS commissioner fired by Trump

4 August 2025 at 13:22

In today’s edition: Mark Zuckerberg’s raid on Mira Murati’s startup, the end of the CPB, and the latest woman fired by Trump.

– You’re fired. President Donald Trump was unhappy with July’s U.S. jobs report, which showed hiring slowing (with 73,000 jobs added, compared to 100,000 predicted) and revised past months’ numbers. The Wall Street Journal called the results “surprisingly dismal.” So, on Friday Trump said he would fire the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Erika McEntarfer.

McEntarfer was nominated to lead the BLS in 2023. At the time, it was an overwhelmingly non-controversial appointment. She was confirmed 86-8 in a bipartisan vote.

She’s a longtime labor economist with more than 20 years experience in the federal government, who had worked at the Census Bureau’s Center for Economic Studies, the Treasury Department’s Office of Tax Policy and the White House Council of Economic Advisers in a nonpolitical role. Her research focused on job loss, retirement, worker mobility, and wage rigidity, according to the AP.

Trump accused McEntarfer of manipulating jobs data and said that the data was “being produced by a Biden appointee.” “She will be replaced with someone much more competent and qualified. Important numbers like this must be fair and accurate, they can’t be manipulated for political purposes,” Trump wrote on Truth Social.

The BLS produces data relied on by businesses and policymakers, including the Fed.

McEntarfer joins a growing list of female officials fired during Trump 2.0 (and lot of fired men, too). There was Admiral Linda Fagan, the leader of the Coast Guard and the first woman to lead a military branch who was removed on Trump’s second day back on the job. Gwynne Wilcox, who Trump attempted to dismiss from the National Labor Relations Board (she sued, and a back-and-forth over her dismissal reached the Supreme Court). Federal Elections Committee (FEC) chair Ellen Weintraub was let go. Phyllis Fong, inspector general of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, refused to comply with her firing in January and was escorted out by security. Carla Hayden, the Librarian of Congress, was fired via email.

McEntarfer’s colleagues have jumped to her defense. Her predecessor William Beach, who was appointed by Trump in 2019 and served until 2023, said that the “groundless” firing “sets a dangerous precedent and undermines the statistical mission of the Bureau.” Former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers said there was “no conceivable way” the numbers could have been manipulated, relying as they do on strict processes and hundreds of staffers. Janet Yellen said that the firing of the head of the bureau charged with accurately reporting economic data “is the kind of thing you would only expect to see in a banana republic.”

McEntarfer’s firing is part of a bigger plan for the BLS, the Journal reports. “The president wants his own people there, so that when we see the jobs numbers, they are more transparent and more reliable,” National Economic Council director Kevin Hassett said.

McEntarfer responded to her firing in a post on Bluesky. “It has been the honor of my life to serve as Commissioner of BLS alongside the many dedicated civil servants tasked with measuring a vast and dynamic economy,” she wrote. “It is vital and important work and I thank them for their service to this nation.”

On Sunday, Trump officials homed in on the revised May and June numbers as the reason for McEntarfer’s firing. “I think what we need is a fresh set of eyes at the BLS, somebody who can clean this thing up,” Hassett said.

Emma Hinchliffe
emma.hinchliffe@fortune.com

The Most Powerful Women Daily newsletter is Fortune’s daily briefing for and about the women leading the business world. Subscribe here.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

President Trump fired the commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics after the release of July's jobs report.
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