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Payal Kadakia is the founder of ClassPass and the founder and artistic director of The Sa Dance Company, a contemporary Indian dance company. An MIT graduate who went on to work at Bain & Company and Warner Music Group, Payal managed to turn the thing she couldn't imagine giving up (dance) into the foundation for both her artistic career and one of the biggest fitness platforms in the world.
Payal and I have known each other for a while, so this conversation has a pretty natural, catching-up feel to it. She tells me about growing up as an Indian kid in New Jersey, being the nerd who also happened to spend her weekends competing in Indian dance, and the process of finally realizing that she didn't have to choose between the different parts of herself. That eventually led her to quit a secure career without a Plan B and build what became ClassPass.
Payal doesn't really think of herself as an entrepreneur so much as an inventor. Whether she's building a dance company, a technology platform, or simply designing her own life, she's constantly asking how to create something that makes people feel something they haven't felt before. Her advice to other founders is similarly straightforward - stop obsessing over the name, the office, the lawyers and the marketing, and make sure the actual thing you're creating works first. It's a conversation about ambition, identity, and making room for the things that give you energy instead of treating them like distractions from your "real" career.
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