The Dance Until Dawn is a series about what keeps founders going. After five years of building a company, with every intention of building for many more, I've watched many founders come and go. Along the way I've formed opinions about what it takes for a founder to last, and for the company to last with her. I see founder longevity as resting on a few core pillars. Each essay in this series takes one of them. Take what's useful.
I'm in incredible shape, and almost none of it is useful for my job. I spent years as a professional acrobat with Cirque du Soleil, and my body still remembers. I can do things most people would find pretty startling. None of them help me with a hard week of founder work, most of which happens in front of a computer.
What carried over is less visible: the stamina, the discipline, and a habit so deeply trained into me that I now need to move in order to think clearly and feel like myself. It took me a while to understand that last part, and it's why this series starts here.
At Cirque I performed ten shows a week, in Japan, in Russia, across Europe and Australia. The tricks weren't really the hard part. The job was doing it with perfection night after night without getting hurt, burning out or growing tired of the work. Many of the people around me were twice my age or older and had done this their whole lives. Some came from countries and backgrounds where it was the only path open to them. I came in from the side, someone who started acrobatics as a hobby and turned professional, and the difference in mindset was obvious. For them the body wasn't something you maintained around the job. The body was the job. It was what you were hired for and what let you keep your place.
Who lasted? Some of it was luck, because professionals still get hurt. But the performers who stayed for years tended to share two things. They loved the work, and they couldn't imagine doing anything else. For many, an alternative had never entered their minds.
Founders differ in a way that matters. Most of us had other options and still do. And our bodies aren't the job, which is exactly why they're the first thing we sacrifice for it. Nobody fires a founder for skipping a month of training. The cost shows up later, in sleep, mood and judgment, and by then it's hard to trace back to its source.
Tech, crypto and now AI make it easy to forget we have bodies at all. There's a familiar kind of founder who wears sitting at the computer all day as a badge of honor. I don't think that founder lasts, because human bodies don't work that way. The vessel through which we interact with the world is our bodies. Trust still forms best in person, in a shared room or a long dinner or a walk between meetings. Since COVID I've let a lot of that go, and I suspect many of us have. When the in-person moments do come, they're physical. A conference is five days on your feet, conversations from breakfast to the last event, often at the end of a long flight. You need to be in shape just to get through it with your judgment intact.
Movement also refuses to stay in its lane. When I move well I sleep better. When I sleep better I eat better and think more clearly. When one slips, the others usually follow.
There's a second benefit I underrated for years. A hard workout is a small, finished accomplishment. Some mornings you start something you aren't sure you'll complete, and then you complete it. Do that often enough and you build the muscle for getting through challenges by getting through challenges. You carry it into the work. When the day goes sideways, you already know what it feels like to be in the middle of something difficult and come out the other side.
As a founder you have bad weeks constantly. Depending on how you count, there are more bad weeks than good ones. I'm grateful to still be here, working toward a vision I've held for a long time and watching the industry move toward it. But on a bad week, an hour of training changes the day. Part of that is chemistry. Part of it is simpler: everything else may have gone wrong, but I got out there and did that.
There's research that points the same way. A study of S&P 1500 companies from 2001 to 2011 counted CEOs as fit if they finished a marathon, and found firms led by those CEOs were worth almost 5% more on average, with the effect strongest for older, longer-tenured CEOs carrying heavy workloads. The internet's version is less rigorous and more fun: founder Pieter Levels built a "Deadlift ETF" of companies whose CEOs lift weights or train in fight sports, and claimed it beat the S&P 500 by 140% over four years. Truflation turned it into an index, and as of late 2024 no actual fund tracked it. I hold all of this loosely. Fit CEOs may start with more time, money and stability, and a marathon is the extreme version of fitness I'm arguing nobody needs.
Training properly takes time, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest. It's a discipline problem as much as a physical one, so I structure around it. I train six days a week. Two are cardio, a run or a long ride. Three are strength. One is an oddball day: plyometrics, calisthenics, handstand practice, anything a little strange and a little fun that asks my body for something new. On weekdays the sessions are short and efficient. On weekends I let training be a luxury, two to two and a half hours of a full workout, because that's how I unwind. The seventh day is off, which in practice means a long walk, time outside, some yoga. I'm moving. I'm just not training.
The plan is made to be flexible. A founder's calendar won't hold a consistent routine, and in my industry you travel constantly. Some days are sixteen hours on a plane, and the only sensible response is to accept it and pick the plan back up when you land. The founder chained to a desk and the founder who trains for two brutal hours and then disappears for three weeks have more in common than either would admit. Both are living in extremes. What I suggest striving for is the version you can keep doing on a bad week.
The judging that matters most is the kind founders do on themselves, and we're all doing it whether we admit it or not. Let's face it: if you feel like shit and look like shit, you're going to perform like shit. As a woman, I know being in shape is expected of me and that it helps my personal brand. How you feel in your body shows up in how you lead. The fitness of the founder shapes the fitness of the company.
At Cirque, nobody had to tell us to put our bodies first. Our bodies were the job. Founders don't get that clarity, so we have to choose it. I think we should expect it of ourselves, and I think the people who back us are right to notice whether we do. A body isn't a scorecard, and it doesn't need to look any particular way. But how a founder treats theirs is a signal of how they treat everything that never shows up on a dashboard: rest, recovery, the long-term health of something they're responsible for. A company is one of those things. If you're not taking care of your body, it's worth asking what else you're not taking care of.
