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For Women's History Month, we thought we would throw it back to the Female Funders Forum and today, we are highlighting Elizabeth Cutler, the co-founder of SoulCycle, one of the most recognizable fitness brands of the past two decades.
The conversation offered a candid look at what it actually felt like to build a company while raising young children, navigating partnerships, and trying to create something entirely new in the fitness industry.
Her message was simple: building a company is exhilarating, chaotic, and deeply human.
The Industry Was Broken
When Cutler and her co-founder Julie Rice began thinking about SoulCycle in the mid-2000s, the fitness industry looked very different.
Most people went to large “big box” gyms and the model was straightforward: sign people up for a membership and hope they didn’t show up often. Classes were hard to access, technology was clunky, and the overall experience was impersonal.
The founders saw an opportunity to rethink the model around something different: hospitality and experience.
Their approach centered on three principles:
- Hospitality first. Treat riders like guests, not gym members.
- Technology that respects people’s time. Allow riders to easily book a bike ahead of class instead of waiting in line.
- Invest heavily in instructors. The teacher wasn’t just leading a workout. They were creating an experience that kept people coming back.
The result was a class that felt less like a workout and more like a shared emotional release.
As Cutler described it, Soul Cycle riders would walk out feeling like they had experienced something profound in just 45 minutes.
Building an Experience That Scales
SoulCycle’s real product wasn’t stationary bikes. It was a community.
Every studio aimed to deliver the same emotional experience regardless of location. That meant investing deeply in instructor training and culture. Instructors weren’t simply hired for fitness credentials. They were chosen for their ability to hold the energy of a room and create a shared moment among dozens of strangers.
The founders believed that if the experience was powerful enough, growth would follow naturally.
People would leave class and tell their friends. Those friends would bring their own friends. The community expanded outward from the studio.
Scaling Lightning in a Bottle
One of the hardest challenges was scaling something so dependent on human energy.
A friend once warned Cutler that expanding the concept would be impossible: you can’t just bottle lightning and replicate it across cities.
But the founders approached the problem deliberately. They spent weeks personally training instructors in new markets, ensuring the experience stayed consistent. In some cases, they even relocated temporarily to oversee the process.
The goal was simple: protect the core experience while the company grew.
The Founder’s Well
Cutler also spoke candidly about the emotional toll of building a company.
During SoulCycle’s early growth, she was raising a one-year-old and a three-year-old while running a startup. At times, everything seemed to break at once. A child’s birthday party might be scheduled the same day a crisis ocurred at the company.
Her way of managing that pressure came down to one idea: maintaining your well.
Founders need a personal system for refilling their energy when the demands of the business are constant. For Cutler, that meant therapy, coaching, and learning how to organize her life so there was room to breathe.
She and Rice hired a business coach early in the company’s life. The two founders had very different personalities, and the coach helped them build the structure needed to work together effectively and they had one very early on. For Cutler, it was making the well deep enough to handle the demands of the job. She had to fill her cup and take care of herself before she did anyone else's.
The Emotional Reality of Entrepreneurship
Throughout the conversation, Cutler returned to the emotional rhythm of startup life.
The highs are exhilarating. The lows are brutal. And sometimes they happen on the same day.
As she joked, entrepreneurship often feels like this: some days you eat the dog, and some days the dog eats you.
But for founders willing to endure the chaos, the payoff is the chance to build something that genuinely changes people’s lives.
And in SoulCycle’s case, that meant creating a room full of strangers who, for 45 minutes, felt like a community, a family.
Tune into our next Female Founders Lunch on March 13th with Andrea Breanna (Gallatin '97 & Tisch ITP '03), Founder of RebelMouse! RSVP here!
