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.”
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
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ALSO IN THE HEADLINES
- Major meeting. Citi CEO Jane Fraser met with President Trump yesterday. She pitched the president on pursuing public offerings for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which could be the largest public offerings in history. Priscilla Almodovar leads Fannie Mae as CEO. Bloomberg
- Contraception consequences. The Trump administration ordered $9.7 million worth of contraceptives that were en route to the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Kenya, Tanzania, Zambia and Mali to be destroyed. The International Planned Parenthood Federation reports that that will lead to 174,000 unintended pregnancies and 56,000 unsafe abortions. Guardian
- Other options. The two leading candidates to succeed Jerome Powell as Fed chair are both named Kevin. (Trump says "both Kevins are very good.") But two dark horses in the race are Michelle Bowman, the Fed's vice chair for supervision, and economist Judy Shelton. Fortune
- Huckabee Sanders and health care. Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders is facing off with Centene, led by CEO Sarah London. The GOP governor is blaming the Medicaid and Medicare insurer for raising premiums—which insurers are doing in part as a response to political uncertainty around the future of funding for Affordable Care Act plans. Bloomberg
MOVERS AND SHAKERS
Amanda Bradford, who founded the dating app the League, is leaving Match Group, which acquired the app in 2022.
ON MY RADAR
Enough with the mom guilt already The Atlantic
Louisa Jacobson on what she learned from her mother, Meryl Streep Wall Street Journal
Mrs. Dalloway's midlife crisis The Atlantic
PARTING WORDS
"It felt very comfortable to not feel so stressed about preparing. The only thing was relearning guitar again."
— Lindsay Lohan on revisiting her role in Freakier Friday
