Ron Schneidermann knows that better than most. 

After scaling his first company, Liftopia, into a business with more than $60 million in annual revenue, he went on to become CEO of AllTrails, the popular hiking map app. And today, he leads test-prep startup Acely. But looking back across his career, he says he had to learn the hard way what real work-life balance actually costs—and what it’s worth.

While building Liftopia, a digital marketplace for ski resorts, that mindset came at a personal price. Schneidermann worked out of a cramped San Francisco apartment, turned spending less than $15 a day into a kind of endurance test, and went two years without taking a salary, surviving largely on canned soup.

The tradeoffs even extended into his family life. When his first daughter was born four years into Liftopia, he took just two days off work. Three years later, he allowed himself just a week for his son’s birth—and thought that was progress.

“I look back, I was just able to justify it as ‘that’s just part of the grind’… but you never get that time back,” Schneidermann told Fortune. “That was a mistake.”

It’s not an easy admission in startup culture, where sacrifice is often worn as a badge of honor and overwork is normalized as the price of ambition. But the 48-year-old has since reframed the experience entirely.

“For everything that was frustrating, that went wrong, that I regretted about Liftopia, I was able to take the inverse and turn it into a strength,” he said.

By the time he joined AllTrails in 2015, that mindset shift was already underway. He eventually became CEO in 2019 and instituted a company-wide ritual: the first Friday of every month, AllTrails shut down and employees were encouraged to go outside.

Last August, he took on the new challenge of becoming CEO of Acely. This time, he’s bringing those hard-won lessons with him from the start. Instead of monthly trail days, the company now runs a monthly “hackathon,” where its less than a dozen employees pause routine work for the whole day and experiment with AI tools and new ideas—no meetings, no KPIs, no deliverables.

Ron Schneidermann says he’ll never take a job for its salary ever again

Even before Schneidermann had his eyes on entrepreneurship, he was learning career lessons the hard way.

In the late 1990s, he was a student at UCLA studying mass communication and business while also working at Abercrombie & Fitch to help pay for his studies. However, he ended up getting fired three separate times because he “never liked it” enough to muster the proper decorum.

Similarly, after graduating in 2000, he landed a job at Accenture working as a business process consultant. Once again, though, he found it not aligning with the life he wanted to have. And despite the lucrative salary of working at a Fortune 500 consulting firm, he quit.

“It was a great experience. I’m grateful for it, but I hated it,” he said. “I hated it, and I told myself, I am never going to take a job for money again. Life is too short.”

That realization eventually pushed him toward startups. 

Through a friend of a friend, he landed a role at Hotwire, then a travel startup that was later acquired by Expedia, and it became his entry point into the tech world. Looking back, Schneidermann said that early career path offers a lesson he wishes more young workers would take seriously: relationships matter as much as résumés, especially in a job market where traditional entry-level pipelines are narrowing.

“Really invest in your network,” he said. “There’s a small pond at the end of the day. If you stay in it long enough, you are going to know everyone, and everyone you know are going to be leaders somewhere.”

Digital-native Gen Zers can boost their careers by working to build real relationships

Schneidermann’s point may resonate with Gen Z at a time when employers say early-career workers are struggling with basic professional norms. A 2024 survey found that six in 10 bosses admitted they had already fired Gen Z employees hired straight out of college, citing poor communication, lack of professionalism, and disorganization.

For Schneidermann, the issue isn’t just skills—it’s mindset. Too many young workers treat networking as transactional, when in reality it’s built on consistency, reputation, and how you show up over time. That starts with small, often overlooked behaviors.

“There’s a human on the other end. Don’t ghost people and just show up,” he said.

The same principle applies more broadly to career growth. Rather than chasing the perfect role or obsessing over credentials, Schneidermann emphasized curiosity as the real differentiator.

“Just approach everything with a curious mindset,” he added. “Just constantly try to be learning and exploring.”

That philosophy has carried through multiple career pivots, including his most recent move to Acely, a startup with no obvious connection to his background. After being approached by an executive search firm, he took the job in part because his high school–aged daughter had recently used the product for SAT prep. She was among its over 50,000 active users.

For Schneidermann, the challenge was one he was eager to take on. From his perspective, he didn’t need to be an expert in the industry—he just needed to be willing to learn it.