The Obsession That Led Rebecca Balyasny to create FitTech Platform Bande

We’ve watched Bande grow from founder obsession to growing community living on a tech platform. And in creating a social network for boutique fitness, Rebecca Balyasny, CEO and Founder of Bande, has truly put herself into brand new territory.

She’s not new to setting goals and achieving, which you’ll hear about on the podcast episode, but she IS new to starting her own business in the fitness space. Previous to founding Bande, she had a career she loved in finance – and while at Prudential she volunteered to raise a $2 billion fund – a challenge that took her more than a year and left her “boss’s boss’s boss” scratching their head because “no one had ever volunteered for that kind of challenge before.”

And through that experience and her work with founders and startups, she caught the bug, second-hand.

“I’ve always been really interested in founders and entrepreneurs and their stories and what they went through,” she explained, noting that, “No one can ever tell you what it’s like until you experience it”

Bande, though, scratches a new itch for her. Solving a problem that was nagging at her – and doing it in an elegant way.

“It was an idea born out of covid and just desperation to both connect with friends and get in the best workouts possible,” She said. “It was really accelerated during COVID and I realized that there was nothing out there that allowed you to connect socially with your friends and get in a great workout and I just saw that whitespace.”

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About Jeana Anderson Cohen

Jeana Anderson Cohen is the founder and CEO of asweatlife.com a premiere wellness media destination that creates content and community to help womxn live better lives and achieve their goals. Before founding health-focused companies Jeana earned a degree in Journalism from the University of Wisconsin-Madison - and fresh out of college she worked on the '08 Obama campaign in Michigan. From there, she created and executed social media strategies for brands. aSweatLife fuses her experience in building community and her passion for wellness. You can find Jeana leading the team at aSweatLife, trying to join a book club, and walking her dog Maverick.