Former Twitter CEO Dick Costolo, who stepped away from the big blue bird last June, has a new health and fitness platform startup in the works, focused on motivating people to make lifestyle improvements by drawing on the expertise of a range of “wellness professionals” to provide inspiring guidance.
That’s not all. Costolo has also signed up to being a VC — joining Index Ventures as a partner, investing in new startups and working with existing Index portfolio companies. So new year, two new jobs for @DickC…
We asked Index if it’s an investor in its new employee, Costolo’s, own new venture — but the firm declined to comment. So we can but speculate. Still, with investor friends like those fundraising surely isn’t going to be this startup’s biggest pain point…
The former comedian revealed the tidbids of personal news in a couple of tweets earlier this morning — managing to just miss the sporadic service outages his former employee has been suffering today. And stuffing way more than 140 characters into a few tweets thanks to the old screenshot trick… (no need to wait for those 10,000 word tweets, then).
“We’re building a new software platform that reimagines the path to personal fitness. This platform will go beyond measurement to motivate and drive improvement and make the road to personal transformation fun and social. For wellness professionals, from fitness coaches to doctors and nutritionists and more, our platform will be the easiest and most flexible way to extend expertise and guidance by orders of magnitude,” the tweeted text about the new startup reads.
His co-founder for the fitness startup is Bryan Oki — a former crossfit coach who brings plenty of relevant industry experience, having also previously founded and led a health and wellness consultancy, Fitify.
“The fitness industry is transitioning to a world of specialized studios and programs with a multitude of connected devices and software trackers. We’ve developed a system that works within this evolving landscape, and we believe we can scale this system with technology and deliver it to a massive audience. A lot more to say as we continue to build out what’s working so well in our proof-of-concepts,” Costolo’s tweet adds.
Asked via Twitter whether the fitness platform would work with a particular indoor cycling workout called Soul Cycle, Costolo said yes but added that it’s not about creating a niche solution — noting: “It’s a platform for everyone.”
Given the proliferation of fitness trackers and health quantification measures in recent years there’s no shortage of raw material for consumers to pull in pertaining to their personal wellness. Yet that growing volume of data arguably creates a challenge for those wanting to intelligently navigate the various signals it’s possible to acquire — rather than just doing something super basic, like counting a daily number of steps.
So perhaps Costolo’s platform aims to tackle the challenge of intelligently interpreting a range of wellness signals in a way that maximizes their utility and effectiveness, and also amps up the motivational potential (hello social features) of using devices and services to achieve fitness lifestyle goals. But let’s wait and see.
