The first machine Jean-Michel Fournier learned to understand was not a brain-sensing headband. It was the electrical world of a small village in southern France, where he left school at 16 to become an electrician. The route from there to the CEO’s chair at Muse is long enough to look cinematic from a distance. Up close, it is more useful: a series of rooms entered because someone noticed a door, followed by Fournier doing the stubborn work of walking through it.
That first door came with a person. Fournier has recalled meeting a business leader who helped him understand what he might do with his life. The encounter raised his ambitions. He returned to school, studied in Nîmes, earned an electronic engineering qualification connected to the University of Birmingham, and later continued his education at Harvard Business School. A career that began with wiring became a career concerned with signals, systems and what happens when complicated technology reaches a human being.
A second education in possibility
Fournier’s biography is often compressed into a cheerful leap from electrician to executive. The interesting part is the middle. Returning to education did not erase the first chapter; it gave the chapter a new use. Electrical work teaches respect for invisible systems. Engineering makes those systems legible. Business asks which ones deserve to exist at scale. Fournier kept adding languages without discarding the old ones.
At Hewlett-Packard in Palo Alto, he worked around computer science, networks and high-end servers. He has described HP as the place where looking for new technologies pulled him toward mobile. Around 2000, his curiosity moved toward the overlap between technology and the routines of everyday life. At UnitedHealth Group, he focused on emerging technologies. In Silicon Valley, he co-founded startups and served as an adviser supporting French companies expanding abroad.
“I’ve always enjoyed having a rich blend of experiences.”Jean-Michel Fournier
“Rich blend” is a modest phrase for a resume that hops between enterprise hardware, partnerships, mobile software, computer vision, music licensing, streaming video and wearable sensors. Yet the blend has a flavor. Fournier repeatedly arrives where a technical capability is looking for a consumer behavior. He is less interested in the laboratory trick than in the moment when somebody understands what the trick is for.
The treadmill needed a view
BitGym made that instinct visible. The company used the camera in a phone or tablet to detect a person’s motion on cardio equipment, then adjusted a video journey to the pace of the workout. A stationary bike could travel a road. A treadmill could move through a landscape. The computer vision mattered, but the pleasure lay in its disappearance. The user saw the route, not the model doing the work.
BitGym also placed Fournier inside the unromantic disciplines of a consumer startup: distribution, retention, platform choices and the tiny indignities between a prototype and a habit. The company’s premise foreshadowed his next chapter. Screens could make physical activity more immersive, but only if the experience respected why people showed up in the first place.
Music before machinery
His path into Les Mills began socially rather than formally. Fournier was friends with the president of Les Mills in France, who was speaking with executive director Phillip Mills about reaching consumers directly. Fournier analyzed the business, presented a strategy to senior leadership and joined the company. By 2018, he had become CEO of Les Mills Media, responsible for the worldwide consumer operation, its business-to-business and direct-to-consumer digital portfolio, and worldwide music management.
The scale changed. The basic question did not. Les Mills On Demand offered hundreds of workouts across devices, extending an experience long associated with instructors and studios into homes and hotel rooms. Fournier argued for a blend of physical and digital rather than a duel between them. A screen could widen access, but community and live instruction still supplied the heartbeat.
“Music and movement are also universal languages.”Jean-Michel Fournier
His ordering was revealing: music first, then choreography, science and testing. For an executive with an engineering background, he was unusually willing to put emotion at the front of the product brief. He spoke publicly about artificial intelligence, augmented reality and holographic telepresence, but he did not mistake novelty for the experience. The future still needed a good song and a reason to turn up.
The smallest room yet
After Les Mills, Fournier moved to BODi, where his work included corporate development and strategic partnerships. In April 2023, Interaxon appointed him CEO and a member of its board. Muse brought the strands together: physical hardware, sophisticated signals, software interpretation, a consumer interface, recurring content, research relationships and partnerships. The room had become smaller than ever. Much of the system now sat on a person’s forehead.
Muse’s devices measure electrical brain activity and translate the data through software. Under Fournier, the company has pushed further into a platform strategy, pairing wearable hardware with research tools, datasets and newer sensing methods. Muse researchers joined a Microsoft Research presentation in 2025 about learning from real-world neural data at scale. The same year, the company described its Athena device as combining multiple sensing technologies in a lightweight wearable.
By 2026, Fournier was at the World AI Cannes Festival explaining Muse’s work during an Ontario technology mission. The geographic arrangement is characteristic: a French-born operator based around San Francisco leading a Canadian company and speaking at a French conference about a globally distributed research platform. His career has never been especially respectful of borders, including the border between a consumer product and a serious technical instrument.
Three words, no decorative plaque
When his alumni network asked what life had taught him, Fournier offered three words: “Persistence, resilience and empathy.” Executive language often arrives scrubbed of biography. These words improve when returned to his. Persistence is going back to school after leaving at 16. Resilience is moving between corporations and startups, technical roles and consumer ones, without requiring the story to remain tidy. Empathy is the work of making the machine meet the person halfway.
Let a second beginning count. The decision to return can matter more than the decision to leave.
Carry skills across industries. A chapter can end while its vocabulary remains valuable.
Translate the system. People adopt an experience, not a specification sheet.
Those values also explain his preference for bridges. At Les Mills, he resisted treating digital and physical experiences as enemies. At BitGym, software animated familiar equipment rather than replacing it. At Muse, the company is building connections between consumer hardware, research data and software. The operating move is additive. Find an established behavior. Give it a new layer. Keep the human ritual recognizable.
Fournier’s public persona is more practical futurist than oracle. He enjoys the big horizon, but his work keeps returning to execution: partnerships, product portfolios, distribution and user experience. Even his old prediction about immersive fitness was anchored to what clubs and consumers might actually do. The shiny object is allowed in the room, provided it can explain its job.
The useful signal
There is an appealing circularity in an electrician leading a brain-sensing company. It is also a little too neat. The stronger connection lies elsewhere. Fournier’s formative lesson was not electrical; it was relational. Someone else could see potential that he could not yet see. His career since then has involved a similar act of interpretation: detecting possibility in a technical signal and presenting it in a form that another person can recognize.
That makes his story less about reinvention than translation. The electrician did not vanish when the engineer appeared. The engineer remained inside the founder. The founder’s impatience traveled into the executive roles. The consumer operator now sits inside a company dealing with signals that are noisy, intimate and difficult to explain. Each chapter supplies the next with an accent.
The lesson worth stealing is refreshingly unglamorous. Careers compound through portable questions. Fournier’s has been consistent: how can this technology become an experience people understand and choose to use? Ask a good question for long enough and the industries may change around it. The resume will look varied. The work will feel strangely continuous.