kickoff
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Michael Villar
Michael Villar is the founder and CEO of Height, a New York-based project management platform that is trying to hand the tedious parts of running projects over to an AI reasoning engine. He is Belgian, was selling forum skins at 14, sold his previous startup Kickoff to Stripe in 2013, spent years designing and coding early Stripe products, and now runs Height as a lean team with a Series A behind it.
Kickoff
Kickoff is a New York-based remote fitness and nutrition coaching platform that pairs clients with certified personal trainers and registered dietitians who deliver custom workouts, meal guidance, and daily text and video check-ins. Founded in 2019 by CEO John Gardner, the company set out to make elite-level personal coaching affordable, and more recently has moved to have its dietitian-led training covered by health insurance so many clients pay little or nothing. Kickoff has attracted more than 20,000 coaches and raised roughly $11M from investors including 645 Ventures, FJ Labs, and Expa.
Jack Gardner
Jack Gardner is the founder and CEO of Kickoff, a New York wellness platform that pairs everyday people with certified personal trainers over text, video and an app for a fraction of in-person prices. An NASM-certified trainer himself, he built the first version while coaching his own mom, then turned that into a marketplace of 20,000+ coaches that has paid out millions to trainers and helped tens of thousands of clients. Before Kickoff he was a Bain consultant and a BuildZoom SVP; today he runs the company on a Notion-and-Metabase stack with a mission to make elite coaching something that doesn't require an elite bank account.