I have always been a huge believer in remote work. Long before COVID made it normal, I was already trying to figure out how far a laptop and decent Wi-Fi could take me. I loved the freedom of it. I could spend time in Mexico, work from Colombia, extend a trip, and build more of my life around the world instead of arranging the world around a desk. To me, that flexibility felt like progress, and I still believe it is.
At the same time, I started noticing something about myself that seemed contradictory. At my old company in Austin, we had an office, but there was no mandate to be there. I could have worked from home every day and nobody would have cared. Still, I found myself going in two or three times a week. It was not because I needed someone watching me work. It was because I was learning things by simply being around people that I could not learn as easily through a screen.
I worked in tech, but I was not technical, and there were plenty of moments when I felt like an imposter. I would hear engineers talking about things I barely understood, but over time, just being near those conversations helped. I picked up vocabulary. I started understanding how they thought. I could ask a question in passing instead of scheduling thirty minutes on someone’s calendar. I learned by proximity.
The same was true of relationships. Some of the people I became closest with at work did not become friends because we had a team-building exercise. It happened because we grabbed coffee, talked before a meeting, overheard each other working through a problem, or happened to eat lunch at the same time. Those moments were small, but they compounded. Remote work had given me freedom, while being around people gave me context, connection, and a feeling of being part of something.
That tension stayed with me. I did not want to go back to a world where everyone was chained to an office five days a week simply because that was what work had always looked like. But I also did not believe that spending every day alone behind a laptop was the natural end point of progress. The interesting question was somewhere in the middle. If people had more freedom over where they worked, where would they actually want to spend their days?
I had been learning another version of the same lesson through the mountains.
One of the best quarters I ever had professionally was also a quarter I intentionally cut short by nearly a month so I could go into the mountains in Pakistan. On paper, that should have been a terrible formula for performance. I had less time to work, and at the same time I was training constantly for something physically demanding.
Instead, I felt incredible.
The climb gave me a reason to take myself seriously outside of work. I was training hard, eating better, sleeping with more intention, and paying attention to what I was putting into my body because I knew I was going to ask a lot from it. My skin looked better. My head felt clearer. I felt stronger, and that strength carried into everything else.
More importantly, training forced me to architect my days instead of letting work consume whatever space I gave it. I would wake up early, get quiet work done while my mind was fresh, train, come back and handle the most demanding tasks, push meetings later where I could, then move again in the afternoon. I had fewer hours, which somehow made me more honest about how I was using them.
That season changed the way I thought about work-life balance. I had always heard it described as if work and life were competing against each other, one stealing time from the other. My experience was the opposite. Taking care of myself made me better at my job. Having a meaningful physical goal made me more focused. A stronger body made my mind feel stronger too. The mountain was not getting in the way of my work. In a strange way, it was helping me do some of the best work of my career.
That realization stayed with me because it exposed something I think most people experience. We usually do not lack good intentions when it comes to taking care of ourselves. We genuinely mean it when we say we are going to train at four o’clock. Then four comes and a meeting runs over. Something urgent pops up. Tomorrow starts sounding reasonable. Tomorrow becomes Friday, Friday becomes next week, and suddenly the workout you planned to miss once has been gone for a month.
We tend to blame discipline, but I started wondering how much of the problem was actually environmental. If every important part of your life requires a separate trip, a separate membership, another calendar block, and another act of willpower, eventually friction wins.
That became one of the earliest ideas underneath Gevity.
When we were writing the business plan, a significant portion of Austin was working remotely. That number has shifted as companies have pulled people back toward offices, but the broader change is not disappearing. Hybrid work is here. Flexible work is here. Millions of people now have more control over where they spend a large part of their day, yet we have barely begun redesigning our environments around what that actually means.
A kitchen table was never meant to become somebody’s entire professional world. A coffee shop can be wonderful, but it was not built to support your health, privacy, recovery, or relationships. Traditional coworking solved the desk problem, but often stopped at the desk. At the same time, the rest of our lives stayed scattered. Work here. Training there. Recovery somewhere else. Friends across town.
It struck me as strange that we had become obsessed with efficiency while designing days that were incredibly inefficient.
I also started questioning the way we talked about wellness. We like to divide it into categories: physical wellness, emotional wellness, social wellness, professional wellness. Those labels can be useful, but they are not how a human being experiences life. If you hate your job, that stress does not stay politely inside your laptop when you close it. If you are lonely, that affects how you show up professionally. If you have not slept or moved your body properly in weeks, your thinking changes. Your patience changes. Your relationships change.
It is all one life.
There was another piece of this that felt personal to me. The wellness spaces I had been around often seemed to sit at one of two extremes. On one end was a world that could feel intensely spiritual, beautiful in some ways but also easy to feel outside of if you did not already speak the language. On the other end was a hyper-masculine version of health built around intensity, harder training, darker rooms, and often a fair amount of ego.
I appreciated pieces of both, but I never felt completely at home in either.
I can connect deeply with the spiritual side of life. I also love training brutally hard for a mountain. I care about ambition. I care about becoming stronger. I also care about sitting around a table with people I love, laughing, traveling, being curious, and having enough space in my life to actually notice that I am alive.
I figured there had to be more people somewhere in that middle.
People who wanted to take their health seriously without making wellness their entire identity. People who wanted to be ambitious without turning every room into a competition. People who wanted to work hard and still feel human.
That became part of the spirit behind Gevity. Leave your ego at the door. Come in as you are. Push yourself when you want to be pushed. Slow down when you need to. Meet someone because they are interesting, not because you calculated what they might be able to do for you. Take your work seriously, but not yourself.
The deeper we got into the idea, the less interested I became in building a place with a long list of amenities. You can put a cold plunge, a desk, and a gym in the same building and still completely miss the point.
The more interesting question was whether an environment itself could make a good life easier to live.
Could movement happen naturally because it was thirty seconds away instead of twenty minutes across town? Could you step out of a hard meeting, reset, and return differently? Could friendships form not because you went to a networking event, but because you kept seeing the same people and eventually started talking?
Could a place support ambition without worshipping busyness, and wellness without turning it into another performance?
That was much closer to what I wanted to build.
I do not believe the point of health is to become a more efficient machine. The point is to have enough energy to participate fully in your own life. To do work you care about and still have something left when you get home. To feel strong enough to take on something difficult. To have room for an unexpected conversation. To be ambitious without looking up ten years later and wondering what all the rushing was for.
Remote work taught me the value of freedom. Going into the office when nobody required me to taught me the value of proximity. The mountains taught me that taking care of my body did not make me less ambitious; it made my ambition healthier. Travel taught me how naturally people connect when the environment makes room for it.
Gevity came out of trying to hold all of those truths at once.
Not by telling people how to live, but by asking a simpler question: why were all the things that made us feel most human living in different places?
And what might become possible if we finally put some of them back together?