In early 2023, I had no idea Gevity would ever exist. There was no name, no concept deck, no business plan, and certainly no vision for an 18,000-square-foot social wellness club in Austin. I had just lost my job in tech and was in a season of life that felt far less exciting than the story sounds in hindsight. I was in a dark place, trying to figure out what came next and, more importantly, trying to feel like myself again.
At first, I did what seemed responsible. I started interviewing. The obvious move was to find another job, get back into a routine, and keep life moving in the direction it had been going. Then one Saturday morning, I woke up with a thought that I still remember clearly: when you are young, you tend to have time and no money. When you are older, you finally have the money, but almost no time.
For whatever reason, that thought landed differently that morning. Losing my job had felt entirely like something had been taken from me, but suddenly I could see the other side of it. For the first time in years, nobody was expecting me to be anywhere on Monday morning. I had no company depending on me, no major obligation tying me to one place, and no idea when I would have that kind of freedom again. Maybe this was not only a setback. Maybe it was a window.
I had always wanted to travel around the world properly, but I had never wanted the polished version of it. I was not interested in disappearing for a few weeks to Paris, Sydney, and a couple of beaches and then calling it a world trip. I wanted to go slowly, travel through places I knew almost nothing about, take uncomfortable routes, spend time with people whose lives looked nothing like mine, and see how far I could push myself in the mountains along the way. The idea eventually became an eleven-month journey through 27 countries, starting in West Africa and working toward Argentina, with the back half built around some of the bigger physical challenges I had been dreaming about, including the Three Pass Trek in Nepal and Aconcagua in Argentina.
Even as I was planning to disappear for almost a year, part of me still assumed I would come back and end up in the corporate world again. I could already imagine the interview on the other side. Someone would scan my résumé, see this giant gap, look across the table, and wonder where the hell I had been for the past year.
That concern led to something that, at the time, felt completely unrelated to anything I would eventually build. I decided to make a travel website.
The idea was pretty simple. Rather than trying to explain a year of my life in a few awkward sentences during an interview, I could point someone somewhere that actually told the story. I had already traveled to 38 countries, so before leaving I wanted to fill the site with guides, stories, lessons, and useful information from everything I had already experienced. Then I could document the larger trip as I went. In a strange way, the first iteration of this website was originally just an elaborate answer to a future job interviewer asking, “So, what have you been doing?”
The problem was that I had never built a website. I did not know how to code, how to structure it, how to make it look good, or really what I was doing at all. So I started learning. What began as a side project quickly swallowed entire days. I remember barely sleeping one weekend because I was determined to get the thing live before I left. I was writing, learning, building, breaking things, fixing them, and trying to load years of travel into a site that still existed mostly in my head.
At the same time, I was training hard for the mountains. My days became this strange combination of sitting behind a laptop for hours and then trying to prepare my body for long days at altitude. One afternoon, a close friend and I went to a local wellness spot to get out of the house and break up the routine. We did a few rounds between the sauna and cold plunge, and I came out feeling completely different. My energy was back. My head was clear. I felt awake in a way I had not felt after hours of staring at a screen.
My reaction was not profound. It was practical.
I thought, I should come back here tomorrow with my laptop.
In my head, the day made perfect sense. I could show up, get in the cold plunge, sit in the sauna, have a good cup of coffee, open my laptop, and get a few productive hours of work done without having to bounce around town. So I asked whether I could bring my laptop back and work from there the next day.
The answer was basically, “No Wi-Fi, man.”
It was such a small interaction, but it stopped me.
I remember looking around and thinking about how strange that was. I had just found a place that made me feel more energized, more focused, and more capable of doing good work, yet the moment I wanted to actually do that work, I had to leave. From there, the thought widened almost immediately. Why did I need one place to work out, another place to work, another place to recover, another place to grab coffee, and another place to spend time around people I liked? Why had we organized some of the most important parts of life into completely separate destinations?
The more I thought about it, the more ridiculous it felt. We talk constantly about being busy, not having enough time, and trying to find balance, yet most of us are driving across a city all day trying to assemble that balance piece by piece. Gym membership here. Coworking over there. Sauna or recovery somewhere else. Coffee shop when you need a change of scenery. Dinner or drinks if you actually want to see your friends. We had taken movement, work, recovery, and connection, all things that should naturally support one another, and put them into different boxes.
That was the moment I saw the gap.
At the time, I had no idea what to call it. I did not know exactly what the business model would be, where it would live, or whether anyone else would even care about the problem as much as I suddenly did. I just could not stop asking the same question: why should the most important parts of our lives live in silos?
What if you could walk into one place in the morning, move your body, wake yourself up in cold water, grab a coffee, sit down and do meaningful work, meet someone interesting, recover later in the day, and then go home without spending half your waking hours moving between places? What if ambition and taking care of yourself were not competing priorities? What if health, productivity, and community were not things you had to schedule separately?
That became what I now call the ice bath epiphany.
A few months later, I left for West Africa with a backpack, a travel website, and no real idea what life would look like when I came home. The idea came with me, but it was still just that, an idea. Over the next eleven months, though, travel gave it more shape.
The places where I felt most alive rarely separated life as neatly as we tend to. Some of my strongest memories came from places where people worked, ate, moved, talked, rested, and spent time together without needing a reservation or a different building for each part of the day. I stayed with families, sat around tables with strangers, spent time in villages, hostels, mountain huts, cafés, and homes where community was not something anyone had to manufacture. It was simply built into the rhythm of life.
That perspective stayed with me. The healthiest environments I encountered were not necessarily the places with the newest equipment, the most expensive wellness technology, or the most perfectly designed routines. Often, they were the places where people had not separated being productive from being human.
By the time I came home, the original question had become much bigger than whether I could use Wi-Fi near an ice bath. It became a question about how we design our lives in the first place.
What would happen if we put the important pieces back together?
That question eventually became Gevity.
When I look back now, I love that the origin story was not particularly polished. There was no genius business insight scribbled on a napkin. There was a guy who had lost his job, was trying to rebuild himself, decided to travel around the world, taught himself how to build a website because he was worried about explaining the gap on his résumé, trained for some mountains, went to a wellness spot with a friend to break up the day, and asked whether he could bring his laptop back tomorrow.
Then somebody said, “No Wi-Fi, man.”
Funny what can happen from there.