GoKawiilKey Takeaways Rob Schneidermann lived on under $15 a day and survived on canned soup while building his startup Liftopia, a marketplace for ski resorts, from 2005 to 2014.
He only took two days off when his first child was born — a choice he now calls a mistake as he admits you can never recover that lost time.
Schneidermann’s mindset changed by the time he took the helm at hiking app AllTrails in 2015; he introduced a monthly reset where the entire company logged off on the first Friday.
Longtime startup CEO Ron Schneidermann has had to make sacrifices on the road to success — and, now, in retrospect, he calls those tradeoffs “a mistake.”
The 48-year-old CEO first built Liftopia, a marketplace for ski resorts, into a $60 million-a-year business from 2005 to 2014, then took the helm at hiking app AllTrails in 2015. Now, he runs test-prep startup Acely, a position he assumed in August 2025. But with hindsight, he recently told Fortune that it took years to understand the true price and value of work-life balance.
Building Liftopia demanded more than long hours — it consumed his life. Working out of a cramped San Francisco apartment, Schneidermann lived on under $15 a day and went two years without pay. His diet consisted mainly of canned soup.
The sacrifices spilled into his home life, too. When his first daughter was born four years into his tenure at Liftopia, he stepped away for just two days. By the time his son arrived three years later, he stretched that to a week — and considered it an improvement.
“I look back, I was just able to justify it as ‘that’s just part of the grind’… but you never get that time back,” Schneidermann told Fortune. “That was a mistake.”
Schneidermann was able to take all of his regrets from Liftopia and change them into strengths at AllTrails. By the time he arrived at AllTrails in 2015, his thinking had already begun to change. He put that shift into practice — introducing a monthly reset where the entire company logged off on the first Friday and headed outdoors.
When he took over as CEO of Acely last August, he approached the role differently from day one. Drawing on those lessons, he created a monthly “hackathon,” where the small team of fewer than a dozen people steps away from routine work to experiment with AI and new ideas, free from meetings, metrics, or deadlines.
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