182: Don’t Build Companies - Build Teams! Valerie Bures, Serial Entrepreneur

Valerie Bures is a serial entrepreneur, and founder, CEO, investor, board member, and a mom of three with an incredible track record.  Over the past 20 years, she founded and scaled Mrs.Sporty, Pixformance and VAHA - successful businesses at the intersection of fitness, health and technology.  Mrs.Sporty is a Europe-wide chain of fitness clubs that Valerie helped to scale to around 300.000 members in 550 Clubs and 10 countries with revenues of more than 80 Million EUR during this time period.  The insights gained at Mrs.Sporty led her to found Pixformance, which offers digitally-enhanced movement therapy and is now entering the US market.  In 2019, she also founded VAHA, a smart fitness mirror company that offers live and on-demand classes from yoga to strength and aims to be the best alternative to a gym. Last year, Bioniq acquired VAHA, and Valerie joined their board.   Valerie’s view is that “you are not building companies. You are building teams. Teams who want to create and change the world together. That’s what I learnt from sports. It is more about the team than the company. You have to fail again and again to eventually score.”  Part of her extended team has been athletes turned investors in her companies such as Steffi Graf, who was one of the early investors in Mrs.Sporty, and German football star Manuel Neuer who backed Vaha.   In this wide-ranging conversation, Valerie explains how Mrs.Sporty built a sales machine, and predicts which companies will win in the health & fitness space in the future.