When Your Heart and Energy Align: Interview with Endorphins Running Founder, Tyler Swartz
This week’s interview is with Tyler Swartz, the founder of Endorphins Running, a running club that has grown to over 25,000 global members. While running is the foundation, the club’s members would tell you that Endorphins is about much more. At its core, Endorphins is rooted in its mission to spread positivity and happiness through movement and exercise. And those aren’t just words on a website, the community lives by them in everything they do. Case in point, if you show up to an Endorphins event, you’re likely to leave with at least a new friend or two.
While he grew up playing team sports, Tyler wasn’t always a runner. After running the New York City marathon and participating in a group training program run by Nike, he was officially hooked. The inspiration for Endorphins started to brew when Tyler decided to train for a 50 mile ultra marathon. He decided to publicly document his training experience on TikTok, inviting strangers to meet up and train with him. He knew he had something special when a post inviting New York based runners to an impromptu happy hour turned into an event where 300 people showed up! Tyler’s boss at the venture capital firm he worked for at the time took notice of the running passion that was lighting Tyler up. He sat him down and said, “When your heart and energy are aligned - that's when the best businesses come to life.” A week later, Tyler quit his job and went full time on Endorphins. He hasn’t looked back since.
Over the course of the interview we spoke about:
Learning to embrace the title of founder
What helped him overcome the fear of putting himself out there on TikTok
How leaning into what’s best for the community gives him comfort around not knowing what’s next
Longevity and why he’s comfortable building the business to not be reliant on him
Why being mission led has helped him avoid succumbing to scarcity mentality
How Endorphins lives its mission and ensures that it is more than words on a website
Note: The following interview has been lightly edited for clarity and length. While every effort has been made to preserve the integrity of the conversation, please be aware that the quotes may not be verbatim but reflect the essence of the dialogue.
How would you describe your occupation?
Depends on who I'm talking to. At one point in time, I was on a career path that others could easily understand and relate to, whereas now my path is extremely different and nonlinear and might not feel as serious to others. These days I say I'm a founder but for a long time I wouldn’t use that term.
I listened to a few interviews where you said that you would almost exclusively use the term “organizer” rather than “founder.” What was the mental switch you made to get comfortable with the term “founder?”
It was a mental tug of war because I didn't want people in my community to feel like I was making this into a business. I wanted it to first and foremost be a community because that’s what it is. I think the second you start commoditizing a community is when it dies. I am an organizer, which is still the truth. But I now have to operate Endorphins like a business because that’s what it has grown into. I’ve realized that the more transparent we are about how we make money and how we take those proceeds and invest it back into our community, the more we thrive. Transparency has actually allowed us to flourish more.
All that to say, I’m having so much fun. It doesn’t feel like a business. The reality is that I sit here in my apartment in New York everyday thinking of ways that I can support all of our members and make the most memorable experiences and connections for people.
I want to go back to the Endorphins origin story. You decided to train for an ultramarathon and document your experience training on Tik Tok. That led to a succession of experiences which eventually became Endorphins. Can you talk more about that period of your life and the origin story?
I’d actually go all the way back to my childhood. I’m an only child and always needed an outlet to make friends. A big way I did that was through team sports. I played football, basketball, and baseball in high school and so many of my favorite moments from growing up were being part of those teams. I loved the support system and the accountability, and it was also just a ton of fun. I remember the bus rides home from games and the locker room pranks way more than the games themselves.
I also grew up in Boston, which is a huge sports town. The Boston Marathon was a big tradition in my family. Fenway Park is at Mile 25 of the Boston Marathon. So every year my family and I would go to the Red Sox game and then go watch the marathon. I always left feeling inspired. I’d tell myself, “I’m going to run a marathon one day.” I was a mile away and got locked down when the Boston Marathon bombings happened. All that to say, the Boston Marathon is a big part of my life.
I went to college, stopped playing team sports, and leaned into having fun and being social. Sports re-entered my life when I moved to New York after graduation and a friend invited me to run the New York City marathon with them. I had no idea what I was getting myself into. Fortunately, I got into a training program with Nike, which consisted of three in person training days per week. Had I done that training alone, I probably would have hated it. I’d show up Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday and grind through the training with this group of people from different backgrounds and walks of life. I’m talking about everyone from a 50 year old man to an 18 year old girl. I had no training experience and ended up training through sixteen weeks of highs and lows and sharing those emotions with the people I was training with. It really felt like team sports again, and I had such a good time running the New York Marathon that I signed up for the Chicago Marathon the next day.
My love for the sport wasn't actually about the running. It was really about being with other people and pushing myself. Over the pandemic, I was running a lot and told my coach from the Nike program that I wanted to train for a longer race. She thought I was crazy. The reality was I wasn’t feeling fulfilled in my job and felt this pull to start speaking about and documenting my running experience. All that led up to the moment I started posting on TikTok.
I do want to ask more about posting on TikTok. I often work with ambitious professionals who are paralyzed by the fear of what others will think about them. What’s the mindset that helped you put yourself out there online?
It was tough. The first video I ever posted was literally me walking around my apartment shaking. I said, “I'm going to post on Tiktok for 30 days, talk about my training, and be vulnerable with you all.” I think that vulnerability is actually what works online because it’s super relatable. I got a ton of pushback from people in my life. I worked on a small team at a venture fund and my bosses were like, “What’s going on here?”
What kept you going? Hearing a comment like that from your boss would be enough to stop most people from ever posting again.
I think it was the fact that I made a commitment to myself to do it for 30 days and really feeling like I needed a creative outlet. Fortunately, I stuck with it, and it paid off.
At what point did you leave your job to go full time on Endorphins? What was that process like for you?
I've never spoken about this publicly. I’m not sure people even know that I do this full time. There's a lot of serendipity in my story, and it really did feel like the stars were aligning. I was training for a race in May of 2023, which is what led to sharing my story on TikTok. I did that 50 mile race and hosted a happy hour the week after. I just posted about it and said something like, “If there are any runners in New York that want to come to a non run focused happy hour, come hang out.” 300 people ended up showing up. It felt like there was a really special energy that night. The club grew from there, and I was having a ton of fun doing it. To be honest, I started neglecting what I should have been doing at work. My boss eventually sat me down and said, “You should probably go do this.” I didn't get fired, but I was definitely guided to “go lean into building the club and figure it out.” It was hard advice to hear, but at the same time it was really smart advice. My bosses were very successful entrepreneurs. They told me, “when your heart and energy are aligned - that's when the best businesses come to life.” That’s the ethos behind Endorphins. It’s quite literally in our logo. We combine the lightning bolt which represents your energy and the heart which represents your passion. When you combine them, that's when you feel endorphins. A week after that conversation, I decided to leave my job.
I had a ton of fun that first year. We launched a training program the week after I quit and generated real revenue. It didn't feel like we were selling anything because the community actually asked for it. We had our first brands come in and support endorphins through media activations. It turned into a real thing the second that conversation happened with my boss because it felt like all the energy I’d been harnessing compounded on itself.
I listened to an interview of yours on the Directors Podcast from May 2024 where you said, “I don’t know what’s next. We have no plans.” Similarly, I’ve heard you talk about how you don’t make top down decisions for the community and instead let the community discuss and vote on what’s next. What’s helped you get comfortable with not knowing what’s next and making decisions in a more decentralized way?
It’s uncomfortable, but at the same time I fall back on knowing that if I listen to our people then we'll make the right decision in the end. When in doubt, we always ask our members and ensure that whatever we do is helping support them, which will then support our organization. On a more meta level, I think we’re trained in school to be given a problem and figure out a solution, whereas I think true entrepreneurs and true creative thinkers can identify what the problems are and ask the right questions. So when we put a vote to our community, I already kind of have an idea of where I want to steer the ship, but I ask leading questions to see if that’s actually the right direction. I would never ask our community, “Should we launch a shoe?” That’s not aligned with our mission or the resources, team, and expertise we have. But, for example, when I asked our community, “Should we launch a technology product to support our virtual home?” I already knew there were pain points around what we were using. It was a leading question, and we had 85% in favor. It wasn’t unanimous but a clear majority said that we should build it. That decision led us to the next phase of our business which is the technology offering. It’s pretty simple: we have a sense of where we’re going, and then we ask before we make any big decisions.
Another aspect of the way you’ve built Endorphins is focusing on the organization becoming self-sustaining so it isn’t reliant on you as the leader. I think that most entrepreneurs know that a goal should be for the organization to be less reliant on them, but then find it difficult to remove themselves from being at the center of everything. What helped you be so intentional about building in this way?
For one, there's so much happening that it would be difficult for me to do it on my own. I think the best leaders are the best delegators, but it’s not even really about delegation for me. I think my desire for the organization to be self-sustaining is rooted in wanting Endorphins to have a legacy of creating impact for decades to come. I want my kids to be able to come to our events! I want our members to be able to recommend Endorphins to their kids. That desire for longevity and impact is really the north star.
The other aspect is that I know I'm not going to be living in Lower Manhattan, showing up on the West Side highway at 6:45 in the morning in 10 years. I might not even be doing that next year. It’s the same for our leaders. I always tell them, “At some point in your life this is no longer going to be for you. Raise your hand and let us know so we can bring someone else in.” The organization is built to embrace change and embrace transition because we are thinking about longevity.
I do want to talk about running. I listened to an interview on the Turning Pro Podcast where you spoke about marathon running saying, “you have to go slower to go faster over time” meaning that you have to learn to run at a pace that you can sustain for long periods of time, rather than going all out. I work with a lot of entrepreneurs who are struggling to find a pace that they could sustain for the next 10,20,30 years. What advice might you give them based on what you’ve learned from marathon running and your personal experience?
I definitely need to listen to my own advice more on that front. I don't have a sustainable pace. I have one pace, and it's extremely always on, all day everyday. I can do a better job of making time for myself. I have a whiteboard that I'm looking at where I break out different categories of my life. The majority of the items are work, the second most are under personal health, and the third bucket is social. Normally, there's one thing under the social bucket a week. I’m recognizing a need to reallocate my priorities to allow for having things outside of work because I know that when I do those other things, they compound into the work bucket.
I also know there are moments where you have to sprint, and there are moments that you have to slow down. I think being able to internalize what mode to be in is extremely crucial for anything in life. I'm in a sprint mode right now, and I might be for the next year. I’ll relate it back to running. Most runners wear a watch that helps them know when to speed up and when to slow down based on their heart rate. If you exceed a certain heart rate, the watch helps you know to chill out and slow down. It’s hard, but I’m really trying to listen to myself more and be honest about when to speed up and when to slow down.
Journaling has been really good for me. Giving myself the space to reflect and think backwards helps keep me accountable because I’ll look back and say, “Oh, shit! I didn't do that social thing that I wanted to do” or “I didn’t go to yoga this week even though I said I would.”
Marathon running involves a lot of dealing with pain. What helps you manage negative self talk and get through the moments when you’re in the thick of the pain cave?
The pain cave is definitely an acquired taste, but once you've been there before you're able to navigate it. They call it a cave for a reason. It’s dark, it’s hard to navigate, and you can’t really practice getting through it until you’re there. A lot of it is about listening to yourself and understanding what you need to proceed so that you can make the right decision for yourself, even if it’s scary or uncomfortable.
What’s an example of a dialogue you might have with yourself in the thick of the pain cave?
Steve Magness is a performance coach for athletes who’s influenced me a lot. One thing he talks about is removing yourself from the problem. It’s a super helpful way to change your perspective and perception of what’s going on. Think about the sentence, “I’m hurting so bad.” You’re fully involved in the problem there. Now shift to the second tense with something like, “You’re going to be okay.” It’s emotional but you’re much further removed from the problem. Some athletes take it even further and speak to themselves in the third person. Something like, “He’s got it!”
Another strategy I use is the classic “glass half full” mindset. When you’re running a marathon, it’s very easy to say, “Shit. I have 16 more miles!” That’s a tough spot. Instead, you could say something like, “I’ve run 16 miles so many times in my life.” When I’m in the thick of the pain cave, I might be saying something like, “Only 8 more miles to go. Six miles ago it was 14. I’ve done eight miles every single day of training for the last month.”
You can tell me if this resonates with you, but one thing I took away from listening to some of your prior interviews was a lack of scarcity mentality. Rather than constantly worrying about the existence of other run clubs and there not being enough to go around, you seem to embrace partnering with other clubs and operate from a belief that the right people will find Endorphins. What helps you avoid operating from scarcity?
I stay rooted in our mission. At Endorphins, our mission is to spread positivity and happiness through movement and exercise at all 1500 events we host every year. It's really important that we're all grounded in that. That’s our operating north star. Any time we make a decision, we’re asking: Will this help support spreading positivity and happiness? How could I fault someone else for creating that space for connection? We don't actually care about how many people show up to the events. We care about creating that space. If anyone else is attempting to create that space, we need to honor that because we live in a world that needs connection badly. That’s the mentality I've instilled in our organization. If we’re not the right vibe for someone, then I want them to go somewhere else because they deserve that space for connection.
Community and mission driven tend to get overused in this day and age, but Endorphins seems to truly be mission led. What do you think has helped you successfully do that in a time when most organizations fall drastically short?
For starters, if you were to ask any one of your friends what the mission of their company is, they probably wouldn’t be able to tell you. If you ask any single one of our members that comes to our events, they would know. There’s a book I refer to often called Impact Networks. One thing the author talks about is the importance of setting a purpose about why you’re there any time you bring people together. If you don't tell people why you're gathering, everyone will get different things out of it. We make it really clear that our gatherings are about making friends and connecting with others. We tell people, “If you see someone that you don't know, please say hi. If you've been here before, and you don't recognize someone, welcome them into our community and treat them with the same respect that you wanted when you first joined.” We want to ensure that our experience is conducted in a way where everyone's on the same playing field.
There are two pillars that dictate everything we do. Number one: Is this decision going to help create lasting or meaningful connections for our members? We know that if you're making friends at our events, you will have a happier and healthier experience. Number 2: Will this decision help our members achieve their goals? When you're achieving your goals, you're living a happier and healthier life. When you're not achieving goals, you're not happy.
Many people I interview for the No Directions blog have created lives that are uniquely theirs in terms of how they live, work, and build their lives. What does the life that is uniquely yours look like today?
I’m creating a lot of connections for other people, but I’m not creating them for myself. That’s something I want to explore more. But I really feel like my path and the core mission for my life is creating connections for as many people as possible. Overall, I just want to create a happier and healthier world and spread positivity and happiness for as many people as possible. As long as that’s my North Star, I can’t go wrong.