Inc. magazine - Mar 2017

WHEN MIKE LEE SAYS “we,” it’s rare that he’s referring to the staf of MyFitnessPal, the ftness and nutrition app company he and brother Albert co-founded in

2005. More likely, Lee is referring to colleagues at Under Armour, which bought MyFitnessPal for

$475 million in February 2015.

It took a while for Lee to take the money. And when he did, he didn’t run. When Under Armour frst called, Lee agreed to visit founder Kevin Plank at his Baltimore ofces only because he thought he might end up with some kind of partnership. Then Plank started talking about his vision for what he called connected ftness. Plank knew that technology would be playing a bigger role in improving athletic performance, and Under Armour didn’t have the technological capability to compete.

Lee got it. “If we were acquired by a company like
Google or Apple, we would become one small piece
in this giant machine,” he says. “At Under Armour,
we knew we would matter. We would have the
attention of the CEO, we would be a big part of
the strategy, and we would make a diference.”
Lee had months to get used to the idea of being
part of Under Armour, which, with $5 billion in revenue,
is hardly small. His staf would have no such luxury. He
knew the deal would fail if his employees fed. So his
frst presentation to them, the day the acquisition was
announced, had to cover the basics: No one would be
laid of. Everyone would report to the same person as
before. The company would not move from its San

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MIKE LEE

He sold
MyFitnessPal
because he
believed in the
strategic vision
that Under
Armour CEO
Kevin Plank had
outlined.

has money to pay the bills and simply
allocates what’s left. LearnVest bases its
fnancial advice on a person’s cash fow,
providing guidance even when there’s
little to nothing to invest. Schaefer’s
outlook is similar: “We believe you work
with people with potential and help them
get where they need to be, fnancially.”
To bring the companies together, the
standard choices were for Northwestern
either to fully absorb LearnVest or to
keep it at arm’s length. Neither felt right
to von Tobel or Schaefer. Northwestern
Mutual envied LearnVest’s approach and
its ability to test, learn, and change things
quickly, but its own culture was under-
standably more conservative. “Ultimately
when you manage a business you have to
think about disruption,” says Northwest-
ern CEO John Schlifske. “In many ways
we’re trying to disrupt ourselves. We put
the client at the center of everything, and
we’re willing to let go of the past if the
client wants something new.”
LearnVest, it realized, could do with
some more long-term planning, and had
to grow quickly to make the acquisition
work. Von Tobel (a onetime Inc. colum-
nist) refers repeatedly to the creation of
a third company culture, located some-
where in the psychic space between
Milwaukee and New York. For now, some
engineering teams have leaders in both
New York and Milwaukee; so do teams
reporting to von Tobel. Hackathons
take place in both locations and sporadic
synergy is not unusual. Northwestern has
even set up an internal venture pool to
fund ideas from employees.

LearnVest’s crew has largely stayed put. Von Tobel notes attrition of about

10 percent; even that, she says, is “crushing.” Still, no one had to leave; no one even had to leave New York.

Since the acquisition, LearnVest has
hired 150 people. “On a startup budget,
you stretch and reach,” says von Tobel,
“and now we’re like, ‘Let’s just go out and get the best.’”
On its own, LearnVest could deliver 10,000 fnancial plans
annually; now, with Northwestern Mutual’s assistance, it’s
looking at roughly 500,000 fnancial plans.

Von Tobel says that selling to Northwestern will help fulfll her vision in starting LearnVest, which is why she intends to stick around. “We didn’t come together to be done with it,” she says. “We came together to change fnancial planning in America.”