He Survived on Canned Soup and Only Took 2 Days Off for His Child’s Birth — Now This CEO Warns Against Startup Hustle Culture: ‘That Was a Mistake’

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.

Schneidermann disliked working traditional jobs

Long before he set his sights on founding a company, Schneidermann was already picking up career lessons through experience. In the late 1990s, while studying mass communication and business at UCLA, he worked at Abercrombie & Fitch to help cover tuition — but was fired three separate times, admitting he “never liked” the job enough to play by its rules.

After graduating in 2000, he joined Accenture as a business process consultant. But the role, and the lifestyle that came with it, didn’t feel right. Despite the prestige and pay of a Fortune 500 firm, he walked away.

“It was a great experience. I’m grateful for it, but I hated it,” he told Fortune. “I hated it, and I told myself, I am never going to take a job for money again. Life is too short.”

Instead of fixating on titles or ticking off credentials, Schneidermann pointed to curiosity as the trait that truly sets people apart. 

“Just approach everything with a curious mindset,” he said. “Just constantly try to be learning and exploring.”