Karianne Kraaijestein had always been interested in sports. It started with gymnastics, followed by snowboarding, wakeboarding and other explosive, edge-seeking activities. And her professional career successfully followed along as she did marketing for outdoor brands and athletes.
Then came the setbacks: she suffered a broken kneecap and had to undergo appendix surgery. As part of the recovery, she started swimming. And because she needed a goal, ended up trying triathlons.
A couple of injuries and a torn ACL later, she had learned that training and recovery schedules are more or less the same for everyone. Because historically, only about six percent of sports science research funding has gone toward women in sports science.
The problem: the schedules did not work for her. And not for a lot of other women either.
That was the start of Adaptive, a company that helps female endurance athletes perform throughout their hormonal transition through a coaching layer that is driven by athletes’ input and research-backed performance insights.
In episode 168, Karianne joins me to share what she learned about endurance sports, entrepreneurship, and her own body. We talk about
- Why standard training plans, built for a generic body, fail women in the hormonal transition
- Why tracking sleep, heat regulation, and training load matters more than tracking hormones directly
- Why she considers a scientific advisory board the biggest de-risking factor for investors in a trust-dependent product
Plus, you’ll learn how Karianne finished part of the S’GRAIL in Girona on a torn ACL, and what that taught her about risk.ps need to create markets too. So community building is a core component of building a company. medicine, and, towards the end, a full set of takeaways for founders who are fundraising.
Start listening by pressing play below.
Or keep reading for practical takeaways, highlights, and trends from the episode.
Practical Takeaways for Founders
Part of our conversation is about what she learned as an entrepreneur before starting Adaptive. The result is a wealth of tips for founders. Here are three of the most important takeaways:
Design for people’s personal context
Adaptive is built on the learning that the women going through hormonal transition need training schedules that take into account their unique context. Karianne does this by talking to cohorts of athletes and by ensuring she stays up to date on what is happening in science. It’s her way to ensure that her community gets the personalized advice that supports their performance in the long run.
Understand what data you need
From her personal experience and from interviewing other women, Karianne found out that understanding sleep patterns, heat regulation and how the athlete subjectively experiences training load provides far better outcomes than tracking hormonal data. It also reduces the tracking burden on the user. Not overasking, and being clear about what you use the data for, are examples of how trust can be built into the business from the start.
Make sure your heart does not overrule your mind
Before starting Adaptive, Karianne went through a bankruptcy of her yoga studio. Looking back, she says it was a case of “too much heart and not enough mind”. She built the studio around her love for the space, without testing whether the cost structure could survive. For Adaptive, she is testing things like price points prior to building anything. This way she does not fall in love with her product again without knowing that it has a chance to survive.
These three takeaways all build on the same principle: don’t assume you already know the answer. Rather, verify needs and wants, only collect data that is demonstrably better for your customer, and make sure to pressure-test your business case before starting.
When you know a founder who could use some help with testing assumptions, feel free to share this post with them.
Or scroll down for magic moments.
Highlights and timestamps
| Time | Highlight |
|---|---|
| 00:00 | Introduction |
| 04:45 | Introduction to Karianne and Adaptive |
| 07:33 | The Journey into Endurance Sports |
| 10:28 | Mental Challenges in Endurance Sports |
| 13:29 | The Importance of Goal Setting |
| 16:22 | Navigating Individuality in Triathlons |
| 19:14 | Overcoming Physical Setbacks |
| 22:20 | The Recovery Process and Age Factors |
| 25:01 | Building Adaptive for Women |
| 28:13 | Understanding Hormonal Transitions |
| 31:05 | Energy Management and Training Adjustments |
| 34:11 | The Role of Data in Training |
| 36:43 | Adaptive’s Unique Approach |
| 39:49 | Integrating Research into Adaptive |
| 41:33 | The Power of Athlete Data |
| 42:47 | Research Collaborations and Insights |
| 44:17 | Understanding Amateur vs. Professional Athletes |
| 45:30 | Adaptive vs. Competitors in Women’s Fitness |
| 46:38 | Building a Community for Endurance Athletes |
| 47:55 | Coaching Integration with Adaptive |
| 49:23 | Business Model and Pricing Strategy |
| 52:56 | Proving the Business Case for Adaptive |
| 55:41 | Data Privacy and Trust Issues |
| 1:00:10 | The Role of Community in Data Sharing |
| 1:01:34 | Building Trust with Scientific Validation |
| 1:03:20 | Future Expansion and Market Opportunities |
| 1:04:46 | Navigating Burnout and Performance |
| 1:09:22 | Lessons from Past Experiences |
| 1:12:50 | Design Principles for Personalized Solutions |
| 1:15:01 | Connecting with Adaptive and Future Plans |
The Episode In an Infographic
3 Magic Moments In The Episode
If there is one thing this episode will teach you, it’s that mid-life can be a period of significant growth rather than decline. Karianne used a combination of curiosity, perseverance and being mindful of her body’s changing physical needs to discover new personal and business limits. Here are three magic moments from her story.
The “Pay-it-Forward” Movement
While interviewing the women in her research cohort, Karianne discovered that they were eager to share their personal data. When she asked why, they mentioned that it was because they felt a responsibility to make sure future generations of women in their thirties wouldn’t have to navigate the same lack of research and support. It is a magical way of paying it forward, something that is a trait of founders too.
Coaches Asking “How Can I Help”
Like the women in the cohort, the coaches Karianne spoke with one-on-one didn’t need to be pitched. They immediately offered to carve out time to help bring Adaptive to life. They recognized the problem as they had seen women struggling. When the people who risk being displaced by your solution start contributing to it, it’s a sign of traction that is difficult to ignore.
Finishing two legs of a triathlon on a torn ACL
For most people, including top athletes, tearing their ACL would be a sign to visit a hospital. Karianne tore hers an hour before the S’Grail in Girona and decided to start anyway. Fueled by adrenaline, she had her knee taped by medics, took painkillers, completed the sea swim using only her arms and finished a grueling 90-kilometer gravel bike ride by only focusing on getting to the next resting place. The magic of this is not in that she competed, but in looking for what she could do given the circumstances.
These moments show what is possible if you start with the opportunity instead of the obstacles. Whether that’s a group of women handing over data, coaches volunteering their time and knowledge, or an athlete looking for what is possible within her own body’s limits.
🗣 What was your magic moment in the episode? Was it one of the three I mentioned, or was it my “wait-what?-moment” about the need for hormonal data? Drop your magic moment below or slide into the DMs on LinkedIn or Instagram!
Or scroll down for my favorite quote from the episode.
The Quote from the Episode
“It’s the curiosity of exploring what’s still possible, at an age where people usually think that’s the start of your decline.”
— Karianne Kraaijestein, founder of Adaptive
When asked what drew her to triathlon at 47, Karianne traced it back through a life of “looking for edges.” From gymnastics to indoor climbing, snowboarding, and ashtanga yoga, each one a different edge to find. Triathlon was the next one, and what she learned along the way was the upramp to building Adaptive.
Know a founder who needs to hear that life isn’t over when you reach 45? Be a real supporter and use the share buttons to let your crowd know about the episode.
3 Trends I’m Seeing Across Conversations
While this episode covers sports as its main topic, there are quite a few topics that cross over to other episodes. Here are three, with the links to the other episodes:
The Data and Funding Gap Extends to Sports
One of the stats from this episode that I remember is that historically only 6% of sports science funding goes to science on women’s sports. This stat is in line with the funding stats in venture capital (2% of VC goes to female-led teams) that we remember from recent conversations with Beata Wandachowicz-Krason, Nithya Ruff, Maaike Steinebach and Sophie van Dijk. The gap has real consequences, because it means that women’s health and sports remain underresearched, keeping the data gap in place.
The Stigma of Women’s Health is real
In this episode, you’ll hear Karianne say that she talks about hormonal shifts rather than perimenopause and post menopause because these terms don’t give positive connotations with her own audience. Her remark took me back to the conversation with Maaike Steinebach from FemTech NL in episode 159, who shared that women asked her not to talk about these topics as they were afraid it would hurt their career opportunities. The stigma on terminology from women’s health is not helping the funding and data gaps.
Scientific validation helps to build trust and de-risk the value proposition
Karianne mentions that she sees the scientific validation from research and her scientific advisory board as a way to build trust with both customers and investors. As she puts it, “If trust is part of the success of the product, you want to have experts.” This echoes what investor Karen Berg mentioned back in episode 161 when she talked about clinical validation as the moat of a startup. And in episode 151, Carmen van Vilsteren even mentions explicitly that having a scientific advisory board with ‘Key Opinion Leaders’ derisks startup investments significantly for investors.
What connects these items is the bigger picture. Besides the direct pay-off in building trust with customers and investors, scientific validation and the associated clinical research support founders in using data to present a fundable business case. With that, it helps close both the data and funding gaps.
🗣️ What was the value you got from listening to this episode? I’d love to hear from you in the comments.
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Coming Up On Women Disrupting Tech
“We have the answer for 2,000 euros. We will teach you how to be AI ready.” Juliette van der Laarse kept running into that pitch while researching how companies and individual engineers were handling AI transformation, and it’s part of why she decided against putting a price tag on her own work.
Juliette is the author of the AI Flower framework, a roadmap for AI transformation built over a year of research on top of her day job as an engineering manager at a financial corporate. The framework maps out the activities, roles, and decisions involved in adopting AI across an organization, aimed at engineers and companies who can’t afford to hire an EY, a Deloitte, or a Cap Gemini to figure it out for them.
In this clip, Juliette explains the moment she chose to keep the AI Flower open source instead of monetizing it, even with people around her telling her it was her chance to go big.
Curious how she built the framework, what it maps out, and why she’s betting on a five-year window to get it right? Leave your email below to find the episode in your inbox on 3 September 2026 at 8:00 hours CEST.
Until then, as always, keep being awesome,
Dirkjan
What I Want to Leave You With
One of the reasons I love this conversation is that it is a story about reinvention. Karianne used her knowledge and experience as an athlete and sports marketer to reinvent herself and build a solution for a problem she experienced. She then used the experience from her bankruptcy of her Yoga Studio to build a solid company around it. Whether that will be enough for long-term success remains to be seen. But it sure makes for an inspiring conversation.
Another reason is this. While we talk about sports, there are quite some learnings for founders and investors. One I want to mention here specifically is this: her story about the bankruptcy of her yoga studio is proof that passion alone doesn’t carry a business. It’s also proof that failure is never final if you try again.
What I wish for you to take away from the episode is this: we often see the middle of our lives as the beginning of the end. I do not believe that to be true. Like Karianne, I ran my first marathon at age 47. And unlike Karianne, I started building a new life as an entrepreneur at age 45 and have grown significantly as a person since. So, rather than seeing it as the start of decline, I encourage you to see it as a learning experience. One that continues for a very long time.
You can listen to our conversation on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and YouTube. And if it resonates, feel free to drop me a line in the comments or slide into my DMs.
PS. Given my background in financial services, I could not help but wonder if Adaptive carries a sort of insurance aspect. Because improving training schedules, sleep, etc. should have the result that you’re also more fit and less likely to have an injury that blocks you from participating in events that you already paid for. By extension, Adaptive could be a useful offering for Occupational Health insurance companies who want to help people protect against the income loss that comes with sports injuries by helping them prevent getting injured in the first place. Curious if you think that could work.
Listen to the full conversation with Kraaijestein on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or YouTube. And if you are a female founder navigating a funding conversation, take a look at FundingCoach.ai.
About Karianne Kraaijestein
Karianne Kraaijestein started her career at McCann Erickson before founding her own advertising agency, Fresh Communications, which she ran for thirteen years, working with sports brands including Quicksilver, Helly Hansen, and Arc’teryx, and guiding Dutch athletes through media and sponsorship. She later founded a yoga studio in Amsterdam, which went bankrupt. She spent the following years working as an interim managing director, including for Stuart Own through the Zebra network.
Sport has run through all of it. At 47, after a series of injuries and surgeries, she took up swimming as part of her recovery and found triathlon soon after. Along the way, she noticed that the training schedules built around her were built on male physiology. While recovering from a torn ACL, her physiotherapist told her that recovery takes longer for women at her stage of life, “but we don’t know exactly why, there isn’t enough data.” That gap, and her own experience starting hormone therapy without being told what training effects to expect, became the founding insight behind Adaptive.
You can connect with Karianne on LinkedIn.
About Adaptive
Adaptive is an intelligent training platform for female endurance athletes navigating the hormonal transition. Hormonal fluctuations and the menopause transition are rarely factored into training plans, even by coaches, and a significant number of female endurance athletes over 40 drop out due to injuries that better data could have prevented.
Adaptive is built for serious amateur female endurance athletes roughly between 40 and 60, training seriously for triathlon, marathon, or ultra trail running. The platform integrates female physiology and hormonal transition directly into training recommendations, on a subscription model, positioned as an intelligent layer on top of the tools athletes already use.
Karianne is building Adaptive’s credibility deliberately: talking directly to athletes and the coaches who guide them, assembling a scientific advisory board, and pursuing academic partnerships to validate the platform’s approach. She is currently raising €450,000 to build the MVP and fund the core team. Connect with Karianne for more information.
Listen to Episode 168 on Spotify, Apple or YouTube
Featured Event: TEDx Coolhaven Women
The TEDx Coolhaven Women event takes place on 9 October from 6:30 to 11:30 in the evening at HAL4 aan de Maas in Rotterdam. This year’s theme is The New Builders, a theme that seamlessly aligns with the content on this podcast.
Throughout the evening, you’ll hear powerful TEDx talks from women who are redesigning the systems that shape our lives—from leadership and parenting to women’s health, mental healthcare, and access to investment capital. Together, they’ll explore what it really takes to build a better future.
As a proud media sponsor, I am happy to offer you a chance to be there in person, to listen to groundbreaking talks and meet and network with like-minded people. As a listener to the podcast, you’ll get a 25% discount when you use the code WDT25 at checkout. And even though this is a TEDx Women event, men are very welcome to join.
- 🗓️ 9 October 2026, from 18:30 – 23:30
- 📍 HAL4 aan de Maas in Rotterdam
- 🎟️ You can buy your ticket here.
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