John Foley

John Foley is an American businessman and entrepreneur who founded and grew Peloton. Foley exited the company in September 2022 and resides in New York City.

John Foley, founder and CEO of Peloton - by Goldman Sachs (October 2020)

John Foley cofounded Peloton in June 2012. While working as president of e-commerce at Barnes & Noble, Foley saw the Nook reading device disrupt a massive category of book retailing by digitizing books and reducing the demand for physical bookstores. In 2011, Foley was taking an indoor cycling class and thought, here is another physical location that could be digitized. Foley used Kickstarter to launch Peloton and raised $307,000.

As CEO, Foley grew Peloton into a company worth almost $50 billion by January 2021, with rapidly growing sales during the COVID-19 pandemic. At that point, Foley had a fortune of about $1.9 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. However, Peloton began to struggle and Foley stepped down as CEO in February 2022, at the same time as a large round of company layoffs. He then continued to serve as executive chairman of the board until September 2022, when he exited the company with its stock price down 70 percent for the year. When Foley left Peloton in September 2022, his net worth had dropped significantly to about $225 million, according to Bloomberg.

Prior to founding Peloton, Foley served as the president of e-commerce at Barnes & Noble and president and CEO of Evite. Before joining Barnes & Noble, he founded Proust and Pronto.com. During college, Foley worked at M&M/Mars as a production shift manager. He continued in this position for two years after graduating from Georgia Tech. He then joined Citysearch as director of operations.

John Foley earned an industrial engineering bachelor's degree from Georgia Tech in 1994 and an MBA from Harvard Business School in 2001. Foley graduated high school in Key Largo, Florida.