Longevity Is a Core Ingredient of Ambition
- Feb 6
- 3 min read
By Zach Pretzell
In the San Francisco Bay Area, high ambition is table stakes. The AI boom has swept everyone off their feet, and people from all over the world have come here to try to claim a piece of that pie before it’s too late.
Whether their bodies have signed up for the grind or not is another story. Over the last decade, ambitious people started to realize one of the core engines of high performance is health and longevity. Ambitious people know this, but integrating this into their busy life while building a company is brutally impractical, often competing with time that could be spent shipping that next feature or finding a new customer.
Zach Pretzell learned that firsthand working in tech while dealing with chronic low back pain. He was familiar with the standard advice: get consistent sleep, walk 10k steps everyday, drink lots of water, stretch consistently. Executing even one of these reliably while grinding through long product cycles was a losing battle. He needed something more efficient, something more potent.
He tried everything he could think of, until he found sauna. The contrast was immediate, nothing else delivered a mix of stress reduction, mental clarity, pain relief, and better sleep in such a short, contained window. But even after discovering his gym sauna, actually getting to the gym to use the sauna every single day was impractical, and the routine broke as soon as his schedule got messy.
He asked himself, could he put a sauna in his backyard, or even in his apartment? And again, because buying a sauna is expensive and committal, could he rent one? This desire became the seed of SF Sauna.
Once Pretzell began building and installing saunas for customers across San Francisco, he realized that, just like him, so many people want to make sauna a habit, but that was impractical unless you had one at home.
One of SF Sauna’s customers was building a startup while managing a stubborn health issue that responded well to frequent sauna use. His apartment building had a communal sauna, but it had limited hours and was often crowded. He could barely step away from his computer long enough to check. He decided to rent a sauna for his studio apartment, and put it literally beside his bed. With the friction gone, he used it twice a day and his symptoms stabilized.
Another customer had helped start a company in Germany, where sauna culture is baked into daily life. When the company expanded to San Francisco, he felt cut off from a ritual that shaped his early team culture. Installing a sauna in his high-rise let him keep that practice alive even as the company scaled in their new city.
A third customer, a programmer in big tech, called her in-home sauna her “confession booth.” It became the place she and her friends could decompress from the week without the awkwardness of a public spa. The sauna became her place of not just physical health, but emotional health, too.
These stories showcase how longevity only works when it’s built into the physical geometry of daily life. When the sauna requires a commute, it becomes theoretical. When it’s ten feet away, the habit becomes inevitable.
Startups obsess over removing barriers so work can actually get done. Health is no different. Strip out the friction and the habit finally executes.
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