Welcome back to Dry Powder, I'm William D. Cohan.

Thanks as always for following my work here at Puck. Today, I'm taking a closer look at new Peloton C.E.O. Barry McCarthy, the ex-Netflix, ex-Spotify executive who recently supplanted John Foley and who investors are hoping can bring some of that streaming pixie dust to Peloton.

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Is Peloton an Apple or a GoPro?

Corporate turnarounds, especially in the tech sector (or wherever “connected fitness” is), are few and far between. Can Barry McCarthy, Peloton’s new C.E.O., regain the other 80 percent of his stock price?

Call me crazy but I’m feeling some sympathy for Barry McCarthy, who has been the new C.E.O. of Peloton since February 9. He’s got a brutal assignment ahead of him: turning around the fortunes of the once high-flying exercise equipment company with the hyped-up mission to use “technology and design to connect the world through fitness” and “empowering people to be the best version of themselves anywhere, anytime.” Let’s face it, that’s a tall order during the best of circumstances, let alone the one McCarthy inherited. Peloton, which was once worth more than $50 billion during the height of the workout-from-home-forever depths of the pandemic, is now worth around $9 billion. Its stock is down 83 percent from its all-time high on Christmas Eve 2020. In 2021, Peloton was the worst performing stock in the Nasdaq 300 Index.

But McCarthy gives a lot of us aging Liberal Arts majors some hope. First, he’s 68 years old and came out of “retirement,” as he puts it, to take on the assignment, after leaving his position as C.F.O. of Spotify in January 2020, right before the pandemic. McCarthy hasn’t only been hanging out in the Presidio, playing golf, though. He’s also been an “executive advisor” to Technology Crossover Ventures, the 27-year-old uber-successful venture-capital firm with early-stage investments in Airbnb, Facebook, Spotify (which was probably why McCarthy was the C.F.O. there for nearly five years after serving on the board of directors), Netflix (where McCarthy was C.F.O. for nearly 12 years until December 2010), LinkedIn, Expedia and, quelle surprise, Peloton, which is probably why he is now the C.E.O. According to the New York Times, he says he told TCV, “Hey, Coach, put me in. I can fix this.”

I can relate to McCarthy...

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