How Supernatural Got A Second Life Without Meta

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Months after Meta ended new development and laid off its team, Supernatural is being rebuilt as an independent company. Head of Fitness Leanne Pedante tells UploadVR about the unlikely path back.When Meta ended new development of Supernatural and laid off its team in January, it appeared to be the end of one of VR's most recognizable fitness services.Instead, something unusual happened.Five months later, Meta announced that Supernatural Health, a newly formed independent company, would take over the Supernatural experience, giving the service a path to continue outside of Meta. A new app is expected to launch on the Meta Horizon Store this fall, while Meta's existing Supernatural app will remain available until December 3.The original founders are returning.

Former members of the team are coming back. And a service Meta had decided to stop developing is now being rebuilt outside the company.Meta's June announcement explained what would happen, but offered little detail about how Supernatural arrived at this unexpected second life.Leanne Pedante can't answer what happened inside Meta to make that possible. But as Supernatural's Head of Fitness and a longtime coach, she can tell the story from the other side. She was among those who lost their jobs in January and, months later, found herself helping rebuild Supernatural as part of a much smaller independent team.

And for Pedante, that story begins thousands of miles away from Meta.An Unexpected Call In ItalyAfter the layoffs, Pedante started dismantling her life in Los Angeles.She gave up her apartment, put her belongings into storage and left for Europe without knowing exactly when she would return. The trip had already been in the works, but suddenly there was no job waiting for her back home."I was like, maybe I won't come back," Pedante told UploadVR.Then, about two weeks after arriving in Italy, she began hearing from Supernatural's original founders.The possibility they were discussing seemed improbable: What if Supernatural could continue?The timing struck Pedante as almost absurd.

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After years of having a home and career to return to, she had finally given both up."I felt like it was like the cosmic joke," she recalled.Pedante wasn't ready to believe it yet."It sounded like such a long shot that I really wasn't getting my hopes up too much," she said.So she stayed in Italy while conversations continued back home.Roughly two months later, Pedante returned to find that the long shot had become something much more concrete."Everyone is aligned and this is actually going to happen," she recalled realizing."So then I had a job again.""This Is Not Like Any Other Layoff"The path toward that return began with a shutdown that Pedante says caught much of the Supernatural team by surprise.Layoffs were always a possibility working in tech, she acknowledged, but many on the team didn't expect it to happen when it did.Former colleagues quickly created Discord servers and text groups to stay connected.

Pedante said years of working together had produced genuine friendships across the company, including coaches, choreographers, engineers and others who had spent years building Supernatural together.At the same time, something else was happening. Supernatural's users, referred to within the service as “athletes,” were making it clear that they weren't ready to lose it."There was this dual thing happening where we were all so sad and grieving and shocked and not sure what was going to happen next," Pedante told UploadVR. "But then we were being inundated with so much love and support and sadness from the community."For some employees who had experienced layoffs elsewhere in the technology industry, the response was unlike anything they'd encountered before."I had many colleagues who had been through layoffs before say, 'This is not like any other layoff,'" Pedante recalled.Athletes wrote about relationships they'd formed, changes they'd made in their lives and what Supernatural's coaches and community had come to mean to them.Pedante described the response as "a salve to our own individual pain."But it did something else too.

It showed the former team that there was still considerable demand for what they had built.The Community Refused To Move OnIn the months after the layoffs, Supernatural athletes organized petitions, filled social media with calls to save the service and looked for ways to make their objections heard.A Change.org petition launched the day after the shutdown was announced ultimately drew more than 7,800 supporters. Among its requests was that Meta either allow the team to continue Supernatural within the company or permit it to spin off independently so the experience could survive.The campaign extended beyond petitions and social media.