Ep. 1: Mark Gainey, Strava

You asked me in the name of the most underappreciated success in consumer startup history, the first thing would pop into my head would be Mark Gainey and Strava. Mark found in Strava in 2009, which now powers 130 million athletes all over the world. It adds millions of new members a month, and a whopping 96% of this growth is fully organic. Strava works by connecting to your wearables, passively tracking your workouts and sharing them with friends. In 2021, they raised 1 billion at a $6 billion valuation. I'm Zayn Sabag and you're listening to the Apprenorist podcast. Today's questions were informed by over two years of conversations with Mark, and it will explore how Strava's unconventional early strategies shaped it into the winner it is today. Thanks so much, Mark, for being here. Could you tell us a little bit about your early days running the MVP test for Strava? You told me lots of great stories about collecting watches, giving them to your friends and trying to extract data manually from them. Yeah, well Zayn, thanks for having me here. It's your fun. Yeah, we're going to go walk down memory lane. So, the early days of Strava, you've got to go back to that 2008-2009 period, and a couple of things for people to be aware of. This was really the very early days of mobile. The iPhone was only launched in 2007, so the idea of mobile apps and things was not in people's vernacular, which means Strava was a mobile company. We were web-based, we built a website and we affectionately called the Green Machine because it was a pretty hideous shade of green, but it had a lot of features in it, built by our early engineer, great guy named Davey Kitchel, who's there with the company. And it had everything but the kitchen sink in it, but the challenge was in order to participate on Strava, you're right, you had to have a garment device, typically a cycling computer that you normally had on your handlebars, you have to take it off your handlebars, plug it into the back of the computer, and then upload the data. And that was the way you participated, and then you go off and do another ride and take it back off and plug it back in. And our hope and theory was that we could provide enough insight, information, kind of entertaining, fun experiences on that Strava website that you want to keep doing it. So what did that mean? That meant, you know, well, small numbers, you know, when we were recruiting, we were recruiting our friends to deal with which means I remember, you know, the very first customer who wasn't a Strava employee who was on Strava, his name was David, he's still with us now, 15 years later. I remember creating a competition in the summer of 2008, but we probably had 20 users, maybe, and I mean, this is a company now, the day that has, I think we're about 130 million. So I remember the first 20, and we basically challenged them to compete with each other for the month of July, 2008. The reason that that was valuable to us is that by getting them on, allowing them to compete with each other, we could watch their behavior with Strava. We could watch the way they interacted with the web application, with the website. We watched the way that they interacted with us as a business, but we also watched the way they interacted amongst themselves. And that, we didn't know we were building a social app at the time, but we clearly saw that there was this dynamic and in a really fun way, kind of the trash talking and just a speedy core that comes from sort of this shared level of support turned out to be really effective. Last thing I was just saying was, we also knew from day one, we wanted to support it, the global community of people who are athletes across lots of different sports and activities. But our go-to-market strategy was very focused. We picked one group, and that was the passionate road cyclist, and we tried to build features unique to them. And our thesis was, if we could do it well for them, that would give us enough credibility in the market and confidence to then end out. So the early days that you'll ask me about, they're all hyper focused on that, that we used to joke they were mammals, middle age men and Lycra. But it worked, because having that focus on that very targeted audience allowed us to kind of create momentum to then have the confidence to. Could you expand a little bit more about mammals? I think one of the things young consumer founders struggle a lot with is building very strong and specific pain points with their users and building empathy. Yeah, so you're right, that mammal, that middle age man and Lycra that we were building for, this was somebody who. So we knew that they were passionate about cycling, they'd probably spent fair bit of money already on their bicycle and so forth, and we were talking to them. So why? Why go so niche? And trust me, there was a lot of pressure not to do it. Users are worried about the addressable market. We were trying to figure whether there was a business there, but we were willing to take the risk. And the phrase we've used for years is, you know, go inch wide and mile deep. Because in doing so, once you've identified a targeted audience, you can go and create a conversation with them where you really can start to understand their needs, their challenges, their issues, their opportunities, that as you expand the universe of potential users only get, I often joke it's the, they call it the Starbucks effect and, and quick anecdote. But I was with a good friend of mine who's a consultant in the consumer subscription space, really bright. She's written books on the topic and we were meeting at a local Starbucks one day and I was telling her about Strava, this is the early days, and she said, "Well, tell me about your target audience." And it just so happened that there were a small group of cyclists sitting in a corner, they'd probably finished their ride and they were drinking their espresso and they said, "We'll see those poor folks over there, that too we're going." And her eyes lit up because she's like, "Mark, not only when I ask an entrepreneur that, they'll quickly say, "Well, the beauty of our business is that, see anybody who's here inside Starbucks, we can meet their needs." And it scares me to death because that distributed and so diverse, that how can you possibly be great for all those? So to me, one of the challenges that you want to focus on in the earliest days is, how can you be not just good, great? And in order to be great, it requires focus. And then if you do that, you have to have the confidence that it allows you that opportunity for expansion. So our focus on mammals was to understand why they rode, how far they rode, what they were looking for from their rides, who they were riding with. And as we did that, we weren't just building what they were asking for, that doesn't really work. But you can begin to see where the nuggets, best little example I'll give you, we learn from talking to psychoists that they love their coin. It doesn't matter whether they're on a five mile ride or a hundred mile ride, there's usually some really important climb in the middle of that ride. Yeah, here in the Bay Area, it's Old LaHonda, and everybody wants to go and do Old LaHonda. And so once we understood that, we took that and said, "Oh, I bet we could auto-identify clay. We'll look at the data, and if it's a certain length and a certain sort of grade, we can auto-identify that climb, and we can pull that out from the ride, and we can show us someone, "Hey, here's how you did on the climb, and here's how difficult the climb was." And we can give it a bunch of different characteristics. And here's what you'd be. Yes, and, well, that's what happened. So then the next thing that we built that, and the next thing that our customer asked for was, "Hey, my friend was on that same climb yesterday. Could you show me how I did relative to him or her?" Well, yeah, we can create, and so we create leaderboards. And then it turned out that not only did the climb of interest, but there were other pieces of road that people really interested in. And so that was basically where Strava segments became from. For anybody familiar with Strava the app, segments is sort of this critical piece of the experience where now any piece of road, trail, climb, you name it, you can create your own segment. But that whole thing was basically found out on the premise that cyclists love climbs and how do we sort of create that, and that created the social layer, that they're the competitive layer, they created, you know, unique IP for Strava. We never would have found, had we not had that conversation, would have said, "Yeah, that climb is, that's what I care about on my ride." Yeah, I mean, Strava, segments continued to be one of my favorite parts about Strava. It's really nice getting like 15 awards after you run, seeing where you're ranking on that segment. That's right. Exactly. Yeah, and they're very different for a runner versus a cyclist versus a walker. They serve different purposes. But we picked up that core piece of, again, the feature set within Strava from those early conversations, and then you can just see how it has a life of its own as you mature the product. Coolie. Could you talk a little bit more about very early grassroots recruitment for Strava and what that looked like? Sure. Yeah. Again, this is where I will joke about the wild small numbers. Everybody wants to get excited, you know, today Strava adds anywhere from 1 to 2 million members per month, trust me, it took us years to get to that kind of growth rate. And so early, I often joke, and you and I probably talked about in the past, you have to be comfortable doing things that don't skip. So examples of, I'll give you just two examples of things we did that didn't scale. Number one, we went out to the local Costco and cut a deal where they would give us garments at basically, and we would take our personal money and buy, we probably bought, I mean, 100. I mean, maybe a few thousand, but we bought a lot of garment devices that we could then hand out or give it at even greater discount to our friends and the friends of friends and so forth. And was it something we would think would be doing three years later? No. But in the early days, how could we get people to be in just giving us feedback and use it? So buying garments, you know, enabling people to participate. And then another thing that we did, we realized that cycling is very social, oftentimes you're out riding with other friends. So we came up with these, they almost looked like little Strava business cards, and they were somewhat waterproof, so they were called sweat proof, and we would give them to a lot of our early members to have in their back pockets and their jerseys so that when they're out riding they could hand them to their friends because we really felt that our growth was going to be organic, was going to be through the social layer, through the network of people who are already out there. And that's proven to be the case. 96% of our growth continues to be organic, it's just word of mouth. So how do we enable word of mouth? Well, sometimes it's as simple as, again, handing a piece of paper to somebody and saying, hey, you should check this out. This is what I'm on. So I would just, what I would want to encourage on first to do is be very comfortable doing things early that you know two years later would make no sense. But if you're just trying to go from one to two users and then two to four and then four to eight and then eight to 16, it's okay to sort of do the things to just get to that number. And trust me, pretty soon you're going from 100 to 200 and 1000 to 2000 and you'll figure out how to do each of those incremental sort of growth phases at the right time. But doing non-scalable early stage guerrilla marketing to get people on, then is focus on engage. This is even people miss growth for growth sake, you'll churn them out. This is great. But if you're really diligent about now that we have somebody who's on stroller, how do we ensure they're going to stay on stroller? And sometimes we get so focused on how to grow that we forget, wait, our existing customers having fun that they still with, much easier to keep a customer than it is to keep working for new ones. Did you do a double top on that a little bit? You've told me a lot that organic growth comes from engagement. Could you talk a little bit about the single player utility for Stravan, how you focused on that in the beginning? Yeah, yeah. So you're referring to a couple of things. One, I'll just double down on when I'm speaking to engagement, there's all kinds of different metrics you can look at sort of the success of a business. A lot of people focus on your growth rates, how many users you're adding, how your revenue is growing, these are critical. We found in Strava we had one metric we focused on the sort of drive success then in all the other metrics. It was engagement. It was the frequency and the passion with which our existing members were using Strava on a daily, weekly, monthly. It's a workout app. It uses every day is pretty hard, but if someone were on it weekly and monthly, that was a really good sign. How do we keep people doing it? If we did, two good things happen. One was, if somebody was happening engaged, more than likely they were inviting their friends that we were getting the viral growth, and we believed over time we could build enough value on our subscription that they would pay for the upgrade, which is our source of revenue. So that was the thesis. Now, how did we get there? You referred to single player mode versus we'll call it sort of that multiplayer mode. Strava today is known for a lot of its community-based features, the fact that it's a very tight community worldwide, and so everybody wants to ask me about how to build a community. What they forget is that when Strava started, we had a customer base over one, and we had to figure out how to build enough value in the Strava experience that one customer would come back again and stay engaged, and then two customers may not even know each other, that they're both using Strava. That's our single player mode, and I can't emphasize enough if you don't have utility that is highly not just sufficient, but engaging for a user, it's very hard to then think about the community opportunities that might exist in the future. So in the case of Strava, we put a lot of thought into what is the feedback loop we're creating because we were, in essence, we were what we call a post-ride or a post-activity experience. You go do something, whether it's ride, run, ski, whatever the activity is, you post it to Strava. Good things should happen there, and so we spend a lot of time just thinking about if there were nobody else in the system, what kind of eduette could we provide, and it just naturally happened that that was a lot of the early features set, and then over time, there were features that became somewhat social. We talked earlier about, you know, climbs and comparing climbs, and then leaderboards. So there was sort of a natural progression into the social, but it didn't happen overnight. It itself was kind of this organic process of looking for social, it was authentic. Absolutely. Could you talk a little bit more about what you mean by post-workout and how Strava's evolved over time to include during workout and pre-workout? Yeah. So we think of our user base and the way in which this kind of use case is lots of different ways, but one simple way to think about it is, anybody who is active, there's three modes. They're either getting ready to be active, they're currently active, or they've just finished being active. So there's the pre, the during, and the post, and you're right, Strava's DNA was very much sort of born out of post-activity. You go to a ride, you go to a run, you post it to Strava, and hopefully you have some fun app. That, actually, the next phase that happened for us was we got deeply involved in the during process, and that was when we launched our mobile app, but the original reason that we launched mobile was to solve a very specific problem, which was it was really expensive for someone to participate on Strava, if they had to go buy a garment. So in 2011, in 2012, we really made the investment to begin to build a mobile app that would allow someone to track their activity. So we became engaged in that, in that, while you're active, what's the role Strava can play? And it was, basically, it was a glorified stopwatch. It was, it was real track, how far, how long, you know, get a hearty monitor, we'll pull that data in. They're the handful of things that we were trying to do while you were working out. And then you're right, that has led to now, if you fast forward, the Strava experience. I know a lot of where I spend my time as a Strava user is pre-work out, well, what do I want to go do? I want to do it on Strava, because there's all kinds of mapping features and routing features and discovery features and, you know, there's event location, there's all kinds of things that kind of enable me to, like, what do I want to go do today? So I often open Strava before I work out, either decide where I want to run or, or I'm inviting friends to join me on a run. So we've sort of, as we matured as a company, those opportunities have been unlocked and we've been able to now make offerings across all three of the modes of being active. But you have to be patient. You know, one thing, we probably knew all along that there were all these different modes. The pre-mode only became valuable once we had enough data inside Strava to create experiences around, again, around route or trail discovery, things like that. And the early days, the data didn't exist. I can't, I want to challenge our partners. You need to go hard and fast and break things while simultaneously being patient and just knowing that if you're patient in the process, you can ultimately create just award-winning product. It does take longer than anything. Something Alexis, the founder of Reddit, talks a lot about spending hours on Reddit initially when it first launched and really creating a lot of the content, creating a lot of the engagement in the app. I think you have well over a thousand followers on Strava. Can you talk a little bit about how your personal use of the app drove any sort of engagement early on? Oh, that's funny. Yeah, because as you think about my followers, it's a small following compared to other people on Strava, which is just, it's amazing to see. I mean, we have members now who have hundreds of thousands of followers, a lot of these professional cyclists and things like that. I mean, we're going to ask the questions, and it's a really good one. I would say that my use as a Strava member to enable its success probably had less to do with the followers I had, although it held. I think it had to do with just their way in which as I was active and could populate an area with, we call it Strava Keat. So anytime I would go run somewhere, that now is data on Strava. And so I had the privilege of going out and creating all the segments, you know, here and on the peninsula and where I live, which is just south of San Francisco. So that was really fun, because in some ways I'm sort of napping the active world in my area. And I was the key leader. I was the, we call them KOMs for cyclists or CRs for runners, you course records, you're here. And I was basically the leader on all these segments. Now I've spent the last 15 years being told every week by Strava that you've lost your KOM here and you've lost your kid. So now there's much, you know, there's a lot of people who are faster than me, but I think if I point to sort of where I was most helpful, A, we're just kind of populating the system with data and B, look, I'm as passionate user as I am a founder. And so all kinds of little tweaks around the, you know, the feature set and, you know, what's working and wasn't that was kind of that collaborative work that we were doing with the rest of our team was critical. Absolutely. I think that's a great point to talk a little bit more about your background. A lot of times, you know, VCs are looking for founders that, you know, the product was made to them and they're the perfect user of the product. You talk a little bit more about your background as a rower, doesn't have any. Sure. Yeah. I think so it is true. And one of those fortunate entrepreneurs who has kind of found an industry where I'm also dispassionate as an individual, goes back to, you know, my youth. So I grew up in Reno, Nevada and grew up in Reno. It's a brief, fun place if you enjoy the outdoors because I was either a playing soccer or I was running or I was skiing or I was embitant Tahoe just loving the outdoors and being really competitive. It was competitive runner in high school and that got me into college and then college I switched and became a competitive where I met my co-founder Michael Horbath. We've been best friends for, you know, 30 something years. So sports are in my DNA. I've gone on to compete in everything from Iron Man triathlons to, you know, long distance mountain bike race, you know, long distance running, marathons and things. So you're right. The part of my DNA is that I just love to be outdoors and being active. So I think that that helps with strider, that being said, I would not say it is a, it is critical to the success. In fact, I'd argue you have to be careful when you're passionate about a space where you're trying to build a business, you need to make sure that you're objective enough around what you're building that you're not just building for yourself. I honestly, I think one of the challenges that strider faced in the early days, we were often accused of building for kind of the hardcore athletes and the most elite athletes in the world. And that was never our intent. Our thesis was just, let's make sure we build, to meet the standards of the most demanding athletes in the world. We felt if we didn't do that, it would be very hard to serve as others, but what we didn't want to do was in any way sort of intimidate people. I think we worked really hard in the last five to six years to ensure that strider can be inviting to anybody, regardless of their athletic background, regardless of how fast they are. It's not about performance. It's about simply enjoying that feeling you get when you're active and being supported by other people who are trying to do the same thing. And there's a balance, but it's just a long way of saying, you don't have to be a runner to go and start a running company. You don't have to be a cyclist or a cycling company. It helps a little bit, but it's by no means a shoe. Thank you. What about when you knew you might want to study a couple of Michael and how your friendship must work, and then I've evolved over the years? Sure. Yeah, so we got to go back to the last century for some saying, I'm going to age myself here, kind of sore, because our first company was founded in 1995, 1996. I had come out of college in 1990, Michael was two years ahead of me, met only crew team as I mentioned, and we were good friends in college. He had gone off, he got his PhD in economics, and he was teaching. It's named, he's teaching macroeconomics at the time. I had just left working for a venture capital firm called TA Associates in late '95, and wanted to be an entrepreneur, so I was trying to do two things. One was trying to figure out what business could I launch, and I was also desperately looking for co-found, or at least a co-founder. And most of my good friends turned me down, you're crazy what are you doing. But Michael was great. Michael was working at Stanford, I used to joke, his greatest contribution was that he had an office in 1995 that had a high school year. Which was really hard to come by back then, and so regardless of whether he was a founder, I just like going to his office, because we could actually surf the web, if you wanted to call it that back then, on a decent internet connection. But those conversations just led to more, I think he caught the bug along with me, and ultimately when we founded Coda, we figured out a relationship that worked well. He didn't leave academia, Michael stayed in academia and was busy starting a family, so we were co-founders at Coda, he contributed a ton, particularly the early days there. And I was fortunate that I could be the one who was running it and be full-time. So that was our con on experience. If you fast-forward to Strava, we were in a place where both of us had the freedom to work on it together, 50/50. And at that point, we had enough trust in each other because we'd done the first company. And we sort of know each other's strength. I like to joke, I mean, I hold on to Michael with an iron fist because there's nobody smarter, there's nobody who understands his, as a PhD in economics, he has a way of looking at our business in a way that's different from me. He looks at it oftentimes through the lens of the numbers and the data, and I probably just see it from a vantage point that's around the story and maybe some of the qualitative aspects of it and those things seem to marry really well. But yeah, it was a relationship formed over decades and not without its ups and downs, you know, I could tell you all kinds of challenges we've had along the way, but never putting the friendship at risk. I love that. I wanted to talk a little bit about trying to build Strava the first time right before you launched Kanna and why timing is really important for me. Yeah, I'll be the first to acknowledge, you know, luck plays such a huge role in any of these startups and never. So what you're referring to is when I left TA Associates in the fall of 1995, I had an idea that I wanted to pursue. It was a virtual walk-around on the internet. There was this new thing called the internet and we thought it'd be really interesting to try to build a business there. And I had a personal problem, which is having graduated and left rowing. There was this void in my life. Actually, for both of us, we both felt the same thing, which was we really missed the camaraderie and the Aspreity Corps and the, frankly, the trash talking, everything that came from being on that team while in college. And the problem was once we graduated, it just disappeared, despite, you know, continuing training and participating in weekend, fun runs and things, it just wasn't the same. So we had this theory that we could build this virtual walk-around on the internet. But this new thing called the internet, we called it ConnoSports, was named after my dog. And we went about looking for partners that could help us build it. We went and looked down to a website, to Dolman Company, and we began talking to other sports companies that might be our sponsors. That was the business model that we were contemplating. And again, what sounds like kind of basic stuff today, 25 years later, it was not so basic back then. Well, the bad news was, we were way too early for the idea. The reality was, how are we going to get people to seamlessly put their data in the strawberry, their workout? We're going to have to sit down and type it in. That's not very compelling. There wasn't such a thing as subscription build models at that point that folks we hope would be our advertisers and our sponsors. They were only just now starting to understand what their internet strategy was going to be. So they were, there was a lot of friction. And as we talk to these sports companies, a number of them kept telling us, geez, we don't think we want to sponsor you because, frankly, we're already getting too many messages and emails from customers. We don't want any more emails. And we kept hearing this problem over and over and like, how could be a bad thing? Well, I'm a customer. Don't you want them to communicate with you? So we kind of that natural, you know, you and I were just talking earlier before we went online here, you know, pivot versus evolve, you know, I'm not sure what the right word is. And we heard that like, well, gosh, if we're ever going to get these companies to support our virtual locker room, we should help them solve their customer email problem. And so chronic sports actually became chronic communication because we ended up identifying a very big problem in the market around customer email management and just how to help companies. As they began to build their businesses online, how would they manage their customer relationship problem on? And we turned out that sports companies weren't the only one with that problem. Anybody who was going online did that. So Michael and I ended up building chronic communications. And over the next four or five years, we went from two guys in a dog, 1200 employees and company went public and it was really fun. We had a great ride. And we're the first to acknowledge it had nothing to do with sports, which again goes back to my point. You don't have to be passionate to have fun building something. This is much fun that comes from just the process itself and frankly, being on a great team. Thinking about building great things, can you talk a little bit about the motivation to hire some of your early users as early employees? Well, yeah. Okay. So there's, I don't know how common that is. And this was sort of just taking full advantage of the circumstances. So Ad Strava, the first two really key outside of hires we made and for all intents purposes, we really made these guys co-founders of the business were two gentlemen in Mark and Chris that we had known at Kona. We had hired them straight out of they'd actually had just graduated from Stanford as undergrad and computer science. And they joined our team at Kona in the early days. And they were two fantastic developers who also happened to be fantastic people and just the kind of teammates you would want involved in any business. And so when you fast forward to the early days of Strava, we weren't necessarily looking for Mark and Chris to be on our team. We knew they were also passionate cycles. And so we said, hey guys, you understand software, you understand technology and your cycle, would you try that and give us feedback? And I genuinely, if all they had done was given us feedback, I think that would have been great. But they did get excited. They gave us a lot of feedback and that immediately triggered, oh gosh, would they also be willing to work with them all the time. So I don't know that everyone who has that opportunity where they kind of have friends, they might be able to pull in. I will say though that someone should not over think through how they pull teams together. People are passionate about an idea or they have a trust in what you're trying to do. As long as you're fair and as long as you're transparent, you ask, you ask for help. You ask, you know, do you have time? And if someone says no, no problem, you know, you've done it, but I can tell you, you and I've had some other conversations where I get more and more excited at building software companies because the challenges we had in 1995, I'm trying to get a piece of software from sort of concept to commercialization, it was exceptionally hard. Like it, it was a six to nine month process and then you delivered it on a disc to your customer. I mean, it was, and then maybe six months later you'd do the next version of it. And then with Strava, we got really excited when we could do nightly deploys and begin really sort of, you know, evolving the product on a daily, weekly basis. Now, you know, it's in you and I again, we've talked offline and you don't even have to be a sort of developer to think about the way in which you develop code given the sort of automated tools that are out there today. So I'm not suggesting you don't need to hire really smart people who are good at technology and good developers, but I am very excited as entrepreneur that I think it's only becoming easier and easier for us to bring our ideas for life. And whether that's through your friends or your extended network work as an entrepreneur, you beg borrow and steal all the time. Maybe it's not steal. That's the wrong one. But you beg and borrow a lot. And then you, you, you do that and you just remember who was there for you and you ensure that you treat them well going forward. Worse to live by certainly. Yeah, I think the opportunity to just build software very, very fast without having much of a very strong software back on as something I've done in particular, when we first started building out candidate and roles and vitals now. I knew almost nothing about writing code for production. And now Matt and I are with the ones writing code and then very excited. I, you're one of my, we were joking earlier, you're just a beacon for me in terms of anybody who says, ah, but it's really offensive and challenging as he goes and I'm not sure that's the right mindset. Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. Not today. Um, could you one of the things that really fascinates me about Strava is how well you guys have managed to pack so many different features into a relatively straightforward interface. Tell me a little bit about the building process. I have a couple of questions here. One of the things you've mentioned to me in a previous conversation is initially when you expanded to running, you built two separate apps. Yeah. So tell me about the decision to unify those. Yeah. Yeah. So then actually, I'll preface all my comments by saying, I'm not sure, I would agree with you that we have a lot of features packed into a pretty tight app. I don't know that that serves our communities as well as I would like. I do think that there's, you'll read a lot about sort of simplicity as bliss and, you know, that reducing one's experience is as important, you know, the editing process of anything, including software is important. So I actually think we probably have too many things that are kind of hidden away that are hard to find. And, but I appreciate the compliment, for sure. So now let's, let's talk about how we, we went from cycling to cycling and running because you're right. We made the strategic decision when we decided to go into running to launch a separate second app called Strava run. We had Strava, Strava cycling, Strava bike, I can't remember, but we did not, the biggest concern we had was that we did not want our existing community to feel as though we were, in any way, short-changing their experience. And we felt, the more we learned about running, we realized, these are not the same experience. They might be some of the same underlying technologies, but at their core, we really wanted each of those audiences to know that we were looking at their needs in an authentic way. So you're right, we launched two apps and it was difficult because now you're trying to market two apps. Now you're trying to think about deployment and resources across two apps. No question it was a challenge. Was it the right-or-one decision? You know, I don't think that's one we second guess much other than within the next two years, we worked very hard to then merge the two and bring them together. And we found that that merging was invaluable because it turned out many of our users, many of our members, they were doing both. Yeah. So it turns out most people are not just one activity only. Their seasonality and just change of pace and whatever goal they have allows them to kind of do different activities. And it was much more important that Strava sort of recognized that user experience than to be authentic. The initial thinking was, we want to make sure that we get the experience right and that we, our customer feels like we're meeting their name. Absolutely. Yum, how did you balance pressure early on to monetize with just building the methods various possible for users? So I'd like to think that this is, this comes from some of my DNA all the way back to my four plus years at TA, so should my first job. That job, the firm was a very unique firm in that it looked for established companies that were bootstrapped. So they were on fairly own, they had not raised outside capital and they were also profitable and growing. And we were looking for investment opportunities that were pretty rare, at least in Silicon Valley. Although it turns out that when you go out to the rest of the world, that's what a lot of companies have to do. Like they don't have access to venture capital. So it's important to Strava because Michael and I both believe that great companies, their success is predicated not on how many eyeballs they have or just on NPS scores or, you know, monthly active users. Ultimately, a great business is measured on its ability to generate revenue and profitability. Those are the quarter. And frankly, Michael and I had a chip on our shoulder because at Kona, we had tremendous growth, top line revenue. But in the six years that we were there, the company was never a problem. It was the phrase that we use of the acronym in those days with GBA, get big fast. It was, it was a total land grab. It was a market share game was, it was all scale. Now, and we went public on that promise and we had a crazy market cap on that promise. But it always bothered us because the fundamentals weren't sound. It was always kind of a company that, frankly, when the, when the sort of internet sort of imploded in the early 2000s, companies like Kona really struggled because they just didn't have the cash. So for Michael and I, part of our thesis with Strava was this should be a company that's built last. One of our favorite books. You haven't read it. It's an own one. It's a good one. It's a great business work. Go to last. We wanted that DNA of the product. So what does that mean? That meant from almost the day we started, we created a subscription model, premium. So you could use Strava for free or that you could upgrade. Initially, it was usage-based and then it became feature-based. And our thesis was really simple, which was will know for building a great product when someone's willing to pay us. We, you know, here we are 15 years later, we're still very much of that mindset. That the best way we know that our product is working is the someone seeing a value that they want to pay. And in a world where we're inundated with subscriptions and so forth, sometimes it's a high bar. But I believe that even the management team believes deeply that that's the way to measure our system. Yeah. I think Strava is an exceptional case in that a lot of like prosumer companies work into their companies. They have very, very low monetization rates. So about like one percent of people actually paid for product and I don't think that's Strava. No, yeah. We don't have some numbers but I can tell you it's much, much better than that. And look, to be clear, it's not everybody. Anybody who wants to use Strava for free, we love having them as free members. One of the wonderful things about Strava is that our free members are contributing value. Every time they upload an activity to Strava, that enhances the experience, not just for themselves, but for everybody else. So we don't look at our free users as somehow just sort of taking advantage of it. Like, they are contributing great. We're just hopeful over time that they will see that the features that are on the other side of the paywall could be of value and that they'll at least want to try this infrastructure. Absolutely. Either way, it's one of those funny things. We're happy either way as long as people feel engaged and enjoy it. Thankfully, there's enough percentage of our members that are subscribers, that it makes for a really great, healthy business. Yeah, I think it's a very compelling case for both network effect and data effect, using the free users as content for the paid users, and it's phenomenal and deepening both of their engagements and attention, but to ask something to make. Yeah, anecdotally, as a Strava user, the paywall pop-up comes up almost every single day for me. And every single day, I'm tempted to buy it. And I think it's done in a way so that it's almost annoying enough, but yeah. Yeah, that's funny. As a subscriber myself, I don't see that. So I can tell you, it'll go away if you pay. And I'll just give credit to our team. We're constantly iterating on what that should look like, how to figure out that balance between being persistent, not annoying, continuing to add value. One of the key things is it's not good enough just to be really good at selling it. Are we continuing to just increase the value of the subscription so that every day you look, there's something else that might be interesting? We put a lot of thought into what should be on one side of the paywall or the other. There was a period of time where we felt like everything should, anything new we were doing should go on the subscription side. You know, we've got that we've backed up, but we continue to evolve that thinking, and now we see something should be free versus other. In perfect example, we took something that used to be paid for, beacon, and we made it free because it's a great safety feature and we didn't want that to be a hindrance. We didn't want people to just, only if they could afford it, if they use it. So, that's a good example of taking something that used to be paid for moving it across the other way. So, it's an art. It's not a science. But yeah, you're going to continue to be annoyed until you at least give the subscription a try. That's very principal decision making, taking that paid feature that's a safety purpose. Yeah. No. To those to the team, I think we, we, no sacred cow, though constantly going back and just looking at, you know, what's in the best interest of the community and how do we match that with the business? It should be a, if we do this right, the win-win-win, that's when we win, it's coming when the shareholders win. And if we, when we're doing it right, that's what it feels like. Yeah, I think one thing Strava does so well is, is being, is being a, you know, gatekeeper of very serious user location data. I love that it erases the initials of the start and segments from your run so that people, you know, can't see where you're starting from or, you know, there's also a habit of just talking to you, it's really hard to see somebody's activities when you're not friends or impossible. So that's it. Yeah. That goes to you guys on privacy. How did that thinking evolve over time? Were there any, you know, early days, like very early days that kind of through red flags that you? Yeah. I mean, it is definitely evolved over time as we've learned sort of what the opportunities are, technology-wise. You've just, you've kind of highlighted a couple of key features that, frankly, we're constantly trying to promote, again, these are free features that allow for greater privacy. And whether it's something like hiding your start and stop or enabling you to just always be private unless you otherwise decide. So you're right. We've got the good news I can tell to any Strava member is take the time to look at our privacy settings, decide how you want to be present on Strava and more than likely we've given you that option. Did that evolve over time? 100%. Were there moments? Probably the most, one of the most intense moments that we had there was a wrongful death lawsuit on Strava in our early, early years. Really sad situation where a cyclist was descending, was going downhill very fast and crossed over W.O. Align and ran into a car and died. And surely before the statute of limitations was to happen, the family members of this person sued Strava and accused us of basically being an event organizer or 40 with the details but it came after us pretty hard with somehow we had caused this death. We thought it, we looked internally and said no, this is something we should defend and we did and the case was thrown out and we were able to move on. But it did sort of, you know, I wouldn't be honest, but I didn't say we had to sort of take a hard look and say, are there ways we could improve? And part of it was as simple as just making sure we're having an ongoing conversation with our community. One thing that wasn't changing any features, part of it was just saying, look, the intent here is to enjoy being active, it's to support one another in this process. That means things like obeying rules of the road. That means being respectful of one another. That means being respectful of others who are also trying to use trails and roads and so forth. One of the things that came out of that incident was just simply some community standards. If you're going to be a member of our community, forget our privacy regulations in terms and conditions, here's the standards by which we expect you to behave, you're going to be a member. So, you know, there've been moments like that. In general, I would say we've just constantly are evaluating trust and safety and privacy. Thank you so much. Just a couple of final questions. Addict, overly, I think that a lot of VCs are probably big strawberry users. There's like a lot of fitness hype running hype in the VC community. Can you talk about how that's interfered with any sort of races? Well, probably at the end of the day, interfering in a good way. I'll preface by saying, Java is not unlike any other start about there, which is that we've had our challenges raising money for obvious reasons. It's, you know, fitness is a category where it's seen, a lot of capital come into it. It's not one that investors immediately jump to. There've always been questions about, you know, the addressable market size and, you know, how big and, you know, how loyal and, you know, aren't you going to get crushed by XYZ company. So, these are good questions. They should be asked over and, and Strava faced those a lot. Where we tended to find success with investors was when we identified investors who also happen to be Strava user. And why did that work? My theory is that it worked because once you remember and you actually have a sense of the experience, you recognize some of the unique qualities that exist that make Strava pretty special as a business. So that was, that was a natural. It was just much easier for us to talk to somebody who already understood the, the user experience. And now we could talk about the financials and the aspects of the business. Whereas if you're trying to explain Strava to somebody who doesn't like being active, that's a tough, that's a tough rock to push up the hill. There's a lot of evangelizing. So, yes, if you go back and look at most of our raises, someone who was in the middle of that address was more than likely active enough that they're like, look, you need to understand these things about the business. And I would say that that's going to be important for any entrepreneur as you're thinking about fundraising, trying to connect the dots between someone who will have some sense for the domain, and also has that investment mindset that's going to be your biggest win. It's okay. A lot of people don't get it. Don't waste time with them. It's your, it's called bloody Knuckleson or don't get bloody Knuckles knocking on the door for somebody who's knocking or appreciating what you're doing. It's okay. It's not a reflection on, on you or the business. It's just people have different areas of expertise and interest and they'll play a big role in raising money, particularly early. Do you think Strava's at all ease apprehensions investors might have about investing in two-way companies? Well, for every Strava, there's another company that, you know, has imploded or made a challenging and, you know, I'd like to think that we've played a positive role. I would tell you there's one thing that's kind of been in the middle of Strava's life cycle that I think has made this, has made this particular discussion somewhat challenging. And that's COVID, you know, because in the early days of COVID, anything related to sports and fitness was just on a rocket. We just had this global focus on health and wellness. You had people who no longer had to commute and so they had time to be active. And so, you know, we saw a tremendous influx of capital into the space. And for better or worse, some of those companies turned out to be COVID darlings, but post-COVID and not able to meet expectations. Strava went through its own, you know, just trying to figure out a forecast growth was really challenging. Thankfully for us, we're on the other side and, I mean, our business today is stronger than it's ever been. So, we're really happy with what we believe is a continuing trend in the space. But for everyone of Strava's, there's, I can name three or four companies that did not make it through that, that chasm or that period and that's, that weighs heavily on investors. They're just as aware of those unfortunate circumstances that they are as Strava's. That's a long way of saying, I don't know that it's any easier today in the space. Just, yeah, you have to be, you have to be patient and it's a numbers game. You have to talk to a lot. You're going to raise capital, you prepare to talk to a lot of potential investors and treat it literally like a second fiddle. It's literally you're going to have to pair a little process and you're going to spend as much time trying to fundraise as you are working on your career. And if you do that and you set the expectation, you'll get it done. We'll figure out somewhat. With all due respect to the companies, can you talk about some of those company deaths and why you think they happen? Well, I'm so careful because, I mean, these are partners of Strava and I have a lot of respect and, frankly, as an operator, I just know how hard it is. So let me talk to somebody that I have a lot of respect for and it's not that they're dead by any stretch. But I think we all know, I mean, Pelotonous has its up and downs. They are a great partner of ours and I actually think they come out the other side of this. Where I would compare the differences, one of the challenges that they face is that Strava never had to face is they're a hard worker and they're predicated, you know, a lot of their business was predicated on the success of selling stationary bikes and treadmills and that believe now they have rowers and so forth. While they simultaneously were also building a digital business, so they just had a level of complexity that, frankly, we didn't have. And I imagine with COVID, a lot more people were staying home than you actually used in the sheets. You couldn't go to a gym. Right. You couldn't show the alternative. It's worked. So there are a lot of things outside of their control and that's the thing. I'm much more quick to defend Peloton and kind of where they are today and why I think they actually still have a great product and will come out the other side. You know, these expectations got, maybe we talked earlier this phrase success equals results minus expectations. They just reached this point where everybody thought that they would continue to just be on a growth rate that was off the charts. And I think what we all learned in hindsight, and this is a problem, it's really easy to be an armchair quarterback and sit back and say, well, didn't just see that that was going to happen. Nobody was saying that we didn't know, we didn't know if we would be going back to work. We didn't know if we could have been working out together. So I think what Peloton has continued to have to work through is what is the ongoing demand for the product? What is the right product mix? What does their business model look like relative to hardware versus software? And I think they'll get it right. I really do. I'm not just being blowing smoke. I think they're an important partner of ours and we love what they do because they are a never-enableer of people being active. Trust me. I don't. I actually don't feel safe riding a bike out on the road. There we are. I'll do it to get to a good trail. But I've just had bad karma on the roads, but I can do a good workout indoors on a bike. I'm happy. And I don't think that's going to go away. That's an example of a company that just like Strava and others kind of went through a lot of ups and downs through the pandemic. Their recovery is just taking a little bit longer. But I'm optimistic. Yeah. Absolutely. What are some spaces, especially in sports, that you're excited for young consumer entrepreneurs to build in? And what do you think are the biggest differences in building a consumer company today for scratch versus 10 or less 20 years ago? Well, I'll answer the second question first. And you and I alluded to this earlier. If I'm excited about particularly consumer technology today, I do love a lot of the automated tools that are out that allow us to test and iterate solutions and quit applications in front and consumers quickly. It doesn't have to be perfection is not the goal. It can redevelop things that we think are going to have a positive impact, somehow solve a problem, get it in front of a desk and iterate. And then it's why I love spending time with you because I've watched your journey. And as you've talked about, you know, the apps that you've developed along the way and your ability to learn from each one and you will find your sweets. You will find this product market in an opportunity and you'll be off to the race. And I think that the tools that enable you to do that are very different from the tools that I have before. I graduated with a degree in art history. I've never written a piece of code in my life yet I've successfully managed to found and build two software companies. I can do it. Anybody can do it. And I just think for today, the tools that are in front of us only make that easier. It means it's easier for everybody. So there's going to be competition, but competition means there's a real market. So that would be my first point is like, don't fear it and test and iterate. Don't look for perfection. Get products early in the hands of users because they will tell you whether you're onto something or not. Don't trust your instincts. In terms of the sport spaces, I'd state the point out to maybe really basic observation. One is, I continue to be impressed with the kinds of devices that we're wearing today and the kinds of data that those devices are kept. I happen to be a big fan of, I don't have it on today, but typically I'm wearing a garment and I also wear an R-ray. And those two alone, I'm just impressed on a weekly basis how they continue to iterate in terms of the kinds of things that they're capturing. And just because they're capturing their data doesn't mean that other companies can't figure out a way to then take that information and create insightful product and services for them. So I really like that sort of this, the ability for very sort of simple, easy to use devices are capturing more and more information, which is exactly what happened in 2008 when we were launching, which was that Garmin was capturing a lot of information while someone was riding a bike. And we were able to take that information and do unique things that Garmin wasn't doing. And then we could do the compliment Garmin, though we weren't trying to compete directly with them. We were trying to enhance someone's youth. So I think that continued, whether it's glucose monitoring, whether it's wet monitoring, whether it's different things with car rate, whether it's sleep data, we're just seeing this whole new category of human performance and wellness data that I think we're only scratching the surface with what we can do with it. And then the second one, not to be a broken record, but it's funny, I just came from another meeting with an entrepreneur, AI as a tool. I think we'll play a really interesting role in fitness and sports and wellness going forward. I don't put AI at the center of the conversation, but as we're thinking about, I'll use the example of coaching, as we're thinking about how people want to be coached to go do their first marathon or coach to do a sensory bike ride or something like that. I am excited about the way in which we can use some of these new technologies to provide greater access to coaching, for a more personalization and coaching at lower cost solutions so you don't have to hire somebody that you're paying, you know, hundreds of dollars every month, but actually using technology that they can look at what you're doing and iterate from there. And that's exciting because that wasn't really available a few or three years ago. So those would be two examples. Oh, thank you so much for your time, Mark, I appreciate that. Yeah, it's fun.