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we have reprogrammed our lives to be remote and so we are stuck in patterns that are really difficult to get out of
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i actually i don't know if i'm gonna get cancelled for this but i think that um
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michael hobart the ceo and co-founder of straba with over 76 million athletes you
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track your activities turn those activities into a post that's when the strava magic happens if you want to be
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as good as you possibly can be you have to strive to be the best but can you be okay also with not actually achieving
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the goal of being at the top of everybody win or lose that's the feeling you're looking for
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how are you doing in your personal life my wife was diagnosed with a terminal illness in september of 2013. i think i
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prepared a lot for how to live my life caring for her i wasn't prepared for how to live my life when she was gone
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[Music] i had to not rediscover who i am i had to define
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who i am that doesn't happen overnight if what you do every day is put a little
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effort into being kind to the people who are important to you in your life and the complete strangers then that's where
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you're going to find the meaning so without further ado
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i'm stephen bartlett and this is the diary of a ceo usa edition i hope nobody's listening but if you are
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then please keep this to yourself [Music]
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michael i tend to believe that people have i know i eventually
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developed it but i tend to believe that people have some kind of hypothesis as to what factors or experiences from
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their earliest years shaped them most significantly into the person they are today do you
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have a hypothesis like that i think i have several starting with
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how my family felt to me being the youngest of of the five
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kids in my family felt like it was pulled apart by
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geography uh between sweden and the united states at an early age my sisters stayed behind
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when my family moved back to the states when i was five years old and
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i had this uh dream to reunite us in some way how could we how could we be
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one family again um now my sisters were older they were choosing to it was the normal
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maybe a few years early what from what you'd say normally would have happened anyway then deciding just
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where do they want to live who are they as people and but me i was i was this five-year-old and i was uh i was sad to
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to lose my my sisters my uh i had my brother with me and um when you think about one of the most
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important things in your life it's the relationships you have with people um now i'm not necessarily an outgoing
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person myself so i don't that's not where this is this hypothesis has led me but it has led me to the idea of
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connection deep connection with people you care about is super important for how you
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live your life and the choices you make and what you prioritize so that was that's the one that's one
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theory and then there's one other one which is i think growing up going through high school coming tonight
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first of all coming united states not speaking english at the age of five and learning it all you know from television
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and getting thrust into school and you have this this feeling like you don't belong you don't fit in uh that just that kept you
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know for many people i think it keeps going and you don't have that great sense of belonging until later maybe
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until your teenage years you're later even into your 20s but throughout all that time of
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searching and looking for something like what i kept believing is that there's something inside
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me a potential that needs to get realized and i don't just think that about me now i
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think that about every single human being on this planet and um the aspect of what it means to realize
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someone's potential your own potential and then create the opportunity for the people around you to realize their potential
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that drives me that is something that i've i feel like has been a constant in
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everything i've done since i've been about 25 years old that moment when you're you're growing up and you've
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you've parted ways with your siblings seems to be one of the first seeds that led to
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the success of your later businesses because it was i mean in hindsight i guess we all do this but
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you i guess it highlighted the importance of connection and community as you said when was the next seed planted because i
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kind of think about that with like great business ideas and i saw that in your story that there's these moments these key moments which introduce you to
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like the idea of community and then to the idea of sport and competition when was the next chronological seed
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um yeah so coming out of that um like high school feeling like i know
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[Music] i've i've got some amount of intellect i don't really understand like what if i'm gonna use it
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um i don't feel like i was that you know call it like high school wasn't where i peaked i don't think anyone should peak
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by the way in high school like that's a lousy time to be at your like the pinnacle of your life you want to peak
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later than that so getting into harvard going to a good school that that seemed like that would be it but it wasn't that
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wasn't it for me it was actually walking into the boathouse never having rode before and finding this group of people who also were
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trying to figure out where what's this where is their place at this institution that
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in some ways it's like well you got into there so is aren't you kind of done it's like actually no now you're
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you're scared because you don't know if you measure up you don't under have any understanding of where you stand will you make it there
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but finding that going into the boathouse you're like hard work and what is this boot house this is the house
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yeah for the rowing team it wasn't that i went in there thinking i'm gonna i'm gonna conquer this i'm
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gonna be uh one of the best rowers that this school has seen when i went in there but within a few
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weeks i was like that was my goal i was going to be the best like that was somehow it wasn't there wasn't anything
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else except he just turned on inside me and i was i was hooked by that that experience
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because i found my place i think that was the key is i'd found a group of people i'd found this vibe this energy it was
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the part of the day i looked forward to was the part i felt so good about the rest of my life because i was there
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in that experience i was motivated by the desire to be as
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good as i can possibly be at this thing and i don't think i'd experienced that feeling before in my life
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i was really compelled by the use of the word best it made me start thinking about the idea of competition and
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um i think i sat here a couple of days ago with simon sinek talking about this like the role that competition and wanting to be number one plays is it
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toxic is it uh a healthy motivator because i'm filled with that anyway we went bowling
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last night with the team i was very quiet until i knew that i was gonna win
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you know what i mean i'm a deeply competitive person it motivates me it drives me and i've wondered if that's a deficiency of my character or if it's a
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healthy thing what have you learned about that yeah i think it can lead to
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challenges both at the personal level and then you know in a in a group what i found at the in the crew team was that
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we couldn't be the best team if each of us individually wasn't trying to be the best but we always knew that you don't
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win a boat a boat race by yourself you win it with um seven other rowers and a coxswain
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you have to think like a team but you have to think like like an individual who wants to be the best at what you can be
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another way to think about it is like if you want to be as good as you possibly can be you have to strive to be the best
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um but can you be okay also with not actually achieving the goal of being
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the top of everybody but being as good as you know you got reached that point of you you could not have given more
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that's what you're that's where i get the satisfactions i know at the end of that race you know i'm thinking of the race of my freshman year
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where we won the championship and we came from you know a boat length back we had lost to that team in a previous race
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and that feeling that went through my body and i believe everyone's body in that boat halfway through the race we
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said we're not giving up and we just rode them down and at the end of that it wasn't like like i'm the
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best it was like we did something that we didn't think was possible we created a new capacity
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and so then all of a sudden you know maybe some spaces opened up with what you thought you were capable of and what you could be and you you try it you go
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back at it again you you train again for for reaching that point where you said you did everything you possibly could
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and win or lose that's the feeling you're looking for i think when you when it's positive in your life and
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i've been in those places where it can be really destructive too um it changes your relationships with other people
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you start to actually hate the thing you're doing because you're striving for the wrong
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you're striving for some outcome that maybe is not the right outcome um what experience are you talking about training for races where you're by the
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time you're on the starting line you just don't even want to do it anymore that was often the feeling i had by the time
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you know a uh a big race came around where i was just like i'm so done with this i just want to
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just not not be not be here right now um these things should be additive to
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your life it should be something that you that makes you better in other ways besides just stronger physically probably a sign that
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you just you have lost the reason why you're doing it the why behind the work
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when i was reading about strava's work values i read about this
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abc's thing and the b in that was about balance which is what you're talking about there
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is that in part why you put the b there in terms of the the culture and the the office and the
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professional culture you're trying to create with strava is that why the b is so important there balance balance is elusive and the counterpoint
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we have another one of the c's is commitment so i talk about that a lot that
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these things seem like they're at odds with each other if you have balance how can you also be 100 committed to the
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goal of building the best company we can build doing the most we can do for our athlete community
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and i say yes that is the struggle in life is to both have
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balance and be committed to something it's incredibly challenging and to hold both concepts in your in your
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heart and in your head is is the work that is actually why they're there they're there to remind us
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um if we only have one balance we won't we won't do as much we won't we won't
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strive for as much as we can be if we only have commitment we will burn out we will we will get to that place where we
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don't love the work we do anymore and we will question why we're here so it's by putting them together that
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that my co-founder and i felt we had the best chance at achieving that long-term commitment with balance and it's a
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struggle it is you're not there's no recipe here there's no you know playbook that tells you how to do it um and each
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person does have to work at it on their own on their own is it their responsibility to to work work at it i i
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sometimes struggle with this as an employer which is what role do i play in because i know the role i play in
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driving commitment right it's very obvious you set ambitious goals you set tight timelines
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you create a good prize and a worthwhile you know carrot at the end of accomplishing the goal that drives
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commitment if you have the right people and you have camaraderie and all those things that you said but then in terms
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of telling people to encouraging them to have balance in their life
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what role can i play as an employer what role do you think you should play um
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if you hire people who respond really well to those those motivators that that lead to their
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commitment um i think you also have to look at it from how long do you want them to be
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there to do the work to be working at that level and i think you can structure teams in different ways you can you can roll
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through you know people in the sense of that they may only contribute for a couple of years or a
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year and and that's that's if that's the structure and many companies in silicon valley
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operate this way which is two years that the on the team is is a pretty standard
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length and then you move on uh and you recommit somewhere else
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we are trying to build something different at strava we're trying to build the 100 year brand the company that will
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last longer than i will be there it will still be here after many of the people who have been
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investors in the company have exited the company it's it is uh something that we hope will
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withstand the test of time and in that setting i think it's much more important to think about these you need some people
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who are going to be there for much longer than that one or two years that's where balance comes in yes it's
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easy to say you don't want people to burn out but if it's only that you don't want them to get that tired that sick of their job
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that their quote unquote burned out you've probably lost some level of productivity for quite a while before
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that so we strive for a different kind of relationship with
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our team uh it is a challenge also as a leader to make sure we're still performance
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oriented we we still want that that sense that we have we have to bring our a-game we cannot be satisfied with
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past success or be complacent there's plenty of competition out there all sorts of new
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uh new technologies that are coming uh into the into the four today new ways
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of uh building communities new ways of motivating people we have to stay competitive and so that is my job as a
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leader i have a leadership team that helps me with this it's not just my job but it is it is ensuring that we are taking
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care of our people but also expecting that they're going to climb the mountain with us the way that you're building that
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company and what you're aiming to to do to create a a long-term
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long-withstanding business goes against the narrative especially in silicon valley
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where the objective is to like raise money before you're profitable sell the thing or go public and move on
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to the next thing clearly there's experience behind your desire to pursue a longer term strategy
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where you're not just you know investing all your money in user growth getting a gazillion users and then
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exiting i suspect it's because of your other business the one that came before strava
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am i right and if so why did that teach you that this longer term approach to
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company building is a better path forward for you as the founder and for other things
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when we started strava we were looking back at the previous company we had started and we started talking about
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um creating what is now strava back in 2006
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we got together uh starting on the phone weekly talking about ideas that we if we're going to
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start a company what would it be eventually we got mark and i my co-founder mark gainey and i uh decided
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we had to get together for a few days the summer of 2006 and we defined at its core that what we
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had experienced in that other company khana software back in in the late 90s it was the silicon valley olympics
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that's the way a term that you you you have an idea you raise some capital you're at you're off to the races and
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either you have taken a public or sold it in four years or it's you know and that's the gold medal
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or go home because it's that's it um we didn't want to do that again and a few
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reasons why um it wasn't terribly satisfying at the end of the day we
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kana was a wild ride during a wild time in the first internet boom um
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a lot of people made a lot of money a lot of people lost a lot of money um and so
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what in it would we look back on and say besides the experience itself and what we learned
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what would it be that we would say to our kids or grandkids like here this is something we're really
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proud that we created we can't even lay claim to having created if we're only there for four years and then other
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people take it forward is it really ours um so we were out on the doorstep you know
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literally almost four years to the day after starting kana how and why well personal choice in my
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case i wanted to go back to teaching i was i came from academia i was teaching economics when we started kana i wanted
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to go back to academia mark the company got to a point where he brought in another ceo to run it um and
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he found that it wasn't his company anymore he didn't have the role that he thought he would have on the other side of that decision
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so i don't speak for him but it was like this sense of like it was a personal choice for both of us but at the same
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time we look back on it and say where it goes next is not
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not part of us we have to forge a different path there's got to be an idea that's worth that much of our investment
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and perhaps it's that sense of at that point in our lives where we were then late 30s early 40s when we're starting
00:17:13
strava we were thinking about this could be it this is it's not like we're we're going
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to have that many good ideas in our life we're not we're not going to have another opportunity and
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to to build this kind of a company at least um and so let's make it worth it and
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let's let's find something that we're extremely passionate about and we used to say things like it
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doesn't have to be big it has to be great it has to have me give meaning to the people who are our customers and we
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define that as like we want to we want to help people live a more more a
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life of more full of meaning adventure and fun we didn't say activity we weren't yet sure what it was going to do
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but it had to have some impact it can't just be transactional it has to have an effect on you at the at the core
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level of what you value what decisions you make on a daily basis and that's where i think
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we got our we got to strava and i love to go to like the idea behind strava was a
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20th century idea we had that idea coming out of the boathouse when we graduated from college we had the idea
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that we what we experienced there is something that is applicable in so many places in our
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lives being connected to other people through sport is what motivates you to lead a more
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active life and makes you a better human being it helps you live a healthier life and makes all the rest of your life
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better it did that for us when we were in our 20s and that's the universal part that we wanted to tap into when we were starting
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to create what became strava was that it's the context of the people around you that keeps you motivated it's the
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it's the way in which you're connected through sport to other people that unites you um and so we started to explore that
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space and um when you explore and are willing to talk to people about your ideas
00:19:03
they respond they tell you ideas that they've had that sound pretty close to what you're doing even if
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they're not sure that it's really relevant and so those conversations in the early days 2008
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led to us actually putting a team behind this to build a prototype
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and and that eventually became the earliest version of strava in 2009. so it was really just a set of
00:19:27
conversations that led to what we actually decided on but it came from something we had experienced in
00:19:34
in um in college back in in the in the late 80s and 90s a 20th century
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idea when i think about how you formulated strava and that early process it's like exactly what i tell an entrepreneur not
00:19:46
to do in the in the respective um a lot of time entrepreneurs
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you see that they actually just want to be an entrepreneur so they think it oh gosh what shall i do
00:19:57
and they look around for a problem to solve one that isn't in line with any of their intrinsic like passions and innate
00:20:03
motivations so the minute they encounter some difficulty the first hurdle in business which is inevitable they then
00:20:09
fold and they give up because why would you pursue karen doing something that you weren't genuinely um in love with and i guess you know i
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guess the process is the thing that i wouldn't i've never would advise someone to kind of like
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sit down with your mate and think of a business but i guess the process also led you just closer towards what did
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innately matter to you which was adventure activity community even though you did it the other way
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around does that make sense yeah well so uh i guess i'm drawn to tell this like how
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we've originally conceived of what became what is now strava was
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in 1994-95 when i'm a professor at stanford
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teaching economics mark is working in venture capital in palo alto and there's this thing called the
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internet uh that has just become like a household word uh before i got to stanford
00:21:05
i think i had sent one email in my life i had never i didn't know what the
00:21:11
internet was i had no idea when i got to the department of economics the the
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person who managed all the i.t equipment said i'm going to install a browser on your computer i had no idea what he was
00:21:22
talking about what's a browser so had lived up to that point without the internet and the internet is introduced
00:21:28
it's a different thing than today with you know kids growing up with all this around them but when it was introduced what mark and
00:21:34
i did was exactly that entrepreneur that instinct is like what is this new thing going to do what
00:21:40
problem can it solve what's the what's the you know and mark wanted to start a company i was a professor i was going to be his sounding board he came to my
00:21:46
office because i had an internet connection and he didn't you know so what we we cooked up was like well what
00:21:52
are the problems in our own life that we would want to solve with this new technology as a starting point because we didn't know what else where else to
00:21:58
start right so we we went through a bunch of you know different ideas of the thing that we hung on to was like we missed the
00:22:05
crew team we missed that the bunch of people who were you know from all different walks of life and
00:22:10
they found their the same thing that we were passionate about and we spent a ton of time with them we were
00:22:16
with them hours every day and we missed that feeling of being connected to them we missed the
00:22:21
boathouse we missed the feeling of competition could we recreate that with this new technology called the internet
00:22:28
could we create the virtual locker room and so what we were describing to ourselves was what you see in strava
00:22:35
today is like a place where you could see other people's workouts you could see you could talk about you track your performance over time a
00:22:41
training log all that was we sketched that out we wrote a business plan this is 1995 right so
00:22:47
we we're we're not anywhere close to the stat the founding of strava but in any means we actually went out and
00:22:53
talked about this idea with companies that were building websites and that's that was the earliest
00:22:59
internet companies were the ones that were building the websites that other companies would then
00:23:04
use to become internet companies right so um and they told us this is a lousy idea you know like
00:23:11
come on guys can't you do better than this this is never going to work people are not going to share personal information about themselves with
00:23:17
strangers on the internet that's never going to happen let's see there's no technology that's gonna make it easy to get the data in uh
00:23:24
people are gonna be having to fill out forms and submit them online that's gonna be really really full of friction
00:23:30
you should you should just put this away don't don't don't tell anyone about this idea it's such a bad idea right and they
00:23:36
turned us on to the idea that became kana software which was something so mundane boring
00:23:41
built a great company but it was build systems to help these internet companies respond to consumer
00:23:49
inbound consumer email customer support email so we did that we got
00:23:54
turned under that idea why did we pursue that we weren't passionate about it we became passionate about it especially
00:23:59
mark you know we just wanted to be entrepreneurs we wanted to to seize the moment of this new technology this new
00:24:06
world of the internet we wanted to create something we were motivated by the idea that anyone can do this that's
00:24:13
the way it felt and we tabled the thing we were really passionate about because some people told us it was a bad idea
00:24:19
and i thanked them for it because it probably was a bad idea at the time it would have failed right
00:24:24
but where we were in 2007 2008 that idea was still in our back of our
00:24:30
minds that idea came to the front that's what we went and said now what has changed well a lot has changed right
00:24:36
right so you have facebook showing us that people are actually willing to share
00:24:42
with people that they trust on the internet you and before that that i'm sure facebook wasn't the first to prove that
00:24:47
out but facebook was the first to prove out that you can build community with the internet at least in our world
00:24:53
then you have gps as in the things that's in our pocket all of a sudden this mobile phone has got a gps chip in
00:24:58
it around to that around that time frame and it's okay it's not great and so we're like all those reasons why
00:25:05
we shouldn't have started that company are now reasons why we should start that company and it matches the things we talked
00:25:11
about in that time in veil could we build something that people would use every day would they tell their friends
00:25:17
about it would it help them get out and live a more a life of more adventure would they would it be trusted would it be a
00:25:23
trusted brand and we're like hey wait a minute the universe is putting this in right in front of us this is all coming together
00:25:31
and why not why not this and in some ways we denied that it could be that easy that this
00:25:37
idea we had had so many you know more than a decade earlier could be the thing that we're
00:25:42
now going to go and start a company we had denied that for a while and tried these other things first we explored
00:25:48
other places in the very very much the way that you would say the way entrepreneurs should do it
00:25:54
and we said no we got to do this this is the thing we and we didn't and then it says you know you you meet some people
00:26:00
you talk to about about your idea with some people and you see this has got some legs this other people
00:26:05
have had similar thoughts and you can get them on board uh the person we met dave davis kitchell
00:26:12
instrumental in how we got this company started um he happened to be living in the same small town i was living in
00:26:18
he was trying to work out technology to use gps to compare the time it took him to climb
00:26:24
on his bicycle up a road by his house he was just exploring this because he was curious
00:26:31
and we thought oh that's interesting i wonder if i wonder if that could be somehow the basis of what you could do in this
00:26:37
virtual locker room that we were building and that became strava segments that was the earliest
00:26:43
first conversation about something that became a fundamental part of what strava is today that would never have happened if we
00:26:49
hadn't just opened up and said we're trying to build something that will help people live a more active life
00:26:54
and then davey says well i'm working on something that helps me that might help motivate me to be more active i wonder
00:27:00
if it could be relevant to you um and he's still part of the team today and strava segments is
00:27:06
is a big part of what people know about strava what have you learned then from all
00:27:11
these people who are changing their lives and exercising on strava about
00:27:16
what motivates us to go from a place of being sat on the sofa as i was in 2020
00:27:22
in march as that first lockdown rolled in to downloading strava and then um going on
00:27:29
a fitness journey there's something weird that happened to me which i've never really understood if i look at the person i was before that date i was a
00:27:36
repeat failure at fitness like every year this is going to be the year everyone knows the story like no this year is going to be the year then
00:27:42
crashed out that no this year is going to be the year and then i think i know what's changed but is there data to prove
00:27:49
or to suggest what it is that makes people finally get the bug
00:27:54
the fitness health bug yeah great question um
00:28:01
what we see is that people who you do have to catch on and find
00:28:06
something that keeps you in strava but the thing that happens to you when you use when you're when you're part of the
00:28:13
community when you're when you stay with it is you become more regular you become become more it's more
00:28:19
frequent that you are active you may not get faster you might but that's not actually what we see
00:28:26
you're just more regularly active consistent even more consistent and so what is
00:28:32
what is also true is that if you're more connected to other people and doesn't have to be a lot of people i think most
00:28:39
the majority of it is you have to be connected to people you actually care about on strava that motivate you to be
00:28:44
more more consistent and so we say people keep people active people motivate people to be active
00:28:51
and you may not realize it but your journey motivated somebody else too
00:28:56
your activities were the source of motivation for someone else and they were more active and they added their activities and that was the motivation
00:29:03
for someone else so this has a way of exponentially
00:29:08
increasing people's motivation and i believe we can
00:29:13
change over time over the next many years we can help people follow the same
00:29:19
journey you took more and more regularly so we may have started in a place which was
00:29:26
more about the performance aspects of being active how can you get faster
00:29:31
but we quickly realized it's about it's about consistency it's about the experience and that's i
00:29:37
think where we keep people you may come for the competition you stay you stay for the community you may come
00:29:43
for wanting to track your workout but you stay because of the people you you meet and how they motivate you and how
00:29:48
it feels am i missing anything then from my because i'm because i'm just personally
00:29:53
very interested in this the competition the community i guess striving towards a
00:29:59
goal or a metric sometimes for people it's improving my running time or something um
00:30:05
i guess there's a sense that might be linked to the sense of like accomplishment of winning a badge or a
00:30:10
reward or a little bing you know when i'm on my peloton or when i'm on start you little something
00:30:16
is there anything else that you you've seen as a significant motivator for people to be engaged with their fitness journey well it's got to make them feel
00:30:24
better yeah i definitely think there's and we don't i would say we don't necessarily attract that very well today how do you
00:30:30
actually feel about yourself now versus a month ago or two months ago we talk a lot about your physiological performance
00:30:36
we can show you you're better um lower heart rate lower resting heart rate you your your fitness score has
00:30:43
gone up um all sorts of ways in which we can show progress physiologically but i'm more interested in joy i mean that's
00:30:49
that's where we're not good yet at measuring the meaning and joy we bring to people's lives we'll get there and i think but
00:30:56
that's a very important part of the equation is that you feel better and you want to keep feeling that good
00:31:02
so if i also look back on where we thought we were starting was
00:31:08
we were building something that had to be good enough for the best athletes in the world to use because we believe they
00:31:13
could motivate people who were not as committed to
00:31:19
active life to come on board i actually don't think that that's that is motivating but i think
00:31:25
the other stories are even more motivating stories like yours like you've dramatically changed how you live
00:31:31
your life you put activity at the center and that's incred incredibly motivating
00:31:36
for people that they can see that that's possible so i believe it's increased storytelling
00:31:41
is really the key yeah i think that's that's so being you know the idea of the gamification yeah we did
00:31:47
that but where we're leaning more much more heavily now is telling allowing
00:31:53
the people in our community to tell their story and not just of today i went out for
00:31:58
this run yeah that's part of a story but what does this amount to over time how do i accomplish my goals what are the
00:32:03
things i'm striving for how do i feel when i get there and maybe that's where we can start measuring the joy a bit bit more
00:32:09
precisely quick one we bring in eight people a month to watch these conversations live
00:32:15
here in the studio when we're here in the uk and when we're in la if you want to be one of those people all you've got to do is hit subscribe
00:32:23
i was thinking one of my hypotheses which i've shared many times but i feel compelled to ask you is that my goals were bad my goals were
00:32:30
like they they were goals and it's funny because it kind of goes back to your first company there were goals that
00:32:35
could be completed they were short-term goals this is when i crashed out and failed all the time they were like surface level superficial get a six-pack
00:32:42
four summer goals and it wasn't until i i mean simon sinek said where you are in a couple of
00:32:48
days ago one of the things he talks a lot about is infinite games right until i started setting goals that were
00:32:53
more infinite like you've done with strava in trying to create a long-standing company and those goals ended up just being about consistency it
00:33:00
was like go to the gym today something i could never accomplish that was one of the turning points the other was the pandemic which is i think it was which
00:33:07
was a i mean i mean i know you saw a boost in customer position i mean that's when i joined and i i knew the numbers
00:33:13
but um i think in part it was realizing that health was fragile seeing that for the first time in my
00:33:18
young life that health was the foundation of everything i was doing i actually want to ask you a question about the pandemic because you were
00:33:24
talking earlier on about how at the boathouse you learned that community and connection and these things are so
00:33:31
unbelievably important one of the things the pandemic has robbed us of is community and connection it's put us behind screens so i was compelled to ask
00:33:37
you like what's strava's take on this remote working thing right you're cool you're about community and connection
00:33:43
and you know that more than anyone yeah it's been it's been hard for us to find our way back to how it felt to work together
00:33:51
we were camaraderie is one of our other seas um commitment craftsmanship and camaraderie
00:33:58
so camaraderie was important in the it showed up in a lot of ways we had
00:34:03
a wednesday workout at lunchtime we'd go out for runs or there was a group that walked there was a group that
00:34:09
met some mornings to go for a ride so the camaraderie in sport yes there was
00:34:14
camaraderie in we spent a lot of time working together and building those relationships it it
00:34:20
felt like a team inside the company and th that was really difficult to replicate um virtually
00:34:27
um but something else has happened uh as a result of pandemic
00:34:32
that i think is a real beautiful outcome that will lead us back to camaraderie of a very different kind
00:34:38
we stopped putting location as a requirement on any job openings so we hired we've more than doubled the
00:34:45
team over the course of the last year and a half and have added people across the united
00:34:50
states in many different countries as well because if you're if you have the talent and we're looking for it
00:34:57
you don't have to be in san francisco or denver which were the two main offices we had or bristol uk
00:35:03
we've now opened an office in dublin so we will have physical locations but we have a
00:35:08
over 150 people today who don't have any one of our office locations as
00:35:14
their home city and the beautiful thing in that is these people all have incredible talent
00:35:20
yes they they were the best people that we could have possibly attracted for the position but they have such different lived
00:35:26
experiences they bring that to the work they do so we're learning a ton about what
00:35:32
camarader where it really comes from you maybe the thing we were creating
00:35:37
was in the old uh in the pre-pandemic times was a camaraderie that was built around
00:35:43
a very limited set of rituals like going for that wednesday workout
00:35:49
it turns out that a lot of people felt excluded by that because they weren't fat they didn't feel fast enough to go
00:35:55
with the crew that was going out for a run we have to find our ways to replicate or create something that is is
00:36:02
like that today but what we have is a much broader set of stories that people can bring and
00:36:08
tell about what they did before they join strava what they're experiencing here they're coming from all sorts of
00:36:13
different locations uh so that's that's an aspect of what camaraderie can we feel when we got together in san diego in person for a
00:36:20
week at the beginning of march what came out was how much we already appreciate each
00:36:26
other even if we've never been together we've nev most of us had never met in person but we we already felt like we knew each
00:36:33
other and we didn't start with the awkward hello i'm so and so it was hugs right
00:36:38
away it was this sense of this this is the team that now is in the same place and i want to carry that forward i want
00:36:45
i want that to be like we put coins in the bank that'll get us for the next six months or a year
00:36:51
to the next time we get together but we can we can create that sense of camaraderie even if we're not sitting in
00:36:56
the same office building or the same room uh so that was a that was eye-opening for me that that that was possible
00:37:03
because of pandemic that we could create this very distributed interesting
00:37:09
diverse workforce team that felt everyone felt for the most
00:37:14
part felt a sense of belonging what role does that play the in person stuff because i because we all here
00:37:21
yeah i mean think it's of my my personal team here in this in this uh studio what role does that play though
00:37:26
and what value does that add because i don't know i think i i think i have a real bias towards being with people and maybe it's i don't
00:37:33
know what it is maybe i don't know i don't know what it is but i like being with people and i really struggle on
00:37:38
zoom i don't feel like it's real yeah me too no it's so
00:37:44
i think what i what it's what is possible is you can be with people but you don't
00:37:51
have to be with them all the time that you can find the the combination of
00:37:57
um my colleague brian who's here with me today he lives in dallas uh in the uh in
00:38:02
uh in the dallas area and we have
00:38:08
we we looked at the calendar it turns out we've actually gotten together in person now i think you know four out of the last five weeks because
00:38:15
business need brought us together yet we've also spent time working in a virtual setting
00:38:21
so it's i call that putting the coins in the bank we have enough opportunity to see each other
00:38:26
in person to get that feeling that we can be more effective when we have to work virtually together
00:38:33
and i think we replicate that that's the model i think that we we can get to it if we only worked with people who are
00:38:39
geographically proximate we're losing that opportunity to work with people with a completely different set of experiences that they
00:38:46
can bring to what we're trying to build we're trying to serve athletes everywhere there are
00:38:51
i think easily over a billion people who wake up every day wanting to be active and we want to meet them all
00:38:57
they're in every part of the world and so that incredible diversity of the customer that we want to serve
00:39:03
it just moves us that we need to build a team that tries to match that diversity and the people on the team
00:39:08
and so if we're not there anywhere you know we most of our team is still in the us like as in terms of
00:39:14
the geographic bias we have today but i think that it's not possible to build that kind of a company that kind
00:39:20
of a team if you're if you require everyone to be in the same location all the time so we give some little on the
00:39:25
location and we get a lot back in terms of what people can bring the different experiences they can bring to us so i
00:39:31
guess the conclusive question here is like what role does the corporations or do you feel you play
00:39:37
in adding you give community to your customers but what role do you feel you play in giving that in like that in
00:39:42
person community outside of your home out in the wild
00:39:47
to your employees yeah we we pay a lot of attention to it i think it's
00:39:52
important for people to do their best work that they feel a sense of belonging and i don't think this is just that strava i
00:39:58
think it's true in a lot of places and sometimes that that is so much easier to do when you're in person and you're
00:40:04
providing the breakfast and the the the desk and that's that that place that this is a i
00:40:10
can feel productive in this space and yes the colleagues around me are people with you know incredible talent and like
00:40:16
i'm energized by the by the by the by the group by the the setting that i'm in
00:40:21
um and i think for many of our team they really miss that um
00:40:26
during the pandemic they would love it back to come back but it's really difficult to bring it back
00:40:31
right now it's it's going to take us time to work our way back why
00:40:37
there are two reasons i see and i i've thought a lot about this in the sense of justin strava's example one is we have
00:40:43
programmed our lives to be remote reprogrammed our lives to be remote and
00:40:49
so we are stuck in patterns that are really difficult to get out of just like in the beginning of pandemic it was really difficult to get into that
00:40:54
pattern we were forced to we're not forced to get out of it now strava's not forcing people back into the office so
00:41:01
it's difficult with everything from how you organize your your day maybe you have
00:41:06
children or other dependents at home you have to take care of you have pets you have um
00:41:13
you have worked worked out a routine that works really well for working from home and so getting people back into the
00:41:18
office is getting over those those hurdles and frictions and so what do we do we make it more enticing um
00:41:25
wednesdays we offer lunch um we are trying to organize wednesday as the day if you're going to pick one day
00:41:31
a week maybe one day a month make it a wednesday get people oh this wasn't so bad i got over the friction that one day
00:41:36
maybe i'll do it again that's just that's like the mundane reason why it's why it's hard the second reason i think
00:41:43
is more fundamental is like it is really difficult to be halfway halfway back to work
00:41:50
coordination of either being all remote or all in the office is a lot easier
00:41:56
and we're not ready to go all in the office we'll lose people on our team we don't want to lose that's that's like maybe a
00:42:02
too much of a calculating way to think about it it's more like that i don't think we'll get the best work out of the people who we forced to
00:42:08
come back in and they stay on the team um and that just may that that is what will take more time and more of a sense
00:42:14
of a sense of security that this is going to be a good experience i'm not going to number one
00:42:20
just my health is not going to suffer the health of the people i love around me won't suffer so we're not there yet
00:42:26
maybe in terms of from a medical or scientific basis yet but i think it's more important it
00:42:32
doesn't really matter what the sign says if what you feel is i don't feel secure and safe when i go to the office that's
00:42:37
what i i think is going to be much harder to overcome and that's the part where coordination just makes it really difficult to
00:42:43
replicate if you don't have everyone to say yeah i'm i work from the office or during working from home
00:42:49
you lose you lose all those things are true and we we lot we had that great sense of disconnection
00:42:55
uh the days of endless video meetings and um
00:43:01
trying to do whatever you could to get that sense of energy you get by being around another human being um
00:43:07
it was a struggle did you find in that in that period you lost employees so
00:43:13
from my perspective with my company we had about 700 people around the world one of our big usps as we thought was
00:43:18
community you know that's what we that's one of our the reasons why you'd come and work at our company social chain was
00:43:23
community the culture in the office and all of those things we offered flexibility so people generally decided
00:43:28
what days they worked etc but the minute the pandemic rolled in and everyone had to stay at home in their boxer shorts in
00:43:34
their one bed studio apartment it felt like people then started to make the decision about where they wanted to work
00:43:40
based on well if i'm going to be in my box of shorts looking at the screen anyway i might as well get paid more to do it
00:43:47
and we we saw a little it was the first time in our history where we saw people just leaving for and we asked why
00:43:53
they're leaving the girl more money before then it didn't matter and i was wondering and this is part of the reason why i think i have a real
00:44:00
bias towards the office can kind of be like open about what i do in my companies is
00:44:06
at the moment we actually had a group session the other day where people said we talked about the days but the moment there's two days a week where
00:44:13
we we all want to come we come in right and in between that like whatever and if
00:44:18
you can't make money like the days then because you've got something going on fine but that's when we all try and
00:44:24
really be the present because we want that synchronous collaborative all that wonderful stuff
00:44:30
and taking a hard line on it i'll be honest i think has helped i speak to so many founders and
00:44:37
companies who are trapped in this limbo of can't force them back trying to insert trying to make the
00:44:42
office a nicer place but people aren't coming back and i i actually i don't know if i'm gonna get cancelled for this
00:44:47
but i think that um there's risk in not setting a hard line and having clarity and saying listen if you don't want to
00:44:53
work here there's other places to work but here's how we do it and we're choosing to do this not this
00:44:58
way not because the ceo is an egotist and wants to control people but when we reverse engineer our objective as a
00:45:04
company back from whatever it is we believe that the best way to achieve our goal as a team and that's what we are is
00:45:11
by having moments where we're together as well and so that's my stance in it not popular all the time no i but i agree
00:45:17
with you that it it provides clarity for people they don't have to make a choice they're it they may be unhappy with the
00:45:24
decision but they say at least it removes my requirement that i have to think about it and decide each
00:45:30
time on my own is this the day go in or other people doing it too you have coordinated people for
00:45:35
you've done the work of coordinating them and i think that's the way we used to operate we used to have
00:45:41
no we don't work from home we work at the office that's that's our policy only under rare situations would we say
00:45:47
that it that's okay to work from home um so what at least what the path we've taken
00:45:54
right now is to try the carrot approach before we you know move to something else and i don't want to say what you're
00:45:59
doing is a stick but it's it's that right now uh it's by degrees and maybe this is the difference
00:46:05
between the uk right you know versus the u.s differences it and maybe san francisco is even
00:46:11
particularly this way we did not lose people during the start of the pandemic a lot
00:46:17
of different reasons we instead what we saw was people a lot of people moved away from san francisco because we said you can oh yeah of
00:46:24
course and so i think we may have saved ourselves from from a lot of uh
00:46:29
you know departures by giving people that escape another way
00:46:34
um it sounds like you already had a distributed workforce you couldn't tell them they could go go to other places they already were other places right
00:46:40
yeah they were yeah yeah so that wouldn't wasn't really the thing um and we haven't said now come on back
00:46:47
to san francisco yet i also need to point out another difference which i just realized from what you said about the difference of the cultural differences in san francisco there's
00:46:54
a precedence is that the word across every all the tech companies are doing it following a very similar line
00:47:02
whereas in the uk it's not like that so when i think about the companies working in san francisco especially in
00:47:07
tech whether it's the big ones like twitter or whatever they've all kind of adopted the same approach so if you're the only one not adopting that approach
00:47:13
i guess that's a bit of an existent a bit of a risk to losing people i think there's just going to be a sorting i i agree with you
00:47:19
that in the start you kind of like you followed the lead of the bigger pl we did at least we saw what they were doing
00:47:24
and we followed the lead of the the bigger players thinking that's teaching us um what we need to do as well i think
00:47:31
there'll be a sorting here it's going to take another year or two but there will be companies that say we're all about hybrid work
00:47:37
and they'll be coming to say we're all about office work and employees then will say i get to sort based on which
00:47:42
one is the way i want to so actually that will be a really healthy outcome i think a lot of companies that would
00:47:48
never have tried the hybrid approach or enabled remote work are now happy they did like we are we're
00:47:54
happy we have this much more you know geographically distributed workforce
00:47:59
that's bringing us incredible talent with a lot of different experience uh behind that
00:48:04
and then on the other side i not sure you know where this is going to
00:48:10
go for some of the companies that are ins like right now we're saying you all have to come back into the
00:48:15
office they the just the loose number of conversations i've had with with other ceos says you
00:48:22
lose about 20 of the people if you do that and you're not really sure which of the 20 because it's really difficult to
00:48:27
know until you you make people decide um but they're going to be okay i mean
00:48:34
they'll find other people who then say yeah i really want to work at a place where everyone comes to the office and that's what i want to
00:48:39
um and so that's the sorting that will happen here in the next few years but you know these things take time that's
00:48:45
the thing in time you know we don't have a lot of i mean yeah i mean we're trying to build a long-lasting company but we want to have
00:48:53
we don't want this to be the thing that gets in the way of us progressing as a company so we are
00:48:58
balancing that too is there not a middle ground where you say like these two days a week the team
00:49:04
comes to the is that a middle ground and you're just very clear on that yeah i think that is
00:49:10
a really good next step uh if we're not achieving that sense of coordination
00:49:16
with giving people a choice but encouraging them to say with incentives like lunch or or events
00:49:23
or uh the presence of the senior leadership will be there on these certain days there needs to be a point there needs to be a point where you say
00:49:28
okay it's not working we're going to try to try another way i had a few words to say about one of my sponsors on this podcast as the seasons
00:49:34
have begun to change so has my diet and um right now i'm going to be completely honest with you i'm starting to think a
00:49:40
lot about slimming down a little bit because over the last couple of probably the last
00:49:45
four or five months my diet has been pretty bad um and it started to show a little bit really over the last two months i go to the gym about 80 of the
00:49:53
time so i track it with 10 of my friends in a whatsapp group and this tracker online that we all use together
00:49:58
and so one of the things i'm doing now to reduce my calorie intake and trying to get back to being nutritionally complete and all i eat is i'm having the
00:50:06
heel protein shake thank you hill for making a product that i actually like the salted caramel is my favorite i've got the banana one here which is the one
00:50:12
my girlfriend likes but for me salted caramel is the one
00:50:18
what was the hardest moment at the start of the strava growth
00:50:23
that you faced at the start in those opening years yeah we opened like we
00:50:28
created the company got the founding team 2000 beginning of 2009
00:50:35
we were only web-based so you had to you couldn't track your workout with your mobile phone on strava
00:50:42
you used a third-party gps device an example of one
00:50:48
was a garmin 305 cycle computer it was largely cycling only to start with you really we
00:50:55
didn't encourage any other any other sport type but you you had to have you had to pay for that piece of equipment
00:51:00
you had to plug it into your laptop or desktop computer transfer the file and upload it
00:51:07
incredible friction right so we we did not grow fast at all in the beginning it was like so many you had to really want
00:51:12
to try to experience this thing you you and it's not because mobile wasn't a thing you could do
00:51:18
we just didn't do it there were companies that started largely with they did maybe had a
00:51:23
website but they pretty quickly built a mobile app companies like runkeeper
00:51:28
they were one of the first hundred apps in the app store imagine that now there are i don't know millions of apps in the
00:51:33
app store but how are run keep it doing well they got bought i mean that's the a lot of these companies that were we
00:51:39
launched into a pretty crowded space back in 2009 there were at least 10 maybe more companies that were doing
00:51:45
something you would call activity tracking with gps most of them had a mobile app so we did not
00:51:50
run keeper was acquired in i wanna say 2015 2014
00:51:58
by one of the big sports brands map myfitness was acquired by under armour
00:52:04
runtastic was acquired by adidas by the way none of these acquirers ever
00:52:10
came to talk to strava i can't tell you why i would have to you'd have to go i have to go talk to them
00:52:16
maybe we were perceived as we were too niche because we were perceived as only
00:52:21
focusing on more hardcore athletes and not the masses it wasn't true but
00:52:28
in any case what what was true back in 2009 what we had we built you know the wrong
00:52:34
the wrong experience for what ultimately would drive community growth which is it needs to be on your
00:52:40
mobile phone it needs to be you know kind of all on your mobile phone the mobile phone is not just the
00:52:45
tracking device but then you then go to the website to look at have the experience you need to build the experience on mobile
00:52:51
and we were really late to that we were so late um and so by 2012 we finally have a
00:52:57
mobile team that's building an experience so three years after founding two and a half years after founding the company
00:53:03
we are finally in the game if you will how did you know you were wrong we were wrong in the sense that we
00:53:10
weren't seeing the community growth we were we were building an experience that really people was v people once they
00:53:16
got through all those frictions to get started they stuck around they were committed they were they were engaged
00:53:21
they converted to the subscription which is the core of our businesses you can use travel for free as long as you like but the best that we have to offer
00:53:28
um kind of the if you're gonna put something you say you're gonna you're gonna invest in yourself and try to
00:53:34
live a more active life you the subscription really helps you it gives you more ways to stay motivated
00:53:40
more fun more ways to discover what's great around you so the subscription has all these great things and it was there
00:53:45
from from the early days we we didn't wait to launch it we launched it in the end of 2009
00:53:51
so we had a lot of people who were found we had who we had a high conversion rate if if you want we had a
00:53:57
low community size but a high conversion rate so we knew we were on to something and so what taught us we were wrong was
00:54:02
we we actually said okay we better build a mobile app and we built one that basically just tracked
00:54:08
your workout you could record a workout to get it into strava we saw off the charts community growth
00:54:14
in the first week really we were adding prior to the mobile app we were adding maybe 100 new users 100 new athletes a
00:54:21
week we added 10 000 a day on the launch of the of our mobile app we got featured in the app
00:54:27
store that was 100 000 in a day wow why because it's such an easy
00:54:33
entry point you don't have to pay for anything you already have the phone in your pocket you're just downloading um our our app from the app store the
00:54:40
app store is pushing you us out to a community we would never have had the the money to meet from a marketing
00:54:46
perspective there was only one problem we built the wrong there again we learned we built the wrong experience we we thought you
00:54:53
tracked the workout on your mobile phone and then you go to the website to see your results and that's uh people like
00:54:59
people aren't going to do that we so we had to rebuild that that app and that rebuild the experience to be all
00:55:05
completely on mobile but the idea that what can unlock the community growth is the form factor of reducing the
00:55:12
frictions getting meeting people where giving them a chance to onboard into
00:55:18
something without having to go through a lot of hoops jump jump through all the things basic stuff but those those were
00:55:23
like the earliest things that we that we did did prove that we could build something that wasn't highly engaging we just
00:55:29
couldn't get people into the into the experience in the early days until we built the mobile apps
00:55:35
as you're going through that iterative experience to figure out how to scale the business and where the product market fit is
00:55:41
how are you doing in your personal life at that stage on the b the balance
00:55:47
yeah i mean this is where going back to when mark and i were thinking of starting another company
00:55:53
we were saying it's going to be different this time right we're not going to let it consume us we're going to find a way
00:55:58
to keep the b in my personal case that did not last
00:56:04
more than the first year i uh we we thought we were going to build a company i was living in hanover new
00:56:10
hampshire which is this very small community in um about two hours north of boston
00:56:16
in the state of new hampshire it's in the woods um dartmouth college is there and they had a they hired me to teach
00:56:23
entrepreneurship in 2000 and so that's what brought us there my family my wife and four kids
00:56:28
so we arrived when my youngest daughter she's now 20 turning 24 this year she was turning two that year so
00:56:35
you can like we had this very little you know we have four kids in in five years we're very young kids we're gonna raise
00:56:40
them in hanover and i was like we gotta i gotta live in hanover and mark is in in the bay area he's living in california well he's got to live he's
00:56:48
got to live in in portola valley so we're going to build this company on on two coasts and it was going to be you know team in new hampshire and a team in
00:56:54
california and by 2010 it was like that's clearly not going to be the case the to hire the
00:57:02
the talent we need it's probably going to be the team in san francisco that's going to be
00:57:07
the headquarters and so i start flying to san francisco more and more regularly all throughout 2010 instead of going
00:57:14
like once every two months i'm going once a month staying for five days now it's
00:57:19
once every two weeks staying for five days and then it's that's gets more and more frequent so i'm definitely not on the on the be the
00:57:25
balance has gone out the window and this was 2010 through the end almost
00:57:31
to the end of 2013 where i'm i'm ceo of the company we're growing we're growing this community is
00:57:37
now surpassing a million members in the community and we get to
00:57:43
the point where i think we're just shy of 10 million by the time that i'm stepping down and you know what uh it's
00:57:49
a very sad story but my wife was diagnosed with a terminal illness in september of 2013
00:57:55
she had had been diagnosed she had had breast cancer gone through treatment at in 2004 long before we start started
00:58:03
strava and it had come back and it was uh it was you know those those first months we
00:58:10
weren't sure exactly how long she she would have to live the doctors were we got to do a lot of tests and
00:58:16
um i'm i'm still living this dual life between new hampshire and california because she
00:58:23
didn't move to california with me we didn't move the family that was a choice we made to remain in new hampshire
00:58:30
um as the home base for the family and so what ends up happening at the end of 2013 is
00:58:36
i stepped down from running the company mark steps in as the ceo i i'm in a supportive function but i have
00:58:42
a lot of flexibility and i move back to new hampshire and for the next
00:58:48
three and a half years until anna passed away i that was my my priority became
00:58:54
taking care of my family taking doing what i could to to take what time we had left to make it
00:59:01
as meaningful as possible and all sorts of things we can talk about of finding meaning to the to the last day there's there's a lot of
00:59:07
lessons learned there but what i was that's not that's a different kind of
00:59:13
balance i want to be honest it's like not necessarily what i what i expect you
00:59:19
know when we say balance for as a value it it feels like what we do is we pass
00:59:25
through that balance point over and over again in our lives we never quite seize it and hold on to
00:59:30
it and feel like we live in it but it's something we experience we go through over and over again
00:59:36
and we try to return to it and it's the act of trying to return to it that i hold out as like that's what i'm
00:59:43
motivated by by putting balance into the core values of strava by having it be something i focus on in my life
00:59:50
i want to return to it as often as i can even if i won't be able to stay in it all the time so leaving strava that was the that was
00:59:57
definitely not balance moving into caring for my family there were periods
01:00:03
where it came in definitely found a flow and a harmony and a balance but then times where you know just it
01:00:10
completely is out the window and everything is all hands on deck on what's the next treatment we're going to
01:00:16
try to find for for anna where are we going to in one case we had to move
01:00:21
and we chose to move back to move to san francisco so she could be in a clinical trial
01:00:26
of a novel therapy that showed some promise and these are the kinds of examples where balance just didn't
01:00:32
wasn't there either you you had to you had to work at it and then in the balance is where i think you find
01:00:38
the most meaningful moments you said about the passing of your wife anna in that period you were trying to
01:00:44
find meaning to the last day and you've learned a lot about what that is
01:00:49
what is that you have to you have to think of it not
01:00:57
as the goal is to get to something some state of health or physical ability
01:01:03
or mental ability to do something like a dream or a trip you want to take
01:01:09
it's it's the the day that is the day you're you're living in it's take it as it comes
01:01:15
today and having having a living a life where we're all terminal by the way turns out
01:01:21
we're all on our way to some point where we say we're on our last day but what you experience when you're
01:01:29
going through regular measurement of the progress of a disease like that
01:01:34
because that's the way your your the medical treatment is we're monitoring the
01:01:39
disease to know when to change therapy
01:01:44
when to add other drugs that will help handle the side effects of all the therapy
01:01:51
when to say it's time to stop the therapy the meaning can't be
01:01:57
extend my life at some point if that's your goal you will not find meaning in that goal it will be out the
01:02:04
window so you instead you have to find meaning in what can this day bring
01:02:09
it starts by how do i feel today um if you string together a bunch of days
01:02:15
where you feel you've gotten something out of the day that's a meaningful life and you can find that to the very end and
01:02:23
just i learned so much from watching anna progress through that
01:02:28
and uh give give to people around her but also give
01:02:33
to herself she was an artist worked in her studio
01:02:38
to nearly the very last day was working on projects that she knew she would never finish but she was
01:02:45
motivated by what she could experience of working on those pieces of art she
01:02:51
did leave behind like if if this were going to continue here's what i would do with it
01:02:58
my youngest is an artist i know what's motivating her is like she wants to get to some of those
01:03:03
pieces and see if she can bring them to some version of what her mom
01:03:08
had left behind what what she had indicated this could be something like this
01:03:13
i think mira will bring it to something else she'll add her own thing to it but that that was what on a
01:03:20
you know i think she got there struggling against the end is not the way to find the meaning
01:03:27
how has that shifted your because experiences like that i imagine um
01:03:32
teach you other profound things about the point of all of this i know i spent much of my early years thinking the point of all of this was to
01:03:39
buy a lamborghini right and then even the pandemic was one of the catalysts that made me realize there was
01:03:46
as i said earlier this tectonic plate that mattered a little bit more and then it was really interesting to watch um
01:03:52
how i had a rolex at the time i don't have one anymore but my rolex was exchanged for my apple watch and there's
01:03:59
something quite symbolic in that it went from being about signaling status to others to
01:04:04
caring about my health and when i think about
01:04:10
the loss of someone um especially someone young
01:04:15
someone close to you as well what are the what is the priority shift that happens you know i'm presuming there is one but
01:04:21
is there a priority shift that happens a different perspective on what matters that maybe an entrepreneur like me needs
01:04:28
to hear i don't i don't know that i knew this
01:04:33
when she was going through her life those last few years or even the few years after she passed away i don't
01:04:40
think i was i was i think i prepared a lot for how to live my life caring for her i wasn't
01:04:46
prepared for how to live my life when she was gone but what i've come to i think is
01:04:53
it's this is again maybe somewhat obvious
01:04:58
is that the relationship you can build with some an individual and in this case my wife the person i we
01:05:06
met where did we meet in your we met in my backyard when i
01:05:11
when i started grad school at northwestern university i rented this coach house which is like
01:05:16
a little carriage house behind a bigger home and i was walking to the front of the house one morning
01:05:23
to get my mail and walking through the backyard and there's this young woman in her pajamas talking to my
01:05:30
landlord and this is anna she's she turns turns out she's a friend of my landlord had babysit sat for her children when she
01:05:37
was going to college at the same school i was getting my phd this is northwestern university in chicago in evanston illinois
01:05:44
so i meet ana and in my backyard and she's not living in evanston she's
01:05:51
living in cincinnati ohio but she she comes back to visit a few months later
01:05:56
and a few months after that we're married and so we start we're we're babies right i'm i
01:06:03
got married the day after i turned 25. i remember she was 23. we were not yet fully formed
01:06:09
human beings right we're but we're now building a life together and
01:06:15
we went through all sorts of highs and lows in our marriage and we had the we have four children and we
01:06:21
we live otherwise like this life we would say we built something together i look back on that
01:06:28
and say like the best thing i've built it's two things my friendship with mark
01:06:34
and my marriage with anna those i hope those are those are the things i look back on
01:06:40
apart from everything else and say at the end when when my day comes
01:06:45
like those were the things where meaning comes from that's where if i go back to what's most important
01:06:51
it's the relationships with the people who are closest to you in your life and then that extends to the people who
01:06:57
are also important but they may not you may not have that same bond so what did i learn
01:07:05
well losing that person is extremely difficult you're left with i was i don't want to speak for everyone
01:07:11
who goes through this but it's there is an aspect of you don't know which way is up anymore you're off
01:07:17
script you're whatever you thought your life was going to be about it is you you're questioning
01:07:22
everything and um in my case i had four children
01:07:28
who were 17 to 22 at a in age at that time
01:07:34
and we pulled together this is i wear this bracelet this is i gave one
01:07:41
to each of my children i they wear it every day we get we this is on the day of anna's funeral
01:07:47
and we pulled together and we helped each other through that darkest darkest moment
01:07:53
and again it's the relationships and it's we we're a normal family we've got our
01:07:59
highs and lows um we got we got dysfunction we got function you know it's we've got it all
01:08:06
but there's something in there that's like we know what we can that we can count on each other we know that with that that is at the core
01:08:12
i want to i want to look at that as like the model for what is possible even inside something like a company
01:08:18
even in something like the strava community that that's happening that people are building relationships
01:08:24
so if strava is like what is it all about it's about motivating people to be active through the relationships they
01:08:30
build with other people and you return to the
01:08:36
company several years after anna passed
01:08:44
that that section between anna passing and your return to the company you you almost referenced being somewhat disorientated in terms of not knowing
01:08:52
were you were you double guessing whether to go back to the company i wasn't thinking of going back um no i
01:08:59
wasn't we had recruited in someone to replace mark as ceo uh so
01:09:06
mark stepped down in may of 2017 so just a few months after anna passed away i wasn't thinking about returning at all
01:09:14
i was you know i was that was
01:09:19
a i knew i had to discover what was next but i wasn't considering that it was going to be returning to strava so what
01:09:26
got me closer was that strava started to need some help um
01:09:32
by 2018 i step in as interim cfo and head of people
01:09:37
um by the middle of 2019 we're looking at a pretty challenging environment for the
01:09:43
company we were um [Music] we were about 100 and 200 people in
01:09:49
terms of team size we were not profitable um and we had to figure out a way to get to
01:09:55
sustainability very quickly we were not able to raise capital at that time given the
01:10:01
state of the business and so we made a decision to make a leadership change
01:10:07
and i
01:10:12
would i recall from the conversations with the board i want to characterize it as like i feel
01:10:18
like i was the least bad of all the bad options because there weren't very many good options at that time we weren't going to be able to recruit someone in
01:10:25
given the state of the company i don't know if i was ready to dive back in this is i'm still really
01:10:33
doubting whether what my place is right now but there was one thing that mark and i were convinced about which was inside
01:10:40
what we had what was there there was a great company we had
01:10:45
at that time 50 million people in the community so 50 million registered athletes
01:10:52
we were not yet profitable but we what we november 2nd 2019 my second day back
01:10:58
leading the company we get up on stage and we say here's here's the path back this is how we're
01:11:03
going to do this we're going to focus nearly 100 of this company on our customer and that's the person who wants
01:11:10
to lead an active life that's the athlete we're going to build this for them
01:11:15
and we're going to we're going to build something so good that they're going to pay for it and that's the subscription
01:11:20
so we focused the company on that goal to build the best subscription service for
01:11:27
the athlete and the team responded they dug in we climbed that mountain
01:11:35
and we did have help with pandemic bringing us a lot more people we doubled during the pandemic from 50 million to i think
01:11:42
we're now we're at 99 million registered athletes so we have we
01:11:47
the uh the team knows i love analogies we had the right sails up when the wind
01:11:53
started to blow we got that tailwind from the pandemic and it accelerated our business
01:11:58
and so now we can imagine a very different outcome as a result uh for this company we were 2019
01:12:06
it was how do we get this back on track now it's how do we make the most of this opportunity
01:12:11
and for me personally i've had to really rethink
01:12:17
everything from what's my purpose what what what motivates me to be the person who can
01:12:22
lead this company and what i'm reconnecting with is this is what we intended all along is that
01:12:27
mark and i create something that we want to stick with and stay with for decades
01:12:34
so finding that path back personally out of the abyss that i was in is tied
01:12:39
integrally to what strava means for that future for me i
01:12:45
you know i don't at all ascribe to the idea that i saved strava but strava saved me
01:12:50
brought me back from something and where we have now what we have to look
01:12:56
forward to what we can be what we can imagine for the future of the company and the community we're building for is
01:13:03
a much much richer experience doing more for athletes all the time investing in
01:13:09
what they're like they'll be able to experience years from now how it will be a part of their active
01:13:15
life for as long as they live because we've built sustainability into the core of the business
01:13:21
yeah so one of the really difficult things in 2019 when you're changing the
01:13:27
fundamental model of a business under the pressure of
01:13:32
a cash crunch as they call it when cash is running out because you're not comfortable and you can't raise
01:13:38
is you've got to let some people go and it sometimes feels like a bit of a
01:13:43
contradiction of values that when you're a family you know you have that kind of family community connection you really care
01:13:50
about the people but then there's got to be a decision at some point to say goodbye to some of them unvoluntarily and
01:13:56
for the greater interest of the company you you had to do that right in 2019
01:14:01
yeah that was november 1st so november 2nd was how we're going to get this company back
01:14:07
to winning again november 1st was we have to let in that time it was a little over i think 32 people go out of
01:14:14
out of the 200 or so that were there so [Music] uh
01:14:20
really tough way for your first day back on the job but what was even harder was that the
01:14:25
deep wound it created in that family that sense of
01:14:31
we didn't think this would happen here how come we didn't know that feeling of
01:14:37
can i trust leadership and they didn't know me i wasn't i wasn't like i was a host i was
01:14:43
not around nearly for for most of the people in the company at that time they weren't hired during the time when i was the ceo the
01:14:49
first time they knew that i was a founder they knew i had been helping out as an interim cfo
01:14:54
but i wasn't really a presence for in in leadership for them
01:15:00
so there was just the basic level of needing to rebuild trust needing to say
01:15:08
not only do we have a plan but you're you're a really important part of the plan and here's how i show
01:15:13
that you can trust me or here's how i want to build a relationship so that over time you will trust me
01:15:19
that period of time in november and december and january i remember i think just the the level of
01:15:27
how much we thought about every word we said was aimed
01:15:33
at the objective of getting people to believe again compared to today
01:15:39
where i think people believe and maybe what we're changing what we focus on now is getting them to
01:15:45
understand what our potential is they believe that we are going to be successful but
01:15:51
i think we today where i focus so much my effort is
01:15:56
making sure people connect with what our what our potential really is and how we're going to get there
01:16:02
whereas in in 2019 it was all about believing we even had one a future
01:16:07
today your the company looks very different from in some respects to the company that you and mark set out to
01:16:13
build there's now hundreds of people when you started out you wanted 20 or 30 in this company you weren't going to do
01:16:18
what you did last time yeah um and we do talk about that it's
01:16:24
like this is very different than what we had imagined you know something that was additive to it's additive in a very different way
01:16:29
but something that where we could by and large not give up so much of
01:16:35
our personal life for the sake of the company that what we're creating
01:16:40
and you know it is consuming and that so what part of that is well this is what
01:16:47
we should have expected if we were going to be successful it's just a given you have to do it this way and what part is it you need to create
01:16:54
the structure so you can maintain that measure of i'm still michael horvath apart from
01:16:59
strava strava is not my 100 of my identity that's something i struggle with
01:17:05
and it's really important because i don't think i'll be as good a leader if my identity is completely wrapped up
01:17:11
in this company i need to have that level of commitment that says i'm
01:17:16
here this is super important to me but i have to be myself i cannot be
01:17:21
define myself as this is the thing that makes me who i am what's the risk well for someone who's a rather
01:17:27
emotional person you'll bring your emotion to the decision in a in an unhealthy way if your identity is
01:17:33
wrapped up in the company so what i strive for is thinking what is in the best interest
01:17:39
of strava and ever like when i wake up in the morning i ask myself the question what
01:17:45
am i doing today to help connect people to the full potential of what we can create
01:17:52
and that sometimes is it's the obvious things making sure that we're we have the right set of priorities
01:17:58
executing against a longer term strategy not um churning people around with different
01:18:05
ideas limiting how many things i throw into the room some days it's about do we have the
01:18:10
right team do we have to add someone or take someone away from the team
01:18:16
those are hard choices for someone who's pretty i call it emote i say emotional i have a lot of feeling
01:18:22
and so that's the part that i feel like i suppress a lot is like i can't feel as
01:18:27
much i can't let myself feel everything i want to feel because i feel it will come out in ways
01:18:33
that are not healthy not in the best interest of the company
01:18:39
so what gets me through that is like well that's not this is me as the ceo of this company it's not me michael horvath
01:18:46
that's another person who will live on i'm not going to be the ceo forever so i will have a life that's my life and
01:18:54
what is that life what is in that life that is mine that isn't the companies
01:19:00
um one thing is for example everyone in the company knows this i love to cook
01:19:05
it's it's i feel like it's an incredibly valuable creative outlet i'd love to cook for
01:19:10
other people there's nothing more better than to imagine a meal
01:19:16
design it think of it think it through get all the ingredients make the dinner and have your friends or your family
01:19:23
sitting around a table and enjoying what you've created that for me that is that is part of my identity
01:19:29
and so finding like that's that's that's a core belief in
01:19:35
if you you got to give some time for that you got to you got to invest in that you you you
01:19:40
create the space for it as a way to say it still there's still a part of me that's not the company has that specific issue of identity
01:19:48
evolved or changed in you since anna passed
01:19:53
yeah um that's a really really interesting and like that the way i
01:20:00
think about it is i had to not rediscover who i am i had to define
01:20:05
who i am after my life with her i was dramatically changed by my life with her i don't go back to being the person i
01:20:12
was without her i am somebody who is now discovering who
01:20:17
am i as the survivor of that life with her
01:20:26
that doesn't happen overnight i think my first
01:20:32
inclination was to try to make it happen as quickly as possible get on with it
01:20:37
find find out who you are and i think well at least what i learned was you you can make some pretty
01:20:45
what you think are good choices or good moves and you realize it's not that's not you that's not the what you
01:20:52
you're you're still thinking of the life you had and wanting to recreate find fill the hole that's
01:20:57
missing you know the deep wound you're trying to sort of fill that with something
01:21:04
when there's something yet to be discovered about what you really who you really are on the other side of this
01:21:11
so as i said i wasn't thinking at all of going back to strava joining you know coming back to
01:21:17
the company i wasn't thinking of starting another company i didn't know what it was going to be i
01:21:22
imagine it was going to be something like uh
01:21:29
deep sense of rescuing people somewhere like this idea that what i couldn't save
01:21:35
my wife but i'm gonna go find other people to save
01:21:40
but that isn't it that was just that that again was like this idea that i'm trying to solve
01:21:46
the hole in my heart by finding people i can
01:21:52
help and what i've
01:21:57
though it wasn't that what i chose or how i thought i would get
01:22:03
that sense of purpose again that sense of who i am it is through strava it is through running this company and connecting back
01:22:09
to what we tried to create the idea we had in 1995 the thing we came back to in 2006 the way in which we've built this
01:22:17
team around our abc's with the future we can have
01:22:23
the the company that we will be in 20 and 30 years i can contribute something to that now and that's what is
01:22:31
that is where where i have found that sense of completeness again
01:22:37
so we have a closing tradition on this podcast which is the previous guest writes a question for the next guest so
01:22:43
so clever okay what should the average person optimize
01:22:50
their life for if their goal is fulfillment said another way
01:22:55
how is fulfillment achieved i believe we are
01:23:01
what we do every day and what i mean by that is that it's not the big moments
01:23:07
it's not the thing we strive for for
01:23:12
several years and achieve at one moment in time or the big trip we take or
01:23:18
call it the peaks that actually give us the most meaning
01:23:24
they are important but what really defines who we are is
01:23:30
what we do every day and so if what you do every day
01:23:36
is put a little effort into being active being kind to the people who are important to you in your life and the
01:23:42
complete strangers if that's how you walk through life
01:23:48
then that's where you're going to find the meaning
01:23:53
so fulfillment i believe comes from being intentional about what we do
01:23:58
every day amen and you this to you you said it correctly you said that you don't realize that you then you then have that
01:24:05
impact on others well i've have a podcast and tens of millions of people downloaded and i bang on about
01:24:11
the fact that i changed yeah and what that does for people who are struggling like i used to struggle
01:24:16
with all these false starts in their fitness journey is it lets them know that it is also possible for today to be
01:24:22
the day where you where you begin that journey in your life and again if you think about the catalyst there that that
01:24:27
strata moment at the start of my journey and how many tens of millions of people have now heard me talk about this um
01:24:33
it's incredible the the ripple effect across the ocean by one small catalyst so thank you
01:24:40
thank you as you might know crafted are one of the sponsors of this podcast and crafted are
01:24:45
a jewelry brand and they make really meaningful pieces of jewellery and this piece by crafted when i put it on for me
01:24:53
it represents courage it represents ambition it represents being calm and loving and respectful and nurturing
01:25:00
while also being the antithesis of that seemingly the antithesis of that which is um sometimes a little bit aggressive
01:25:07
with my goals and determined and courageous and brave the really wonderful thing about crafted jewelry is
01:25:12
it's super affordable it looks amazing the pieces hold tremendous meaning and they are really well made
01:25:19
[Music]
01:25:26
oh [Music]
01:25:40
you
