How I Built This with Guy Raz - How I Built Resilience: Michael Horvath and Mark Gainey of Strava

Episode Date: February 11, 2021

Strava is a social fitness platform with more than 76 million users in nearly every country worldwide. Co-founders Michael Horvath and Mark Gainey spoke with Guy about the recent surge in users joining their virtual fitness community. They share how they've focused on creating new content and features to meet peoples' increased need for connection in a socially distanced world. These conversations are excerpts from our How I Built Resilience series, where Guy talks online with founders and entrepreneurs about how they're navigating turbulent times.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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happening next month with Jay Shetty. Jay is a bestselling author, former monk and wellness coach. And if you're searching for purpose, peace, and clarity in your life, or you're struggling to find meaning and motivation at work, you will not want to miss this conversation. Please join us. It's happening on Thursday, March 11th, and anybody around the world can take part. For more information and tickets, head to nprpresents.org. And I hope to see you there. Hey, everyone, and welcome to How I Built This Resilience Edition from NPR. I'm Guy Raz.

Each week, on Thursday, we invite entrepreneurs and other business leaders to come onto the show to talk about how they've been building resilience into their businesses this past year. And you can join us each Thursday at 9 a.m. Pacific 12 Eastern on the How I Built This Facebook, Twitter, or YouTube pages to hear the conversation and ask questions as well. This week, my conversation with Mark Ganey and Michael Horvath, co-founders of the social media app Strava. Strava is a social fitness platform for athletes at every level, and it's got more than 76 million users in nearly every country worldwide.

If you've ever tried the app, you know that it's a way for users to track activities like running and yoga and cycling, all while connecting and sharing with other people in a huge virtual community. Strava's focus on community engagement was inspired in part by how Mark and Michael first met as teammates on their college rowing team. For those who don't know about you or Strava,

the two of you started a software company before Strava. How did the two of you meet? Mark, let's start with you. Yeah, we have to go back to the last century guy. We're a couple of dinosaurs here. We met while in college. Michael was the senior of the two here. I'll point that out.

He was class of 1988, and I was class of 90 at Harvard. We met on the crew team. We met in the boat house, which is pretty critical on two fronts. One was just the opportunity to develop that friendship. He was kind enough. Michael was captain of the team at the time that I joined,

and he and some friends really took me under their wing and taught me how to row. I was a kid from Reno, Nevada. Not a lot of rowing going on there. So learn how to row. the friendship developed. And frankly, then, just that experience we had in that boathouse became really a catalyst for what we're talking about later with Strava. Wow. And you both went on to totally different careers. I mean, Michael, you went on to become an economics professor

for a while. I say in a former life, I was a struggling academic. After graduating with my PhD, I could go east or I could go west. I went to school in the middle of the country because Mark was already in the Bay Area, I decided that job at Stanford University was the one that I would take. And so moved out in 1994. And so for the people who remember what the early Internet was like, it was really difficult in some ways to sort of understand how it would change our lives, but we knew it would. And Mark was there. And we started to explore, what would we do with this thing called the Internet? How would it affect us in our lives? And that that was part of how we came up with the idea for Strava in those early days.

How did the two of you, I mean, you, Mark, you went and worked into the early tech sector. Michael, you were an academic. How did you, the two of you, come together to form your first company? What's the story behind it? I mean, because you left academia, Michael. So how did that, how did that happen? Simply put, we were getting together in my office at Stanford, in part because I had a fast internet connection. And Mark had nothing or dial up back in those days. So we were exploring the space and we started to ask ourselves these questions like, what would it, how would it change our life, what we would we do with this? And I was in curious, both from an academic perspective, but also, you know, as someone who just had some entrepreneurial inclinations, and Mark was

definitely in that, in that area. We went right away to what problems do we have in our own life? What are we missing that the internet might be able to solve? And one of those was, as Mark mentioned, we met on the crew team. And we had, when we graduate from that environment, you lose the team. It's difficult to keep rowing, unless you're going to dedicate. had a lot of your time to it. So we said, yeah, we kind of missed that feeling of being connected to a bunch of people around fitness. What if the internet could solve that problem for us? Could we create the virtual team, if you will, with this new technology? Yeah. Now, it would take quite a while. I mean, 1994 early days and Strava launched it, I think, 2009. So let's kind of fast

forward to that. Mark, let's talk about the idea for launching Strava. How did that, I mean, you're talking about community or talking about fitness, fit bits and stuff start to come out around then. Tell me about how Strava came about. Yeah, you hit the nail on the head. A couple things happened. One was just a simple fact that the technology itself had advanced in a way that really opened up opportunities for us that didn't exist in the mid-90s, things like wearable devices and garments on bicycle handlebars and the advent of the smartphone, even the idea that we could start using phones for things other than talking to people. So that technology, definitely benefited us. There were some social changes around technology. We had the advent of

Twitter and Facebook and things. And so all of a sudden, this concept of people sharing their personal lives and sharing information, that was very different from, again, 1994, 95. And so we saw those social trends. And then there was the personal situation for Michael and I. You know, as you alluded to, we had been fortunate enough to have this other company that we actually built in the late 90s when the original Strava idea just wasn't ready for prime time. And so we, we had been fortunate enough to have this other company. And so we had enjoyed what it was like to start something and to build a team and to be competitive out there in the business world. But we had left that company in the early 2000s after we took it public. And he and I were both sort of searching for that next thing.

We realized that we had some life left in us and we wanted to roll up our sleeves and do something again. But something different. You know, it'd been enterprise software the first time. And this time we really were, you know, enamored by this idea of could we build a trusted consumer brand? kind of company that we could, you know, leave a legacy with. It could be around for decades to come. So that was the spur, the catalyst, and thankfully a couple other folks joined us and away we went. So for those watching, I think a lot of people probably use Strava and how it works,

but for people who don't know how it works, can you explain how it works? Sure. Yeah. By joining the Strava community, you put the things you do to be active into the community. You upload your activity, if you will, when you can track runs, rides, hikes, walks, over 30 different activity types. And by doing so, you connect with other people who share your joy of being active. And so we enable those connections and a lot of different ways as part of the experience.

And when you do that, what happens, as we learned, is that you stay more active. People keep people active. And so it's that community by joining Strava, but you join that community. And it helps you fulfill your goals of what you want for your fitness. Yeah. We had the founders of SoulCyle and Zumba and John Fulia Peloton, others on, and accountability is the word they use, which I want to come back to in a moment. But before I do, I want to ask you about the business model. Strava is free to use.

There is a paid subscription side to it. It's a freemian model. A lot of brands use this Dropbox. It's a great example. We just had Drew Houston on the show. And I think he said something like 3 or 4 percent of Dropbox users actually pay for the product, but that's more than enough to make it into a profitable business. Tell me a little bit about your business model because I don't think you advertise on the app, right?

We don't. Yeah. We focus on building things athletes love to use and are really glad to pay for and tell their friends about. That's the aspect of our subscription offering. And it's a number of different parts of the experience that you get when you subscribe that make it even better. And so by focusing on building things that athletes love,

that builds a great business. Yeah. Mark? Yeah, I know. I think Michael hit the nail on the head. we really like this idea of having just one customer that we can focus on, and that is the athlete. For us, if you sweat, you're an athlete. It doesn't matter what pace you run. It doesn't matter how hard you're out. If you're going out and walking the dog on a Sunday afternoon, put it on Strava, it's fantastic for them and for us.

And so that's the idea is to focus on that athlete. We love our free members. They're contributing great content and activities and being part of the community. But our focus is to convince them that there's something here worth paying for and investing in. and together we're going to build this over the long term. NPR is a great example. It's public radio is a great example because we offer all of our content for free and we hope that people will voluntarily contribute to stations. And I think almost 10% of public radio listeners do. They voluntarily contribute to their station.

But it's a social contract. It's like we kind of hope most of you will. And, you know, that model works. I know you can't talk about because you're privately held and you don't talk about financials and so on and so forth. But can you give us a sense of whether the business model works. I mean, can you talk about whether you're profitable? Yeah, you're right. That as a, as a privately held company, it's not something that we share. What we can tell you is that when we

focus on things that athletes love, it really does make for strong business. And so we have, we have the starting point, as Mark mentioned, is like that customer is, is the person who wakes up every day wanting to be active and we want to help them. We want to bring joy to their lives in the movement that they do. That is the basis of this 12-year-old company. We started with it. team of six of us with an idea that it didn't have to be big. It had to be great. It had to make something meaningful impact in people's lives. And we're here 12 years later and growing and thriving. It's been a fun journey and we're really looking forward to the next 12 plus years. A lot of folks watching our early stage entrepreneurs, small business owners, and they look at people

like you for advice. So here's a question that I'd love to hear your answer on. You have investors. raised tens of millions of dollars, and those investors at some point want a return on their investment. So you have resisted advertising on the platform, but you've got tens of millions of eyeballs on your app. I mean, you've got a lot of people who use it. How do you resist the pressure to run ads? Because that would be an easy way to clear some cash. We watched Social Dilemma recently, Guy, and this notion of if you're not buying the product, you are the product. And I really, we believe deeply in that thesis at Strava. We're, we're convinced that there is a capacity within this fit community to continue to support Strava and grow this business in a

way that our investors are excited about. We've not felt that pressure from the outside. Do we believe that there's opportunities for diversifying the kinds of services we offer over the next, you know, again, 10, 20 years, of course, but we really are stuck on this principle that you need to understand who your customer is and stay focused there. Only to add that you also get to pick your investors. So for entrepreneurs out there, it is really important to align what you see as the vision for your company with who you're bringing in to help you grow it. And we picked our investors really carefully on that regard.

Let me ask you a question about privacy. Okay, I'm one of these Greek people who has like 20 burner email accounts and I use that for pretty much everything I sign up with, even though I know that doesn't matter because my iPhone knows who I am. But, you know, I've got this ring here. here that tracks my sleep, so they know me. It does concern me because I really am worried about privacy. I know you guys had a feature called flyby that you now allow people to shut it down. It basically allowed you to, you know, when you were passing by somebody, you could see

their running route. And how do you deal with this question of privacy? Because people are becoming increasingly aware of how important it is to maintain privacy. So because you, I mean, for better or worse, there's a lot of information that is, you know, that's on the app that is revealed on Strava. You know, absolutely. You hit the nail on the head. This is very important to us because it's very important to the athletes on Strava. So we take our athletes data and the privacy of that data very seriously. And we are working all the time on trying to make sure that we're providing the right set of tools and understanding of how to use Strava in the way that you want to, to. You can use it in completely private mode. You can open it up to a larger circle and you can be

completely out there, you know, in public. But the important thing is making sure you can educate people on how they want to set that level of privacy for them and for their needs and thinking ahead. So we've done a lot of things over the years. And we're never done. It's like it's a constant, a constant pursuit of making sure that people understand and how to stay in that mode of feeling good about the information they are sharing. And we can go to some things that have very specific things. How do you educate people on an experience that they may not have really understood yet when they first join?

So you have to continually remind them that these privacy settings are there and think ahead. And that's why, for example, making flybys something that you have to opt into was really important to us so that someone who joined who may not even understand what that feature means wouldn't inadvertently be sharing information that they didn't want to. This past year, a lot of people have found routines because they're not traveling. They're working from home. And a lot more people have taken up fitness routines. For people who haven't, how do you get people to get motivated?

Mark, what do you suggest? Well, I go to two basic principles. One is I tell my own story, which is, you know, It's not, this is not about being fitter or faster or stronger. This is just simply an acknowledgement that when I find even 20 or 30 minutes a day to go do some form of exercise, and again, it can be the walk around the block. I've just found that I'm a better person guy. I'm a, I'm a better partner.

I'm a better coworker. I'm a better parent. And it's just a fundamental principle. And it's been proven by science and everything else. But anecdotally, I need to share that. The second thing I'll say is, to be candid. There's enough people who've decided that fitness is going to be part of our life, that that's, we're really there to help them stay motivated because we believe that not only is it about accountability, but if we want to get other people off the couch, they need to be inspired. And so we know the community we're supporting that's figured this out. They're going and inspired the rest of the world.

We could tell you some amazing stories of creativity and innovation from our athletes this past year during the pandemic. People running marathons on their balcony, you know, doing what we call Everesting, where you basically go the, equivalent of climbing 29,000 feet in their backyard on a little hill, right? So for us, if we can support those folks, they're telling the story. And Strava doesn't have to do it. But I think it really comes back to that concept of inspiration and personal anecdote. Like, here's why this is valuable. When we come back in just a moment, more of my conversation with Mark Ganey and Michael Horvath

and how uncertainty and isolation brought more users together on Strava in 2020. Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz, and you're listening to How I Built This Resilience Edition from NPR. And one more thing. The New York Times best-selling book How I Built This is now available. It's a great read and a great gift for anyone looking for ideas, inspiration, wisdom, and encouragement to have the courage to put out an idea into the world. It's filled with tons of stories you haven't heard about how some of the greatest entrepreneurs you know and respect, started out at the very bottom. Check out how I built this, the book, available wherever you buy your books. Hey, welcome back to how I built this resilience edition. And my guests are Mark Ganey and Michael Horvath, co-founders of the social media app Strava. Near the end of 2019, Strava went

through a very public layoff. And then a few months later, the pandemic shut down their Bay Area office. The co-founders were obviously worried. But, Much to their surprise, Strava saw incredible growth in 2020 as people looked for more ways to find community online. The initial reaction was one of how will we get through this. It's public knowledge that we had had to reduce the number of people in the company. We had to do a layoff a few months before. So we had been through already a trauma for the company. It was really difficult for everybody involved.

And so on the heels of that, a few months later, we're going into this unknown of pandemic. our focus in the beginning was really, we need to make sure that our people are okay. All the other considerations, they have to come after that. And that was where we focused initially. So in some sense, you have a single purpose. You do that. You do that as best you can. And together we made it work.

And you saw like geometric growth. Like, I mean, just insane growth over the past year, right? Like growth that you, I guess sounds like you didn't anticipate initially. Yeah, that's right. Looking back now at the data, you can, even see the initial signs of it in January and February. And we're not sure what was causing it. We didn't sort of think too carefully. But when we knew that it was because of people's need to get through this moment in time and the world's history with movement and connection,

we leaned into that. It took a lot of work to even be able to handle the increased load. we went from adding about a million new athletes to the platform every month to at some points three million a month. And it's settled down to about two million a month now. So we overnight kind of had to go to a different mode of operating. Though it's software, you still have a lot of hardware somewhere that's running all of this and scaling all that up and making sure that it wouldn't all fall down and crumble under the increased load.

We have some very, very talented people in our team that have worked day and night to make that possible and really appreciate all the work they did. You know, a lot of companies have taken big swings for the fences this past year because they've had to, out of necessity. They've had to be radical. Are there any radical things that you've done this past year that maybe would have been more challenging or more bureaucratic to try in previous years? Well, I can think of two. The one predated the pandemic, and then we faced an interesting sort of question as to whether or not it was appropriate. And that was some paywall moves. We did some, in essence, some pricing changes, Guy.

And it goes back to what Michael alluded to. You know, we'd gone through a rough past in 2019, and we needed to stabilize the business. And we were really thoughtful around, wait a second, if we're going to dedicate to our athletes and to the subscription business, then let's be transparent. But let's do it in a way we believe is scalable long term. And so in the midst of the pandemic, we shifted the paywall. We added 70 new features throughout 2020. But it was not without trepidation because here we are not just in the middle of an illness and a pandemic, but there's an economic downfall that's taking place and being very

sensitive to our own athletes and what they're trying to go through. So the other I would add is just the way in which we had to allow our team to sort of find their comfort zone, find their space. And whether that was physically, where did they need to be? No longer could we ask them to be in our offices. in Denver and San Francisco, we need to let them go where they could find comfort and solace, whether that was family or just someplace safe and off the grid. Those are two that I can initially think of.

Wow. And do you think, I mean, 70 features over the past year, I mean, do you think that, you know, some of those features would have been harder to introduce in a less volatile year, in a sense, a more stable year? I can see it in both directions. One of the things we worked on very hard was on a way to explore. the world around you with a whole bunch of functionality around routes and route planning and finding the interesting places to go be active. That's a really tough thing to launch into a world

that's shut down where you may not be able to leave your apartment for very long and certainly shouldn't be far away from it. So we had to really pivot on that one and say even if you're just exploring your own backyard, this can help you. And then on the other hand, I would say where the focus of the past year has been predominantly around our subscription offering. What we're asking, you know, where we have invested most heavily is, you know, on the athletes who are investing in us, I'd say that part in any other time might be more difficult to do when right now people are paying a lot of attention to being active. And so this really looks like a great investment. You're investing in yourself when you subscribe to Strava. Were you seeing a

correlation between how people were exercising and how their either geographic area or the country was affected by COVID. Like, for example, there were times in Italy where you couldn't even run outside, you know, and then the epicenter was the UK for a while, then it was New York, and then it was L.A., and it's moved around. Has that correlated to how people are exercising outdoors? Yes, and indoors. I think we see a shift to indoor activity, lots of different ways you can track a workout, even if you're not outdoors, saw that in countries that went through extreme lockdowns like the ones you're talking about. And then when it was removed, you see people freed and they go outdoors and they roam further. The patterns that were very clear.

What I think the data can speak to is that you find new ways as your life patterns get disrupted by pandemic. You find new ways to cope through activity. I know a big part of Strava's community. community building. It's getting people, you know, connecting with other people who use it and getting people to hold you accountable and you holding other people accountable and showing up, right? How do you encourage that, right? Like every day I wake up and I exercise from six to seven, but I can only do it because I have somebody who holds me accountable in the morning on a video every day. And I have to be there because that person is going to show up on my screen, right? How do you enable that accountability through the app? And can you make it even more of a central feature of

Strava? Oh yeah. We're investing in exactly that right now. This is where we see the needs that people have in this present moment with pandemic as well. What people are lacking is that sense of connection with others. So we're building specifically around things that how you can use Strava together with the people that will help you stay accountable to your goals and help you get more out of the time you spend being active. So that's coming in the months ahead. We're really excited about the work. Can you tell us about it? We're getting a lot of questions about it, from Madison Harris and Brian Fur and people that say, what are you going to do to bring people together? Tell us about it. Can you give us a taste of what you're going to do?

We'll just say you may have participated on Strava challenges before, which are kind of global, everybody just trying to accomplish a goal. We're building a capability for you to challenge a few of your friends. And it could be collaborate with a few of friends to accomplish a goal together, but that we can bring this so that you can decide what you want, what you find would be motivating for you and your friends. That should be coming before the middle part of the year. Yeah, I love that idea of a collaborative challenge.

That's so cool. Right. That's what you guys did in crew. You all had to work together to make that boat win. That's correct. How can you think about teamwork elements here? Gai, if you're not familiar with our challenge platform, I mean, it's a really amazing experience. I think last May was the first time we had over a million people just sign up for our 5K. And it's one thing to sign up. But then, you know, to be able to sort of connect with those individuals throughout that month and try to go for it. That's what has us inspired to just continue to think about ways in which we bring that to smaller groups and individuals and allow them to not always compete with each other, but sometimes support each other in a shared goal. With, you know, I mean, you guys started this in 2009, there's been an explosion in fitness apps and programs and there's a lot of competition out there. There's a lot of options. There's, you know, fit on and they have other devices and Garmin and other competitors. Obviously, you have a huge critical mass, but how do you maintain your competitive edge when there's so many options out there? We designed Strava to be the social platform at the center of all that. So many of those experiences.

experiences and devices, they're partners. They help athletes get their activities into Strava so they can be part of the community and interact with their friends around those activities. And that's the way we intend to continue to build Strava is as we say, it's the model where like if we can be the Hoover vacuum for all activities in the world, we want to be the record of the world's activities. So we we want to build it so that others can plug into it. And we have an open API that allows developers to develop an experience, perhaps it's around us, sport that we don't do particularly well inside our app. They can plug in through our API to get the data from the athletes into Strava,

and then it's part of that community experience inside Strava. Likewise, with devices, hardware, you know, hardware like that you see on trainers, like anything, if you're on Zwift, you can connect your Strava accounts. If you're on Peloton, you can connect your account to Strava. And that brings that experience into Strava. so it can be part of what you get out of the community of other people who love to be active. I want to ask you about, given that Strava is such an important cultural force in the world of running, particularly running, I want to ask you about race, running and race. You know, back in May, obviously we all, you know, heard the story of Ahmad Arbery and his killing when he was going for a run.

And a lot of media attention was focused on running as, you know, predominantly seems. as a white or an activity that excludes black runners or that it's literally dangerous. There was a whole conversation about running while black. Given your cultural importance in the world of running, what role can you play in changing that in working to make running perceived as an inclusive and safe activity for everybody? Yeah, I'm really glad you asked this question, guy. It's This last year, not only did the world face pandemic, but we had to face also the iniquity and injustice in the world. And it's everywhere.

Amad's killing definitely affected the world of sport and the world of running. And we aren't leaders in that space. Before we can be that platform, which we, I believe we can one day be to give people voice, to raise awareness of the injustice and inequity in the world. We've got to work on our inside Strava first. And so we made a commitment to be an anti-racist company after the murder of George Floyd in May. And you can make a commitment, but then honoring that commitment takes real work. And we're engaged in that now.

Thankfully, there are a lot of people who are on the outside of Strava, who are helping us and connecting with us, people like Alison Desir, who was the first to raise awareness of Ahmad's killing and what that really indicated about the world of running, how different the experience was for people of color than for white people. So we are definitely at work in progress. We spend a lot of our time right now really just focusing on how do we strengthen inside so that we can be great at being that platform one day for giving voice to groups that are going to make real change in the world.

I think we're not the only company doing this. There's lots of companies that realize they have a role to play. What started in the summer in the middle of 2020 absolutely needs to continue into the decades ahead. We have to keep on it and we will. Before you guys go, one last question for both of you. In practical terms, how has this past year and all that you've been through as a business and as partners and as leaders, how has that helped you become a better leader? Mark, first to you. You know, Guy, I think what is done is it's taught me to slow down. I think for me,

trying to figure out how to do that more effectively to slow down to appreciate things in ways that I hadn't before. Michael's heard me for years, talk about the three P's. It's something that he and I created way back in the late 90s. And the three P's were patience, persistence, but also perspective. And I think these last nine, ten months, there's a lot of silver linings to what's happen here. Being able to slow down time. I keep joking. I never was a walker. If I went out with my two feet somewhere, I was either running or biking or skiing, but I wasn't going to walk. Just to walk now, something as simple as that, realizing the value of that pace, both physically but also sort of mentally and for everybody else around us. Michael? Yeah, it's a corollary to what Mark just said,

which is do less better. We are besieged with all sorts of places where we need to pay attention and get involved and we can't spread ourselves thin and expect to accomplish things that we're going to be proud of. So make some tough choices to prioritize the best things. You have to say no to some really great things.

And doing less better is what I have taken away from the last year. That's an excerpt from my live conversation with Mark Ganey and Michael Horvath, co-founders of the social media app Strava. If you want to see the full interview or any of our past live interviews, you can find them on the How I Built This Facebook page or at YouTube.com slash NPR.

And if you want to join our conversation live and maybe even ask questions, they happen every Thursday at 9 Pacific, noon Eastern. If you want to find out more about the How I Built This Resilience series or other virtual NPR events, You can go to NPR Presents.org. This episode was produced by Liz Metzker with help from Ferris Safari, J.C. Howard, Bruce Grant, Elmanian, Gianna Capadona, John Isabella,

Julia Carney, Neva Grant, and Jeff Rogers. Our intern is Janet Ujong Lee. Thanks for listening. Stay safe and I'll see you in a few days. I'm Guy Raz and you've been listening to How I Built This Resilience Edition from NPR.