How Strava built a Global Fitness Community with 100M+ users | Expanding a consumer app to 196 Countries | Why Strava never intended to be a Venture Case | Hiring Young Potentials instead of Senior Staff (with Strava Co-Founder Mark Gainey)

Fabian Tausch:
[0:00] Strava is probably the most prominent consumer sports app out there. More than 100 million users, live in 195 countries, hundreds of millions of revenues.

Mark Gainey:
[0:11] If I can leave any message with your audience today, if we can do it, anybody can do it. You do have to be sort of patient and really begin to think about who are your customers and are you taking care of them. We've had to go through layoffs at Strava in the past. We've had wrongful death lawsuits. We've had investigations by the government. Over the course of the years, we've had lots of unexpected things that have come up that have led to tension. The sooner you can get comfortable with the uncomfortable under the right perspective, there's nothing better. Don't let your business and what you're trying to create define who you are.

Fabian Tausch:
[0:48] Strava is probably the most prominent consumer sports app out there. More than 100 million users, live in 195 countries, hundreds of millions of revenues, but they started out targeting pro cyclists who are owning a Garmin bike computer. Without this bike computer that costs $300, you couldn't use the first Strava version because it was a web one. And then throughout the years, there was a shift to mobile, there was less friction because the GPS function in phones became better and better and they then could increase their user count. And today I'm talking with Mark Ganey, co-founder and in between CEO, chairman and since a month retired from Strava.

Fabian Tausch:
[1:39] After more than 16 years, who goes into depth with us regarding the inception of Strava. Where did it start? Because the actual story started in 1995, not in 2009. And then we talk about the inflection points. We talk about hiring first time talent and identifying potential and coaching these people. We're talking about engagement metrics that Strava used to identify product market fit, but also to ensure growth because growth came through better engagement rates that they had and many more important steps in the Strava journey. So thanks to LinkedIn co-founder Konstantin Gureke for the introduction. Without you, this podcast wouldn't be possible. And thank you for listening to the Unicorn Bakery. My name is Fabian Tausch, and here are the tactical insights on building Strava from co-founder Mark Ganey. Mark, welcome to the Unicron Bakery.

Mark Gainey:
[2:43] Thanks so much for having me, Fabian. It's exciting.

Fabian Tausch:
[2:46] The fun part that I didn't know when I started researching for this episode is that you weren't building Strava the first time in your head when you're actually building the app or the web version. You started thinking about together with michael um about strava in a different name a different setting way earlier in 1995 take us back to that time and what happened.

Mark Gainey:
[3:12] Yeah yeah happy to yeah we've got to go back boy to the last century i'm quickly becoming a dinosaur here uh yeah so 1995 uh fascinating period i was about five years out of college uh michael was arguably one of my best We had met on the crew team in college and had developed a great friendship there and had this amazing experience on that team. You know, to be a college athlete and competing at the highest level and particularly crew where it's such a team oriented sport and there's a lot of hard work that goes into it. I often joke, you know, I should have graduated with a degree in crew because that's where I spent all my time. The problem was you graduate, and that experience disappeared in both of our lives. And as hard as we tried to replicate it by competing in other things and doing marathons and so forth after college, it just wasn't the same. And so 1995, I'd been working here in California for basically an investment firm. Michael had gone off, got his PhD in economics. He was actually a teacher at Stanford.

Mark Gainey:
[4:21] And we began thinking about in my case really I wanted to be an entrepreneur I wanted to go start something uh and wasn't sure what that was going to be uh but knew that I just I had an itch that I had to scratch and the combination of missing that that camaraderie that esprit de corps everything that came with kind of being in that boathouse and on that team along with the desire to go start a company. And then I'll add in a third piece, which was 1995 is really the beginnings of the internet and the commercialization of the internet. And the first time companies are going online. And so we had this idea. It was, it was named after my dog, Kana, and it was called Kana Sports. And we were going to create this virtual locker room on these, this new thing called the internet. And we were going to invite all of our friends to, you know, post their workouts. And we were We were going to find sponsors, we were going to find big companies to be our sponsors of this locker room.

Mark Gainey:
[5:20] And we started going down the path. We built a business plan and we started talking to website developers and so forth. And, you know, there's good news, bad news. The bad news was we were way early. That idea had a lot of challenges, both technically as well as sort of business model wise. The good news was it actually led us to an amazing opportunity around, I won't bore you now, but a very different business that became Kana Communications. And that was something that we then built for the next four to five years and ultimately took public and had a great entrepreneurial journey. So the Strava story started in 1995. It got detoured or sort of put on the shelf for a few years, but that was always in the back of our mind. what

Fabian Tausch:
[6:07] Was then the time to pick it up again and say hey we are now building what we wanted to build in 1995 because now is the timing and the time is right.

Mark Gainey:
[6:20] Yeah yeah i wish i could say it was just obvious i think you know with with hindsight everything feels so clear and obvious but so what happened was as i mentioned we we ended up building kana a very different business as enterprise software company, had this great experience doing that.

Mark Gainey:
[6:39] And then there was a period of time from the early 2000s to about 2006 where Michael and I were on, frankly, sort of different paths. He continued in academia. He was now teaching entrepreneurship in Dartmouth back on the East Coast. I was here in California. I was serving on lots of different boards and, I mean, everything from public companies in South Korea to healthcare startups and so forth. And both of us felt like while that is interesting, it wasn't really satisfying our desires as entrepreneurs and operators. And frankly, we wanted to get back in the game. And so Michael and I, we literally met in the middle of the country here in the United States. We met in Colorado in Vail in the summer of, uh, 2006, we sat down for three days and a little condominium and we just started brainstorming again. Hey, if we were going to go start a company, what would it be? And we weren't thinking about that locker room at the time. In fact, candidly, Fabian, we were spending a lot more time thinking about other companies that had been founded by other people. And, you know, we wished we'd founded this one or that one. And we started asking ourselves why and, you know, what were the qualities? And we found that we were really interested in consumer for the first time. And so we were trying to think about, OK, what would be consumer ideas? And out of that trip and that time together, we came up with a couple ideas. One was the old idea, the virtual locker room. And so we said, well, maybe we could spend some time exploring that again.

Mark Gainey:
[8:07] We came up with some other stuff. We were looking at, I mean, literally we're looking at things like filtered water delivery. And I mean, I won't, again, lots of ideas sort of surfaced out of that first sort of foray into entrepreneurship. But over the course of the next 12, 18 months, the more that we explored what was becoming Strava, the more we got excited about the fact that the world had changed. To your point, there were some things that were very different. One, it was much easier to capture somebody's activity. There were Garmin devices and various GPS devices that were making it much easier to seamlessly get an activity. And the other thing in hindsight that was changing, although I don't think we really appreciated it at the time, but in hindsight was really important, was just the advent of social media and the way in which people were sharing information online. If you go back to 1995, you know, people were not sharing what they had for breakfast on Facebook. But you fast forward to 2008, 2009, the time we really started to get going. The willingness for people to share information particularly if there was value in doing so had radically changed and that sort of opened up the door for Strava.

Fabian Tausch:
[9:21] Quick move forward into present time Strava has far north than 100 million registered users there was a time I'm not sure how is this today and if you can comment on it anymore but where you said that you were adding 2 million users monthly active in 195 countries and so much more so hundreds of millions of revenue so there is a lot of stuff that happened in between and we will cover a few breaking points because it's not possible to um yeah compress down like 12 years No, let me, I was in my head. 17, 18 years of history in an hour or one and a half. So we will only focus on a few breaking points that we can dive deeper into. But when you would summarize it, and that's probably the hardest question of all, because you have so many things in your head in a second, what would you say is the most critical and crucial denominator for success when you look at the Strava story and journey?

Mark Gainey:
[10:38] It is a great question, one I've not been asked before. So I appreciate the challenge. The first thing that pops in my head, I think that the team at Strava has done a good job over the course of these 15, 16 years of retaining one really important thing we said all along from day one. And that was, if Strava remains fun and entertaining for its members, good things can happen.

Mark Gainey:
[11:08] And I think we still do that today. I think that we make all kinds of mistakes. We've tried things and failed and so forth. But I do think at the end of the day, Strava is, when you talk to our members, when you talk to our users, it is a joyful part of their day. It is something that gives them joy, that gives them entertainment. And the reason that's important is it reduces the friction with then the use. And by the way, we are someone mission-oriented as well, which is we believe that when someone is active, they end up being a better person. It's just really hard to stay active. And so our thesis was, well, if we can help make it fun and entertaining, and there's lots of different ways in which people are entertained. Some of it's social, some of it's competitive, some of it's data-driven. And so there's lots of different techniques that we can use, but I think that that common thread over these 15 years has been, we're not, you know, again, we're not trying to cure cancer for better or worse at Strava. We're not trying to create Olympic athletes by any stretch. We're trying to keep people active. And, uh, I think we've done a good job of that largely by just making sure that, Hey, we don't take ourselves too seriously and, and you can have fun on Strava as a member. Hopefully you can have fun largely as a person who works at Strava and or be a partner to Strava. And that's been the common thread.

Fabian Tausch:
[12:29] How much of that could you grasp once you started?

Mark Gainey:
[12:35] I think that the concept of not taking ourselves too seriously and trying to create something that would keep us motivated was there early on in part because Michael and I used to joke if we were the only two customers but it kept us active, It was, it was a success. So, you know, our bar for what was going to be successful in the early days was pretty low. It was, you know, it's like, Hey, you know, maybe we serve a thousand cyclists, uh, which was kind of our initial target audience and we'll be happy. Uh, I think what's been surprising is just the universal nature of, of, of what happens when you encourage people to be active and you give them a platform where they can share that with their friends and, and stay connected and support one another. And, you know, it's powerful. It is universal. And it goes across borders and it's a common language. And I think that that's been, I don't want to call it a pleasant surprise, but it's been one of the great sort of outcomes that we could not have predicted. To your point, we could not have predicted 150 million people across the globe and everything. It's far exceeded, I think, speaking for Michael and myself, our expectations.

Fabian Tausch:
[13:49] It's interesting to see throughout the last years how normal it became to share your runs or cycling session, swimming session, hiking, anything else on Strava and then use that Strava post and all those statistics to then post it to social media. It can be TikTok, it can be Instagram, it can be anywhere. But the word of mouth is so crazy by now that it feels like everyone is using Strava, even when 150 million registered users out of 8 billion something people is still a smaller part of the population.

Mark Gainey:
[14:33] It is. And we'd argue too small. I think if you were to talk to our shareholders and everybody else, we'd still say, wait, why haven't we grown even faster? and added more people. So I look at that as opportunity. I'm excited for the team that's running the company now because I think they see that. I think that they see, you know, we've always said that we don't necessarily have to be in the business of convincing someone to become active. We don't have to convince someone to get off the couch and do their first walk. If they want to, we're there for them. We've more believed that 10% of the world today is active already. They're already playing sports and doing their hikes and so forth. And if it's 10% of the world, then what is that? That's probably 700 million people. So we'd love to believe that Strava still has lots of opportunity for growth and can support a larger audience. But to your point, we like our start. Maybe it's taken us 15 years to get here, but it's a really solid foundation. And I think the community that's here will continue to invite their friends and family members and others to join them. so yeah lots of future opportunity

Fabian Tausch:
[15:42] A question that i wanted to ask later but i was on the phone with um jan frodeno the former iron man world champion earlier today and he said hey when you're talking to mark you should ask him what the plan is for the future of strava and how they plan on exactly the growth that you explained let me add one twist to that question because Because what I would love to understand throughout the years when you thought about growth is when did you decide to, or how did you decide between doing more of what we already did because there's still opportunity versus, hey, we have to add a new field. Like, for example, from professional cyclists to we are adding runners as well to maintain the growth.

Mark Gainey:
[16:35] Yeah. Yeah, it's a fascinating topic. and people are always asking, so, you know, what's next? A few random thoughts in no particular order here, but I think that they kind of give the context to what you're asking. Michael and I come from an entrepreneurial experience, both from our prior company as well as Strava, where we're actually very comfortable taking risk of particularly in the early days, going very deep, very narrow. The phrase we used to use is an inch wide and a mile deep, be extremely focused on a particular audience and their needs and try to just do that exceptionally well to the risk of maybe it's not a large enough market or maybe we're not doing enough. So, you know, we just start from a place of we'd rather be great than big.

Mark Gainey:
[17:26] And if you look at where we started, we were often accused of being a hobby in part because our initial target audience was a very specific customer. We've often used the acronym M-A-M-I-L, mammal, middle-aged men in Lycra. And that audience was that road cyclist, that person who is very passionate about getting out on their bike, probably has spent thousands of dollars on some carbon fiber machine that they love to go ride a few days a week. And what we always wanted to explain to anybody who would listen is, look, it's a go-to-market strategy. It's not our long-term vision. If we can go to market and serve this audience exceptionally well, our growth strategy will be, A, can we do the same exact thing, but for new audiences? And we always believe the next one in Strava would go from cycling to running. So if we could do cycling, then could we do running well? If we could do running, could we add other sports? But maintaining roughly the same experience just for a different athletic audience.

Mark Gainey:
[18:29] And that was the strategy that we deployed. I would say we learned a lot along the way. You'd think that you could just do what you were doing for cycles and then kind of do some UI clever things and do it for runners. No, it turns out you can't do that. It turns out you actually need to take a step back and really understand the running ethos and the running culture and be authentic. And so it took us longer to get running right.

Mark Gainey:
[18:57] Over time, we built that out, and now that's a much larger audience on Strava than cycling is.

Mark Gainey:
[19:03] So that growth was pretty straightforward because we were trying to do roughly the same thing. What's fascinating today is with so much data inside Strava and so many members now in different parts of the world, I often joke that it's a little bit like three-dimensional chess. We're continuing to expand geographically. We're continuing to expand across activities. but now we're also trying to think about the way in which we expand across the services that we can offer our existing members. Because by the way, the last thing I'll say on growth, anytime we focused on growth for growth sake, we aren't very good at it. I shouldn't speak for the existing team. When I was running the business, we would always joke, like when we would try to focus on how do we grow or grow faster, we weren't very good at it. Our growth is very organic. When we focused on engagement and really trying to take care of our existing members and make sure that they were enjoying Strava, that was when we saw our best growth rates. And I think it's just a testament to, you know, the question that you and, you know, our other members are asking around what comes next. We are very focused on what are the different things that they continue to see a value from Strava and how can we bring those to market?

Fabian Tausch:
[20:18] How did you define the critical engagement metrics to not focus on vanity metrics, like just the overall growth?

Mark Gainey:
[20:31] Yeah. Well, I'll give you one example of a metric that really started to present itself three or four years in that we gravitated towards and really helped us. And it was simply looking at the ratio of time and app versus time being active. You know, one of the beauties of being a subscription business is we don't need to worry about time and app. We don't have to sit there and make sure that someone is staring at the screen because they need to scroll through some ads. And so what became more interesting for us was, hey, are we actually helping our members become more active? Are they spending more time outdoors? Are they spending more time doing the things that they love while they're using Strava? And in fact, it was true. We were, I won't have the current numbers, but back in the day, it was something like for every one minute in the app, we were seeing an average of 50 minutes that people were being active and out, you know, with their phone in their pocket or, you know, somewhere else.

Mark Gainey:
[21:28] And that ratio was actually increasing. We were seeing the 50 go to 51, 52, 53. So that was an example of a metric that was pretty authentic to Strava. It wasn't something that you just saw on every other social media that we could measure on kind of a quarterly basis to check and see. And that was really then a pretty good proxy that, hey, they're being active. And if they are, they're more than likely going to subscribe. They're going to become subscribers. They're going to remain with Strava. They're going to invite their friends. So that was one. I'll give you two others. We were very clear that particularly in the early weeks, if we could get just someone to upload two to three activities, it didn't take a lot, but if we got two to three activities in, there was now enough data that we could begin to give them insight and feedback. And could we get them to follow just two of their friends? It's kind of this two plus two mentality. If we get two friends and two activities, that began to create an experience in Strava where you would feel some connection.

Mark Gainey:
[22:28] On Strava, you don't need a following network of a thousand people. You need five of your closest friends that are enjoying the same activities that you are. And it's really fun Because now you're, again, you're kind of kudoing or high-fiving everybody and you're seeing when somebody went for a run in the morning, you're like, I can do that. I can go out and get in, you know, 30 minutes in this afternoon. So those were the kinds of metrics that definitely helped us through those early days.

Fabian Tausch:
[22:58] So knowing that you registered more than 100 million users and spent tons of time improving the onboarding so that people are doing the 2 plus 2 during your time, because numbers might change over time still with the new management team. But what percentage were you reaching of people who actually achieved the 2 plus 2?

Mark Gainey:
[23:25] Ooh, yeah, good question. You know, I want to be careful because off the top of my head, I'm not sure that I've got an accurate number for you. You know, it'd be easy for me to sit here and say, oh, you know, it was a massive percentage. Actually, that's a really great question in terms of sort of what was our hit rate and success rate on that 2 plus 2. I can tell you it was good without knowing the number. I'm not trying to hide it. And I actually, it's something I can go and try to dig up for us on a follow-up conversation. We can have it. The reason that I'm confident in it is that even today, here we are 16 years in, I think the number that's pretty accurate, something like 96 plus percent of our growth still remains organic. Word of mouth. And so the reason that that percentage can remain so high is because these, this ability to get people engaged on Strava fairly early and then get to a point where they're wanting to invite their friends and come in is very strong. So I would, you know, whether it was a majority or it was just a strong, strong percentage, it's always worked well for us. And again, it goes back to this thesis of, hey, let's focus on engagement. Are our current members having fun? Are they entertained? Are they getting insight? Are they getting utility from Strava? And if so, yeah, we were always impressed with then what happened with the rest of the business.

Fabian Tausch:
[24:51] I'm just asking because no matter how much, time and effort you spend on that this number will never be 100 and so also giving um the perspective for people actually working on it that it might take time and effort to get to a certain level but it will never be perfect it will be good but not like um perfect because it's just not possible you will lose people um in that journey and just wanted to to put that input into perspective.

Mark Gainey:
[25:24] You know, Fabian, it's a really important point, and I want to emphasize. In fact, not only would I agree with you 100%, and I'm not holding back on the number because I know and I'm not proud of it. I think to your point, maybe I would say, I'm not sure we've ever been able to nail what it is. We just fundamentally can see that good things happen from it, and whether it was 10% or 20% or 70%. The thing that I'll also share, though, particularly in the early days, we came to appreciate that oftentimes doing things that don't scale long-term led to some of our best outcomes. So I'll give you a silly example in the earliest days of Strava.

Mark Gainey:
[26:05] You know, many don't know that when we launched the business, the only way you could participate on Strava was if you owned a Garmin cycling computer, you know, the kind of thing you'd put on your handlebars, you'd finish a ride, you'd take that off of your handlebar and plug it into the back of your computer. These devices didn't have Bluetooth and they weren't Wi-Fi enabled. So you literally, there was a lot of friction associated with doing that. And so one of the things that Michael and I did was we went to a local Costco. I don't know if you have Costco's in Germany, but here it's like a Walmart. It's just a big shopping center. And we would go buy a couple hundred garments as cheap as we possibly could. And we would hand them out to friends and friends of friends, you know, with a commitment that, hey, if we give this to you, will you, you know, you'll participate on Strava, right? You know, you'll do this. And as crazy as that sounds, like, and we can talk today, we still add about 2 million members every month. But I remember the days when we were adding three people and four people and five. And, and I'm, I want to encourage everybody like you, it is a lesson in patience and persistence. That's, you know, And we often refer to Strava to the three Ps, patience, persistence, and then maintain perspective.

Mark Gainey:
[27:22] And that's, a lot of these things you'll do, it's not that there's one silver bullet that all of a sudden launches the business. It's just a series of thoughtful, hey, are we learning? Are we iterating? Are we innovating? Okay, let's try this.

Mark Gainey:
[27:37] Encourages someone. We realized one day, I'll give you another one silly example relative to it. People go for a ride together, but maybe they're not all on Strava. So how do we make that easier? Well, we just simply added a little button on your activity that says, hey, add others. And if someone was riding with you, but they didn't happen to be on Strava or they forgot to record their ride, you could just click add others and you could just quickly add them into the system that little thing paid huge dividends uh uh so but it was test and iterate right it was it was not you know one day we we launched it and changed the business it was constantly talking to our members and thinking about okay how do we make things easier back

Fabian Tausch:
[28:21] Then when you said you had to have the the garmin on the handlebar was it because you were like hey garmin is the platform that we want to grow with or was it hey garmin is the only way that we can fetch the data and therefore we need.

Mark Gainey:
[28:37] The users

Fabian Tausch:
[28:38] To have the garment because that's the only way we will in the end have the data.

Mark Gainey:
[28:43] Yeah much more the latter uh you're spot on it had to do with the accuracy of the information uh again you have to go back to those early days 2007 2008 2009 that was a But the Garmin was really one of the few trusted devices where the data coming in was accurate enough that the feedback we could then give our members would ring true. The problem we had with the smartphones of that era, A, their battery life was really bad. So you couldn't go on a three or four hour ride. But B, even if you could record it, the GPS chips in those early smartphones were very poor. And so we just couldn't trust other devices. So we were sort of, I don't want to say stuck, but we were thankful that at least Garmin was out there and we could use those. But we had a very different problem, which was Garmin's were expensive. And so it was a big limiter to our market. And thankfully, by 2009, 2010, you could really start to see that the smartphones were improving dramatically. And that was when we launched our mobile business and our mobile app. And when you talk about inflection points in the business, that was a big inflection point. Once we were able to get Strava on mobile and begin building the mobile app, the game really changed for us.

Fabian Tausch:
[30:05] So then when Garmin wasn't the platform that you wanted to grow with mobile and the app store was.

Mark Gainey:
[30:12] Yeah, it became that it again. It's so easy in hindsight, like, of course, you wouldn't you want to try to get on the app store? You know, we were all early app users and so forth. We weren't trying to do it because we thought it would be the best growth path. Candidly, the reason we were largely trying to launch a mobile app was just to reduce the cost and friction associated with joining Strava. If we were basically telling you, hey, come and join us, but it cost you $300 to go buy this Garmin, and then you're going to pay us $60 a year, that was a big lift. So at least if we could get to a place where somebody could use their existing smartphone to track their activities, that reduced the friction in a massive way. And so that was really what we were trying to do. Now, what we learned pretty quickly was by partnering with Apple, by partnering with Google, becoming a good app and so forth, you're absolutely right. We really started to see our growth take off on those platforms and so forth. But the first step was just to reduce the friction associated with participating on Strava. And then from there, take advantage of the growth opportunities.

Fabian Tausch:
[31:23] So the important part was we found our niche, but at first we had a lot of friction because you had to own the Garmin. So your two things that don't scale moment was we buy garments, hand them out, get the first users. We test if the hypothesis that we have works. And then you saw it working with some of the people then mobile came along and you were like okay now we have the opportunity to find more of the people that might love using strava because with of less friction.

Mark Gainey:
[31:54] Yeah yeah and not to make things even more complicated but just to sort of show you sort of these funny certain nuances the other thing we were trying to test very early and i would encourage all entrepreneurs to do this we were we were also very dedicated to monetization from day one. So we didn't just want to build something and try to get as many users as possible and then figure out monetization later. We launched with subscription, basically. Within the first few months, we had this. But our original subscription offering, because it was this Garmin related, was, hey, you could upload for free five times a month. But after that fifth time, the sixth time, you have to pay. So you could just keep it to five and always be free. or it was, you know, it was usage-based. And it worked really well. Our conversion rates were exceptional in those early days, because once somebody was used to it, they didn't want to stop their rides, you know, stop uploading. However, when we launched the mobile app, which was largely treated initially as a recording device, because we were trying to create the mobile app as an alternative to the Garmin,

Mark Gainey:
[33:05] We ran up against this problem, which was, well, we can't tell people to stop using the Strava mobile app to record after the fifth time. So at that point, we shifted our business model to be feature-based subscription. So there's a whole bunch of features that are free, and then you can get these new features if you pay. And it was the right thing to do.

Mark Gainey:
[33:27] You know, now that we're 10 or 15 years in, we're really happy with the subscription business. But that talk about creating new friction we now had this great growth rate in terms of members but we had a new friction associated with now the the subscription side of the business was far less obvious it was not it was very binary as usage based and now with the feature base now we had to learn how to sell these upgrades and and you know why somebody should for years we were always told our free was our free is good it's good enough we don't need to pay and they were kind of right you know it was uh it was not um it it took us a long time to really build value into the subscription side to the point where now we can say no it's it's it's really good it's worth paying for what

Fabian Tausch:
[34:14] Made it good enough that people are like hey i'm paying for that.

Mark Gainey:
[34:17] Well i think there's been three areas that uh we've done things so um one there's a handful of competitive things that you can only get on the subscription side around leaderboards and so forth today. And so not that everybody's competitive, but for those who are, and they really like the context, they like to be able to compare and understand how they're doing relative to their peers, relative to other sort of, I mean, we look at leaderboards through all kinds of different categories. So there's a competitive element. There's a big training element that's associated. If you're training for something, whether it's a marathon or a triathlon or whatever the event might be, there's a really great set of features associated with the training elements in your fitness and so forth that you would only receive on that front. So in some respects, what's happened over the years at Strava is the social side to it, we've made sure we wanted to keep on the free side. All the connection, all the community, that ability to support one another, that's always there. But as we've really dug into when someone is trying to plan for something, set goals, uh how are they going to achieve those goals uh how they're what they're competing for that seemed like a natural place to build that paywall i

Fabian Tausch:
[35:33] Have one question out of curiosity how long did it take you to reach the first thousand users.

Mark Gainey:
[35:39] Oh yeah another good question i got to get all this history right um long actually a thousand users it was probably i'm going to take a guess and say our two years. Uh, I know this because if we started, what we started putting users on in 2008, uh, in the summer of 2008 was when we had our very first sort of beta users, 2009, we launch and end of 2010 was when we did our first actual outside financing. And the reason we did that was that we were really beginning to see strong organic growth and strong conversion to, to premium to the subscription and if i'm not mistaken when we did that financing at the end of 2010 there were about 5 000 users so roughly two years in two and a half years in we'd gotten to 5 000 i'm guessing though that we got from a thousand to five thousand pretty quickly so i'll bet it took us a good two years to get to our first thousand

Fabian Tausch:
[36:41] I always love that because it feels like strava is there forever and was always large but um you also struggled to get these first users and had to and then also to maintain them so it's probably the harder part to also to also figure out how they how they stick and how they actually use the product and for everyone who's currently building they might be in the first spot of like hey how do we get the first thousand users that are then also using it because if i would ask what are when did you find the for the first time the first thousand weekly active users then it will be even harder to get the number so we are not trying to fetch it but still still it's like um there are certain levels that are coming step by step that just take time a.

Mark Gainey:
[37:27] Hundred percent i i am if i can leave any message with your audience today if we can do it anybody can do it and it but it it you do have to be sort of patient and and really begin to think about who are your customers and are you taking care of them. I remember that the, our first paying customer who was not an employee at Strava, his name's David. He's still on the platform today. I know who he is. Uh, he's a friend, he lives here in Bay area and you know, I remember him. And then I remember Mike and I, I still remember the first dozen that, that were willing to sort of test and iterate with us and be on Strava. And I'm sure we grandfathered some subscription for them over the years and so forth.

Mark Gainey:
[38:13] You have to start somewhere. It's one of the things I always get a little frustrated when we talk to investors because they'll, sometimes investors, you know, they want to understand this big addressable market and, you know, why aren't you growing fast enough? And I said, well, look, the only way we're going to get to a hundred million and we're only at a thousand now, I got to get to 2,000 first. And then from 2,000, I got to figure out how to get to 4,000. 4,000, I'll get to eight. And, you know, there's, there is this amazing sort of multiplier effect. And that's part of the organic growth. Once you get a viral loop going in something, which is why I focus so much on engagement, if you have a loyal customer, they're your best salesperson. And so by creating something that's highly engaged, where people are very loyal to the product and they're using it and they want to tell their friends, that's what gets that flywheel beginning to turn. And a it's highly cost effective and b that multiplier effect you know before you know it now you are starting to talk about some pretty big numbers

Fabian Tausch:
[39:14] A friend of mine yad madish is the co-founder of research gate and the first time i met him he told me hey i learned this one thing from my friend matt matt was early at linkedin and facebook and matt told me exponential growth at first is super super slow and yes it means it doubles but it doubles from 10 to 20 from 20 to 40 from 40 to 80 and it's like super super slow and at some point the tipping point comes where it's fast but you cannot mistaken slow exponential growth for no growth because that's still a sign of there could be something yes and especially for social products and community products that's so important to keep in mind because we are all of us trying to grow faster and faster and reach that one number that we have in our mind it can be 10 000 can be 100 000 can be a million whatever, without giving the time for the foundation to build that's.

Mark Gainey:
[40:18] Right that's right this is why i keep coming back to engagement too, because I think the risk that sometimes entrepreneurs find themselves in is they feel this need to figure out how to push that curve faster. And so then what they try to do is they try to spend into it. So that when I say you have to be patient, is it, it, and again, I'll speak for Strava's experience. We were never good at, you know, doing paid acquisition, trying to just sort of, you know, what we do to, anytime that would happen, Maybe we'd be successful at adding members, but they wouldn't stay engaged. So there's a certain quality of the user that you want to find. You have to find somebody who genuinely wants and needs the product. And so by focusing on engagement and when we got someone in, again, how do we get them to start following some people? How do we get them to start uploading activities? If they're engaged, now we've got retention. Having that retention is a big piece of being able to double. If you've got high growth but high churn, you're not getting that exponential effect because for every two you're adding, if you're losing one, you really need to add three or four to even get close to doing it.

Mark Gainey:
[41:33] I think that some entrepreneurs make the mistake that they raise the capital and say, okay, good. Now we can, we can go and pay to get these members to join and register. Uh, no, I would caution people. It's like, you got to look kind of the way you were describing earlier. You got to look down the funnel. You got to look at not just who's registered, but what is that monthly? What is that weekly? What does that daily active look like? Uh, what are those ratios? You know, how do you segment them? What's happening? I mean, in our case, we quickly became international. So now we're really trying to understand. And I'll give you a case in point, like for whatever reason, the UK has for 15 years outperformed every country on the planet for us to struggle. There is something about the population in the UK, the density there, their passion for being active. We've never really been able to recreate the magic that happens in the UK, but it was a bellwether for us and really helped us launch the rest of Europe. Because of what happened there so it's that it's that desire to really stay engaged with whoever is on your platform and help them stay active it's a far more valuable use of time than trying to figure out how to just juice the the early numbers internationalization

Fabian Tausch:
[42:54] Is an interesting topic did you proactively try to create it or did you reactively work on it because you saw hey our app is downloaded in the uk now or in other countries.

Mark Gainey:
[43:06] Yeah it i would say it started as the latter we were reacting to just an interesting phenomenon which was that this concept of sort of sport and and people's networks turned out to to be without borders so uh it really it's kind of funny i find even on strava as somebody who's a longtime member and has lots of followers and follow a lot of people. I have two populations. I have the people I follow who are really my local folks who are on the same trails and same roads as I am. But then I really have a just as interesting of more interesting sort of international following where, you know, I'm giving kudos to people in the UK and Brazil and Germany and Portugal and Tokyo. And we all have this common language. So that happened to us without us doing anything. And then we had to be much more thoughtful around, okay, not just how do we localize and make sure that this

Mark Gainey:
[44:07] You know, in the proper language and the proper currencies and, you know, all the obvious. But actually we, over time, I think we've started to learn and we're getting better at, even the cultural nuances associated with sport are very different. You know, the example I'll use, Brazil has been a fascinating country for us in Strava. And I've now been down there multiple times, as is my co-founder and other executives. We have a team that works down there, but they're, they have this amazing sort of way of combining their social with their sports. Uh, that's just unlike anywhere I've seen in the world. Um, I mean, their run clubs are phenomenal, hundreds and hundreds of people. And they go out and they, they run late at night when they, when it gets cooler, when the roads are safe and so forth, they carry boom boxes. Uh, it's a, it's a huge party that goes down the road. And so thinking about the way that Strava supports that actually ends up being different than the way you might support, say, a run club in San Francisco. And we've been more intentional in recent years at trying to understand how to be an effective partner wherever we're located. But that's taken a lot of time. And that's where we've thankfully been in a place to put the resources and put people on the ground and try to be part

Fabian Tausch:
[45:29] When was the first time that you had the feeling of what we today call product market fit? I'm not sure if that term existed back then.

Mark Gainey:
[45:40] No, it did. And I think that I would go back to within that first year, year and a half, as I mentioned, when we raised our Series A and decided to actually raise outside capital, because Michael and I had funded the business up to that time, that was when we really started to have confidence that not only do we have product market fit, but perhaps self-funding it is being penny wise and pound foolish. That in fact, there may be something bigger going on here than, than we first realized. Uh, but it took us a good, I would say it was a good year. And also, I mean, I think it's, I would challenge any entrepreneur that product market fit is a, it's kind of an ever evolving thing. So it wasn't that just one day we didn't have it. And the next day we've got it nailed. Um, like I'll tell one story that in the very earliest days, in the summer of 2008, when we first had our very basic website and we were asking friends to upload on it, we put about 15 or 20 friends onto the site for the month of July. And we ran a competition and we basically put them in two teams. There was East Coast and West Coast here in the United States. And we said, Hey, would you be willing to just for the next month participate anytime you go for a ride, upload.

Mark Gainey:
[47:00] And what we saw during that month, we would run these silly little competitions. We would send out an email to the 20 friends and say, hey, whoever posts the fastest 5k bike ride today, we'll send you a pair of socks. Or, you know, we were doing silly things like that. But we watched their behavior over that month. We saw the amount of emails going back and forth between this group. We watched kind of the trash talking and the, you know, kind of the jabs at each other.

Mark Gainey:
[47:28] And we realized, oh, there's something here. We may not have a business model figured out. We may not know how to make money, but look at the way in which they're engaged with each other. Look at the way that they're... And so I would say that that gave us enough confidence to keep going, to start thinking about, you know, maybe we should hire some real developers and really start to think about how we could commercialize this. And then that led to when we started to see the conversion rates on the subscription, that gave us a little more confidence. So I would say product market fit. And then I'd argue the last thing, sorry, but you get me, I'm passionate about this one, which is, so we had product market fit for the mammal, for that road cyclist, but that didn't mean we had product market fit for a runner. We thought we did. And then when we launched our first running app, it was horrible. And we had to go back to the drawing board and really we actually started to hire runners into the company so that we could, speak the language and understand it. And we started that journey again. So product market fit is this sort of ever evolving, expanding and contracting phenomenon that, you know don't ever think you've got it and you're done it's it's more that how do you just keep looking for those little milestones along the way those little signals that give you confidence that you're on to the right path could

Fabian Tausch:
[48:46] You say or when you think back to it hey every time we doubled in size we had to reiterate on product market fit or in a community once we were deeply enough into the cyclists we found all the more professional cyclists therefore we had product market fit for them but for the more broader cycling interested persona we didn't have it like what were the layers of product market fit is there anything that you could um call a framework probably not but that we that you realized when you when you look back at it.

Mark Gainey:
[49:24] Yeah i'll give you one example uh you know we've referred quite a bit here to our business model which you know today 90 percent of our revenue is the subscription and it's a freemium model so the vast majority of our members on strava are free and then but we have a a healthy substantial percentage of them who pay us and so the framework that we often use um once we sort of saw that the flywheel of of organic growth and free members were joining and by the way let me let me preface something here that's important Our free members are incredibly valuable to Strava. They're not just sort of, you know, freeloaders that we're hoping at some point we can get to pay. Anytime someone's free, they are uploading activities to Strava, which increases the value of the platform. So we have no problem with the vast majority of our members being free, but a framework we use that goes to product market fit is understanding how the free population is changing relative to demographics, relative to use cases, relative to geographies.

Mark Gainey:
[50:33] And as we think then about the subscription business, which is obviously the heartbeat of how we grow and succeed, that really evolves our product market fit thinking. So probably the silliest example I can use, as we transitioned from cycling to running, one of the things that really changed for us was the demographics around gender. As a cycling company, we were 90-10, 90% male, 10% female. Once you begin adding running, there's more female runners in the world than there are male. And we quickly had a population on Strava today. We're equally 50-50. It's equal male and female, but a lot of our paid for features were pretty focused on that competition, focused on things that weren't necessarily appealing to, I don't want to, there's plenty of women I know who are competitive, so I don't want to overgeneralize, but I think you understand, like we needed to really understand how we were speaking to these different audiences, not just to a runner, but to a female runner. Um, we learned a lot about, uh, safety, uh, and, and really thinking about ways in which, um, people want to present themselves on Strava. Silly little example. It took us way too long, but, uh, many folks, men and women, they don't want to share their pace on Strava.

Mark Gainey:
[51:54] And okay, let's make that something you can hide. So it was that evolving thing, but the framework we would use was as we were getting these members in and they were using Strava, if we wanted to see them become subscribers, how would we have to evolve that side of the paywall to create that conversion opportunity? That's where a lot of the, over the last few years, that's been where a lot of the product evolution has come from.

Fabian Tausch:
[52:20] One question that I have in mind is, how do you, with the growing audiences, the growing feature sets, the growing needs that you have to fulfill also as an internationalizing company with localization for all the different communities, how do you structure that in a tech team, for example, that not even the general team, but also starting in the tech team to build a global network? Community app that delivers to so many different audiences in so many different countries and languages I think that figuring that out is, be one of the hardest challenges over the years.

Mark Gainey:
[53:05] Oh a hundred percent uh uh the phrase that i would use oftentimes is uh we are both blessed and cursed with the noise of opportunity uh it's deafening there's so many things that we can do for our members that we should be doing that we we would like to do and yet we're always going to be resource constrained so to answer your question how would we organize first off we've probably tried every organizational model that's been developed on the planet by other companies. We probably tried it at Strava at some point in time. So there's no right or wrong. It is very dependent on where you are as a business and what kind of resources you have. I would say if there's been one guiding principle that has served us well, when we have kept our organization, what I would refer to as product centric, meaning, um, if we're going to keep investing, let's make sure that our product organization, which is really our product, our product team, which is product management, product marketing, design, and then most importantly, engineering, you know, Strava is a software company. So if, if we're well invested there and thinking about the needs, the resources that that team has

Mark Gainey:
[54:25] It's not to say that everybody else isn't important they are we think highly of all of our teammates but the business will thrive when that product organization is firing at 100 percent is firing sort of on on on all cylinders and working really well and that has evolved over time you know you can imagine with um i mean i can only imagine right now what mike martin the current ceo is thinking about is as we continue to implement machine learning and artificial intelligence into into strava and think about the ways we use that but that all keeps coming back to his product org and the way that then the rest of the company supports that. So that's the nucleus inside Strava. And it ebbs and evolves depending on, are we very focused on launching a particular sport? Are we in a moment in time where we're trying to understand a different piece of our demographic? There have been moments in time, to your point, when we've really been thinking about how we localize more effectively in key markets. I know one of the things Mike Martin's got right now is that he has five or six markets today that are mission critical for Strava's future. And so they're kind of organizing the whole company around how to ensure that those five or six markets

Mark Gainey:
[55:43] Perform exceptionally well. So there's a, I would just, probably what I would tell any entrepreneur is like, go with some confidence with an org structure that you can use. if you're going to be a tech company, it has to be within product. We don't have a sales team. So everything has to happen. Not only the product itself, but all the sales and marketing has to happen in the app, in the experience itself. So that's why that organization, we spend an enormous amount of time trying to get that right. But by the way, when i say we trying to get it right it's very different than having gotten it right like we've had a lot of heads of product over the years we've we've ebbed and flowed and and you know a lot of a lot of trial and error so

Fabian Tausch:
[56:27] Strava is a few hundred people by now um when you were running it and you put product in the in the center how large is the product team in percentage of the total team size.

Mark Gainey:
[56:41] Oh gosh easily two-thirds to 75 yeah it's it when you incorporate again that sort of engineering being the largest population i mean that that typically is at least half the company uh it's kind of your your core engineering and and everything related to that so maybe data science and and you know there's some fringe on that but fundamentally your developers and then the designers, the product managers and others around it. That's yeah. Two thirds to 80% of the business. Um, because who's, who else is there at Strava? We have, we have an amazing marketing team, uh, particularly, you know, off platform. So the team that does handle a lot of our social media and thinking about brand building and so forth. And, and brand has been important to Strava. We, we've always felt like we had to invest in that. We're a consumer brand. Um, and so what are we doing outside. There's a big partnerships team. As you can imagine, you know, we, we want to integrate with everybody in the world, uh, and, you know, make sure that we're a great partner out there. So there's a team there. They are pretty connected to that product organization because at the end of the day, that has to work well.

Mark Gainey:
[57:53] Uh, and then you got the overhead, you know, folks like myself, uh, you know, just trying to sort of keep everybody organized, but that, that should pretty, pretty, pretty lean. At the end of the day, the majority, I always like to joke we're dedicated to runners and cyclists and fitness or if you come inside we look like a Salesforce or an Oracle or you know you know name your software company today that that's that's what Strava looks like and it's it's it's a great team but the eye it it looks and feels like a software company because that's what it is so

Fabian Tausch:
[58:26] Who are the first people that you hired at Strava what were you looking for.

Mark Gainey:
[58:33] Well, so the first folks that we brought on board, well, let me take a step back. So there were four of us in the earliest days, Michael, myself, his nephew, Pella, and then a great guy who's still with us today. His name is Davey Kitchell. We affectionately like to call him the mad scientist because Davey, while not a trained developer, he is really the person who helped us develop the first website and put a lot of features to life. And that was just happenstance. That was just sort of who was available. Michael knew Davey because they lived close to each other on the East Coast. Our first hires were two developers, and they were two individuals that we had known because we had hired them in our prior company. So they were well-known to us. These were high-caliber individuals, high-integrity individuals who happened to be world-class developers, Mark Shaw and Chris Donahue.

Mark Gainey:
[59:30] Uh, and, uh, when I talked about those 20 people we put on the platform in the summer of 2008 to test, they were two of the 20, they were also passionate cyclists and athletes. And so we got them as users and we got them excited. And then I like to joke, we went fishing, we, we reeled them in and we got them onto the team. Uh, and they were our first two developers and between them. And then we, we made a hire on the product management side. Um, this guy, his name was Nick at the time and, uh, and that was it. And, you know, that was, that was the core team that really existed for probably the better part of two years, uh, which is, you know, of course, set of developers and, um, we started to add some design elements to that and so forth. And. Really, that product team was what started to build out, at least until this time as we really began, you know, generating revenue and you begin to sort of need the other pieces.

Fabian Tausch:
[1:00:28] So when was the first time that the organization grew to a level where you were like, okay, now we have to think about culture. We have to think about management layers. We have to think about everything that then makes a professionalized organization over time.

Mark Gainey:
[1:00:44] Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You know, I'll give you two answers, because I think that the first thing I would say is that Michael and I, having been previous founders together, we put a lot of thought into culture before we even started it. Not that we had it locked down, because I think a team starts to develop its own culture. So I want to be careful with this statement, but it was important to us the kind of company that we wanted to build. So, you know, like a silly example, I remember even with our first two developers, one of the first things that we gave as a perk was just a gym membership. Because, hey, if we're going to be espousing the ethos of being active, shouldn't we be supporting our team that way? So there were just little things that we were doing in the earliest days. But I think your question's a good one. And you have to fast forward actually two or three years into Strava's history. Actually, it's probably more like four or five, where we decided at that point to sit down and codify our culture with a set of values. They were there, they had grown, they had sort of developed. And then we decided as a team, it's time for us to actually put a stake in the ground and really sort of name them and begin to really build a culture around those. And those became what we call the Strava ABCs. It's funny, I'm sitting here, let's see if I used it.

Mark Gainey:
[1:02:06] Here we go. I'm sitting here at my desk. This is lucky. So we developed the ABCs. It was an A, a B, and three Cs. So it was authenticity, balance, and then three Cs, craftsmanship, commitment, and camaraderie. And those were the values that, frankly, we could see inside the company at that point. We were probably 50 or 60 people. And we felt like these are things that would drive a lot of our decision-making going forward. So what I just pulled out of my desk was the way we codified it was we created this coin and on one side you have the word Strava and on the other side you have basically the five the values and that that there was a hashtag carry the coin everybody knew that I always had my coin in my pocket I would pull it out during all hands meetings I would I would reference it during you know key decision making moments

Mark Gainey:
[1:02:58] And that really kind of helped then sort of solidify what it was that was one piece of values there's other pieces of the culture which they just they just naturally take place the silliest one that i always think of we always had a much bigger bike locker room than we did you know like a you know our conference room or something like that there's tons of space for bikes if you came in around one o'clock in the afternoon into a Strava office, it would often not smell very good because you can imagine that, you know, half the team had just gone for a run at lunch and, and come back. And, you know, we used to joke that, Hey, there's always time for a ride or a run, just get your work done. And so a lot of things just sort of naturally evolve that really become part of the culture and the lore of the business. And, you know, I'd like to think that that's still there today, but with 500 people, it's naturally going to change.

Fabian Tausch:
[1:03:52] One thing we didn't spend that much time on yet is you by now raised far north than 100 million from investors. And with investors, there comes expectation, there is a pressure for growth. And at the same time, you need to maintain a platform that has the engagement that you were looking for. So the question that I would love to put in perspective is how did you navigate putting the users first, but still at some point also given a little to the growth expectations that you might've had from outside investors?

Mark Gainey:
[1:04:39] Yeah. Yeah, Fabian, you are striking right into some of the best opportunities in terms of, you know, we have some amazing investors and partners on our team, but also some of the hardest challenges along the way, just managing expectations. I have an equation that was given to me by one of my CFOs years ago, and the equation is success equals results minus expectations. And that equation rings particularly true when talking about, you know, managing investors and the board and so forth. And, you know, my quick short answer to you was it was an art, not a science, constantly trying to bridge the gap. It wasn't that we were trying to have opposite expectations. We wanted to grow as quickly as the market would allow us to and so forth. There wasn't, so I think we were very much aligned and getting alignment with your board and with your investors is critical. You don't want to be on the opposite sides of the table. And so I don't think that we had misalignment,

Mark Gainey:
[1:05:45] But I'll be the first to acknowledge, there've been many times in Strava's tenure when a board meeting, the vast majority of the conversation is how can we grow faster? And it's always met with, you know, does more dollars really do the trick? Kind of that conversation we had earlier here, just a few minutes ago, it's like pouring dollars in and driving top line growth. If you can't retain those customers is, it's just not a very good business. So those are the conversations that we would have, and we would have good debate and healthy debate.

Mark Gainey:
[1:06:21] But ultimately, I think we, we've, have felt very good, you know, case in point of all of our investors who have been, And even from the earliest investor who's been with us since 2010, they've never sold a share. So they continue to believe in the growth of the business and the upside. And that to me is the signal. And the same way that I look for signal from customers in terms of, you know, are they retained and happy in paying us from an investor standpoint? The fact that, you know, our earliest investors are still holding their entire position and believe in the future of the business is a pretty good indicator that we're, you know, we're doing something right. Not without its challenges i could give you lots of stories just in the boardroom of yeah how we're trying to not not balance quality over growth but how to get both because one should beget the other uh they shouldn't be at odds with each other but rather in a perfect world engagement like i said engagement led to better growth at strava and so we just had to make sure we could we could prove that out can

Fabian Tausch:
[1:07:25] You take us uh into the boardroom for one of the harder conversations you had.

Mark Gainey:
[1:07:29] Oh gosh yeah um well there was an infamous one with uh ironically one of our investors who wasn't on the board but um but was welcome anytime and had a lot of experience and so forth and uh you know he he was just quick to come in and uh he's a very blunt individual so oh, I'll just put it that way. And, uh, you know, his, his blunt direct thing was, um, you know, you're not only are we not seeing the growth, but your, your product isn't performing the way that it should. And I mean, it was just this sort of just cold water thrown on what was otherwise sort of set up as a meeting where there was a lot of good momentum, but it was, he came in with an attitude of this is crap and what are you going to do about it? And why Why aren't you making changes? And the thing that I've found in these moments in time is you can react one of two ways. You can either get your hackles up and get defensive and try to go toe to toe, or oftentimes at the end of the day, what I found is the best thing is to listen. And look, the reason that we have them as investors and advisors and people that we want at the board table

Mark Gainey:
[1:08:50] Because they have a set of experiences that we don't necessarily have. And so that's what I did. And listened and tried to acknowledge and tried to own what this individual was saying, where he was seeing the problems and saying, we see the same problems you do. And then listening and saying, also, the other thing that I will often do with folks is say, you know, it's a classic line that many people use. But if you're going to come and point out a problem, point out a solution. So that became my rule of thumb, which was, okay, we hear you loud and clear. What do you suggest we do? What is it that we should be doing differently that we're not doing now? And that did two things. One is that it calms the waters a bit because you basically are acknowledging, hey, we're on the same page. We do hear that we have problems and we've got to go. But it forces people to now start to be creative and start to talk about what might be possible. And that's where the real debate starts, because what I've found with investors is that they're really good at just telling you all the things you should be doing.

Mark Gainey:
[1:09:52] And what I have to remind them oftentimes is, okay, but at what cost? Like, what are we not going to do in order to go do that? Because I only have so many people and so much capital. So we can't just keep adding to the to-do list. We have to actually put some of the stuff either on hold or we have to stop or, or we can't do these. And when you start to get into that, that trade-off, that's, I think when the, the real work gets done because that, that ability for people to acknowledge, oh yeah, we're going to have to make some trade-offs here. We're going to have to basically not do things we really care about in order to be successful here. So that's,

Mark Gainey:
[1:10:33] That's one silly one, but I mean, I could, look, we've had to go through layoffs at Strava in the past. We've had wrongful death lawsuits at Strava. We've had investigations by the government at Strava. We've had, over the course of the years, we've had lots of unexpected things that have come up that have led to tension and how we should navigate them. And again, being a good listener, asking for solutions, if you're going to raise problems and then really trying to get to that, Hey, we're going to have to make trade-offs. You just, you can't be the best at everything all the time. You have to sort of pick what you're going to go do really, really well and be willing to sacrifice in other areas. And I think that's the, you brought it up earlier. You know, how do you choose, you know, which features to work on next and so forth. That ability to sort of navigate the the prioritization of work is exceptionally hard and that's that's the place where boardrooms can be really helpful but you have to have the right framework to do it and

Fabian Tausch:
[1:11:40] You have to have the right people in there so who am i looking for when i'm now starting out and looking for an investor out of all your experience what makes a great investor.

Mark Gainey:
[1:11:52] Yeah. Yeah. Another one that it's funny that you ask, because I just had this conversation yesterday with an entrepreneur. We talked for an hour about this.

Mark Gainey:
[1:12:01] So I'm going to say something that is a little counterintuitive to my belief. In general, when I'm building teams, Fabian, I love first timers. I love, I love, I'll take an experience, but attitude oftentimes more so than I will sort of that senior person who's done it a thousand times, except when it comes to investors. I believe that when you have the ability to pick and choose, and you often don't, so the first thing I'll point out to entrepreneurs is don't forget, at the end of the day, the money is all green. Investors are selling a commodity. Get the dollars in. Speed over greed so you can keep building your business. As long as the investor you're dealing with is ethical and, you know, has a good reputation, you can make it work. If you have the opportunity to be more selective. I personally like to find investors who have a very strong track record already. The reason that's important is that if they've already been able to be successful at generating returns for their partners and their limited partners, they just simply have two things that are going on. One is they have perspective because that means they've probably been through a number of difficult situations and they'll just be more seasoned and frankly more mature when it comes to having tough conversations because there will be tough moments. But the other thing that they have is they have credibility within their partnership.

Mark Gainey:
[1:13:25] Once you have credibility in your partnership, you can be more patient with your portfolio. But if you're a first-time investor and, you know, you don't have any track record and so forth, you are itching to try to get an outcome. And I just worry at times that that particular investor will come into a boardroom and so desperately want to see an exit or a liquidity event that they'll really be pushing the management team to do things that they otherwise wouldn't want to do. So I don't know if I'm making sense, but it's the one place where if I have my preference, I do like to find investors who've kind of been through the process. They don't have to have been operators. By the way, I think there's a misnomer. I think that somehow, oh, yeah, I love this investor because they used to be a founder and they understand my perspective. I want an investor who is a fantastic investor. Like that's what they do really well. If they have operating experience, great. That does. That's helpful. But I would put that lower than somebody who's been really good at what they do. And then what I do is I do the references and I want to talk to the entrepreneurs and I want to ask them, what was your relationship like? When things got difficult, were they on your side or were they antagonistic? What was that? What did that feel like? And if I can find, this is a person that you've got to be able to partner with. So finding that person that you feel like you can trust, it's worth every penny.

Fabian Tausch:
[1:14:51] You said you love to hire first timers. So you also have to be great at helping them grow into a role they never did, help them figure out things they never did before. So how are you approaching at first the assessment of a first timer, if the person has the potential to grow into that role that you're seeing for them that they might not even see?

Mark Gainey:
[1:15:21] So, assessment and then how do I support? On the assessment side, I'll just give you two things that I love to look for. One is I'm just looking for a record of success. So, not just. I like to find somebody where, okay, maybe they haven't been a VP of marketing before, but I can go back in their history. And as I talk to them about their career, when I talk about their schoolwork, what I see is a pattern of, boy, when they went and tried to go do something, they did it exceptionally well. And it could be totally outside of the realm of what we're talking about. So they don't have to have done something great in marketing. They might've been, I have a bias for, for athletics. So if somebody has gone and, and, you know, they're winning races and so that just tells me something about their dedication, their work ethic and so forth. So I'm looking for success in their background. But the second thing I'm looking for is a level of humility.

Mark Gainey:
[1:16:13] Um when somebody i i go back to my own sort of beginnings i was really fortunate to do my first company when i was 25 years old and part of why i say i was fortunate was that i was young enough to know i don't know anything i don't i don't i don't know how to market i don't know how to sell i definitely don't know how to code i graduated with a degree in art history so i don't know how to write any software code and because of that i spent the time to go find the people who do I spent the time to go find really great marketing executives and salespeople and developers and so forth. And then once I found them, I empower them. Like, go. You know your job better than I do. You just tell me what resources you need and I'll help. And so that was my background. So there was just a, I was fortunate. The way I was raised, it's like I'm incredibly grateful for what I've been given. And there's that humility that's still there. So if I find someone who's both humble and has been successful,

Mark Gainey:
[1:17:13] And they're excited about the job they want to go do. And they want to prove to me they can do it really well. I'm willing to take a risk. How do I support them? There's always advisors out there who have that experience that are more than willing to help. It's amazing. You know, once you start to reach out, particularly in the world we live in today, where, I mean, look at the two of us. You know, I'm sitting here in California. You're in Berlin. And we're having this great conversation. Like, you can find amazing people out there who are willing to give of their time. And, you know, maybe it's formal, maybe it's informal, maybe it's once a month, maybe it's every week. Maybe it's because we hire them or because they're just doing something as a favor. But you can find those resources. And part of that humility that that person has means they're willing to learn and listen. And if they're willing to learn and take it in and go, great things happen.

Fabian Tausch:
[1:18:03] Do you incentivize the advisors? Or is it more like, hey, would you mind chatting with David, who is now responsible for our marketing?

Mark Gainey:
[1:18:12] Yeah, that's another really good one. Both have happened. At Strava, we ultimately did develop a very sort of loose advisory board. I wouldn't even call it a board, more of an advisory network. And those advisors who did join, they were given equity in the business. And they would earn it over time. They would earn, I think it was like a three-year vesting plan. And, and that way they were available and it was very low key. Um, you know, I'm thinking of, you know, there was one person in particular, uh, well, there's been, there's been many of them, but I'm thinking of one who's an expert in subscription has literally written books about it. Uh, this, um, her name's Robbie going back. So she's, she's, she's great. And she lives here in California and we got her involved and she spent a lot of time with our product teams, with our monetization teams and so forth over time, just sharing sort of her own experience, because she'd been not only writing books, but consulting with hundreds of companies in the space. Um you know they'll they'll kind of spend a lot of time with her and then the months may go by when there really isn't any interaction and that was fine but she's she's got a stake in the company and um it's great to have her on board we've got lots of examples like that i

Fabian Tausch:
[1:19:25] Love that now we probably talked about a ton of things definitely not everything that we could talk about but um when you are given the last words of this podcast episode and targeted towards founders who are currently building and often enough struggling as you know yourself um even when it sounds like everything is perfect there would be probably hundreds of moments that we could talk about where you were like you and michael and the whole team were like holy shit what's happening here yeah what would be your advice um for these founders currently in these situations of like hey i'm not sure when and how this might end up where my vision wants it to be yeah.

Mark Gainey:
[1:20:11] Yeah uh well i i will i'll start by saying uh one if they've made it this far into the podcast um i'm really happy that you know they're willing to listen to this at this length and that i haven't put them to sleep uh and then more importantly like if their kindred spirits in this entrepreneurial journey, I'm there for them. Just like you are. What you're doing is really, really important because I think that you are bringing a voice to an occupation and a way of life that can be extremely lonely. Entrepreneurship is tough.

Mark Gainey:
[1:20:49] There's kind of this dark underbelly. As you've said, it's a lot of grinding. It's a lot of grit. It's a lot of people saying, no, that doesn't work and you have to just sort of go past it. And there's this weird balance between sort of having to have this belief, I can make this work, yet being objective enough to know, hey, when am I pushing something that... I've got to course correct. I've got to change. And that's, that's really hard. So my first thing would be just like, you're not alone. And, you know, we'll make sure that you, you can tell all your listeners how to reach out to me and I'm happy to have a conversation anytime, but it's, we're here to support each other because we're doing good stuff, building things for people and being innovative. This, this is the lifeblood of sort of what's going to make this world great. Right. And look, we're in some difficult times right now. So I, you know, we don't need to get into politics, but let's just suffice it to say that entrepreneurs are going to save the world. We're going to figure out how to do it.

Mark Gainey:
[1:21:48] So that would be one. And then, you know, my second thing is just like a dumb phrase, but the sooner you can get comfortable with the uncomfortable, the better you'll sleep. It's, you know, this is, this is hard work, but it is under the right perspective. There's nothing better. You get to control your destiny. You get to decide. I used to always joke, the reason that I wanted to become an entrepreneur was so that I could set my alarm clock myself. Nobody had to tell me when I was getting up. I would decide when I would do it. And I would just leave people with folks that it's worth it. You just got to be patient and keep grinding and know you're not alone.

Fabian Tausch:
[1:22:32] I have to add one more question what would you say.

Mark Gainey:
[1:22:35] Is the

Fabian Tausch:
[1:22:36] Recipe to not burn out throughout a more than a decade-long journey.

Mark Gainey:
[1:22:42] You know i referred to those three p's earlier and that's patience persistence and perspective and that third one actually changed so the original three p's when we were building kana was patience persistence and perfection and i realized Just perfection is not something we should be chasing, but instead maintaining perspective. So I would say there's been two goals. And by the way, I'm not always good at this. My boys would tell you, I used to have something called sob disease, Fabian. It was Strava on the brain.

Mark Gainey:
[1:23:16] I would come home. I'd be having dinner with the two of them. I'd ask them how their day had gone at school. They'd start telling me. And two minutes into the conversation, they would basically say, hey, dad, what did we just say to you? And i'd be so embarrassed because actually i hadn't even heard it because my brain was still just like spinning around how to do it so i'm preaching something that i'm not always good at but i would say number one is you got to maintain perspective here like we're we're we're trying to build things that that bring joy to the world we're trying in our case at strava we're trying to make it easier for people to be active we think that's really important because again as i said earlier, I know when I'm active, if I can just go run for 30 minutes in a day, I'm a better person. I'm a better parent. I'm a better coworker. I'm a better student. I'm a better partner and spouse to my wife. I mean, I'm just, I know I'm better and it's hard. So that's what we're here to do. But we're not curing cancer. Like we've got to maintain perspective here. We're going to make mistakes. We're going to screw things up. We need to own those.

Mark Gainey:
[1:24:21] Part of its perspective. And the other piece around perspective is don't let your business and what you're trying to, to create, define who you are. Um, it's, you know, you asked me earlier when we were off camera and off, you know, uh, why did I decide to retire from Strava and why I'd left? And, you know, part of this is like, I will always be a co-founder. I'll always be really proud of what Strava is. And it's a piece of my life. It's, it's one of many things that, that I've enjoyed, but I can't let it define. There's, there's a bunch of other things that are just as important to me, uh, whether it's my boys' careers and what they're doing, my wife, Ashley, and, you know, our two dogs and, uh, um, I'm passionate about skiing. So I'm, I'm chasing snow right now and, you know, looking for, for great ski conditions and I love entrepreneurship. So I'm, I'm constantly talking to young entrepreneurs. You and I talked earlier. There's, there's amazing things going on. And I think you've got to, you got to make sure that you have a life outside of whatever it is that you're trying to build. Uh, it doesn't mean that it has to be balanced. Uh, there's going to be late nights when you're working on stuff and you just have to do it. You got to get through the, got to get through the grind, but you got to

Mark Gainey:
[1:25:35] Then occasionally sort of pull that release valve and make sure that you've got whatever that other thing is uh just one or two things whether it's working out whether it's uh reading good fiction whether it's um you know spending time with your partner i don't i'm not here to tell you what it is do it you will be a better entrepreneur if you give yourself that grace to occasionally have that that release valve

Fabian Tausch:
[1:26:01] I think that's something that a lot of entrepreneurs need to hear and including myself because i'm not the type of guy that's like working 24 7 i'm sometimes very lazy and only doing the things that need to be done but i'm still identifying myself a lot with the podcast especially because it's a lot of my um work time and so actually me talking to people that's quite might be even more easy easily identified with myself personally but um it's hard to to leave but, um, as a doorstep when you're coming home and not thinking about it. So definitely something that a lot of founders will listen to and be like, yeah, he got me here, but I'm not sure how to change it.

Mark Gainey:
[1:26:47] Yeah. I'm, I, again, it's that little thing of do what I say and not what I do. I talked about that sob disease that I have and kind of the way in which it just creeps in and it's always there. So it's, I think there's some intentional stuff, but I would, you know, speaking to you personally, I would, I would just remind you, like you are multidimensional, you know, Unicorn Bakery is amazing what you're building and what you're doing for people. And you should take great pride in it. And, and frankly, right now is probably a time where you are investing a big piece of who you are in it. And it makes sense to do it. I'm very careful when it comes to balance. Balance is not something that happens daily or weekly. It, it tends to ebb and flow over time. But I'm also here to tell you, I'll bet if you and I just spent another two minutes and I got to start asking new questions, I'd find other aspects of your life that are just as interesting and just as important. And what I will remind you is, if you give that stuff time, Unicorn Bakery will thrive from it.

Mark Gainey:
[1:27:47] There's a misconception that somehow if I stop thinking about it, it'll be off. But at times, what I've learned in 30 years is some of my best ideas have come when I've taken a break. And, you know, I often joke, like, my best stuff comes when I just go for a run. When I leave, I put my shoes on and I go. And I don't think I'm going to be about business. But then as I'm going, it pops. And it's because you have to, sometimes you just have to change your frame of reference and so forth. So, yeah, I'm a big believer that having those other aspects of your life enhance what you're trying to do as an entrepreneur.

Fabian Tausch:
[1:28:25] The coaching session, I didn't know I needed, but thank you so much. It's been such a pleasure talking to you. I would say probably not the last time that we will do it. Depends on your end in a few months or years, but I really enjoyed it. Thank you so much. I will link to your LinkedIn for people who want to reach out. You mentioned it yourself. You are retired from Strava in all professions besides the co-founder title. So you have a bit more spare time to talk to people. That's right. Thanks a lot for your time my.

Mark Gainey:
[1:29:00] Pleasure this is really fun thank you

Fabian Tausch:
[1:29:02] The strava story is so inspiring it's crazy to see how it took a long time for it to take off and then also starting with garmin handlebar attachments for your bike and bike computers that.

Fabian Tausch:
[1:29:19] You had to have and now having more than 100 million users that obviously don't have to have a garmin they might.

Fabian Tausch:
[1:29:25] Because runners and cyclists and.

Fabian Tausch:
[1:29:28] Triathletes and everyone is into garments but to see.

Fabian Tausch:
[1:29:32] Where to start it and how it evolved is crazy inspiring and i'm super thankful for mark uh taking the time and diving deeper um mentioned that we did he now has a bit more time so you can slide in his linkedin dms and he probably is able to take some time because he loves talking to entrepreneurs so if you're building and think that mark could help you with a few insights he could be open to it so in the end i love what strava builds as a community app probably one of the most loved community products out there for especially in the sports industry and then a substantial business with hundreds of millions of revenue even when not all the numbers are communicated it's an impressive story and if you haven't checked out Strava feel free to otherwise I'll link Mark's LinkedIn profile in the show notes if you don't want to miss other great founders and tactical advice on building startups and successful companies please subscribe to the unicorn bakery wherever you're listening or watching and share it with a friend because I can imagine you at least you know at least one person who can absolutely learn something out of this conversation or share it on social media could also be super helpful for us i'm super grateful that you're listening my name is fabian tausch you're listening to the unicorn bakery and then looking forward to seeing you back in the next episode.