How Strava Scaled to 100M Users | Mark Gainey (Strava)

Mark is currently the Chairman and co-founder of Strava. He co-founded the company in 2009 with Michael Horvath. The firm is headquartered in San Francisco and supports users in over 180 countries.

In this episode, we discuss Strava’s origin story and how it got its name, we talk about the early days of the company, and learn about their interesting growth strategy and how they got their first customers. Also, we speak about the founder mindset and what it takes to build an enduring company, the inch-wide-mile-deep strategy, effective daily routines, and much more!

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You can follow Mark on LinkedIn and, of course, Strava.

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🎧 You can also listen directly to the episode on YouTube, Spotify, or Apple Podcasts.

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⏱️ Timestamps

(00:00) Intro teaser

(01:01) How Strava got its name

(03:01) First entrepreneurial beginnings in the 1990s

(05:14) How Strava got started as a “virtual locker room”

(08:10) Lessons on solving real problems and pursuing your interests

(11:01) The value of starting in a niche market

(12:01) Type 1 vs Type 2 fun

(19:04) Do things that don’t scale

(20:08) The pivotal summer of 2008: competition and direct outreach to validate product

(21:46) The importance of not worrying about scaling too early

(28:55) How Strava created vital network effects

(31:18) Fundraising: VC vs. bootstrapping

(35:04) The value of having a co-founder

(38:59) Why recruiting for skills you lack is crucial

(41:29) Managing emotional ups and downs as a founder

(42:07) Overcoming existential threats/crises

(49:41) Mental health

(01:00:27) Strava’s future

(01:04:02) Advice for founders

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💡 Q&A Conversation Highlights

Questions:

• Why Strava, and where did the name come from?

• Can you go back to the early days and tell us about your journey and how you met your co-founder to understand the roots of the Strava story?

• How do you compare entrepreneurship with being an athlete?

• What was the brainstorming process like when you and Michael figured out there was something with Strava, and how did you transition from brainstorming to execution?

• 🔒 What happened next to get traction and grow Strava?

• 🔒 Did you consider whether Strava should be venture-backed, and how important is it to have a co-founder?

• 🔒 Were there any roadblocks that you vividly remember that caused anxiety or sleepless nights?

• 🔒 Were there moments where you felt like this might be it for Strava, or did you have a growth mindset to fight through it all?

• 🔒 How do you deal with mental health challenges, personally and as a founder, and how has exercise helped?

• 🔒 What tips and advice can you offer young, budding founders?

• 🔒 What was your daily routine like when you were grinding it out, building Strava?

Barry: Why Strava, and where did the name come from?

MG: The name Strava is Swedish; it means to strive for. My co-founder, Michael Horvath, has deep Swedish roots—his family’s from Sweden. He and I had founded another company decades ago that also had a Swedish name. We pronounced it Kana, although that’s not actually the correct pronunciation, but that had been very good to us.

So when we came back to thinking about a name for this company, we liked the Swedish roots, we liked the luck, and frankly, we liked the short domain name. That was the reason behind the name. The reason behind the company is a little longer, but it’s equally fun.

Barry: Can you go back to the early days and tell us about your journey and how you met your co-founder to understand the roots of the Strava story?

MG: In order to tell the Strava story, you have to go back to the 1980s. That’s where and when I met my co-founder, Michael Horvath, who’s my best friend and has been so for 30-plus years. We met while rowing on the crew team at Harvard in the late ’80s. We had this transformational experience. First off, to go to Harvard, we were really lucky to be on the crew team, one of the really great teams that come out of a place like Harvard, with all the history, camaraderie, and esprit de corps, working out of that boathouse—it was fantastic.

I always argue that I should have a degree that says “crew” because, frankly, I spent way more time at the boathouse than I did in any classroom. The only problem was that we graduated, and that whole experience disappeared for both of us. Michael went off, got a PhD in economics, and started teaching at Stanford. I took a job working for an investment firm out in California, in Palo Alto. Within just a few short years, I had this itch to be an entrepreneur. I wanted to start something, and I also had this itch for the good old days of hanging out with my teammates and training partners.

A very long story short, in 1995, we tried to launch what was Strava, although it was called Kana Sports at the time, under a different name. We tried to launch this virtual locker room on this new thing called the internet, circa 1995.

The short version is that the idea was a little ahead of its time. The good news was we found a different opportunity in the midst of starting that first one, and so we did build a great company called Kana Communications and had a lot of fun doing it. That’s what taught us how much fun and challenge come from being an entrepreneur and starting companies.

Fast forward to 2006, 2007, 2008—Michael and I are getting the itch to start something again. We started brainstorming ideas and looked at a lot of different ideas, but ultimately we came back to the virtual locker room, this idea of bringing our friends together to help us train and stay active.

The thesis was really simple: number one, when I’m active, I’m a better person. I’m a better co-worker, I’m a better parent, I’m a better student, I’m a better partner. So, hey, let’s stay active.

The other thing we learned was that staying active is really hard. Having teammates, having friends who can share that journey with you. So, how do we keep people connected in a way that they can do that? That was the genesis for Strava, circa 2008.

Thankfully, the times had changed—the advent of GPS devices, smartphones, and frankly, social networks were now all in existence and changed consumer behavior in a way that we could much more easily build that virtual locker room, that place on the internet where people could share their activities.

Barry: How do you compare entrepreneurship with being an athlete?

MG: When you talk about how people romanticize entrepreneurship, I often refer to the fact that I’m fortunate that I’m both an endurance athlete and an entrepreneur because I think there’s a lot of similarities between the two.

You start to appreciate what we call type-two fun. In the moment, it’s just not very fun—it’s a grind. But then you finish, you forget all the bad stuff, and you enjoy it.

I think that’s a lot about entrepreneurship: can you grind, can you persevere through a lot of pain and suffering, and then, lo and behold, you forget one day, and you have that one win—whether it’s a small win, just a customer says yes, or an investor says yes, and you’re on cloud nine.

For those who don’t know what type-one and type-two fun is, type-one, everyone’s familiar with: we go out on a Saturday night, we go to the movie theater, we’re having fun, we’re enjoying the movie we’re watching, or we’re having a nice meal—that’s type-one, that’s the one we’re all familiar with. Type-two fun is you’re running a marathon, you’re at mile 21, you are in pain, you are suffering, you don’t think you can even finish, but somehow you just grind it through, even if you crawl across that finish line. About three hours later, actually probably a day later, you’re like, that was fun. In the moment, no, it was horrible, but in a weird way, you’re ready to go sign up for your next one.

That’s entrepreneurship: it can be lonely, there’s a lot of dark moments as you’re trying to overcome everything from your own insecurities to a lot of self-doubt to people saying no to you a lot. You’ve got to have a thick skin. That’s the type-two fun I’m describing. If you can get used to that, I do think there are tremendous benefits to entrepreneurship. The fact that I control what time I wake up in the morning and what I’m going to do with my day is something that I’ve always appreciated.

Barry: What was the brainstorming process like when you and Michael figured out there was something with Strava, and how did you transition from brainstorming to execution?

MG: We can walk through the process that Michael and I went through. For everybody, it’s a little bit different, but there were some good things there. Michael was a PhD in economics, and I graduated with a degree in art history, so we can’t write code—we are not software developers.

If we’re going to come up with an idea like Strava, the very first thing we’re going to do is figure out if we can rope anybody in who actually knows how to put some of this stuff onto a computer or onto a phone. I’ve got to give credit where it’s due—there’s an amazing gentleman who’s still with us at Strava today, his name is Davis Kitchell. Davis was somebody that Michael had met out in New Hampshire, where Michael was at the time that we started Strava. Davis was an endurance athlete like Michael and I, really passionate about thinking about ways in which we could use data to create stories and inspire. Michael and his nephew were working on one idea around water conservation, and Davis and I were working on the Strava idea.

We had this theory that there was a lot of data being captured by some of these very basic devices, either worn on your wrist or on your handlebars of a bike, like a Garmin device. People were treating that data almost like a circa-1980 Timex watch: start, stop, how far did I go, how fast did I go, and that was it. Yet there was a little mini-computer that was sitting there capturing all kinds of information, around grade, elevation, average speed, and heart rate. Could we bring that information together and create visuals that maybe would be interesting for somebody after they had gone for a ride?

We were very focused on the cyclist at the time because they had access to this data. Davis built a very basic website—we called it the Green Machine because it was this horrific color of green that we were contemplating as the Strava colors. Ultimately, we came up with orange, thank goodness for orange—that was another person who helped us on that. But at the time, we had this crazy green, and with that, he threw everything but the kitchen sink into it. We probably had features in that first website that still haven’t made it to commercial Strava today. In doing that, he created just enough of a basic little platform, a true MVP, that minimally viable product.

Then we just started conning, honestly, a few of our friends to try uploading their Garmin data to Strava. This is back in a time when you had to take a Garmin off your bike, plug it into the back of your computer, upload it, and do it.

I often joke with founders in the early days: do things that don’t scale. People want to focus on scale and network effects early on. We were focused on one thing: if we had one person uploading to Strava, could we get them to come back and do it again? Are we creating enough utility and value there?

That led to a pivotal summer of 2008, where we brought about 20 of our closest friends, about half on the East Coast, half on the West Coast, onto Strava in a competition. We basically put East Coast up against West Coast: “Would you guys do this for 30 days?” It was right during the Tour de France in 2008. We would send out little emails every day saying, “Hey, whoever posts the fastest 5K on their bike, we’ll get them a pair of socks or some racing wheels or whatever we could afford.” In return, we’d love to get feedback, see if you guys are enjoying this process.

By the end of those 30 days, we saw a couple of things.

We saw high energy—people were not just willing to upload, they wanted to upload, they wanted to see what they were experiencing. We were also really surprised by the amount of interaction between the cyclists online. We hadn’t anticipated that there was this social component to Strava. By allowing this trash-talking and interaction that was going on, even by email, not even on the platform, we realized there’s something to this. There’s something about sharing your activities with other people that keeps you motivated.

That experience in the summer of 2008 was the catalyst for Michael and I saying, “We’re not quite sure what the business looks like, but there’s something here. We’re solving a problem, we’re hitting on a need. Let’s get some professional developers behind us.” We had some good friends we knew from our prior company who were willing to join us, and by early 2009, we had a small team, and we were beginning to build something that we could charge for.

Barry: What happened next to get traction and grow Strava?