The Exchanges

Q When you, I mean, this is still, again, I mean, I think the iPhone comes out in 2007, and smartphones kind of are beginning to emerge, but immediately before you launch, because you launch it in 2009, the summer of 2009, Did you think that it was going to be an app first product?

A No. We should have moved off of web onto mobile sooner, but we, that's not the team we had. That's not the, that's not Mark and I. We were not big app users. So going back to this sort of, did we have the set of experiences that would ultimately make Strava the most successful? I'd say here's an example where we didn't. We launched Strava into a pretty crowded space already, and we were on a, on a technology, on a platform, the web, that was not going to become the dominant platform, and, um, it wasn't until the, 2012, until we, we really had a, a viable mobile app into the market. We launched something in 2011 that, that didn't work, but, um, it took us a while to shift off of that.

AI assessment note: “No. We should have moved off of web onto mobile sooner”

Q So while the, while the two of you were, were at college together, did you, I mean, did you, the two of you particularly become close or, or did that happen later? Did, did, did the two of you kind of forge a close friendship already while you were students?

A What I recall was, it was the summer, a year after I graduated, Mark is still on the team, and, ah, there was the Harvard-Yale-Princeton race down at Princeton, and we both realized we wanted to go on this trip to go see the race, and so I, I offered to drive. I had a car, I had a really very old and not very dependable Jeep CJ-V. So we hop in this car, It's a very cold day, and the car has very little heat, but this trip is burned in my memory as the moment where Mark and I went from being classmates to being friends, and we did it down and back in the same day. We weren't, you know. Wow, that's a long trip. Didn't have a lot of options at that time. We didn't have money to pay for hotels, but this is where we, the friendship really started, and from there it was, the rest is, is, you know, he's been part of my life ever since.

AI assessment note: “the moment where Mark and I went from being classmates to being friends”

Q And meanwhile, Michael, you're now living in, in Hanover, New Hampshire, teaching at Dartmouth at the business school there, and I guess while you're there, you actually, like, get asked by some colleagues to help with their startup, which is like a health startup, is that right?

A Yeah, so there's this, uh, group of scientists at the engineering school who have started a biotech platform company, um, and looks like they need some help. They keep, you know, they ask me to, to give them some advice, We start meeting more regularly, and by virtue of being exposed to their idea and where I see I could be helpful, I realize I could have a role to play in this nascent company, and so I joined as the CFO and the VP of operations at this company called Glycify, and we go through a process of raising capital. We go through building a team, building a laboratory, and I stayed with that company until it's 2005, and it's sold in 2006 to, to Merck, Really good outcome for everybody involved, but what do I do next? And so, I, I don't go back to teaching.

AI assessment note: “Yeah, so there's this, uh, group of scientists at the engineering school”

Q The venture world was very different in the late nineties, but also this was the beginning of the The dot-com boom era would eventually become a bust, but I mean, there was, there was money pouring into companies. Was it easy for you to raise money at the time?

A Yeah, we, I'd say we were, uh, early on the wave of the big investments in internet, but we were also different. We were not a dot-com, where are your e-commerce, for example, or, uh, we were trying, weren't trying to disrupt something that was already happening in the real world, per se. We were really trying to build tools to enable those companies to be successful, so. I think we had a hard time raising capital relative to had we tried to do this two or three years later. We had a hard time because I think a lot of venture firms looked at what we were trying to offer and saying, well, why is that going to be a standalone company? Why won't that just be handled by Microsoft outlook or, you know, the other email software companies out there that just, they didn't understand the translation between personal email and customer service via email. So Um, that started to change as you, you, the, the problem got written about more. There was a, for us at least a very formative, uh, moment was where, I can't remember if it was the Wall Street Journal started to write about how Amazon was solving this problem with building their own solution for customer service email because they didn't, couldn't find anything. And that was really validating for what we were trying to do. But we did find eventually success with raising capital, our series A, Uh, led by Draper, Fisher, Jurvetson, DFJ.…

AI assessment note: “I think we had a hard time raising capital relative to had we tried”

Q Why did you decide to, to leave it at that point?

A Yeah, so it was the summer of 1998, uh, so about a year before we are going to take the company public, I went to Mark and I said, I, I think this is where I really do have to make a choice. It's either jump all into Kana, because that's what Kana needs, or jump all into academia. I can't be, have a foot in each any longer, um, and, and do well for either one, and so we did work out a An advisory relationship with Kana, so I, I stayed connected, but in a very different capacity, and I want to be clear here, it's like, it's almost like you're, you, you do have a, you have a better quality, and the company has a better quality of existence if you really separate as much as possible at some level when you don't have a role to play anymore.

AI assessment note: “It's either jump all into Kana... or jump all into academia. I can't be, have a foot in each”

Q Um, during your time, When you stepped away, um, did you stay in Hanover in New Hampshire?

A Yeah, that's where we, we'd kept our, our home there, uh, during my, my increasingly long visits to San Francisco. I had an apartment in San Francisco, which I gave up. So I'm in Hanover. We have an office there. We have a growing team there, actually, and Mark is, is CEO running the company in, in San Francisco. Uh, so during that phase, um, I was his commute partner. He would, Whenever his ride into the, into San Francisco, it would be when he and I would talk every morning, 45 minutes or so of, of touching base. And again, just roles switched here. I'm now the sounding board. I'm, uh, whatever he needs, needs me to do, I'm doing, uh, whatever he, however I could be helpful, um, I'm trying to do what I can from, from Hanover.

AI assessment note: “Yeah, that's where we, we'd kept our, our home there”

Q So how did the two of you, I mean, you, Mark, you went and worked in the early tech sector. Michael, you were an academic. How did you, the two of you come together to form your first company? What, what's the story behind it? I mean, cause you left academia, Michael. So how did that, how did that happen?

A Simply put, we were getting together in my office at Stanford in part because I had a fast internet connection and Mark had nothing or dial up back in those days. So we were exploring the space and we, We, uh, started to ask ourselves these questions, like, what would it, how would it change our life? What we, what would we do with this? And I was in, I was in curious, both from an academic perspective, but also, you know, as someone who just had some entrepreneurial inclinations, and Mark was definitely in that, in that area. We went right away to what problems do we have in our own life? What are we missing that the internet might be able to solve? And one of those was, as Mark mentioned, we met on the crew team, Uh, and we had, when we graduate from, uh, that environment, you lose the team. It's difficult to keep rowing, uh, unless you're going to dedicate a lot of your time to it. So we said, yeah, we kind of missed that feeling of being connected to a bunch of people around, around fitness. What if the internet could solve that problem for us? Could we create the virtual team, if you will, with this new technology?

AI assessment note: “we were getting together in my office at Stanford in part because I had a fast internet”

Q And you saw, like, geometric growth, like, I mean, just insane growth over the past year, right? Like, growth that you, I guess sounds like you didn't anticipate initially.

A Yeah, that's right. Looking back now at the data, you can even see the initial signs of it in January and February, and we're not sure what was causing it. We didn't sort of think too carefully, but when, ah, when we knew that it was because of people's need to get through this moment in time in the world's history with movement and connection, Uh, we leaned into that. Uh, it took a lot of, uh, work to even be able to handle the increased load. We went from adding about a million new athletes to the platform every month to, at some points, three million a month, and it's settled down to about two million a month now. So we're, we overnight kind of had to go to a different mode of operating. Though it's software, it's, you still have a lot of hardware Somewhere that's running all of this and scaling all that up and making sure that it wouldn't all fall down and crumble under the, under the increased load. We have some very, very talented people in our team that have, have worked day and night to make that possible and really appreciate all the work they did.

AI assessment note: “We went from adding about a million new athletes to the platform every month to”

Q Why is that? Why did you, why did you take that position?

A We already found that advertising on the websites and digital experiences that we were using, that it wasn't, it was a distraction. Um, it was, it may work economically for the advertiser. It may work great for the, for the platform that presents the ads, but it didn't feel like it was in the best interest of the actual experience or the, the customer. And so we believed we, we at least wanted to start with a thesis that we could build something Better than that. Um, advertising, per se, so that you could basically turn your customer into the product so that you, you're selling their attention. That did not make sense to us from the very early days.

AI assessment note: “it didn't feel like it was in the best interest of the actual experience”

Q So for those watching, I think a lot of people probably use Strava and know how it works, but for people who don't know how it works, can you explain how it works?

A Sure. Yeah. By joining the Strava community, you put The things you do to be active into the community, you upload your activity, if you will, and you can track runs, rides, hikes, walks, uh, over 30 different activity types. And by doing so, you connect with other people who share your joy of being active. Um, and so we enable those connections, uh, in a lot of different ways as part of the experience. And when you do that, what happens, as we learned, is that you stay more active. Uh, people keep people active. And so it's that community by joining Strava, you join that community, and it helps you fulfill your goals of what you want for your fitness.

AI assessment note: “you upload your activity, if you will, and you can track runs, rides”

Q like that, that, that were out there, but it's still pre, pre-mobile devices, right? It's still, like, a couple years before the iPhone's gonna come out, and so what, what were you initially thinking? That you would do a website that would Be this community where you could track and, and compare your, you know, your, I don't know, your running times? Was that the idea that you landed on?

A So we got to introduce a very important person to the story, and that's Davey Kitchell. Davey and his family live in Norwich, Vermont, across the river from Hanover, and it's my 40th, the day of my 40th birthday, and we sit down for coffee that morning, and Davey has been experimenting with, if he uses a Garmin cycling head unit, Garmin was making, uh, GPS, with GPS in it, Uh, it was a, this is in, in, in 2006, this is pretty bulky, pretty expensive, but he wanted to see if he can use this to try to collect some data that could help him train better. So there was something interesting there that we said, we ought to keep talking because you seem to be working on the actual, call it the, the R and D of something that could be important and, and, and fit into our world as well. And so we asked Davey to keep working on stuff and see what he comes up with, and what he comes up with by the summer of 2008, spring of 2008, is what we now know as the Strava Segment Leaderboard. The idea that you can have people, in this case, riding their bicycles at different points in time, but they can see their, their times on a climb or any stretch of road compared to each other. So this prototype that he is working on Comes out of that phase of 2007, 2008. And, uh, we, we, uh, decide in the summer of 2008, Mark and I are now pretty sure this is going to be it. It's, it's the virtual locker room i…

AI assessment note: “what he comes up with by the summer of 2008... is what we now know as the Strava Segment Leaderboard”

Q you to, you know, when you were passing by somebody, you could see their running route. And how do you deal with this question of privacy? Because people are becoming increasingly aware of Of how important it is to maintain privacy. So, cause you, I mean, for better or worse, like there's a lot of information that is, you know, that, that's on the app that is revealed on Strava.

A You know, absolutely. Uh, you, you, you hit the nail on the head. It's, it's a, this is very important to us because it's very important to the athletes on Strava. So we take our athletes data and the privacy of that data very seriously, and we are working all the time on trying to make sure that we're providing the right set of tools and understanding of how to use Strava in the way that you want to. You can use it in completely private mode. You can Open it up to a larger circle and you can be completely out there, you know, in, in public. But the important thing is making sure you can educate people on how they want to set that level of privacy for them and for their needs and thinking ahead. So we've done a lot of things over the years and we're never done. It's like, it's a constant, a constant pursuit of making sure that people understand and how to stay in that mode of feeling good about the information they are sharing. Um, and you know, we can go to some things that are very specific things are like, how do you, how do you educate people on an experience that they may not have really, uh, understood yet when they first join? So you have to continually remind them that these privacy settings are there and, uh, and think ahead. And that's why, for example, making flybys something that you have to opt into was really important to us so that someone who joined, who may not…

AI assessment note: “making flybys something that you have to opt into was really important to us”

Q as, you know, predominantly seen as a white Um, or, or an activity that excludes black runners, or that it's literally dangerous. There was a, a whole conversation about running while black. Um, I mean, given your cultural importance in the world of running, what role can you play in changing that, in, in working to, to make running perceived as a, as an inclusive and safe activity for everybody?

A Yeah, I'm really glad you asked this question, Guy. It's, uh, this last year, not only did the world face pandemic, but we had to face also the iniquity and injustice in the world, and it, it's everywhere. Um, uh, Ahmaud's killing definitely affected the world of sport and the world of running, and we aren't leaders in that space. Uh, before we can be that platform, which we, I believe we can one day be, To give people voice, to raise awareness of the injustice and inequity in the world. We've got to work on, on our inside Strava first. And so we, we made a commitment to be an anti-racist company after the murder of George Floyd in May. And you can make a commitment, but then honoring that commitment takes real work, and we're engaged in that now. Thankfully, there are a lot of people who are on the outside of Strava who are helping us and connecting with us, people like Allison Desir, who was the first to raise awareness of Ahmaud's killing and what that really indicated about the world of running, how different the experience was for people of color than for white people. So we are definitely a work in progress. Uh, we spend a lot of our time right now really just focusing on how do we strengthen inside so that we can be great at being that platform one day for giving voice to, to groups that are going to make a real change in the world. I think we're not the only company doi…

AI assessment note: “before we can be that platform... We've got to work on, on our inside Strava first.”