Strava Founder: How I Motivated 100 Million People To Stay Active: Michael Horvath | E148

1. 0:00 – 1:17

   Intro

   1. MHMichael Horvath0:00

      We have reprogrammed our lives to be remote, and so, we are stuck in patterns that are really difficult to get out of.

   2. SBSteven Bartlett0:05

      I actually ... This, I don't know if I'm gonna get canceled for this. But I think that, um ... Michael Horvath, the CEO and co-founder of Strava.

   3. MHMichael Horvath0:14

      With over 76 million athletes. You track your activities, turn those activities into a post, that's when the Strava magic happens. If you wanna be as good as you possibly can be, you have to strive to be the best. But can you be okay also with not actually achieving the goal of being at the top of everybody? Win or lose, that's the feeling you're looking for.

   4. SBSteven Bartlett0:34

      How are you doing in your personal life?

   5. MHMichael Horvath0:36

      My wife was diagnosed with a terminal illness in September of 2013. I think I prepared a lot for how to live my life caring for her. I wasn't prepared for how to live my life when she was gone. I had to not rediscover who I am, I had to define who I am. That doesn't happen overnight. But if what you do every day is put a little effort into being kind to the people who are important to you in your life, and the complete strangers, then that's where you're gonna find the meaning.

   6. SBSteven Bartlett1:07

      So without further ado, I'm Steven Bartlett, and this is The Diary of a CEO USA Edition. I hope nobody's listening, but if you are, then please

2. 1:17 – 11:02

   What made you different?

   1. SBSteven Bartlett1:17

      keep this to yourself. Michael, I tend to believe that people have, I know I eventually developed it, but I tend to believe that people have some kind of hypothesis as to what factors or experiences from their earliest years shaped them most significantly into the person they are today. Do you have a hypothesis like that?

   2. MHMichael Horvath1:47

      I think I have several, starting with how my family felt. To me, being the youngest of, of the five kids in my family, felt like it was pulled apart by geography, uh, between Sweden and the United States at an early age. My sisters stayed behind when my family moved back to the States when I was five years old. And I had this, uh, dream to reunite us in some way. How could we re-, how could we be one family again? Um, now that my sisters were older, they were choosing to... It was the, the normal, maybe a few years early what, from what you'd say normally would have happened anyway, them deciding just w- where do they wanna live, who are they as people. And, but me, I was, I was this five-year-old and I was, uh, I was sad to, to lose my f- my sisters. My, uh, I had my brother with me. And, um, when you think about what are the most important things in your life, it's the relationships you have with people. Um, now, I'm not necessarily an outgoing person myself, so it's, I don't, that's not where this is, this hypothesis has led me. But it has led me to the idea of connection, deep connection with people you care about is super important for how you live your life, and the choices you make, and what you prioritize. So that was, that's the one, that's one theory. And then there's one other one, which is, I think, growing up, going through high school, coming to the United, first of all, coming to the United States not speaking English at the age of five and learning it all, you know, from television and getting thrust into school. And you have this, this feeling like you don't belong, you don't fit in. Uh, that just, that kept, you know, for many people, I think it keeps going, and you don't have that great sense of belonging until later, maybe until your teenage years or later, even into your 20s. But throughout all that time of searching and looking for something, like, uh, what I s- kept believing is that there's something inside me, a potential that needs to get realized. And I don't just think that about me now. I think that about every single human being on this planet. And, um, the aspect of what it means to realize someone's potential, your own potential, and then create the opportunity for the people around you to realize their potential, that drives me. That is something that I've, I feel like has been a constant in everything I've done since I've been about 25 years old.

   3. SBSteven Bartlett4:08

      That moment when you're, you're growing up and you've, you've parted ways with your siblings seems to be one of the first seeds that led to the success of your later businesses, because it was, uh, I mean, in hindsight, I guess we all do this, but you, I guess it highlighted the importance of connection and community, as you said. When was the next seed planted? 'Cause I kinda think about that with like great business ideas, and I saw that in your story, that there's these moments, these key moments which introduce you to like the idea of community, and then to the idea of sport and competition.

   4. MHMichael Horvath4:37

      Mm-hmm.

   5. SBSteven Bartlett4:38

      When was the next chronological seed?

   6. MHMichael Horvath4:41

      Hmm. Yeah, so coming out of that, um, like high school feeling like I know I've, I've got some amount of intellect. I don't really understand like what or how I'm gonna use it. Um, I don't feel like I was that, you know, call it, like high school wasn't where I peaked. I don't think anyone should peak, by the way, in high school.

   7. SBSteven Bartlett5:00

      (laughs)

   8. MHMichael Horvath5:00

      Like that's a lousy time to be at your, like the pinnacle of your life. You wanna peak later than that. So getting into Harvard, going to a good school, that, that seemed like that would be it, but it wasn't it, that wasn't it for me. It was actually walking into the boat house, never having rowed before, and finding this group of people who also were trying to figure out where, what's this, where is their place at this institution that, in some ways, you're like, "Well, you got into there, so is it, aren't you kind of done?" And it's like, actually, no, now you're, you're scared 'cause you don't know (laughs) if you measure up. You don't under- have any understanding of where you stand. Will you make it there? But finding that going into the boat house, you're like, hard work and, and ...

   9. SBSteven Bartlett5:39

      What is this boat house? This is the boat house at Harvard?

   10. MHMichael Horvath5:41

       The row- yeah, the, uh, for the rowing team. It wasn't that I went in there thinking, "I'm gonna, I'm gonna conquer this. I'm gonna be, uh, one of the best rowers that this school has seen," when I went in there. But within a few weeks, I was like, "That was my goal. I was gonna be the best." Like that was, it somehow, it wasn't, there wasn't anything else except it just turned on inside me. And I was, I was hooked by that s- that experience.... uh, because I'd found my place. I think that was the key, is I'd found a group of people, I'd found this vibe, this energy. It was the part of the day I looked forward to. It was the part I, I felt so good about, uh, the rest of my life because I was there in that experience. Um, I was motivated by the desire to be as good as I can possibly be at this thing. And I don't think I'd experienced that feeling before in my life.

   11. SBSteven Bartlett6:28

       I was really compelled by the use of the word best. It made me start thinking about the idea of competition. And, um, I think I sat here a couple of days ago with Simon Sinek talking about this, like the role that competition and wanting to be number one plays. Is it toxic? Is it a healthy motivator? 'Cause I'm filled with that. And even, we went bowling last night with the team.

   12. MHMichael Horvath6:49

       (laughs)

   13. SBSteven Bartlett6:49

       I was very quiet until I knew that I was gonna win. (laughs) You know what I mean? I'm a deeply competitive person. It motivates me, it drives me, and I've wondered if that's a deficiency of my character-

   14. MHMichael Horvath6:59

       Mm-hmm.

   15. SBSteven Bartlett6:59

       ... or if it's a healthy thing. What have you learned about that?

   16. MHMichael Horvath7:02

       Yeah, I, I think it can lead to challenges, both at the personal level and then, you know, in a, in a group. What I found at the, in the crew team was that we couldn't be the best team if each of us individually wasn't trying to be the best.

   17. SBSteven Bartlett7:15

       Mm-hmm.

   18. MHMichael Horvath7:16

       But we always knew that you don't win a boat, a boat race by yourself. You win it with, um, seven other rowers and a coxswain. And you have to think like a team, but you have to think like, like an individual who wants to be the best at what you can be. Another way to think about it is, like if you wanna be as good as you possibly can be, you have to strive to be the best. Um, but can you be okay also with not actually achieving the goal of being the top of everybody, but being as good as, you know you got, reached that point of you, you could not have given more? That's what you're, that's where I get the satisfaction, is I know at the end of that race, you know, I'm thinking of the race in my freshman year where we won the championship, and we came from, you know, a boat length back. We had lost to that team in a previous race. And that feeling that went through, um, my body, and I believe everyone's body in that boat, halfway through the race, we said, "We're not giving up." And, uh, we just rode them down. And at the end of that, it was, wasn't like, like, "I'm the best." It was like, "We did something that we didn't think was possible. We created a new capacity." And so then, all of a sudden, you know, maybe some spaces opened up with what you thought you were capable of and what you could be. And you, you try it, you go a- back at it again. You, you train again for, for reaching that point where you said you did everything you possibly could. And win or lose, that's the feeling you're looking for, I think, when you, when it's positive in your life. And I've been in those places where it can be really destructive too. Um, it changes your relationships with other people. You start to actually hate the thing you're doing, uh, because you're striving for the wrong... You're striving for some outcome that maybe is not the right outcome. Um-

   19. SBSteven Bartlett8:57

       What experience are you talking about there?

   20. MHMichael Horvath8:58

       Training for races where you're, by the time you're on the starting line, you just don't even wanna do it anymore. Uh, that was often the feeling I had by the time, you know, a, uh, a big race came around, where I was just like, "I'm so done with this. I just wanna just not, not be, not be here right now." Um, these things should be additive to your life. It should be something that you, that makes you s- better in other ways besides just stronger physically. Probably a sign that you've just, you have lost the reason why you're doing it, the, the why behind the work.

   21. SBSteven Bartlett9:29

       When I was reading about Strava's work values, I read about this ABCs thing.

   22. MHMichael Horvath9:37

       Mm-hmm.

   23. SBSteven Bartlett9:37

       And the B in that was about balance-

   24. MHMichael Horvath9:39

       Mm-hmm.

   25. SBSteven Bartlett9:39

       ... which is what you're talking about there. Is that in part why you put the B there, in terms of the, the culture and the, the office and the professional culture you were trying to create with Strava? Is that why the B is so important there, balance?

   26. MHMichael Horvath9:53

       Balance is elusive. And the counterpoint, we have another, one of the Cs is commitment. So I talk about that a lot, that, um, these things seem like they're at odds with each other. If you have balance, how can you also be 100% committed to the goal of building the best company we can build, doing the most we can do for our athlete community? And I say, yes, (laughs) that is the struggle in life, is to both have balance and be committed to something. It's incredibly challenging. And to hold both concepts in your, in your heart and in your head, uh, is, is the work. That is actually why they're there. They're there to remind us, um, if we only have one, balance, we won't, we won't do as much, we won't, we won't strive for as much as we can be. If we only have commitment, we will burn out. We will, we will get to that place where we don't love the work we do anymore, and we will, we will question why we're here. So it's by putting them together that, that my co-founder and I felt we had the best chance at achieving that long-term commitment with balance. And it's a struggle. (laughs) It is. You're not, there's no recipe

3. 11:02 – 19:34

   What role do you play in keeping life balance within your team

   1. MHMichael Horvath11:02

      here. There's no, you know, playbook that tells you how to do it. Um, and each person ha- does have to work at it, um, o- on their own.

   2. SBSteven Bartlett11:08

      On their own. Is it their responsibility to, to, to work, work at it? I, I sometimes struggle with this as an employer, which is, what role do I play in... 'Cause I know the role I play in driving commitment, right? It's very obvious. You set ambitious goals, you set tight timelines, you create a good prize and a worthwhile, you know, carrot at the end of accomplishing the goal. That drives commitment if you have the right people and you have camaraderie and all those things that y- you said. But then in terms of telling people to, encouraging them to have balance in their life, what role can I play as an employer? What role do you think you should p- play?

   3. MHMichael Horvath11:44

      Hmm. If you hire people who respond really well to those, those motivators that, that lead to their commitment, um, I think you also have to look at it from, how long do you want them to be there, to do the work, to be working at that level? And I think you can structure teams in different ways. You can, you can roll through, you know, people in the sense of that they may only...... contribute for a couple of years, or a year. And, and that's, that's, if that's the structure, and many companies in Silicon Valley operate this way, which is two years at the, o- on the team is, is a pretty standard length, and then you move on, uh, and you recommit somewhere else. Um, w- w- we are trying to build something different at Strava. We're trying to build the 100-year brand, uh, the company that will last longer than I will be there. Um, it will still be here after many of the people who have been investors in the company have exited the company. It's, it is, uh, something that we hope will withstand the test of time. And in that setting, I think it's much more important to think about these, you need some people who are gonna be there for much longer than that one or two years. That's where balance comes in. Yes, it's easy to say you don't want people to burn out, but if it's only that you don't want them to get that tired, that sick of their job that they're, quote-unquote, "burned out," you've probably lost some level of productivity for quite a while before that. So we strive for a different kind of relationship with our team. Uh, it is a challenge, also, as a leader, to make sure we're still performance-oriented. We, we still want that, that sense that we have, we have to bring our A game. We cannot be satisfied with past success or be complacent. There's plenty of competition out there, all sorts of new, uh, new technologies that are coming, uh, into the f- into the fore today, new ways of, uh, building communities, new ways of motivating people. We have to stay competitive. And so that is my job as a leader. Uh, I have a leadership team that helps me with this, it's not just my job, but it is, it is ensuring that we are taking care of our people, but also expecting that they're gonna climb the mountain with us.

   4. SBSteven Bartlett13:57

      The way that you're building that company and what you're aiming to, to do to create a, a long-term, long-withstanding business goes against the narrative, especially in Silicon Valley, where the objective is to, like, raise money before you're profitable, sell the thing, or go public, and move on to the next thing. Um, clearly there's experience behind your desire to pursue a longer-term strategy, where you're not just, you know, s- uh, investing all your money in user growth, getting a gazillion users, and then exiting. And I suspect it's because of your other business-

   5. MHMichael Horvath14:36

      Mm-hmm.

   6. SBSteven Bartlett14:36

      ... the one that came before Strava. Am I right? And if so, why did that teach you that this longer-term approach to company-building is a better path forward-

   7. MHMichael Horvath14:47

      Mm-hmm.

   8. SBSteven Bartlett14:47

      ... for you, as the founder, and for other things?

   9. MHMichael Horvath14:52

      When we started Strava, we were looking back at the previous company we had started. And we started talking about, um, creating what is now Strava. Back in 2006, um, we got together, uh, starting on the phone weekly, talking about ideas that we, if we were gonna start a company, what would it be? Eventually, we got, Marc and I, my co-founder, Marc Gainey, and I, uh, decided we had to get together for a few days the summer of 2006. And we defined, at its core, that what we had experienced in that other company, Cana Software, back in, in the ni- late '90s, it was the Silicon Valley Olympics. That's the way I term, that you, you, you s- have an idea, you raise some capital, you're at, you're off to the races, and either you have taken it public or sold it in four years, or it's, you know, and that's the gold medal, or go home, because it's, that's it. Um, we didn't want to do that again. And a few reasons why, um, it wasn't ter- terribly satisfying, at the end of the day. We, um, Cana was a wild ride during a wild time in the first internet boom. Um, a lot of people made a lot of money, a lot of people lost a lot of money. Um, and so what in it would we look back on and say, besides the experience itself and what we learned, what would it be that we would say to, to our kids, our grandkids, like, "Here, this is something we're really proud that we created." We can't even lay claim to having created if, if we're only there for four years and then other people take it forward, is it really ours? Um, so we were out on the doorstep, you know, (laughs) literally, almost four years to the day after starting Cana-

   10. SBSteven Bartlett16:30

       H- well, how and why?

   11. MHMichael Horvath16:31

       Well, personal choice in my case. I wanted to go back to teaching. I was, I came from academia. I was, uh, I was teaching economics when we started Cana, I wanted to go back to academia. Marc, the company got to a point where he brought in another CEO to run it, um, and he found that it wasn't his company anymore. He didn't have the role that he thought he would have on the other side of that decision. So I don't wanna speak for him, but it was like this sense of, like, it was a personal choice for both of us. But at the same time, we look back on it and say, "Where it goes next is not, not part of us. We have to forge a different path." There's gotta be an idea that's worth that much of our investment. And perhaps it's that sense of, at that point in our lives where we were then, late 30s, early 40s, when we were starting Strava, we were thinking about, "This could be it. This is, it's not like we're, we're gonna have that many good ideas in our life. We're not, we're not gonna have another opportunity and, to, to, to build this kind of a company, at least." Um, and so let's make it worth it. And let's, let's find something that we're extremely passionate about. And we used to say things like, "It doesn't have to be big, it has to be great. It has to have m- give meaning to the people who are our customers." And we defined that as like, "We wanna, we wanna help people live a more, more, uh, life of full, more full of meaning, adventure, and fun." We didn't say activity, we weren't yet sure what it was gonna do, but it had to have some impact. It can't just be transactional, it has to have an effect on you at the le- at the core level of what you value, what decisions you make on a daily basis. And that's where I think w- we got our, we got to Strava, and I love to-... go to, like, the- the idea behind Strava was a 20th century idea. We had that idea coming out of The Boathouse. When we graduated from college, we had the idea that what we, what we experienced there, is something that is applicable in so many places in our lives. Being connected to other people through sport is what motivates you to lead a more active life and makes you a better human being. It helps you live a healthier life and makes all the rest of your life better. It did that for us when we were in our 20s, and that's the universal part that we wanted to tap into when we were starting to create what became Strava, was that it's the context of the people around you that keeps you motivated. It's the, it's the way in which you're connected through sport to other people that unites you. Um, and so we started to explore that space and, um, when you explore and are willing to talk to people about your ideas, they respond. They tell you ideas that they've had that sound pretty close to what you're doing, even if they're not sure that it's really relevant. And so those conversations in the early days, 2008, led to us actually putting a team behind this to build a, a prototype. And, and that eventually became the earliest version of Strava in 2009. So, it was really just a set of conversations that led to what we actually decided on but it came from something we had experienced in,

4. 19:34 – 27:03

   Strava's journey

   1. MHMichael Horvath19:34

      in, um, in college back in, in the, in the late '80s and '90s, a 20th century idea.

   2. SBSteven Bartlett19:41

      When I think about how you formulated Strava and that early process, it's like exactly what I'd tell an entrepreneur not to do, in the- in the respect of, um, y- a lot of time entrepreneurs, you- you- you see that they actually just want to be an entrepreneur. So they think, "Fuck it. Oh gosh, uh, what shall I do?" Um, and they look around for a problem to solve, one that isn't in line with any of their intrinsic, like, passions and innate motivations. So, the minute they encounter some difficulty, the first hurdle in business, which is inevitable, they then fold and they give up because why would you pursue carrying on doing something that you weren't genuinely, um, in love with? And I guess, you know, I guess the process is the thing that I d- wouldn't, I never would advise someone to kind of like sit down with your mate and think of a business, but I guess the process also led you just closer towards what did innately matter to you, which was adventure, activity, community. Even though you did it the other way around. Does that make sense?

   3. MHMichael Horvath20:35

      Yeah. Well, so, uh, I guess I'm trying to tell this, like, how we originally conceived of what became- what is now Strava was in 1994/'95, when I'm a professor at Stanford teaching economics, Marc is working in venture capital in Palo Alto, and there's this thing called the internet, uh, that has just become, like, a household word. Uh, before I got to Stanford, I think I had sent one email in my life. I had never... I didn't know what the internet was. I- I had no idea. When I got to the Department of Economics, um, the- the person who managed all the IT equipment said, "I'm gonna install a browser on your computer." I had no idea what he was talking about. What's a browser?

   4. SBSteven Bartlett21:23

      (laughs)

   5. MHMichael Horvath21:24

      So, had lived up to that point without the internet and the internet is introduced. Uh, it's a different thing than today with, you know, kids growing up with all this around them. But when it was introduced, what Marc and I did was exactly that entrepreneur, that instinct is like, "What is this new thing gonna do? What problem can it solve? What's the, what's the..." You know, and Marc wanted to start a company. I was a professor. I was gonna be his sounding board. He came to my office 'cause I had an internet connection and he didn't.

   6. SBSteven Bartlett21:49

      Mm-hmm.

   7. MHMichael Horvath21:49

      You know, so what we, we cooked up was like, "Well, what are the problems in our own life that we would wanna solve with this new technology?" As a starting point, 'cause we didn't know what else, where else to start, right? So we, we went through a bunch of, you know, different ideas, and the thing that we hung onto was like, we missed the crew team. We missed that, the bunch of people who were, you know, from all different walks of life and they found their- the same thing that we were passionate about and we spent a ton of time with them. We were, we were with them hours every day. And we missed that feeling of being connected to them. We missed The Boathouse, we missed the feeling of competition. Could we recreate that with this new technology called the internet? Could we create the virtual locker room? And so what we were describing to ourselves was, what you see in Strava today, is like a place where you could see other people's workouts, you could see- you could talk about- you could track your performance over time, a training log. All that was, we sketched that out, we wrote a business plan. This is 1995, right? So, we- we're- we're not anywhere close to the Sta- the founding of Strava by that- uh, uh, in any means. We actually went out and talked about this idea with companies that were building websites. And that's- that was the earliest internet companies, were the ones that were building-

   8. SBSteven Bartlett23:01

      Websites. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

   9. MHMichael Horvath23:03

      ... the websites that other companies would then use to become internet companies, right? So, um, and they told us, "This is a lousy idea." Uh, you know, like, "Come on guys, can't you do better than this? This is never gonna work. People are not gonna share personal information about themselves with strangers on the internet. That's never gonna happen. Uh, let's see, there's no technology that's gonna make it easy to get the data in. Uh, people are gonna be having to fill out forms and submit them online. That's gonna be really s- really full of friction. You should- you should just put this away. Don't te- don't- don't tell anyone about this idea. It's such a bad idea," right? And they turned us onto the idea that became KANA Software, which was something so mundane, boring, built a great company, but it was build systems to help these internet companies respond to consumer, inbound consumer email, customer support email. So we did that. We got turned onto that idea. Why did we pursue that? We weren't passionate about it. We became passionate about it. Especially Marc. You know, we just wanted to be entrepreneurs. We wanted to- to seize the moment of this new technology, this new world of the internet. We wanted to create something. We were motivated by the idea that anyone can do this. It- that's the way it felt.... and we tabled the thing we were really passionate about, because some people told us it was a bad idea. And I thank them for it, because it probably was a bad idea at the time-

   10. SBSteven Bartlett24:22

       Mm-hmm.

   11. MHMichael Horvath24:22

       ... it would have failed, right? But where we were in 2007, 2008, that idea was still in our back of our minds, that idea came to the front. That's what we went and said, "Now, what has changed?" Well, a lot has changed, right? Right? So you have Facebook showing us that people are actually willing to share with people that they trust on the internet. You ... And before that, that, I'm sure Facebook wasn't the first to prove that out. But Facebook was the first to prove out that you can build community with the internet, at least in our world. Then you have GPS is in the thing that's in our pocket all of a sudden, this mobile phone has got a GPS chip in it, around to that, around that timeframe. And it's okay, it's not great. And so we're like, all those reasons why we shouldn't have started that company, are now reasons why we should start that company.

   12. SBSteven Bartlett25:10

       Mm-hmm.

   13. MHMichael Horvath25:10

       And it matches the things we had talked about in that time in Vail. Could we build something that people would use every day? Would they tell their friends about it? Would it help them get out and live a more, a life of more adventure? Would they, would it be trusted? Would it be a trusted brand? And we're like, "Hey, wait a minute. The universe is putting this in, right in front of us, this is all coming together. And why not? Why not this?" And in some ways, we denied that it could be that easy, that this idea we had had so many, you know, more than a decade earlier, could be the thing that we're now gonna go and start a comp- We had denied that for a while and tried these other things first. We explored other places in a very, very much the way that you would say, "The way entrepreneurs should do it." And we said, "No, we gotta do this. This is the thing we..." And we, and then, and then it says, you know, you, you meet some people, you talk to about th- about your idea with some people, and you see this has got some legs. This is, other people have had similar thoughts and you can get them on board. Uh, the person we met, Dave- Davis Kitchel, instrumental in how we got this company started. Um, he happened to be living in the same small town I was living in. Eh, he was trying to work out technology to use GPS to compare the time it took him to climb on his bicycle up a road by his house. He was just exploring this 'cause he was curious. And we thought, "Oh, that's interesting. I wonder if, I wonder if that could be somehow the basis of what you could do in this virtual locker room that we were building?" And that became Strava Segments. That was the earliest first conversation about something that became a fundamental part of what Strava is today, that would never have happened if we hadn't just opened up and said, "We're trying to build something that will help people b- live a more active life." And then Davy says, "Well, I'm working on something that helps moti- that might help motivate me to live, be more active. I wonder if it could be relevant to you?" Um,

5. 27:03 – 32:17

   How does Strava motivate people to stay healthy and fit?

   1. MHMichael Horvath27:03

      and he's still part of the team today, and Strava Segments is, is a big part of, um, what people know about Strava.

   2. SBSteven Bartlett27:09

      What have you learnt then from all these people who are changing their lives and exercising on Strava about what motivates us to go from a place of being sat on the sofa as I was in 2020 in March, as that first lockdown rolled in, to downloading Strava, and then, um, going on a fitness journey? There's something weird that happened to me, which I've, I've never really understood. If I look at the person I was before that date, I was a repeat failure at fitness. Like, every year, "This is gonna be the year," everyone knows the story, like, "No, this year is gonna be the year," then crashed out. Then, "No, this year is gonna be the year." And then I think I know what's changed, but is there data to prove or to suggest what it is that makes people finally get the bug, the fitness health bug?

   3. MHMichael Horvath27:56

      Hmm. Yeah. Great question. Um, what we see is that people who ... You do have to catch on and find something that keeps you in Strava. But the thing that happens to you when you use, when you're, when you're part of the community, when you're, when you stay with it, is you become more regular, you become m- become more, it's more frequent that you are active. You may not get faster. You might, but that's not ac- actually what we see. You're just more regularly active.

   4. SBSteven Bartlett28:28

      Consistent.

   5. MHMichael Horvath28:29

      More consistent.

   6. SBSteven Bartlett28:30

      Mm-hmm.

   7. MHMichael Horvath28:30

      And so what is, what is also true is that if you're more connected to other people, and it doesn't have to be a lot of people, I think most, m- m- the majority of it is you have to be connected to people you actually care about on Strava that motivate you to be a, more, more s- consistent. And so we say people keep people active, people motivate people to be active. And you may not realize it, but your journey motivated somebody else too. Your activities were the source of motivation for someone else, and they were more active, and they added their activities, and that was the motivation for someone else. So this has a way of exponentially increasing people's motivation, and I believe we can change over time, over the next many years, we can help people follow the same journey you took more and more regularly. So we may have started in a place which is, was more about the performance aspects of being active, how can you get faster, but we quickly realized it's about f- it's about consistency, it's about the experience. And that's, I think, where we keep people. You may come for the com- competition, you stay, you stay for the community. You may come for wanting to track your workout, but you stay because of the people you, you meet and how they motivate you and how it feels.

   8. SBSteven Bartlett29:50

      Am I missing anything then from, from my ... 'Cause I'm, 'cause I'm just personally very interested in this. The competition, the community, I guess s- striving towards a goal or a metric, sometimes for people it's improving my running time or something, um, I guess there's a sense, and that might be linked to the sense of like accomplishment of winning a badge or a reward or a little ping, you know, when I'm on my Peloton or when I'm on Strava, little something. Is there anything else that you, you've seen as a significant motivator for people to be engaged with their fitness journey?

   9. MHMichael Horvath30:22

      Well, it g- it's gotta make them feel better.

   10. SBSteven Bartlett30:24

       Feel better.

   11. MHMichael Horvath30:25

       Yeah, I definitely think there's... And we don't, I would say, we don't necessarily track that very well today. How do you actually feel about yourself now versus a month ago or two months ago? We track a lot about your physiological performance. We can show you you're better. Um, lower heart rate, lower resting heart rate, you, you, your, your fitness score has gone up. Um, all sorts of ways in which we can show progress physiologically. But I'm more interested in joy. I mean, that's, that's, we're, we're not good yet at measuring the meaning and joy we bring to people's lives. We'll get there, and I think... But that's a very important part of the equation, is that you feel better and you wanna keep feeling that good. So if I also look back on where we thought we were starting was, we were building something that had to be good enough for the best athletes in the world to use, because we believed they could motivate people who were not as committed to a active life to come on board. I actually don't think that that's- that is motivating, but I think the other stories are even more motivating. Stories like yours, like you've dramatically changed how you live your life. You put activity at the center, and that's incre- incredibly motivating for people, that they can see that that's possible. So I believe it's... Increased storytelling is really the key.

   12. SBSteven Bartlett31:43

       Yeah, yeah, yeah.

   13. MHMichael Horvath31:43

       I think that's, that's so Bing... You know, the idea of the gamification, yeah, we did that. But where we're leaning more, much more heavily now is tell- allowing the people in our community to tell their story and not just of today, "I went out for this run." Yeah, that's part of a story, but what does this amount to over time? How do I accomplish my goals? What are the things I'm striving for? How do I feel when I get there? And maybe that's where we can start measuring the joy a bit, bit more precisely.

   14. SBSteven Bartlett32:11

       Quick one. We bring in eight people a month to watch these conversations live here in the studio

6. 32:17 – 50:13

   How did the pandemic impact your work community?

   1. SBSteven Bartlett32:17

      when we're here in the UK and when we're in LA. If you wanna be one of those people, all you've gotta do is hit Subscribe. I was thinking, you know, one of my hypotheses, which I've shared many times but I feel compelled to ask you, is that my goals were bad. My goals were like... They, they were goals, and it's funny 'cause it kind of go- goes back to your first company, they were goals that could be completed. They were short term goals. This is when I crashed out and failed all the time. They were like surface level, superficial, get a six-pack for summer goals. And it wasn't until I... I mean, Simon Sinek sat, sat where you are and a couple of days ago, and one of the things he talks a lot about is infinite games, right?

   2. MHMichael Horvath32:51

      Mm-hmm.

   3. SBSteven Bartlett32:51

      And it's till I started setting goals that were more infinite, like you've done with Strava in trying to create a longstanding company, and those goals ended up just being about consistency. It was like, "Go to the gym today." Something I could never accomplish.

   4. MHMichael Horvath33:03

      Mm-hmm.

   5. SBSteven Bartlett33:03

      That was one of the turning points. The other was the pandemic, which is, I think it was, which was A, I mean, I mean, I know you saw a, a boost in customer acquisition.

   6. MHMichael Horvath33:11

      Oh, definitely.

   7. SBSteven Bartlett33:11

      I mean, that's when I joined, and I, I know the numbers. But, um, it, I think in part it was realizing that our health was fragile. Seeing that for the first time in my young life, that health was the foundation of everything I was doing.

   8. MHMichael Horvath33:21

      Mm-hmm. Yeah.

   9. SBSteven Bartlett33:22

      I actually wanna ask you a question about the pandemic. 'Cause you were talking earlier on about how at the boat house, you learned that community and connection and these things are so unbelievably important. One of the things the pandemic has robbed us of is community and connection. It's put us behind screens. So I was compelled to ask you, like what's Strava's take on this remote working thing? Where at your core you're about community and connection, and you know that more than anyone.

   10. MHMichael Horvath33:45

       Yeah. Yeah, it's been, it's been hard for us to find our way back to how it felt to work together. We were... Camaraderie is one of our other Cs. Um, commitment, craftsmanship, and cam- camaraderie. So camaraderie was important in that it showed up in a lot of ways. We had, um, a Wednesday workout. At lunchtime, we'd go out for runs or there was a group that walked, there was a group that met f- um, some mornings to go for a ride. So the camaraderie in sport, yes. There was camaraderie in, we spent a lot of time working together and building those relationships. It, it felt like a team inside the company. And the- that was really difficult to replicate, um, virtually. Um, but something else has happened, uh, as a result of pandemic that I think is a real beautiful outcome that will lead us back to camaraderie of a very different kind. We stopped putting location as a requirement on any job openings. Uh, so we've hired, we've more than doubled the team over the course of the last year and a half and have added people across the United States, in many different countries as well. Because if you're, if you have the talent and you were looking for it, w- you don't have to be in San Francisco or Denver, which were the two main offices we had, or Bristol, UK. Uh, we've now opened an office in Dublin. So we will have physical locations, but we have a, a, over 150 people today who don't have any one of our office locations as their home city. And the beautiful thing in that is these people all have incredible talent. Yes, they, they were the best people that we could have possibly attracted for the position. But they have such different lived experiences. They bring that to the work they do. So we're learning a ton about what camaraderie, where it really comes from. You... Maybe the, the thing we were creating wa- in the old, uh, in the pre-pandemic times was a camaraderie that was built around a, a le- very limited set of rituals, like going for that Wednesday workout. It turns out that a lot of people felt excluded by that because they weren't f- they didn't feel fast enough to go with the crew that was going out for a run. We have to find our ways to re- replicate or create something that is, is like that today. But what we have is a much broader set of stories that people can bring and tell about what they did before they joined Strava, what they're experiencing here. They're coming from all sorts of different locations. Uh, so that's, that's an aspect of, uh, what camaraderie can... We feel, when we got together in San Diego in person for a week at the beginning of March...... what came out was how much we already appreciate each other, even if we've never been together. We've ne- most of us had never met in person, but we, we already felt like we knew each other. And we didn't start with the awkward, "Hello, I'm so-and-so." It was hugs right away. It was this sense of this, this is the team that now is in the same place, and I want to carry that forward. I want, I want that to be like we put coins in the bank that'll get us for the next six months or a year till the next time we get together. But we can, we can create that sense of camaraderie, even if we're not sitting in the same office building or in the same room. Uh, so tha- that was a, that was eye-opening for me, that that, that was possible because of the pandemic, that we could create this very distributed, interesting, diverse workforce team that felt, everyone felt, for the most part, felt a sense of belonging.

   11. SBSteven Bartlett37:16

       What role does that play though, the in-person stuff? 'Cause I, 'cause we all here think it's great. That's why we're all here together.

   12. MHMichael Horvath37:21

       Yeah.

   13. SBSteven Bartlett37:21

       I mean, a lot of my, a lot of my personal team are here in this, in this, uh, studio. What role does that play though, and what value does that add? 'Cause I don't know, I think I, I think I have a real bias towards being with people. And I, maybe it's, I don't know what it is. Maybe, I don't know. I don't know what it is, but I like being with people. I, and I really struggle on Zoom. I don't feel like it's real.

   14. MHMichael Horvath37:41

       Yeah, me too. No, it's, uh, so I think what I, what what's, what is possible is, you can be with people, but you don't have to be with them all the time, that you can find the, the combination of... Um, my colleague Brian, who's here with me today, he lives in Dallas, uh, in the, uh, in, uh, in the Dallas area. And we have, we, we looked at the calendar, it turns out we've actually gotten together in person now, I think, you know, four out of the last five weeks, because business need brought us together. Yet, we've also spent time working in a virtual setting. So it's p- I call that putting the coins in the bank. We have enough opportunity to see each other in person to get that feeling that we can be more effective when we have to work virtually together. And I think we replicate that. That's the model I think that we, we can get to. It, if we only worked with people who are geographically proximate, we're losing that opportunity to work with people with a completely different set of experiences that they can bring to what we're trying to build. We're trying to serve athletes everywhere. There are, I think, easily over a billion people who wake up every day wanting to be active, and we want to meet them all. They're in every part of the world. And so that incredible diversity of the customer that we want to serve, it just moves us that we had to build a team that tries to match that diversity in the people on the team. And so if we're not there anywhere, you know, we, most of our team is still in the US, like as, as in terms of the, the geographic bias we have today. But I think that it, it's not possible to build that kind of a company, that kind of a team if you, if you require everyone to be in the same location all the time. So we give some a little on the ge- location, and we get a lot back in terms of what people can bring, the different experiences they can bring to us.

   15. SBSteven Bartlett39:30

       So, um, I guess the c- conclusive question here is like, what role does the corporations, or do you feel you play in adding... uh, you give community to your customers, but h- what role do you feel you play in giving that in p- like that in-person community outside of your home, out in the wild to your employees?

   16. MHMichael Horvath39:49

       Yeah. We, uh, we, we pay a lot of attention to it. I think it's important for people to do their best work, that they feel a sense of belonging. And I don't think this is just at Strava, I think it's true in a lot of places. And sometimes that, that is so much easier to do when you're in person and you're providing the breakfast and the, the, the, the s- the desk, and that's, that, that place that this is a, "I can feel productive in this space."

   17. SBSteven Bartlett40:12

       Mm-hmm.

   18. MHMichael Horvath40:12

       And yes, the colleagues around me are people with, you know, incredible talent, and I c- I'm energized by the, by the, by the, by the group, by the, the setting that I'm in. Um, and I think for many of our team, they really missed that, um, during the pandemic. They would love it back, to come back, but it's really difficult to, to bring it back right now. It's, it's gonna take us time to work our way back.

   19. SBSteven Bartlett40:35

       Why?

   20. MHMichael Horvath40:37

       There are two reasons I see, and I, I've, I've thought a lot about this in the sense of Justin m- a- our Strava's example. One is, we have programmed our lives to be remote, reprogrammed our lives to be remote. And so we are stuck in patterns that are really difficult to get out of. Just like in the beginning of the pandemic it was really difficult to get into that pattern, we were forced to. We're not forced to get out of it now. Strava's not forcing people back into the office. So it's difficult, with everything from how you organize your, your day. Maybe you have children or other dependents at home you have to take care of. You have, uh, pets, you have, um, you have worked, worked out a routine that works really well for working from home. And so getting people back into the offices, so getting over those, those hurdles and frictions. And so what do we do? We, we make it more enticing. Um, Wednesdays, we offer lunch. Um, we are trying to organize Wednesday as the day if you're gonna pick one day a, a week, maybe one day a month, make it a Wednesday. Get people, "Oh, this wasn't so bad. I got over the friction that one day. Maybe I'll do it again." That's just the, that's like the mundane reason why it's

   21. NANarrator41:41

       (laughs)

   22. MHMichael Horvath41:41

       ... why it's hard. The second reason, I think is more fundamental, is like it is really difficult to be w- halfway, halfway back to work. Coordination of either being all remote or all in the office is a lot easier, and we're not ready to go all in the office. We'll lose people on our team we don't wanna lose. That's, that's like a, uh, maybe a, uh, too much of a calculating way to think about it. It's more like that I don't think we'll get the best work out of the people who we force to come back in and they stay on the team.

   23. SBSteven Bartlett42:09

       Mm-hmm.

   24. MHMichael Horvath42:10

       Um, and that just may, that, that is what will take more time and a more of a sense of, a sense of security, uh, that this is gonna be a good experience. I'm not gonna, number one, just my, my health is not gonna suffer. The health of the people I love around me won't suffer. So we're not there yet, maybe in terms of a, from a medical or scientific basis yet-... but I think it's more important, it doesn't really matter what the sign says if, if what you feel is, "I don't feel secure and safe when I go to the office." That's what I, I think is going to be much harder to overcome. And that's the part where coordination just makes it really difficult to re- replicate, if you don't have everyone just say, "Yeah, I'm, I work from the office." Or during working from home, you lose, you lose... All those things are true. I mean, we, we lo- we had that great sense of disconnection. Ugh, the days of endless video meetings and, um, trying to do whatever you could to get that sense of energy you get by being around another human being. Um, uh, it was a struggle.

   25. SBSteven Bartlett43:08

       Did you find in that, in that period, you lost employees? So, from my perspective with my company, we had about 700 people around the world. One of our big USPs we thought was community. In our, that's what we, that's one of our, the reasons why you'd come and work at our company, Social Chain, was community, the culture in the office, and all of those things. We offered flexibility, so people generally decided what days they worked, et cetera. But the minute the pandemic rolled in and everyone had to stay at home in their boxer shorts, in their one-bed studio apartment, it felt like people then started to make the decision about where they wanted to work, based on, "Well, if I'm gonna be in my boxer shorts looking at the screen anyway, I might as well get paid more to do it."

   26. MHMichael Horvath43:46

       Mm. Mm.

   27. SBSteven Bartlett43:47

       And (laughs) we, I, we saw a little... It was the first time in our history where we saw people just leaving for... And we asked them why they're leaving, they go, "More money."

   28. MHMichael Horvath43:54

       Mm.

   29. SBSteven Bartlett43:55

       Before then, it didn't matter.

   30. MHMichael Horvath43:56

       Mm-hmm.
7. 50:13 – 55:35

   What were the hardest challenges you faced when starting up?

   1. SBSteven Bartlett50:13

      my girlfriend likes, but for me, salted caramel is the one. (paper crinkles) What was the hardest moment at the start of the Strava growth that you faced? At the start, in those opening years?

   2. MHMichael Horvath50:27

      Yeah. We opened, like, we created the, the company, got the founding team, 2000, beginning of 2009. We were only web-based, so you had to, you couldn't track your workout with your mobile phone on Strava. You used a third-party GPS device, an example of one was a Garmin, um, 305 Cycle Computer. It was largely cycling only, to start with. You really, we didn't encourage any other, any other sport type. But you, you had to have, you had to pay for that piece of equipment, you had to plug it into your laptop or desktop computer, transfer the file and upload it to Str- it was incredible friction, right? So we, we did not grow fast at all in the beginning. It was like so many... You had to really want to try it to experience this thing. You, you, and it's not because mobile wasn't a thing you could do, we just didn't do it. There were companies that started largely with, they did, maybe they had a website, but they, they qui- pretty quickly built a mobile app, companies like RunKeeper. They were one of the first 100 apps in the App Store. Imagine that. Now there are, I don't know, millions of apps in the App Store, but...

   3. SBSteven Bartlett51:34

      How are RunKeeper doing?

   4. MHMichael Horvath51:36

      Well, they got bought. I mean, that's the, a lot of these companies that were our c- we launched into a pretty crowded space back in 2009. There were at least 10, maybe more companies that were doing something you would call activity tracking with GPS. Most of them had a mobile apps, and we did not. RunKeeper was acquired in, I wanna say 2015, 2014? By one of the big sports brands. Um, MapMyFitness was acquired by Under Armour, Runtastic was acquired by Adidas. By the way, none of these acquirers ever came to talk to Strava. Can't tell you why, would have to, you'd have to go, have to go talk to them. Maybe we were perceived as we were too niche, because we were perceived as only focusing on more hardcore athletes, and not the masses. Wasn't true. But in any case, what, what was true back in 2009, what, we had, we had built, you know, the wrong, the wrong experience for what ultimately would drive community growth, which is, it needs to be on your mobile phone, it needs to be, you know, kind of all on your mobile phone, you, it, the mobile phone is not just the tracking device, that then you then go to the website to look at and have the experience. You need to build the experience on mobile, and we were really late to that. We were so late, um, and so by 2012, we finally have a mobile team that's building an experience. So three years after founding, two and a half years after founding the company, we are finally in the game, if you will.

   5. SBSteven Bartlett53:06

      How did you know you were wrong?

   6. MHMichael Horvath53:08

      We were wrong in the sense that we weren't seeing the community growth. We were, we were building an experience that really people was v- people, once they got through all those frictions to get started, they stuck around. They were committed. They were, they were engaged, they converted to the subscription, which is the core of our business, is you can use Strava for free as long as you like, but the best that we have to offer, um, kind of the, if you're gonna put something, you say you're gonna, you're gonna invest in yourself and, and try to live a more active life, you, the subscription really helps you. It gives you m- more ways to stay motivated, more fun, more ways to discover what's great around you, so the subscription has all these great things. And it was there from, from the early days. We, we didn't wait to launch, we launched it in the end of 2009. So we had a lot of people who were found- we had, who, that we had a high conversion rate, if, if, if you want. We had a low community size, but a high conversion rate, so we knew we were onto something. And so what taught us we were wrong was we, we actually said, "Okay, we better build a mobile app." And we built one that basically just tracked your workout. You could, you could record a, a workout to get it into Strava. We saw off-the-charts community growth in the first week.

   7. SBSteven Bartlett54:15

      Really?

   8. MHMichael Horvath54:16

      We were adding, prior to the mobile app, we were adding maybe 100 new users, 100 new athletes a week. We added 10,000 a day on the launch of the, of our mobile app. We got featured in the App Store, that was 100,000 in a day.

   9. SBSteven Bartlett54:30

      Wow.

   10. MHMichael Horvath54:30

       Why? Because it's such an easy entry point. You don't have to pay for anything, you already have the phone in your pocket-

   11. SBSteven Bartlett54:36

       Mm-hmm.

   12. MHMichael Horvath54:36

       ... you're just downloading, um, our, our app from the App Store-... the app store is pushing you, us out to-

   13. SBSteven Bartlett54:42

       Mm-hmm.

   14. MHMichael Horvath54:43

       ... a community we would never have had t- the money to meet, from a marketing perspective. There was only one problem. We built the wrong ... there again, we learned, we built the wrong experience. We, we thought, you track the workout on your mobile phone, and then you go to the website to see your results. And that's not ... people are like, people aren't gonna do that. We, we ... so we had to rebuild that, that app, and that, uh, rebuild the experience to be all, all completely on mobile. But the idea that what can unlock the community growth is the form factor, reducing the frictions, getting ... meeting people where i- giving them a chance to onboard into something, without having to go through a lot of hoops, jump through a lot of things. Basic stuff, but those, those were like, the earliest things that we, that we did. Did prove that We could build something that was highly engaging. We just couldn't get people into the, into the experience in the early days, until we built the mobile apps.

8. 55:35 – 1:00:40

   Work-life balance & stepping down

   1. MHMichael Horvath55:35

   2. SBSteven Bartlett55:35

      As you're going through that iterative experience to figure out how to scale the business and where the product market fit is, how are you doing in your personal life at that stage on the B, the balance?

   3. MHMichael Horvath55:47

      Yeah, I mean, this is where, going back to when Mark and I were thinking of starting another company, we were saying, "It's gonna be different this time, right? We're not gonna let it consume us. We're gonna find a way to keep the B." In my personal case, that did not last more than the first year. I, uh, we, we thought we were gonna build a company. I was living in Hanover, New Hampshire, which is this very small community in, um, about two hours north of Boston, in the state of New Hampshire. It's in the woods. Um, Dartmouth College is there, and they had a ... they hired me to teach entrepreneurship in 2000. And so I ... that's what brought us there, my family, my wife and four kids. So we arrived when my, my youngest daughter, she's now 20- turning 24 this year, she was turning two that year. So you can ... like we had this very little ... you know, we have four kids in five years, and they're very young kids, we're gonna raise them in Hanover. And I was like, "We gotta ... I gotta live in Hanover." And Mark is in the Bay Area. He's living in California. While he's gotta live, he's gotta live in Portola Valley, so we were gonna build this company on two coasts, and it was gonna be, you know, a team in New Hampshire and a team in California. And by 2010, it was like, that's clearly not going to be the case. The, the ... to hire the talent we need, it's probably gonna be the team in San Francisco that's gonna be the headquarters. And so I start flying to San Francisco more and more regularly all throughout 2010. Instead of going like once every two months, I'm going once a month, staying for five days. Now, it's once every two weeks, staying for five days, and then it's ... that gets more and more frequent. So I'm definitely not on the B. The balance has gone out the window. And this was 2010 through the end, almost to the end of 2013, where I'm CEO of the company, we're growing, we're growing this c- ... community is now surpassing a million members in the community, and we get to the point where I think we're just shy of 10 million by the time that I'm stepping down, and you know what, uh, it's a very sad story, but my wife was diagnosed with a terminal illness in September of 2013. She had had, uh, been diagnosed, she had had breast cancer, gone through treatment at, in 2004, long before we start, started Strava, and it had re- had to come back, and it was, uh, it was ... You know, those, those first months, we weren't sure exactly how long she, she would have to live. The doctors were, "We gotta do a lot of tests," and, um, I'm, I'm still living this dual life between New Hampshire and California, 'cause she, she didn't move to California with me. We didn't move the family. That was a choice we made, to remain in New Hampshire, um, as the home base for the family. And so what ends up happening at the end of 2013 is, um, I step down from running the company. Mark steps in as the CEO. I, um, I'm in a supportive function, but I have a lot of flexibility, and I moved back to New Hampshire. And, um, for the next three and a half years until Ana passed away, I ... that was my, my priority became taking care of my family, taking ... doing what I could to take what time we had left to make it as meaningful as possible, and all sorts of things we can talk about, of finding meaning to the, to the last day. There's a lot of lessons learned there, but what I was ... That's not, that's a different kind of balance, mm, I wanna be honest. It's like, not necessarily what I, what I expect. You know, when we say balance for, as a value, it, it feels like what we do is we pass through that balance point over and over again in our lives. We never quite seize it and hold onto it and feel like we live in it, but it's something we experience, we go through over and over again, and we try to return to it. And it's the act of trying to return to it that I hold out as like, that's what I'm motivated by, by putting balance into the core values of Strava, by having it be something I focus on in my life. I want to return to it as often as I can, even if I won't be able to stay in it all the time. So leaving Strava, that was the, that was definitely not balance. Moving into caring for my family, there were periods where it came in, definitely found the, a flow and a harmony and a balance, but then times where it, you know, just, it completely is out the window and everything is all hands on deck on what's the next treatment we're gonna try to find for Ana? Where are we gonna ... In one case, we had to move and we chose to move back to, move to San Francisco so she could be in a clinical trial of a novel therapy that showed some promise, and these were the kinds of examples where balance just didn't, wasn't there either. You, you had to work at it. And then in the balance is where I think you find the most meaningful moments.

9. 1:00:40 – 1:08:36

   What did you learn from the passing of your wife

   1. SBSteven Bartlett1:00:41

      You said about the passing of your wife, Anna, in that period, you were trying to find meaning till the last day, and you've learned a lot about what that is.

   2. MHMichael Horvath1:00:49

      Mm-hmm.

   3. SBSteven Bartlett1:00:49

      What is that?

   4. MHMichael Horvath1:00:54

      You have to, you have to think of it as not as the goal is to get to something, some state of health, or physical ability, or mental ability to do something like a dream, or a trip you want to take. It's, it's the, the day that is the day you're, you're living in, it's, take it as it comes today. And having, having a, living a life where... We're all terminal, by the way. Turns out, we're all on our way to some point where we say we're on our last day. But what you experience when you're going through regular measurement of the progress of a disease like that, uh, because that's the way you're, you're, the medical treatment is, we're monitoring the disease to know when to change therapy, when to add other drugs that will help handle the sim- the side effects of all the therapy, when to say, "It's time to stop the therapy." The meaning can't be, "Extend my life." At some point, if that's your goal, you will not find meaning in that goal. It, it will be out the window. So you, instead, you have to find meaning in, "What can this day bring?" It starts by, "How do I feel today?" Um, if you string together a bunch of days where you feel you've gotten something out of the day, that's a meaningful life, and you can find that to the very end. And just, I learned so much from watching Anna progress through that and, uh, give, give to people around her, but also give to herself. She was an artist. Um, worked in her studio to nearly the very last day, was working on projects that she knew she would never finish, but she was motivated by what she could experience of working on those pieces of art. She did leave behind, like, "If, if this were gonna continue, here's what I would do with it." Um, my youngest is an artist. I, I know what's motivating her is, like, she wants to get to some of those pieces and see if she can bring them to some version of what her mom had left behind, what, what she had indicated, "This could be something like this." And I think Mira will bring it to something else. She'll, she'll add her own thing to it, but that, that was what Anna... You know, I think she got there. Struggling against the end is not the way to find the meaning.

   5. SBSteven Bartlett1:03:27

      How has that shifted your... 'Cause experiences like that, I imagine, um, teach you other profound things about the point of all of this. And I, I spent much of my early years thinking the point of all of this was to buy a Lamborghini, right? And then even the pandemic was one of the catalysts that made me realize there was, as I said earlier, this tectonic plate that mattered a little bit more. And then it was really interesting to watch, um, how... I had a Rolex at the time. I don't have one anymore, but my Rolex was exchanged for my Apple Watch, and there's something quite symbolic in that. It went from being about signaling status to others to caring about my health. And when I think about the loss of someone, um, especially someone y- young, uh, someone close to you as well, what are the, the, what is the priority shift that happens? It, you know, and presuming there is one, but is there a priority shift that happens, a different perspective on what matters that maybe an entrepreneur like me needs to hear?

   6. MHMichael Horvath1:04:28

      Hmm. I don't, I don't know that I knew this when she was going through her last, those last few years or even the, the few years after she passed away. I don't think I was, I was... I think I prepared a lot for how to live my life caring for her. I wasn't prepared for how to live my life when she was gone. But what I've come to, I think is, it's, it's, this is, again, maybe somewhat obvious, is that the relationship you can build with some, an individual, and in this case, my wife, the person I, we met... Where did we meet? In your... (laughs) We met in my backyard. When I wa- when I started grad school at Northwestern University, I rented this coach house, which is like a, a little carriage house behind a bigger home. And I was walking to the front of the house one morning to get my mail and walking through the backyard, and there's this young woman in her pajamas talking to my landlord. And this is Anna. She's, she turns, turns out she's a friend of my landlord, had babysit, sat for her children when she was going to college at the same school I was getting my PhD. This is Northwestern University in Chicago, in Evanston, Illinois. So I meet Anna in, in my backyard, and, um, she's not living in Evanston. She's living in Cincinnati, Ohio, but she, she comes back to visit a few months later, and a few months after that, we're married. And so we start... We were, we were babies, right? Um, I, I got married the day after I turned 25. I mean, we're, she was 23. We were not yet fully-formed human beings, right? We're, but we're now building a life together, and we went through all sorts of h- highs and lows in our marriage, and we had the, we have four children, and we, we live... Otherwise, like, this life where you'd say, "We built something together," I look back on that and say, like, "The best thing I've built is two things: my friendship with Mark and my marriage with Anna." Those, I hope those are, those are the things I look back on apart from everything else and say, at the end, when, when my day comes, like, "Those were the things, where meaning comes from. That's where..."... if I go back to what's most important, it's the relationships with the people who are closest to you in your life. And then that extends to the people who are also important, but they may not- you may not have that same bond. So what did I learn? Well, losing that person is extremely difficult. You're left with, I was l- I don't want to speak for everyone who goes through this, but it's, there is an aspect of you don't know which way is up anymore. You're off script. You are, whatever you thought your life was going to be about, it is, you're- you're questioning everything. And, um, in my case, I had four children, who were 17 to 22 in, at, in age at that time. And we pulled together. This is, I wear this bracelet. This is, I gave one to each of my children. I, they wear it every day. We get, we- this is on the day of Ana's funeral. And we pulled together and we helped each other through that darkest, darkest moment. And again, it's the relationships. And it's, we're- we've- we're a normal family. We got our highs and lows. Um, we got, we got dysfunction, we got function. You know, it's, we've got it all. But there's something in there that's like, we know what we can, that we can count on each other. We know that, that is at the core. I want to, I want to look at that as like the model for what is possible, even inside something like a company, even in something like the Strava community, that- that- that's happening, that people are building relationships. So if Strava is like, what is it all about? It's about motivating people to be active through the relationships they build with other people.

   7. SBSteven Bartlett1:08:34

      And you returned to the company

10. 1:08:36 – 1:13:21

    Returning to Strava

    1. SBSteven Bartlett1:08:38

       several years after Ana passed.

    2. MHMichael Horvath1:08:41

       Hmm.

    3. SBSteven Bartlett1:08:44

       That- that section between Ana passing and your return to the company, you- you- you almost referenced being somewhat disorientated in terms of not knowing... Were you- were you double-guessing whether to go back to the company?

    4. MHMichael Horvath1:08:57

       I wasn't thinking of going back. Um...

    5. SBSteven Bartlett1:08:58

       Really?

    6. MHMichael Horvath1:08:59

       No, I wasn't. We had recruited in someone to replace Mark as CEO. Uh, so Mark stepped down in May of 2017, so just a few months after Ana passed away. I wasn't thinking about returning at all. I was, you know, I was, that was (inhales) a... I knew I had to discover what was next, but I wasn't considering that it was going to be returning to Strava. So what got me closer was that Strava started to need some help. Um, by 2018, I step in as interim CFO and head of people. Um, by the middle of 2019, we're looking at a pretty challenging environment for the company. We were, um, we were about 100, 200 people in terms of team size. We were not profitable. Um, and we had to figure out a way to get to sustainability very quickly. We were not able to raise capital at that time, uh, given the state of the business. And so we made a decision to make a leadership change. And I (pause) would- I recall from the conversations with the board, I want to characterize it as like, I feel like I was the least bad of all the bad options, 'cause there weren't very many good options at that time. We weren't going to be able to recruit someone in given the state of the company. I don't know if I was ready to dive back in. This is, I'm still really doubting whether, what my place is right now. But there was one thing that Mark and I were c- convinced about, which was inside what we had, what was there, there was a great company. We had, at that time, 50 million people in the community. So 50 million registered athletes. We were not yet profitable, but we, but we... November 2nd, 2019, my second day back leading the company, we get up on stage and we say, "Here's- here's the path back. This is how we're going to do this. We're going to focus nearly 100% of this company on our customer, and that's the person who wants to lead an active life. That's the athlete. We're going to build this for them, and we're gonna, we're gonna build something so good that they're going to pay for it. And that's the subscription." So we focused the company on that goal to build the best subscription service for the athlete. And the team responded. They dug in. We climbed that mountain. And we did have help with pandemic bringing us a lot more people. We doubled during the pandemic from 50 million to, I think we're now we're at 99 million registered athletes. So we have, we, the ana- uh, the team knows I love analogies. We had the right sails up when the wind started to blow. We got that tailwind from the pandemic and it, it accelerated our business. And so now we can imagine a very different outcome as a result, uh, for this company. We were, 2019, it was how do we get this back on track? Now it's, how do we make the most of this opportunity? And for me personally, I've had to really rethink everything from what's my purpose? What- what- what motivates me to be the person who can lead this company? And what I'm reconnecting with is, this is what we intended all along, is that Mark and I create something that we want to stick with and stay with for decades. So finding that path back personally out of the abyss that I was in, is tied integrally to what Strava means for that future for me. I, you know, I don't at all ascribe to the idea that I saved Strava, but Strava saved me, brought me back from something.... and where we have now, what we have to look forward to. What we can build, what we can imagine for the future of the company and the community we're building for, is a much, much richer experience, doing more for athletes all the time, investing in what they'll al- they'll be able to experience years from now. How it will be a part of their active life for as long as they live, because we've built sustainability into the core of the business.

    7. SBSteven Bartlett1:13:20

       One of

11. 1:13:21 – 1:16:07

    Difficult moments in Strava

    1. SBSteven Bartlett1:13:21

       the-

    2. MHMichael Horvath1:13:21

       Yeah?

    3. SBSteven Bartlett1:13:21

       So, so one of the really difficult things in 2019, when you're changing the m- the fundamental model of a business under the pressure of a cash crunch, as they call it-

    4. MHMichael Horvath1:13:35

       Mm-hmm.

    5. SBSteven Bartlett1:13:35

       ... where cash is running out 'cause you're not profitable-

    6. MHMichael Horvath1:13:37

       Yeah.

    7. SBSteven Bartlett1:13:37

       ... and you can't raise, is you gotta let some people go. And it sometimes feels like a bit of a contradiction of values, that when you're a family, you know, you have that kind of f- family community connection, you really care about the people, but then there's got to be a decision at some point to say goodbye to some of them, involuntarily, and for the greater interest of the company. You, you had to do that, right, in 2019?

    8. MHMichael Horvath1:14:02

       Yeah, that was November 1st. So November 2nd was, how we're gonna get this company back to winning again. November 1st was, we have to let, in that time, it was a little over thir- I think 32 people go, out of, out of the 200 or so that were there. So, uh, a really tough way for your first day back on the job. But what was even harder was that, the deep wound it, it created in that family. That sense of, "We didn't think this would happen here. How come we didn't know?" Um, that feeling of, "Can I trust leadership?" And they didn't know me. I wasn't, I wasn't like I was a host. I was not around nearly, uh, for, for most of the people in the company at that time. They weren't hired during the time that I was the CEO the first time. They knew that I was a founder. They knew I'd been helping out as an interim CFO, but I wasn't really a presence for, in, in leadership for them. So, uh, uh, there was just the basic level of needing to rebuild trust, needing to say, "Not only do we have a plan, but you're, you're a really important part of the plan, and here's how I show that you can trust me," or, "Here's how I wanna build a relationship so that, over time, you will trust me." That period of time in November and December and January, I remember, I think, just the, the level of how much we thought about every word we said was aimed at the objective of getting people to believe again. Compared to today, where I think people believe, and maybe what we're changing, what w- what we focus on now is getting them to understand what our potential is. They believe that we are going to be successful, but I think we, today, we're, the, I focus so much of my effort is making sure people connect with what our, what our potential really is and how we're gonna get there. Whereas in, in 2019, it was all about believing we even had one, a future.

Episode duration: 1:25:40