Co-founder and Chairman of Strava: A podcast with Mark Gainey
I've been a big admirer of Strava since its early days. In fact, I have 950 activities on it as of today.
It's something about the simplicity of the product, the ability to connect any device, and the awesome brand and community they built.
For some facts, Strava was founded in 2009, has more than 100m active users, and is in more than 195 countries worldwide.
Thus I was very excited about this conversation with Mark Gainey, the co-founder and executive Chairman of Strava.
We spoke about the early days, his pre-history with his co-founder Michael, being in the rowing club at Harvard University, and how they thought about the idea of Strava.
Then, Mark spoke about focusing on a specific customer from the beginning and ‘The Starbucks Effect.'
The first integration was with a Garmin watch, but distribution changed widely with the introduction of the phone app.
The conversation also was about how wearables are used to generate content in the platform, which helps the user stay engaged, and improve the experience over time.
Mark also spoke about their commitment to making it easier and easier for friends to support each other when they're active and how they can help to build the tools for the ecosystem to thrive.
