In this podcast, we connected with Robin Thurston, founder of MapMyFitness, former Chief Digital Officer of Under Armour, and CEO of Outside.
Robin: Not that this is your interview, but I'm curious, so I have to ask - what made you (Kyriakos) build Terra?
Kyriakos: Over the years, I've spent much time using wearables. From my days in the special forces, I used everything from the first Fitbit, the first Pebble, the First Nike, etc. I love wearables, but I always had the same problem - my heart rate remained in the Polar chest strap, my workout in my Garmin, and I was using MapMyFitness back in the day to track my runs. The issue was that connecting all the data to any app was impossible. Like, what about Spotify? What about Netflix? What about any other app that needed access to that information? That's basically how I realized when I was speaking to my co-founder, Raouf, who was working in the same space. It was basically a personal need.
Kyriakos: Robin, I started reading about your background, and I think if I do a breakdown of all the things you did in the past - we would need a 10-hour-long podcast. Firstly, I read that you were a great cyclist; how did you start cycling?
Robin: Well, I was lucky that I grew up in Colorado, where you could go skiing during the winters and cycling during the summers. Cycling, to me was certainly socially driven, but I was also very competitive, which led me to what I would say was a "semi-professional" career. We had a massive cycling event here in Colorado for elite junior riders called the Zinger Mini Classic. Throughout my career, I would say I was more of a bottle carrier and breakaway chaser than I was winning the races, haha.
Even though cycling in the early 90s was a controversial time for the sport, I felt very lucky to travel across Europe and learn three languages along the way. I even have friends in Europe to this day that I speak with every month. It was my four-year college experience in some ways. I loved living in Switzerland - I lived two years in New Chateau and two years in Lugano, and I just had such an amazing experience in Europe.
In 1994, I moved back to the US, but I still love cycling and riding to this day. I mean I ride about 7,000 miles a year, with practically the same consistency - I love the bike, I love everything about it. I completed an undergraduate and a graduate degree in finance back in Colorado, and my first job was in a company called Lipper that did mutual fund analytics and big data. I was employee #35 at the company, and it was the first stock option that I got paid out when Reuters bought us in 1998. I was like "Wow, this is how equity works?" It was kind of my first experience in the startup world.
Kyriakos: How did MapMyFitness come about?
Robin: Back in 2005, I was working at a company called Wellington Management in Boston and traveling on a cycling trip to Switzerland. We were sitting at this table at dinner, and somebody was like "Oh, it'd be great if I could come to Switzerland and know these roads that you know, but without you being there." And I was like "I don't think that exists" - something that allowed me to create a map of a ride and send it to you via a link, which allowed you to ride that map.
Imagine, before the early days of the iPhone, we used to print PDFs in four-by-four format, and you put them in your pocket. That's why I think we were really lucky timing-wise in that even before the iPhone; people were creating millions of maps on top of MapMy. It was a really good product at the time, built on top of the Google Maps API, and actually, my co-founder, Kevin Callahan, now works at outside as the Head of Product.
Our timing was very good because we built two of the first one hundred iPhone apps.
MapMyRun and MapMyRide were apps number 98 and 99, respectively. We were in the App Store by July 2008, and then we got featured by AT&T for one of the apps in November of the same year. It was a fairytale, our apps were displayed everywhere on iPhones with downloads, users, and everything. I don't want to say the rest is history, but Kevin Plank came along from Under Armour and was a big MapMyRun user. He simply called me and said, "hey, do you want to sell the company?"
Kyriakos: You launched early in the App Store. Why did you launch in the App Store, and how could you do it?
Robin: It was interesting because we knew mobile was a good use case for us, so we competed in this Google Android competition in December of 2007. We started building an Android app, and you can still actually see the video of the App up on YouTube - basically the original MapMyFitness app. We knew this app was a good use case, so we were hanging out and waiting for Google because we thought they would first have an App Store. Then we realized Apple would beat them to it, and we just pivoted and built an iPhone app as quickly as possible.
Kyriakos: You mentioned the importance of being first, and the publication from AT&T helped. From a distribution standpoint, did it help to be first in the App Store?
Robin: Oh yeah, because we got featured by Apple and Google all the time. Remember, this was well before Strava and hundreds of other running and cycling apps. The AT&T ad was huge as in the beginning, they had exclusive distribution rights to iPhones in the US and we were one of the main app icons on that ad. They ran that ad across every major publication in the US. It was like everybody was downloading MapMy.
We would literally have weeks with millions of downloads where our servers would break, and everything would fall over. Everyone rushed, but it was great - I mean it was just really good timing.
Kyriakos: You mentioned you reached a destination when Kevin Plank from Under Armour reached out. Why did you decide to sell?
Robin: I always say that once you take capital, there are only three decisions as an entrepreneur. There are not forty, there are three. You either go: 1) Bust: you go bankrupt because you run out of money and no one gives you more money, 2) Sell to a strategic, or 3) Go public.
Once you take the capital, there are only three decisions as an entrepreneur.
I wish I could tell entrepreneurs there are like twenty other roads, paths, and everything - there's just not. Once you take institutional money, I know NEXT Ventures is an investor in you; you're done - those are the three decisions. After that, it's just a question of time - how quickly will that stuff happen?
I think that is what I realized with MapMy - we had like 20,000,000 users and about $20,000,000 in revenue when Under Armour bought us. I just realized that to build a public company it was going to take at least another decade.
Kyriakos: What three things have you learned from a marketing perspective?
Robin: To take Kevin, when I was at Under Armour, we celebrated the $3 billion revenue mark, and he still really sweats the details - even to this day. Regardless of an event, a marketing campaign, or a product - every detail had to be perfect. And he would push people really hard to make sure that people understood. Like he was just obsessed over things like stitching, where the laces were placed on the shoes, and for example, how big the logo was. Secondly, he was an amazing storyteller. His ability to draw the audience in and create a narrative around what he was doing was incredible. Lastly, Kevin is really good at relationship building. He was just so good at being interconnected with other humans.
Kyriakos: How was the culture in MapMy, and how did it change when you went to Under Armour?
Robin: Our culture was very technology driven. We were constantly iterating. It was a very agile environment.
We didn't really care if something was going to break for the consumer - we just wanted to get it in front of the consumer.
For example, Kevin and I would sit in on product meetings on Monday mornings and we would go through the three things we wanted to develop that were most customer driven. We would go through Zendesk methodically line by line, and we would do that every single week. Bottom line, MapMy was a customer and technology-driven company.
Under Armour, on the other side, was built more around American sports leagues such as baseball, basketball, and football. It was an innovation company on the product side, but not a technology-driven company. Kevin pushed us to launch hardware, such as the HealthBox, that included a heart rate strap and a wearable.
Kyriakos: I bought it, I remember it well!
Robin: Oh yeah, HealthBox was the first hardware that I built. Then we built the connected shoe hover, which was also a great product. To this day, I still think it's the best-built integrated technology shoe that's on the market that syncs with MapMy automatically when you get home.
Kyriakos: Outside looks like a very different way of doing business to your past experiences of building MapMy, working with Kevin at Under Armour, and your last startup before Outside. How did you buy Outside, and what did you see in the company in the first place?
Robin: Well, I mean part of the story is what happened at Under Armour. At Under Armour we bought eight companies and merged them into Under Armour Connected Fitness. We owned MyFitnessPal, which was arguably one of the most successful companies in the category. So we tried to paint this complete picture of your health - your weight, food intake, calorie intake, motion, sleep - everything connected in one ecosystem, which was called Under Armour Record.
Under Armour could have built a billion-dollar subscription business if they got into the content.
I believe that Under Armour could have built a billion-dollar subscription business if they got into the content. That was back in 2015 after we'd done all the acquisitions and Record was launched. I was not convinced that hardware was "the thing," and I was not on the same page with Kevin about hardware.
Kyriakos: How did you come to that realization?
Robin: Well, I just felt that we needed something that brought people back to the platform more often. I also saw trends of what was happening in the industry. I went to Kevin at the end of 2015 and said, "Hey, I think we could build a billion-dollar subscription business if we got into the content." Kevin was just like, "Man, we've invested a billion dollars in connected fitness - I simply don't have any more money." I was basically like - "okay, I'm going to go."
I told myself, I'm going to take off because I don't see how we can get to a really stable business - which I thought was going to be around subscription and not hardware. But Kevin was a product guy, he wanted the physicality of the health box. He wanted to touch, feel, and see it in a store. I understood that, but it just wasn't what I thought would make a big difference in the business.
Kyriakos: How was it different from when you raised funds to when you raised funds with Outside?
Robin: I learned a lot. Between MapMy, Helix, and Under Armour, I pitched 1,000 pitches to investors. No joke. So you curate the meetings and what you learn from those meetings, and every time you learn something new. Another thing is that I would say in sales, you sell your API for connectivity to third parties. The key is that you have to know when to move on, and you have to come to the realization that this person right now - it's not their focus, I got to move on to the next person.
My thing is my optimism - no one can get me down. I could get hit in the face five times and still get up and smile at you.
So I think you have to have a lot of that when it comes to investors because so many will say no.
Kyriakos: This resilience - does it stem from your cycling days?
Robin: I think a little bit. Also as a kid, I was raised by a single mom. In my childhood, we never made more than $25,000 a year. She was working three jobs and barely getting by. Some of it stems from my childhood, but a lot comes from cycling as well. I joke that I lost a thousand times in cycling.
I love when Michael Jordan said "I missed the hoop a thousand times," - and I'm like yeah, that's fair, but you've also hit a lot and won many championships. I on the other side, have no such records, haha!
Kyriakos: You have built arguably the biggest media conglomerate in our space - how did you approach it?
Robin: Firstly, we knew that we wanted to build a single sign-on. We want to build tools that track consumer behavior, like what products they purchased, how far they ran, how much they ate, etc. We wanted it all in one place so we could actually analyze that customer. So I knew I wanted to do the same thing - I wanted to know if you registered for an event and used trail forks to look at five different articles related to buying a new bicycle. I wanted to bring all of these aspects together in one centralized way.
I wanted to do this because I would argue that the friction we go through as outdoor enthusiasts is still incredibly high - there are so many pieces of friction. Even registering for an event is still too hard, it's too many steps. It takes way too long, and you're like "god, do I really want to run the London marathon that bad?"
I've been in the category for now, forty years, and I've been in and around activities for most of my life - and I've always felt that the consumer experience could be way better.
That's what we're trying to do at Outside, we're hoping to create a much more seamless experience for the consumer while bringing them more value.
Robin: The biggest part that is missing from the industry is the reward side.
You have to understand we're in a global health crisis. Fundamentally - let me be 100% clear.
People are spending less time outdoors. Like kids in the US, rural and urban, are only spending forty-seven minutes a day outdoors (!). This is a health crisis. It's insane.
Personally, I hate the Metaverse, and I hate the idea of the Metaverse. Because when we're not connected to the planet, we stop caring about what happens to the planet. And by the way, I'm not Elon Musk - I'm not getting off this rock. I'm probably going to be here; my kids are going to be here. So we better figure it out because it ain't getting any better.
My view is that we're competing, you and me, against things that draw us into indoor time. Things like Zoom, video games, VR, and social media do not require you to go outdoors. You could sit there and desk roll on Instagram for twelve hours straight, lose sleep, feel terrible, and then wake up the next day and do it all over again.
So I feel like we have to compete with mechanisms like the behavioral science behind getting you and me to death scroll on Instagram is phenomenal science. The gamification reward mechanisms are off the charts. Unfortunately, in fitness, we're not as good at building those things as the people that want to keep us indoors are. For me, that's what we at Outside are trying to build.
At the end of the day, this is what we're competing against - we're not competing against Strava, Onyx, or Altria. We're trying to build something that builds similar reward mechanisms to the most advanced technology on the market. We're competing against what I would call the most detrimental sort of health stuff in the world: our iPhones and screens.
Kyriakos: What is the approach - given that you're going up against companies like TikTok and Twitter that basically have all the science behind them playing with your dopamine for every single waking hour, you have to look at your phone for that dopamine boost. How can we reverse this?
Robin: Well, I think you have to play their game. What I mean by that is that we have to build technology with strong enough reward mechanisms. Something to get a twelve or thirteen-year-old kid to want to do something that rewards them for outdoor time versus playing video games.
We have to build things to get kids to want to do something that rewards them for outdoor time versus playing video games.
We also need what I call the intermediaries, such as doctors and parents. Doctors in the UK, Singapore, and Canada are starting to issue and prescribe outdoor time because they know as a first line of defense for a kid, that might be better than giving them some antidepressant or some other medication, right?
Like you might have read recently, there's all this stuff going on around a Japanese tradition of what they call forest bathing, which is not hard, actually. You go sit in nature. It's not like you're talking about going out and playing soccer or football every day and things like that. I'm talking about literally going into the trees and just sitting there, right? That's pretty easy, but it reduces hypertension. All these physical things happen when you're in nature, even if you're sitting there, like not hiking or not doing rock climbing. So I think we're going to see some push. But I think you need help from the intermediaries.
