Co-founders of Breakaway: Jordan Kobert and Christian Vande Velde

Fantastic. Guys, so first thing first, you are building one of the really interesting startups out there. You've been through YC and you are leveraging wearable data to make it easy to enhance the experience and the performance of cyclists. You've been one of the most sought after startups out there, raising funds from the best investors in the world. So let's go a bit back. How did this start? I know a big part of your journey, Jordan, but how did you guys meet and then why this space?

Yeah, we, um, so Christian and I met, it's been over 20 years now, which still kind of blows my mind. I got out of college in the late nineties and decided I was going to go try and be a bike racer and move to Boulder, Colorado, which at the time was where a lot of the best bike racers in the world trained. I figured out that I was not very good. I met Christian and some other people and you just, you learn real quick when you're with guys at that level. But that was really, we became friends training and kind of with Christian kicking my butt on the roads of Colorado. We stayed friends over the years.

Yeah, it was maybe a little bit later because it was definitely during COVID, a COVID project where people had way too much time on their hands. But yeah, Kyriakos, to back up, he was calling me a sellout for being a Peloton instructor. Like, what has happened to your life? You used to be a Tour de France rider and now you're a spin instructor. I mean, come on, man. Then now he has a bike and now he's asking me about, now he wants to make a product to help people who ride those bikes. I'm like, whoa, wait, who's the sellout over here now, Jordan?

The Breakaway started with me getting a Peloton. It started with my family moving to a winter environment for the first time. 2018, 2019, we lived in the Bay area, but we moved to the mountains of Lake Tahoe. For the first time in 20 years, I had to train inside. I had to work out inside. Through an argument with my wife, which I always lose, we got a Peloton. I started riding and I had nothing to do. There was snow everywhere. I was doing these 30-minute exercise interval workouts. I came out of that winter kind of with two aha moments. One is I was stronger than I'd been in years. I had a background in bike racing, but all of a sudden, three months of doing intervals two or three days a week. I literally called Christian and I was like, all right, I'm going to follow my sword a little bit thing, but maybe this thing works.

Yeah, dude, you did intervals. It's not rocket science. Training's not super complicated. You were forced to do intensity. That was a big part of it. Then as I looked, and then I started using Zwift and also other stuff. I just kind of had this feeling that there's all this data out there. There's going to be more and more of it, but little, if any of it is actually giving people simple guidance on how to improve.

We talked about it on and off. Then I think it was summer 2020, I grabbed Kyle, my co-founder. He was one of the first mobile product designers we had at Strava back in the early days. We grabbed a couple of engineers we knew, and we literally just said, let's go see if we can build something. We didn't know, you know, we had no like, oh, we're going to go raise venture money. We're going to go get into Y Combinator. We just, we really wanted to see like, you know, a little bit of COVID stir crazy. We all had day jobs, but we said, let's go see if we can build something. And then every month, I feel like since we started, it just kind of became clear that the opportunity's bigger.

Yeah, late 2020. And then finally you just gave me an ultimatum, I think in October, November of that year, like, yo, you in it, you're out and we started running with it.

So YC sounds like the validation you needed to say, let's just go.

Yeah, I think it was, I don't know that it was the validation. It was more the catalyst. Right. I think we knew at that point by the time we applied, we knew there was a huge opportunity there. We were pretty resolved that like, all right, we're either going to go do Y Combinator, or we're just going to go raise some money and build this thing. So at that point we were still going to go. But I think, you know, there's no back to the bootcamp conversation, right? There's no, let's just go into Y Combinator and see how it goes. Like you got to go all in. So that was kind of the validation, the catalyst more to say like, all right guys, game on.

I think I really just fast forward a full year of work into three months and that, uh, something that we would have never done if we weren't pushed to do so as well. And then of course, you know, the tutelage as well, and just being able to learn from the very best and people who've already done it before in times when quite frankly, you're second guessing what you're doing and they're still more, they're encouraging you more than you're encouraging yourself at times.

What was the initial product? What was your product in YC and how were you going after customers with it?

The initial product is similar to the product we have today, which is we sync your cycling data from platforms that you have. We rate you and rank you across benchmarks based on your age, gender, and weight. So it's not a leaderboard, right? It's about you versus you, you versus people like you. And then we give you insight and analysis and motivation to improve. So that's always been the core of the product. Christian and I, more and more, we've been doing some, excuse me, we've been kind of just relooking at our vision, our mission, or are we, you know, kind of checking in on the longer term plan? And we keep kind of coming back and be like, man, those conversations we had two plus years ago, before we even put, you know, an ounce of code into this, they still hold.

And then how much I would say that you're going from in, in the future from power data, are you going to involve sleep, for example, are you going to involve the actual nutrition for each one? What what's going on there?

I mean, the short answer is, yeah, we want to bring all of it in. Right. I mean, again, the future that we all talk about is that this is going to have everything, you know, so in the near term, yeah, we'll start bringing in sleep and recovery pretty shortly. So we'll know, we'll know your intensity and then we'll know how recovered you are. Eventually, you know, the stuff we talked about earlier, blood glucose, you know, continuous glucose monitoring, whatever's out there. I really, I really believe that there's a platform for bringing all this data together and get with, with the goal of fitness, right. With the goal of improving your skills.

And teaching them without even pushing it on them, without even knowing that they're being taught. And I think if that happens and they know a lot more about their body within some time of using it, then we won.

Well, I was a little bit different than Lance, whereas my father was an Olympian in 68 and 72. So he was making me take naps when I was a kid and go to sleep at nine o'clock and 10 o'clock, much to my chagrin, right? Like no teenager wants to be going to bed at nine o'clock. There's not one on earth that wants to do that. So he was always forcing that on me, but he always made it evident and just did the simple things. Like if you're sitting, then sit, if you can lay down, then lay down, always get off your legs, just all those kinds of, but sleep was always the number one thing on his mind, making sure you're recovering at all times. And I took that to the bank and I always had that in my mind. And so I was a little bit, maybe more aware of it than most average person. I didn't have to read the books. I was just, it was already in my household. The bosses that I had were my dad's friends later in my life. So it was, it was that intuition was already put inside, but like Lance, for example, he, he was always going, right? So, but when he slept, he slept like the dead and there were days where he just needed to sleep and just, so for example, Johan Brugna wouldn't let him take his computer to the Tour de France because he knew how he was, that he would be distracted and he would start doing things and he wouldn't go to bed. So he wasn't allowed to have, and this is before iPhones and all this kind of stuff. So he wasn't allowed to have his computer, which was absolutely genius on Johan's side. So there were simple things like that go a long way at the time, you know, just like taking your phone, my phone away from my daughter last night, you know, cause I know that she would still go back in her room and probably look at her phone and not go to bed until 11 o'clock. And so, yes, we didn't have any, you know, we didn't have Whoop, we didn't have Aura, we didn't have any way to track what that was actually doing or how exhausted we are. And to be honest with you, sometimes I'm happy that we didn't because psychologically you don't want to wake up on stage 19 of the Tour de France when you got to do Alpe d'Huez and say that your sleep score sucked and you should probably take a rest for a month and a half right now. But so again, it goes back into intuition. We knew that it was a big deal as data was coming out more and more so during our career, we realized that probably the biggest thing we could do to help out was sleep. It was rest. If anything, in hindsight, and that's across the board with most of us during our generation that we are constantly over-trained, always going too hard and we didn't put enough emphasis on rest. And maybe that's one of the biggest takeaways. I mean, over-training and not eating good enough or well enough or not at the right times. Those are the two biggest things that I say that every one of my generation could say that we could have done better. And again, now with data, now knowing these kinds of things, we could easily just be a bit better by simple things.

But there's another part. And Kyriakos, I don't know how much you think about this because you, I mean, you live deep in this world too. Christian, I've been talking a lot lately about what I call the joy of data. Because there's this, listen, we all, three of us love data. I geek out on all of it. But I remember I've told this story before, but early days of Strava, when people all of a sudden started going for KOMs all over the place, my wife was like, congratulations, you ruined cycling. Nobody just goes for a ride anymore, right? You're out there, it's like, there's all these early stories of people, yelling at people on trails, it still happens, right? The data, the data, the data, right? And like Christian's point on like, you're waking up for a big stage, big race. The last thing you want is some app telling you you're not ready, right? It doesn't matter, right? I mean, if you have that day, whether it's the ride you have planned with your buddies or a tour to France stage, nobody wants to wake up, pick up their phone and be like, oh, well, shouldn't probably do this today. How do you balance that? And I think that's the fascinating part to me that we think about from, I think about it as an athlete, I think about it for the breakaway and I just think about it in this world of data we're going into, right? Which is like, how do you balance joy and data? Because you want to improve, we all want to get better. As Christian said, anyone who's into these things, you're probably, the general profile is you're some version of a type A personality. You want to improve, you've got information, right? We all would be up all night checking stuff out and looking at data, but at some days, we all got into this for fun, for how it makes you feel. That's the fun part of sport, right? And so there are, I don't know how much you've thought about that or talked to other folks about it, but that's something that comes up with us a lot is how do you balance the data with just the joy of going out for a bike ride or a run?

Yeah, I'd rather having the positive reinforcement from it's like, I'll just, I have an eight sleep bed, right? It's like some days it just shows me and it comes up with a notification saying, oh, you know what? You didn't sleep so well last night. You seem stressed. Your heart rate was higher. I'm like, yeah, you just ruined my day. I much rather have only the positive ones that they tell me, you know what? You rested well last night, so you could train today rather than having the negative.

Right. Yeah, do that again. What did you do right there? Did you, you know, was the room cool? Was the room dark? All those kinds of things. I want to hear the positive as well, Kyriakos. I've been trying to convince my wife to get an eight sleep. And that's been her biggest thing is she's like, I'll get it, but I don't want to ever look at the data. She's like, you look at the data. I just want to know I'm asleep. I'll know I'm sleeping better. Cause she's like, I don't want to wake up. She's like, I don't want to go to bed worried about, you know, what's my sleep score going to be. And I don't want to wake up and be told, you know, I mean, she totally gets it from like a cooling and just kind of sleep science standpoint. But it's an interesting, I think her point is valid sometimes, right? Which is like, I want to know I'm sleeping better. You know, I got to, I've played around with all the things, right? And I remember the first time I got, you know, something that started, the first time I got a sleep tracker actually was a jawbone. Kyriakos, I don't know if you remember that, but it was a jawbone in 2011. I was three weeks into being a new father. It was at Strava. So we were testing all the things, right? And I learned that on average, I was getting three hours of sleep a night broken up into 20 minute chunks. And I learned that there was no joke. There was one night, my oldest was just tough to go to sleep. You'd have to walk her around. And there was one night I did a mile and a half in our bedroom, right? Just pacing. So like, you know, try going to work in the morning, right? When you wake up and it's like, oh, this is really cool. I did, you know, I never slept more than 18 minutes in a row last night. And so again, this is like-

Did you show that to Jen? Did you show that to Jen and say, look, I'm suffering too? I'm suffering.

Yeah, no, you don't. So I think that's the interesting part. And I wonder if as we evolve with how we talk about data with customers and how people interpret it, you know, do we go into these moments of, you know, do apps and products and almost come into these kind of like blackout moments, right? Where it's like, hey, you know what? I got a race coming up on Saturday for the next three days. I'm just gonna, I want everything to not show me the data because I'm just gonna do the best I can to sleep. I've done the work. The last thing I wanna do, you know, I'll know if I wake up feeling good, but really do I wanna be looking? I don't know. I hadn't thought about it before, but I wonder if we'll wind up evolving to a place where it's like, yeah, you want, there's times when you want the data and then you switch into fun mode. And you're like, use this data historically, record my ride, but don't show it to me. I'm just going for a bike ride with a friend and I wanna smile and laugh and enjoy the fresh air.

You know, it sounds like there are two types of future companies in our space, right? One is what you guys are doing. So you're aggregating all the information and you're educating me on exactly what I need to be doing in order to improve my performance. And then the second is the guys that we mentioned already, like Aidsleep, that they take that data and they optimize your temperature, for example, while you sleep. So they make, they kind of close the loop between the education part and the action, right? So, and then it's companies like us that we aggregate all that information, we made it easy to connect to all. So, but having said that, where do you see this going? Like, I see those three kinds of companies, where is your view in this?

Yeah, I think that, I think I have a similar version of that, right? So I think there's a couple of things happening. So I think we're just gonna, it's clear that there will be more devices, more connections, more data in perpetuity, right? So that's never changing. We're gonna, who would have thought five, 10 years ago, we'd be tracking, I'd have a mattress that knows how to sleep and how to cool me or any of these things, right? So I think that's, there will absolutely be companies tracking everything, showing you as much data as possible that's out there. I think over time, consumer data, the user, we're gonna wanna have all our data aggregated one way or another, and then have some control over where that data goes, right? So I've been using a risk-based heart rate on a Garmin watch for seven years now. I don't think, risk-based heart rate, there's tons of science around that being decent, but having its challenges around intense activity, right? So if I'm doing a hard workout, I wear a chest heart rate monitor because that's more accurate. Part of the reason I wear the risk-based heart rate is because I firmly believe that there's stuff that they're gonna know from our heart rate data and be able to track and detect from a wellness standpoint that they haven't done yet, right? And so when you can walk into your doctor and say, oh yeah, and they say, oh, well, if you have heart rate data we can now detect ABC, right? I can say, well, hey, here's 10 years of heart rate data, right? The more data you have, so I think there's companies that are gonna collect all the data. There's all sorts of things that are gonna be able to happen with that data that we don't even know yet from a fitness and a wellness standpoint. And then I do think there are companies that are gonna, like the breakaway and others that are gonna find that they can do interesting things with that data. I just think there's so much room for other types of analysis, interpretation, gamification, fun. There's just so much that could be created on top of that data, right? Because if you're one of the individual data collection companies, then you have a focused area that you're gonna go on and you need to be good at that, right? Like the amount of technology and science it takes to be good at that is heavy, right? I think what's really exciting is as that data becomes more open, as it becomes more shareable, then people can build on top of that. And you'll see all sorts of stuff. You know, I liken it a lot to the financial industry, right? Where in the early days of financial industry, it was like, oh, my bank can go online, cool, right? And then you had companies like Mint that came out where you could pull all your data together. And that was fascinating, right? Wow, I can look at, you know, nine different accounts together, right? And now fast forward to where you've got, you know, companies like Wealthfront doing, you know, AI driven investing based on preferences and things like that, right? And that's not even talking Web3 and kind of where the blockchain is going. So I think the financial industry to me is always a great analog for fitness, where there's just more and more data, there's more and more information, and there's just gonna be different ways for people to build on top of that to create customer experiences.

And I guess it's like, it's the plot example. It's like, once plot came into the market, then everybody started building brief solutions as what you said, it's like aggregating my banking accounts. And then you started seeing like a lot of FinTech banks being built on top of that. And then a lot of KYC companies being built on top of that. It's like, you know, companies being built on top of that is like, is the enablement of so many companies is exact. I think it's going to be much more important in the health space because all that time, we were relying in all those static information. It's like you do one time and blood testing and your doctor tells you once every year, this is what you need to do. Whereas now it's like all the wearable data you have, it's like you have your heart rate, you have your heart rate variability, you have like your, Samsung is doing now like blood pressure on a real time basis. Like you get all this information on a real time basis, which is going to change radically the way we are looking health. And we're going to move maybe mostly towards the predicting what's going to happen rather than reacting after the fact.

But having said that, Jordan is like you, we haven't touched at all on how to build a brand. I think you guys are some of the best in the world about this. So maybe if we touch a bit on that, you guys led some of the earliest works in Strava in regards to what it became today. What's the first few things that someone needs to know about how you build a brand there and what's your approach in Breakaway?

That's a great question. That's a curve ball. I wasn't ready for that one. I can't take any credit for the Strava brand that existed before me, but I learned a ton there. I think Strava is a great example. There's a ton of thought. There's a ton of ways to interpret brand. At the end of the day, I think a brand is every single touch point every single time. So you can't, your brand evolves whether you like it or not. People are building personal brands and it's every touch point. It's every photo, tweet, post, everything. So I think you have to think about brand as kind of it's gonna happen whether you like it or not. So you have to be intentional about it from the very beginning. So with the Breakaway, having been a part of multiple startups, having seen brands get built, having been a part of creating brands, successful brands, I knew day one that we had to think about brand. And it's really easy as a product person as a platform, just think about the product. And I knew day one, especially if we're gonna be a consumer product. It's a little easier in enterprise. You can kind of work your way into a brand and work through that with a sales team and sales and marketing approach. But with a consumer product, there's so much noise and challenge out there. It has to be something where every single touch point feels like something you wanna be a part of. And so I think that's the first place to start, which is, do you need to be brand focused day one? Most companies do. And then you have to be there day one, right? It has to be in every single thing you do. Most people think about brand as a logo and marketing and the colors, right? And brand is every email you send out, every touch point someone has, every customer support inquiry, every response to a tweet, or it's just, it's every single thing. You're either building or destroying a brand, right? I mean, every single move, you're either helping a brand or if you mess up a customer service ticket, then you're hurting a brand, right? So you have to think about it in that way in terms of every single thing that you do. And then I think the other key component of it for a successful brand, if you look at the best brands out there, it has to be authentic to the people who created it and are creating those touch points, right? So I think if you look at some of the great brands out there that was the founders, the founding team, we're eight people today. And I always talk to the team that like, the first 10 people of a company, that is the culture of that company no matter what, right? I've been part of early teams. I've seen teams grow to from zero to five or 10, 50, 200, right? You can always look back and be like, yeah, those first 10 people, eight people, 12 people, whatever it is, like that's the culture of the team. That's the brand of that company, right? And so I think, again, it starts day one. You have to either be intentional about it or it happens in spite of your lack of intention. And it does, and it has to be authentic, right? You can't really fake it, right? So, for the Breakaway, I think part of what's been fun about this for us, part of what's kept the team fired up, part of what's helped us be successful to this point is that this is kind of who we are. Someone's had a quote recently, they said you're retired when you work on what you want with who you want, when you want, right? And I think, I won't speak for Christian, like I've got two of those three now. I'm working on what I want. I'm doing it with a team that I love. You know, it's a startup. So would I love to do it a little bit less sometimes? Sure, but that's the game, right? But I think that's part of what helps make a brand feel authentic is that it is just, it's true to who you are.

Yeah, it took you a while to get around to that, but yeah, I'm glad you went to authenticity because I agree 100%. And I don't think it was, I think it was the latter. I think it was in spite of, it wasn't that we were thinking about doing this because it truly is who we all are. And we've been lucky enough to have a great team from the beginning and something that we were truly doing for no money for a while while we were building it. So it was a fun project. And I look forward to jumping on the phone with these guys every time. And I look forward to doing it. And lucky enough, we're not selling snake oil. We're trying to help people get better and that makes it even easier. So all the pieces are together right now. I hope we can still have the same conversation in 10 years' time. And I hope don't hate Jordan.

You said something, Christian. I think this goes back to brand, Kyriakos, because I think like the two, Strava, I mean, Strava did a great job of building a brand. They were very brand focused early on. So, again, I don't take credit for that, but early days, it was very clear that like we're gonna build a brand. We're gonna build something that's gonna be around for a long time. We had some great people early on who understood how to protect a brand, right? How to say, no, we won't do those things. So part of being authentic, part of building a brand is knowing who you are and knowing who you're not, right? And what you're not willing to do. There were a lot of things we could have done early on in Strava to maybe grow a little faster, but they wouldn't have been authentic. They wouldn't have been authentic to who we were. And it was a much more longer view of that. But I think that part of, and again, back to the whole kind of notion that like, it's the team, it's authenticity. You know, Christian, I hope you don't mind, but you said this recently once, you were like, you know, having been an athlete, having been part of professional teams that have brands that are based on those athletes, right? I mean, if you look at the brand of, I don't care whether it's, you know, your Garmin team back in the day, U.S. Postal, New York Yankees, right? I'm not great at other sports ball teams, right? But like, you know, I'm timing out right there, right? But if you look at the brands of these teams, F1 teams, professional football teams, right? They're kind of a culmination of the players and the coaches and the people there, right? Like the logo and the color of the jersey is less about the brand than is the combination of the people. And so, you know, Christian, you said one thing where you're like, yeah, you know, it's been a while since you've been part of a team, right? And so I think when you have a great team, you can build a great brand. But I think it's really hard to build a great brand without a great team.

It's like, it sounds from your side as well. It's like everything starts from the team. And then it's the extension is a brand. The extension is a product. The extension is how well you're doing what you're doing. So if you have the foundations right, and if it's a real team, then, and if you have great people, which is, what we are thinking at Terra as well all the time, it's like, if you bring the best people in the world and you can make them feel like a team, then the best people in the world come with the best ideas, whether it's for branding, whether it's for, I don't know, sales, it might be for products, but yeah, at the end of the day, it's about the people.

Awesome, fantastic. Guys, thank you so much for the chat.

Yeah, thanks, man.

Thank you. Appreciate the time.

You too.