Mike Horvath
The Steward
Legacy, values and the long now, leadership as care and continuity.
Mike Horvath emerges in this interview as a Steward, a builder oriented around longevity, trust, and purposeful care for the communities he creates. He describes founding Strava not to win a Silicon Valley-style sprint but to cultivate a brand that could endure a century, echoing his rowing-team ethos of finding deep meaning in shared effort.
“That was the state of the art, was if you were starting a company, your first question was, how do I build a website? The skill set wasn't really well developed. Today, you can pay for services online that will build a website for you in five minutes, but back then it was something you went to talk to companies to go do for you.”
“So we built a company called Kana Software and initially was called Kana Communications. It was really built around this idea that customer support would move off of telephone-based support, mail-based support, which had been the standard for For decades into internet based customer support.”
“So this is seven years after her original diagnosis and not knowing exactly how long we had together. I thought initially at least we would be able to figure out a way that I could continue to run Strava and I could also care for her and for myself and for our four kids. And it wasn't obvious to me that it was time for me to step down.”
“How could we build a product that's not just the podcast that is actually derived from the same content, perhaps, that is worthy of a subscription?”
Money Maze Podcast: ““Running Up That Hill” - Strava’s Co-Founder, Mike Horvath, on Building, Branding and Delivering: An Entrepreneurs’ Story”
LISTEN AT THE SOURCE ↗THE RECORD IS CHECKABLE