YouSaid · the spoken record

Mark Gainey

lines on the record: 58
first: 2022-05-02
most recent: 2022-05-02
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“There's a huge percentage of my life associated with sort of luck and circumstance. Because I keep pushing, because I keep grinding. So I think that there is an element of creating luck. And my thought is that I was just reading a book recently. I think it's called How Champions Win or something to that effect. And it just talks about optimism being a learned trait rather than something you're born with. And that is what I think I do have in me is optimism. And with that, then, yeah, the luck comes and goes. If I look back in my life, I've had plenty of bad luck. I've had bicycle accidents and ski accidents and I've had heart problems and I've had a divorce. I can go back and look at bad luck and good luck. But if you bring optimism to things, it's amazing how the luck keeps servicing in a good way.”
2022-05-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Strava: Mark Gainey and Michael Horvath · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But fighting is, but then there's all these caveats to that. Our challenge, what I've, and I'll speak for myself here, our challenge as two co founders and partners is when we don't communicate, that's when challenge occurs. As long as we're able to stay synced, it doesn't even have to be synchronized 100% of the time, but as long as we have communication going, then it's pretty rare that you see fights. But we've had our moments. We've had to figure out when we have our friend hat on versus when we have our business hat on. That's the art.”
2022-05-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Strava: Mark Gainey and Michael Horvath · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He wins. Michael's. Michael's a very quiet winner, whether it was Kana or Glycophi, good outcomes. And I just give him a lot of credit.”
2022-05-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Strava: Mark Gainey and Michael Horvath · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The concept of trust is a word that often gets overused but not understood and there's just he and I had such a long history together and being able to trust someone at a very intimate level that's hard to define but it's there second is we complement each other very well i like to joke that all you have to do is look at our degrees you know art history and economics and there's just a yin and a yang to the way in which we think and the third reason i'll tell you guys is that because he's got he's got the golden touch michael's uh you know there's some truth to the simple fact that um as long as i've known him”
2022-05-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Strava: Mark Gainey and Michael Horvath · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That was what late 2019 was for us as two founders. Let's come back, remind everybody we really only have one customer at Strava, and that is the active person who just loves being out and being active every day. And we want to build something that's great enough that they want to pay us for it. And if they want to use it for free, that's great because our free members are not just a marketing channel. Our free members are contributing their activities to Strav every day, which enhances the experience for everybody else. Companies go through these ebbs and flows. And we went through this period where we, in some ways, I'd argue we just bid off more than we could chew. We were spread really, really thin as a company in 2017, 2018, 2019. And we learned the value of focus. We just brought it back to its basics.”
2022-05-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Strava: Mark Gainey and Michael Horvath · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, guy, just to give you context, because I think there's an important chapter in here where there was an important lesson that hopefully any of your other entrepreneurs, because from mid-2017, 2019, we had brought in an external CEO and no regrets. However, during that period from 17 to 19, we were experimenting across a lot of monetization models. We were looking at, frankly, we were looking at ads in the feed for the first time in Stravis history. We were looking at data insights. So when Michael refers to coming back and facing some challenges, but also just trying to simplify.”
2022-05-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Strava: Mark Gainey and Michael Horvath · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Core best source of our growth. It's happy members. It's people who are engaged in Strava and are telling their friends. And yes, that was happening in 2013 and in a typical sort of network-like effect, and particularly a freemium business like ours, if you're patient and you have the resources to be patient, the flywheel does start to spin faster and faster and faster. And you could see that in our growth, just Michael can tell you how long it took us to get our first million members. And now we add two million every month. But I think it took us what Michael, eight years to see our first million members, something maybe not quite that long. Yeah, not eight years, but it was like three or four. What was it, Mich”
2022-05-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Strava: Mark Gainey and Michael Horvath · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It is as simple as it sounds. Our greatest source of growth are our members. It's been like that from day one. And frankly, despite our efforts to come up with other ways to grow and so forth, and that's not to say we don't have a fantastic marketing team and there aren't things that we continue to do, but if you look at sort of the”
2022-05-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Strava: Mark Gainey and Michael Horvath · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly. So here I was CEO for all of a year and change. And at that point, even though he was in Hanover, I was like, and coming out on a frequent basis, but not out here running things. I owe him because he stepped in in a moment in time when I needed to devote my energy to my family.”
2022-05-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Strava: Mark Gainey and Michael Horvath · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, when we launched, I was running the business in the Bay Area. And then in 2009, literally that spring that we're doing at my ex-wife started to have some pretty serious health problems again. And I'm now single parent full-time dad. And so by early 2010, it was, hey, Michael, I really need you to run this.”
2022-05-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Strava: Mark Gainey and Michael Horvath · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Would get value Even today, with the tens of millions of people who are there, you can actually onboard Distrava and have a very private rich experience where you can see your trends, you have this digital log that's available to you, but the magic happens when you begin following just a few people. You referred to my ride this morning. It's nothing to write home about. It was only eight miles, but what was fun about it was I got up there before the sunrise. And if you look at the activity, it's not my distance or how fast I was, but there was some spectacular color out there this morning that I was able to enjoy and then to be able to share that with some friends.”
2022-05-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Strava: Mark Gainey and Michael Horvath · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, but I've had this insight that as people have joined Strava historically, they often don't join because they're trying to join the community. They join because they're looking for a way to track their own personal activities. And I often refer to it as single player mode versus multiplayer mode. If you go back to our earliest days, we actually had to build an experience where if you were the only person on Strava,”
2022-05-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Strava: Mark Gainey and Michael Horvath · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“These are shades of gray. It's not necessarily how good they were, but how passionate they were. So you're right. We were targeting, they didn't necessarily have to be good at it, but they were probably spending thousands of dollars on it. They were probably. Talking about it with their friends when they weren't writing. We used to have a phrase, you know, let's make sure we build it for the best in the world and meet their needs because if we do, they're the ones who inspire so many others to then join the platform.”
2022-05-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Strava: Mark Gainey and Michael Horvath · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To answer your question, you're right. We did... Have if you look over Stravo's 13 year history explored various monetization models. And we've always come back to that fundamental premise, which is when we're building something for our customer, for our members, and it's something that is a value enough that they'll pay us, that's a good thing. I like to state the simple idea that we want Strava to be as important as a runner's running shoes, as important as a cyclist bike. And if we can get to that place. The rest sort of sorts itself out”
2022-05-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Strava: Mark Gainey and Michael Horvath · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Basically, we tried to make participation strava as hard as possible. Let's make this extremely hard and then start reducing friction slowly but surely. Right. No, just as you were describing that, I was reminded of one of the points of friction was, well, how many people have garment devices? And so, I mean, there was a whole period of time where Michael and I were negotiating with the likes of Costco and others just literally trying to buy garmins so that we could either sell them or give them away to friends so that we could get people onto the platform. We have sometimes a phrase that we say, which is do things that don't scale Would say we probably did this perhaps to an extreme level in the early days of Strava when we look back at it.”
2022-05-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Strava: Mark Gainey and Michael Horvath · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Lastly, the reason was there are lots of running apps that were out there and running solutions. There actually weren't very many. Solutions that were addressing the needs of cyclists. And so we kind of did an end around instead of going into the crowded market, we picked a space that had just as fanatic a base. But without the noise of other competitors.”
2022-05-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Strava: Mark Gainey and Michael Horvath · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Arcana experience had taught us something really valuable, which was by just picking one subcategory of an audience or a prospective customer. And back in Echonadays, it was email response, which I can tell you, many investors said that's not even a company, that's not even a product. That's a feature. Yet, solving that problem for that one audience opened up so many opportunities for us going forward. And so we in many ways applied the same thing here. We went after a passionate cyclist, not because we thought that that was going to be the sole market, but by creating that opportunity and that relationship with them, the way in which you can build an experience becomes really rich and really authentic for that group. And there is a leap of faith. And I always remind people. Case of Strava, our go-to market strategy was cycling”
2022-05-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Strava: Mark Gainey and Michael Horvath · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And creating a story for somebody afterwards. Takeaway too was just the level of interaction between the cyclists now. I mean, the level of trash talking and gamesmanship and camaraderie and the competition back and forth between East and West, it was fervent. It was just this really funny experience to watch them and they couldn't get enough of it. And so that experience over three weeks in the summer of 2008 was really the final catalyst that we need to say, okay, we may not have the business model nailed down here. There's a lot of specifics, but it was enough of an energy there and enough excitement after that quick three weeks that we said we've got something.”
2022-05-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Strava: Mark Gainey and Michael Horvath · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was clear very quickly that the cyclists who were using it were infatuated by the information they were seeing. Like there was a high level of engagement with this data and the storytelling. Davy just did this amazing job of taking what was pretty raw GPS information.”
2022-05-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Strava: Mark Gainey and Michael Horvath · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, summer of 2008. We had a group of individuals, I think maybe no more than half a dozen cyclists on the East Coast out in Hanover and another half dozen cyclists that we recruited on the West Coast. And Davy had built a very basic website, and we used to call it the green machine. It was this lovely shade of green that everybody would log into. And we made sure that everybody had Garmin cycling devices. And we asked them through the time of the tour de France, so over a three-week period in July of 2008, would you be willing to upload to this website? And in exchange, we're going to create some competitions. We're going to put East Coast against West Coast. We just love to get your feedback and your reactions to this experience of not just going out for a ride, but then sharing that information on this Strava website. And for me, the takeaway was twofold.”
2022-05-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Strava: Mark Gainey and Michael Horvath · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, we were committed to the distributed model, but as soon as we began the process of hiring folks, we also believed in the power of face-to-face and being in person. So we opened a small office in Palo Alto.”
2022-05-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Strava: Mark Gainey and Michael Horvath · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Michael, where it's like, Yeah, let's go do something we've never done before. We were almost going back to what we felt like when we were 25 and we didn't know. We knew that sports and participating in games and things were meaningful to us, yet it's really hard to do. Life gets in the way. And so could we think about software as a platform and the internet as a way to perhaps help both inspire and motivate folks like ourselves to stay active?”
2022-05-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Strava: Mark Gainey and Michael Horvath · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And we spent some time thinking about companies that we really admired. We made a list of if we had been founders of XYZ company, what would it have been? And it was telling because it wasn't a bunch of Silicon Valley companies. I don't think there was, maybe we put Apple on there. I can't remember, but otherwise it was all these iconic consumer brands. It was the Patagonia's or it was a virgin from the UK. It was these brands that had withstood the test of time had been around for decades, but they just had a unique relationship with their consumer. And if you think about our history now, we're these two enterprise software guys. And we both sort of took this leap of faith that it's like, we don't want to do that again. It would be easy to pull out the playbook and replicate another enterprise software or company. And we could bring the band back together and hire a bunch of folks we knew before, but there was an intellectual curiosity. And I think this is, again, I give credit.”
2022-05-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Strava: Mark Gainey and Michael Horvath · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think it was as stuff stabilized in my life, as my, again, health and family situation, as those things stabilized in that 2005 timeframe. Michael was just coming out of glycophi at that time. So I remember. Okay, here's our chance. He's coming out of that I'm stable, knock on wood. We're too young not to think that there isn't something else to go do here.”
2022-05-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Strava: Mark Gainey and Michael Horvath · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The only problem is you leave the board meeting. That's like junk food. It's just not that satisfying at the end of the day. You're not on that team who's going and now executing all these ideas that you discussed. It served its purpose for those four or five years that we were basically trying to stabilize our family and get everybody back and healthy. And this was the time. I ended up, Lisa and I divorced in 2005, so we had to go through that period and that chapter in our life as well. So between the health issues and just the family dynamics, board service was a great way for me to keep my finger on the pulse of what was going on. But it wasn't something that was going to satisfy me long term.”
2022-05-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Strava: Mark Gainey and Michael Horvath · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's right, right? There was a period that professionally, what I did was I spent a lot of time on boards and I thought that perhaps that was the next chapter in the same way Michael described his academic opportunities as sort of the next chapter. I saw myself as okay, well, perhaps now I can take my experience and apply it across a spectrum of board opportunities and so forth. But what I learned was those, I love to equate being on boards to eating junk food. And I'll be the first to attest, I like junk food. I will occasionally have it. And so in the moment being on a board can feel really good. You're contributing. You're having interesting intellectual conversations. You're thinking through strategy.”
2022-05-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Strava: Mark Gainey and Michael Horvath · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That period of time for me after Khanna was, again, wouldn't give it up in terms of particularly the two boys in my life and the friendships I have. But I also learned that just because you're set financially doesn't mean you shouldn't keep working. Because when I don't work, I tend to have problems arise in my life. So I like to stay busy professionally as well as personally.”
2022-05-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Strava: Mark Gainey and Michael Horvath · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Full time dad. But honestly, guy, there was kind of a dark cloud that then for whatever reason kind of rested over the Gainey family for a bit. And the boys were born prematurely. So we had health issues. And Lisa, unfortunately, had pretty significant health issues that carried on for a while. And then it was early 2002. I was out. I was actually training. I was actually trying to get some of my athletic life back. Unfortunately, 10 days before an Ironman event that I was training for, I had a bike accident. This was Memorial Day of 2002. Was airlifted to Stanford and emergency surgeries. Wow.”
2022-05-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Strava: Mark Gainey and Michael Horvath · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was a focus on my personal life and specifically, so my wife at the time. Divorce now for many, many years, but still one of my closest friends. And if I'm not mistaken, she became pregnant in August of 2000 with twin boys. So, my life over the next year or two, I would say filled with joy when it comes to sort of Jake and Charlie, who are the twins who were born in March of 2001.”
2022-05-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Strava: Mark Gainey and Michael Horvath · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was a crazy time. I'll be the first to admit. I mean, it went from two guys and a dog hanging out in an office. I know when I left in the summer of 2000, we had just over 1,200 employees.”
2022-05-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Strava: Mark Gainey and Michael Horvath · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right. Part of our strategy was let's own the dot coms. We used to joke, if we see that someone gets a venture round and raises capital, we should be one of the first checks that they write. Because if they're starting an e-commerce business, there's three or four pieces of infrastructure that they have to have. And one of those pieces is communication.”
2022-05-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Strava: Mark Gainey and Michael Horvath · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So much of good entrepreneurship is timing. And we got very lucky. This was 1995, 1996, right as all of that infrastructure was just beginning to be developed in a meaningful way. And within a year, we were doing million dollar contracts.”
2022-05-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Strava: Mark Gainey and Michael Horvath · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I go back to my days, even working at the venture firm, one of the key things that the partners used to tell me is if you can solve a real problem where there's significant pain, it doesn't matter how small a company you are, they'll listen to you. And I took that to heart, and it was proven true. The pain was significant enough and was growing fast enough. I mean, when we started to talk to some of the larger internet companies, you know, we had clients that were now receiving tens of thousands of customer emails on a daily basis. And you do start to realize, no, this is a critical piece of their business going forward. And I'm the first to always admit, I mean,”
2022-05-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Strava: Mark Gainey and Michael Horvath · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And that one fateful meeting, we turned him into a consultant to us, this 16 year old, I think, became perhaps the first consultant we had at Conna. And, you know, we became those experts that you described. It was, you know, you learn pretty quickly. It comes in these funny little chunks.”
2022-05-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Strava: Mark Gainey and Michael Horvath · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“First off, guy, I think you're hitting an important nail on the head here. And so, in my case, and Michael, what we did, I'll never forget, we did track down a little company. It was called Catapult Entertainment. This was a company again mid-90s that was basically allowing two Nintendo gamers that live in different cities to play and communicate with each other. And they had a part-time 16-year-old kid who was answering customer email for them. And my old roommate was in that company, and he said, hey, you should talk to the 16-year-old kid. I think he's actually got a pretty good solution. And so I remember sitting down with him in a local subway restaurant, and he took a place mat, turned it over, and been sketching sort of.”
2022-05-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Strava: Mark Gainey and Michael Horvath · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, okay. Yeah. And then we could stay in sports and we can stay connected and we'd figure out how to bring that to life. But when we learned that nobody was solving for customer email, That was the moment in time where, like, wait a second, this is crazy. This is, I mean, this is going to be the future. This is how consumers are going to, this is how they're going to interact online. Maybe we ought to spend a little more time here.”
2022-05-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Strava: Mark Gainey and Michael Horvath · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so again. We heard about customer email, we assumed that that problem had been solved in other industries. It was just that the sporting goods companies didn't yet have the solution. So Michael and I then started making calls. I remember I started calling around to basically Silicon Valley, you know, to the big companies of the day, the Intels and the Cisco's and the Oracles, because I just assume they must be handling all their custom email really well. And we'll take that solution. Yeah. And we'll bring it to the sporting goods industry. So we were still hopeful that we were going to stay kind of in this industry, that we were passionate about, but we were evolving sort of the solution set. Here's the irony. When we made those calls out to these other companies, nobody had a solution. They all had a huge problem.”
2022-05-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Strava: Mark Gainey and Michael Horvath · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, name your company. And what was amazing was consumers are really smart. If they're on the internet, and I can click on that button and send a question saying, hey, where do I find a size 11 in the color blue? It's way easier to do than picking up the phone and calling an 800 number”
2022-05-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Strava: Mark Gainey and Michael Horvath · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, that's crazy. Of course, you want to answer the customer email. I mean, that's gold. How do we help you solve that problem? Wait, so let me.”
2022-05-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Strava: Mark Gainey and Michael Horvath · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And they too were very skeptical. They were like, you know, we just spent a million dollars on this new website of ours. And we're not really sure we want to get any customers coming to this because we're frankly faced with this bigger problem, which is we're getting all these emails from customers now directly from consumers with the advent of the internet. It was much easier to go to www.nike.com or trekbikes.com than it was to try to find a retailer online. So they were like, look, we don't want to sponsor you because we don't even know what to do with this website and consumer that we have. And that was when I would say that's the good news because what happened to us is entrepreneurs was while we were disappointed that our idea didn't have merit. We were listening and what they were telling us was, hey, there's this other problem out there, which is we're getting a lot of customer email that we don't know what to do with. And Michael and I just looked at that and said,”
2022-05-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Strava: Mark Gainey and Michael Horvath · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They also put us though in touch with a number of their other clients because from a business model perspective, the way we thought that this virtual locker room would make money was in a sense through sponsorship, that you'd have these sporting good companies that would want to interact with all of our athletes who were involved in the locker room.”
2022-05-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Strava: Mark Gainey and Michael Horvath · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Spread across the globe, and we're in all their jobs. And basically share their workouts. So, this was when people ask when was Strava started, you know, the honest answer is the first business plan was written in late 1995. It just wasn't called Strava. It was called Cona Sports. It was named after my dog, Kana, and we had this concept of we're going to go create this virtual locker room.”
2022-05-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Strava: Mark Gainey and Michael Horvath · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, they sold me on a lot of stuff. That was one that was a total bag of beans that they sold me because that was not the same. Great job, not fulfilling in terms of my competitive drive. So we started exploring this notion of could we create a virtual locker room on this new thing called the internet?”
2022-05-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Strava: Mark Gainey and Michael Horvath · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Big range, so two examples. We were looking at things like headlamps for mountain bikes and night running and things like that. Didn't go very far for a variety of reasons. But another idea that we were looking at was this simple notion of You know, my friends and I who had all been competitive in college and in high school, when we graduated, there was this void in our life. There was this hole that we felt. I remember when TA first hired me, my firm, they said, oh, you know, one of the things you're going to love being here is you're going to get that same competitive thrill that you got while you were competing and rowing and running.”
2022-05-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Strava: Mark Gainey and Michael Horvath · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So we could do that. There was some truth to that, but it was also just he was somebody that I could trust and was really smart helping me think through these ideas.”
2022-05-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Strava: Mark Gainey and Michael Horvath · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, entrepreneurship is lonely. I felt it was important. I wanted a partner and I wanted a teammate, right? Part of the best thing, all the experiences that I had in my life that were positive were where I had teammates where we were training hard together. So I had gone out to a number of my friends and Michael was somebody obviously that spent a lot of personal time with. And I loved to joke that he had the office at Stanford, which was one of the few places on the country that had really good internet speed.”
2022-05-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Strava: Mark Gainey and Michael Horvath · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“At his wedding in Chicago, he and I had, we'd even done a race out in Chicago, we'd done the marathon together and things. But no, I was a big sales. I was one of my best sales jobs was selling him on the merits of coming to Northern California”
2022-05-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Strava: Mark Gainey and Michael Horvath · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right, I left, but then I had to still put food on the table and pay the rent. So I went from a very nice cushy investment job to getting, I think I got $8 an hour working at Metro Sports. But it was great because I could work at the running store for, you know, maybe four hours a day, punch a clock. And then have the rest of my time totally free to focus on whatever business opportunity I wanted to go do.”
2022-05-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Strava: Mark Gainey and Michael Horvath · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That was the first inkling. And then you're right, talking to all these entrepreneurs in my first job, I absolutely just had an interest to start something. And so I left. I left the firm in September of 1995 to go pursue something.”
2022-05-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Strava: Mark Gainey and Michael Horvath · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We had this. We had a concessions business. So we figured out that all the non mainstream sports, swimming, indoor track and field, all these sports that Frankly, we're not of interest to the professional concessions, guys. There were still spectators that were there. So myself and a friend of mine, Chris. Go down to local grocery store, we'd buy a bunch of hot dogs and buns and coke, six packs of coke, and we figured out that, you know, for nine cents, which was the cost of a bun and a hot dog, we could turn around and sell that for $2 at these local sporting events. And that was great. I mean, that's how I paid for all my meals and spending while I was at Harvard.”
2022-05-02 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Strava: Mark Gainey and Michael Horvath · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT