YouSaid · the spoken record

Michael Horvath

lines on the record
94
first
2022-06-02
most recent
2022-06-02
sittings or episodes
1
sources
podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

  1. “I believe we What we do every day. And what I mean by that is that it's not the big moments, it's not the We strive for several years and achieve at one moment in time where the big trip we take or call it the peaks. That actually give us the most meaning. They are important. But what really defines who we are is what we do. Every day. And so, if what you do every day is put a little effort into being active. Being kind to the people who are important to you in your life and the complete strangers. That's how you walk through life. then that's where you're going to find the meaning. So, fulfillment, I believe, comes from being intentional about what we do every day.”

    2022-06-02 · The Diary of a CEO · Strava Founder: How I Motivated 100 Million People To Stay Active: Michael Horvath · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  2. “Is through Strava. It is through running this company and connecting back to what we tried to create, the idea we had in 1995, the thing we came back to in 2006, the way in which we've built this team around our ABCs with the future we can have. The company that we will be in 20 and 30 years, I can contribute something to that now. And that's Is where I have found that sense of completeness again.”

    2022-06-02 · The Diary of a CEO · Strava Founder: How I Motivated 100 Million People To Stay Active: Michael Horvath · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  3. “When there's something yet to be discovered about what you really, who you really are on the other side of this. So, as I said, I wasn't thinking at all of going back to. Strava joining, you know, coming back to the company, I wasn't thinking of starting another company. Didn't know what it was going to be. I imagined it was going to be something like Deep sense of rescuing people somewhere, like this idea that what I couldn't save my wife, but I'm going to go find other people to save. That isn't it. That was just that, again, was like this idea that I'm trying to solve the hole in my heart. Finding people I can help. What I've Though it wasn't what I chose or how I thought I would get. That sense of purpose again, that sense of who I am.”

    2022-06-02 · The Diary of a CEO · Strava Founder: How I Motivated 100 Million People To Stay Active: Michael Horvath · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  4. “Yeah, it's a really, really Interesting and like that the way I think about it is I had to not rediscover who I am. I had to define who I am after my life with her. I was dramatically changed by my life with her. I don't go back to being the person I was without her. I am somebody who is now discovering who am I as the survivor of that life with her. Don't happen overnight. I think my first. Inclination was to try to make it happen as quickly as possible, get on with it, find out who you are. And I think at least what I learned was you. Could make some pretty What you think are good choices or good moves, and you realize it's not you. That's not the what you. You're still thinking of the life you had and wanting to recreate, fine, fill the hole that's missing, the deep wound you're trying to sort of fill that with something.”

    2022-06-02 · The Diary of a CEO · Strava Founder: How I Motivated 100 Million People To Stay Active: Michael Horvath · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  5. “You got to give some time for that. You got to invest in that. You create the space for it as a way to say there's still a part of me that's not the company”

    2022-06-02 · The Diary of a CEO · Strava Founder: How I Motivated 100 Million People To Stay Active: Michael Horvath · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  6. “So, what gets me through that is like, well, this is me as the CEO of this company. It's not me, Michael Horvath, that's another person who will live on. I'm not going to be the CEO forever. So I will have a life that's my life. And what is that life? What is in that life that is mine, that isn't the companies? One thing is, for example, everyone on the company knows this. I love to cook I feel like it's an incredibly valuable Creative outlet. I'd love to cook for other people Nothing better than to imagine a meal, design it, think of it, think it through, get all the ingredients, make the dinner, and have your friends or your family sitting around a table and enjoying what you've created. For me, that is part of my identity. And so finding like that's a core belief in”

    2022-06-02 · The Diary of a CEO · Strava Founder: How I Motivated 100 Million People To Stay Active: Michael Horvath · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  7. “And that sometimes it's the obvious things making sure that we have the right set of priorities, executing against a longer-term strategy, not churning people around with different ideas, limiting how many things I throw into the room. Some days it's about, do we have the right team? Do we have to add someone or take someone away from the team? Those are hard choices for someone who's pretty, I call it, I say emotional. I have a lot of feeling. And so. That's the part that I feel like I suppress a lot is like I can't feel as much. I can't let myself feel everything I want to feel because I feel it will come out in ways that are not healthy, not in the best interest of the company.”

    2022-06-02 · The Diary of a CEO · Strava Founder: How I Motivated 100 Million People To Stay Active: Michael Horvath · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  8. “Level of commitment that says, I'm here. This is super important to me. But I have to be myself. Cannot be defined myself as this is the thing that makes me who I am. Well, for someone who's a rather emotional person, you'll bring your emotion to the decision in an unhealthy way if your identity is wrapped up in the company. So, what I strive for is thinking what is in the best interest of Strava. And like when I wake up in the morning, I ask myself the question what am I doing today? Help connect people to the full potential of what we can create.”

    2022-06-02 · The Diary of a CEO · Strava Founder: How I Motivated 100 Million People To Stay Active: Michael Horvath · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  9. “Yeah, and we do talk about that. It's like, this is very different than what we had imagined, you know, something that was additive to, it's additive in a very different way, but something that where we could by and large not give up so much of our personal life for the sake of the company that what we're creating. It is consuming. So what part of that is, well, this is what we should have expected if we were going to be successful. It's just a given. You have to do it this way. And what part is it you need to create the structure so you can maintain that measure of I'm still Michael Horvath apart from Strava? Strava is not my 100% of my identity. That's something I struggle with. And it's really important because I don't think I'll be as good a leader if my identity is completely wrapped up in this company. I need to have.”

    2022-06-02 · The Diary of a CEO · Strava Founder: How I Motivated 100 Million People To Stay Active: Michael Horvath · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  10. “Making sure people connect with what our potential really is and how we're going to get there. Whereas in 2019, it was all about believing we even had one, a future.”

    2022-06-02 · The Diary of a CEO · Strava Founder: How I Motivated 100 Million People To Stay Active: Michael Horvath · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  11. “In leadership for them. So there was just the basic level of. Needing to rebuild trust, needing to say not only do we have a plan, but you're a really important part of the plan. And here's how I show that you can trust me or here's how I want to build a relationship so that over time you will trust me. That period of time in November and December and January, I remember I think just the level of How much we thought about every word we said was aimed at the objective of getting people to believe again. Compare it to today, where I think people believe in maybe what we're changing, what we focus on now is getting them to understand what our potential is. I believe that we are going to be successful I think we today, I focus so much my effort”

    2022-06-02 · The Diary of a CEO · Strava Founder: How I Motivated 100 Million People To Stay Active: Michael Horvath · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  12. “That was November 1st. So November 2nd was how we're going to get this company back to winning again. November 1st was we have to let in that time it was a little over I think 32 people go out of the 200 or so that were there so really tough way for your first day back on the job but what was even harder was that the deep wound it created in that family that sense of We didn't think this would happen here. How come we didn't know that feeling of can I trust leadership? And they didn't know me. I wasn't like I was a house. I wasn't not around nearly for most of the people in the company at that time. They weren't hired during the time that I was the CEO the first time. They knew that I was a founder. They knew I had been helping out as an interim CFO. But I wasn't really a presence.”

    2022-06-02 · The Diary of a CEO · Strava Founder: How I Motivated 100 Million People To Stay Active: Michael Horvath · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  13. “Brought me back from something. And where we have now, what we have to look forward to, what we can imagine for the future of the company and the community we're building for is. Much richer experience doing more for athletes all the time, investing in what they'll be able to experience years from now, how it will be a part of their active life for as long as they live, because we've built sustainability into the core of the business.”

    2022-06-02 · The Diary of a CEO · Strava Founder: How I Motivated 100 Million People To Stay Active: Michael Horvath · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  14. “We had the right sales up when the wind started to blow. We got that tailwind from the pandemic and it accelerated our business. And so now we can imagine a very different outcome as a result for this company. We were 2019, it was how do we get this back on track? Now it's how do we make the most of this opportunity? And for me personally, I've had to really rethink Everything from What's my purpose? What motivates me to be the person who can lead this company? And what I'm reconnecting with is this is what we intended all along, is that Mark and I create something that we want to stick with and stay with for decades. So, finding that path back personally out of the abyss that I was in is tied integrally to what Strava means for that future for me. I don't at all ascribe to the idea that I saved Strava, but Strava saved me.”

    2022-06-02 · The Diary of a CEO · Strava Founder: How I Motivated 100 Million People To Stay Active: Michael Horvath · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  15. “Get up on stage and we say, Here's the path back. This is how we're going to do this. We're going to focus nearly 100% of this company on our customer. And that's the person who wants to lead an active life. That's the athlete. We're going to build this for them. And we're going to build something so good that they're going to pay for it. And that's the subscription. So we focus the company on that goal to build the best subscription service for the athlete. The team responded. They dug in. We climbed that mountain. And we did have help with pandemic bringing us a lot more people. We doubled during the pandemic from 50 million to, I think, now we're at 99 million registered athletes. The team knows I love analogies.”

    2022-06-02 · The Diary of a CEO · Strava Founder: How I Motivated 100 Million People To Stay Active: Michael Horvath · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  16. “What I recall from the conversations with the board. I want to characterize it as like I feel like I was the least bad of all the bad options because they weren't very many good options at that time. We weren't going to be able to recruit someone in. Given the state of Company, I don't know if I was ready to dive back in. I'm still really doubting what my place is right now. But there was one thing that Mark and I were convinced about, which was inside what was there, there was a great company. We had at that time 50 million people in the community, so 50 million registered athletes. Not yet profitable, but we November 2nd, 2019, my second day back leading the company.”

    2022-06-02 · The Diary of a CEO · Strava Founder: How I Motivated 100 Million People To Stay Active: Michael Horvath · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  17. “Wasn't thinking of going back? No, I wasn't. We had recruited in. Someone to replace Mark as CEO. So Mark stepped down in May of 2017. So just a few months after Anna passed away, I wasn't thinking about returning at all. I was, you know, that was. I knew I had to discover what was next, but I wasn't considering that it was going to be returning to Strava. So what got me closer was that Strava started to need some help by 2018, I step in as interim CFO and head of people. By the middle of 2019, we're looking at a pretty challenging environment for the company. About 200 people in terms of team size, we were not profitable. And we had to figure out a way to get to sustainability very quickly. We were not able to raise capital at that time given the state of the business. We made a decision to make a leadership change.”

    2022-06-02 · The Diary of a CEO · Strava Founder: How I Motivated 100 Million People To Stay Active: Michael Horvath · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  18. “But there's something in there that's like we know what we can count on each other. We know that that is at the core. I want to look at that as like the model for what is possible even inside something like a company, even in something like the Strava community, that that's happening, that people are building relationships So Estrava is like, what is it all about? It's about motivating people to be active through the relationships available with other people.”

    2022-06-02 · The Diary of a CEO · Strava Founder: How I Motivated 100 Million People To Stay Active: Michael Horvath · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  19. “Way is up anymore, you're off script. You are whatever you thought your life was going to be about, it is, you're questioning everything. And in my case, I had four children who were 17 to 22 in age at that time. We pulled together. This is, I wear this bracelet. This is, I gave one to each of my children. They wear it every day. This is on the day of Anna's funeral. And we pulled together and we helped each other through that darkest, darkest moment. And again, it's the relationships. And we're a normal family. We've got our highs and lows. We got dysfunction. We got function. We've got it all.”

    2022-06-02 · The Diary of a CEO · Strava Founder: How I Motivated 100 Million People To Stay Active: Michael Horvath · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  20. “Otherwise, like this life where you'd say we've built something together and look back on that and say, like, the best thing I've built is two things. My friendship with Mark. My marriage with Anna. I hope those are the things I look back on apart from everything else and say at the end when my day comes, those were the things where meaning comes from. That's where if I go back to what's most important, it's the relationships with the people who are closest to you in your life. And then that extends to the people who are also important, but they may not, you may not have that same bond. So what did I learn? Well, losing that person is extremely difficult. You're left with, I don't want to speak for everyone who goes through this, but there is an aspect of you don't know.”

    2022-06-02 · The Diary of a CEO · Strava Founder: How I Motivated 100 Million People To Stay Active: Michael Horvath · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  21. “Walking through the backyard, and there's this young woman in her pajamas talking to my landlord. And this is Anna. She turns out she's a friend of my landlord, had babysit for her children when she was going to college at the same school I was getting my PhD. This is Northwestern University in Chicago in Evanston, Illinois. So I meet Anna and in my backyard and She's not living in Evans, and she's living in Cincinnati, Ohio, but she comes back to visit a few months later. And a few months after that, we're married. And so We're babies, right? I got married the day after I turned 25. I remember she was 23. We were not yet fully formed human beings, right? But we're now building a life together. And we went through all sorts of highs and lows in our marriage. And we had four children and we live.”

    2022-06-02 · The Diary of a CEO · Strava Founder: How I Motivated 100 Million People To Stay Active: Michael Horvath · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  22. “I don't know that I knew this When she was going through her last few years, were even the few years after she passed away. I don't think I was, I think I prepared a lot for how to live my life caring for her. I wasn't prepared for how to live my life when she was gone. But what I've come to, I think, is This is again may Somewhat obvious is that the relationship you can build with an individual, in this case my wife, the person we met, where did we meet? We met in my backyard when I started grad school at Northwestern University. I rented this coach house, which is like a little carriage house behind a bigger home. And I was walking to the front of the house one morning to get my mail.”

    2022-06-02 · The Diary of a CEO · Strava Founder: How I Motivated 100 Million People To Stay Active: Michael Horvath · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  23. “Was working on projects that she knew she would never finish, but she was motivated by what she could experience of working on those pieces of art. She did leave behind like if this were going to continue, here's what I would do with it. My youngest is an artist. I know what's motivating her is like she wants to get to some of those pieces and see if she can bring them to some version of what her mom. had left behind what she had indicated this could be something like this. I think Mura will bring it to something else. She'll add her own thing to it. But that was what Anna, you know, I think she got there, struggling against the end is not the way to find the meaning.”

    2022-06-02 · The Diary of a CEO · Strava Founder: How I Motivated 100 Million People To Stay Active: Michael Horvath · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  24. “Extend my life. At some point, if that's your goal, you will not find meaning in that goal. It will be out the window. So you instead, you have to find meaning in what can this day bring? It starts by, how do I feel today? If you string together a bunch of days where you feel you've gotten something out of the day, that's a meaningful life. And you can find that to the very end. And just I learned. So much from watching on a progress through that and give Give to people around her, but also give to herself. She was an artist, worked in her studio to nearly the very last day.”

    2022-06-02 · The Diary of a CEO · Strava Founder: How I Motivated 100 Million People To Stay Active: Michael Horvath · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  25. “You have to You have to think of it as not as the goal is to get to something, some state of health or physical ability or mental ability to do something like a dream or a trip you want to take. It's the day that is the day you're living in. Take it as it comes today. Having a living a life where we're all terminal, by the way, turns out we're all on our way to some point where we say we're on our last day. But what you experience when you're Going through regular measurement of the progress of a disease like that. Because that's the way your medical. Treatment is we're monitoring the disease to know. When to change therapy, when To add other drugs that will help handle the side effects of all the therapy. When to say it's time to stop the therapy. The meaning can't be.”

    2022-06-02 · The Diary of a CEO · Strava Founder: How I Motivated 100 Million People To Stay Active: Michael Horvath · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  26. “That I hold out is like, that's what I'm motivated by putting balance into the core values of Strava, by having it be something I focus on in my life. Want to return to it as often as I can, even if I won't be able to stay in it all the time. So leaving Strava, that was definitely not balance. Moving into Caring for my family. There were periods where it came in definitely found a flow and a harmony and a balance, but then times where just it completely is out the window and everything is all hands on deck on what's the next treatment we're going to try to find for Anna, where are we going to, in one case, we had to move. We chose to move back to San Francisco so she could be in a clinical trial of a novel therapy that shows. You had to work at it. And then in the balances where I think you find the most meaningful moments.”

    2022-06-02 · The Diary of a CEO · Strava Founder: How I Motivated 100 Million People To Stay Active: Michael Horvath · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  27. “And for the next three and a half years until Anna passed away, that was my priority became taking care of my family, doing what I could to take what time we had left to make it as meaningful as possible and all sorts of things we can talk about of finding meaning to the last day. There's a lot of lessons learned there. But what I was. That's a different kind of balance. I want to be honest, it's like not necessarily what I expect when we say balance as a value, it feels like what we do is we pass through that balance point over and over again in our lives. We never quite seize it and hold on to it and feel like we live in it, but it's something we experience we go through over and over again and we try to return to it. And it's the act of trying to return to it.”

    2022-06-02 · The Diary of a CEO · Strava Founder: How I Motivated 100 Million People To Stay Active: Michael Horvath · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  28. “Those first months, we weren't sure exactly how long she would have to live. The doctors were, we got to do a lot of tests. And I'm still living this dual life between New Hampshire and California because she didn't move to California with me. We didn't move the family. That was a choice we made to remain in New Hampshire. As the home base for the family. And so what ends up happening at the end of 2013 is I stepped down from running the company. Mark steps in as the CEO. I'm in a supportive function, but I have a lot of flexibility and I moved back to New Hampshire.”

    2022-06-02 · The Diary of a CEO · Strava Founder: How I Motivated 100 Million People To Stay Active: Michael Horvath · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  29. “Throughout 2010, instead of going once every two months, I'm going once a month staying for five days. Now it's once every two weeks staying for five days. And then that gets more and more frequent. So I'm definitely not on the balance has gone out the window. And this was 2010 through the end almost to the end of 2013 where I'm CEO of the company. We're growing this community is now surpassing a million members in the community. And we get to the point where I think we're just shy of 10 million by the time that I'm stepping down. And you know what? It's a very sad story, but my wife was diagnosed with a terminal illness in September of 2013. She had been diagnosed, she had had breast cancer gone through treatment in 2004 long before we started Strava and it had come back. And it was”

    2022-06-02 · The Diary of a CEO · Strava Founder: How I Motivated 100 Million People To Stay Active: Michael Horvath · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  30. “We had this very little, you know, we have four kids in five years, we're very young kids. We're going to raise them in Hanover. And I was like, I got to live in Hanover. And Mark is in the Bay Area. He's living in California. Well, he's got to live in Portola Valley. And so we're going to build this company on two coasts and it was going to be a team in New Hampshire and a team in California. By 2010, it was like that's clearly not going to be the case to hire the talent we need, it's probably going to be the team in San Francisco that's going to be the headquarters. And so I start flying to San Francisco more and more regularly.”

    2022-06-02 · The Diary of a CEO · Strava Founder: How I Motivated 100 Million People To Stay Active: Michael Horvath · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  31. “Yeah, I mean, this is where going back to when Mark and I were thinking of starting another company, we were saying it's going to be different this time, right? We're not going to let it consume us. We're going to find a way to keep the bee. In my personal case, that did not last more than the first year. We thought we were going to build a company. I was living in Hanover, New Hampshire, which is a very small community in about two hours north of Boston in the state of New Hampshire. It's in the woods. Dartmouth College is there. And they hired me to teach entrepreneurship in 2000. And so that's what brought us there. My family, my wife and four kids. So we arrived when my youngest daughter, she's now turning 24 this year. She was turning to that year.”

    2022-06-02 · The Diary of a CEO · Strava Founder: How I Motivated 100 Million People To Stay Active: Michael Horvath · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  32. “Only one problem. We built the wrong there again. We learned we built the wrong experience. We thought you tracked the workout on your mobile phone and then you go to the website to see your results. And that's how people like people aren't going to do that. So we had to rebuild that app and rebuild the experience to be all completely on mobile. But the idea that what can unlock the community growth is the form factor, reducing the frictions, getting meeting people where giving them a chance to onboard into something without having to go through a lot of hoops, jump through all the things. Basic stuff. But those were like the earliest things that we did did prove that we could build something that wasn't highly engaging. We just couldn't get people into the experience in the early days until we built the mobile apps.”

    2022-06-02 · The Diary of a CEO · Strava Founder: How I Motivated 100 Million People To Stay Active: Michael Horvath · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  33. “Said, okay, we better build a mobile app. And we built one that basically just tracked your workout. You could record our workout to get it into Strava. We saw off the charts community growth in the first week. We were adding prior to the mobile app, we were adding maybe 100 new users, 100 new athletes a week. We added 10,000 a day on the launch of our mobile app. We got featured in the App Store. That was 100,000 in a day. Why? Because it's such an easy entry point. You don't have to pay for anything. You already have the phone in your pocket. You're just downloading our app from the App Store. The App Store is pushing us out to a community. We would never have had the money to meet from a marketing perspective”

    2022-06-02 · The Diary of a CEO · Strava Founder: How I Motivated 100 Million People To Stay Active: Michael Horvath · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  34. “We were wrong in the sense that we weren't seeing the community growth. We were building an experience that really, once they got through all those frictions to get started, they stuck around. They were committed. They were engaged. They converted to the subscription, which is the Corvar businesses. You can use Strava for free as long as you like, but the best that we have to offer kind of if you're going to put something, you say you're going to invest in yourself and try to live a more active life. The subscription really helps you. It gives you more ways to stay motivated more fun, more ways to discover what's great around you. So the subscription has all these great things. And it was there from the early days. We didn't wait to launch it. We launched it in the end of 2009. So we had a lot of people who were found that we had a high conversion rate. We had a low community size, but a high conversion rate. So we knew we were onto something. And so what taught us we were wrong was we actually.”

    2022-06-02 · The Diary of a CEO · Strava Founder: How I Motivated 100 Million People To Stay Active: Michael Horvath · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  35. “Tell you why I would have to go talk to them. Maybe we were perceived as we were too niche because we were perceived as only focusing on more hardcore athletes and not the masses wasn't true. But in any case, what was true back in 2009, we had built the wrong experience for what ultimately would drive community growth, which is it needs to be on your mobile phone. It needs to be kind of all on your mobile phone the mobile phone is not just the tracking device that then you then go to the website to look and have the experience. You need to build the experience on mobile. And we were really late to that. We were so late And so by 2012, we finally have a mobile team that's building. We are finally in the game, if you will”

    2022-06-02 · The Diary of a CEO · Strava Founder: How I Motivated 100 Million People To Stay Active: Michael Horvath · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  36. “Well, they got bought. I mean, that's the thing, a lot of these companies that we launched into a pretty crowded space back in 2009. There were at least 10, maybe more companies that were doing something you would call activity tracking with GPS. Most of them had a mobile apps, and we did not. Runkeeper was acquired in... Say 2015, 2014. One of the big sports brands map my fitness was acquired by Under Armor, Run Tastic was acquired by Adidas. By the way, none of these acquirers ever came to talk to Strava.”

    2022-06-02 · The Diary of a CEO · Strava Founder: How I Motivated 100 Million People To Stay Active: Michael Horvath · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  37. “We opened, like we created the company. The founding team beginning of 2009. We were only web based. So you had to, you couldn't track your workout with your mobile phone on Strava. You used a third party GPS device, an example of one was a Garmin 305 cycle computer. It was largely cycling only to start with. We didn't encourage any other sport type. But you had to pay for that piece of equipment. You had to plug it into your laptop or desktop computer, transfer the file, and upload it. It was incredible friction, right? So we did not grow fast at all in the beginning. It was like so many, you had to really want to try to experience this thing. And it's not because mobile wasn't a thing you could do. We just didn't do it. There were companies that started largely with, they did maybe had a website, but they pretty quickly built a mobile app. Companies like Runkeeper, they were one of the first hundred apps in the App Store. Imagine that. Now they're, I don't know, millions of apps in the App Store, but”

    2022-06-02 · The Diary of a CEO · Strava Founder: How I Motivated 100 Million People To Stay Active: Michael Horvath · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  38. “Yeah, I think that is a really good next step if we're not achieving that sense of coordination with giving people the choice, but encouraging them to say with incentives like lunch or Events or the presence of the senior leadership will be there on these certain days.”

    2022-06-02 · The Diary of a CEO · Strava Founder: How I Motivated 100 Million People To Stay Active: Michael Horvath · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  39. “You all have to come back into the office. Just the loose number of conversations I've had with other CEOs says you lose about 20% of the people if you do that and you're not really sure which of the 20% because it's really difficult to know until you You make people decide But they're going to be okay. I mean, they'll find other people who then say, yeah, I really want to work at a place where everyone comes to the office. And that's what I want to. And so that's the sorting that will happen here over the next few years. Know these things take time. That's the thing, and time, you know, we don't have a lot. I mean, we're trying to build a long-lasting company, but we want to have, we don't want this to be the thing that gets in the way of us progressing as a company. So we are balancing that too.”

    2022-06-02 · The Diary of a CEO · Strava Founder: How I Motivated 100 Million People To Stay Active: Michael Horvath · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  40. “What we need to do as well. I think there'll be a sorting here. It's going to take another year or two, but there will be companies that say we're all about hybrid work. And there'll be companies to say we're all about office work. And employees then will say, I get to sort based on which one is the way I want to. So actually, that'll be a really healthy outcome. I think a lot of companies that would never have tried the hybrid approach or Enabled remote work are now happy they did like we are. We're happy we have this much more geographically distributed workforce that's bringing us incredible talent with a lot of different experience behind that. And then on the other side Not sure, you know, where this is going to go for some of the companies that are in like right now, we're seeing.”

    2022-06-02 · The Diary of a CEO · Strava Founder: How I Motivated 100 Million People To Stay Active: Michael Horvath · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  41. “I think there's going to be a sorting. I agree with you that in the start, you kind of like you followed the lead of the bigger, we did at least. We saw what they were doing and we followed the lead of the bigger players thinking that's teaching us”

    2022-06-02 · The Diary of a CEO · Strava Founder: How I Motivated 100 Million People To Stay Active: Michael Horvath · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  42. “And so I think we may have saved ourselves from a lot of departures by giving people that escape another way. It sounds like you already had a distributed workforce. You couldn't tell them they could go to other places they already were other places, right? Yeah, they were. So that wasn't really the thing.”

    2022-06-02 · The Diary of a CEO · Strava Founder: How I Motivated 100 Million People To Stay Active: Michael Horvath · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  43. “And maybe San Francisco is even particularly this way. We did not lose people during the start of the pandemic. A lot of different reasons. Instead, what we saw was a lot of people moved away from San Francisco.”

    2022-06-02 · The Diary of a CEO · Strava Founder: How I Motivated 100 Million People To Stay Active: Michael Horvath · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  44. “No, but I agree with you that it provides clarity for people. They don't have to make a choice. They may be unhappy with the decision, but they say at least it removes the requirement that I have to think about it and decide each time on my own. Is this the Dago In? Are other people doing it too? You have coordinated people for, you've done the work of coordinating them. And I think. The way we used to operate. We used to have no, we don't work from home, we work at the office. That's our policy. Only under rare situations would we say that that's okay to work from home. At least what the path we've taken right now is to try the carrot approach before we move to something else. And I don't want to say what you're doing is a stick, but it's that right now, it's by degrees. And maybe this is the difference between the UK versus the US.”

    2022-06-02 · The Diary of a CEO · Strava Founder: How I Motivated 100 Million People To Stay Active: Michael Horvath · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  45. “And that just may take more time and more of a sense of security that this is going to be a good experience. I'm not going to, number one, just my health is not going to suffer. The health of the people I love around me won't suffer. So we're not there yet, maybe in terms of from a medical or scientific basis yet. But I think it's more important. It doesn't really matter what the sign says if what you feel is I don't feel secure and safe when I go to the office. That's I think is going to be much harder to overcome. And that's the part where coordination just makes it really difficult to replicate if you don't have everyone just say, yeah, I work from the office during working from home, you lose all those things are true. And we had that great sense of disconnection, the days of endless video meetings and trying to do whatever you could to get that sense of energy you get by being around another human.”

    2022-06-02 · The Diary of a CEO · Strava Founder: How I Motivated 100 Million People To Stay Active: Michael Horvath · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  46. “The second reason I think is more fundamental is like it is really difficult to be halfway, halfway back to work. Coordination of either being all remote or all in the office is a lot easier. And we're not ready to go all in the office. We'll lose people on our team. We don't want to lose. That's like maybe too much of a calculating way to think about it. It's more like that. I don't think we'll get the best work out of the people who we forced to come back in and they stay on the team.”

    2022-06-02 · The Diary of a CEO · Strava Founder: How I Motivated 100 Million People To Stay Active: Michael Horvath · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  47. “Are two reasons I see, and I've thought a lot about this in the sense of Justin Arstrava's example. One is we have programmed our lives to be remote. Reprogrammed our lives to be remote. And so we are stuck in patterns that are really difficult to get out of. Just like in the beginning of the pandemic, it was really difficult to get into that pattern. We were forced to. We're not forced to get out of it now. Strava's not forcing people back into the office. So it's difficult with everything from how you organize your day. Maybe you have children or other dependents at home. You have to take care of. You have pets. You have worked out a routine that works really well for working from home. And so getting people back into the office is getting over those hurdles and frictions. And so what do we do? We make it more enticing. Wednesdays we offer lunch. We are trying to organize Wednesday as the day. If you're going to pick one day a week, maybe one day a month, make it a Wednesday. Get people, oh, this wasn't so bad. I got over the friction that one day. Maybe I'll do it again. That's just like the mundane reason why it's so hard.”

    2022-06-02 · The Diary of a CEO · Strava Founder: How I Motivated 100 Million People To Stay Active: Michael Horvath · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  48. “We pay a lot of attention to it. I think it's important for people to do their best work that they feel a sense of belonging. And I don't think this is just at Strava. I think it's true in a lot of places. And sometimes that is so much easier to do when you're in person and you're providing the breakfast and the desk that place that, I can feel productive in this space. And yes, the colleagues around me are people with, you know, incredible talent. And I'm energized by the group, by the setting that I'm in. And I think for many of our team, they really miss that during the pandemic. They would love it to come back, but it's really difficult to bring it back right now. It's going to take us time to work our way back.”

    2022-06-02 · The Diary of a CEO · Strava Founder: How I Motivated 100 Million People To Stay Active: Michael Horvath · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  49. “Just moves us that we build a team that tries to match that diversity and the people on the team. And so if we're not there anywhere, most of our team is still in the US in terms of the geographic bias we have today. But I think that it's not possible to build that kind of a company, that kind of a team if you require everyone to be in the same location all the time. So we give some little on the location and we get a lot back in terms of what people can bring, the different experiences they can bring to us.”

    2022-06-02 · The Diary of a CEO · Strava Founder: How I Motivated 100 Million People To Stay Active: Michael Horvath · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  50. “And I think we replicate that. That's the model I think that we can get to. If we only worked with people who are geographically proximate, we're losing that opportunity to work with people with completely different set of experiences that they can bring to what we're trying to build. We're trying to serve athletes everywhere. Think easily over a billion people who wake up every day wanting to be active. And we want to meet them all. They're in every part of the world. And so that incredible diversity of the customer that we want to serve.”

    2022-06-02 · The Diary of a CEO · Strava Founder: How I Motivated 100 Million People To Stay Active: Michael Horvath · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT