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Michael Horvath

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2022-06-02

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2022-06-02

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1. “Yeah, me No, so I think what is possible is. With people, but you don't have to be with them all the time. That you can find the combination of. My colleague Brian, who's here with me today. He lives in Dallas in the Dallas area. And we have, we looked at the calendar. It turns out we've actually gotten together in person now, I think, four out of the last five weeks because of business need brought us together. Yet we've also spent time working in a virtual setting. So I call that putting the coins in the bank. We have enough opportunity to see each other in person to get that feeling that we can be more effective when we have to work virtually together.”

   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. “Came out was how much we already appreciate each other, even if we've never been together. Most of us had never met in person, but we already felt like we knew each other. And we didn't start with the awkward hello. I'm so-and-so. It was hugs right away. It was the sense of this, this is the team that now is in the same place. And I want to carry that forward. I want that to be like we put coins in the bank that'll get us for the next six months or a year to the next time we get together. But we can create that sense of camaraderie even if we're not sitting in the same office building or the same room. So that was eye opening for me. That was possible because of pandemic, that we could create this very distributed, interesting, diverse workforce team that felt everyone felt for the most part felt a sense of belonging.”

   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. “But what we have is a much broader set of stories that people can bring and tell about what they did before they joined Strava, what they're experiencing here. They're coming from all sorts of different locations. So that's an aspect of what camaraderie can, we feel when we got together in San Diego in person for a week at the beginning of March”

   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. “And the beautiful thing in that is these people all have incredible talent. Yes, they were the best people that we could have possibly attracted for the position, but they have such different lived experiences. They bring that to the work they do. So we're learning a ton about what camrada, where it really comes from. Maybe the thing we were creating was in the old, in the pre-pandemic times was a camaraderie that was built around a very limited set of rituals like going for that Wednesday workout. Turns out that a lot of people felt excluded by that because they weren't, they didn't feel fast enough to go with the crew that was going out for a run. We have to find our ways to replicate or create something that is like that today”

   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. “A requirement on any job openings. So we've hired, we've more than doubled the team over the course of the last year and a half and have added people across the United States in many different countries as well because if you have the talent and we're looking for it, you don't have to be in San Francisco or Denver, which were the two main offices we had, or Bristol, UK, we've now opened an office in Dublin. So we will have physical locations, but we have a over 150 people today who don't have any one of our office locations as their home city.”

   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. “It's been hard for us to find our way back to how it felt to work together. We were, camaraderie is one of our other seas, commitment, craftsmanship, and camaraderie. So camaraderie was important. And it showed up in a lot of ways. We had a Wednesday workout, lunchtime. We'd go out for runs. There was a group that walked. There was a group that met some mornings to go for a ride. So the camaraderie in sport, yes, there was camaraderie in. We spent a lot of time working together and building those relationships. It felt like a team inside the company. And that was really difficult to replicate virtually. But something else has happened as a result of pandemic that I think is a real beautiful outcome that will lead us back to camaraderie of a very different kind. We stopped putting location”

   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. “I think that's so being the idea of the gamification. Yeah, we did that, but where we're leaning much more heavily now is allowing the people in our community to tell their story. And not just of today, I went out for this run. Yeah, that's part of a story. But what does this amount to over time? How do I accomplish my goals? What are the things I'm striving for? How do I feel when I get there? And maybe that's where we can start measuring this.”

   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. “If I also look back at where we thought we were starting, we were building something that had to be good enough for the best athletes in the world to use because we believe they could motivate people who were not as committed to an active life to come on board. I actually don't think that that is motivating, but I think the other stories are even more motivating. Stories like yours, like you've dramatically changed how you live your life. Put activity at the center, and that's incredibly motivating for people that they can see that that's possible. So I believe it's increased storytelling is really the key.”

   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. “It's got to make him feel better. Feel better. Yeah, I definitely think there's, and we don't, I would say we don't necessarily track that very well today How do you actually feel about yourself now versus a month ago or two months ago? We track a lot about your physiological performance. We can show you you're better. Lower heart rate, lower resting heart rate, your fitness score has gone up, all sorts of ways in which we can show progress physiologically. But I'm more interested in joy. I mean, that's, we're not good yet at measuring the meaning and joy we bring to people's lives. We'll get there. And I think, but that's a very important part of the equation is that you feel better and you want to keep feeling that good.”

   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. “More about the performance aspects of being active. How can you get faster? But we quickly realized it's about consistency. It's about the experience. And that's, I think, where we keep people. You may come for the competition. You stay for the community. You may come for wanting to track your workout, but you stay because of the people you meet and how they motivate you and how it feels.”

    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. “The majority of it is you have to be connected to people you actually care about on Strava. That motivate you to be more consistent. And so we say people keep people active. People motivate people to be active. And you may not realize it, but your journey motivated somebody else too. Your activities were the source of motivation for someone else. And they were more active and they added their activities. And that was the motivation for someone else. So this has a way of exponentially increasing people's motivation. And I believe we can change over time over the next many years. We can help people follow the same journey you took more and more regularly. So we may have started in a place which 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

12. “Great question We see is that people who you do have to catch on and find something that keeps you in Strava. But the thing that happens to you when you're part of the community, when you stay with it, is you become more regular, it's more frequent that you are active. You may not get faster. You might, but that's not actually what we see. You just more regularly active. More consistent. What is also true is that if you're more connected to other people, and that's not to be a lot of people, I think most.”

    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. “And that became Strava segments. That was the earliest first conversation about something that became a fundamental part of what Strava is today. That would never have happened if we hadn't just opened up and said, we're trying to build something that will help people live a more active life. And then Davies says, well, I'm working on something that helps, that might help motivate me to be more active. I wonder if it could be relevant to you. And he's still part of the team today. And Strava's segments is a big part of what people know about 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

14. “And we said, no, we got to do this. This is the thing. And then it says, you know, you meet some people, you talk to about your idea with some people, and you see, this has got some legs. Other people have had similar thoughts and you can get them on board. The person we met, Davis Kitchell, instrumental in how we got this company started. He happened to be living in the same small town I was living in. He was trying to work out technology to use GPS to compare the time it took him to climb on his bicycle up a road by his house. He was just exploring this because he was curious. And we thought, oh, that's interesting. I wonder if that could be somehow the basis of what you could do in this virtual locker room that we were building.”

    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. “And it matches the things we had talked about in that time in veil. Could we build something that people would use every day? Would they tell their friends about it? Would it help them get out and live a life of more adventure? Would it be trusted? Would it be a trusted brand? And we're like, hey, wait a minute. The universe is putting this right in front of us. This is all coming together And why not? Not this? And in some ways, we denied that it could be that easy, that this idea we had had so many, you know, more than a decade earlier could be the thing that we're now going to go and start a company. We had denied that for a while and tried these other things first. We explored other places in very, very much the way that you would say the way entrepreneurs should do 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

16. “Showing us that people are actually willing to share with people that they trust on the internet. And before that, I'm sure Facebook wasn't the first to prove that out. But Facebook was the first to prove out that you can build community with the internet, at least in our world. Then you have GPS as in the things that's in our pocket all of a sudden. This mobile phone has got a GPS chip in it around that time frame. And it's okay. It's not great. And so we're like, all those reasons why we shouldn't have started that company are now reasons why we should start that 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. “Mark. We just want it to be entrepreneurs. We want it to seize the moment of this new technology, this new world of the internet. We wanted to create something. We were motivated by the idea that anyone can do this. That's the way it felt. And we tabled the thing we were really passionate about because some people told us it was a bad idea. And I thank them for it because it probably was a bad idea at the time. It would have failed, right? Where we were in 2007, 2008, that idea was still in our back of our minds. That idea came to the front. That's what we went and said, now what has changed? Well, a lot has changed, right? Right. So you have Facebook.”

    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. “Used to become internet companies, right? And they told us this is a lousy idea. Come on, guys, can't you do better than this? This is never going to work. People are not going to share personal information about themselves with strangers on the internet. That's never going to happen. Let's see. There's no technology that's going to make it easy to get the data in. People are going to be having to fill out forms and submit them online. That's going to be really, really full of friction. just put this away. Don't tell anyone about this idea. It's such a bad idea, right? And they turned us on to the idea that became Kana Software, which was something so mundane, boring, built a great company, but it was build systems to help these internet companies respond to consumer inbound consumer email, customer support email. So we did that. We got turned onto that idea. Why did we pursue that? We weren't passionate about it. We became passionate about 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

19. “And so, what we were describing to ourselves was what you see in Strava today is like a place where you could see other people's workouts. You could talk about, you track your performance over time, a training log, all that was, we sketched that out. We wrote a business plan. This is 1995, right? So we're not anywhere close to the founding of Strava in any means. We actually went out and talked about this idea with... Companies that were building websites. And that's the earliest internet companies were the ones that were building. The websites that other companies would then”

    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. “And Mark wanted to start a company. I was a professor. I was going to be his sounding board. He came to my office because I had an internet connection and he didn't. So what we cooked up was like, well, what are the problems in our own life that we would want to solve with this new technology as a starting point? Because we didn't know what else to start, right? So we went through a bunch of different ideas of the thing that we hung onto was like, we miss the crew team. We miss that bunch of people who were, you know, from all different walks of life and they found the same thing that we were passionate about and we spent a ton of time with them. We were with them hours every day. And we miss that feeling of being connected to them. We miss the boat house. We missed the feeling of competition. Could we recreate that with this new technology called the internet? Could we create the virtual locker room?”

    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. “Yeah, well, so I guess I'm drawn to tell how we've originally conceived of what is now Strava was. In 1994, 95, when I'm a professor at Stanford teaching economics, Mark is working in venture capital in Palo Alto. And there's this thing called the Internet that has just become like a household word before I got to Stanford. I think I had sent one email in my life. I had never, I didn't know what the internet was. I had no idea when I got to the Department of Economics. the person who managed all the IT equipment said, I'm going to install a browser on your computer. I had no idea what he was talking about. What's a browser? So had lived up to that point without the internet and the internet is introduced. It's a different thing than today with, you know, kids growing up with all of this around them. But when it was introduced, what Mark and I did was exactly that entrepreneur, that instinct is like, what is this new thing going to do? What problem can it solve?”

    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. “That they've had that sound pretty close to what you're doing, even if they're not sure that it's really relevant. And so those conversations in the early days, 2008 led to us actually putting a team behind this to build a prototype. And that eventually became the earliest version of Strava in 2009. So it was really just a set of conversations that led to what we actually decided on, but it came from something we had experienced in college back in the late 80s and 90s, the 20th century idea.”

    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. “Go to the idea behind Strava was a 20th century idea. We had that idea coming out of the boathouse when we graduated from college. We had the idea that what we experienced there is something that is applicable in so many places in our lives, being connected to other people through sport is what motivates you to lead more active life and makes you a better human being. It helps you live a healthier life and makes all the rest of your life better. It did that for us when we were in our 20s. And that's the universal part that we wanted to tap into when we were starting to create what became Strava was that it's the context of the people around you that keeps you motivated. It's the way in which you're connected through sport to other people that unites you. And so we started to explore that space. And when you explore and are willing to talk to people about your ideas, they respond. They tell you ideas.”

    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. “We were thinking about this, could be it. This is, it's not like we're going to have that many good ideas in our life. We're not going to have another opportunity and to build this kind of a company at least. And so let's make it worth it. And let's find something that we're extremely passionate about. And we used to say things like, it doesn't have to be big. It has to be great. It has to have meaning to the people who are our customers. And we define that as like we want to help people live a more life more full of meaning, adventure, and fun. We didn't say activity. We weren't yet sure what it was going to do, but it had to have some impact. It can't just be transactional. It has to have an effect on you at the core level of what you value, what decisions you make on a daily basis. And that's where I think we got to Strava, and I love to.”

    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. “Well, personal choice in my case, I wanted to go back to teaching. I came from academia. I was teaching economics when we started Kana. I wanted to go back to academia. Mark, the company got to a point where he brought in another CEO to run it. And he found that it wasn't his company anymore. He didn't have the role that he thought he would have on the other side of that decision. So I don't want to speak for him, but it was like this sense of like it was a personal choice for both of us. But at the same time, we look back on it and say where it goes next is not part of us. We have to forge a different path. There's got to be an idea that's worth that much of our investment. And perhaps it's that sense of at that point in our lives where we were then, late 30s, early 40s, when we're starting 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

26. “In the first internet boom, a lot of people made a lot of money. A lot of people lost a lot of money. And so what in it would we look back on and say, besides the experience itself and what we learned, what would it be that we would say to our kids or grandkids, like, here, this is something we're really proud that we created. We can't even lay claim to having created if we're only there for four years and then other people take it forward. Is it really ours? So we were out on the doorstep literally almost four years to the day after starting Kanna.”

    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. “When we started Strava, we were looking back at the previous company we had started. And we started talking about Creating what is now Strava back in 2006, we got together starting on the phone weekly talking about ideas that we, if we're going to start a company, what would it be? Eventually we got Mark and I, my co-founder, Mark Gainey, and I decided we had to get together for a few days the summer of 2006. And we defined at its core that what we had experienced in that other company, Cona Software, back in the late 90s, it was the Silicon Valley Olympics. That's the way I term that you have an idea, you raise some capital, you're off to the races, and either you have taken it public or sold it in four years, or it's, you know, and that's the gold medal or go home because that's it. We didn't want to do that again. And a few reasons why it wasn't terribly satisfying at the end of the day. Kind of was a wild ride during a wild time.”

    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. “We still want that sense that we have to bring our A game. We cannot be satisfied with past success or be complacent. There's plenty of competition out there, all sorts of new technologies that are coming into the fore today, new ways of building communities, new ways of motivating people. We have to stay competitive. And so that is my job as a leader. I have a leadership team that helps me with this. It's not just my job, but it is ensuring that we are taking care of our people, but also expecting that they're going to climb the mountain with 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

29. “We are trying to build something different at Strava. We're trying to build the 100 year brand, the company that will last longer than I will be there. It will still be here after many of the people who have been investors in the company have exited the company. It is something that we hope will withstand the test of time. And in that setting, I think it's much more important to think about these, you need some people who are going to be there for much longer than that one or two years. That's where balance comes in. Yes, it's easy to say you don't want people to burn out. But if it's only that you don't want them to get that tired, that sick of their job that they're quote unquote burned out, you've probably lost some level of productivity for quite a while before that. So we strive for a different kind of relationship with our team. It is a challenge also as a leader to make sure we're still performance oriented.”

    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. “You hire people who respond really well to those motivators that lead to their commitment. I think you also have to look at it from how long do you want them to be there to do the work, to be working at that level. And I think you can structure teams in different ways. You can roll through people in the sense of that they may only contribute for a couple of years or a year. And that's if that's the structure. And many companies in Silicon Valley operate this way, which is two years on the team is a pretty standard length. And then you move on and you recommit somewhere else.”

    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. “Putting them together that my co firmer under and I felt we had the best chance at achieving that long-term commitment with balance and it's a struggle there's no recipe here there's no playbook that tells you how to do it and each person does have to work at it on their own”

    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. “Is elusive and the counterpoint, we have another one of the C's is commitment. So I talk about that a lot that these things seem like they're at odds with each other. If you have balance, how can you also be 100% committed to the goal of building the best company we can build, doing the most we can do for our athlete community? And I say, yes, that is the struggle in life is to both have balance and be committed to something. It's incredibly challenging and to hold both in your heart and in your head is the work that is actually why they're there. They're there to remind us. If we only have one balance, we won't do as much. We won't strive for as much as we can be. If we only have commitment, we will burn out. We will get to that place where we don't love the work we do anymore and we will question why we're here.”

    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. “Training for races where you're by the time you're on the starting line, you just don't even want to do it anymore. That was often the feeling I had by the time a big race came around where I was just like, I'm so done with this. I just want to just not be here right now. These things should be additive to your life. It should be something that you that makes you better in other ways besides just stronger physically. Probably a sign that you've just you have lost the reason why you're doing it, the why behind the work.”

    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. “and what you could be, and you go back at it again. You train again for reaching that point where you said you did everything you possibly could. And win or lose, that's the feeling you're looking for. I think when you're positive in your life. I've been in those places where it can be really destructive too. It changes your relationships with other people. You start to actually hate the thing you're doing because you're striving for the wrong for some outcome that maybe is not the right outcome.”

    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. “Way to think about it is like if you want to be as good as you possibly can be, you have to strive to be the best. But can you be okay also with not actually achieving the goal of being the top of everybody, but being as good as you know you got reached that point of you could not have given more. That's where I get the satisfactions. I know at the end of that race, I'm thinking of the race of my freshman year where we won the championship and we came from a boat length back. We had lost to that team in a previous race. And that feeling that went through my body, and I believe everyone's body in that boat halfway through the race, we said we're not giving up. And we just rowed them down. And at the end of that, it wasn't like I'm the best. It was like, we did something that we didn't think was possible. We created a new capacity. And so then all of a sudden, maybe some spaces opened up with what you thought you were capable of.”

    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. “I think it can lead to. Challenges both at the personal level and then in a group. What I found in the crew team was that we couldn't be the best team if each of us individually wasn't trying to be the best We always knew that you don't win a boat race by yourself, you win it with seven other rowers and a coxswain. And you have to think it like a team, but you have to think like an individual who wants to be the best at what you can 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

37. “Yeah, for the rowing team, it wasn't that I went in there thinking I'm going to conquer this. I'm going to be one of the best rowers that this school has seen when I went in there. But within a few weeks, I was like, that was my goal. I was going to be the best. Somehow it wasn't, there wasn't anything else except it just turned on inside me. And I was hooked by that experience because I had found my place. I think that was the key is I'd found a group of people. I'd found this vibe, this energy was the part of the day I looked forward to. It was the part I felt so good about the rest of my life because I was there in that experience. It was motivated by the desire to be as good as I can possibly be at this thing. And I don't think I'd experienced that feeling before in my life.”

    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, so coming out of that high school feeling like I know I've got some amount of intellect. I don't really understand what I'm going to use it. I don't feel like I was that, you know, call it like high school wasn't where I peaked. I don't think anyone should peak, by the way, in high school. Like that's a lousy time to be at your, like the pinnacle of your life. You want to peak later than that. So getting it to Harvard, going to a good school, that seemed like that would be it. But that wasn't it for me. It was actually walking into the boathouse, never having rode before and finding this group of people who also were trying to figure out where is their place at this institution that in some ways like, well, you got into there. So aren't you kind of done? It's like, actually, no, now you're, you're scared because you don't know if you measure up. You don't have any understanding of where you stand. Will you make it there? But finding that going into the boathouse, you're like, hard work.”

    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. “But throughout all that time of searching and looking for something, like what I kept believing is that there's something inside me, a potential that needs to get realized. And I don't just think that about me now. I think that about every single human being on this planet. And the aspect of what it means to realize someone's potential, your own potential, and then create the opportunity for the people around you to realize their potential. That drives me. That is something that I feel like has been a constant in everything I've done since I've been about 25 years old.”

    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. “Growing up, going through high school, coming to the United States of all, coming to the United States and not speaking English at the age of five and learning it all from television and getting thrust into school. And you have this feeling like you don't belong, you don't fit in. That just kept for many people. I think it keeps going. And you don't have that great sense of belonging until later, maybe until your teenage years or later even into your 20s.”

    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. “Important things in your life. It's the relationships you have with people. Now, I'm not necessarily an outgoing person myself. So that's not where this hypothesis has led me, but it has led me to the idea of connection, deep connection with people you care about is super important for how you live your life and the choices you make and what you prioritize. So that's the one theory. And then there's one other one, which is I think.”

    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. “I have several starting with how my family felt to me being the youngest of the five kids in my family felt like it was pulled apart by geography between Sweden and the United States at an early age. My sisters stayed behind when my family moved back to the States when I was five years old. And I had this dream to reunite us in some way. How could we be one family again? Now my sisters were older. They were choosing to, it was the normal maybe a few years early from what you'd say normally would have happened anyway than deciding to where do they want to live. Who are they as people? But me, I was this five-year-old and I was sad to lose my sisters. I had my brother with me. When you think about what are the most important...”

    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. “My wife was diagnosed with a terminal illness in September of 2013. 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. I had to not rediscover who I am. I had to define who I am. That doesn't happen overnight. If what you do every day is put a little effort into being kind to the people who are important to you in your life and the complete strangers, then that's where you're going 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

44. “You want to be as good as you possibly can be, you have to strive to be the best. But can you be okay also with not actually achieving the goal of being the top of everybody? Win or lose, that's the feeling you're looking for.”

    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