Welcome back or welcome to the single track podcast. As regular listeners know, most conversations

on this platform take place at the intersection of business, culture, and performance within the

sport of Mountain Ultra Trail Running. This episode captures that spirit perfectly. On today's show,

we have the co-founder and current chairman of Strava, Mark Ganey.

As many of you probably already know, Strava is a fitness tracking and social media app designed primarily for endurance athletes.

And it's had a considerable impact on the culture of our sport in particular.

As Mark will explain, Strava was born out of the desire to recreate that community element of team sports that's typically strongest in high school and collegiate settings and to leverage the power of the internet to reinstate this phenomenal social support system for athletes at every stage of life.

Mark's thesis was that amazing things happen in this teammate environment.

You might push a little harder in workouts.

You might stay more motivated about your sport in general.

You might be held more accountable in training cycles and you might exercise more even when

it's being replicated digitally.

And we get into all that.

Specifically, Mark and I go in depth about his entrepreneurial philosophy of going an

inch wide and a mile deep, how it applies to the creation of Strava and the importance of separating

go-to-market strategy from overall vision. We talk about the debate over building a social media

platform versus a training platform, whether Strava can invest in both simultaneously and still

delight customers.

We look at the ways that Strava thinks about investing in community building on the platform

and increasing the serendipity of athlete connections.

We look at the pros and cons of increasingly bridging the physical world and the virtual world

when it comes to exercise in sport. We look at what the future of sport might look like for amateur athletes and how Strava

...