Who you are defines how you build.

This is the Entrepreneurial Thought Leader series.

Brought to you by Stanford E-Corner.

On this episode, we're joined by Mark Ganey.

Mark is the co-founder and executive chairman of Strava, a workout app that is now used by more than

40 million people around the world. Here's Mark.

I was asked to come in and give you a little bit of background on myself, a bit of the Strava story,

some war stories, some lessons along the way.

And in particular, as the title slide shows here, you know, this idea of an inch wide mile

deep.

I want to take sort of one lesson that we've learned, actually both from the Connades as well

as Estrava days.

See if I can go a little deep on that, a strategy that worked really well for us as a go-to-market. It may not work for everybody, but in our case it's been pivotal twice through two different startups. So let's get growing.

And by the way, my hope is 20, 25 minutes of me talking, and then we can get some Q&A.

Some quick background. So as I mentioned, art history major, I actually grew up in Reno, Nevada, was lucky enough

to go out to Harvard, studied art history, learned very quickly that it's really cold back

there, so I hoofed it back as quick as I could to the West Coast.

I graduated in 1990, the previous century.

I came out here and I went to work for a venture firm, a firm called TA Associates in downtown Palo Alto.

Great job out of school. This is pre-internet folks. So my job was to basically sit on the phone all day long and talk to entrepreneurs.

Call startups, try to find out whether there was an investment opportunity. Great for two reasons.

One, I learned the business of, you know, the language of business, but two, I caught the bug to be an entrepreneur.

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