Strava Comes Full Circle

Every afternoon in the mid-1980s, a group of Harvard lightweight rowers would hurry towards Leavitt and Peirce, the tobacco shop in the Square, to catch a glimpse of that day’s training schedule. In an age without the internet, reading the paper plan posted on the wooden boards of Leavitt and Peirce created a sense of ritual for two young rowers, Mark S. Gainey ’90 and Michael T. Horvath ’88.

Several years later, these two would revisit the communal feeling in Stanford’s Economics Department, where Horvath was an assistant professor of economics.

Surrounded by the four walls of Horvath’s Stanford office — one of the only places with a stable internet connection in 1994 — the two dreamed up the idea of a “virtual locker room.”

The precursor to Strava was born.

Strava, a popular app that turns tracking physical activities into a social network, has garnered over 120 million users from over 190 countries. The app took off among Gen Zs and millennials during the pandemic sports boom as run clubs surged, and it continued to spread this summer.

A Harvard ‘Love’ Story

From a young age, Gainey has been interested in entrepreneurship, watching his dad create ski carriers. In Gainey’s junior year at Harvard, he decided to buy hot dogs and Coca-Cola from local groceries stores and sell them at sports games.

Originally recruited to the College as a runner, Gainey injured himself in his freshman year and, encouraged by his coach, decided to try lightweight rowing to keep himself in shape. On the rowing team, he met his future business partner, Horvath, who was a junior then and captain of the team.

“There was just a really great group of people that were in his class, and they took me under their wing,” Gainey said. “They were nothing but hugely supportive.”

In my recent conversations with Gainey and Horvath, one day apart, I asked the same question: What was the most memorable moment of their friendship? They both recalled a trip to Princeton.

“It was pouring rain in his very old Jeep, and going down to watch that race together,” Gainey reminisces. “That was kind of the beginning of what has now been a 30-plus-year friendship.”

Hovarth, designated driver, tells a similar story about the Jeep trip. “It had plenty of problems with it, like holes in the floorboards, and the roof leaked,” he says. “It’s crazy, crazy cold, and so there’s very little heat in this car. We drove down in the rain, watched the race, drove back in the rain, and so the trip itself was kind of miserable.”

Nevertheless, it was memorable. “That sealed our friendship forever.”

Chasing Big Dreams

After Gainey graduated, the pair drifted onto different paths but kept in touch. They attended each other’s weddings, called, and occasionally visited each other.

Gainey worked with TA Associates, a growth equity firm, for four years before quitting and heading to Palo Alto to try to start his own business.

Horvath, on the other hand, pursued a Ph.D. in economics at Northwestern before heading to Stanford.

“When I was coming out of grad school, I got a Ph.D. in economics, and I was trying to decide which job to take. I had an offer from an East Coast school and an offer from Stanford, and I opted to go to the West Coast, largely because Mark was in Palo Alto, and at least I knew somebody there,” Horvath says.

At Stanford, Gainey frequented Horvath’s office where they bounced ideas off each other. Hungry to create his own company, Gainey pitched various ideas to different people, and Horvath was the one he clicked with.

“I think the honest answer was, he was willing to be my co-founder,” Gainey says. “Most of the people were just like, ‘These ideas are really bad, Mark.’”

“In 1994-95 we were dreaming up, ‘What could we do with the internet?’ It’s this new thing in our lives,” Horvath says. “And we said, you know, it’s kind of funny, but we really miss walking to Leavitt and Peirce and seeing what the workout would be, who would be working out with us. What if we could create that sort of feeling using the Internet?”

They settled on the idea of a “virtual locker room” but were too ahead of the curve — most people did not have access to the internet in 1995, and investors turned down their concept.

So, they pivoted.

They founded KANA, a customer email service company, after talking with sports analytics groups and realizing that businesses rarely answer their emails.

From 1996 to 2000, KANA grew to 12,000 employees and generated hundreds of millions in revenue. In less than four years, the company rode the highs of the dot-com bubble and went public in 1999 before eventually being acquired by Accel-KKR in 2010 for $40.82 million.

“In a very short period of time, we had it from literally a piece of paper and an idea to employing over 1,000 people and having offices across the globe,” Gainey says. “Ringing the bell at the NASDAQ and doing all the things that some people wait an entire career to do — we did in the four years.”

Record. Sweat. Share. Kudos.

Though both Horvath and Gainey’s time at KANA ended in the early 2000s, they soon jumped back into the startup world.

After briefly considering founding a water delivery service, they returned to the idea of a virtual locker room in 2006. This time, the arrival of phones with GPS and internet helped push the platform mainstream.

“When we started Strava, we definitely had a mindset of, ‘Hey, let’s build this to last. Let’s see if we can create a trusted brand.’ I’d like to think we’re still on that journey, but that was a big lesson from the KANA days,” Gainey says.

In 2023, the app reached 120 million users. According to Gainey, its impact has been as deep as it has been wide.

Once, Gainey received a message from someone who lost 300 pounds because on Strava, “they found community, and it just kept them active.”

Another person, a cyclist, noticed that his heart rate was higher than that of his friends on Strava. “It forced him to go to a physician, and they found out that he needed a bypass surgery,” Gainey says. “He was basically asymptomatic, but he was at risk of dying from a heart attack.”

“To me, if there’s legacy, it’s that we seem to have created something that people really enjoy,” Gainey says. “It stayed fun even 15 years later; it’s still a fun place as far as something that’s social. It doesn’t have a lot of the baggage that I think a lot of the social apps have had historically.”

‘Starting Things Since Last Century’

In place of a bio, Horvath’s LinkedIn page simply states “Starting Things Since Last Century.” In a sense, he’s been creating companies since the 1990s. In the time since, life has taken its twists and turns. A few years ago, Horvath stepped away from his role on Strava when his wife became terminally ill. He rejoined in 2019 and ultimately decided to step down in February 2023. When I met with him last week, he had just sold his Cambridge apartment, and in a month, his daughter is expecting a child.

When I asked him what he would be up to for the next few months, he told me that in addition to spending more time with family, he was already working on something new.

“I’m not ready to talk about it, but all I will say — it should look a little different. I’m interested in exploring the kinds of opportunities that typically get overlooked by venture capital,” Horvath says. “I want to start something where it’s specifically aimed at a smaller niche market, that you can really build a great product for and that then translates into a good business.”

A few hours before our interview, Horvath had just recorded a run on Strava around Cambridge. He posted photos of Memorial Bridge and a photo of sticky-notes on a Canaday dorm spelling “Fall!”

Back in Cambridge, the place where it all began, Horvath simply captioned the run, “Chasing down a dream.”

—Staff writer Xinni (Sunshine) Chen can be reached at sunshine.chen@thecrimson.com. Follow her on X @sunshine_cxn.