Horvath tried to return to teaching, but yearned for the entrepreneurial life.
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Instead, the pair made a fortune by developing consumer-services software firm Kana, which they floated in 1999. Horvath and Gainey first pitched the idea of a “virtual locker room” in the mid-1990s, but it generally received a negative response. The business was practically part of the family, first mooted with co-founder Mark Gainey as a way to virtually recreate the camaraderie, and competition, of the Harvard rowing club where they met in the 1980s. Horvath says he was partly motivated to return to the company by a desire to realise a vision partly influenced by his wife Anna, whom he married when they were both in their early 20s and who died in 2017. The app gained notoriety in 2018 for revealing sensitive information about military bases thanks to staff logging their exercise routines on Strava’s app. The reinvention also included extra security measures, which he says focus on providing better education around the app’s controls and automatic privacy zones around the start and finish of journeys amid concerns over safety, particularly for women. “It was pretty clear was not financially sound and needed to make changes and I stepped back in,” he says. He stepped back in as chief executive of the then loss-making business in 2019, after five years out to care for his four children and terminally ill wife.
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That format – offering a certain amount free with premium services accessed via subscription (of £4 a month in the UK) – was a key part of Horvath’s reinvention of Strava. “We focus on building things athletes love to use – and hopefully find things they will pay for so business will thrive,” Horvath says.
The app has already extended from just cycling to 33 activities, including rock climbing, surfing and using a wheelchair, and links to more than 30 devices which measure performance, from Garmin and Fitbit activity trackers to Peloton exercise bikes. He says finding new ways to create a sense of camaraderie and fun – and offer more services, such as tips on where to get active on holiday or ways to monitor non-active health concerns such as sleep and nutrition – will help drive the company’s future growth. Horvath believes getting involved with improving towns and cities is “incredibly important” in motivating the group’s 350 staff, and also gives Strava’s clientele another reason to sign up and map and share their routes. He says there has been a drift back to more car use but believes local authorities will nevertheless continue to invest in “enabling people to move through cities under their own power”. We saw immediately how city authorities responded by creating quieter streets and repurposing streets to serve the people,” Horvath says.
The pandemic not only created more sense of demand from people who live in these cities but also the supply increased too. “Anecdotally, look at San Francisco, Paris, London and Stockholm, where I’ve spent some time recently since the pandemic. Horvath says Strava decided offering free data was better for the company in the long run because it would help more people get active and become potential app users.įor example, the number of female cyclists joining Strava more than doubled during the first year of the pandemic, as, it appears, women felt safer taking to the streets as protected bike lanes popped up around the country and cars stayed at home. Since 2020, the app has been making its data available free to local authorities and public bodies, including Transport for London, Transport for Greater Manchester and Active Travel England now more than 1,500 such bodies are using it, compared with just 50 pre-pandemic. He wants Strava to be a tool to help continue to drive that change, with data from its cyclists and walkers’ activities used to help design and validate rejigs of town and city centres. Strava in use on a cyclist’s smartphone in 2015.
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