Mark Gainey

The CEO and co-founder of Strava on the unexpected history of segments, Strava marriage proposals and the pain of losing his course records to a teenager.

- Mark Bailey

Cyclist: You first had the idea for Strava in the 1990s but only launched it in 2009. Did you have to wait for the technology to catch up?

Mark Gainey: Yeah, Michael [Horvath, the other Strava co-founder] and I had families, we were on opposite coasts of America – he was on the east coast and I was in California – and we were these two guys in our early forties who were still passionate about sport and camaraderie but life, obligations, kids and work got in the way.

We had this old idea about a ‘virtual locker room’ after we rowed together at Harvard, but by 2009 two things had changed. One was technology with the wearable marketplace and GPS devices. The other was the concept of sharing information with the advent of Twitter and Facebook. Strava is old enough to have started as a web company supporting GPS devices such as Garmin, then in about 2011 Apple and Android devices came to have a strong enough battery life and a strong enough GPS chipset to be viable tools to use. That changed the game for us, enabling us to grow the network more effectively.

Cyc: What was the idea behind Strava segments?

MG: The whole history behind segments is fascinating. It wasn’t as though we had this masterplan about how this was going to cover the entire world. It was really simple. Cyclists love climbs. Let’s see if we can identify climbs and we’ll show them how they are doing, just by themselves. Hey, you did a hard climb – you should know about it. Then we thought perhaps if another member rides that same climb, maybe we can show how they compare against each other. That ability to put people together and allow them to compare came in and all of a sudden we saw the trash-talking, the camaraderie, the gamesmanship and those little things added up to the fervour behind the experience.