Announcing Our Anniversary Dinner Guest Speaker
Pop quiz:Our guest speaker is…
- The co-creator of your favorite bicycling app.
- An innovator in the tech industry.
- An advocate for better bicycling infrastructure
- All of the above.
The answer is D, all of the above. We’re pleased to announce Mark Gainey, former CEO and co-founder of Strava, will be this year’s speaker at SVBC’s 25th Anniversary Dinner. It’s a very special year as Silicon Valley Bicycle Coalition celebrates our 25th anniversary, and we know Strava, which created an online community for bicyclists, is near and dear to our members—old and new.There’s a saying in the bicycling community—if it’s not on Strava, it didn’t happen. However, even some of our die-hard Strava fans might not know the app does much more than allow athletes to compare personal bests and encourage friends to ride. Today, Strava supports 32 activity types–including riding, of course–and has more than 33 million athletes from 195 countries who inspire and motivate each other to sweat. Strava Metro takes the information uploaded to Strava to make cities better places to bike. Metro aggregates and de-individualizes data, then partners with departments of transportation and city planning groups to improve infrastructure for bicyclists and pedestrians.In 2007, the Seattle Department of Transportation announced an ambitious goal of tripling ridership in the city. Starting in 2015, the city used data from Strava Metro to see how bicyclists responded to a new bike lane and create an accurate map of risky roads that accounted for traffic volume. So where does Mark Gainey, our speaker, fall into all of this? Mark founded Strava in 2009 with Michael Horvath. Since then, millions of athletes worldwide have joined for the camaraderie found in tracking and sharing their rides, runs and fitness activities both outside and indoors.Where did the idea come from? What did it take to build Strava from the ground up? Stay tuned to our blog and buy tickets to Annual Dinner to learn more about the man behind the much-loved app.We can’t wait to see you at Annual Dinner, and we can’t wait to hear what Mark has to say about bicycling. Click here to buy tickets to Annual Dinner.