When I was a kid, I rode my bike a lot. All over the place. Not competitively in races, but against an imaginary peloton while wearing my yellow polyester baseball jersey pretending to be Greg LeMond in the Tour de France.

Strava first came into view for me while I was working on a cycling project, mining the 2011 Tour of California for inspiration. Given the imaginary races of my youth, segments hit me hard: asynchronous, side-by-side, data-backed comparison was obvious territory that no other sport had unlocked. It dramatically shrunk the perceived gap between regular Joe's and the pros. I did everything I could to get Strava, or at least a similar concept, into the project.

Beyond design inspiration, I've been a Strava member since 2011. Through marathon training, multiple half marathons, mountain biking, climbing, SUP, and so on, this app has genuinely helped me in ways that no other app has been able to do. Moreover, it's the only tool I use for tracking physical activity, for a while as a paying customer (I really liked their early-ish model), but my payments ceased when my activity slowed.

Strava has undeniably shaped sports like running & cycling for athletes across the board. Overall (despite certain community tendencies) I believe it's a net good by a long shot. Beyond the first-order market in athletes, they've found non-obvious, second-order markets in its Strava Metro service, selling the data in cities & other organization to improve urban infrastructure and active transportation planning.

In aggregating and presenting data from a wide range of users and devices, they've revealed latent meaning, context, and community within and between activities. They've come a long way and there's a lot for that team to be proud of.

Some statistics:

• Founded in 2009

• 46(?) patents

• ±$180m in 9 rounds of funding

• Billions of activities from hundreds of millions of users

• Almost $500m in revenue

• $2.2b valuation

• Planning an IPO in 2026

Things are looking good.

So they sued Garmin.

DC Rainmaker has a great analysis as usual, and Hunter Weiss is pulling threads together as well, so I won't try to improve on those areas. I'm more interested in the notion that Strava is a wrapper for Garmin data.

Multiple sources have estimated that the majority of Strava's data — including the majority of paid user data — comes from Garmin. If true, then Strava's business is much less substantial, differentiated, and independent than it appeared just a couple months ago.

Strava's bet is that they, as the ones making the best use of Garmin's data (at individual user and aggregate levels), are in a better position of leverage than Garmin, the primary source of that data.

If this sounds familiar, it's because Strava is an old example of the same challenge faced by a new industry: GPT wrappers. Just as Strava built social, contextual, and product experience layers on top of Garmin’s (and other's!) data, GPT wrappers build niche-oriented functionality on top of OpenAI’s services. Hundreds of such products/companies have spawned almost overnight, providing more focused, value-added experiences, and are now facing challenges to the validity of that value in the face of OpenAI's Apps in ChatGPT.

While everyone is rushing to add AI into their software, OpenAI is releasing ways to bring the rest of the internet into their experience.

If we zoom out, we can see a pattern that repeats across industries:

• Repositories (primary sources, effectively or explicitly): Garmin, Claude, Gemini, etc.

• Derivatives (built on top of Respositories): Strava, Bolt, Harvey

• Legacies (pre-existing products adding Repositories): Zapier, Miro, Figma, Vercel

• Platforms (Repositories integrating legacy products): OpenAI, Google...Garmin?

Each of these categories has its strengths. Repositories benefit from the compounding exposure and value added by Derivatives and Legacies; Repositories enable Derivatives and Legacies to focus on meeting specific market needs; and we don't need to say much about Platforms.

Microsoft started out as a DOS interface on top of IBM hardware. Eventually, its operating system was so in demand that it drove distribution for IBM. We can imagine a customer journey that starts running with Strava and ends with buying a $1k watch, but it's hard to say how much demand the app generates for Garmin.

Strava rightly sees themselves as a primary touchpoint, but they're have ostensibly conflated that with being the primary value for the users. Where Strava believes its heatmap & segment features/patents are a major competitive advantage, the value of those patents goes down dramatically without the data from Garmin that populates those visualizations. They've overlooked an important dependency.

The technology is not the product is not the business.

These technologies that Strava has developed are valuable in helping athletes improve their performance, but they're not the business. The consumer app is an impressive and culturally meaningful product, but it's not the business. Strava's business is a social-oriented fitness data collection & visualization platform.

Data dependencies aside, Strava has enabled and built a massive community of cross-platform athletes that Garmin couldn't ever hope to achieve with their closed system and focus on hardware; software & human connection have never been priority. As an aggregator, Strava's value proposition is that it pulls people and data throughout the ecosytem into one neat package. This attention to the broader fitness experience is an excellent example for the value-added wrapper-product industry and they should lean into that.

On the other hand, while Strava's app indeed collects data, the distribution of value in this "vertically integrated" data remains to be seen; some data is more desirable than others. According to internal marketing data, "Strava users are significantly more likely to be professionally successful, tech-savvy and affluent." The users that are the face and base of the product are being alienated and all but told to choose a side. That's a problem.

Not only is this affluent, tech-savvy, and premium-oriented audience a dream for most brands — and exactly who Strava built their product and business for — that audience is more committed to Strava's target in the lawsuit!

If social media is any indication, there appears to be much stronger affinity for Garmin than Strava. Among a crucial set of users that generate a lot of data and spend a lot of money, there's likely a strong commitment to and investment in the gear that Strava can't compete with.

Yet there's a major phase change in progress, one that requires a new destination and narrative of a business to guide its behavior. Building pressure from long-time investors forced the hiring of "a CEO with the experience and skills to help us make the most of this next chapter": a revenue-generating event.

Preparation for an IPO demands fundamentally different narrative and behaviors than a startup or a healthy, revenue-generating company. In order to demonstrate robust fundamentals to investors and to set a narrative for growth during & after the IPO, they're looking for a foothold, a point of leverage, a .

Like the GPT wrappers now scrambling to prove independence from OpenAI, Strava is shifting its narrative to show that it controls its own destiny — not just visualizes others' data. Each claim in the suit shows a deviation (possibly a misunderstanding?) of what's made the product and business so successful.

• • •

Can Garmin survive without Strava? Absolutely. Even though Garmin Connect isn't nearly as highly regarded as Strava's (sorry, friends!), it's a standalone offering and multiple third-party apps already integrate. Signs show Garmin's desire to move into Strava's territory but they'll always be constrained by an unwillingness to play with other hardware brands.

Can Strava survive without Garmin? Possibly. If Garmin plays hardball and cuts off the data flow (either explicitly or financially), Strava will be hard pressed to find a better source of affluent, die-hard athletes. That they have these athletes is their current advantage: they should lean into what else these athletes need in order to improve their performance and well-being.

Successful businesses create clarity around the value they bring to the broader ecosystem. LLM wrappers should focus on meeting specific needs for a specific market, then creating a value lever within that space. As a fitness data wrapper, Strava's value has aways been context: visualizing data to help athletes visualize the best version of themselves.