4 July 2024
I recently sat down with Eric Min, one of the co-founders and current CEO at Zwift, to dive into a whole slate of topics. This is actually a bit of a two-part interview set. This interview is heavily focused on the business/industry side to Zwift, whereas a ‘companion’ interview we did for the FIT File Podcast will likely release tomorrow, which is focused a bit more on the backstory of Zwift, technology, and 45 minutes worth of questions there. There’s virtually no overlap at all between the two interviews (on purpose, obviously), with both containing plenty of new and unheard nuggets.
Below are a fair number of the topic markers as YouTube chapters. There’s probably twice as many questions in there than listed below, but otherwise YouTube Chapters gets a bit out of control with too many items. Most of the committed chapter markers below are follow-up/related questions to the topic listed. You can easily listen to the session here in the background, there’s no pieces that ‘require’ the video portion.
0:00 Quick Introduction
0:35 What did Eric do before Zwift?
3:01 First time Eric showed Ray Zwift
4:33 Zwift employee bases and HQ behind-the-scenes
5:32 Why take on investor baking for Zwift?
6:50 Which cycling app was Eric’s inspiration?
7:54 Eric’s Bike Collection/Fleet
8:46 Eric’s favorite route to ride in the world
9:30 Explain the leadership changes over last year
11:40 What Eric wants to change near-term
12:51 How can Zwift attract new users to Zwift?
14:25 Can Zwift ever get an ROI for investors?
16:12 Explain the price increase
17:30 How many paid subscribers does Zwift have?
17:55 Is Zwift’s staff count right-sized now?
18:40 How do you balance new cycling tech vs waiting?
19:46 How does and will Zwift leverage AI?
20:48 What’s Eric’s proudest moment at Zwift?
21:42 Why hasn’t Zwift invested in structure training?
22:47 Zwift’s complicated industry relationships
22:33 Is Zwift’s Women’s Tour de France Sponsorship working?
26:35 Is Zwift still trying to get into the Olympic Games?
27:40 Explain all things Zwift Secret Tron Bike
29:30 When will other companies be compatible with Zwift Ride Frame?
30:00 Why can’t people use Zwift Ride/Cog with other platforms?
31:13 Why isn’t Zwift doing more around cheating?
32:51 What’s Eric’s favorite Zwift feature?
33:55 Will Zwift gamify the platform more?
34:51 What’s unannounced coming up?
Go forth and enjoy the above! Also note if you found this interesting, you’ll probably find the one I did with the founder of Wahoo Fitness, Chip Hawkins, back a little bit ago. Expect more of these here and there as I find sports tech executives that can talk both about the technology side as well as the industry side.
Thanks for watching/listening!