Imagine thousands of people sprinting hard on a real bike at home, yet also congregated in a hyper-colored biome filled with mega-redwood trees and dinosaurs - yes, dinosaurs.
Each rider pedalling like crazy to set a new personal best, unlock a new virtual bike or ‘Everest’ after hours slaving and sweating. Imagine these thousands of humans riding communally, together, but digitally, often thousands of miles apart.
Today our special guest Eric Min, founder and CEO, gives us a compelling insight into the growth and design of Zwift, the ‘massively multiplayer online game’ that blends real physical effort with a virtual world to create an experience that is augmenting and evolving the world of cycling.
With hundreds of thousands of cyclists pouring from their bikes at home into the colorful, addictive biomes of Zwift through both hobby and lockdown, this hybrid healthy game isn’t just for the amateurs: this summer, the world’s peak cycling event, the official Tour de France conducted competitive races, linking racers around the world across their stationary bikes to fight for the Yellow Jersey. An incredible progression in traditional sporting practice, and a brave and serendipitous opportunity in global pandemic.
What we can learn from Zwift is about so much more than just cycling.
If this combination of…
‘real’ and digital
amateur and professional
addictive and healthy
…isn’t a fascinating part of how the world is changing around us right now, I don’t know what is! We talk about game mechanics, public health, wellbeing and obesity, professional sport, virtual/physical, scaling a community, and what’s tough about the challenges ahead.
And my lively discussion with Eric builds beautifully on the themes and core concepts established in our very first episode ‘Exploring esports’ with the brilliant Angela Natividad, which is required listening and a great companion to follow up with after this deep dive with Eric.
Friends, I do this for the impact (and the really interesting conversations!), so please help me grow Here Right Now by rating the show on Apple Podcasts, sharing with friends you think will enjoy it, and talk to me on Twitter with your feedback :) It all adds.
WM
Links
Eric Min on Twitter
How to get started on Zwift with a Smart Trainer - Zwift Insider
Zwift Stories - Mathew Hayman wins Paris-Roubaix (11 min video)
Zwift raises $450 million for gamified fitness to cycle past Peloton - VentureBeat
Credits
Lee Rosevere for music
Automated transcript
Will McInnes 00:02
So I'm incredibly privileged today to have Eric min, the CEO and founder of Zwift here with us. Hi, Eric.
eric min 00:09
I will. Thanks for having me.
Will McInnes 00:11
How are you today?
eric min 00:13
Great. Another rainy day in London.
Will McInnes 00:19
Yes, beautiful weather. So this isn't the first time we've met, I was churning away on the bike, doing the build me up programme in Zwift. And someone flew past me and gave me a thumbs up which people use with full nodes called ride on. And I saw the name pop up. And I was like, Wait a second, I recognise that name. So while I was on the bike pedalling away, sweating into my iPhone, I googled you. And yeah, you'd give me a thumbs up, and it absolutely made my right. And I just wonder, do you? Do you do that? Do you routinely it's either you or a bot? I was basically like they've either created a bot. That's Eric, or is the real
eric min 01:08
guy. It's funny. I saw this on Facebook thread. About the same question. You know, I've gotten from Eric, is this a? Is this an automated script, a bot? Or is it really Eric? And as a discussion thread went on? And people said, Yeah, no, it's really hard because I am on Zwift every day. And as I would do in the real world, out on the road, of course, I'm going to acknowledge someone who I panellist or, you know, say hello. I mean, this is the polite thing to do when you're on the road. And so this is our version of that,
Will McInnes 01:42
I absolutely love it, I was really impressed. And it says something about you and the community you're building. And I really want to get into some of that as well. Just to break it down for the the lay person, the purpose of the podcast is really, I'm fascinated by the future that's right here with us already. And for me, Zwift is a fantastic example of something that feels very futuristic, but it's actually real and happening right now. But break it down for the layperson, like, What is Zwift? How does it work?
eric min 02:14
Right? Well, Zwift is a way to sort of recreate the outdoor activity of cycling, and we have running as well. But what we try to do is, is to do all the things that we love about outdoor cycling, and try to recreate it in a very convenient virtual setting. Um, and, you know, the thesis was that if we can get to like, 80%, of the things that we enjoy about outdoor cycling, it's many things, it's fitness, it's a social, it's the competition, it's a, it's the, you know, being able to explore new places, right, you know, come across random things, or, you know, do something that's routine to you. So, this is, this is what we tried to do, from the very beginning, I think we've, we've stayed to our core, and, you know, try to create this, this sense of community in a, in a virtual world that we are increasingly living in, that we will do something good, right. And it's all about encouraging people to, to, to lead healthy, active lifestyles, by giving them a way to do that very conveniently. Loving and, and I think, you know, that was our mission back six years ago, and it remains to be true. And I think it resonates so powerfully with, with our community, with our staff, with our investors with the media. I mean, I feel like we, you know, we're doing something really powerful for, for society. It's, you know, we live in a world of obesity, we, it's increasingly more challenging for us to go and play sports. It's not safe in many places to to do things outdoors, especially riding a bike. And so they're just it checks so many boxes, that it solved my problem and and I figured that if it would solve my problem, I suspect I can't be the only one who is you know, who had the the appetite and the craving to do more this stuff outdoors, but just can't
Will McInnes 04:28
love it. And so much of that resonates for me, my Zwift story and there are twos with subscribers in this house. My Zwift story starts with the pandemic Actually, I'm a mountain biker. I've never been a roadie. I'm not into you know the skin tight lycra and the pain the pain of the cobbles. But the pandemic began, I decided that I wanted to be cycling indoors. I spent weeks looking for turbo trainers. My friend Andy managed to find one on some niche Italian websites. I set up my gravel bike and it provided me with the conduit to stay healthy to feel good to follow a training programme. Just for the layperson, you're on your laptop, you can use a tablet, it's your the cyclist or the runner. There's there's terrain around you, you know, how do you how do you think about the virtual world that you've created? Like, where did that spring from?
eric min 05:26
You know, there was a product called a torx degiro that I used, I guess, in 2013. And it was it was a, it was a much worse version of Zwift. But it was good enough to convince me that I was there with someone else, you know, with a group of people. And we were racing. And I thought, jeez, I, I've just like, lost myself in this little group of 10 people. Imagine if we can create a beautiful version of that. Imagine if there were more people, and there were more activities for us to take part in. And you can have lots of different communities. So that was really the beginning of like, wow, this could can really work. And I think there were other like virtual cycling projects out there. I don't think there were many commercial projects. So the idea was there for many, many years. This was like before broadband was popular, right people, you know, riding using a modems, instead of broadband, cable broadband. And there was no social media, there was no mobile phones. And so you fast forward, like 2025 years, and all the pieces were there, including MMO. So, so the idea is, like, Look, let's create an MMO. Right. And let's create a this world that can have, you know, nearly infinite number of people. So our maps have to support, you know, there shouldn't be a cap, our map can support hundred thousand people, you know, we can do that. And so we can build a largest cycling community, motivate each other to train, to compete, to stay active and lose weight. And, you know, and of course, then COVID hit. And it just, I think it it, you know, it's something like COVID can really change people's behaviour. Those who had never considered riding indoors had no option. And it was an opportunity for for 10s of thousands of people to like yourself to finally try Zwift. It's not that you hadn't heard about Zwift, you probably heard about it, you know what, no one gets excited about underwriting. And so what COVID did for us is just, you know, a lot of people to experience Zwift and many of them are on Zwift still, many of them will come back as as we head into the winter. And it doesn't take long for people to change behaviour. There's, there's a saying it takes 21 days to change behaviour. Well, I think the pandemic is gonna be around for a bit longer than that. And it is definitely reappraising how people consume fitness.
Will McInnes 08:10
I completely agree. Now, I got particularly excited when I first downloaded and started using Zwift because a scary amount of years earlier, I had been wandering around this virtual world called Second Life, and it was so clunky it was even It was terrible in many ways.
eric min 08:30
Wouldn't be old wouldn't have. Because I'm not. No,
Will McInnes 08:33
no, no, I'm asking you to explain Zwift and then I'm talking about Second Life. But you know that you were 3d characters that you could customise how you looked your avatar. And there was this weird glimpse into the future this weird sense that virtual worlds will be a thing there's something strangely and innately human about doing that. And you mentioned earlier yourself on the the JIRA product that that was a precursor or a snippet of what Zwift could become, you get this sense of the belonging or the human elements of the experience, mean that time can pass and you can enter a flow state and you're actually absorbed in what you're doing. The thing I wondered about with you guys is, you know, this world this word virtual is is is whiffed virtual, it's so inherently physical, what I'm doing and you've layered on community, like, should we think of it as virtual?
09:30
That's a really good question. Because you it's the matrix is probably the better way to describe it. I wouldn't call it a virtuous the matrix. And, you know, when you're when I'm on zero for an hour, I'm on somewhere else. And this is why, when people ask, you know, why don't we have a picture in picture video of an instructor. So Well, that would just break the matrix up here. Mind that you're somewhere else. Now we don't want you to be reminded we want you to be there for that, you know, for that 45 minutes for for an hour. And, you know, the way our society is, just look at my teenage teenagers in my home, they live in this video game world, this is where they socialise. You know, when we were kids, we go and play football or play in the parks. This is where they congregate in video games. And so it is pretty real. It's their playground, it's very different from the playground that we used to have. So yeah, the question is, you know, what's real, what's not real. I mean, it is real.
eric min 10:44
people making real social connections. That's it,
Will McInnes 10:47
they are making real social connections. And it strikes me that, you know, at my heart rate band, because there's a little part of the experience that has a place for my heart rate. So then I'm like, Well, I need to put my heart rate in and then and then, you know, as we'll come on to you guys have just run this incredible Tour de France experience, you know, that's physical, these are professional athletes. I did a you know, I'll tell you a personal story I did a friend of mine, Kelvin said you should try doing a race. And I did his race in Zwift. My goodness, that is the closest I've come to, I don't know, my max Hydra. I don't know what my max heart rate was, when I fell off the bike, I won the category c race that I am. But, but I'm telling you the commitment that I put in, so I'm really interested in the, in the balance of physical and virtual, it's like, it's inherently physical. And yet, and yet it is also I guess, it's a hybrid, but it's a really interesting balance. And I wonder how you guys think about building the experience that you're building, right?
eric min 11:49
We talk about the addiction, right? And, and the addiction and in, in zwift, is, is physical to right? Because the fitness and the endorphins that you get from it gets you addicted the way you would be addicted to outdoor cycling. And then you layer on that all the gamification that is we know is well documented is addictive in the video game well, so when you're trying to use the power of video games, and all of the the game mechanics to keep you coming back for more, then you layer on top of that, the the physical into the fitness that you're getting, and people do get addicted to fitness. I think many of us have experienced that. And so it's it's very powerful. And we anecdotally I hear of, of some members of our community who runs with two or three times a day, that's extreme. I only need about an hour a day, other people need multiple hours a day. But I'm so glad to hear about your efforts. And your your your efforts to take part in a race and because you know, you sounds like you really push yourself. And when you go through that experience, it's it's as real as it gets. It's hard. And it's so satisfying as well. And so accessible, think about it, you did that from the comfort of your home. And this is what we're trying to do with eSports. The notion that you can compete at the highest level, even, you know, even at the highest level, from the comfort of your home, makes this sport that we're trying to institutionalise super accessible, in many ways, extremely affordable. And, and global. There's no other sport and this is why we're so excited to work with the UCI and to deliver the World Championships in December, or someone from their home will get a world championship jersey
Will McInnes 13:56
and metal. It's incredible. And in that takes us nicely on to sport so So, you know the first episode I actually did on this podcast series was with Angela Natividad and we were talking about eSports which is her area of expertise. And she helped me understand that in in video gaming eSports they as the as the discipline has evolved, those guys and girls think of themselves as and behave and are professional athletes and that was really interesting to me. And it challenges your notions and then I see here with you guys and the collaborations that you have I see inverted commas real sport happening in this virtual world with you know, calibration and with rigorous controls to provide the kind of level playing field. How do you see this developing? How do you see this confluence of, of sport and virtual colliding.
eric min 14:52
Um, I think the pandemic being in the backdrop just creates opportunities for that You know, the sport that we're trying to develop with, with the governing governing body. You know, if you look at how we're setting up the World Championships this year in December, there'll be about 200 athletes from all over the world. And they get slots based on how they perform outdoors. And then we'll go through all the national, a major, I think, top 25 National federations, all of the athletes have to be on some sort of drug testing programme, whether through the National Federation, or through the water programme, everyone would be receiving the same piece of hardware smart trainer, where you can't tamper with the calibration, everyone will have to weigh in and measure their height, it has to be captured through video so that we know that it's it's all, you know, accurate. And then there's just no more room apart from traditional doping, which is not our part of our remit, that is something that the the Federation's and the the water body would have to deal with. But it is, you know, that is in terms of controls, it's pretty tight. And I think, you know, at the highest level, you're going to see this, this kind of controls in place to ensure that there's, there's credibility and integrity of the sport. Cheating is Yeah, I mean, cheating is it's just, it's, it's, it's in every aspect of our lives, right. And sport is usually the one that gets highlighted. But it's something that we definitely need to combat to make sure that, you know, people believe in the performance of the athletes. And the other thing I would say about the athletes, these are the exact athletes who are competing, the Tour de France, and the World Championship, they outdoors, they will be competing in, you know, on our platform, at the World Championships, with the best community races in the world, as long as they, you know, meet the criteria of, you know, be part of a drug testing programme. It's incredible.
Will McInnes 17:08
And for those that aren't aware, you know, this comes off the back of a large fundraiser as well, you recently raised 400 and $50 million from a very well known institution. I'm so excited about the scale. Like I love the ambition of what you're about. And, and I and I wonder, when you peak, you know, you seem and you speak in quite visionary terms, when you get super bold, like, how does this look? Three years out five years out? Or perhaps it doesn't matter about the timeline, but but where where do you see us going society with, with all of this?
eric min 17:48
Well, I've, we're seeing it already, people working more from home. Because of the pandemic, that's not going to change, you know, once the pandemic is over, there'll be another, you know, another pandemic, or people will continue to work from home and or have this hybrid situation. So what that does is afford people, I think, the opportunity to move out of the city where they have more space. And when you're when you've got more space, you're going to create carve out space for for fitness. And I think, you know, that combined with the concerns around obesity and mental health, you know, health issues, I would expect, I predict that employers should be paying for a service like Zwift You know, this is, I think, a benefit that every employer should be offering to their, to their staff, because it's great, it's a great engagement tool, just within the company. All those corporate challenges that we you know, used to hear about Well, certainly in the US, you have these corporate challenges that the JP Morgan sponsors and have these running events in Central Park. These could all be virtualized. So it's just a great engagement tool, I think within company and within industries. And I think this could be you know, one of those types of tools that just make sense for an employer to want to offer to every single staff including the hardware, whatever it takes, I think this is a small expense for I think you know, so much upside for building engagement and and loyalty and ultimately that the Oneness that you know we need to consider for staff
Will McInnes 19:40
Yeah, that's an interesting point of view and I totally agree on the on the move to homes with more space on the carving out of fitness at home that I think those and then combined with this, employers taking an interest in wellness that's that's really interesting. What also happens That we see elsewhere in the world with marketplaces, digital connectivity is that the the, the opportunity is opened up to millions, if not billions, more people. And so we see this where there's a levelling of the playing field, and therefore more talent and more creativity can come in. So what I'm really interested in to see with Zwift is we've got the very Pinnacle athletes, right now, in the collaborations that you have, it will be really interesting to see just more talent come into the platform, like, Where Where is the future talent going to come from? Because you're potentially you're potentially increasing the total market size, I guess, of, of competitive cyclists?
eric min 20:50
Yes, I would say that our community is larger than probably all of the licenced cyclists that are out there. And we get away with two children under 16. So we have, you know, thousands, probably easily 20,000 kids under the age of 16, who are, you know, receiving the service for free, encouraged probably by their parents, you know, I worry about my kids riding outdoors. And I think every parent should, unless they live in a, you know, in a place where they've got the safe infrastructure for recycling. So I think he was, you know, you cast a net pretty wide, including kids who are young, you're going to find talent, you're going to find, then the future winners of the Tour de France, because so much of cycling is about pure, you know, natural talent. And if you're born with it, right. And, and, and I think Zwift is just a great way to find find that talent. And we have a programme called lift Academy that we've been running for the last several years, where we work with professional cycling teams, and we run it a tonne competition. And we find those the rough diamonds in the world. And we've been finding some incredible talent, particularly in the southern hemisphere. In a New Zealand, Australia had been hotbeds probably because of the, you know, when we run the programme, it's the height of their season, right. We run it usually in the winter, which is when their peak form. But we found some incredible athletes from Germany from the US from the southern hemisphere. And now you go from being an amateur to a professional on a world tour team. It's super exciting. And, and what we do with that is just tell stories of, of, you know, human interest stories that inspire the rest of us, to one take part in the similar programme, to be part of that journey, and then to follow their stories, right. So, you know, part of what we do is to be a platform where we can tell those stories, and you tell those stories, our community tells us stories, the media tells those stories. And that's, you know, surf is not just about this fitness activity, I think we're much more than that. And that's what sport is, for us sport is this whole infrastructure of, Okay, you've got heroes that, that at the pinnacle of the sport, right at the high end, which then creates the credibility of the platform. And I enjoy watching the best wrestlers compete with one another. And it inspires me and I think inspires other people to want to do the same activity. I use this analogy a lot. Um, you watch the US Open the French Open, or the Wimbledon, and you get inspired, you want to play tennis the next day. And we're trying to create this same sort of analogy with with Zwift, because I think, you know, if you're talking about something that is accessible, and generally speaking, pretty affordable, then, you know, can we can encourage more people to, to, you know, get into Zwift, or something like Zwift so that they can stay active,
Will McInnes 24:08
given how well it's going. You can you've been doing this for four years now. But the the trajectory feels like it's, it's steepening, you know, the conditions environmentally have have accelerated your growth. I guess. I'm interested to know what's hard. You know, you've bitten off a lot here. They're scaling technology, massively multiplayer online games. You've got all of these collaborations happening, like, you look quite calm. But this this is a big job. Like what what's what help us understand what's hard about doing this?
eric min 24:47
Well, there's, you know, it's, it's hard. Actually, we're quite, you know, we're converting customers one out of time. It's hard work, actually. You know, convincing someone to take out their wallet and pay for a service is not easy. You know, and building a product is one thing, you know, selling and supporting and convincing people to continue to pay is just a whole nother spectrum. So there's a lot of work that we have to do. And the big theme of of our latest round of investment is all about investing in the experience. And when I talk about the experience, I am talking about the, the, the platform, right, the actual game that you you, you enjoy, then all the content that we create on top of that, and that could be training, that could be competition, it could be all the different achievements to giving you reasons to keep coming back for more. And that's got to be content the way you think of Netflix and, and other online services or Spotify, you show up because you want to see fresh content. So we need to create that fresh content, a lot of that is created by the community, but we need to create our own as well. And the third thing is hardware. hardware is not something that we've been in, but we have a commitment to, to get into the hardware business, the sole purpose of just streamlining that entend experience, we, you know, for us to scale as a business has to be super easy. I was just thinking about how easy it was for me to order my Tesla I, I didn't speak to a single person looking at their website, but 100 pounds down, and then it should arrive in the next two months. It's It's incredible how easy it is. That is what we need to do with Zwift. And just make it super easy to buy, super easy to use. And just just take away all the friction of the entire experience. And that sounds so easy. But that is super hard to do. It really is I'm working myself in a technology company. And actually Zwift and Brandwatch share an investor in Highland Europe.
Will McInnes 27:04
And it was Sam from Highland who mentioned to me the Mattie Heyman story, which is a story that people should google if they're interested in, in how Zwift helps professional athletes, but that's a story for a different time. I wanted to to share a couple of different anecdotes. So Georgia, my girlfriend, I got her into Zwift, she used to love spin classes in New York City, when she lived. She the gamification on Zwift is so powerful, that she gets super frustrated when she does a ride and she doesn't get stars. So when you do a training ride there for the listener, there are different phases of the ride you warm up, then it starts to ramp up. And then there are different colours denoting the amount of effort that you're putting in. And it's the grey phases the the warm up warm down and in between stages where Georgia seems to get a she seems to miss out on stars. And she is so angry. And this is this to me speaks and we talk about this. This to me speaks to the power of gamification. So there's that's Georgia story. Then Kelvin is a friend of mine who has thrown himself at Zwift. He did an interesting this weekend or Friday, I think for his birthday. He's transformed his fitness and his physique. He's now doing cat category a racing. He's a machine he's a machine. And but he wasn't when he started on that journey. And these are people I know, this is not hype or PR these are these are humans I know. And I just I'm really, I have to give credit to the design thinking that's going on. Because you are nailing some some quite tricky things in human software interaction to get those kinds of results.
eric min 28:55
Yeah, no, um, you know, we, we definitely took some cues from from Strava astronomer was the one who popularised KLM. And you know, when Wentworth started, I remember we built the five kilometre or three mile circuit. And that's all it was. It's just three mile circuit. So we showed up, and we started riding like, this is great, but this is it. That's what I told it. I saw I said, let's let's throw some kale engine. Let's make sure that you can always chase three jerseys whenever you show up. Now, that was the hit three jerseys. There was a KLM, Sprint, and the fastest lap. So you show up. There were no events, nothing organised. And people would just be chasing these three jerseys. And that's simple. gamification was so powerful people just keep coming back because yeah, you can show up and try to take the jersey away from someone else who was wearing it on the island at the time. Right. So How fun is that? It's so simple, but so powerful. And that was really the beginning of like, Okay, what else can we do? How about power ups? About and there was so much pushback from the community, because early on, you have to remember, we had like, you know, diehard enthusiasts, the classic, you know, the classical outdoor cyclists who simply wanted to simulate, and not gamify. And so we had to ease them in, we had this one powerup, they just absolutely hated, because they thought it was anti social, it's called a burrito. If you hit a burrito powerup, then no one could rush you. But in terms of gamifying, the experience, it's fun for competition, right? You hit that, and then you attack, and no one can grab your wheel. So it took us like four years or five years to reintroduce that. And by that time, I think they the community, getting very comfortable with the idea of like, let's have more gamification, but early on, it was like they just wanted a simulator. And that's not what Zwift is. Let's do something you can't do outdoors. Right? Let's go places go to places that don't exist. Right? That is not what a simulator does. So I think we've gotten into we've gotten the community very comfortable with the idea of like, Well, look, there times, we will want to simulate courses like the Tour de France. There are other times we want to create this fictitious beautiful places, that just doesn't exist. It's so unique please, with like what topia,
Will McInnes 31:38
yeah, what type here is a wonderful place and for listeners, it's this kind of lush, jungle, there are dinosaurs occasionally it's volcanoes is,
eric min 31:48
yeah, and have four or five different biomes.
Will McInnes 31:51
So it's like a magical kingdom. And actually, eight times out of 10, I will choose to ride more topia, occasionally, I will choose to ride in New York, because I used to live there and I find it like it genuinely feels like I'm in New York, London actually feels like you're in London, which is really, really credit to the team. It's it's they've done, they've done a brilliant job. And then I guess the other question I had when I was on Zwift recently was are there tensions between or trade offs that you guys have to think about between gamification between realism between health between community? Like, I think the balance has been well achieved so far, but behind the scenes, is it difficult to make those decisions? Or do they do they come together?
eric min 32:39
So early on, we made the decision to go with more of a cartoony theme style, then a photo realism style, the problem with the photo realism style is that, you know, if it starts to look like the real thing, people start to compare it to the real thing, and you can, you can never win. Okay. And the second thing about photo realism is that it is more computer intensive, you need the processing power to create that visually. And so we, you know, we, if we can support more devices, more low end devices will simply have more customers. So we decided to go with a theme that allowed us to, to run our, our game on an iPhone five, you know, and how many people have iPhone five, but we, it turns out there about 10,000 people 10 to 20,000 people who still die from five years worth. So if we, you know, deprecated support for that, then we'd have, you know, we'd have 20,000 less customers. But in any case, I think the point is that we're targeting customers who aren't investing in expensive computer, you know, gaming specific hardware. We're targeting people who have all sorts of devices, apple, particular. And these are not high powered devices. So it was the right decision, and I think continues to be the right decision to to make it not too cartoony. It's not mariokart but it's not photorealism somewhere in between. And I think that just enough to convince you that you're somewhere else.
Will McInnes 34:26
So as we begin to wrap up, I guess I'm interested. You're very committed to the mission that you have right now. And it must be hard to think beyond that. But as someone creating this part of the future, what else inspires you What else do you look around the world and find interesting what what what would you do if you weren't doing this? Where would you start to investigate? Like what what are you curious about in the world?
34:55
Well, I'm I'm at a stage in my career, where I need to do something that has some sort of social impact. And so, you know, this was specifically picked because it checks so many boxes, including, you know, let's do something good for society. And so I think this is a business that, and a brand that will last for decades, I really do with or without me, I think, I think there's a place for Zwift and the kind of services zwift offers, we're in over 200 different countries, it resonates globally. And I think this is still the very beginning of a transformation that we're seeing in the in the fitness space and the wellness space. And, you know, if you look at the fitness industry, it's a pretty big industry. It's one of the the last industries that have yet to be transformed digitally. And so, and of course, the pandemic is accelerating this, this change. I'm not so sure that many people will rush back to the gym. You know, once the pandemic is over, I think by then people will have understood and experienced and reappraise fitness from from the home that you can, you can have, you know, look, it's not a complete replacement, but there's so many other benefits to doing from home. And I think for me, when I ride outdoors, or when I, when I am outdoors, it's because it's a special occasion. I love riding outdoors. But I don't, I don't have to ride out those if I don't want to. I'll do it because it's, it's a, it's a new destination, or I'm doing it with friends or the weather is perfect. So I'm much more selective. And when I do go outside.
Will McInnes 36:45
That's interesting. Thank you. And how can how can listeners follow the Zwift journey? I mean, they will, they will hear much more about Zwift but you you personally, where's a good place for people to follow you?
eric min 36:56
And Well, certainly come to Zwift calm. But there's no shortage of videos on YouTube, created by our community. The community is just incredible source of knowledge. And they they love to share. You can find Zwift, almost on every sort of platform, whether it's Reddit or, or Facebook, Instagram, there's just a, you know, endless amount of content out there. So if insider.com is a community site that has just great, great insight into into, you know, what we do the way Apple insider is for the apple community. That's a great source of content.
Will McInnes 37:45
Wonderful. Well, I massively appreciate your time, Eric, and I appreciate the work that the Zwift team are doing. It's been fantastic for me personally and selfishly, so. Thank you. Great, thanks. Well, take care man.
eric min 37:58
Okay, thank you. Bye bye.
#6: Scaling the healthy world of Zwift with Eric Min, CEO