Halloween 2022

Halloween 2022

While Run The Day has been keeping communities united since 2003, today marks my 2-year anniversary with the company. To honor the occasion and help others in search of meaningful work, I thought it would be useful to share how I got involved with Run The Day.

It started with a nagging feeling that began in 2020.

I had spent the beginning of my career in finance. First in investment banking then in private equity. When COVID came in 2020, the nagging feeling felt like this: “Ian, the work you’re doing is great. You are learning a lot and meeting many interesting people. But how meaningful is your work? What impact are you having? Plus, couldn’t the firm just hire a Wharton MBA to replace you and do just as well or maybe even better?”

I tried to shake the feeling, but failed. So after sleepless nights, inner turmoil and writing down every reason why I would fail, I decided to build a mission driven business. Why build a business? Organizations that sustainably make money can attract talented people and invest in growth to continue influencing the future. Why be mission driven? If making money was our only goal then the nagging feeling I was trying to shake would inevitably return.

Selfishly, I was excited for a job where my work had the potential to outlive me by making a positive impact far into the future.

Selflessly, it seemed like our communities were becoming more divided and COVID had only amplified that. I believed that modern technology built to bring people together and unify communities (instead of keeping users scrolling to display more ads) would be good for everyone.

I didn’t know where to start, so I started somewhere. I read shoe dog (great book, highly recommend!) and modified Phil Knight’s mission at Nike to fit us. Now we had a mission to guide our decisions and I had my 2-item to do list:

1. Advance Our Mission: unite athletes and strengthen communities - if you can move, you’re an athlete

2. Become Sustainable: turn money into more money

Not only did I want to make a positive impact, I wanted to make the greatest impact possible. To do that, I would need to offer something that could be used by many people at once. That meant that I needed to build technology.

The problem was that I didn’t have the skills. I had spent my career building financial models, analyzing data, structuring transactions and joining conference calls. Writing code was not my background.

So I got to work. I called a friend of a friend who builds websites and shared the idea. He understood the concept, built us a website and came up with a name for the business - eseo. For more technical expertise, I called a software engineer who had successfully built and scaled multiple tech platforms. He liked being active and was willing to roll up is sleeves. His name was Suny and he began writing code to develop a mobile app.

Now that we had technology, we needed people to use it. The route to failure is trying to please everyone, so we needed to focus. But where? Our mission defined an athlete as someone who could move and there are over 8 billion of those in the world!

A professor of mine once told me “Ian, to learn deeply, learn from experience. To learn quickly, learn from others.” I needed to learn quickly, so I searched for others. I found a technology company in Florida called Bvddy that had launched several years earlier with a similar concept, so I flew to Miami and asked the founder what sport was the most popular in his app. Running was the most popular by far.

At first, I was confused. Why would something that could be done individually be more popular than sports like tennis and soccer, which required 2+ people to play? After a few conversations, it quickly made sense. Runners love connecting with other runners. Now we had our focus. We would build technology that unites athletes and strengthens communities by bringing runners together.

Fast forward to the spring of 2022. Our website had launched and runners began downloading version 1 of our mobile app. It wasn’t long before the feedback was clear. Runners loved connecting with other runners, but they did not love our mobile app. Instead of connecting on our app, they wanted to connect at group runs and races. So I created a 30 runs in 30 day challenge for myself to better understand how our technology could support run events. During the 30 runs, I met many passionate people, including Run The Day’s founder Tim.

At races, Tim was always in high demand with people buzzing around him asking questions. Since he seemed mission critical to the events, I called and asked him on a beer date to better understand his role.

During our beer date in summer 2022, I heard the Run The Day story for the first time. How Tim was tasked with putting on a race when volunteering at his daughter’s school and how he came away thinking - “jeez what an awesome event but that was damn complicated!” I learned how Tim built Run The Day’s initial website in the early 2000s (which would later be copied by other registration platforms), how he had personally timed thousands of races and how he had trained countless of other race timers over the years. I also heard how he had recently sucked the juice out of his mosquito bite with a suction syringe to prevent it from being itchy.

Over beers, we discussed the value of a partnership. How logical it would be to marry Run The Day’s registration platform and timing operations with the modern technology and run community that we were building. Not only did it tactically make sense, it was obvious that our missions were aligned. I was convinced that together we would have a larger positive impact than we would separately.

After our successful first date at Barnaby’s, the courtship began. For several months I tagged along to Run The Day races where I learned about the bib distribution process, the scoring software and the timing equipment. Over zoom calls, Tim shared more about the company’s history (and his bass guitar collection).

As summer turned to fall, I continued attending races. At a race in late October, bibs had been mislabeled and the timing equipment did not connect properly, which caused the awards ceremony to be delayed. The following Monday morning, I called Tim. I shared that I believed there was a ton of opportunity to grow together, but that things were broken and needed attention. I suggested that we finalize our partnership immediately so that we could move to the next chapter and focus all of our combined efforts on growing together. Several minutes later, our partnership was official.

That Monday was October 31. Halloween 2022.

The past 2 years have come with challenges - things have broken and I’ve been yelled at a bunch (sometimes for good reason). I’ve made mistakes, communicated poorly and let people down, but have also advanced our mission. And it’s not just a gut feeling that convinces me of this:

• Others tell me how Run The Day has simplified race day for them, allowing them to more easily organize events that keep their community united.

• I’ve experienced first-hand the unifying impact of races on communities.

• The improvements we’ve made are reflected in our growth numbers, which consistently tick up (albeit never as fast as I would like).

While we have a long way to go, Halloween 2022 seems like the beginning of a win/win/win:

• Win #1: It eliminated my nagging feeling (only to be replaced by many other nagging feelings - stay tuned for the Halloween 2026 newsletter!)

• Win #2: It helped to improve Run The Day.

• Win #3: It has united athletes and strengthened communities.

The best part - we are only getting started.

— Ian

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