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The point about defence spending having a positive affect on the rest of the economy- in my lectures this was talked about using the concept of the multiplier effect. This is the idea that if someone, ie the state, spends £1 on something then it increases national GDP by some amount because that’s been spent at a local supplier, who then pays wages, their employees go to the local butcher, who buys from the local farmer, etc etc.
The issue with defence spending is it has a comparatively poor multiplier effect vs other forms of government spending. If I spend on education, as well as seeding cash into the economy I also produce a better educated population who are more productive with a given set of resources, come up with a new way to build more durable roads, make new companies etc etc. Education spending can in this way expand supply (look up vertical supply long run aggregate supply curves in classical economic theory).
Defence spending has a really poor supply side effect. The end product is a non productive asset, a better bomb, a gun, a tank. Your state might need it for strategic reasons and may employ it to put your state in a better strategic position than it would have been in if it didn’t possess the thing (like how your government is acting in the Middle East now, right?). But it doesn’t have the same supply side affect as education, or building a railway, or health or many other forms of government spending.
This is all a wild oversimplification right, and economics is all about wild oversimplifications in order to isolate one thing that you want to look at. Defence spending does still support an industrial base and all that other good stuff. But my point is that other forms of spending do that stuff as well as often having a positive supply side effect. The relative sizes of all these effects is what it comes down to.
One bubble counter argument to the multiplier effect, defense spending makes stable manufacturing companies that have some free time on the machines that can then be used to make bike components by the enthusiasts working there (5DEV) 😁
Love posts like this.
Broadly, I agree. I’ve always liked Valerie Ramey’s work on fiscal multipliers, especially in the context of defense spending, assuming that’s who you were referencing.
The piece I think sometimes gets underweighted is the role of DoD spending in producing major dual-use breakthroughs. The internet and GPS are the obvious examples. Could those breakthroughs have happened through other channels with less waste? Absolutely. But it’s hard to argue that defense-funded R&D has not produced enormous civilian spillovers.
Bringing it back to the topic at hand, I’m generally in favor of building more dynamic, redundant, and agile supply chains in any critical industry - and if DoD spending helps get us there, so be it. High-performance electric motors are likely to become one of those industries. And to be clear, I don’t think this has to be purely U.S.-centric. The real thing I care about is overdependence. Relying on one country, one company, or one narrow set of suppliers for something that may become strategically essential gives me a lot of anxiety.
TSMC and leading-edge chip manufacturing are a useful analogy. You have deep tribal knowledge, geographic concentration, a small number of truly elite players, and an incredibly important supply chain that remains very difficult to replicate. Many are trying, but the fact that it is so hard to copy is exactly the point. (was wild to see DeepSeek latest trained entirely on huawei chips...impressive group of AI nerds over there)
5DEV does defense manufacturing? I’m calling for a total and complete shutdown of pentagon spending until our country's representatives can figure out what the hell is going on
That wild recent evacuation in Los Angeles was due to failure of a holding tank of epoxy used for windscreens on jet fighters. Dod is everywhere. And there is countless communities dependent on those contracts.
Ultimately I don’t care about our government spending money in general. I care more about how they source that money (taxing wealthy folk versus borrowing) and that the money spent either a) directly pays money to poor folk or b) creates jobs. And having the world’s most advanced and funded military is an obvious strategic advantage. Even if we have often used that advantage some pretty dumb stuff that’s killed a lot of people and cost a lot of money to achieve nothing of value.
I haven’t read proper economics for years but I’ll have to give that a read, I probably picked it up from an article or something, cheers for the recommendation.
Anyway I’ll stop derailing the thread now!
The "multiplier effect" is an economic fallacy.
"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed."
Their about blurb is a word salad and all of it is rotten.
"AI, Web3, and Deep Tech are simultaneously reaching the inflection point of their exponential curves.
Couple these technologies with the macro pressures of demographic and climate change, and traditional power structures will fade.
By deploying capital to fill this vacuum, there is an opportunity to generate massive wealth through creation of structures that are more equitable, beneficial, transparent and accessible."
Nigerian scam, the boardroom edition.
Fallacy or not, if our domestic manufacturing capacity is contingent on wreaking havoc in the Middle East and the global south then I want nothing to do with it.
Based on the tidbits shared above, it sounds like our domestic production capacity only exists because the ruling class can’t afford to outsource defense manufacturing without the risk of it being used against them (see Westmag drones) but they’re happy to sell us out for everything else. It may support the workforce but that’s just happenstance as evidenced by them actively trying to replace human labor with AI without any plan for what happens to us.
At the risk of bringing this back to bikes I listened to the second episode of the escape collective podcast (subscriber only I'm afraid). One of the things they highlighted was that Woom bikes has been having significant growth. If you haven't heard of them it might not be surprising because they focus on (pricy) kids bikes.
My son's bike is now newer than either of his parents bikes and he's not even hit his growth spurt yet... Whilst it's easy to postpone a pricy upgrade for the adults it's a little trickier when the bike just doesn't fit. I can't wait for him to reach adult sizes.
They interviewed the owner of Woom and one of the things he highlighted was being very granular on demand forecasting. If every region rounds up.by a couple of % "just in case" then across the world you're now way over.
This is a theme the escape collective keep on coming back to - the lack.of real industry wide data that's readily available. Hence looking at Fox / Shimano etc as the closest proxy.
They're doing such good reporting! Gift links below if you want to check the series out:
Part 1: https://escapecollective.com/why-cant-the-bike-industry-get-itself-out-…
Part 2: https://escapecollective.com/part-2-have-we-reached-a-new-normal-for-th…
This is something I deal with and think about constantly. In many cases, demand forecasting is still based on little more than last year’s performance plus vibes. And yet, getting it right can be the difference between success and failure, sometimes even bankruptcy.
I’ve long thought about trying to bootstrap a feedback loop by surveying hundreds (ideally, thousands) of bike shops anonymously to better understand what is happening at the consumer level. I probably don’t need to say this, but as powerful as that could be, it comes with a lot of near-term pitfalls. Getting broad shop buy-in is hard. Controlling for geography is hard. Categorizing shops by size, type, customer base, and local riding culture gets messy fast.
Upstream data is more uniform and easier to parse, but much of it is isolated to a handful of public companies or component categories, like Fox Factory. That data can be useful, but it is not exactly a clean read on end-user demand, and if we try and expand to more than just Fox/Shimano/etc we face many of the bike shop problems (not to mention it becomes a huge lift).
Other signals, such as race participation, bike park traffic, trail counters, and event registrations, are often too granular or too niche to tell the whole story. In some ways, the ideal system would be a computer vision network at every major trailhead in America, or at least the top 1,000, tracking actual riding activity over time. Honestly, if this were a larger industry, I’m convinced hedge funds would already be doing something like that to find a cleaner demand signal.
The problem I’m describing is not unique to bikes, it shows up in a lot of industries. I’m one of those weirdos who strongly believes we need a “Manhattan Project” for economic data so institutions like the Federal Reserve can make better decisions around rates and broader policy. Better data will not make forecasting easy or perfect, but it would make us a lot less reliant on vibes/data from our Grandparents era.
Would Strava sell you that data? I know they sell that data to Forestry England as they've whipped it out in a presentation on land access before.
Strava/Garmin are logging like an appreciable % of all MTB rides.
That is a seriously good idea.
I know Strava is as cagey with their data as any company could be, though they are improving slightly. Garmin less so, but in my attempts to get a developer account with them I've thus far been unsuccessful.
The best part about this is the data has been collected for years.
Peter Cotton has an interesting take if you're not already aware - Microprediction: Building an Open AI Network | MIT Press
Strava Metro is a thing, I can't seem to find details about what kind of segmenting it does though: https://metro.strava.com/
Also unclear if they'd provide access for industry research, it looks to be mostly focused on commuting/urban mobility
I just started listening to a whole podcast season that is about how outdoor gear, including camping, hiking, hunting, and even biking gear can trace a lot of its roots to the military. The Berry Amendment is a big reason why there is any domestic outdoor gear manufacturing industry at all. I've only started episode 2, but it's very interesting and I think a lot of people who are interested in this forum thread would think so too. https://articlesofinterest.substack.com/p/gear-chapter-1
It also goes into some of the sociology of how fashion developed for different outdoorsmen over the past few centuries and built a whole industry around "looking the part", from English hunters wearing specific tailored suits just to go fox hunting, to wearing Arc'teryx to the grocery store. As much as people, myself included, want to claim that certain gear is purely for function, not for outward appearance, it's not true. I don't need a POC logo on my knees to keep them safe, and my helmet visor is barely in my field of view. Fishing shirts don't need collars, and there's no reason for hiking boots to all be brown still. A lot of that came from the military or historical adventurism and facades of machismo.
Trailforks might be another viable option. They also have a lot of riding associations linked in with them.
They have less data recently because Strava closed off their API. Now you can't have trailforks auto update from strava, you have to directly link in your Garmin device to both services, which is another step that most people don't do.
If you have a garmin though. If you use one of the competitors your SOL.
What bugs me the most about Strava is that a self hosted app that I use to see my past completions of a segment (because strava paywalls it) doesn't show maps because I don't have everything set to public or something.
Strava really needs a good competitor.
As many of you know, I had been working on a Strava alternative that I planned to launch this spring. Unfortunately, I had to put it on pause.
It’s still something I want to build, but after digging in further, I became less convinced it could pay my bills anytime soon. And realistically, raising outside capital for a non-AI consumer product with Strava as the entrenched incumbent felt close to impossible.
The good news is that the amount of capital required is probably far lower now than it would have been even a year ago. Frontier models have made product development dramatically faster. But it would still take hundreds of hours (plus a ton of tokens), and I just don’t have that kind of time or financial slack at the moment. (i have the opposite of financial slack!) Plus, infrastructure costs aren't cheap on this one for a non AI product (backend worker cost + database costs are higher than you'd think)
If, or when, one of my side hustles starts making me feel a little less like there’s a gun to my head professionally, I’ll probably pick it back up. I’m more confident than ever in my ability to build and ship quickly, and the iteration speed would be insane.
But the honest reality is this: building a consumer tech company is hard. Building one that needs network effects to become truly valuable is even harder.
If you're ever able to get this project going, I look forward to cheering you on, enthusiastically adopting your new tech, and inviting all my friends to join the platform with me, and then later calling down curses on you and the Brines family for generations to come for the inevitable enshittification of your platform after you've sufficiently saturated the marketplace.
My Trailforks still auto updates with my Strava data. Did I slip through the cracks?
(Strava is definitely selling their ride data, I'm sure the Metro product includes options for not just paved roads)
Sad to hear that Jeff! It's even sadder to think Strava could introduce private segments and bike park mode on a slow Tuesday morning without breaking a sweat but don't and leave it up to overworked people with their hands in multiple pickle jars to do so.
Back when Garmin and Strava had their little spat a few years ago, I thought Strava was going to try and bring there own head unit to the market..
It still blows my mind that Strava is a company at all, obviously it has the social network aspect with monetisation and tons of users, but to me and everyone I know it's just the convenient place to store your ride logs and have segment leaderboards.
I nearly ended up working for their kinda competitor Komoot at one point, but had similar doubts about the long term viability of the business model (and didn't prepare for enough for a technical interview). Unfortunately for them I was kinda right about that one: https://www.dcrainmaker.com/2025/05/komoot-team-goodbye.html.
One of the issues for Strava is that I wouldn't pay for any of it, the free stuff is quite barebones and the paid stuff is entirely useless to most users especially with so many other apps notably from Garmin for health and training tracking. If anything, their decision to hide positions on the leaderboards if you arn't top 10 just gives me even more incentive to get better to maintain my top 10 positions rather than pay to see how middle of the pack I would be.
We'll get a lot more information on Strava in the latter half of 2026 being they've already filed their S-1 to go public (confidentially), but their success doesn't shock me, network effects are powerful (and hard to beat). For those who don't know what an S-1 is, it serves a number of purposes, most importantly (for us) forcing disclosure about the company's financials. That means we'll finally get to look under the hood and understand how profitable the company really is. For fun, here is GoPro's S-1 and here is Fox Factory's S-1 (Vital MTB is cited!).
What Strava decides to actually do with their future IPO will depend largely on what happens with the mega-IPOs on deck: SpaceX, Anthropic, OpenAI. The amount of capital these three companies are going to raise is legitimately absurd, and it may trigger a large rotation out of everything else (i.e., people sell their stock in XYZ to buy the "AI frontier labs"). To put a number on it, the market is expecting roughly $195B raised from those three alone, which is more than the entire 2021 IPO boom, the prior high-water mark, when 397 companies raised $142B (and that's excluding SPACs).
The capital these three plus all the other AI-ish (anything in the blast radius of AI) companies are gobbling up will ripple through everything else. The amount of money in the system isn't infinite, so Strava may have a problem on its hands, especially given the rotation we've already seen out of SaaS ("it's dead..." lol). Strava obviously isn't SaaS...It's a consumer tech app, which used to be considered harder and less durable than SaaS. You have to market to a fickle consumer who will likely churn in "XX" months, and the amount you pay to acquire a new user has to be meaningfully lower than what you earn from them over their lifetime in the app. Recent estimates put Strava's user base around 195M, with paying users somewhere between 2M and 4M.
When I put my wannabe-venture-capitalist hat on, I think it's an decent business with really durable network effects. But I don't see the management team navigating the current environment very well. Too closed with their data, too slow to iterate. Hard to grow the current model, but plenty of opportunity's to grow the company (ask me how lol). I think there is room for a competitor, and I still want to be that pirate ship.
On that note, bootstrapping something like Strava used to be a fool's errand, a low-quality bet. Now it's a month of burying myself in front of computer screens and finding one or two people to help. Would v0.1 handle millions of users? No. But we could ship something meaningful in a very short amount of time, which ought to scare everyone, myself included.
This is why I'm excited about the world we are going into (or is here). It lets the little guy feel less like a peon and more like Iron Man. I can chase ideas that are genuinely huge and use AI to be more agile than Strava and all their layers of middle management could ever be. We could be razor sharp on the sports we actually care about, and be okay with something smaller because I don't have a team of 1,000 people to support. This change should let us atomize software at a higher level - IE, go after ideas with lower levels of revenue because our opex is also lower. This breaks the traditional model and (this part of AI) should be good for the consumer. More options at a lower price, again, in part fueled by lower opex. (this is the theory)
All the tailwinds aside, I would still have to get a meaningful number of users, deliver an incredible experience, and somehow make money all the while realizing Strava is right there with alllll the data aiming to crush me. It's hard.
"It lets the little guy feel less like a peon and more like Iron Man. I can chase ideas that are genuinely huge and use AI to be more agile than Strava and all their layers of middle management could ever be. We could be razor sharp on the sports we actually care about, and be okay with something smaller because I don't have a team of 1,000 people to support. This change should let us atomize software at a higher level - IE, go after ideas with lower levels of revenue because our opex is also lower."
This is the part I'm most excited about; I'm not especially technical (and not any kind of engineer) and I built myself a training app/coach in one weekend; it uses my Strava and Whoop as data-sources, and a custom training adaptation model (which sounds fancy, but all I did was feed Claude a few years of Strava data and it figured it out).
If I can do that, the possibilities for an actual software engineer are mind-boggling
Jeff will know way more on the topic; however, Strava is reportedly doing about $415 million in revenue on 4-5 million subscribers (~180 million users, 50/60 active). I don't think they disclose real numbers of subs or a split of where revenue truly comes from. As always, if it is free, you are the product, so your mid-pack data, and everyone else who tracks any activity when their butt is off the couch, is clearly the valuable part. Enthusiast super users be damned.
I did see that the number one tracker used with Strava is an Apple watch. That tells me something.
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