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@jeff.brines's latest is a (somewhat grim) banger: https://open.substack.com/pub/jeffbrines/p/q2-outdoor-industry-roundup and I encourage y'all to read it. These jumped out at me: "The one thing DJI and the broader Asian push have done better than anyone is move fast and iterate faster, shipping new platforms before the last ones reach dealer floors. You cannot answer that with a committee and a two-year product cycle. The West is not losing because it cannot build. It is losing because it cannot turn fast enough, and the other side keeps accelerating." And "Trek has access to capital and is very large, but if I were...

I also read 52 books last year! Well, I didn't exactly read each book all the way through. But I read the title on the spine, and if it sounded promising, I looked at the pictures on the cover and read the rest of the book jacket.

From the article: He said he's tried to build a culture at Trek that "confronts the brutal facts," moves fast, and always seeks to learn. When people tell him he's wrong, he said, he gets curious. "I'm more interested in how we improve. I'm not interested in proving that we're right." From being on the inside the last few years, one of the biggest problems is that he has surrounded himself with yes men and ignored what the people he employs have suggested across various choices and has done little to show he was responsible for the bad decisions. With...

Clearly this SHUSH product doesn't work great, it failed to keep Ridewrap silent.

I actually liked the article. Whether any of it’s true or not is a different story, but calling out military spending and Milton Friedman is awesome in my book.

ahh yes.... the universal thumbnail theme over and over haha

We stopped stocking full suspension mountainbikes last year. I'll order them if there is demand for one. Else, it has a motor. We kept low cost hardtails for the youth though.

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...

When you do, please create a version for highly illegal racing of cars on the road. I need some segments on the canyon twisties around me to irresponsibly try and beat please. The top award would be "KOR" "king of the road" - although that sounds a bit Scania truck like. Maybe "douche of the road" could work LOL. You'll probably need to host this one in Moldavia or something. :-) Strava could turn this on so easily, but imagine the lawsuits.

"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...