Ed Baker

Focus on Growth

By InnerVoice

September 28^th, 2018

New Type of endurance

The idea of endurance sports isn’t completely new to me, even if Ironman triathlon is. I've been a runner my entire life. I went to college at Harvard, where I studied physics and chemistry, balancing my classes with a commitment to the cross country and track teams. Immediately after college I worked at Bain & Company as a consultant, and then joined Bain Capital, which is a private equity firm. From the beginning of my career, it was clear to me that the hours of work and focus needed to be successful would be all consuming. I decided to apply to Stanford Business School, which I thought would be a good way to get out to Silicon Valley to jump into start-up culture in a big way. I moved out there in 2006, and two years later, after graduating from Stanford, I started a company called friend.ly. It was a social Q&A site, where users asked other people questions about themselves as a way to get to meet new people.

Friend.ly grew to about 25 million registered users, and we sold the company to Facebook in 2011. As part of that process, I joined Facebook’s international growth team where I helped the company experiment in competitive markets like Japan, Korea, and Russia, as well as emerging markets like India, Latin America, Africa, and Southeast Asia. Working at Facebook was a great experience, but as it grew larger and larger, I felt the desire to get back to a smaller start-up with massive potential. In 2013 I decided to join Uber, then a small start-up with just around 200 people. My parents were confused: “What is this company that you’re leaving Facebook for?” They lived in Florida and Uber wasn’t there yet, but they told me they didn’t think it would ever work in a place like Florida (Not surprisingly, they now use it all the time). During my time at Uber, we grew from 20 million trips per year to over 20 million trips per weekend. To help a company through a period of staggering growth was an exciting experience, but after almost four years of long hours, I felt it was time to take care of my health and spend more time with my family.

I discovered zwift

I had been an avid runner since high school, but I didn't get my first road bike until I started working at Uber. I was living in Palo Alto and working in San Francisco - an hour commute each way by car. I thought it would be great if I could cycle from home to work once a week and found it was a good way to stay in shape. I also really appreciated that it was low impact; as I was getting older I found that running caused a significant amount of pain and injury, so cycling turned out to be a great outlet for me.

I first discovered Zwift when I saw Mark Zuckerberg posting some of the workouts he was doing. I asked him about it and, on his recommendation, I ended up getting an indoor trainer and setting up some space in my house to Zwift. At that time, I was working long hours, and Zwift was a very efficient way to get in regular cycling workouts. I wish I could have done it more than a few times a week, but there was a trade-off between getting the extra hour of sleep or getting a quick morning workout in. I was already stretched pretty thin.

In March of 2017, I moved on from Uber and suddenly had a lot of extra time and started to train at a higher level. Thanks to the recommendation by Eric Min, the CEO of Zwift, I even started working with a world-class coach.

No expectations

I went into my first Ironman — Lake Placid — with absolutely no expectations. My coach, Matt Dixon of Purple Patch, drilled it into my head that I wasn’t racing, I was simply trying to gain experience. I took that advice to heart and didn’t pay attention to my place as I was coming out of the water. On the second loop of the bike, I overheard the announcer saying that I was 2nd overall, which surprised me, but I thought it was pretty cool. Up until that point, I’d been focused on my own race, and trying to stay present in the moment. Soon after, I caught site of the only rider ahead of me. I was afraid of blowing up in my first Ironman, so I decided to try to keep him in sight on the bike, and being a runner, seeing if I could catch him on the marathon.

It was a weird situation because I was confident about the run, but I’d never run a marathon after spending hours doing other sports beforehand. Those first few steps off the bike, my legs felt like Jell-O. As I was running barefoot into transition I got really nervous, I was thinking, “Oh no, I don’t even know if I’ll be able to make it through the first mile.” I actually decided to take off my suit and put on running shorts and a singlet, which added a bit of time. (When I asked Matt about changing clothes beforehand, he said if it was going to make me more comfortable it’s probably worth the extra time.) As surprising as it was, once I got out of T2 my legs no longer felt like Jell-O, I felt surprisingly smooth and fresh.

“I watched YouTube videos of good swimmers, people like Michael Phelps, and when I got to practice in the morning I’d try to remember what I saw and test it out for myself.”

Scared and excited

I’ve never been to Kona. I can't even imagine what it's going to be like. The one thing I’m making sure I do is to respect it. I did a training session last week, and I said to Matt, “I think that training session was more difficult than the Copenhagen Ironman,” and he responded with “Well, that’s good because Kona is going to be four times harder than Copenhagen.” Today I actually did a session on my indoor trainer, trying to replicate the conditions. I got the heat in my training room up to 90 degrees and the humidity up to 70%, and I just did an easy 45-minute ride — it was tough. My heart rate went right up, I was very uncomfortable, and I was just thinking to myself, “How am I going to spend 9 hours in these types of conditions?”

I would be lying if I said I wasn’t scared. I mean, it’s intimidating to think about the heat and the wind and the competition that I’m going to be facing there. But I'm also excited about it. I think no matter what happens it's gonna be a great learning experience, and as long as I give it my best without having expectations or shooting for a specific outcome, it'll be a good day.

The business of sport

Long workouts have afforded me time to reflect on the places I’ve been and the current challenges I’m taking on. There are so many parallels between triathlon and business, which may be why I have felt so comfortable throwing myself into both. Here are some of the similarities that stick with me the most:

FOCUS ON GROWTH

My roles at Uber and Facebook were focused on growth, meaning we had a North Star metric that we were constantly trying to optimize. At Facebook, it was monthly active users, and at Uber, it was weekly trips. I’ve always had a very quantitative approach to things — my background is mathematics and physics — so I’ve really enjoyed the data-driven approach to improving my race time, which is my North Star in triathlon.

BUILD YOUR TEAM

As much as triathlon is an individual sport, you can’t do it without your team. For me, my team is my family, friends, my coaches at Purple Patch, Charles River Masters Swimming, and Swim Smooth, and various other people I’ve gone to for advice. Whether in triathlon or business, it’s about building a team of people who are experts in the things you’re not an expert in and letting them help you achieve your goal.

RUNNING EXPERIMENTS

Every day at Facebook, we’d run experiments like A/B tests to determine which version of the product is better. You can have all sorts of great ideas, but you want the results of your experiment to tell you what works. This year, I’ve run triathlon experiments to find out how I can be more aero on the bike, determine what running shoes I should be wearing, and whether I should breathe on my left side, right side, or both sides, during the swim. Continual experimentation is absolutely essential to maximizing your output.

MAKE BIG BETS

I see big bets as something where you’re making a fairly significant investment, and you’re not sure it’s going to pay off or not, but you feel like it might. And if it does pay off, you’re going to leap forward rather than improving incrementally. At Uber, we allowed riders to pay in cash in certain markets. It was very controversial at the time, and I argued with our CEO over it many times. Uber was supposed to be something that allowed you to never take out your wallet, but a lot of people in India don’t have credit cards, and even if they do they find it cumbersome to sign up to the app. We found by adding the cash option, twice as many people started taking trips on Uber. That was a big bet that paid off. One of the big bets I’ve made this year was to train almost exclusively over the winter on the rowing machine. I found that all the training quickly translated over to the bike, and to some extent the swim and run as well. I don’t think that was an obvious thing that would make me a better triathlete, but looking back it did accelerate my growth curve in the sport.

BE FLEXIBLE AND RESILIENT

You can try to come up with a master plan, but chances are you're going to start going in a different direction and have to make sure you're able to constantly navigate towards that North Star, even if it's changing. My original plan this year was to focus solely on 70.3 and move up to full Ironman next year. But when we found out my wife was pregnant and due in September, we realized I shouldn’t go to South Africa the same month our baby is due. We talked about it, and she said if I wanted to shoot for Kona, she’d be cool with me going once the baby’s born. So we reformulated the plan in the middle of the year, and now I’m headed to Kona.

HAVE FUN AND BE HUMBLE

I think being humble actually helps you have fun. Whether it's the business rules or sports, I think you end up getting the best outcomes if you have fun and enjoy the process more than anything. When I’ve met pro triathletes, they’re incredibly intelligent, driven and humble people who are also fun to be around. It’s just like the people I’ve worked with at Facebook and Uber.

methaphor for life

One of the things that bothered me about triathlons was that people would start at different times and you wouldn’t really know where you were relative to other people. Prior to doing triathlons, every time I’d raced everyone started together, so it was relative. What I’ve now learned is that you need to focus on yourself and the process to have your best race. I started paying attention to my heart rate and power and how I’m feeling, making sure I am getting the right nutrition and hydration. I would probably finish in a slower time if I were paying too much attention to the people around me, and I’d have a much higher chance of blowing up before the finish line. I feel like, maybe for the shorter distances, you can get away with focusing more on the competition and just going all-out. In a full-distance Ironman, I don’t think you can get away with not being focused on the process. To a certain extent, it’s a metaphor for life.