Why the startup CEO rides a bike

One of the things that surprised me most about starting LaunchDarkly is how much bicycling is involved. No, LaunchDarkly has nothing to do with sports or cycling — we’re a developer tool company that helps software teams launch, measure, and control their features. We are based in San Francisco, and we have customers, investors, potential employees, advisors, and partners all over the city. When I worked at TripIt, with rare exceptions, vendors and customers came to visit us. Now as a startup CEO, I have coffee meetings, go to meetups, and visit customers on-site for their feedback. As well, I ride my bike to work.

Despite being known for it’s jaw dropping hills climbed by the famed cable cars, downtown San Francisco itself is relatively flat. There’s a bike lane down Market, and at rush hour it can resemble a scene from 1980s Beijing with biker after biker fighting for space in the peloton.

So why do I bike rather than walking, public transit, drive, or taxi? Biking is:

• Faster than walking. Time is important to me.
• Faster and cheaper than public transit. When you factor in waiting for the bus or muni, the bus having to negotiate traffic, biking is the clear answer.
• Faster and cheaper than driving. Not only is traffic in SF horrendous, parking ranges from difficult and expensive to impossible. I can lock my bike wherever there’s a bike rack. In fact, I don’t even own a car!
• Faster and cheaper than taxis. With a taxi, I don’t have to look for a parking spot. However, there’s still the traffic issue. My co-founder John lives in the East Bay, so occasionally he’ll BART in, then take a taxi to meet me at a meeting. Inevitably, I am first back at our office after our meeting, as biking is faster than driving. I actually factor in 15–20 minutes extra transit time if John is attending a meeting with me.

My bike outside of the Twitter building. I don’t know who put the bear there.

So as startup CEO, the choice is very clear — biking is faster and cheaper, so I bike to SF meetings. This leaves out one very important factor — I love biking! My friend (and LaunchDarkly customer) Patrick Cushing, said he saw me biking down Market with a big smile on my face after a meeting. I replied “Why wouldn’t I be smiling? I was biking!”