Building Zwift
Indoor training has been around for longer than I can remember, but it was in 2014 when Zwift came along that it changed this market forever. It came into the world with bold ambitions, reimagined the space and what it could become, and has grown the market to a size that nobody could have imagined.
As far back as I can recall the earliest pioneers in the indoor virtual world space were the likes of Computrainer and Tacx - that would have been in the late 90’s, early 2000’s. But they never really delivered on the promise making indoor training much more enjoyable. They can’t be blamed for lack of vision or not trying - the technology wasn’t even there at the time. Social networks didn’t exist, multi player online games weren’t around, broadband speeds were slow and wireless protocols such as ANT+ and BTLE hadn’t been invented yet.
But, in 2010 when a gaming software developer in Southern California named Jon Mayfield began tinkering with his kinetic trainer and finding ways for it to communicate with a virtual world he built, he had no idea how big this would become.