Outside's CEO wants 400 staff off Zoom and onto walking calls: encouragement, not a cap

Thurston's own week is the only part of this that comes with numbers, so it is the part that can be checked. Three workday rides of 90 to 120 minutes, plus three to four hours on Saturday and two to three on Sunday, is 9.5 to 13 hours a week on a bike ^[1]. Annualised, that is 494 to 676 hours, or twelve to seventeen forty-hour work weeks ^[2]. Set it against the 7,000 to 10,000 miles a year he reports ^[4] and the implied average lands between 14 and 15 mph ^[3], which is unremarkable for someone who came up through the national team system and raced in Europe for four years ^[5]. The personal figures reconcile. They also describe a calendar only a founder can write, because the ride takes three workday mornings between 8 a.m. and noon ^[6].

The company version is thinner. Outside Interactive has about 400 employees ^[8] and offices in the US, Canada and Germany, with none in Boulder, where Thurston works from home ^[9]. Staff are encouraged to hold meetings on walks rather than on Zoom ^[10], and encourage is the word in the essay: no cap, no quota, no stated exception. What the account does show is where his own meetings went instead, to roughly 15 food meetings a month around town ^[17], about 180 a year ^[5]. That substitution is available to a chief executive in his home town. It is a harder trade for two colleagues in different countries ^[9].

Then there is the awkwardness of an anti-screen norm inside a screen business. Outside Interactive, founded in 2019, owns Outside Magazine, Velo, Gaia GPS, Inntopia and Outside Days ^[2], products people read and navigate by on the devices Thurston says are taking over ^[12]. His winter substitute for outdoor riding is an indoor Zwift trainer ^[15]. His estimate that we spend 5 to 10% of our lives outdoors ^[12] works out to 1.2 to 2.4 hours of a 24-hour day ^[6], and he presents it as a guess rather than a finding. The daily ketone drink he credits with less brain fog and better endurance over at least four years ^[16] is his own assessment, not a policy.

None of that makes the walking-call norm wrong. It does mean the evidence on offer covers one person's calendar ^[6], while the norm it recommends covers 400 ^[8]. His reason for preferring the walk, that video is useful for a first meeting and tiring after that ^[11], is a claim about meeting quality, and meeting quality is the one thing a media company with three national offices could actually instrument.