In 2009 Michael Horvath was tinkering with a fitness tracking app in the snow-capped New England town of Hanover. Flanked by the white mountains of New Hampshire on one side and the green hills of Vermont on the other, Hanover is an attractive but unremarkable place. With a population of 5,000 people it is best known as the home of the prestigious Dartmouth College. “It’s not a tech centre, and you really can’t imagine Strava coming out of that environment,” Horvath chuckles, recalling the early days of what was to become the world’s most popular fitness app. The 53-year-old has just returned to the helm of the company he co-founded with Mark Gainey in 2009. The pair, who previously floated an email management company in the nineties, have tapped into a generation of fitness fanatics with more than 50 million users now on the platform. Many of them have grown addicted to the Strava app, which gamifies sports activity and allows cyclists, runners and swimmers to compete against each other every day - often on their daily commute to work or school....