AllTrails CEO Ron Schneiderman stands along a trail at Las Trampas Natural Area Preserve on Tuesday, February 6, 2024 in Alamo, California. AllTrails is a trail navigation application. (Aric Crabb/Bay Area News Group)
If you love hiking, you've probably heard of AllTrails. More than 60 million hikers use the San Francisco-based hiking app, which offers his 400,000 hand-picked trail guides to locations around the world. With more than 1 billion miles of trails recorded, the platform was named Apple's iPhone App of the Year in 2023.
The app not only provides trail reviews and user-generated hiking tips for nature lovers around the world, but also provides user insights. For example, how much have you been enjoying the outdoors lately and which trails are your favorite? . (Mission Peak Loop is the most popular for Bay Area hikers, followed by Land's End and Steep Canyon.)
We recently sat down with AllTrails CEO Ron Schneiderman at the Las Trampas Regional Natural Reserve, near his home in Alamo, to learn more about the company, the app's features in development, and how it's helping more people connect than ever before. He talked about how his team is working to achieve this goal. With nature.
question: What was your path to AllTrails?
answer: I grew up here in Walnut Creek. My father was a geologist and took me and his sister around Mount Diablo and local, state and national parks to look at rock formations. As a kid, I hated it. I just wanted to go to the beach or Disneyland, and I think that's where the seed was planted. Fast forward quite a bit. He ran a ski startup called Liftopia for nine years. The original founders[of AllTrails]had been with the company for about five years and wanted to do something different, so they asked me if I wanted to come and run it. I couldn't say no since he was working at Yelp at the time. I started as Chief Marketing Officer and Chief Operating Officer (in 2015) and became CEO in 2019. I've been doing that ever since.
question: Skiing, hiking — it’s obvious that I’m passionate about the outdoors…
answer: The connection with nature is human. For various reasons, we have lost connection with it, but I think we are reawakening it. This is consistent with his data since 2010 that more and more people are recognizing the importance of nature in their lives and are very actively and intentionally trying to spend more time outdoors. . That's really what we're about: getting as many people as possible to spend more time outdoors.
When I first started, we focused on inclusivity and accessibility and pivoted away from anything that might make people feel like the outside world wasn't for them. Our underlying philosophy is that the reason people don't spend time outdoors is a lack of information and lack of confidence, and we believe that technology can be used to instill both.
question: What are some of the challenges and responsibilities that come with that? How do you help manage risk outdoors?
answer: We take that responsibility very seriously. We push people off the sidewalk and sometimes off the grid. Must be understood correctly. It starts with how to create and manage trail content and add user-generated content. The thing about trails is that they are always changing. We create feedback loops and mechanisms so that as soon as we receive a signal that a trailhead has been moved or there may be a road closure, we can communicate that. We have a wonderful symbiotic relationship with our community. They go out and take the time to leave reviews for other future trail participants.
question: How has the pandemic affected AllTrails?
answer: At first everything stopped. No one was using our platform or going out. I'm sure you'll need a release valve at some point. It is impossible for people to remain indoors for months with this level of stress and anxiety. There's no better time for a pandemic than to be outside. So we were determined to address this situation even before it started to settle down.
I don't think it's a secret that our company has been one of the lucky companies during the coronavirus pandemic. We saw triple-digit growth. But what really changed our company was hiring great technical talent. During the pandemic, everyone was at home, facing an existential crisis, and wondering things like: Am I working on something that I want kids to use?'' Applications started coming in from people with a level of talent that was unattainable before the pandemic.
In 2023, people spent more time outdoors than in 2022. I think this is because of the pandemic. People were trading their commutes for morning or evening hikes. Once you rediscover the joy of being outside, it's long-lasting.
question: Please tell us about your company's corporate culture.
answer: We are about 90 percent outside the bay. We were the first to go remote from a hiring standpoint, and we also had a ton of people who were in the Gulf region leave as well. As you can imagine, they went to every cool mountain town imaginable.
The first Friday of every month is Trail Day. We will close our offices and encourage everyone to get outside and spend time on the trails. It's a core part of our culture, and I think it's unleashed some of our best ideas.
question: What is the process for adding new trails to the app?
answer: Today, trails exist in every country in the world. We exceeded that standard last year. The final two countries were Sudan and North Korea. We truly are a global platform mapping the planet.
Our data integrity team not only tracks creation, but also curates it. We have a unique set of tools and processes. There are machine learning and clustering algorithms, and we're relying a little bit on AI, but it's still all done through the lens of human curation.
What we've added to our toolkit is a partnership with public land managers across North America. This partnership will also allow land managers to issue warnings to community members. We are also developing safety tools to aid search and rescue. Obviously, our goal is to provide information in advance so that people can choose the path that suits them and not get lost. But once they get out, the question is, what tools do you give them so that if something happens, they can stay safe and communicate with their loved ones back home? It's about whether you can do it. This month we're introducing a new feature that lets you share your current location on the trail.
question: Is climate change affecting trails?
a: The issue of climate change is daunting. We are a 1% for the Planet partner and donate 1% of our profits to environmental nonprofits. We focus our energies through the lens of our connection to nature. People aren't interested in things that don't concern them. If you just think it's buggy, muddy, scary, and dirty outside, you won't care if a developer comes and burns down the area. We focus on that connection and getting people outside and interested in nature. Great things can happen downstream from there, but it has to start with caring about the outdoors.
Ron Schneiderman
position: AllTrails CEO
Year: 45
Residence: alamo
education: University of California, Los Angeles, Bachelor of Arts
family: wife, Jenny, and three children
5 things to know about Ron Schneiderman
1 His childhood hiking memories are exploring Rock City on Mount Diablo with his family.
2 He met his wife Jenny when he was in middle school.
3 When he was in college, he and some friends drove from Walnut Creek to Maine, camping every night along the way. “We had so much fun that the following summer we took an epic six-week road trip from Walnut Creek to Alaska, covering 8,000 miles,” he says. “That’s when I fell in love with backpacking.”
4 He and Jenny have three children, the older two of whom are three years apart and have the same birthday.
5 San Francisco AllTrails The office freezer is always full of fun-sized frozen chocolates.
