The Riverside Press-Enterprise
APP BLAZES TRAIL TO THE OUTDOORS
CEO shares how the pandemic fueled the company's growth and what the future might hold
If you like to hike, chances are good that you know Alltrails. More than 60 million hikers use the San Franciscobased hiking app, which offers 400,000 curated trail guides to locations around the world. With more than a billion miles of trails logged, the platform was named Apple’s iphone app of the year in 2023.
The app provides trail reviews and user-generated hiking tips for nature lovers in every country in the world, but it also offers some insights into its users — how much we’re getting outdoors these days, for example, and which trails we love most. (Bay Area hikers are all about the Mission Peak Loop, followed by Land’s End and Steep Ravine.)
We recently met up with Alltrails CEO Ron Schneidermann near his Alamo home — for a hike, of course — at Las Trampas Regional Wilderness to talk about the company, app features in the works and how his team is working to help more people than ever connect with nature.
Q What was your path to Alltrails?
A
I grew up here in Walnut Creek. My dad is a geologist, and he dragged me and my sister around Mount Diablo and local, state and national parks, where we would go check out rock formations. As a kid, I hated it. I just wanted to go to the beach or Disneyland, but I think that’s where the seed got planted. Fast-forward quite a bit: I had a startup in the ski space for nine years called Liftopia. The original founder (of Alltrails) had been at it for about five years and wanted to go do something else, so he hit me up to see if I wanted to come and run it. I was working at Yelp at the time and couldn’t say no. I started as chief marketing officer and chief operating officer (in 2015) and then in 2019 became CEO. I’ve been doing that ever since.
“Connection to nature is a human thing. For different reasons, we’ve lost connection to that, but I think there’s a reawakening.”
— Ron Schneidermann, Alltrails CEO
Q
Skiing, hiking — being outdoors is clearly a passion for you …
A
Connection to nature is a human thing. For different reasons, we’ve lost connection to that, but I think there’s a reawakening. This matches the data we’ve seen going back to 2010 that more and more people are recognizing the importance of nature in their lives and are very proactively and intentionally trying to spend more time outside. That’s really what we’re all about: trying to get as many people as possible to spend more time outside.
When I first started, we pivoted to focus on inclusivity and accessibility and move away from anything that might make people feel that the outside isn’t for