Prior to Strava, Kitchel worked as a software developer and was an avid cyclist and rower. In the late 1990s, inspired by informal hill-climb competitions on Wednesday night group rides, Kitchel began recording his times on strips of paper carried in his jersey pockets, tracking personal records across locally named climbs.[2] This practice formed the conceptual basis for what would become Strava's segment leaderboard feature.[3]
On 20 December 2006, Kitchel was introduced to Michael Horvath through a mutual friend. At the time, Kitchel had already been independently experimenting with GPS data to generate cycling training insights.[2] His technical work provided the foundation that Horvath and Mark Gainey needed to develop the platform they had long envisioned.[4]
In 2009, Kitchel co-founded Strava alongside Horvath, Gainey, Chris Donahue, Mark Shaw, and Pelle Sommansson.[5] He subsequently served as Director of Strava Labs, an experimental division of Strava's engineering team that released side projects built on the platform's GPS dataset.[6] One such project was Strava Metro, a service that provided anonymised GPS data to city planners and transportation departments. Oregon's Department of Transportation became its first customer in 2014.[7]