Ben Katz, Co-founder & CEO of HYBRD

In this Q&A, you’ll hear from Ben Katz, co-founder & CEO of HYBRD, a platform for hybrid training. Simplifying workout tracking for strength and cardio athletes, Ben and his team quantify elite performance—and healthy competition—with wearables integration and AI-assisted scoring.

Tell us about HYBRD?

Ben Katz: HYBRD is Strava for the modern athlete who combines strength and cardio training.

Integrating with top wearables, the app brings all your training data together and uses AI to make tracking weightlifting easy, allowing you to fully understand your training load, track holistic progress over time, and compete with your friends in fresh, exciting ways.

What led you to pursue this opportunity?

BK: Existing products tend to focus on only one type of exercise, either cardio or strength. This leaves hybrid athletes juggling disconnected tools — something that was especially frustrating to our founding team.

Mats [Terwiesch] was on the US national rowing team, and Shoe [Caroline Shoemaker], [Matt] Ruiters, and I are IRONMAN athletes. Having become friends in Boston, we started having some friendly competition but couldn’t quite quantify the thing we were interested in.

For example, Mats can run a marathon about an hour faster than me. But I can bench over 100 pounds more than him. Who is the better athlete? And how can I catch up to him without losing my strength?

So, we set out to build the unified approach we wanted for our training, and now we’re in Y Combinator scaling it up.

How did you turn your idea into a company?

BK: We realized that what we’re building won’t be for everyone — but the people that get it really get it.

Most of our customers have been dedicated athletes in a single sport, then “graduated” from that sport and are looking for the next challenge. Think of someone who completed their first marathon only to realize that all their strength has been sapped away — being able to track and quantify the shift is what makes HYBRD so valuable.

Our unique positioning has led us to be very selective with who we initially grant membership to, reaching out to the best athletes in our network and relying only on word of mouth from there.

At the end of the day, our strategy is to build something that the most serious athletes will love before we introduce the product to others.

How big can this get?

BK: Consumers spend billions of dollars a year on fitness apps and technology. We’re starting with serious hybrid athletes because they feel the gap between cost and value most acutely.

But in the long run, optimizing strength and cardio is something every human should be doing for longevity and healthspan, so the sky’s the limit.

What’s next on the roadmap?

BK: Our sole focus at the moment is building an excellent experience for our members. As I said, we’ve purposefully only welcomed a selective set of our users so that we can stay dialed in to building a brand that they love.

For our current members, we release improvements to the app every day, and the main things I’m looking forward to as a user myself are advanced analytics on strength and cardio load, as well as some forthcoming social/competitive features.

Anything else you’d like to share with readers?

BK: If you love fitness, and love to compete, we’re going to be bringing you a whole new way to do that. If you’re a serious athlete, apply to join at hybrd.app!

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