On EQT Ventures’ investment in Let’s Do This, helping people discover epic experiences

When you distill it to its essence, the VC model is really quite simple: find and then fund companies before they become successful. The secret, of course, is knowing which companies have the best chance of getting there, and therefore, which ones to back early on.

There’s no magic formula here, but a key to the answer is usually in the founding team. While the product and market are always shifting, the people driving the company tend to be the one core constant throughout its journey.

With that in mind, here’s the fundamental thesis behind our investment in Let’s Do This: the company’s founding team is in a league of their own. With their infectious energy and unbounded ambition, the all-star team is made up of hyper-competitive founders with a religious obsession for the problem they’re solving — how to discover and book endurance events.

With an outstanding track record across academics and athletics, this a team that knows what it takes to win and is prepared to put in the work to get there. With an Olympic Gold medallist, ex-Navy Seal and a deep bench of podium winners all with elite education pedigrees, it’s hard to overstate how impressive they are when put together.

Since launch, the team has only brought in even more exceptional talent on board, with industry-leading hires in product and engineering, and a phenomenal roster of investors, amongst them some of the world’s greatest living athletes including Serena Williams, Usain Bolt and Paula Radcliffe.

This, in itself, goes to show the team’s ability to execute in a critical function of building a company — attracting and retaining talent. Above and beyond, however, this is further evidence of their winner’s mindset. As NFX, LDT’s lead-seed investor, put it: “You don’t start a company because it’s the easier path. And you don’t pursue a venture backed company because you’re aiming for silver.”

When all you know is to aim for gold, you pick a game where your odds of winning are guaranteed. It should be no surprise then that the team has such a strong “founder-market fit”, being uniquely positioned to serve their customers given that they’re athletes themselves who know their industry inside out.

Based on this domain expertise, the team has built the world’s largest online marketplace for endurance events all in under 18 months. In practice, the way the platform works right now is by connecting athletes with the best sports events globally (30,000+ of them). What that means, however, is that Let’s Do This is effectively building a central hub for fitness activities — think of it almost like the Netflix of fitness.

In a world in which cardio is the new religion, the portal which people use to access fitness becomes sacrosanct. With the devotion to health and wellness amongst young people showing no signs of slowing down anytime soon, owning the customer relationship to this world is pretty valuable.

With offline experiences overtaking physical goods as the category where people are now spending most of their money on, Let’s Do This is positioning itself at the epicenter of this massive shift in consumer behavior. As their own mission says, LDT aims to inspire more epic experiences than any other community on the planet.

Sports events, then, is just the initial layer of a global fitness market, which in itself is just a fraction of the whole experiences category. All of a sudden, that TAM starts becoming really interesting once you factor in the adjacent revenue sources available and the opportunity to expand into new verticals over time.

Align all of the factors above and you have the perfect launching pad to build a global winner. As the team gets ready to seize this massive opportunity, we couldn’t be more excited to support them along their journey to inspire epic experiences and empower people to push their limits along the way.

Let’s Do This!