Why is Rendezvu here

On having a mission that drives me every day.

3/18/2026

Somewhere in Jackson right now, a guide is standing knee-deep in the Snake River with a client who's about to land their first fish on a fly rod.The client looks up and asks: what rod is this?And the guide tells them. Freely. Without hesitation. With full conviction, because they've been on this water hundreds of days a year for decades and they know exactly what works and what doesn't.That recommendation is going to disappear.Not because the guide doesn't mean it. Not because the client doesn't want to remember it. But because there's nowhere for it to go. It lives in the air for a moment and then it's gone. The client might write it in their notes app. They might forget before they get back to the car. The guide has given that same recommendation a thousand times, and not once has it been captured, credited, or compensated.That's the problem. That's why we built Rendezvu.<hr>Think about how gear recommendations actually happen.Not on the internet. In person. At races. During guided trips. Through AMGA networks and climbing gyms and fly fishing shops and ski lodges and group chats that never see the light of day. A coach telling a client exactly what shoe to race in and why. An athlete at the finish line answering the same question they always get: what are you wearing? A backcountry guide on day three of an expedition explaining why they chose this binding over that one, in these conditions, for this kind of skier.This is how the outdoor industry actually runs. On trust. On relationships. On the earned authority of people who've spent their whole lives learning one thing deeply.And none of it gets recorded.Meanwhile, the internet offers you its version of help. An algorithm. A listicle written by someone who tested a jacket for a weekend. A five-star review from a user you know nothing about. Affiliate links from bloggers who were paid to recommend something they may or may not have used. The gap between what you get online and what you'd get standing next to someone who actually knows is enormous. And most people feel that gap every time they go to buy gear. They just don't know what to do about it.We do.<hr>The people who are building their profiles on Rendezvu right now are not casual users.We have AMGA certified guides who've spent years taking people up rock faces and through avalanche terrain. Ultrarunners who've set world records and tested gear in conditions most people will never see. Fly fishing instructors who fish two hundred days a year and have clients who've followed them for decades. Backcountry ski guides who've summited things that don't have names yet. Physician assistants who guide on the weekends. Physical therapists who coach ultrarunners and treat their injuries. Coaches who've spent careers in both the classroom and the mountains. Athletes whose mottos are things like find joy in doing things the hard way and if there is any doubt, there is no doubt.These are not people who recommend gear lightly.And almost every single one of them found us the same way. Through a friend. Through another host. Through someone they trusted who looked them in the eye and said, you should be on this.That's not a coincidence. That's the whole point.People buy from people they trust. That sentence sounds simple. It isn't. It's the fundamental problem with the outdoor gear industry, and it's been hiding in plain sight for years. The system keeps trying to solve trust with data: more reviews, more ratings, more algorithmic recommendations. But trust doesn't scale that way. Trust scales through relationships. Through expertise. Through someone who has earned the right to tell you what to buy because they've paid for that knowledge in long miles and cold mornings and years in the field.That's who we're building for.<hr>Here's what I believe, and why I'm working as hard as I am.Getting more people outdoors changes lives. Not in a marketing-copy way. In a real, measurable, fundamental way. People who spend time outside are healthier, happier, more grounded. They live longer. They experience more of what their bodies are actually capable of. They become better versions of themselves.And the thing standing between a lot of people and the outdoors is not motivation. It's not access. It's confidence. It's knowing what to buy. Knowing what to wear. Knowing what's actually going to work when they get out there. And right now, the best source of that knowledge is sitting in a conversation that never gets recorded, between an expert and a client, somewhere on a mountain or a river or a trail.We're trying to change that.We want the person who's never skied a day in their life to be able to find an AMGA guide who's spent twenty years in the mountains and actually trust what they're reading. We want the new trail runner to find the ultrarunner who ran their race in that shoe and know exactly why they chose it. We want the person who just booked their first guided fly fishing trip to show up already knowing what they need, because someone who knows took the time to write it down.That's the chain. Guide recommends. Person trusts. Person buys. Person goes outside. Person comes back changed.We just want to give that chain a place to live.<hr>I don't know if we'll build a billion dollar company. That's not the sentence I go to bed thinking about.I go to bed thinking about the guides who've told us this is the first technology platform that treats their expertise like it's worth something. The coaches who've spent years giving recommendations into the void and finally have somewhere to put it all. The athletes who said I've been waiting for this. The people who found us not through an ad but through someone they trusted, who trusted someone else, who trusted us first.That's not a growth metric. That's a reason to exist.And on the nights when it all feels too heavy, when the problems stack up and the progress feels invisible, I come back to that.We're here because trust is the most valuable thing in the outdoor industry and nobody has built a home for it yet.We're going to.