It was 2016, and Joe Bondi was ready to give away his first successful start-up. A Northeastern alum, Bondi co-founded Runkeeper in 2008 and brought numerous Northeastern co-op students into the fold. Now, it was time for something new.

“I’ve never had to send a kid off to college, but a lot of people told me that selling a company would feel like that,” Bondi said. While he and his co-founder, Jason Jacobs, ultimately sold the GPS fitness-tracking company to ASICS Digital, Bondi was able to build on his record of starting and building companies, a record that continues to sustain him.

Runkeeper was Bondi’s first big success, but he had been working in the start-up world since he left Northeastern in 2002 with a BS in electrical and computer engineering. He credits his co-op experience with introducing him to the start-up world. His first co-op was at his uncle’s company, where Bondi was able to begin building his professional network. Later, he completed his second co-op at Lionbridge in Waltham, Massachusetts.

“I was working at Lionbridge when they IPO’d,” Bondi explained, referring to the company going public on the stock market with an initial public offering. “That was really exciting.”

Bondi’s third co-op experience was combined with his senior project, where he and some friends in NU’s business school started their own company, Cadimus, which developed an intelligent digital music system for playlist creation and music discovery, pre-iPod. The student-run start-up raised money from angel investors and their personal networks, but Bondi says their youth and inexperience, combined with the investment market crash in 2001, led to its demise.

After graduation, he went to work for Draper Labs in Cambridge, which he says was crucial for developing the skills to eventually execute a technology startup like Runkeeper. Despite loving his job at Draper, he “still had the start-up bug,” he said.

That’s when Bondi joined up with co-founder Jacobs to build Runkeeper, a mobile-phone app that enables individuals to track their runs, keep personal statistics, and set goals.

Runkeeper adds Khoury alum as principal software engineer

Soon after founding, another co-founder, Mike Sheely, realized they needed help, and he knew just who to ask: John Stucklen, a computer scientist and alumnus of both Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and Khoury College who was new to the startup world but had the technical savvy the company needed.

Stucklen’s interest in computers had been sparked as a child when he watched his father, an electrical engineer, build a computer in the family’s basement. “I brought it upstairs and started tinkering with it,” he recalls. “When my dad noticed, he bought me a new computer to learn on and a book on Pascal,” a programming language.

After Rensselaer, while working full-time in the defense industry, Stucklen decided to continue pursuing computer science and enrolled in Northeastern’s graduate computer science program. He completed his MS in computer science in 2005 and continued working in defense.

“Defense is very stable, you can keep a job forever,” he said. “I started to feel like, ‘What am I doing here?’”

That feeling drove Stucklen to take a chance on Runkeeper and Sheely’s offer. When the company raised their second round of funding, Stucklen became Runkeeper’s first non-founding employee and principal software engineer. In that role, he developed the Apple mobile application and worked on the website and mobile app API.

Principals bring co-ops to Runkeeper

As Northeastern alumni, both Bondi and Stucklen were keen to bring the co-op program to Runkeeper as soon as possible.

“It was less a matter of if we should bring co-ops in and more a matter of when we could bring them in,” Bondi said. “Having done co-op myself, I just knew it was going to be beneficial for both sides.”

The team set the stage, waiting until they completed the seed stage of investing, raised Series A investments — “a typical indicator that a company will be around for at least two years,” said Bondi — and secured an office space.

Then, it was time to bring co-ops on board. Stucklen, who conducted many of the initial co-op interviews, said the partnership was extremely successful. Several Runkeeper co-ops finished their degrees and then returned as full-time employees.

“It was a start-up, so we didn’t want to spend a ton of money hiring employees,” he explained. “We wanted people who could help out and learn skills, but bring value to us as well. Northeastern’s co-op program seemed like a great match for that.”

After ASICS Digital bought the company in 2016, Bondi and Stucklen oversaw the transition for a few years and then left for other opportunities. But soon, they had a chance to work together again. They were both separately introduced to the team at what is now Goodpath, a Cambridge-based health care start-up that provides personalized, integrative care solutions to patients with irritable bowel syndrome, sleep disorders, and back pain.

Both joined the company in 2019, and just like at Runkeeper, the pair is planning to take on Northeastern co-ops in the spring now that they’ve established a solid team.

“While I wasn’t necessarily looking for a particular sector like fitness or health, I wanted to be able to help people directly like we were able to at Runkeeper,” Bondi explained. “The better job we do, the better off people will be.”