Cornell Tech Students Build Real-Time Running Partner App

by Cary Chen, MEng ‘15; Nick Rudd, MBA ‘15; Steve Wall, MBA ‘15; Taylor Shimberg

What is Pace?
Pace connects you in real-time to running partners in your geographic proximity based on your pace and profile. Ou r vision is for Pace to become the leading on-demand activity based sports — starting with running — social network. We’re building Pace so that you never have to run (or workout) alone again.

What was the inspiration behind your company? Why start this company now?
Sports bring people together. We want to empower people to live healthier and more connected lives.

On-demand via mobile is taking over the world. With the explosion of “Uber of X”, consumers are coming to expect this for many products and experiences. Exercise and social meet-ups especially lend themselves to this trend because it’s so easy to skip workouts when faced with even the slightest friction.

We are building a micro-event platform to connect people in-real time over shared activities. Other products only allow people to connect in delayed-time through list serves, Meetups and predefined times, or they simply connect people to new friends with shared interests. A platform to experience real-time events socially is both new and part of the future of social interaction.

Pace wasn’t technically a part of Startup Studio, but 3 out of 4 team members of Pace were on different projects. How did your experience in Startup Studio inform/encourage your progress with Pace?
This is actually a great question for us given that Pace is the only Startup Award winner to not emerge directly from the Startup Studio. Despite that, Pace benefited enormously from this experience.

Many of our classmates will likely think about applying their Startup Studio experience in 2-3 years as they seriously consider their own ventures. We were applying it in parallel with Pace. We went through many of the exercises from the product management course this spring. In some ways, this made our classroom experience more real. We benefited from watching and learning from other teams’ successful pitches as well as when concepts fell flat.

What do you hope to accomplish over the next few months?
Over the summer, we plan to be hyper-focused on three things:

1. Building our user network in New York City
2. Learning from the running community
3. Building the Pace application

We expect to have an app in the Apple App store by mid-summer and are very interested in talking with NYC-based running clubs that are interested in partnering with us. We are also working on piloting the app in hyper-local (block level) areas in Manhattan.

Stay tuned for Pace coming to your neighborhood!

Learn more about Pace at joinapace.com or follow them on Twitter @joinapacenyc