As first appeared in NewsBreak
By Aron Solomon
Erik Pavia wants to save your life.
To say that there are a lot of startups these days would be an understatement. But, from my perspective, having advised hundreds of startups over the years, it seems that far too many are working on something that doesn’t help regular people and that we can’t even understand.
Pantheon is different. Co-founded by Pavia and Sean Dunford, Pantheon is asserting itself in a meaningful startup vertical that we can all understand: one that helps us live healthier (and, hopefully, longer) lives.
Born and raised in El Paso, which he still calls home, Pavia is a Stanford Law grad. While living in Palo Alto a decade ago, he took his lifelong love of fitness to the next level. After graduating from law school, he stayed away from the practice of law, choosing to work on the operations side of scaling Silicon Valley startups.
That experience led him to an important realization back in El Paso at the beginning of the pandemic – that the fitness industry ignores the vast majority of people. Consumers are on the receiving end of things being sold to them that promise to help get them fit, but they aren’t getting fit because they aren’t getting the help they need on their journey to fitness and wellness.
“What do we do with people who fall through the fitness industry cracks,” Pavia asked me in an exclusive interview. “At Pantheon, we wanted to do something we were surprised hasn’t been successfully done yet at scale – create a fitness motivation platform designed to help a lot of people go from where they are today to at least the first step. Sure, we’d love for everyone who uses Pantheon to meet their ultimate fitness goals, but what drives us to keep going is helping people meet their first fitness milestone – often for the first time in their lives.”
This wellness disparity comes with an accompanying Income, health, and wellness disparity. A first-generation immigrant from Mexico, Pavia remarks that “Many people on the coasts don’t seem to understand how unhealthy we are as a nation. Here in El Paso, we see morbidly obese people – these numbers are out of control in most of the country.”
Part of what drove Pavia to enter the wellness space was his sister, who was diagnosed with diabetes when she was in the 5th grade:
“My Mexican immigrant family was low income, had low education levels, and as the demographics would predict, my sister was overweight. Watching her suffer through childhood diabetes instilled a question I’ve been thinking about since. Why do people make adverse decisions about one of the most important aspects of their life: their health? This question led me to study economics, law, and to work in the tech industry trying to create change.”
While Pavia’s sister was an outlier in their childhood, that is no longer the case. The CDC reports 21% of US children aged 6 to 11 are obese. 74% of US adults are overweight, and 42% are obese.
A key contributing factor to this problem is a sedentary lifestyle. Only 24% of US adults meet the minimum recommended exercise guidelines from the CDC, which amount to 150 minutes of walking per week and strength exercises twice per week. In other words, 76% of US adults don’t walk 23 minutes per day or do work to improve strength just twice per week.
For Pantheon, their initial goal is to get someone to the bare minimum in what could be a long journey to being healthier and fitter. While Pavia acknowledges that the bar is extremely low to hit this first milestone, “a LOT of people still don’t do it – this is what we’re focused on at Pantheon.”
Part of Pantheon’s strategy to get people to that first step where the fitness industry writ large has failed is product design. Pavia wants to flip the dark outcomes from social media on their head.
Most people would agree that the engagement techniques used by tech companies such as Facebook and TikTok are addictive, destructive, and dangerous. The average Instagram user spends about an hour a day on the app, significantly more than they do exercising. The obvious solution is to disconnect from these addicting products. Your iPhone comes with a Do Not Disturb and Screen Time setting to help you limit your exposure. There is even a movement among some teens today to return to flip phones to help them become more present.
One of Pavia’s beliefs is that “we have mastered psychological manipulation on social media – it’s why we’re dancing to TikToks. Since this genie is out of the bottle, why not try to reverse its effect to help people have better outcomes?”
That’s the intention behind Pavia’s platform. “We’re building a healthy product with some of the same addictive features, where the output is movement instead of selfies or food pictures. We’re building recommendations to help you get to the gym instead of getting you to click on an ad. And we’re building for the normal person who needs help walking 23 minutes instead of building for people who are already athletic.”
Since Pantheon’s initial launch in July, they have seen a powerful impact on their members. One member in Texas incorporated the app into her daily routine immediately after her morning prayer. She lost 11 pounds in 2 months from increasing activity levels. Another member in New Mexico started going into her office early to walk around her building and increase her step count. She visited the app over a thousand times in her first month on Pantheon.
The fitness tech industry is focused on serving athletes and the affluent, using the niches of professional athletes and high-income customers as wedges into a broader market. There’s a belief in trickle-down fitness – that if they can capture fitness enthusiasts, aspiring ordinary people will also buy into their platforms. The problem with this approach is that, unlike other aspirational luxury goods, you can’t buy fitness. Selling a $500 watch or a $3,000 bike might net excellent top-line revenue. Still, it doesn’t address the underlying issues that prevent people from getting out and moving, which is essentially one of psychology.
When Pavia was in law school at Stanford, he took a class taught by Peter Thiel, “a significant contributing factor in my decision to build for better fitness outcomes rather than trying to regulate for them. Thiel has a famous interview question: ‘What important truth do very few people agree with you on?’”
Pantheon’s truth should give investors a glimpse into the future of the startup vertical, though Pavia remains healthily skeptical:
“Investors on both coasts seem largely blind to the problems of inactivity and obesity. That’s likely because they’re outside of the relevant demographic: these problems disproportionately affect Black, Hispanic, low-income, people with less formal education, and people in the South and Midwest – in other words, the opposite of the tech industry, which has very few people from any of those demographics.”
The tech industry will need to catch up. While this huge population of people just beginning their fitness journey isn’t the low-hanging fruit that gets drawn into TikTok dances and Instagram memes, it represents a decent amount of revenue as they start to get fit. Later, it is potentially a massive number in upsell revenue, as people who are becoming fit now fall into the demographic for sport-lifestyle clothing and everything that comes with it. In other words, the Lulemons and Nikes of the world will be closely watching Pantheon’s journey.
About Aron Solomon
A Pulitzer Prize-nominated writer, Aron Solomon, JD, is the chief legal analyst for Esquire Digital. He has taught entrepreneurship at McGill University and the University of Pennsylvania and was elected to Fastcase 50, recognizing the top 50 legal innovators in the world. Aron has been featured in Forbes, CBS News, Crunchbase, Variety, CNBC, USA Today, ESPN, TechCrunch, The Hill, BuzzFeed, Fortune, Venture Beat, The Independent, Fortune China, Yahoo!, ABA Journal, Law.com, The Boston Globe, NewsBreak, and many other leading publications.