Lindsay Nickel, Paceline

Lindsay Nickel, Commercial Director at Paceline

Lindsay has spent much of her life finding community through sport. Lindsay is a former Division 1 college basketball player turned endurance athlete who spent eight years living and working in Southeast Asia before returning to her native Bay Area in 2024. Today, she works at the intersection of health, technology, and financial services at Paceline and continues to see sport as one of the greatest teachers of her life. 

She shares why health isn’t about optimizing every metric or getting every day right. It’s about consistency: showing up, making the small right choices over time, and building a life that makes you want to keep doing both. 

Tell us about Paceline.

Paceline sits at the intersection of health, wearable technology, and consumer engagement. At its core, we’re interested in how we can help people enjoy a healthy life.  Users connect the apps and wearable devices that they already use, and Paceline brings that information together to help them better understand their health and activity over time. We’ve also explored how healthy behaviors and wearable data can create value in financial services, including through credit cards and insurance. 

What’s most exciting is the opportunity to make all of this data useful. We don’t need more numbers. We need help understanding what the numbers mean and what we can actually do with them. 

Is there one key thing that Paceline tracks—or one metric people can focus on— to improve their health?

I think we’re living in an era where it’s very easy to become obsessed with optimization. But the truth is, there’s no one workout that’s going to transform your health, just as one bad night’s sleep isn’t going to ruin your health. It’s what you do consistently: the small decisions, the small habits you build day by day. 

The Paceline app has historically been built around 150 minutes of elevated heart rate per week, aligned with American Heart Association recommendations. Now we are expanding that idea with our Health Score. It brings together signals like cardiovascular fitness, resting heart rate, movement, and sleep to give our users a broader picture of their health over time.

What I like about that approach is that it shifts the focus from any single number to your trajectory.

What is significant about the current intersection of technology, data, and insight?

It’s an interesting time in the consumer wearable tech space.  For the first time, ordinary people have access to an incredible amount of continuous information about their own bodies. You can understand how you’re sleeping, moving, recovering, and responding to exercise every single day. Paceline already connects to 140+ wearables; the depth, insights, and ability to integrate those wearables into the medical system will continue to deepen. I use Garmin products because of the breadth of capability for the sports that I do. The majority of our users on the Paceline app have an Apple Watch, Garmin, or Fitbit, although that continues to evolve. I believe we’re just beginning to understand how this data can empower us to live our healthiest and our longest life. More broadly, we’re seeing healthcare become more personalized, more preventative, and ultimately more consumer-driven. 

What developments coming down the pike are you most excited about?

I’m most excited about the convergence of wearables, biomarkers, and AI. Healthcare has traditionally been quite reactive. Something goes wrong, you go to the doctor, and try to fix it. We’re now moving towards a world where people have a much more continuous understanding of their health and can potentially make better decisions long before a problem becomes serious. 

I think the next frontier is less about collecting more data and more about making sense of the data we already have in order to understand what it actually tells us, what we should pay attention to, and most importantly, what to do differently tomorrow. 

There’s a wealth of health-focused startups in the Bay Area. How did you connect with Paceline?

It was quite serendipitous! I had spent eight years living and working in Southeast Asia, mostly in Bangkok, and moved back to San Francisco in the summer of 2024. The day after I landed from Bangkok, I joined a small group on a three-day bike ride from San Francisco to Santa Barbara. Three of the people on the ride were Paceline’s founder, Joel Lieginger, Nicholas Wright, Chief Commercial/Marketing Officer, who is now my boss; and Tom Batt, Paceline’s CFO. I got to know the Paceline team and understand their mission as we rode roughly 100 miles each day together. 

I joined Paceline nearly two years ago. Looking back, I feel very grateful for the timing. I came home wanting to build the next chapter of my life in San Francisco, and I found a company working at the intersection of consumer health, technology, and healthy behavior, things deeply connected to how I live my own life. 

Tell us about how sports and health have shaped your personal and professional journey to Asia and back again.

Sport has probably been the most consistent thread throughout my life. I grew up in Los Altos and played basketball at Brown University. Then I tore my ACL in my senior season, and suddenly the thing that has been so central to my identity for most of my life was over. Eventually, running filled some of that space, and I’m now pursuing amateur triathlon at the highest level. 

Aged 25, I took a backpack to Southeast Asia without much of a plan. I ended up helping to build a pharmacy startup based out of Jakarta, working across Thailand and Malaysia, and I eventually moved to Bangkok.

One of the first communities I found there was a weekly running group and a nice mix of Thais and foreigners. This group became some of my closest friends, and we raced together across the region. Triathlon gave me a way into Thailand and ultimately helped me build an incredibly meaningful life there.

Eight years later, upon returning to San Francisco, I connected with the Olympic Club, and I now race on their triathlon team. It’s not only an opportunity to train with world-class athletes, but it’s also opened up wonderful doors for me personally, professionally, and socially.  

Congratulations on winning the women’s field for Escape from Alcatraz Triathlon 2026 with a time of 2:35:06! How did that feel?

Thank you! It was incredibly special! This was my second time competing. Last year I raced and came in second place. It was really exciting to cross first this year: I mostly race longer-distance triathlons, but Escape is different. It’s such an iconic San Francisco race. You jump off a boat into the Bay, ride through the city, run Baker Beach and the Sand Ladder. 

But what made it particularly meaningful was that it was home. I’ve spent most of my adult life living and racing thousands of miles away. To come back to a place where I grew up and to win a race like that, with friends and family all along the course, felt very full circle. I felt proud. 

You’re part of an international team. Beyond the typical office tools and apps, how do you stay connected with your colleagues?

We genuinely like doing sports together outside of work when we’re in the same place— climbing, trail running, or riding in the summer; mostly skiing through the winter.  At the end of our last strategy week at CANOPY, we pulled together a group of five of us—including my boss, who was in town from Europe—for a roughly 100-mile ride around Napa and Geyserville, taking the SMART train out and riding home. It was a long, intense day, and one of the best of the week. A shared challenge, some real suffering, and hours of uninterrupted conversation turn out to be a remarkable platform for collaboration!  Honestly, some of our best discussions didn’t happen in the office that week: they happened on the bike.

How does your CANOPY Membership support your work?

The Paceline team has a private office at Jackson Square, and we’re there most days. It’s such a beautiful space; I love the amenities, the staff is incredible, and their attention to detail is so special. It’s also become part of how I’ve built my life in San Francisco, as it’s given me another community of people I see every day, say hi to, occasionally sit down for lunch with, and get to know. 

What’s one destination you’re always game to visit?

Southeast Asia, always! 

What’s your favorite way to spend a day in San Francisco Bay Area? 

My favorite thing to do is go on long runs and long rides on my bike. I love that I can just roll out my front door and within 30 minutes be across the Golden Gate Bridge, going up Mount Tam, or I can head a little farther along the coast on Highway 1. I think that’s really what drew me back: this is one of the few places in the world that combines being in nature with tech and innovation—it’s somewhere you can create an incredible social life around your passions.

What’s your greatest source of inspiration?

Sport!  It’s been the greatest teacher of my life. It’s taught me patience, resilience, humility, and how to keep going when things are not quite right yet. The older I get, the more I appreciate that the most meaningful things are built slowly and that your consistency—how you show up every day—matters far more than getting it right the first time. 

What’s the most valuable advice you like to give?

You don’t need to have the whole thing figured out. You just need to take the next step. My career has been nonlinear. I took a backpack to Southeast Asia without knowing that I’d end up spending eight years there, building a company and a life. When I moved back to San Francisco, I didn’t have the next chapter perfectly mapped out either. I just knew it was time to come home.

Some of the best things in my life have happened that way. You listen to the little voice telling you that it’s time to go somewhere, try something, meet someone, or make a change, and then you act.  I’ve learned to trust that action creates clarity. You take the next step, and then the following step becomes clearer. Life has a pretty remarkable way of unfolding from there.

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