How Owen Akhibi Built a $640K Run Club While Holding Down a Day Job

The ferry broke down at 6 a.m. Eighteen trucks loaded with supplies were sitting on Wall Street, two thousand ticket-holders were expecting a 5K race and after-party on Governor's Island, and Owen Akhibi — 27 years old, running a side hustle he had built from scratch while holding a full-time job — was on the phone trying to stop the whole thing from collapsing. He got another boat. The last thirty port-a-potties arrived as the first guests stepped onto the island. By evening, he watched a 25-year-old place a medal around an older runner's neck at the finish line.

That moment tells you everything about why Peak and Pace works, and almost nothing about how hard it is to build.

Akhibi launched the run club in July 2024, shortly after moving to New York from London, while working in algorithmic trading sales at J.P. Morgan. The running was always free. The business model lived in what came after — parties with DJs and food vendors, ticketed at $15 to $25, with hiking and ski trips added as the community scaled. By the end of 2025, more than 30,000 people had attended Peak and Pace events. Revenue crossed $640,000, verified by CNBC Make It from financial documents. Profit margin sits at 15%, and Akhibi reinvests every dollar rather than drawing a second salary.

The mechanism here is worth understanding, because it isn't really about running. Run clubs are abundant — New York alone has over 200. What Akhibi identified is that Gen Z is moving to new cities for work and arriving without a social infrastructure. Nightlife doesn't solve loneliness. A community that meets at dawn, trains together, and then celebrates together does. The run is the free acquisition channel. The party is the product.

He is now head of partnerships at Grounded Superintelligence, an AI robotics lab in San Francisco. He ran 18-hour days for roughly a year to hold both together. He describes maintaining his mental state as the hardest part — not the logistics, not the capital, not the broken ferry.

That is the line a CFO should send to their team: the execution wasn't the hardest part. Staying mentally coherent while performing at two jobs simultaneously was.

For anyone building something in Malta — where the market is smaller but the community density is higher — the architecture of this model translates directly. If you're thinking about company formation around a community concept, the lesson from Akhibi isn't scale fast. It's keep the entry free, earn trust first, and charge for the experience people actually want to pay for.