Pandora's Way

Pandora's Way is a public benefit corporation focused on improving youth wellbeing at scale. We offer a customizable tool to help parents teach their kids (age 8-13) how to develop the skills and mindsets for a healthy relationship with their digital devices. Our goal is to create a product that integrates the structure of traditional rites of passage and the latest education and developmental psychology research to support parents through the rocky journey of adolescence – particularly for those families who are unable to afford more costly interventions like coaching, therapy, or treatment. Since 2023, we have surveyed over 300 parents, created numerous paper and digital prototypes and focus groups, brought on a third co-founder (CTO), and pivoted twice to optimize our product to meet the needs of our customers. We’ve raised over $100k in our angel round, including Evan Sharpe, cofounder of Pinterest.

Pandora’s Way is a platform that offers parents a selection of “quests,” or sets of evidence-backed practices designed to help families build healthy digital media skills and mindsets. After a short onboarding, parents see a customized list of recommended quests and select one or more based on their needs. Pandora’s Way delivers personalized, actionable, and simple “missions” or actionable, schedulable activities in a timely fashion. The system offers reminders and other engaging prompts to support the family along the way. Future features will be optimized to create more meaningful personalization and support based on user feedback. Our model is built on three proprietary frameworks. Our outcome framework is called Core Compass, highlighting the focus on supporting the healthy development of Identity, Agency, Belonging and Purpose. In addition, our modern rite of passage framework is called STARS, which stands for Safety, Trust, Accountability, Responsibility, and Service. These frameworks – along with a forthcoming competencies model – were developed in tandem with experts and user feedback. These will guide the development of all future quests. Our target impact is to improve youth mental wellbeing by designing a tool that supports families in creating a modern rite of passage that scaffolds the development of identity, agency, belonging and purpose in their kids. Our first quest, The Joy of Screen/Life Balance is in alpha, with two more on the way: Preparing for Group Texts, and Building Confidence – Online and Off. Longer term, our vision is to expand the platform to deliver modern, customized rites of passage quests for other major life transitions including graduation, marriage, parenthood, divorce and/or end-of-life. For all segments, we will use Harvard University’s Flourishing Index to measure impact.