[Music] thank you Jacob for uh coming on the podcast today I appreciate you taking the time you are the uh founder and CEO of a company called superpower uh you guys are building a personalized holistic health super app uh something that I've kind of waiting for and and looking for for a long time at least it sounds like the sort of thing I've been waiting for and looking for for a long time uh so excited to talk with you today before that you found that a couple other companies uh you do some investing in early
stage startups as well uh so maybe we'll touch on some of that as well but before we dig too deep into anything would love to uh for those who don't know you kind of get your story from as as you're willing to start to where you are today and you know talk about some of the decisions you made along the way thanks Jake excited to be here so you know anybody that's spent any amount of time in a doctor's clinic or on the phone trying to schedule a painful visit knows that healthc care needs a
reinvention and the reason I'm on this 30-year Journey probably starts 15 years back so we'll wind the clock to to when I was 13 teenager and Little Jacob was basically wondering why is Mommy always stuck in bed for half her life so I grew up in a really interesting environment where dad was in the military so we were moving around a lot you know he he was stationed in Taiwan South Korea uh you know Kuwait Germany and my mom was chronically ill so she had a condition that some people listening might be familiar with which
is a rare form of migraine called cluster headaches and the way that cluster headaches work is it basically feels like you're literally taking a spear and like stabbing it through your eye um and it's the way they measure pain it's actually worse pain than child bread so she had a really rough time because she was getting these really you know tremendously intense cluster headache migraines like four to six times a week like how is anyone supposed to hold down a job you know with with with that type of pain and the the crazy thing was
she wasn't even eligible for disability insurance because she took time off work to to raise me and my brother and turns out once you're out of the workforce for 10 years you like disqualify from all these different types of benefits so we were in like a really tough tough place and anyway I grew up in the east coast right outside Baltimore Maryland so we got her thankfully hooked up with what we thought were some really incredible Physicians I'll use quotes incredible um because they were it was the neurology team at John's Hopkins University and my
mom's case was was so perplexing and rare and and unique that they were actually using her brain scans as teaching materials John's Hopkins Medical School um so she basically started getting treatment from them and the what I realized was the reason she was in bed most of the day was actually not because of the debilitating pain of the migraine it was because the only thing they could do for her was give her a Band-Aid solution that would knock out the pain but also knock out her ability to live a normal life which was morphine and
torol these are the strongest two pharmaceutical painkillers on the market that you can pretty much get you know over the counter in your home outside of a hospital hospital setting where things are a bit more controlled and that's how you know she was spending her days and you know basically I start getting curious you know um as a teenager so I start googling what are cluster headaches how do they work and end up discovering all of these esoteric internet forums in rabbit holes I mean this was like you know 15 years back so we're talking
preh huberman pre petera era where people were discussing you know different like holistic interventions and things that they were doing that were actually like making a dous disease so you know what are your gene mutations do you have an MTHFR Gene snip which means like you don't metabolize or process or absorb B vitamins properly uh you know are you using certain perfumes in your environment that are like triggering a hist a histamine response in the body and causing blood vessels to dilate which can trigger the migraines are you eating certain things that are very common
ad additives in food like MSG which you know they add a lot of like different Asian dishes that she like to eat um so we found out that there was all of these basically like environmental genetic and uh you know nutrient related factors that her physician team was completely unaware of and that's just because it's how the the Health Care system works right like thank God for all of the remarkable advances we see in the healthcare world but like the reality is primary care physicians don't have enough time to spend a meaningful amount of you
know head head and brain space like personally working on someone's condition to actually help them get better and Specialists like she were seeing like she was seeing they are very like intentionally myopic in terms of what they're able to look at so they weren't looking holistically at like all of her systems in the body and how everything you know was fitting together and what led her to this like diseased and challenged State rather they were only really able to follow the protocol which is um you know let's reduce the pain reduce the pain without actually
addressing the underlying root cause triggers are getting an understanding of like what might be Brewing here you know beneath the surface or what were the series of different you know environmental lifestyle things that happened over like the preceding decades to get her to this state so from a very early time I was sort of incidentally building up this knowledge base of how the body works and you know realizing that uh there there might be a better way to to to do Healthcare outside of figuring things with my mom I started a few businesses so I
I got sucked into this world of lag goes which uh there's been a few like viral tweet threads posted about this lately so the Secret's kind of out of the bag but you know 10 15 years ago there was like a lot of Arbitrage opportunities in this market because you could go out to Walmart buy 30 of a set part out all the individual bricks sell online for like a 5 to 10x Ry um now there's people that like you know do this type of stuff at scale and have full warehouses and they're bringing in
millions a year and the you know it's it's it's it's quite an underground secret economy um but that's that's where I got my start in in in entrepreneurship outside of you know just tackling interesting internet rabbit holes to to help my mom and learn about health right well I appreciate you sharing the initial interests in the health side of things didn't know of the uh personal story there and it certainly makes sense as to why you want to tackle all this and improve the Healthcare System make it more personalized preventative everything like that um with
what you're doing today with superpower which we'll get to uh but taking a moment on sort of early steps in entrepreneurship uh how old were you when you actually started with like the Lego thing no older than 13 14 13 14 so like using like eBay or something like that yeah we we actually had an eBay store um it was my dad's account at first and uh yeah we we we did quite well for ourselves as as teenagers nice was it like you say we is it like friends of yours or siblings or something like
that it was my brother and I got it so yeah we had a um a whole operation with us and some interesting um we'd bring in from the neighborhood to help us sort and part out all the individual bricks so that we could ultimately sell it online not bad for uh for high school or whatever that was but uh pretty pretty good so uh did you always know that you wanted to you know start companies like be an entrepreneur be a founder or was that just like sort of an early thing and you had your
mind maybe like were you thinking about you know oh I'm interested in this health thing maybe I want to be a doctor uh does did any of that cross your mind you know um it's interesting right because what we're exposed to from like a media environment like scripts and biases are thinking and I i' genuinely never been exposed to anything like truly entrepreneurial right like I I'd never you know I I I'd never been given a book on you know great entrepreneurs to study I just it just really wasn't like within the data points that
I've been like exposed to so I didn't know like I you know it's not like i' you know for the past 10 20 years been thinking I'm going to start a company I'm going to be a great entrepreneur I really didn't know genuinely what I did know is that I didn't want to do what you know um kind of everybody else was forcing me to do right like my parents were like get a job get you know try to go to college um you know make some money like and and I you know even when
I was in certain social environments in high school college there ju as as hard as I tried to fit in it just it never felt like right in like my gut in like my body you know like viscerally right I think our as I've gotten deeper into health I become obsessed with this idea of like interceptive awareness which is being hyper aware of the state of your nervous system at all times and like how you feel literally viscerally at like a cellular level in the presence of other people of certain situations like you know what
makes you comfortable what makes you uncomfortable and like connecting the dots looking backwards with this like you know new realization understanding like I definitely never felt regulated and like like everything was you know fine when I was when I was when I was growing up and in like traditional you know social situations even when I moved to New York in my early 20s and I was hanging out with like the investment banking crowd like I was just like I didn't know what it was but something in my body was telling me like this isn't for
me so it was less of a like a calling and a draw and more of almost like an anti signal right where like I all I knew was that like what I was doing um and the people I was spending time with was was was was not compatible with the way that I should be living living my life life yeah that's really interesting how do you like um how do you like I know you just kind of tried to describe that but I'm still having trouble like kind of understanding like this visceral body like are
you getting like a headache or like pain or something like that or it's just like a gut feeling like this is not where I'm supposed to be what I'm supposed to be doing so have you ever received like an alarming text where you know someone close to like I have a problem or like you know you see notification and it's like oh like that just happened in the world like okay like you know where you get a text it's like oh there's going to be a tsunami you know like about to hit Los Angeles you
know Venice Beach in 30 minutes everybody evacuate like you would you would feel something right like there would literally be like a a a visceral feeling in reaction because you're getting this like Cascade of like you know nephrine and cortisol and all these different like neurotransmitters um it's it's really like becoming aware and that's an extreme example right like that is something that you know anyone would get a little bit wigged out about unless you're just like you know so impressive stoic but even the most stoic bet you like they're not immune from just our
biological you know natural responses right like there's got to be some sort of cascade so I think it's just that's an extreme example but it's becoming aware of like the non-extreme examples so you meet someone you talk to them um you know you go through like a a like slightly less stressful situation and you just start to become really really aware of how your body State changes and like what might actually be happening on like a more biochemical chemical level so everyone's sort of aware that this might be happening when extreme things happen but for
Less extreme it's a lot harder and you kind of have to like train this muscle to become like aware of like okay like what what's the state of my body like what what types of chemicals are getting released right now you know am I stressed am I am I nervous am I anxious am I excited um you know it's it's it's it's it's a delicate thing to try and explain because like I'm using you know like logical reasoning to explain something that's like a feeling and a chemical Cascade but that's the best you know I
could maybe explain it yeah I think of it based on what you just said as almost like there's kind of two things going on there's like this for lack of a better word like emotional volatility or something like there's something that's kind of volatile whether you want to call it like emotional or something else and then there's also like your awareness of that volatility and so the volatility may be more or less for certain people and also the awareness level of that volatility may be more or less for various people and so for you it
sounds like you feel or you know kind of came to the realization that your volatility setting is like relatively High um or at least within the environment in which you were operating it tended to be pretty high and then over time you're awareness increased to recognize that this is like kind of unusual this is feels like high volatility and then in shifting your environment of your life like doing different things for work hanging out with different people has the volatility you know gone down at all do you feel or even with the awareness remaining high
like I assume the awareness once you kind of have it you can't like reverse it in a way um nor would you maybe want to um so it's like changing your your life circumstances change that equation at all yes it's a really great point I love this axy right of like volatility and awareness right it's like what is the volatility of your environment um you know how's that result in your body changing right like what what's what's the resulting volatile Cascade of chemicals and then like how wear are you of and you're either going to
be in like one quadrant or the other right and like for whatever reason um you know I've just had this like you know I now like I'm in a high ranking in the awareness um and because of that uh you know as soon as I found my people and I started connecting with other entrepreneurs and this was when I was living in New York in my early 20s I realized that like this is where you know I think my nervous system is most at ease it's where like you know the stress chemicals are turning me
into an excited state rather than like an anxious nervous State um so yeah I think it's all about finding your tribe and your I mean this is maybe why you know Community is such a like empirically proven lever for longevity and and helpfulness right like there's been a number of metadata or excuse me um there's been a number of like meta analyses which is when you like look at a lot of different conclusion conclusions of a lot of different studies in aggregate that show how uh loneliness and lack of community or the presence of community
can be really really powerful for you know preventing disease or lengthening life yeah so um pulling on that thread a little bit more um just trying to think of the where exactly I want to go basically I've seen those same kind of studies and I appreciate that that point um and I feel that the world I mean this isn't like a novel perspective or anything but it seems though as though the world is becoming more separate more individual less Community oriented um you know you live in an apartment building you don't know your neighbors you
live in a house you don't know the people in your neighborhood um but you know the people you know there at the same time there's a different type of community that's emerging which is primarily digital so um you know there's all these people you kind of see around on Twitter and then one day you end up dming them or they DM you or whatever next thing you know you know maybe you're taking a phone call and then maybe at some point you're actually like meeting up in person or or whatever and in person is like
the last thing and like doesn't seem that important and it's you know the rarest like for every X number of people you kind of are aware of online who you're like seeing content from or whatever you know a fraction of those you're actually like engaging with and a fraction of those you continue to engage with over a long period of time and maybe a fraction of those you're actually like ending up meeting in person and ends up being like a relatively small number of people um but I'm basically skeptical of the idea that this current
thing is sustainable um not that it like can't be sustained but just that it won't be I think um we shifted very quickly from a world in which you know offices provided a certain level of community for a lot of people um and the remote Trend was like kind of in its infancy and Rising fairly fast for what it was but it was like you know single- digit percentages of the workforce and then it jumped to I don't know exactly what the numbers are but like maybe like 40% 50% or something like that of certain
industries at least if not kind of like the overall or something like that and then um you know it corrected when covid was kind of lesser of a concern and it went back down but not down to like two or three or 4 percent down to like you know 25% or 30% or whatever it was like it sort of went up a ton and then corrected down a bit but not all the way it's like once the world changed it doesn't just flip right back it it only goes part of the way there a lot
of changes that came from covid that seemed like they would be temporary turn out to be a lot longer lasting than people think just because when you flip the default it doesn't easily flip back um especially with something like working remotely where there's a lot of freedom that people really like about it and so you know an office only has so much power over their people to bring them back to the office because if they don't like that rule they can go get another job where suddenly there's a competitive advantage to allowing your Workforce to
work remotely so all that said um there's a situation now where a lot of people are working from home alone and I don't think that's going to be the long-term future I just don't I think there's you know it's not going to be necessarily returned to offices but there's got to be something where people are spending more of their days in person with people I think and um you ran an interesting experiment with of on this with uh with launch house which you know you worked on before superpower and now you're still investing out of
launchess fund I believe um so maybe you could talk a little bit about you know what that experiment was about for you and uh you know like what you saw through out that that was kind of interesting or seemed like maybe it gave you a glimpse into the future and then maybe other pieces that you know as it is an experiment obviously things not everything's going be perfect out of the Gat so things that you saw saw or did during that that maybe if you were to run something like that again you might do a
little differently yeah well put you know the community has been sort of the Common Thread throughout all of the businesses I've built and experiments I've I've run so my my first company before launch was called comsort and we were basically building Salesforce for Community go to market and Partnerships teams and that company grew really fast you know we added 70 million to the to the to the balance sheet from a handful of investment rounds in a really short period of time and you know we working with really big Enterprise customers and we made the interesting
decision to build that company fully remote pre pandemic so my prior business partner and co-founder CEO he had started an all remote online gaming business um you know back when he was like 15 so you know I was like scouring you know Integrative Health internet forums and selling Legos on the internet and he was you know running like this big Minecraft gaming Network and you know had like armies of people all over the globe working for him totally remotely so we had like a lot of experience with um you know building a remote company and
a remote culture relative to most businesses uh you know that were completely on the other end of the spectrum like startup building fundamentally Chang with with the pandemic just because of like you know the new access to talent and you know increased emphasis on on remote work but that was like the culture and the climate with which we built my first company and you know it works to a degree like we had ridiculously lower burn relative to most other competitors of ours in the space or even like average SAS companies because we hired Talent from
around the globe um so it could really really help from a talent acquisition and like a a lowering of cost perspective I think um so it worked from a company standpoint I think from a executive founder standpoint it was actually a little bit more challenging um in the sense that you know I think that when you are building something that's like that ambitious and audacious it's really really hard you know to maintain like your motivation and your sanity when you're just like locked away you know in like your Manhattan apartment um with no one to
like bounce ideas off of or chat through and this is where like I started to realize you know there were certain gaps in my life because I didn't have access to Great Community right like I'd have amazing Community every time I'd open up my zoom or every time I'd open up my slack uh you know or my email inbox but um you know when it came to actually like the people that I was spending time with outside of just like the day-to-day grind of of trying to build a really crazy company I didn't have much
right like I actually didn't have that many founder friends surprisingly and believe it or not so fast forward to launch house uh you know one of the The Inspirations for that business was like let's let's find a way to solve all of that and do it by building an institution that really really leans into the magic and Serendipity that can be created by by inperson community so for those listening AR familiar launch house was effectively a Next Generation incubator and founder Community uh that that that we started in I say late 2020 and the the
IDE was like something like why combinator meets we work meets the Stanford dorm room right so what if you combined those three concepts and what would you get well you'd get like a uh really amazing place to live to work and to incubate your company and take it from from zero to one so over the period of two years we helped close to a thousand Founders get their businesses off the ground by running these like 30-day long residency programs where entrepreneurs mind you this was like during you know the midst of like the global pandemic
so people were like a lot more flexible with their living situations and Arrangements but we basically asked people to uproot their entire lives for 30 days you know contrary to what was happening with like Y combinator and Tech Stars where these programs were going like completely remote you like YC had ran its first all remote batch earlier that that that year and we actually had some like members that were going through YC at the time and they like also wanted to come through launch house to join our our community because they were like we moved
to San Francisco but like there's there's no one around in the streets you know and like there's no founder events like where's where's the community right like Zoom breakout sessions just aren't quite the same so that was sort of like the original you know inklings of inspiration for for launch house and what we were what we were seeking to do the idea is as like there's as different like phase shifts shifts happen in Industries or in markets you need new institutions right so you know as like Silicon Valley was was shifting to be like broader
than just this definition of you know San Francisco Bay area and as it was um you know broadening to be more than just like Millennials building businesses but also like gen Z and you know as like modern media Advanced and like Tik Tok started to come onto the scene like we basically figured it to be like the perfect formula for you know a new kind of institution to come and a new brand to be built that Founders could really rally behind and and get around so that was sort of the the idea behind launch more
tactically what that looked like is we rented a crazy mansion so we um we put um Paris Hilton's former estate in Beverly Hills uh you know and turned it into a startup incubator effectively in like a co-working space so every 30 days we'd have 25 new Founders come in we did this in La for about six months them expanded to New York City and so now we were operating like a b Coastal uh platform where we would host events every single week to bring together like the different startup Founders and investors and just like people
interested in building in these different ecosystems to to talks and we had very structured programming where every single week we would like teach Founders like hey here's how to think about fundraising here's like the best practices for growing your personal brand as like you know a distribution strategy for for your business we' bring in uh you know bigname Tik Tok influencers that had like grown large accounts and say like you know what are the secrets like how can we basically use these channels to organically acquire customers and own our own you know audiences as a
as a company rather than just being like you know a renter of Facebook and Google ad ad ad treadmills so that was the the the big idea and you know some of the kind of early inner Inspirations and inner workings of of launch house and and and how that sort of played into you know the the shift to remote work right so a few questions just based on like um this you know trying to piece together various aspects of like future of of living and working um you guys landed at like you know these residencies
I understand were like a month at a time for you know however many people could fit in like sort of one Mansion did you have thoughts around kind of like the size of the group and the duration of the stay that you considered toggling or you know not toggling but uh you know moving these like uh you know twisting the knobs a little bit on these different amounts to see like what the right formula is because to me like the the ultimate thing you would want would be something that's not just like a onetime one
month break but something that is more you know renewable like almost you know you can do for maybe but maybe it's a month every year or maybe it's eight months every year and that's your main thing and then you're going and doing something else or like how how could it fit into the larger picture of someone's living because like you said it was it was like an anomaly of a time where during covid everyone was like all messed up with their living situation or whatever and was like oh yeah I'm paying for rent here but
I I'm going living at home or whatever but for a long-term like sustainable way of living um you need like you know the finances need to work out like Logistics need to work out you you can't be paying for rent here but spending three months here or at least most people can't um so you know you end up paying double rent basically so um how did you guys think about like those different dials those different knobs exactly so that's what ultimately end up you know making that part of the business model unsustainable we moved to
uh you know to just sort of being like a venture fund and an online digital community so you know the the model that we honed in on was a 30-day like live-in incubator program so to speak so rather than uh you know having a incubator program where it's you know intensive with different training and workshops an opportunity to to to kind of you know work on your company problems with with other like-minded peers and get help is it wasn't on zoom and it wasn't you know hey move to the Bay Area for you know 60
days or whatever YC com used to do um and like you come together for events once or twice a week it was like no let's like dial up that to the extreme and actually have everybody living Under One Roof which ultimately what we learned produced insanely deep human connections and it all comes down to just the math if you think about it right like what are friendships friendships are um you know I think at the end of the day like not to sound like overly transactional like reduction is but it's really like you know I
think a function of like the level of depth you're able to go with with people right and then the frequency of touch points so it's like how deep can you connect right in like a one-on-one session where like you find you have common interests or U you know you both get like you know a certain amount of like dop me and excitement and the right like chemical releases you know from your conversations and stimulation and then like how often do you have that right or even if it's like infrequent are is like the the intensity
right of like the touch point so dialed that like it doesn't matter like you could talk to someone once a year and like you'd still be able to like just like that you know um Pi pick right back up um but with launch house it was such an intense like on both it was intense on both spectrums right because we were highly curia the folks we brought together so everyone was very like-minded um you know had the same identity of like being an entrepreneur and you know was like opting in to be there right like
literally uprooting their life for 30 days to go you know trust some like uh you know like guys that were putting on um you know like a a program to help their company and they were seeing all these Founders literally from like the moment they woke up to brush their teeth to like the moment they they went to bed right it's just like a constant like barrage of connection like you literally were not leaving the house even because you know it was during Co and there was like a lot of lockdowns so people like weren't
you know going out and party or going out to restaurants even like we were eating all of our meals in the in in in the property so um and you didn't even really want to leave the property because it was so lavish right in like an amazing extravagant and beautiful environment so that was I think the key learning is like we were able to help people become like insanely deeply bonded relative to any other social experience they've they've ever had and cultivate you know some of you know what I've heard like the closest friendships that
there of their entire life and you know the um the funny thing is there was like this meme that was going around the community called post launch house depression where because the environment was so intense right and like every single day you were just constantly stimulated again from sun up to sun down with like like-minded people in like this Co bubble effectively when you left like the first day of like your return back to home whenever you leave the the the program it was actually depressing because your brain just like was not used to being
away from this like highly stimulated highly frequency of stimulation environment right like just picture yourself you're in a mansion for 30 days with like 30 amazing like-minded people ideas are bouncing off like when literally when people walked into launch house they were like wow I feel like there's an energetic Force at play here because of just like you know the creativity that is brewing you know everywhere and like the conversations you over here and like you the excitement that people had to to to be there so it really was like a a magical place for
for a lot of those reasons I know that that all makes sense and I think like I I've personally experienced you know it's it's kind of shocking how um how how like meaningful or or like deeper relationship you can develop with someone or or with a group of people after spending like even just a week together let alone like a month if it's depending on the experience and what that is and how close you are and how many people there are and stuff like that but like it's kind of shocking I mean like one example
is you know pledging of fraternity like you spend six weeks with a bunch of guys and like you get Incredibly Close um because I mean there's different factors involved there but one is like you're sort of like struggling together which is you know it's like same thing for guys who go to like War together or play sports together it's you know these are similar Dynamics basically where there might be some element to like getting through something very difficult together even furthers some of that maybe just because it sort of increases some of like the realness
in the experience or how you know close you can get to one another or whatever it might be um and it's just it's surprising and then oftentimes you know you move on from whatever that experience was for a week or whatever it was and you know you don't talk to those people for a long time but to your point um earlier you know maybe you reconnect with them down the line and it's like boom you just kind of you can kick it right off um kind of because there's already sort of like that Foundation there
um so it sounds like you know super valuable what you guys were able to do there if you were to do something along those lines again I I know you're hyperfocused on health so it's not a practical reality but um hypothetically or if you were to advise someone who wanted to do something similar like that in the future what would you do differently like why why isn't this you know there's like this sort of magical energy when you walk in the house and things like that why you know why not do that longer than a
month or maybe it's not 30 people in a mansion but maybe it's you know 10 houses with four people each in like a town somewhere that you still are curating from the digital community and still bringing people into this you know physical community and it's just maybe it's not quite as intense because maybe that's not long run the ideal or something like that or some other version of this I'm just kind of making one up but um how would you think about sort of going back for something like that in the future well here's one
of the big realizations Community doesn't scale it doesn't scale it really really doesn't scale I think as soon as you start to scale it the definition changes like it's less of a community and more of like you know a broader identity and affiliation honestly like I think communities have to be defined by intimacy and Community can be engineered right it's like semi formula you touched on one of the important pieces of the formula which is shared struggle right what makes communities really really bonded and strong it's like this idea of shared struggle and literally packing
up your life and moving to like a foreign environment for 30 days with people you don't know and you're trusting that it's going to be because you like want your you know company to succeed like that's it's a big risk and it's tough right to like live with a lot of these personalities and um you know navigate this environment and like everyone's really pushing everyone to like work harder because you know no one wants to be like the startup that you know didn't end up closing their round uh so so like chared struggle was absolutely
you know a key part of like why the community was so Bond and why things things work but it's really hard to like engineer that at scale you know a second piece of the formula is um shared identity which you can have at scale but like um you know I think everyone was an entrepreneur right like they're a Founder founder it's like this propaganda thing right like people just want to feel like they're a Founder it's um and I think that can also have a downside right like there's certain scenesters where like they just they
want to have the the badge the title and be able to put it in their LinkedIn bio but like they don't really know what it takes as far as like a work perspective and like they're probably you know not going to make it um so there's like all these different aspects you know of like kind of the formula of community another one is continual Traditions so like consistent Traditions like people need to know like hey this is what we do as a group like we meet every week we do this um and like you know
I think you can do some of these things at scale but it's it's ultimately really really really hard so if I were to again um you know or saw someone else trying to build community I actually would like recommend figuring out a way to keep things as sentiment as possible for as long as possible and you know figure out what are your economic incentives here right from like a financial sustainability perspective otherwise it it gets really hard the other big learning from launch house which is you know sort of a segue excuse me to what
I'm building now with superp power is you know I had a really unique window into daily life of the average on entrepreneur I like to think and what I mean by that is most of these people although intellectually highly prolific and you know we had some really great companies come out of launch us that you know like um have have have gone on to to to do quite well and irrespective of all that so many these Founders did really not know the first thing about taking care of themselves or um you know being holistically healthy
in all the right ways so um you it was really evident right like with people's sleeping habits working habits eating habits and I know it's hard you know when they're in a foreign environment but still like I actually made a point to host a session for most cohorts with one of my longevity physician friends where we would talk about all these aspects of holistic health and it was probably like one of the most captivating well-received seminars or um excuse me uh like talks that we do every single cohort because people are like wow I never
thought about toxins in my food or um you know pesticides on my food I never thought about like not working up until the point that I would fall asleep like this was literally before even Andrew hubman had like broken onto the scene right who's now a top five in global podcaster and everyone seems to know his name and it's become a meme right like um so this was a few years back and um but that's where like I started to see these patterns and realized that you know if we want to help build generational companies
of future the hardware and software of the human being of like the executives and the founders and the leaders at the helm of these businesses is just as important to take care of as you know investing in all the hardware and software of the actual like business machine itself right everything from like your SAS tooling to your processes so that was kind of the early light bul moment for me coupled with all the health things that I've experienced you know personally with my mom that made me realize people need new heroes in health people need
help and there's really not anything out there that is actually solving this problem so that was the early inspiration for superpower and how it connects back to launch house right well I appreciate you making the segue for me uh I would love to dive more into to superpower now um what was like I mean you've talked about some of the early motivations both from what you saw at launch launch p with Founders and your mom story and everything like that but when did you actually decide like okay I'm actually going to go build this thing
and and what's it been like sort of the early stages of uh bringing this together and making a reality you've been building this for about a year and the you know the the big idea is when you go to the doctor you're frustrated right like you can literally now like learn more from seven minutes of listening to a health Guru podcaster than you can from talking to your primary care position yet they're The Gatekeepers to the medical world um and you know it's really no challenge of their own like I love doctors I feel for
them God bless them but the reality is because of the way we've designed the incentive structure for healthcare in America um you know Physicians are not incentivized to or paid you know basically you know incentives affect Behavior to keep up and stay a breast of like The Cutting Edge of the research The Cutting Edge of like consumer health and wellness Innovations supplements um and just like understanding of like Frontier medic literature doesn't it's not a thing they're also not incentivized to spend a ton of time with you because most doctors get paid on volume right
it's called fee for service is is the model so they only get paid if they see a patient which means that uh they need to maximize the volume of patients that they see and the more time they spend with you means the less patients they can see in a day which is like less take home for them and you know these people have medical uh school loans and families and mortgage it's just so it's really really challenging and it's created a lot of gaps and basically the big idea behind superpower is let's close the gap
let's rebuild a doctor's clinic of the future from scratch from your phone and make it super easy and accessible to understand and access the frontier of healthcare let's get into some of like the nitty-gritty of what you guys plan on doing like how you plan on sequencing some of what you're planning to build so I understand like to start uh correct me if I'm wrong on any of this but you guys are going to sort of start with like the base being you know annual blood tests and testing for a bunch of different biomarkers and
things like this and then um yeah it's going to be like sort of availability for one-on-one uh meetings with like your personalized Health person I don't know if that's a doctor or like someone you know different or whatever it might be and you also have sort of access to all of these different um you know like all the latest Cutting Edge Products and and tests and and whatever it might be so you're trying to be like the Hub but what's the sequence or or order in which you're trying to introduce things or like sort of
the strategy you're going about accomplishing this like massive goal today Healthcare is a super fragmented experience for consumers if you want to holistically optimize yourself you have to run around town to a bunch of different doctors you have to spend time on a bunch of different e-commerce stores you have to do genuinely probably hundreds or thousands of hours of research on like what's legit and like you might not even know right like is this supplement manufacturer just think well is it so like it's really really challenging um so we're trying to basically reduce that friction
and bring everything together into like one trusted ecosystem so that people can get one place for clinicians doctors tests have all their health data in one place access any of the products or Services buy trustworthy supplements that are third party vetted and like pharmaceutical grade nothing by the way is ever superp power branded we're completely um third party agnostic so that you know and don't make margin on this stuff it's more just like a convenience factor um since trust is is is Paramount right like people are literally trusting us with their Futures with their families
with their bodies with their health like it's the most you know crucial important you know piece of ourselves right like we're walking Miracles so we take that really really really seriously um but imagine one place to access everything plus one place to view all of your health info for life like no more you know wrangling spreadsheets PDFs um you know disconnected test results from different systems but rather it's all in one like integrated interface and the starting point is this platform and um product experience we built called the superar Baseline where we make it super
easy to test everything in your body we send a nurse right to you like it's just like ordering door Dash it's pretty simple and we get a baseline read plus like we have an intake you know process where we capture everything from like where you born C-section or vaginally all the way to like you know do use polyester bed sheets since like all these things can like impact you know everything from microbiome to your hormone um status and we marry all that together with some of our clinical algorithms to give you like flat out understanding
like where am I at today with my health right like how do I compare to others in my in my age group you know what's going to kill me ultimately right like what are the risk factors and things that I should be aware of based on like my unique um you know family history or genetic profile or um you know different things that we can see in in your test results and then make it really really easy and actionable to actually Implement that stuff because I think that's where like you know too many um testing
companies that I've seen fall off is they're just like cool here's a bunch of results but like go have fun um you know and then people are left with like a similar problem because the problem is everyone in healthcare and digital health and like consumer health is just building a point solution it's a point solution and people don't need more Point Solutions people need aggregators bundlers they need One-Stop shops they need Super apps they need a trusted partner that can genuinely help them navigate this entire emerging world because we're at this like exponentially you know
increasing point of the curve where more and more Healthcare and digital Health Innovation is is happening it's not going to slow down and anytime you have like that type of caman explosion in a market value will inevitably acre to aggregators and bundlers and companies that um you know can just like reduce friction search time and burden for consumers to navigate a landscape like that right so along those lines what are like the most interesting and like Cutting Edge available products or like Point Solutions today that you would Envision like wanting to sort of bring into
the fold like whether it's I see you're like wearing an aura ring I think at least uh you know there's that yeah there's there's uh you know eight sleep bed is like another sleep thing right and then there's um you know you can get your metabolic Health through these you know continuous glucose monitoring patches or whatever it might be there's all sorts of wearable Apple watch Etc um and then outside of wearables there's like other categories of things like very specific tests that you can take um all of these sort of Point solutions that you
mentioned even down to just tracking your Fitness tracking your workout tracking your run whatever it might be are you guys planning to sort of bring all of that into your all-in-one solution or offer that independently like you know recreating some of these things just how how do you think about that so basically everything you mentioned you know is more or less on the road map we're already available today like we could send you a glucose monitor you know yesterday or we have ordering on our Marketplace as an example and can integrate your data um so
yeah consumers are demanding more all right well I wish we had more time Jacob but I know we're up on the hour so appreciate you taking the time uh where could people go to uh you know follow you and what you're doing with superpower yeah you can go to superpower. comom or find me on Twitter at jorc jakub [Music]
