298: Julia Cheek On Being The CEO Behind The First At-Home COVID-19 Test

Julia Cheek is the Founder and CEO of Everlywell, which makes at home health testing easier than ever. They recently became the first company to receive FDA approval to offer an at-home COVID-19 test. In this conversation, we discuss their COVID-19 response, the lab testing market, how healthcare and telemedicine are changing, why healthcare cost transparency is so important, and why Julia thinks they are just getting started. You can learn more about Everlywell at https://www.everlywell.com/ =============================== Pomp writes a daily letter to over 50,000 investors about business, technology, and finance. He breaks down complex topics into easy to understand language, while sharing opinions on various aspects of each industry. You can subscribe at www.pompletter.com

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Anthony Pompliano?

  This is Anthony Pompliano. Most of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, simply the best podcast out there. Let's kick this thing off.

• 0:11Anthony Pompliano?

  Giulia Cheek is the founder and CEO of Everlywell, which makes at-home health testing easier than ever. They recently became the first company to receive FDA approval to offer an at-home COVID-19 test. In this conversation, we discuss their COVID-19 response, the lab testing market, how healthcare and telemedicine are changing, why healthcare cost transparency is so important, and why Giulia thinks they are just getting started. You can learn more about Everlywell at www.everlywell.com. Before we get into this episode, don't forget that I write a daily letter to over 50,000 investors about business, technology, and finance. I break down complex topics into easy-to-understand language while sharing opinions on various aspects of each industry. You can subscribe

• 0:55Anthony Pompliano?

  at pompletter.com or go into the description and click on the link there. All right, I really enjoyed this conversation with Giulia, and I hope you guys do it as well. Anthony Pompliano is a partner at Morgan Creek Digital. All opinions expressed by Pomp or his guests on this podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Morgan Creek Digital or Morgan Creek Capital Management. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only.

• 1:31Anthony Pompliano?

  All right, guys. Bang, bang. I have Giulia here. I'm super excited to do this. Thanks for agreeing to come on and talk for a while.

• 1:41Speaker 01

  Absolutely. I'm excited to be here. It'll be fun.

• 1:45Anthony Pompliano?

  All right, so we've known each other for a while. We are investors in the awesome business that you've built. But before we get to all of that, let's start with just where did you grow up and kind of how did you get into healthcare?

• 2:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, so Everly Wells is based in Austin, as you said. I'm actually a Texan, born and bred, so was born in Dallas. Spent much of my life there, so obviously my whole youth until I went to college at Vanderbilt in Tennessee. And then came back to the North Texas area and then went to Boston for grad school and then came back. So did move to Austin about four years ago for the business, but ultimately have always kind of been in the Texas area for my career and grew up an only child. And I think that's influenced a lot of my drive and ambition is kind of growing up in that type of environment.

• 2:44Speaker 01

  And ultimately didn't have a significant kind of professional interaction in the healthcare industry. I was really more, after college, I went into management consulting at Deloitte and then I went to business school. It was really traditional. My parents were lawyers. It was much more of a corporate path, right? I didn't even know entrepreneurship could be a career path and be a serial entrepreneur. Like I'd never even heard of any of this. And so when I went to business school, I actually got exposure to entrepreneurship and not to healthcare. And then I kind of had this five-year journey after business school to think about what kind of company I would want to start and felt really called to entrepreneurship, but

• 3:28Speaker 01

  then ultimately didn't get into healthcare until I had the combination of both wanting to start a company and then a personal experience with some really vague medical issues that then caused me to become really passionate about the space and of course specifically about lab testing, as we'll talk about. So it was a, it was a unique journey for me, one that I think when I talk about being in healthcare, sounds a bit like this story where I had this experience and all of a sudden I just started this company, but really it was much more thoughtful than that and I already had looked at what it would take to be a founder over the years. And this was an idea that I came to and ultimately had vetted quite well as something I was both

• 4:11Speaker 01

  passionate about and saw this huge opportunity to transform this broken area of healthcare. But I obviously was not a likely candidate to start a highly regulated lab testing company and certainly had to go through all of the steps that that would take to bring this to life.

• 4:30Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, so I think your life kind of path, there's a lot of people who are on the same path, right? They don't know about starting a business, they've never been exposed to it. And there's almost this desire for the safety and stability of go work at a big company, or go be a kind of a service professional, make a decent living and have a great family and live your life and be happy, right?

• 4:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 4:54Anthony Pompliano?

  What was kind of the thing that pulled you from that, especially since you didn't have that exposure at a younger age?

• 5:03Speaker 01

  Right. I mean, I had really had a very traditional, both where I grew up, I went to a big Texas public high school where it was all Texas high school football and cheerleading. Everyone went to the University of Texas or to a large university. And then you picked a career path after after school. And so I certainly very much fit that bill in some ways, is just that traditional path. There are other things, though, that I now look back, realize made me a little bit different. And I think a couple of them, I was very academic, which was not popular throughout

• 5:47Speaker 01

  both high school and college. And I was very academic because I wanted to be, not because of some kind of false pressure or outside pressure. I also was an equestrian. So instead of kind of doing all the sports that everyone else was doing, since I was eight until I was 25, I was an amateur level equestrian and ended up winning several world championships and did that at a pre-Olympic level for a couple decades. And so that required both a unique discipline and resilience that I think equestrian sports and generally sports brings to hard work, and also for me to kind of do things off

• 6:29Speaker 01

  the beaten path. It was by myself. It wasn't with my friends. It wasn't with my social kind of network at school and at college. And so I didn't really tie that together at the time. But I think when I was making these choices later in my life and felt super called to and driven towards entrepreneurship, when I made a decision to do this and to walk away from what others externally viewed as success, it was actually pretty easy for me. And it wasn't because I'm somehow... Somehow I don't care about what other people think, or I'm totally insulated from opinions and and social constructs, but I had been making decisions throughout my life that weren't necessarily

• 7:10Speaker 01

  understood or popular in the moment, because I was personally fulfilled by them. And I had a really overwhelming internal compass that I knew at the end of my life, if I didn't try to be a founder and start a company, that I was going to regret it. And I did not tie that to the company being successful. I tied it to starting the company and trying, knowing very well that it would likely fail. And so I think that that orientation for me was really helpful. I had really supportive networks. I had supportive parents, a supportive partner. But I will say, I mean, my parents were also really worried. I walked away from a VP level

• 7:51Speaker 01

  job at a public company to do this. And, and you know, they're, they said, look, you've worked your entire life. You've never taken a break. You've gone from job to job. You've never taken a break. Like, maybe just take a beat and like, don't make this big decision on this random thing that we all and everybody else thinks is a terrible idea. And I did it anyway. And, and you know, for better or worse, I think, part of it with being a founder and making these choices is if everyone thought it was a good idea, it would already be done. So you have to be able to really have that faith that at least it's worth trying. And then also kind of say, okay, I appreciate the feedback, but I'm gonna go ahead and do this. And I'm, I'm not gonna care too much about what other people think.

• 8:36Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, it's interesting, too, because you talk about not wanting to go start a specific company, but just start a company in general. And then you went and kind of found the idea. Maybe explain, like, what is that process? Like, I know that I want to start a company, but I don't necessarily have an idea of what that company is yet.

• 8:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 8:55Anthony Pompliano?

  And exploration needed to to figure that out.

• 8:59Speaker 01

  Well, I think it comes first from identifying, or at least what I did, was identify where I really felt fulfilled in work. And I had been in a number of different organizations, all of which were great organizations, but I felt like 5 to 10% of the employees did 95% of the impact. Not the work, everybody did work, but you know, it was a question of tying a lot of work and sort of pulling the machine forward and driving results in an organization. And my frustration level around not being able to drive change

• 9:40Speaker 01

  was something that I internally just could not live with. And so that came across organizations, across sectors, et cetera. And you start to see it even in founder CEOs as they scale, right? And things get bigger and they can't be in that same, quite that same founder mentality. And I very much saw myself as being someone who needed to be able to move at that pace and put in that effort and see if I could build something. And so that for me was the start. And then from there, I spent about four and a half, five years after business school, meeting with classmates, friends, going through different industries. I looked at financial services, I looked at payments, I looked at travel, I looked at food.

• 10:25Speaker 01

  And there are opportunities in every industry at any time, even now. But what really separated it for me was I couldn't find that idea that I both felt was the right time in the market, that's more important than people want to acknowledge, and something passionate enough about where I could make a multi-year, potentially decade commitment to. And so all of that work had been underway when I both had the idea for Everly Well and then had an investor who also had a related idea. He ended up being our first angel investor. And we were able to put that together and make this decision. And it didn't, I mean, to be clear, when I made the choice, it was very hard.

• 11:08Speaker 01

  I really loved my boss and my prior job. And it was very difficult and didn't feel like it was going to work. It was not something where suddenly this light came on and all these things that I had been doing to prep over the last five years made it an easy decision. It just, all these pieces did inform me being able to make the decision and actually take that step forward.

• 11:31Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, and it's super interesting too that you actually went through the exercise of exploring other ideas, other markets, and I think a lot of people, they're sitting at home and they come up with an idea, or their friend tells them an idea, and they're like, "Oh, somebody should go build that business." Right? And it's kind of at the surface level, "Sounds like a great idea." As you know from going through it, and many people who've looked at companies, what looks like a good idea on the surface actually may not be scalable, it may not really as good as you thought it was. What was the work that you did? Was it just intuition that said, "Hey, that sounds like a good idea," but it ends up not being successful? Or were you like, running numbers and spreadsheets and really trying to understand the economics of certain businesses and then deciding not to go forward with them?

• 12:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, it was, it's interesting because what I ended up doing with Everly Well and the idea that I, that I ended up quitting my job over and launching, I did none of, I mean, I did some, but nowhere near as much detailed work as I had done for all these other industries, which I'm not sure what that says or if that's really something anyone else should go do, but it's the reality. But to your point, before that, I had done a lot of business planning. I had looked at industries, I would take, you know, the parent or child and parent and just baby industry. I would take the travel industry, I'd take the payments industry. I would sit down and whiteboard and brainstorm with a friend interested in the space for

• 12:54Speaker 01

  days, weeks, even hours, take an afternoon, and look at where the opportunity was, what was oversaturated, look at total addressable market, look at the competitors, understand the problem. And to your point, I have ideas every single day where I'm like, "Oh, my gosh, I wish someone would go build this company." But again, that is not, there's so many different factors you have to look at, including timing.

• 13:22Speaker 01

  And ability to kind of get in at the right time in the market and all of these frankly, and this gets back a little bit to how much does passion play a role because passion drives resilience for founders, which is, which is perhaps the number one important quality. I would look at travel and I'd be like, gosh, I'm so bored by this, right? And that's for me personally, that's not because it's not a good space. It just didn't speak to me in a way where all I could find reasons to not do all of these ideas. And then that would overpower wanting to kind of make the leap. And so it is, it should be grounded in reality, market size, competitive, all those product market fit, all those kinds of things, which is what I did.

• 14:03Speaker 01

  But then at some point, you also just have to make the leap and something's going to have to tip the scales.

• 14:09Anthony Pompliano?

  How much of having gone to business school gave you the tools to be able to and the confidence to go do this? Versus, do you think you would have been able to actually quit a job and go start without having that education?

• 14:25Speaker 01

  So look, for, for context for everyone listening or watching, I went to Harvard Business School, which I think was a unique both moment in time of when I was at Harvard and the cohort that I was surrounded by, as well as a unique opportunity to steep myself in entrepreneurship. And so it was part classroom, but it was vast majority my exposure to incredible founders and entrepreneurs who are friends. And so for kind of the context of the economic time is my class entered September 2009. Many of my classmates had just been laid off from their investment banking job at Lehman Brothers

• 15:09Speaker 01

  or wherever in the fall of 08. And the graduating class, you know, obviously had, it was in the thick of it from unemployment, et cetera. And so we entered at was the height of the recession, exited in a decent job market. But that was the beginning, 08, 09 was the beginning of Harvard Business School shift towards entrepreneurialism versus private equity, venture capital and consulting.

• 15:37Speaker 01

  Not that that still doesn't play a role, but it's really, I think, become a school known for for founders. And so I was surrounded personally by the launches of Gilt Group, Rent the Runway, Birchbox. I could go on. And then in my class alone, we had Stitch Fix, Katrina Lake, there's one of Bashir of Peak. I had two unicorn founders in my section alone. So when you think about this, it's not so much that I went in at all thinking that this was my path. I went in knowing consulting was not my path and trying to use that time to discover what it was. And I was able to be immersed in this really unique environment

• 16:19Speaker 01

  for both entrepreneurs and female founders, to be honest. And I said, look, my classmates are brilliant and smart, but if they can do it, so can I. And so that was really a turning point for me. It was a confidence booster. I didn't go in particularly confident or self assured into HBS. And so I certainly think the turning point for me was my business school education, but not so much necessarily because of the education itself, but the environment that it created as a ground for me to get my footing.

• 16:50Anthony Pompliano?

  My favorite part of your story is mainly because I could see pretty much every parent doing this is after you go to HBS and you get a great job and kind of crushing it, if you will, in terms of your career, you then call your parents and say, all right, this is fun, but like, I'm gonna go do this other thing. And like, no, please, no, like, don't, don't screw this up.

• 17:09Speaker 01

  I know. I know. And I think, you know, I'm really fortunate. I've always had two incredibly supportive parents, but I think it comes from a place of just worry, right? And making sure that, you know, to my parents' credit, for whatever reason, I always had this innate work ethic, ambition, and kind of determination that they had to actually pull back. So I was always the kid, like, I was a perfectionist. I would run myself into the ground and still do, right? And that's my personal challenge to manage. But I think for their standpoint, it was, look, you've just been running hard for like 10 years straight. You've been running so hard at this job, like,

• 17:55Speaker 01

  Have you had the time to think this through, right? And then knowing at the time, you know, something I haven't touched on a lot, but I've told in the past is my, uh, my husband and I got married in May of 2014. He decided to quit his job and bootstrap a company, a different, not a venture type company, a services company. And so when I quit my job in the summer of 2015, that was a decision we had made together. Right? Cause I had a good corporate salary. We're like, we're just married. It'll be fine. Uh, but we went, uh, down to a significant income reduction and sold our house that we had owned only for 12 months and moved into a two bedroom apartment.

• 18:39Speaker 01

  Um, and so it is not, it, it sounds very dramatic and it was dramatic. These are moves that we both supported and we made. Um, but the reality is of being a founder is you have to also plan out those choices as well. Um, and just think about the reality of your own financial implications and making sure that you're prepared for that. Um, cause it can sound glamorous or maybe like, um, a fairy tale that you're going to get to the end of and be able to tell the bad parts, but it could also just be really bad. Um, and so I think being able to know what you're getting into and make some smart choices. That was another piece of the, of the path that, um, I'm sure everyone else thought was crazy.

• 19:21Anthony Pompliano?

  Knowing that you wanted to start a company and still working a corporate job, but having your husband quit his job and start a business, what was that? Like, I gotta imagine there's an element of like, man, that kind of looks fun over there.

• 19:34Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, his, his, his path was tough. Um, he ultimately did, uh, have a great exit from that business in 2016. Um, but it, uh, his path was not for the faint of heart. He was also on the road five days a week for that. Um, and so, you know, I think our thought process at the moment, we were, it feels like it was, you know, decades ago, but six years ago, um, different lifetime was, okay, great. So we've, we've not combined incomes. We have no idea what, what that even looks like. So this is the perfect time when we only were engaged for five months. We had known each other for two years when we got married. We had never lived together and we had, um,

• 20:18Speaker 01

  You know, basically had had no idea what it was gonna be like to be married. But what a great time for him to quit his job, give up his salary and for us to make all these life changes. It's gonna be, it's gonna be fantastic, right? Um, and then, you know, a year later, this might be some, uh, premarital advice for you, but, uh, but, and then a year later to say, actually now we're down to one income, let's go down to drastically reduced from both of our incomes, right? Um, so I think it, uh, we learned a lot, um, and I think it was for me, you know, I never viewed it, for me, it was an opportunity for him, um, that I was really excited about him having, and I knew that it was the right thing for him to do.

• 21:02Speaker 01

  But certainly, you know, I appreciated his support back when I then came to him, which was not in the plan, and said, hey, I also wanna leave my job. Um, so that was, you know, that was, I think, an interesting time. And then also, of course, when we decided to move to Austin another year after that. So.

• 21:21Anthony Pompliano?

  You're, you're, uh, you're smiling, so I know that there's a lot more going on there. Uh, what, what ultimately, uh, kinda, why the healthcare space and why lab testing fees? So, so did you know when you quit, that's exactly what you were gonna go do? Or was it, uh, I wanna go start a business and, you know, I'm serious, I'm just gonna go find this idea, but I gotta quit?

• 21:42Speaker 01

  Well, I did quit one job with the situation that you just described, and then got picked up for my job at MoneyGram, which ended up being an incredible career experience, and I'm so glad I did. Um, but I quit my job out of business school, um, to give, I had saved money to basically give myself nine months to go figure it out. Um, and then, you know, kind of couldn't get rid of the bug, and so then, when at MoneyGram, I actually went through this health experience, which I'll talk about in a second, um, that then gave me the idea. And so I knew I was gonna go do it. I didn't officially start working, um, on Everlywell until about two months after I left.

• 22:26Speaker 01

  Um, but I, I, that was for sure what I was gonna go do, and I knew that I had funding lined up to do it. Um, and you know, for me... Again, I hadn't even explored, I didn't do a huge canvas of the healthcare space. I personally was on great health insurance, I was in my twenties. And I started having what you hear almost every woman talk about at some point, which is brain fog, chronic fatigue, aches and pains, totally erratic and unexplainable symptoms. And I began this healthcare odyssey that ultimately resulted in thousands and thousands and thousands of dollars of lab testing fees that weren't covered and I never got results for and was left wholly unsatisfied with my experience.

• 23:11Speaker 01

  And so that's really what prompted me digging into the issue area and then making the decision to leave.

• 23:19Anthony Pompliano?

  So would it be safe to say that you are an expert at WebMD and know all the entire website, searching around, trying to figure it out?

• 23:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, although, you know, it's interesting, I'm not a hypochondriac and I'm not a, I'm not an overly, I really had really bad symptoms, right? Like, nothing I've ever had in my life. And so I think having that experience of, you're like, gosh, you wake up and for days and then months, you're not yourself. I think that is really disconcerting for people. And ultimately, when it ended up being something so simple for me, it was like six months of all these doctors and specialists and all running their own tests and then it ultimately ended up being like three hormone imbalances and then several vitamin deficiencies, severe anemia, things like that.

• 24:11Speaker 01

  But ultimately, nothing, nothing that life-changing, you almost have this reaction like, well, couldn't that have been sussed out a different way and rebalanced? And so it's just this reaction in the healthcare system, largely because of how the whole complex is set up, that that's how, you know, you have to kind of maneuver to try to get to the end goal. But yeah, it was, it was a frustrating experience and I think one that like I did end up Googling all my lab results, right? And trying to figure out what they all meant when I couldn't really get any answers or even any, like, anything beyond, oh, it was fine, you're fine, your levels are fine.

• 24:54Speaker 01

  So, you know, then, then I think that's when people start to take things into their own hands.

• 24:58Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, and it's interesting too, because, you know... As you think about healthcare and the more that you talk to, I think, people who have spent time in this space, they realize the body is a machine, right? And yeah, it's got emotions and kind of all the things that make us intelligent life and all this stuff. But then today, it is a machine and a lot of diagnostic testing and lab testing is trying to, just like you diagnose what's wrong with your car, right? It's trying to diagnose what's wrong with the body. But the processes, I'll use the word broken, you may not use that word, but maybe just talk a little bit about like, what are the issues in the legacy model? And then we can get into kind of what the idea for Everly Well was and kind of what you've built.

• 25:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I think why healthcare continues to be both broken and yet have so many people try to fix it, to varying degrees successfully or not successfully, is because there are hundreds of different interrelated and interwoven factors where you pull one lever and you make it better, you affect the next. And so if you look at this spaghetti web, whether it's primary care, whether it's specialty care, whether it's hospitals, surgeries, lab testing, prescriptions, these are all factors that play into an overall, what I call, industrial complex that is broken in so many ways and

• 26:24Speaker 01

  often because the incentives are so misaligned, not because any one party is saying, I want to not provide good healthcare, right? That is not the goal, I don't believe. I really believe that people's goal is to treat patients in the most effective way possible, but we don't get there because it's so broken. And so for my experience specifically, and I think what I see a lot of, especially in women's health, but even more broadly, is you go to a physician, that physician is either a specialist or a generalist, they are under immense amounts of pressure. Um, billing, time and appointments, documentation, all of these things. They're doing the best they can with limited information and time.

• 27:08Speaker 01

  And then they have to order tests. Um, and then they have to make decisions about what they're going to order based on how you relate to their particular specialty and otherwise or refer you elsewhere. Um, and what I really think a lot of the problem is today is a lot of your services are disconnected from your core physician. So whether that's an MRI or a lab or a surgery, you have all these different services that your insurance is going to get billed for. You as the patient don't know how they relate. You don't know what they're going to cost even with insurance. And then you ultimately don't have someone coordinating centrally on what all this means for you. Um, unless you are part of concierge medicine, right?

• 27:50Speaker 01

  Which is again typically reserved for, um, kind of the wealthy and for, for people who can afford that. And so I think it is just a model that needs so much change. And yet there's not one way to change it that's going to fix it. And so you have all of these different pieces that make it very difficult to affect change unless you are in this moment when I think there's been a lot of good change on the regulatory front with the pandemic. So we can talk about that later, but yeah, I think that's, that's the holistic view that I have. Um, I focus a lot on access and price transparency because those are two of the particular areas where I think I can help. And where I think a lot of Americans put, put particular focus. But those are not the only two issues, right? It's so much broader than that.

• 28:34Speaker 01

  That's just where I think that I can play a role.

• 28:38Anthony Pompliano?

  For sure. And so after you go through this experience, uh, you're like, all right, this is an interesting area. I think that this can be improved. What was the original idea for Everly Well? And then why the move to Austin specifically to like go start and do this?

• 28:55Speaker 01

  So in a, you know, it'd be interesting to do, to run some actual like research data on companies, maybe, you know, post-series B, series C, or even beyond, and what their original offering was versus their, how their product and their, how their offering has evolved. We are pretty true to the core mission and like the very first business plan. It did originally focus for like a week, on maybe two weeks, on maternal testing and more around mother and child, breast milk nutrition testing, hormone testing, things like that.

• 29:37Speaker 01

  And ultimately, my read on market size was that was going to be too limiting

• 29:43Speaker 01

  for an entire business that I wanted to be paradigm shifting. So however, that's a product perspective. The mission of the company was always to provide access to affordable and convenient tests that you could do in the home and that you could have digital results that are yours, but then also shared with your doctor if needed. And I think that that, you know, doesn't, it doesn't sound particularly sexy as a model, but what I, what I saw in parallel, that we've seen become true, is what Warby Parker did for eyeglasses, which are a commodity, what PillPack and others have done for pharmacy, which is a commodity,

• 30:28Speaker 01

  Instacart for groceries, again a commodity, mattresses, the list goes on and on. This model has been done in very old school industries that typically had large entrenched players with heavy brick and mortar infrastructures. And being able to use technology, transportation is another great example. So being able to use technology to make a commoditized experience useful for a consumer, I think is something that we were able to take those models and then bring them in a little bit to Everlywell. But it, the product back then is very similar in terms of vision as it is today. What I didn't predict.

• 31:07Speaker 01

  Is how important this service, even before the current moment, how important this service is to all age groups and all demographics. And that moment for us really happened on our Shark Tank airing in 2017. We saw a radical shift in the demographics of our consumer base. Shift from female to male, shift towards things like cholesterol, heart health, STI testing. And that, I think, really set a path for us to think about our platform as a service for essential health needs versus our platform as a service for people, frankly, like me, who were unable to get the answers that they needed and really pursued health.

• 31:51Speaker 01

  There's a big difference there in terms of being a core healthcare delivery service versus someone, something tangential that's supplemental. And we went from being supplemental to essential. Yeah. And Austin, I didn't cover Austin yet, but I can. Go ahead, go ahead. Okay, so, yeah, I started the company in Dallas. And, you know, I started it in Dallas, not because I had a particular view on the location of Dallas, but because that's where we lived, that's where our home was, our family is, where we owned a house at the time. And so I, I had the company there from kind of, you know, August, September 2015, when we started, by we, it was me, working for my apartment. And then until March of 2016.

• 32:33Speaker 01

  So not a super long timeline, but I will tell you that I decided to go out and raise an equity round of financing pre-launch. And I parallel pathed angel investors and VCs because I wanted to just have those conversations and start the process of speaking with VCs. And unanimously, at the time, which this just shifted a bit, and I think will continue to shift, West Coast and East Coast VCs had largely not done deals in Dallas in the tech space, in that fast-growing consumer tech space. And so their concerns were, we don't know if our network in Dallas, we don't know that as a foundation for recruiting the best and brightest talent.

• 33:14Speaker 01

  It wasn't a criticism of Dallas, but it was a reflection of a pattern and what they had seen work and having concerns about that. Not to mention, I was a first-time founder, a female founder, a non-technical founder, and a solo founder with no experience in healthcare. So like

• 33:31Anthony Pompliano?

  Like not a problem at all.

• 33:33Speaker 01

  Right. So like I to be Everyone's always like, gosh, I mean, were you so mad that like VCs reject you? I was like, no, I would have rejected me. I would have, you know, I'm like, I get it. I totally get it. Um, it takes a lot of a great vote of risk and faith from usually angel investors early on, right? So, um, you know, I think that framing really caused me though, to take a look at the talent market in Dallas. And so I started trying to recruit and I found that because there was no substantial startup talent market, all of the people I was talking to had really ridiculous and outsized comp requests for like employee number one, like 200K a year and 25% of the company. Um, you know, and I'm like, listen, like it's just, that's just not a reality.

• 34:18Speaker 01

  And so I knew from angel list and from my friends that, that where the Rangers should be. And I also looked at what was happening in Austin and there had been a number of successful exits there. There was an entire tech community. And so, um, my husband and I agreed that if I could raise the seed round of funding, which closed February 16th, 2016, um, then we would move to Austin, which we did March 8th. Um, we rented a townhouse without seeing it and, um, ultimately moved down on the first day of South by Southwest because we were obviously, um, in neophytes in the Austin scene, not the data move to Austin. Um, and at that, and as we were unloading boxes, I did in-person interviews in Austin

• 35:02Speaker 01

  for people I had already started recruiting over the phone, um, and had about four employees within the next six weeks. So.

• 35:10Anthony Pompliano?

  What is it like, uh, starting a new business, moving and all at the same time, doing it while South by Southwest is going on? I can only have that chaos created by that.

• 35:24Speaker 01

  You know, it's funny. I think about so many, um, moments of just sheer chaos in this journey. Right? Um, sheer chaos, sheer unknowns, situations that you don't know how you're going to solve.

• 35:43Speaker 01

  And in the moment, and maybe this is part of having to be level headed as a founder, it doesn't feel that chaotic. Reflecting back, it certainly was, but it just felt like what you needed to do to move the business forward. And it was change, but I think if you choose to be in this life and in this lifestyle of entrepreneurship, I think that's a little bit of the norm. And so it was a, you know, it was unique for sure, but it was something where it just felt really right and it felt like this was the best chance for the business to succeed.

• 36:25Speaker 01

  And I wanted to hire the best people that I could. And I also knew I could recruit from California and from New York to Austin, which has very much been the case. And I didn't know that I could do that in Dallas. And so really, it just made sense. And it was just, it was kind of a no brainer. No brainer decision to like, bring this to like, if I was really going to do this, I had to, I had to be all in.

• 36:47Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. So let's talk a little bit about what exactly you're doing today and kind of how the business operates. What areas are bigger than others and kind of any updates that you want to share?

• 36:59Speaker 01

  Yeah. So I'll just give a little brief overview on, on how Everlywell actually works. Essentially, we have provided access to Americans to 35 different products of different lab tests. And these span from STI testing to food sensitivity testing, allergy testing, indoor-outdoor allergies, hormones, et cetera. What is unique about our product is we have a brand and an entire infrastructure where you as an individual can go on our website, order a test. We have an independent physician network that is involved in reviewing the test and then the results, and then you

• 37:44Speaker 01

  collect your sample at home. And that can be a blood drop, several blood drops, urines, live, et cetera. You send it in and you get results that are easily explained, color-coded, able to be sent to your doctor, able to be shared within about three to five days. And, you know, I think in theory, this doesn't sound that groundbreaking. But I think when you look at lab testing and if you think about your own lab testing experience, the last one maybe that you did for a physical, you generally have to take time off work. You put down your credit card. You don't know how much it's going to cost. Hopefully it's covered. You maybe get the results or someone calls you. You don't really know.

• 38:27Speaker 01

  And if you're lucky, you maybe get access online. And you don't really know how it plays into your health decisions. And for millions of people, that experience just doesn't work. But, you know, when we launched, we had three tests. Our first seven months in business in 2016, we launched in beta, like the summer of 2016. We did 700,000 in sales. And in 2019, we did north of 40 million. So, and I can tell you, this was before at-home health testing became on the tip of everyone's tongue and an important theme in how healthcare delivery would change moving forward

• 39:12Speaker 01

  in a post or I guess COVID-19 world, if it's post or continuing COVID-19 world. And so, part of that growth was really product market fit around accessibility, bad experience with lab testing, needing to get answers with their doc, with people's doctors. So we had a really good business before. We also, before this moment, we also are nationally distributed in Target, Kroger and CVS. And we have a Medicare business where we do at home health testing for colon cancer, diabetes and kidney disease. Our marquee partner there is Humana. So we've really diversified the business in a big way. And I think found that it's so much more than just, I think a

• 39:56Speaker 01

  lot of people think it's curiosity for people, much like maybe a 23andMe test. It's so much more than that. This is something people rely on who don't have insurance, who don't know if they can go and get the test that they need. It's really essential for many of those people. And I think that's been the biggest shift over the years. But we've really grown tremendously quickly. And now we're in this situation again of looking at hyperscale and trying to figure out how we respond as a business, which is the moment we're currently living in.

• 40:25Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, so I can't remember exactly when we invested either 2016 or 2017. And I remember at the end of 2018, you basically sent a, an update out. And that update was kind of, you know, hey, here's how we did this year. And here's our general goals for 2019. And I'll never forget the moment I opened the email and I saw the revenue projection for 2019. And I literally picked the phone and I called Jason, my partner, and I said, Jason, am I reading this right? They really think they're going to do $40 million or more in revenue. And, and he said, well, that would be great. Right? Like, what's kind of his reaction was just like, sure. And then you guys ended up going and doing it. And so just like, going from, you

• 41:09Anthony Pompliano?

  know, in what, three years, give or take, not even ever having started a business, not even really knowing kind of, is this going to work or not, to doing over $40 million in annual revenue? How does that happen? Like, how much of that is just trial by fire? How much of that is like, let's go find the smartest people we can and bring them in? Like, how do you actually do that?

• 41:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's interesting because I couldn't, like if you had asked me in 2015, like envisioning success, I couldn't even visualize a million dollars in sales. I could not even visualize it. And then, you know, I'm sitting here now realizing how much my perspective has changed when I'm looking at numbers, looking at, you know, thirty million dollar deals that we're able to get and looking at ten million dollar months, and it is a moment of reflection, for sure. And it's something that I do not take for granted, and it certainly has not been because of me.

• 42:15Speaker 01

  I have been the consistent thread, for better or worse, throughout every, every moment, and I am still here and I am resilient, but certainly, you know, so many factors play into this. And I often am asked, like, how do you do it? How do you scale? And then also, like, what are the number, what are the top things that made this happen? And I, I think there's really maybe three things. One is, you have to be in the business twenty-four seven. That doesn't mean working twenty-four seven. But you have, this is your life as a founder for, it is you live it, you breathe it, it's on your mind.

• 42:58Speaker 01

  And so you have to be damn sure that you love it. Because it is not worth it. No one should start a company to want to make money. That is the worst absolute reason to start a company. You should start a company because you want to change the world. And it is very, very hard, and you will find yourself living and breathing this for so long that you have to be resilient and committed and just not quit. So I think for me personally, maybe that's the role that I've played as a leader. But I think more broadly, You know, I didn't have the benefit of having the reputation or the investors to go hire really great expensive people early on.

• 43:42Speaker 01

  And it's those people generally wouldn't have come to work for me. It's not to say we had exceptional early-stage employees, but I couldn't bring in like a really seasoned executive that had had all this track record because they weren't going to take the risk coming in on this brand. And so every step of the way, I have just continuously up-leveled the team, added to the team, thought about where my skill gaps were, thought about what the business needed. And I think that has been a big part of it. I went from being a pretty bad hire of talent, not meaning I hired bad people. I just didn't quite know what the role needed, what the right skill set was, what level, you know, kind of all that matching that you have to do in those early days when you have limited budgets, to being really crisp on who we need and when in the team.

• 44:27Speaker 01

  And I think that's made all the difference. I mean, at this point, with eighty people and with a really seasoned executive team, it's much more about them than about me. But what I do bring, I think, is just an unwavering commitment to the business no matter what. And I think that that drives a lot of respect from the team. And that is something that as a founder, you have to be ready to do. But it is, I've done every role in the business. I was the growth hacker, other than coding, to be clear. That I've not done. I have to have people that I trust to do that. Customer care, I used to be the person on the chat. I finally like changed my name and I think removed my pictures. I was like, maybe people will think it's weird that the CEO is customer service.

• 45:13Speaker 01

  And, you know, then have hired really good clinical and tech talent. But it's not, there's no secret formula. You know, we didn't get traction for like six weeks and I thought the business was dead. Because that was my standard. It takes like a year to get traction, right? And I just kept hacking it with the team and we ended up, you know, getting really good traction in the first six months. And again, it has to be a moment in the market. You really have to understand the problem and you just have to be committed to whatever problem you face working around it. And that's really what it takes. But it's also something that if you think it's the idea or if you think it's you, both of those are wrong.

• 45:55Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. And I think it's interesting for your business because 2016 to, let's say, 2019 is kind of the pre coronavirus age, if you will. Now in 19 until, you know, hopefully forever is a very different environment. And so your business model itself hasn't changed, but the environment in which you're operating has changed drastically.

• 46:20Speaker 01

  Right.

• 46:21Anthony Pompliano?

  How have you navigated that? And then as you think of just healthcare more broadly, whether it's telemedicine, lab testing, etc., like, how does that change moving forward?

• 46:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I think let's, let's talk first about Everly Wells environment in general, outside of even us providing or working to provide COVID-19 testing, because

• 46:46Speaker 01

  we have suddenly, I've been, I've been fighting this battle for five years, talking about how people are, how lab testing is broken and Americans are getting screwed, right? Lab testing is cheap, it can be affordable, you should know how much your tests are going to cost, period. Like, there is no excuse for that, especially as you're having to pay for it out of pocket more and more. There's a great New York Times headline last summer that said, "They want it to be a secret," how the same blood tests cost between 11 to $1,000, depending on what zip code you live in. I mean, that's crazy. So, and there's, and then there's all kinds of explanations for it, right? But regardless, the bottom

• 47:29Speaker 01

  line is you as the individual end up paying that difference, depending on your zip code. And so I had seen this as a problem for so long, understanding that we had a really hard battle of both educating the American public on why this matters, how to do it, and creating a brand around it. Like, this is both a category creation as well as a brand creation. And so that takes a lot of effort, and it's not something that takes years, right? Took 23andMe a decade. And so I think in the same vein, we have been been at this for a while and it had great growth. And then this moment has happened that sheds light for Americans on something,

• 48:12Speaker 01

  frankly, I and my team were well aware of, which is the medical testing supply chain, all of the broken pieces of it, the underinvestment in our infrastructure, and then that it takes a long time to ramp and scale capacity in lab testing. And you can't just snap your fingers and suddenly have a solution, especially for a novel virus. And so all of a sudden, people care about this in a way that they didn't. I believe that testing will become quite a topic and a talk track for the 2020 election. I believe people now have a deep interest in understanding why they can't get a test that should be available. And we can

• 48:55Speaker 01

  broaden that a lot more in their minds around why testing in general is important. And we're already seeing that. So as an example, over the last two and a half months, our core testing categories have grown anywhere from 200 to 500%. Those are categories like STI testing, cholesterol, HBA1C, endocrine. And then our overall business has has grown anywhere from, you know, depending on the week, 100 to 300%. And so that is a very unique position to be in as well. And it just reflects consumer behavior. And it reflects people not wanting to go to doctors' offices. And then even on the Medicare side, we know, we know that

• 49:40Speaker 01

  colon cancer screenings are down 70% year over year. 82 million Americans need to be screened every year for colon cancer. And people just aren't going. And there's a home test for that, right? And that's a lot of the demand that we're seeing both from our enterprise partners, as well as from Just individuals in wanting to do this. And so we have a really unique challenge to face because I think that this change is permanent. I think the telemedicine legislation changes will be permanent. I think that Everly Well Now can be part of your core healthcare delivery and instead of maybe tangential or as the next step when you've exhausted

• 50:21Speaker 01

  other options. And what that means is then we have to think about our business model a little bit differently. How do we think about being a product that everyone can afford? That is reimbursable, that has a fully integrated supply chain that we can really scale. And I think that you will see behavior around healthcare delivery change permanently from here. And we, this is our moment to really respond and show the value of what we have. And if we can't do it now, then we shouldn't, we shouldn't be here.

• 50:53Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. And I guess part of this, you talked about the transparency, but also consumer behavior, right? And so there's obviously a ton of people who are speculating on the idea of, I don't want to go outside. There's a virus and some places my government won't let me even go outside. So I need to stay inside. I still need to get healthcare services. No brainer. Let me order something off the internet, right? And now I can administer the test myself. Part of the experience of going to a doctor, though, is like, whether it's true or not, the person in the white coat is the doctor, right? And being there, there's a sense of safety or security. They're supposed to know what's going on. I think

• 51:32Anthony Pompliano?

  generally they do. But when you do the test at home, there's more of a removal maybe from that. How do you guys address from the consumer behavior can change, but then, okay, what do the tests mean, right? And kind of what you were talking about earlier, like, I get the results, but like, how do I interpret that? Or how do I change my behavior in order to affect my health?

• 51:55Speaker 01

  Right, right. And I think this, this does depend on which types of tests we're talking about, right? A vitamin D test may have different actions to take than an STI test, obviously. But even today, we already have about ten diagnostic tests, like our STI suite, where we have for years leveraged telehealth to be able to be the intervening physician independently, both in the ordering of the test and in the consult afterward and even prescribing where applicable. That's included in the cost. So this is not an additional cost that you pay. You pay one upfront price. And I think that that model is what you're seeing evolve into.

• 52:37Speaker 01

  And it's one where I think we haven't done a good job as Everlywell of making it clear that our model is actually comprehensive and end to end. Now, we cannot replace, nor can telemedicine replace, the value of that physical in-person visit. We also don't aim to replace the value of the doctor. And in fact, we've built the platform to be physician agnostic such that we make sure that you share your results with your physician. And we know, actually, this has been the most interesting part, maybe of surprising insight that we've had. Because, so, so let's, let's walk through this case study. So you put your, your doctor writes a lab requisition, you walk down the hall, you put your credit card down, you get the lab done.

• 53:19Speaker 01

  You then get a bill for $500 for a thyroid test. And the bill on the back says, your, your doctor may or may not have told you that we bill for this separately. Who do you call? You call your doctor and you get mad. And so we know from surveying our, our consumers and talking to them, about a quarter of our customers, their doctor referred them to us and said, send me the results. Because the physician doesn't want to field those calls. It's not their fault. It's not their fault. What they're saying is, hey, I can run this through your insurance and the lab. Well, I don't know how much it's going to cost. I know that Everlywell has this test. It's, you know, $49.

• 54:02Speaker 01

  It's your, it's covered by your HSA. It's your call. Just make sure I get the results and then we can talk about them. And so I think this acceptance of the model has already started to shift. And then with this pandemic and with the shift broadly to telemedicine, now doctors want to be able to order their patients to HomeKit directly. And so I think that you'll both have this consumer initiated channel of like, hey, self-directed, I have symptoms, I want to get an STI test and I want to work with one of the telemedicine physicians, but you'll also have just the opposite, which is physicians referring people into the platform. And that's something we've already seen in a bit of an offline way.

• 54:41Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, it's super interesting, I guess, because really what you end up doing is you're disrupting a model, but you're actually disrupting it not just from logistically, how do I give you the test and you take it at home? But you're actually disrupting the model by the referral component, right? And you're actually solving a problem for the doctors, it sounds like, which completely changes that consumer behavior because again, I trust the white coat, right?

• 55:08Speaker 01

  And you should, yeah.

• 55:10Anthony Pompliano?

  I'm gonna go and do what they send me. And then talk a little bit about the price transparency. When people hear you say things like a blood test can cost $11 or $1,000, one, they get mad, right? Two, they're confused. And then three, they probably go check their bills and see, did they get the $11 one or the $1,000 one? You know, why, I guess, has this not changed? Is it literally because they're profiting off of the lack of education? Or are there other components that play into it?

• 55:41Speaker 01

  It's other components.

• 55:44Speaker 01

  It has everything to do with, well, it has everything first to do with what is your insurance plan? And even if a physician or a lab is trying to check that, where you are in your deductible, your plan coverage, all those things. There are also, you know, tens of millions of Americans uninsured, which we forget about. It's not, it's not an insignificant population. And then, of course, underinsured as well and don't have the coverage they need. But even if you have good insurance,

• 56:16Speaker 01

  it often falls in the category of, were you diagnosed with something? Is there the right coding in how the requisition was coded? Are there the right codes? Are you in the right demographic for this to be covered? Um, so I'll give you my own personal example. Um, many years ago, maybe in 2014, uh, this was before all my chronic fatigue. I was still feeling fatigued and my OB GYN said, I always recommend a vitamin D test as one of the first steps. She said, but I have to tell you, because you're not over 40, it will likely not be covered. And it'll be probably four to $500.

• 56:57Speaker 01

  And so she said, instead, you could just like, let's work on a supplementation plan and see if you feel better. Um, but if you were over 40, it would be covered. Um, so that it's a lot of arbitrary and, and maybe clinically supported at a time, but arbitrary rules that end up being able to not accurately predict how much the test is going to cost you as the person. Right? And a lot of this shift has happened and why I think the attention hasn't been on it is before kind of 2010 ish era, the last 10 years, people didn't pay much for their healthcare. High deductible plans are a new invention. Healthcare savings and flexible healthcare savings accounts and flexible spending accounts are a new invention of the last decade ish.

• 57:42Speaker 01

  Um, and new meaning in mass. So like something like 60 or 70% of American families are on high deductible healthcare plans. Um, that means there's a lot more costs that then end up either not being covered if they're out of network or out of pocket, or you're still having to pay for. Um, and so there's more attention on the fact that, oh my gosh, I got this blood test done that I got no value from, and I'm now getting a separate bill for $400. Like, why, why would I pay this and how did I get into this situation? Um, and so I think it's a number of factors again, um, of the entire infrastructure being broken. And, and look, I mean, 13 billion tests are run annually. Almost everyone has to have a blood test annually.

• 58:25Speaker 01

  Um, and so this is not like a niche problem in healthcare. It may not be a particularly, you know, glamorous vertical, but it is a huge, it's like going to the DMV. Everyone has to do it. Everyone hates it and it's not a great experience.

• 58:40Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, it's absolutely wild to kind of see when you, you know, pull back the curtain, if you will, and kind of see how a lot of this goes. How much of your success and kind of the consumer behavior change do you think is healthcare related, meaning the doctor is telling them, go change the behavior, or now with COVID, people are staying at home, versus something like other aspects of their life, they're ordering off of Amazon, or other types of, you know, kind of e-commerce, or direct-to-consumer type services? And of course, now, once they get that experience in the non-healthcare sector, they want to bring that over, and that's their expectation in healthcare.

• 59:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think it's a combination. I mean, I think without, and I point to 23andMe a lot. I mean, 10 years ago, or 15 years ago, would you ever have put a spit sample in the US mail? Would anyone? Nobody would have put a biological sample in the mail, right? And this was being, you know, home health has been done for decades for certain conditions, but en masse, you would not have a critical mass of Americans doing this for 23andMe and Ancestry. And so, I think that behavior was crucial to developing the consumer memory, the muscle memory. And then I think so much of the shift of the world for consumer and direct-to-consumer

• 1:00:03Speaker 01

  shifted to online, that I think people had experience in it. And so, it wasn't just that, though, because there were other companies that have tried this model over the years, and the timing was not right. Consumers did not have enough pain from this process to want to convert to an Everlywell experience. And I say this because it's not like, our customers are not people that are like, "Oh, I'm curious, let me buy this." It is people who, time after time, the healthcare system has failed them, and they want a better solution, and they're working with their doctor, and they need access to testing that is affordable, and they don't want to be surprised. That is who our customer base is, and so, that situation didn't exist.

• 1:00:49Speaker 01

  To the degree it does today, unfortunately, for today, but unfortunately, you know, over a decade ago. And so you had companies launch like for quantified cell fers, expensive price points, concierge medicine testing, different iterations, not too different from whatever Lee Well does. But we are the first company to focus on accessible price points for everyone, for core testing. Not for testing on the fringes, not for, you know, quantified cell fers, but really for everyone. And I think that is a different model and one that wouldn't have worked 10 years ago. And that's why other companies didn't work back then either. This really, timing is so important and I can't say that's credit to me. I didn't actually fully understand how quickly all this would shift around costs.

• 1:01:33Speaker 01

  But it has, unfortunately, we have served as more and more of a parachute for people.

• 1:01:38Anthony Pompliano?

  How much pressure is this putting on the legacy world? Like, I'm assuming that the big monolithic healthcare system is not going to just stand by while you print tens of millions of dollars in revenue and say, you know, we don't care about that. What have you seen either in response from legacy players? Or do you see, maybe not direct responses, but like behavior changes or anything there?

• 1:02:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, you know, the two largest players in lab testing are two publicly traded companies, Quest Diagnostics and LabCorp.

• 1:02:13Speaker 01

  They are, you know, they're huge companies and they focus on a very different part of the service delivery model, R and D, brick and mortar, owning the lab value chain. We do not own the lab value chain, we partner across the country, right? So they really are in a different business. My argument would be they're not in the business that serves the patient. That does not mean that they don't care about the patient. They're just in all these different types of businesses for where their competency is. We have great relationships with both of them, to be honest. I'm not sure we're yet big enough to cause them any pain.

• 1:02:57Speaker 01

  I have seen, though, they've both revamped or relaunched their direct-to-consumer or consumer-initiated businesses in the last eighteen months to two years. And most recently, LabCorp launched Pixel, kind of shuttered it a bit, and then has relaunched it as part of their COVID-19 response. And then Quest has a Quest Direct business to go in and have blood draws that they've amped up a lot of their social advertising, social media advertising on. I think what is undervalued by most healthcare organizations, this is not specific to LabCorp and Quest, is the value of community, customer experience, and brand.

• 1:03:42Speaker 01

  And that is something that is difficult to build. We have an NPS score across the business of a seventy, a plus seventy. That is world-class for a lab test. This is how passionately people feel about our service. LabCorp and Quest's NPS is negative. So I share this because, but to be clear, it's not because they're not providing value. It's the question of who is the value for? Who is the value for? And so as the value will shift more towards the patient and the consumer, I do think you'll start to see pressure across the healthcare delivery chain, right? Is this is the moment for the consumerization of healthcare? We've heard that phrase forever. We've heard the phrase personalized health.

• 1:04:26Speaker 01

  We've heard the phrase digital health. All of this is different ways of caring about the patient, and I think you'll finally start to see that come to a head, and companies and large organizations have to do something about it.

• 1:04:38Anthony Pompliano?

  Do you see a world where that brick and mortar kind of much more, I'll call it bureaucratic, that's probably the wrong word, but just much more brick and mortar and a kind of physical world approach to lab testing? There will definitely be lab tests that always have to be that way.

• 1:04:55Speaker 01

  Of course, yeah.

• 1:04:56Anthony Pompliano?

  Trend more towards this at-home, direct-to-consumer kind of what you're doing? Or do you think there will be coexistence of the two models, right? For tests that can be at home and done in a structured consumer way?

• 1:05:11Speaker 01

  I think until we have innovation around blood collection, I think that the two models will coexist. There are many companies working on this. Everlywell exists to hopefully partner with the companies that are successful in doing that. Or until we have assay innovation where tests that are conducted usually via blood can now be done via saliva or urine or some other method. So I think that is really the next frontier, is how can we innovate around blood collection such that it can really happen in much more mass adoption and shift away from these brick and mortar needs, which are expensive infrastructure.

• 1:05:52Speaker 01

  And yes, they will have to exist for tests that naturally have to be done that way. But there's quite a large number of common tests that don't have to be done in a brick and mortar setting. And so I think that innovation will be the next step. Our goal is to be agnostic and say, hey, when there is a great innovation that is FDA-approved, we want to be providing that experience to our consumers. And it puts us in a really good position to capitalize on that once it's available for people.

• 1:06:20Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, and what I want to wrap up talking about is I was very unaware of the

• 1:06:29Anthony Pompliano?

  I don't know. I'll call it maybe not unintelligent, but inefficient regulations that were in place around a lot of the telemedicine stuff. So, simple things like you can't use the iPhone, right, for FaceTime and or you can't do across state lines type telemedicine. And some of this, it sounds like, has been changed over the last couple of years. Some of that's been more like emergency measures been changed. Maybe just give us an understanding of like, how do you see this playing out? And do we get to a world where, you know, there's the the big talk in the food delivery space is cloud kitchens? Like, do we get to like a cloud doctor situation where everything is delivered through a telemedicine that can be?

• 1:07:16Speaker 01

  I don't want to. I think it's too radical to say that we don't need physical in-person visits. There is so much about what doctors do that requires that oversight, even from a primary care standpoint. Let's talk about primary care versus emergent emergent or specialty needs. But I think that a lot of it, for the doctor's sake as well, the practice of medicine, I mean, all those problems I talked about earlier in this conversation, documentation, limited time, all of those things, you can get a lot of freedom, I think, by doing at least interim appointments and management via telemedicine. I think it is here to stay

• 1:07:58Speaker 01

  in a very big way across practices, across specialties, especially in mental health, and especially for people managing chronic conditions. I mean, so many conditions require you to go see a doctor every 90 days for your prescription renewal. That feels quite dated for many of these conditions. And so you saw a 10x increase already in telemedicine. You saw the Medicare restrictions around telemedicine evaporate overnight. I don't think that that shifts back to in the physician's office. But I think it's because you're going to see physicians in favor of it as much as patients. And there's going to be some,

• 1:08:40Speaker 01

  you know, kinks to work out. But I think by and large, this is also the the moment that telemedicine needed to really take hold.

• 1:08:50Anthony Pompliano?

  Hearing that the physician may actually want this makes their job easier, etc. Would it be fair to say that actually there can be a significant economic impact in a positive way for the physicians to start to incorporate more of this technology and do things that actually scale them and their staff so they can see more patients and drive more revenue?

• 1:09:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, you know, physician practice revenue is a complex topic that I'm frankly not as educated on and I know has been under fire or has been declining for physicians for a number of years. But I know from having looked and partnering with a lot of telemedicine companies, that's the pitch, right? The pitch is that it makes your practice more efficient, more effective, you're using technology, all those things. It'll be interesting to see, so you have doctor on demand and you have teledoc. Those are kind of different than what I think you see the practice by practice telemedicine companies that are getting rolled out in this pandemic, right?

• 1:09:56Speaker 01

  There's these companies that serve individual practices and then there's the more national networks. And so what I don't know is how will these practice by practice companies fare and those practices versus being able to go to a national network like teledoc, like my insurance covers teledoc, and using that instead of maybe my PCP that I would have used. And so that might be an interesting rub and disruption that we see where we're hoping that it provides a better economic case for these small practices and it may or may not in the long term.

• 1:10:33Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, it's super interesting.

• 1:10:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:10:35Anthony Pompliano?

  To finish up, I ask everyone the same two questions, then you get to ask me one. What is the most important book you've ever read?

• 1:10:46Speaker 01

  That I've ever read?

• 1:10:50Speaker 01

  I think the most important book I've ever read, gosh, I mean, ever is a really tough term, but let me say the most impactful book of like my last decade was Hard Thing About Hard Things.

• 1:11:06Speaker 01

  Because I read it and I reread it often, but I read it in a moment where I think oftentimes as a founder, you feel very alone and isolated. You're the only, you think you're the only one going through these problems and to have such a clear articulation of the real challenges, just people, I mean, companies are people and the challenges of just how do you make sure that you're doing this the best you can and yet pushing through in really tough moments was really powerful for me. And I think it was a very honest view of what it takes. And in the particular moment when I first read it, that it made such an impact on me, I think that was

• 1:11:50Speaker 01

  why. So that's, that's probably the, the most impactful book for me of the last decade.

• 1:11:57Anthony Pompliano?

  My favorite part of that book is how raw he is with details of it, right? Like there's no sugar coating whatsoever. And even to the, uh, he explains things that he was thinking about doing, but ended up not doing, which I think is super helpful.

• 1:12:12Speaker 01

  Right. And just saying like, this is how bad it was. And here's how we got out of it. And not that I wanted, you know, a story about how bad it was for, for Red Hordes, but I think it was such an honest and raw look in a way, in a world where it's all about funding rounds and new products and media and all those things. And that, that's really changed, I think, obviously, um, for startups in the last, uh, several years is that attention. Um, and typically when you talk to a founder, by the way, their, their reaction is not like, oh, it's all, it's all glamorous. Like they're really real about it. Um, and I think that that narrative is super important. Um, just because you hear about all these challenges and mental health issues for founders

• 1:12:57Speaker 01

  and CEOs and being able to be honest and authentic about the challenges is just as important as it

• 1:13:02Anthony Pompliano?

  Absolutely. And the last question is about aliens. Are you a believer or a non-believer?

• 1:13:10Speaker 01

  I didn't watch the most recent video. The video from like, when was it? Like, two weeks ago? I saw it and I was like, I gotta go back and watch it. I haven't watched it. I think the universe is too large and vast for there to not be life elsewhere.

• 1:13:26Anthony Pompliano?

  All right, that's fair. The UFO video, you'll appreciate that I tweeted it and people started saying to me, "That's old." And I said, "What do you mean?" And they're like, "Oh, it got leaked like years ago." And this was just them confirming that it was real. And so I was and it wasn't, you know, brand new, but also shocked that the internet beat, you know, the federal government to releasing the videos. But like, what else do you expect from the internet?

• 1:13:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. You're like, "No, no, sorry. It was just confirmation." So, yeah, I will go back and watch it now after this question, so.

• 1:13:58Anthony Pompliano?

  For sure. What one question do you have for me to wrap this up?

• 1:14:03Speaker 01

  Oh, so I, one question would be, how are you thinking about crypto in this economic downturn? You're ever the optimist, but I would love to hear your take on where we are. I haven't actually looked into it much, given what I've been busy with the last two months.

• 1:14:26Anthony Pompliano?

  So, last June, I started writing macro environment. Some like, very early alarm bells were starting to look weird.

• 1:14:38Anthony Pompliano?

  And I said, "At some point, we will go into another recessionary period." I don't know exactly when that is, but just naturally that has to happen. Central banks have two tools. They'll manipulate the interest rate down and they'll print money. And I remember writing about it almost gleefully hoping that it would all happen around the Bitcoin halving, right? And kind of like, wouldn't it be interesting if all of this happened around the same time? And that would serve as kind of rocket fuel for the growth of this deflationary asset. Uh, we're here. They've done, you know, rates to zero faster than I ever thought possible. They've printed literally trillions more than I thought was imaginable.

• 1:15:22Anthony Pompliano?

  Uh, and the Bitcoin having successfully executed earlier this week. And, and so I think that when you put those three events together, uh, I've talked to people both in the, the macro kind of Wall Street world and also the crypto world. I just keep going back to this thing of like, supply and demand economics are valid. And if you print a lot of money, you devalue your currency. Like, those are two such simple concepts that I think actually part of the problem with, uh, the analysis of this type of stuff is people overthink. And they start to try to like, be smarter than supply and demand economics. Like, how could it be that easy type thing, right?

• 1:16:02Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:16:03Anthony Pompliano?

  But, uh, I always tell people that like, because of that, uh, that's where really the bullishness comes from.

• 1:16:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:16:10Anthony Pompliano?

  You also have to understand, like, it could be more complex and therefore it could not work as well. So it's still super risky. But, um, for whatever reason, I just don't see, you know, supply and demand economics and the, and kind of the printing of money not doing the things that we've known they've done for literally thousands of years. Um, so we'll see. It, it's a, it's very interesting and, and, um, you know, you're starting to see more people who I think are like the mainstream. Uh, as Paul Tudor Jones said in a recent note, he said, he's not a crypto nut, right? Was kind of how he put it. Like, when those people start to do this, I think then, you know, it becomes, uh, easier, less career risk. Um, and, uh, we'll see how it plays out.

• 1:16:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. I love it. Well, uh, I look forward to find, you're my, you're my crypto expert, so.

• 1:17:02Anthony Pompliano?

  Does Everly?

• 1:17:03Speaker 01

  Where do I follow?

• 1:17:04Anthony Pompliano?

  Do you accept Bitcoin? That's what everyone.

• 1:17:06Speaker 01

  No, no, we, yeah, yeah, we should, we should. We do not yet. And I mean, many, many e-commerce companies do, so.

• 1:17:14Anthony Pompliano?

  Awesome. Where can we send people, uh, to find out more about Everlywell and then find you, uh, on the internet?

• 1:17:22Speaker 01

  Yeah. So my Twitter, although I'm on a bit of a Twitter break just because of the, uh, the work right now to get our, to get our company scaled to meet everybody's needs, um, is Julia T Cheek. Um, and then you can visit more about Everlywell at everlywell.com.

• 1:17:39Anthony Pompliano?

  Awesome, Julia. Well, listen, I appreciate you doing this. I think people will learn a lot and hopefully go over there and check out all the labs you guys have.

• 1:17:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, thanks so much. It was great to see you.

• 1:17:52Anthony Pompliano?

  All right, guys. Thanks for listening to that episode. I hope you enjoyed it just as much as I did. My goal is to educate as many people with these conversations as possible, so please go subscribe on your favorite podcast channel, leave a five-star rating and a review. These things really help the podcast get higher up on the popularity charts, which ultimately brings more people to learn. Also, don't forget you can go to YouTube to watch each conversation in video format as well. Just search my name, Anthony Pompliano, on YouTube and you'll find our channel with hundreds of awesome and informative videos. Thanks again for listening to this one and I'll see you for the next time.