20VC: Hims & Hers: $4.3BN Market Cap on $2.3BN of Revenue: The Comeback | Why Being Public is 10x Better | The Death of the "Strategy" Hire | Why Performance Marketing is Worse than Brand Marketing with Andrew Dudum

Andrew Dudum is the Founder and CEO of Hims, the company reshaping consumers relationship to healthcare. It has been a rocky ride over the last 6 months, the company is down 66%, their market cap today is $4.3BN on $2.3BN of revenue. They just bought their largest international competitor, Eucalyptus for $1.5BN. AGENDA: 00:00 — Why Being Public Is Better Than Private 02:50 — My Advice to The Collisons on Taking Stripe Public 07:15 — How to Hire for the Most Gritty People: The Test 10:55 — How AI Will Reshape All of Customer Acquisition 15:30 — What Did Hims Do That Andrew Wishes They Had Not Done 20:15 — What is the Least Profitable but Most Important Hims Product 27:10 — The $1.5BN Acquisition: Why Hims Bought Their Biggest Global Competitor 33:45 — Why Brand Marketing Beats Performance Marketing 39:40 — The Future of Prevention: Why Your Next Blood Test Should Be Free 46:50 — Disrupting the PBMs: How We Are Breaking the Corrupt US Healthcare System

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  One of the things I learned earliest in my career is if you can't hire people that are smarter than you, you will fail. You know, I think what you gain confidence in with brand marketing over time is that consistency is required. Yeah, the whole thing is totally fucked, right? If you look at the existing system in the US.

• 0:16Harry Stebbings?

  This is 20 VC with me, Harry Stebbings. Now, I am so excited for the show today. We have Andrew Duddham, founder and CEO of Hims on the show. Hims are reinventing healthcare, but wow, it's been a tough six months. They are down 66%. They've got a market cap of 4.35 billion as of today, but they do over 2.3 billion in revenue. It's nuts. I'm so excited to sit down with Andrew today where we discuss this and so much more. This was so much fun to do. But before we dive into the show today, you're in back-to-back meetings all day. You're trying to stay present, but you're also worried you'll forget the decision, the action item, the important next step. That's where Granola comes in. Granola is an AI-powered notepad for meetings.

• 0:59Harry Stebbings?

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• 1:44Harry Stebbings?

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• 2:27Harry Stebbings?

  Beats every competitor in every head-to-head bake-off. Completely configurable and code optional setup. My word. I mean, the benefits just go on and on. It's easy and efficient implementation. It works on any help desk with no tedious migration needs. It's trusted by over 6,000 customer service leaders, including top AI companies like Anthropic, Loveable, Synthesia, Clay, Vanta. So if you're ready to transform your customer service team, scale your support and give team members time to focus on the really high-level strategic work, learn more about Finn at fin.ai/20vc. You have now arrived at your destination. Andrew, it's been like six, seven years. I was, I was young and fresh when, when we last spoke.

• 3:12Speaker 00

  Sorry, I was, I was a lot younger. We looked a lot better back then. But I'd say we're pretty good right now.

• 3:17Harry Stebbings?

  I, I listen, I think life's been pretty kind to both of us. Can I start with a super weird one? And you might be like, dude, I thought we were buddies. But I speak to so many public company CEOs today and I can't find a happy one.

• 3:31Speaker 00

  I might be the only person that believes this, but I think running the company in the public markets is more fun than being private.

• 3:38Harry Stebbings?

  Why? You get shit on every day, dude. I see it and I'm like, oh, poor Andrew. And I so remember our dinner with your lovely wife and I'm like, oh, I like you so nice. And I see the shit on Twitter.

• 3:50Speaker 00

  I love it for a few reasons. One, if you're a highly competitive person, you get to put out high benchmarks every 90 days and see if you can actually deliver on it. And you can build a high-performance team to say, hey, we put this out and it's a big stretch. Let's go kick ass and figure it out. When you're private, it's so easy to get cozy. You know, the worst-case scenario, if you've got some VCs that call you and they're stressed out about something, but in the public markets, it's like, it's bootcamp. It's, it's like, you gotta be, you have to deliver. So I love that from a competitive standpoint. I also love. The ability to hire talent like in the public markets because they they can see the vision and you're forced to not only talk about where you're going to go 10 years from now, but if you're going to actually like make steps quarter to quarter to prove

• 4:31Speaker 00

  it. So as a competitive person, I think it's a lot of fun. Also, when you step back, like, you know, we we went public really early. We went public after like 36 months of launching, which was a little bit crazy. When you look at the biggest companies in the world, they went public within the first few years of launching. Google, Facebook, Apple, Amazon, all of them, like, they didn't stay private for 10, 20 years. You know, the founder was forced to figure it out in the public markets, how we're going to grow, how we're going to get efficient, and how we're going to tell a big vision. And and I think that's a lot of fun.

• 5:01Harry Stebbings?

  I love that. Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, Hims.

• 5:06Speaker 00

  That's right.

• 5:07Harry Stebbings?

  Nice. Yeah, yeah. It's it's actually one of the oldest marketing tricks ever, which is like marketing by association. You know this? It's called Six Flags. Do you remember Six Flags, the really shit theme parks? Yeah, yeah. So I don't know them because I'm British. But like, they wanted to be better than everyone else. And so they just did massive billboards that said not as good as Disney.

• 5:25Speaker 00

  Very smart.

• 5:26Harry Stebbings?

  I know. Yeah, I like a good marketing. Fascinated. You said there about going public so early. If you were sitting down with like the Colossians today, would you tell them to go public?

• 5:38Speaker 00

  I think if your business is ready from a predictability standpoint, and you have a long term orientation, then I would encourage you to go public. I think those two things have to be true. I think you have to actually be able to predict your business with consistency, because you can't enter the markets without that confidence. And you also have to be ready to sign up for a decade or two in the markets, right? This is not something, it's not a quick exit, it's not a liquidity event, it's it's the beginning. And so I would encourage any founder that has those two dynamics to consider it.

• 6:06Harry Stebbings?

  Do you think you can do what you want to do from a long term strategic objective standpoint, and have the, as you said, the 90 day ticker of like, hey, we've got to go hard for the 90 days?

• 6:17Speaker 00

  I think you do. It takes it takes discipline. I think it takes hiring the right people. You know, I think I focus on hiring a certain type of people. You know, they're not particularly fancy in background. They're not credentialed with like all of the really great tech companies. Like, that's not what I look for. I look for mostly people who have been builders and have gone through some shit is the like the honest reality. So if you look at our team, you know, Yemi, our CFO, he was, you know, the divisional CFO of Uber during COVID. The whole business disappeared overnight and he had to figure it out. Or Deirdre, our chief product officer, she was at Robin Hood during GameStop, right? Had to figure out that chaos or.

• 6:51Harry Stebbings?

  Do you seek out crisis in their lives? I know it sounds stupid, but you've mentioned two very iconic.

• 6:57Speaker 00

  Yeah, I seek out grit. I seek out a lot of grit because I think when you're disrupting an industry, which we are, and even in the last year, our category has exploded and changed and been fraught with all types of chaos. You have to have a team that is used to being uncomfortable and used to getting through it and used to staying calm and having that that resilience. And so I absolutely search for people that have seen those types of ups and downs and thrived in them. Because I think when you're disrupting, it's just inevitable that that's going to happen.

• 7:26Harry Stebbings?

  I spoke to so many people around you, like really, I stalked the shit out of you. Which was nice because I know you, but like to kind of hear stories from owning donut shops. Didn't tell me that, did you?

• 7:37Speaker 00

  Didn't tell you.

• 7:37Harry Stebbings?

  My Augustus Gloop was coming out there, but the talent element was one. And they said, in particular, Jules Maltz, I think it was from IVP, said that you're incredible when it comes to acquisition and retention. What do people get most wrong, do you think, about acquiring great talent today?

• 7:56Speaker 00

  I think often people, as they scale, maybe founders as they scale, fall into the trap of trying to hire people that have seen bigger scale than them and are more strategic. And they they feel like they've gotten to the point of success where now it's time where they up level the talent to non startup-y folks, right? To like real professional people. And I think that is a huge, huge mistake, huge mistake. I think as you scale, there's a pressure to go hire that big strategy person who has more credentials than you. And it's kind of, it feels almost confidence inducing as a founder to like get to that level. And I think you have to fight that at all costs. I've made mistakes. I've hired people like that because I thought it was was the right move. And I've always come back to find people who love the mission, who love to build,

• 8:40Speaker 00

  who are tactically excellent at what what the function actually requires. And again, who are gritty as hell.

• 8:46Harry Stebbings?

  What are you not excellent at in the role of CEO but persist relentlessly despite your lack of skill?

• 8:55Speaker 00

  So many things. I mean, I'm constantly trying to find the balance of being in the weeds and building a team that can scale independently of me. That line of how hands-on you should be, how strategically involved you should be, how tactically involved you should be versus-

• 9:10Harry Stebbings?

  Why do you come down on that then? Because we have the founder mode and the, you know, I love Ryan at Flexport, but like I'm so in the weeds and I love him for it.

• 9:19Speaker 00

  You have to be intentional about where you get into the weeds. I don't believe in this concept of like every design review comes through me, everything that ships comes through me, every decision comes through me. Like it's, one of the things I learned earliest in my career is if you can't hire people that are smarter than you, you will fail. And young managers struggle with this all the time. They, they're scared to hire people that are better than them because they feel like if I hire somebody better than me, what the fuck am I even doing here? Why am I here if I just hired somebody who's better than me? And in fact, it's completely the opposite. If you want to continue to scale in our organization or any organization that's growing, you have to realize that your job is changing every 12 months to level yourself up to the next, next highest leverage focus area. In order

• 10:01Speaker 00

  to do that, you have to replace yourself every 12 months with talent equal or better always. To me, that's a really important realization as a CEO and founder, which is I want to hire people better than me. And, and so I trust them. Yet at the same time, if there are specific areas of the business that are critical, either strategic decisions or tactical implementations being worked on, you have to know when you go deep. And you need to acknowledge to the team, hey, this is something that's really important. I'm going to go deep on it. I'm not going to go deep on everything, but this is important. I'm, I'm going to be in the weeds here.

• 10:30Harry Stebbings?

  Do I sit in these boards nowadays? And honestly, they're mostly useless. It's so exhausting. And AI is at the top of every big company board discussion topic. Okay? No shit.

• 10:43Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 10:43Harry Stebbings?

  How does your business change with AI? How many people do you have today?

• 10:47Speaker 00

  About 2,000 employees.

• 10:49Harry Stebbings?

  Okay, you have 2,000 employees. How many do you think you'll have in 2030?

• 10:53Speaker 00

  That's a great question. Probably not many, more than two. Three thousand.

• 10:57Harry Stebbings?

  That's a big range.

• 10:58Speaker 00

  Yeah, we operate about a million square feet of pharmacy fulfillment throughout the US. And so we have a large chunk of labor force, which is actually just variable labor. Responsible for actually pharmacy oversight, pharmacy review and actually shipment of medication. So AI can do a lot in regard to efficiency for core product, engineering, accounting, finance, marketing, et cetera. But when you're actually running facilities, physical facilities, and a lot of this is actually required doctor and pharmacy oversight. You know, those you can't get as much leverage on.

• 11:31Harry Stebbings?

  Are you pushing AI down into every function of the org?

• 11:34Speaker 00

  Yes, yes.

• 11:35Harry Stebbings?

  Are you seeing it have dramatic implications? That we have, we have Ange and we have customer support. I think we overexaggerate elsewhere where it has impact.

• 11:45Speaker 00

  I think those two areas are critical. We're also seeing it have massive leverage in design, right? So we deploy about a billion dollars in marketing spend every year across the him's and hers brands. You know, the cost to do a live photo shoot, the speed of a food photo shoot for every single product launch. You know, we probably have thousands of variations of TV commercials, Facebook ads, Google ads, et cetera. The speed of iteration with AI in that function, I think, is actually one of the most tangible that I've seen across our organization.

• 12:14Harry Stebbings?

  When you speak about the explosion of the business, that explosion is driven largely by GLP ones and weight loss. How much of that is the core business today? Is it like 80% weight loss, 20% everything else? What does that look like?

• 12:28Speaker 00

  No, no, I think that's one of the funny things about our business is we are constantly in the headlines as a single category business. When we first launched, when you and I first met, we were the erectile dysfunction business, right? And it was front page of the New York Times and it was fun and silly and provocative. And all we did from everyone's perspective was ED. And then we launched hair and then all of a sudden it was like we're a hair loss business. And then we launched the hers business and everyone said, oh, hers is never going to work. You're just an ED and hair loss business. And then eventually we launched GLP ones and everyone said, oh, now you're just a weight loss business. And, you know, a year from now, people will say, oh, you're just like a peptides business, probably if I were to take a guess, right? And, and so I think the, the reality is under the hood. Is that you have a dozen completely different clinical categories, completely

• 13:10Speaker 00

  different businesses, each scaling with very solid, robust growth, which is why this business is interesting. Like, that's why I run this business is the durability of it is quite strong because you have 10 different businesses with completely different customer segments. So weight loss is actually nowhere near the majority of this business. I don't think ever will be, just because you're continuing to expand core categories and a lot of new categories. So.

• 13:33Harry Stebbings?

  Do you run those as separate businesses? When I had Nick from Raveloud on the show, he said something fascinating. He said, "We run 26 different product experiments at the same time. I treat it much like a venture incubator and I give them more or less money depending on how well they perform." Do you run them as like a venture incubation unit?

• 13:50Speaker 00

  Yes, absolutely. I mean, you know, when we first met, I was over with with Jack Abraham running Atomic Ventures for a long time. And that training of zero to one exploration, that is what him's and hers is, right? Like, I think of it as a public shell for innovation and bringing great healthcare to consumers, which means every year we're testing completely new go-to-market strategies, completely new categories. And the way we think about it internally is just different bets. And some bets you you starve, and some bets you fund, and some bets you you ring fence to allow exploration for a year or two. But they're run increasingly independently. The the DNA of management is is to look at it as a portfolio that continues to scale. Because ultimately, in our business, you know, health and wellness,

• 14:34Speaker 00

  what what makes up great health and wellness is constantly changing. There's new diagnostics, there's new devices, there's new drugs, there's new learnings about, you know, the sauna and, you know, cold plunges or whatever it might be, whatever's trendy, right? Like, all of this is changing and it's going to continue to accelerate. And our job is to curate the best and bring it to people at scale at an affordable cost. And so we have to think about this frankly, as a portfolio that's constantly evolving.

• 14:57Harry Stebbings?

  I can't get my head around the sauna, Andrew.

• 15:00Speaker 00

  You have to do this sauna four times a week.

• 15:02Harry Stebbings?

  No, I don't.

• 15:03Speaker 00

  37 degrees for 20 minutes. It cuts all costs.

• 15:06Harry Stebbings?

  Have you seen what it does to the motility of your sperm?

• 15:09Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 15:10Harry Stebbings?

  You've got three kids, buddy. Some of us have got none.

• 15:13Speaker 00

  Got to bring an ice pack in there.

• 15:15Harry Stebbings?

  I'm not going to bring an ice pack for my balls. I'm sorry. This is genuinely, this was like the most unattractive thing ever. And it's like, you know, Huberman's like, oh, it extends life by like, you know, I'm not doing ice packs.

• 15:27Speaker 00

  I'll, I'll, we'll sauna together next time I'm in London.

• 15:30Harry Stebbings?

  I'll do it with you.

• 15:32Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 15:32Harry Stebbings?

  There you go. You said there about kind of the best. I think a lot is learned from, what did you do that with the benefit of hindsight, you wish you hadn't done?

• 15:43Speaker 00

  It's a great question. For us as a business, I think it's important to constantly be in a customer's mind, the mind share of the new evolving health and wellness categories. And so I think in many categories, we've been quick to market and in many categories, we've been kind of like, you know, patient to market. And in retrospect, I constantly am kind of evolving my perspective on like how fast we should be there. My net, net takeaway is I don't think we actually need to be first ever in market. I want to be best in market. And so when I think of new categories, peptides, for example, right? You know, a lot of conversation about 10, 15 peptides going from category two to category one compounding. So that people can actually get access to things like BBC 157, TB 500. This is an incredibly interesting category.

• 16:28Speaker 00

  You won't see us be first to market in this category. You'll see us when we launch it, feel extremely confident in the clinical protocols, extremely confident in the guardrails, make sure that the supply chain and the quality is done to a level we are, you know, feel is bulletproof from a pharmaceutical standpoint. So, you know, there's a lot of introspection in my brain around speed and prioritization of which categories to enter. But what I always come back to is not being first, but being best. So that from a brand standpoint, people know him's and hers to be high quality and trusted. Like when we actually bring something to market, you know, it's safe. You know, it's done right. And you know, it could be something that's, that's powerful and important for your, for your health.

• 17:08Harry Stebbings?

  I always remember Hugo Barr, who was the product guy from Xiaomi. And he said on the show, when you're doing anything in physical product, you need to choose one. You need to be feature king or you need to be price king.

• 17:22Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 17:22Harry Stebbings?

  What are you?

• 17:24Speaker 00

  I think you have to be both for us. I think you have to have the best at the most affordable price eventually.

• 17:30Harry Stebbings?

  How how come it was $1,800 to $2,000 for Wegovy and AZEMPIK then, which wasn't wholesale?

• 17:40Speaker 00

  Well, what is it now?

• 17:42Harry Stebbings?

  Well, the self-paid price at the time was 300 to 400.

• 17:46Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's down to about $149 in 18 months.

• 17:49Harry Stebbings?

  On Hims.

• 17:50Speaker 00

  We just announced the Wegovy pill, $149.

• 17:53Harry Stebbings?

  Is that not post Novo deal though?

• 17:56Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah, yeah, it's new partnership, though, absolutely.

• 17:58Harry Stebbings?

  So we want to be price king and feature king?

• 18:01Speaker 00

  We want to curate the absolute best at prices the masses can afford. And I think the way you do that is you work with ecosystem partners, you leverage the scale of the platform, right? We're the largest global distributor at this point probably of medicines. And so by able to then working with, you know, the best diagnostic companies, the cancer Grail detection company, I don't know if you've ever taken this test. This is a test that I've been taking for five years. I've had everyone in my family take because there's there's cancer in my family.

• 18:25Harry Stebbings?

  What's the test?

• 18:27Speaker 00

  It's called the Gallery Test by Grail. It's a blood test and it can detect, you know, 50 to 100 cancers and it focuses specifically its best stat from a clinical standpoint, some of the harder to find cancers, prostate, pancreatic, ovarian cancer. And it's a simple blood test. You know, we, this blood test was thousands of dollars for the last few years. We were able to work directly with Grail, bring that test, I think it's in market now on Hims and Hers at like 600 bucks. And my hope is over the coming years, I'll continue to come down to a few hundred bucks where everybody could do this on an annual basis, like going to the dentist, right? It's just check to see if there's any early signs, any early protein indicators of stage one cancer tumors. So there's an arc, right? When the GLP

• 19:07Speaker 00

  ones first came out, it was $2,000 list price. We applied incredible pressure to the drug companies. The current administration in the US did an amazing job. And thanks to the drug companies, they actually agreed to bring them down from the thousands of dollars to 150 to 200 dollar cash per prices. I mean, that is like completely transformative. It's not something that's really happened in pharmaceutical history, that the blockbuster drug of the century gets cut by 80% in 18. 18 months. The reason for that, I think the reason it happened in part is because companies like us and consumers applied massive pressure to change the distribution model, right? In 18 months, the distribution model has completely changed in pharmaceuticals in the US. Instead of going through PBMs and insurance, they're going straight to customers through platforms like ours

• 19:52Speaker 00

  at prices everyday people can afford. And so there's an arc to that price reduction. But I think for us, we want to have the absolute best and also want to be able to apply pressure to bring that cost down as much as we can.

• 20:03Harry Stebbings?

  Do you think like a PillPack sold too soon? When you think about the erosion of PBMs power that you mentioned there? And how challenging it was for a business like PillPack?

• 20:12Speaker 00

  I don't know too much about PillPack, to be totally honest. What I don't believe is that the pharmacy fulfillment part of our business independently is a particularly valuable business.

• 20:24Harry Stebbings?

  How should I think about the preventative healthcare companies that I'm pitched every day? Whether it's your PreNovos or your Neco's in the UK, which is expanding to you. Is that the future? Some are much deeper, some are much shallower, some are much more expensive. How do you understand, analyze that space? Is that something that Hims would do?

• 20:44Speaker 00

  We spend a ton of time looking at that space. And in fact, we did a partnership with PreNovo that was announced just a couple of weeks ago. I think where there's a lot of interesting companies right now is in highly specialized levels of testing for clinical areas that are meaningfully unmet, right? So you look at things like cardiovascular disease, right? Still one of the number one killers. Most dads die of a heart attack. Yet a statin is, you know, two cents for me to manufacture. And if you take a statin every day, then you won't die of a heart attack or you're meaningfully less likely to die of a heart attack. Yet, nobody does it. And so there's biotech companies right now working on therapies where a single injection quarterly or a single injection annually can absolutely obliterate your cardiovascular risk.

• 21:29Speaker 00

  And if you can do something like that, you meaningfully curve that rate of death and you get ahead on prevention for cardiovascular disease. PreNovo, I think, is another interesting one, right? It's how do we get ahead of detection for things like cancer? An early tumor detection. You know, my, my dad, you know, had stage four colon cancer when he was thirty nine. It then costs the healthcare system hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars, if not millions of dollars, to have surgery and then treat him for many years with chemotherapy, right? And then afterwards, the care involved to, to kind of get him back to a steady state. The idea of an annual exam that can scan your body for early signs, early proteins through blood testing or early actually imaging signs that can detect a millimeter sized tumor

• 22:14Speaker 00

  is incredibly fascinating. Now, I think a lot of clinical people, and they're smart, you know, believe something like that is not yet ready for mainstream, and it might not be. I, I kind of choose to be opportunistic in giving people the ability to make those trade offs for themselves. I take Prinovo annually, so, you know, I recommend it to my family. Is it perfect? Absolutely not.

• 22:32Harry Stebbings?

  How much is Prinovo?

• 22:33Speaker 00

  I think now it's maybe about a thousand or fifteen hundred bucks a year.

• 22:36Harry Stebbings?

  Okay, that's better than I thought.

• 22:38Speaker 00

  Yeah, and so I think, and again, these are machines that cost five hundred thousand dollar one time purchase to, to buy. But then you're charging, you know, a thousand or two thousand dollars a month or a year. And so the idea that this cost could come down dramatically is very real. Five hundred K machine capitalized over a decade. The cost could come down to something like three hundred dollars a year to do this test eventually. And that's where my brain goes when I'm thinking about the future is, what are the, the Swiss cheese layers we can give people that together make up really great prevention? Working backwards from what we know causes, you know, shortening of life and, and health span.

• 23:15Harry Stebbings?

  Is the biggest threat to your business not actually OpenAI? And if ChatGPT is the kind of consumer interface with a lot of healthcare questions that people have today, which, you know, it is in most cases, actually, and that's why obviously health is a big focus for them. Is it not the most natural extension ever that they extend that into delivery, supply, being your on-demand doctor?

• 23:37Speaker 00

  You know, it's a, it's a, something that people have been talking about a lot. Actually, Dario was mentioning this recently. I think some of the most defensible businesses in the age of, you know, Anthropic and OpenAI are businesses that actually do something physical. They require actual specialization and they require infrastructure. A huge part of what we do every single day is treat tens of thousands of patients with thousands of doctors that are specialized and licensed in every state or country in the world and then actually help make people medicine. I mean, this is a million square feet of pharmacy fulfillment. This is, you know, hundreds of pharmacists and robotic machines that are actually compounding treatments or fulfilling branded pharmaceuticals. So when I actually think about the most defensive businesses, the businesses that can thrive

• 24:22Speaker 00

  in the age of AI and actually be enabled by them are ones where the conversation of something like ChatGPT massively expands the funnel of people engaging in health and wellness, but then can be driven to a platform that actually connects them with the specialist and connects them with the products and actually can get that delivered to their door. And ultimately, I think we're a combination of all of those businesses together. So, you know, I think there's, there's a lot of opportunity with that funnel that opens up with things like ChatGPT.

• 24:48Harry Stebbings?

  Yeah, I agree with you in terms of like physical infrastructure and real world requirements, meaning there's just inherently more value there because it's harder to do. So does that look like a partnership then? Say I come in and I say, hey, I've got a, I don't know, a rash here and I'm worried about it and then they siphon it off to him. So how, what does that relationship look like?

• 25:07Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, I think it's similar to what you see on Google. I don't think it's going to be all that much different, right? That you'll be able to, to partner directly with Anthropic and ChatGPT and, and find patients that are looking for certain services and then have handoffs to specialized implementations, right? It's, it's going to be, I, I think there's great opportunities to partner with all of these players.

• 25:27Harry Stebbings?

  Well, we mentioned kind of transition of how people consume healthcare. In terms of how people find you, I actually had Aran from Monday on the show, which was a fascinating show. And he said that with AI overview on Google, that they've lost 18% or I might be butchered, maybe 15 to 18% of their adwords in terms of acquisition.

• 25:49Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 25:50Harry Stebbings?

  How are you seeing the way that people find him change?

• 25:53Speaker 00

  You know, it hasn't had particularly dramatic changes since, you know, some of these new AI companies have grown. I think for us, a huge number of people that come to us are our first time patients interested in some of these care categories. And so they're hearing about it through, you know, watching Fox News. They're hearing about it through watching NFL on Thursday nights. They're hearing about it from their friend who all of a sudden is feeling great. And the friend is talking about the treatments that they're on or the fact that they're getting care from him's and hers. So I think more and more for us, the brand and the spend is moving towards channels where you're talking about the opportunity to feel great.

• 26:33Speaker 00

  You're not reliant on, you know, maybe the AdWords, Google funnel that you mentioned. I do think those businesses inevitably will have struggle in transitioning to some of the, you know, the chat based interfaces. But there will be ad networks that are built through those chat based interfaces that eventually just replace them. So ultimately, I'm not sure it will matter. But for us, I think an increasing amount of spend is actually going towards just telling people about all of the new things him's and hers is doing. The fact that you can feel great, the fact that it's affordable and you can come check it out. And it's a lot of market creation, both in the US and globally versus latent demand that you're capturing through some of these more streamlined channels.

• 27:13Harry Stebbings?

  If I gave you an unlimited chat book, what would you spend on today that you're not currently spending on?

• 27:20Speaker 00

  I would definitely sponsor Ferrari F1 because I've told my wife that if I were to have one job that wasn't my current job, it'd be a Ferrari driver, but she did not really like that answer.

• 27:32Harry Stebbings?

  Do you think that would be a net positive for him's as a business? Don't laugh.

• 27:37Speaker 00

  The Ferrari sponsorship?

• 27:38Harry Stebbings?

  Yeah.

• 27:39Speaker 00

  At this point, probably not because I'm not sure we're live in every market with the penetration we would want where that global footprint matters. I think eventually it would. I think eventually in the coming years, you know, World Cup and global sponsorship opportunities actually do matter. Because, you know, this year was a huge level of commitment to win internationally. I mean, we did not dip our toe. I mean, we acquired three or four companies.

• 28:03Harry Stebbings?

  Did you acquire Eucalyptus for like one and a half billion in cash?

• 28:07Speaker 00

  Some more around there.

• 28:08Harry Stebbings?

  How does that come to be, dude?

• 28:10Speaker 00

  You know what? It comes to be because you get to know the people really well. I've known Tim probably four or five years. I think he was the best operator overseas, no question. I mean, his understanding of the customer, his ability to build a team that just moves fast, experiments, is willing to take risks and fail. I mean, when I first met Tim, he was live in like six or seven markets and it was all failing. And he was telling me how chaotic it was and I was like, I don't know, man. This sounds crazy. You're in like Indonesia, you're in Japan, you're in all these different places. Like, is it gonna work? He's like, I'm not sure, but we're gonna try it. And then a year later, he's like, okay, it didn't work. We're like toning it back. We're gonna focus here. And like, his humility and his willingness to experiment and test and learn is incredible. And because of that, they've just moved so much faster than everybody else.

• 28:53Speaker 00

  I mean, they're the dominant player in Australia, dominant player in the UK, dominant player in Germany, quickly growing in Japan. I mean, it's just a phenomenal business. The power of what we built in the US from a cash flow standpoint has enabled us in the last four or five years to buy that business with pretty moderate dilution, right? Because you can actually just fund the purchase of it off the balance sheet over the next couple of years, which is incredible. And so we have committed a huge amount of dollars and focus internationally because I just think the opportunity for the brand is pretty consistent, whether there's a national system in the UK or not.

• 29:28Harry Stebbings?

  Does it give you cold sweats at night, being as aggressive as you have been, as quickly as you have been? You know, I remember interviewing Dax from Lightspeed, Dax to Silver. And he mentioned the challenge, Lightspeed, the POS system in a lot of restaurants. And he mentioned the challenge in acquiring so much so quickly. I think they made like 18 acquisitions in like a two-year period. Are you worried of like, oh, fuck, I now have to integrate Eucalyptus and these three other businesses?

• 29:54Speaker 00

  Definitely. There is a very fine line of driving so fast that you're losing control. There's no question about that. What I've found, at least in running this business, is if you don't feel like you're getting close to that line, you're probably not pushing hard enough. And so I do think that uncomfortable gut feeling, where you're constantly questioning, constantly evaluating, constantly tweaking the strategy or the tactics, like... That feeling is what success feels like. And so I've, I've kind of taught my team that we're going to get really comfortable with that feeling. We're going to get really comfortable sitting in that feeling and questioning and, and reevaluating and pushing. Because I think that's how you win, right?

• 30:36Speaker 00

  Like, I was a rower in high school and I remember, you know, my coach saying, "The group of guys out there that is willing to be the most uncomfortable and in the most pain are going to win this race." And, and that's actually true in that sport and that's true in, you know, in most sports. And I don't think that's true in business is like, if you can put yourself in environments where you're being aggressive, but smart, taking the right bets, but have a team that is bought into the mission and comfortable with that level of aggressive risk. And I think, I think it's the right formula. So to me, that's what makes this fun.

• 31:08Harry Stebbings?

  When with the benefit of hindsight, did you push too hard and you had to pull back?

• 31:13Speaker 00

  In the early years, and I think we still, I still, you know, try to moderate this. With our business, like we could launch so many things within like a month. You know, you could launch a skincare routine, you could launch like a makeup brand. You could launch sleep vitamins, you could launch like a wearable device. You, I mean, there's just like anything people are doing in health and wellness could live in the him's and hers brand, which is pretty powerful and also extremely risky, right? Because if you, if you do too much and you, you move into the wrong areas, you, you waste a ton of resource. So in the early years, you know, I thought just having everything on the platform was how you win. And so we invested in skincare regimens and we invested in vitamin supplements. And we invested in, you know, so many things that in retrospect were, were fairly commodity products.

• 31:58Speaker 00

  And for pretty much the same price or even less, you could walk across the street to Walgreens and get something that was pretty much the same thing. And I think that, that was a massive mistake. You know, I think it was, it was a belief that just assortment won. And I think there's a more nuanced perspective that the right assortment wins. And so we're really careful about categories we enter, products we launch, to make sure that they're products and offerings that, that are actually differentiated for people, that are hard for other people to receive and get, get access to. And maybe that means it's pharmaceutical grade. It's manufactured in a way that is very, very challenging to get quality. Or there's a level of personalization that is required in this care of treatment that makes it

• 32:40Speaker 00

  unique to you. But when I think about some of the early D to C brands that launched, you know, they were selling commodity products and those products capped out at, you know, a billion in revenue or a couple hundred million in Facebook spend and the curves were like this. And that's my nightmare, you know, and so in the early years, made a lot of those mistakes and try to make sure we don't do that again.

• 33:00Harry Stebbings?

  I do want to go back to brand marketing element just because I suppose you mentioned, obviously, brand being a core component of like the defensibility. You know, when I interviewed Nick at Revolut, he said, brand marketing was the single biggest thing he's changed his mind on in the journey of Revolut, which I thought was an interesting statement. What do you know now about brand marketing and spend on things that seem facile? What do you know now that you wish you'd known?

• 33:25Speaker 00

  You know, I think what you gain confidence in with brand marketing over time is that consistency is required. So I think in the early years with brand marketing as companies are growing, they throw some dollars, you know, let's do an out of home campaign in New York because it's like really cool. It's like takeover subways, right? Which we did a ton of and they do it once and everybody, this team is so fucking excited because it's so cool and you can see it and you take pictures of it, but you do it once and then like months go by and it gets taken off and then that's it because you did it and it was fun and cool. And you look at the numbers and like, ah, maybe there's like a little spike in New York City, maybe on this day, like you can't really tell, probably not, but you hopeful. And then the next year, like, okay, what are we going to do this year? Right? Like that's just like, it's a guaranteed way to just lose money. It's a great way to feel

• 34:08Speaker 00

  good and it's super fun. It's like so much fun and we've done a ton of it and it's really fun. Like, that's not a business strategy. I think in order to have brand marketing work, I think it has to be consistent. It has to be consistently random, if that makes sense. Like, you have to be appearing in different places for people in a randomized way, but with consistency, because it's the multiple hits. Like, you have to be hit 10 different times in 10 different ways for all of a sudden that to say, hey, there's like a cultural zeitgeist association with hymns right now that I need to pay attention to. What are they doing that is showing up in so many ways in my life? Where your brand trust elevates, your cultural relevancy elevates. So it isn't a one-off thing. And I think in the early years, you know, you hope it is.

• 34:53Speaker 00

  You try to track it, but it does require a level of dollars. It requires a level of consistency. And actually, you know, Kathy, our chief comms officer, told me this when we were interviewing, which I completely believe. She's like, the thing early companies struggle with when it comes to communications and their brand is they get bored of saying the same thing. And then they move on to the next thing, right? Like early companies, we're excited, we're young, we're changing. So like, here's our vision and here's what we stand for. Then three months later, like, hmm, it's changed up a little bit. I want to say something different because I already said that thing in that last podcast. Let me say something new in this new one. And in fact, what makes great brands great is the fact that everybody knows why they exist, why they fight, who their customer is, what the value is they deliver.

• 35:35Speaker 00

  And it's because they say the same damn thing in 20 different ways every single week. And so I think that's one of the key parts about brand marketing or comms in general is consistency, making sure that that message and that narrative is not changing, which requires an immense amount of discipline. And in many ways, it's like a lot less fun. It's much more of an engine, but over many, many years, I do think it builds.

• 35:58Harry Stebbings?

  When you're bored of saying it, you've got to remember that there's a new team member that's never ever heard it before.

• 36:03Speaker 00

  That's right.

• 36:03Harry Stebbings?

  And so you need to deliver it with the same passion and gusto that you did. I also think not enough for opinionated enough. If you look at the him's and hers brand today, where would you say you are not opinionated enough?

• 36:16Speaker 00

  I think him's and hers will increasingly have a stronger perspective of what great healthcare looks like. And I think as we grow, we are building an understanding of patients at a scale that I don't think most have, right? When you think about the fact that we're treating 10, 20,000 patients a day, like the largest health systems in the world are not treating 10 to 15,000 patients per day. There's an immense amount of knowledge that's being built around different types of patients, their demographics, their risk factors, their biomarkers, what medicines and treatments work, why, what side effects they have, how much they They feel better, combination therapies that are beneficial, like there's just an immense amount of knowledge base growing.

• 36:57Speaker 00

  Where I think we're going to be able to start having stronger perspectives of what excellence looks like in healthcare. What do we believe the gold standard in preventative care is? Like if you, Harry, want to be the absolute healthiest 29 year old, right? And be ahead of the curve, what are the 10 things you should be doing? What are the tests you should be doing specifically for you? What are the treatments, whether they're holistic supplements or maybe sauna, right? That you should be doing and what's that exact regimen and get ahead of it? And there you go, you're just, you're going to be, you're going to be gold standard, right?

• 37:31Harry Stebbings?

  I'm so far off gold standard, dude.

• 37:33Speaker 00

  You're doing great, you're doing great. And I think that's actually the point of like, to me, that's such a key part of the him's and hers brand is like, everybody feels that way. Everyone feels so far away from optimal and it's really fucking hard to take the first step, to have that confidence to like, make a change. And so most people that come to him's and hers are first time customers because I think we as a brand try really hard to empower you and say, hey, that first step is going to be easy. We're going to make it easy. It's kind of like that old marine or Navy SEAL story of like, you make your bed in the morning, right? Because when you make your bed in the morning, you've completed something like a very tactical action. You've had success, there's like positive adrenaline and then from there, you're going to do other great things throughout the day.

• 38:17Speaker 00

  Like him's and hers, I want to make it so easy for everyone to take that first step and feeling great. That that empowers a lot of people to do so. And from your question, we're going to have a stronger opinion about what great actually looks like.

• 38:27Harry Stebbings?

  So for anyone wondering, that is General McRaven's commencement speech. One of the greatest speeches I think recorded on the internet, I've listened to it probably a thousand times. It used to be the start of every single run because it's 16 minutes, which is always the most painful of any run, the first 16. So amazing aligned, I've got an out there idea for you. You said there you want to make it easier. Why do you not have him's preventative assessments in every city? And say, hey, we'll tell you what's wrong with you, like a pre novo does, or like any of the preventative. You can choose to buy with us or not, but by doing that, you're building up the world's largest set of healthcare data for free and you give it for free and the treatment's what they pay for.

• 39:12Harry Stebbings?

  It's like you're a loss leader. Also, what a goodwill engine. I would go to the dinner party, even if I didn't buy products. I'll go to all my friends and be like, you'll never guess. I found this out about myself when I went to Hims. Oh, what's Hims?

• 39:23Speaker 00

  I think we are, we are very close to that being a reality.

• 39:27Harry Stebbings?

  Are you able, do you have the elasticity and budget to do that? I don't mean that really.

• 39:32Speaker 00

  It requires two tangible things. So last year, we acquired your bio health, which is one of the, the few at home blood collection devices. I have it right here on my desk. And this device costs just a couple bucks to manufacture and you can click it on your arm and it's got 30 micro needles inside of it. Each of the micro needles is smaller than an eyelash. So if you feel nothing, you click a button, you feel nothing. And then a small tube of blood gets extracted from your arm in about a minute or two. You can then peel that off and you can mail it to New Jersey, which is where we have a lab processing facility and we'll have a couple others in the next year or two. And run a full panel, you know, 50 biomarkers and it will cost us like almost nothing.

• 40:13Speaker 00

  Now today, if you go to, to Quest or LabCorp and try to get that panel, cash pay maybe costs you a thousand bucks or 2,000 bucks. If you, you know, go online and go to different competitors, maybe it costs like 300 or 500 bucks for that panel. And, and my, my goal, my vision is like very quickly, I want to give that away as a part of the Hims and Hers membership for free. Because if you can get a sense of those metrics, and, and I'm not talking about just like baseline metrics, like, you know, your cholesterol and the things that I'm actually talking about. Things that are even more sophisticated, like genetic predisposition risks, which, you know, very few people get access to.

• 40:51Speaker 00

  Or, or cancer risks or polygenic risk stores. If you have a really accelerated risk of colon cancer, there's things you should be doing that are different. To me, that is the vision, a preventative front door that is near cost or free. And that requires us to spend hundreds of millions of dollars, which we're doing right now to totally verticalize this stuff and actually own. The devices, the lab processing and that fulfillment. But then a platform that says, here's everything we know. Here's what we can help you with. Give guidance and again, make that next step really, really easy.

• 41:22Harry Stebbings?

  I thought it was really interesting, Gokul Rajaram. He's amazing. I don't know if you know this. He basically said his biggest lesson from Square, where he was for many years, was that when you're running a multi-product company, not every product line has to be profitable.

• 41:35Speaker 00

  That's so right. Yeah, and I think for us, I think that entry point and that data collection, it serves two purposes. One, most people just don't even have access to this stuff. So they don't even know if they're like doing well. You know, I'll give you an example. One of my best friends, mid 30s. He's trying to live healthy. He was telling me the other day how he's running a lot. He looked at his cholesterol numbers and they were, they were like kind of out of whack. So he's like now starting to eat more salmon and going for a run. I'm like, oh, that's great. Awesome. And then I told him, hey, have you done testing for this specific genetic risk factor for heart disease? It's called lipoprotein little a. He's like, no, I've never done that test. So he ran, he did that test and he came back and he's like, my number is like 450. I was like, well, that's a problem because that number should be like under 70.

• 42:18Speaker 00

  And if it's 450, it means there's a pretty good chance you're going to have a heart attack at like 50 or 60. And he looked at me, I'm like, do you have, has anyone ever had a heart attack in your family? He's like, well, my, my dad died when he was 60 and my dad and my grandfather died at 55. Both of heart attacks. And like to me, that moment was why all of this matters. Because he went to his doctor, he went to a cardiologist because he was trying to do well. They gave him a set of panel and blood tests and his numbers were a little bit off. So he started to go for runs. Great first step. What they didn't test was a genetic predisposition marker that we now know is so much more important. And if you have that high genetic predisposition number, your cholesterol numbers need to be like amazing, not good. They have to be incredible or you're going to have a heart attack.

• 42:59Speaker 00

  Like there are so many therapies he should be starting now because he now has access to that number. That's the kind of stuff I want to give away for free. Like that, that level of information helps people actually like get preventative, not reactive. And, and put it on a care spectrum where if somebody wants to be aggressive, they can. If somebody wants to be conservative, they can. But I want to give people information and then I want to give them choice and assortment and a doctor to help navigate that for a cost that, that, that isn't overwhelming.

• 43:27Harry Stebbings?

  I'm sorry to be, and this may be a total tangent, but is it not like totally fucked that doctors get incentivized by drug companies?

• 43:34Speaker 00

  One of the things I learned earliest in my career is if you can't hire people that are smarter than you, you will fail. You know, I think what you gain confidence in with brand marketing over time is that consistency is required. Yeah, the whole thing is totally fucked, right? If you look at the existing system in the US, almost nothing has to do with patient outcomes or patient happiness, right? So many people make money. Everybody makes money, but none of them make money in any way that's actually reflective of success of the customer or patient. And I think that's where our model is most powerful. Like, we only make money at Hims and Hers if you are happier and healthier, period. Because you pay us. You pay us to be healthier. If you don't feel healthier, if you don't feel happier, you stop paying us. And so our incentive

• 44:19Speaker 00

  is only aligned with you. And we then fight behind the scenes, the drug companies, we fight the diagnostic companies, we fight everybody, and we work with them, but we apply pressure to them to get the best stuff at the best price to bring it to you. But ultimately, we only succeed if you succeed.

• 44:34Harry Stebbings?

  In a way, though, your business is like my business, which is like, we don't want you to be too successful where you don't need us. A world where businesses don't need venture capital is a problem for me. That's not a good thing. A world where humans don't need any medication, Andrew, I hate to say it, is not a good business for you.

• 44:52Speaker 00

  Well, for us, it's not necessarily about medication, right? Like, you will always need somebody to help quarterback your wealth and your health, right? Like, as you grow, as you age, you're always going to want to have somebody who's an expert partner that's available to you 24/7, that you trust, that can help you navigate how you feel in life. And this changes, right? Like, at different milestones, like, you might not be there yet, but in the 10 years from now, though, things will be popping up all the time. That trusted partner becomes so valuable, but I don't think that changes. And so that relationship that can last decades with Hims and Hers is what matters, right? Like, me just getting you a specific treatment today and making the most money I can from you today, that actually isn't what matters to me long-term, right?

• 45:36Speaker 00

  I'm 37. I've got like a multi-decade perspective on how big this business can be. In order for it to reach that maximum value, You have to build a brand that people trust to have with you for a very long time. And that means often saying, hey, right now, this treatment might not be for you. But we're here for you when something else pops up. And here's more information and here's more diagnostics. And here's maybe a wearable device. And here's some other habits and food and nutritional support to help you along the way.

• 46:02Harry Stebbings?

  What is your least profitable product that is most important?

• 46:06Speaker 00

  Right, right now, it's the lab testing offering. Right now, it's lab testing because we, we offer it essentially at cost. We haven't verticalized any of this infrastructure. So it costs us, you know, pretty much just as much money as we, we sell it for. And again, it's because I believe the loss leader value to the patient is incredibly important. And that margin will continue to be terrible because what we're going to do is continue to reduce the cost as we verticalize it. And then actually reduce the cost to the consumer. So that, that will always be, I think, a platform benefit from my standpoint where we try to make nothing on, but give patients information and access. And that ultimately can be really transformative for them.

• 46:44Harry Stebbings?

  What do you think not enough people know about Hims that they should know?

• 46:48Speaker 00

  I think a lot of people are still trying to understand why we are fighting so hard. Right? People see us in the headlines all the time. Recently seeing us in the headlines for, for GLP-1s and, you know, with drug company conversations.

• 47:02Harry Stebbings?

  Can I be a bit, why do we see like negative connotations with you and not Ro? It seems like the world likes to dunk on you more than Ro.

• 47:11Speaker 00

  I, I think when it comes to Hims as a disruptor, we are actually disrupting. I think we are pushing buttons that structurally change how people get access to care in this country. If you look in the last 18 months, like we were talking about, the most important medicines of the century got cut by 80%. Not only did they get cut in cost, but now they're available through consumer channels at prices everyone can afford. I think we played a part of that intentionally, right? We applied massive pressure, regulatory pressure, consumer pressure. We leveraged, you know, hundreds of thousands of patients to raise their voices to say, hey, these medicines could save our lives. Like, let's actually get them to us in ways we can afford. And coverage is now expanding dramatically and the prices are tanking.

• 47:54Speaker 00

  And so I think our willingness to be at the forefront of disruption and push on behalf of consumers, I think, causes friction.

• 48:03Harry Stebbings?

  And Ro isn't innovating in that way, hence they don't get the criticism?

• 48:07Speaker 00

  I don't know if, you know, I won't talk specifically about any other brand because I'm not sure their strategy, but I would say, you know, in order to actually disrupt the system, you have to break part of the system. And I think our strategy is doing that.

• 48:21Harry Stebbings?

  What part of the system would you most like to break that you haven't broken yet?

• 48:25Speaker 00

  I think we're in the middle right now of breaking how healthcare is distributed entirely. So instead of going through the PBMs and then through insurance and then through reimbursements, all of that complexity that nobody understands in the US, I don't think any of that makes sense. All of it, or as much of it as possible, will go through consumer channels like him's and hers, where you can pick up your phone, have on-demand access, have total price transparency, have complete choice of which doctor, which specialists, which treatment, complete information access, and then control. The system in the US is entirely paternalistic, right? You get treated with whatever they want to give you, and

• 49:06Speaker 00

  the incentives and reimbursements and costs are so convoluted that it's wildly overwhelming. And so when I think of every other industry we love, food delivery, financial services, banking, retail, everything is simple. It's on-demand, from your mobile device, price transparency, customer choice. Yet the one thing that is the most important part of our life doesn't have any of those elements. And it's the biggest industry in the US. It's where we spend the most money, too. And so I think that's entirely going to change. And so I don't think HIMSS is a D to C company. I think HIMSS is disrupting how healthcare is delivered in a consumer-focused fashion. And I think we're in the midst of that change.

• 49:48Speaker 00

  I think people are just coming around to it, and you're starting to see it with the GLP-1s as a prime example. But I think in the next five years, it's going to accelerate dramatically.

• 49:56Harry Stebbings?

  The lock-in and power of Epic is just mind-boggling. Does that progress or prevent innovation in the healthcare industry?

• 50:07Speaker 00

  I don't think it's relevant, actually. When you look at the patients coming to him and hers today, the patients starting their healthcare journey, the majority of them do not have legacy data and systems within old EMR platforms. Right? They moved to a new city, they moved to New York and they're 22 and they're like, I don't have a doctor, yet I'm feeling a little sad. What do I do? Right? And their first time entry into the healthcare system is him and hers. And so the wave of healthcare for the future, for the next 20 years, for the 50 years after that, is going to be a patient population that's starting today. And that's why I think, you know, you have to, you have to build a relationship early. You have to have an assortment of care that starts young for people so that you can give

• 50:50Speaker 00

  them an example of what great looks like and then build with them over many, many years.

• 50:55Harry Stebbings?

  Final one, and then I promise we'll do a quick fine. I know I've jumped around the whole thing, but that's why I love what I do these days. I think your food industry is at the root of all your healthcare problems. What you guys do to your food is not natural. Like apples are not meant to be that large. Salmon is not meant to be that cut. Do you agree that food is at the root of a lot of your healthcare problems?

• 51:15Speaker 00

  Hundred percent.

• 51:16Harry Stebbings?

  How genuinely, dude, how do you eat healthily and sustainably in New York today when it's all completely artificial?

• 51:24Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's really challenging. I think the current administration is doing an amazing job on that issue. I really do. Right? Like the push to eat real food, the push to normalize the fact that all of the ingredients on these labels is garbage, it's chemicals, the push to educate people to actually see what is good for you and look at those labels and require food companies to disclose it and to force changes on high-processed foods or corn syrup use. Like, it's poison. You know, my wife is, my wife is French and so when we're visiting her family overseas, I look at the labels, it's crazy. I mean, when you look at a French fried bag of, in a French grocery store, it's potatoes and it's olive oil and that's it. You know, you go to Safeway here in the US and you look

• 52:09Speaker 00

  at it and it's 40 different things. So I think there's a huge problem with the food industry. I think the government applying pressure and regulation there is a wonderful idea for people because undoubtedly that's a massive part of the obesity epidemic in the country and also probably the mental health epidemic and many, many other things.

• 52:29Harry Stebbings?

  Yeah, I'm totally with you. I feel, and actually on this one, I feel really sorry for, I don't know if it's about being classless, wealthiest, whatever, but I feel really sorry if you don't have money because I think it's really hard then.

• 52:41Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah, it's so difficult. I mean, we've got three little boys and I, you know, we try to, you know, feed them well and so we'll buy like a carton of organic blueberries, right? And that carton is expensive, organic blueberries in San Francisco. It might be like seven bucks. And I'll, I'll open it and I'll put it in front of the boys for breakfast and they'll grab handfuls and it'll be done in 15 seconds, right? And, and so the idea that, you know, healthy food costs this much and is consumed that easily is a real challenge right now. And so anything people can be doing to eat locally, to have local farms, to, to make sustainability in their communities easier and better, I think is, is, is all positive.

• 53:21Harry Stebbings?

  Yeah, I totally get that. Dude, I want to do a quick fire round with you. Okay. So I'm going to say a short statement. You give me your immediate thoughts. Does that sound okay?

• 53:29Speaker 00

  Sounds good.

• 53:30Harry Stebbings?

  What decision have you made in the last two years that you would reverse today?

• 53:35Speaker 00

  I think I was too slow to force the company to invest in completely disrupting their team processes with AI.

• 53:45Harry Stebbings?

  Which process was disrupted most?

• 53:48Speaker 00

  I think customer care, provider quality, all patient interactions. I think we, we were a year or two too slow on, on totally changing the model of how patients interact with the platform.

• 54:00Harry Stebbings?

  CAC goes up or retention goes down. Which scares you more?

• 54:06Speaker 00

  Retention going down.

• 54:07Harry Stebbings?

  Why?

• 54:08Speaker 00

  There are always ways to optimize efficiency on acquisition. There are always new channels, new brand campaigns, new, new growth avenues. But if you don't have a sticky customer and for some reason they're becoming less sticky, your product market fit, your patient happiness, your customer happiness is going in the wrong direction.

• 54:25Harry Stebbings?

  CAC only ever goes one way. Agree or disagree?

• 54:28Speaker 00

  Disagree. At scale, I think, with scale, with assortment, with brand value, new channels become unlocked, new efficiency grows. Leverage accelerates with assortment. It often only goes one way, but I don't think always.

• 54:44Harry Stebbings?

  Other than Ferrari, what do you not sponsor that you would most like to?

• 54:49Speaker 00

  World Cup.

• 54:50Harry Stebbings?

  Like the event itself, the FIFA World Cup brought to you by Hims?

• 54:55Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 54:55Harry Stebbings?

  Well, you got the US one coming, dude. It's not too late to spend some dollars.

• 55:00Speaker 00

  Right.

• 55:02Harry Stebbings?

  What advice would you give to yourself starting Hymns Again? You mentioned Jack and Atomic and starting it as part of Atomic. What do you tell yourself going back to the very start?

• 55:14Speaker 00

  I would tell myself to trust my instincts as we continue to build and get bigger and bigger. Continue to trust my instincts and also remember that it's going to be a long journey and the ups and downs are going to come and go. But that the persistence is going to be most important.

• 55:30Harry Stebbings?

  And I think we do meaningful jobs and you do a hugely meaningful job. But I think the most meaningful job that you probably do, which you'll agree with is being a father. Final one, what's your biggest advice on being a great father now having three boys?

• 55:45Speaker 00

  You know, there's a, there's a, something I watched once where they asked a whole bunch of little kids what their absolute perfect afternoon was. And these are like two, three, four, five years old. And the perfect afternoon was, all these kids answered the same way, just playing with their mom and dad. Just like sitting with blocks and playing with their mom and dad, or drawing with their mom and dad, or something with their mom and dad. And I don't think, you know, when you're exhausted and you're a parent and you're trying to do everything and pulled so many different ways. You realize that actually all the kids want to do is just have you present and truly present. And so my greatest advice I think would be to, to try really, really hard to just play with them.

• 56:26Speaker 00

  Like actually play, like get down on your, on your knees, on your butt in whatever they're doing. And just ask what they're doing and ask if you can do it with them because they light up. Because in parenting, like it's, it's hard to actually make time for that. But I've found that, that, that's, that's really the most important and valuable stuff.

• 56:44Harry Stebbings?

  Dude, I so appreciate you. I so appreciate the friendship. I so appreciate you putting up with my incredibly wayward comment. I mean, real breadth to the conversation. You've got to give me credit, but you've been fantastic.

• 56:57Speaker 00

  Appreciate you having me. Good to see you again.

• 57:00Harry Stebbings?

  But before we leave you today, you're in back-to-back meetings all day. You're trying to stay present, but you're also worried you'll forget the decision, the action item, the important next step. That's where Granola comes in. Granola is an AI-powered notepad for meetings. You jot down rough notes like you always do, and in the background, Granola transcribes and turns them into really clear, useful notes when the meeting ends. No bots joining your call, no distractions, just a clean notepad that helps you focus during or after the call. You can chat with your notes, ask Granola to pull out action items, help you negotiate, write a follow-up email even, or coach you using recipes which are pre-made prompts. It's actually the same technology we use to create our podcast notes.

• 57:43Harry Stebbings?

  Once you try it on a first meeting, it's really hard to go back. Head to granola.ai/20vc, that's granola.ai/20vc, and get three months free with the code 20vc, that's 20vc. Once Granola turns the conversation into clear notes, Finn turns that clarity into better customer support. If you're looking for a way to transform your customer service, let me introduce you to Finn, baby. Finn is the number one AI agent for customer service, resolving up to 93% of customer queries automatically. There is no other agent that can do that, not 93% of customer queries, okay? No other agent can do that. So why choose Finn? Finn is the best-performing AI agent for CS.

• 58:28Harry Stebbings?

  Finn doesn't just answer questions, it takes actions. It automates the most complex customer queries, like refunds, transaction disputes, technical troubleshooting, with speed and reliability. I wish my team was speedy and reliable. Beats every competitor in every head-to-head bake-off. Completely configurable and code-optional setup, my word. I mean, the benefits just go on and on. It's easy and efficient implementation, it works on any help desk with no tedious migration needs, it's trusted by over 6,000 customer service leaders, including top AI companies like Anthropic, Lovable, Synthesia, Clay, Vanta. So if you're ready to transform your customer service team, scale your support, and give

• 59:09Harry Stebbings?

  team members time to focus on the really high-level strategic work, learn more about Finn at fin.ai/20vc.