Superpower Raises $30M Series A Led by Forerunner

Jacob Peters, CEO & Co-Founder of Superpower, shares their recent $30 million Series A funding led by Forerunner Ventures. We go deeper into their ambitious vision of having an AI doctor in everyone's pocket and his own personal health journey that inspired the creation of Superpower. Superpower aims to provide a holistic and data-driven alternative to traditional medicine, offering personalized insights and actions to improve overall health. He also shares the meticulous steps taken to build the Superpower brand, including the creation of 'the world's healthiest hoodie' and securing the superpower.com domain. Get a glimpse into the future of healthcare, the challenges of the current medical system, and how Superpower plans to disrupt the industry for the better. Molly on X: https://x.com/MollySOShea Jacob on X: https://x.com/j__cub?lang=en Follow Sourcery for the latest updates! https://www.sourcery.vc/ TIMESTAMPS: 00:00 - Welcome Jacob To Sourcery! 00:49 - $30 Million Series A Led by Forerunner 03:57 - Building a Brand: The Story Behind Superpower 08:02 - Securing the Superpower Domain & Social Handles 14:41 - The "Healthiest Hoodie" Ever Made 17:54 - Jacob's Personal Journey & Founding of Superpower 22:03 - Misaligned Health System Incentives 25:06 - Holistic Medicine & Concierge Care 25:48 - The Birth of a Health Company 30:50 - The Shocking State of American Health 33:42 - Revolutionizing Healthcare with AI 34:02 - Building a Mission-Driven Team 36:56 - Comprehensive Health Testing 45:29 - Future of Healthcare & Business Model #podcast #investing #technology #venturecapital #entrepreneur #startup #siliconvalley

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  The word superpower has a certain connotation to it. Once you realize there's a whole parallel world of a better way to do medicine, you can't unsee it.

• 0:06Molly O'Shea?

  Thirty million dollar Series A, could you tell more about the round?

• 0:10Speaker 00

  Every person in America will have an AI doctor in their pocket.

• 0:13Molly O'Shea?

  Eighty-eight percent of people are metabolically unhealthy. This is the healthiest hoodie ever, correct?

• 0:19Speaker 00

  It's veritably the world's healthiest hoodie garment that has ever been made. I almost lost my life due to poor health incentives. As a result of what happened to me, I have to take these things every forty minutes. We are genuinely aligning ourselves with people and trying to help them create a sense of control. And data creates control.

• 0:42Molly O'Shea?

  Jacob Peters, welcome to the pod.

• 0:45Speaker 00

  Molly, stoked to be here.

• 0:46Molly O'Shea?

  Well, congratulations on your thirty million dollar Series A. This is huge.

• 0:51Speaker 00

  It's definitely huge.

• 0:52Molly O'Shea?

  Also, I have to address the elephant in the room. This is extremely awkward. I don't know if you guys are watching online, but we're matching. We're wearing the same sweater.

• 1:04Molly O'Shea?

  This is the healthiest hoodie ever, correct?

• 1:06Speaker 00

  It's veritably the world's healthiest hoodie garment that has ever been made, yes.

• 1:10Molly O'Shea?

  It's lovely. I love it. Okay, anyways, back to the fundraiser. Okay, thirty million dollar Series A, could you tell more about the round? Who led it? What are you doing with the money?

• 1:21Speaker 00

  Yeah. So something that I believe to be true is you build as big as your vision. And in a limit, we think every person in America, and frankly, the world, will have an AI doctor in their pocket. And consumers will fully disintermediate the existing healthcare system as it stands. And this is already sort of happening today, right? People go to ChatGPT or Google or WebMD before they talk to their doctor.

• 1:57Speaker 00

  And that's a trend that's only going to accelerate. And superpowers, obviously, as we'll get into, building some interesting tools to make this this future a little bit possible. So this is a really exciting milestone and important part of the journey. Because yeah, once you get past the embryonic stage and you get to a capitalization like this, capital no longer becomes quite as much of a constraint and you have the freedom to execute. So we're currently hiring eight engineers and building as fast as we can.

• 2:25Molly O'Shea?

  Love it. So who were the investors involved in this round? How did it come together?

• 2:29Speaker 00

  So we were fortunate enough to be able to team up with Kirsten Green.

• 2:32Molly O'Shea?

  Amazing.

• 2:33Speaker 00

  Yeah, amazing. Who's the founder of Forerunner Ventures to join the board and be a part of this, a part of this round. So Forerunner was the lead investor. Almost all of our existing, basically every single one of our major existing investors doubled down. The round was almost double oversubscribed, which

• 2:54Molly O'Shea?

  Oh my gosh.

• 2:55Speaker 00

  Which is one and a half times oversubscribed. I don't want to overstate.

• 2:58Molly O'Shea?

  Okay.

• 2:59Speaker 00

  Which is, which is, which is great. And I think just indicative of the excitement behind the tailwinds in this, in this category. And something that, you know, I think was particularly exciting about working with Forerunner and Kirsten is their ability to uniquely underwrite the power of brand. I think most investors and even founders or just people building companies, brand is a very mispriced concept to them. And I think in the limit, in a world where, you know, AI and vibe coding is only proliferating and making it easier to replicate products, brand is possibly one of the most powerful modes and defensible aspects of, of a business.

• 3:42Speaker 00

  And it, I think ultimately creates higher LTV and market cap, right? Good example of this, take any commoditized product category, gyms, you know, you have Equinox and 24 Hour Fitness. Functionally the same underlying commoditized product, except one has a much sexier, splashier brand. I like Equinox and they have 10x the ability to charge, right? $30 a month versus $300 a month. You know, 3x differential in, in market cap of those types of companies. So brand is a very powerful thing when done right. And I think the thing that attracted me and the team to Kirsten Forerunner the most was just their, their, you know, unique intersection of being a Silicon Valley, you know, native like tech-focused investor, but also

• 4:24Speaker 00

  understanding the power and the resonance of what a iconic consumer brand can become.

• 4:31Molly O'Shea?

  So can we talk more about the brand because you guys have done that really well. You created a little like hype storm on the internet and on socials. I'm wearing the healthiest hoodie that's ever existed. It's incredibly soft and I'm not just saying that. But could you share more about your brand strategy and how you got to that point?

• 4:55Speaker 00

  I think one of my biggest learnings over the past decade in startup world is just the power of eponymous brands, right? Like meaning it is, you know, the name is really what it sounds like. And companies like Robinhood did this exceptionally well a decade ago. They came into the market at a time, you know, post 2008. And obviously they're a $40 billion company now, right? So it's something has worked, but they came into the market in a time when people are feeling super financially disenfranchised.

• 5:26Speaker 00

  And the brand literally stands for giving to the rich or stealing from the rich and giving to the giving to the poor. It's all about financial empowerment, right? There's a lot of like vibe to Robinhood and the story and the ethos of of the company. And they built a tool that helped people take control of their financial life and disintermediate, you know, the traditional almost financial advisor or or or brokerage system. That brand has obviously hit mass market acclaim and we kind of see there being very similar seeds right now in healthcare, right? United Healthcare CEO getting shot. People are very frustrated. You can't go more than like seven minutes on social media without seeing something about, you know, the Make America Healthy Again movement, Nano Plastics.

• 6:09Speaker 00

  It's just, it's reached a boiling point and the zeitgeist is there. It's like the perfect ripe primordial soup where we think a company and a brand to come in that again is eponymous, that is what it sounds like, like superpower where our whole ethos is to superpower people's health and help people, you know, use healthcare as a tool to unlock a better level of human performance that they otherwise thought that was possible. And give them give them control ultimately. So that's some of the ways that we think about brand and the intention behind the name, which was a very intentional thing. And I guess the the backstory and how the name came about, this was actually branded in a pre chat GPT era. So I

• 6:50Speaker 00

  can promise you that this was all just Jacob's brain. So halfway through 2022, I put together this list, again, drawing from this power of like, well, what, what would an eponymous brand in healthcare look like? I wrote out like 250 statements in sentences of like, things that, you know, we could theoretically do as a, as a company towards this goal of, you know, enhancing people and helping with their health. And one of those statements was superpowering your health. I'm like, oh, that's a really interesting one. Of all the words and the, you know, the, just the brain dumps that we'd gotten on paper, this one really stood out because, you know, the word superpower has a certain connotation to it. It invokes, you know, at least in my mind, feelings of, you know, like, or images and like a sense of, you know, Captain America,

• 7:30Speaker 00

  or, you know, being superpowered, right? It's a very strong emotionally, you know, connotated term. So I went out and ended up getting lucky with the way we secured some of the social assets in the domain.

• 7:47Molly O'Shea?

  Okay.

• 7:47Speaker 00

  Which is, which is quite a story. Because I think the, another thing I believe is just the power of domains.

• 7:55Molly O'Shea?

  Yeah.

• 7:56Speaker 00

  And, you know, having like authority and trust and credibility from, from day zero. So when I realized the word superpower, superpowered was something we wanted to, to lean into, I went to go see if the domain was available. It was, but then it turns out it was owned by some like Singaporean private equity firm.

• 8:13Molly O'Shea?

  Superpower.com.

• 8:14Speaker 00

  Superpower.com. Yeah, it was, it was, no one had owned it. So I inquired, went through this whole rigor moral for months and months, tracked down like a domain holding company, but they had had some contract with another holding company in Singapore. So they didn't actually own the domain, even though they said they did. So it was just this multi-month-long process where I was on the phones, you know, probably sunk way too much time into this. Eventually tracked down the domain, put together a deal, and we ended up buying it for actually only a few hundred K. But believe it or not. Yeah. And I've been offered over 2 million for it by a well-funded AI company, which I will not name.

• 8:48Molly O'Shea?

  Do you also have superpower.ai? Or is that in your shopping cart?

• 8:52Speaker 00

  So, so fun story there. When we got the $2 million offer to, to, to sell the domain to this other well-funded AI company about a year ago. I realized, okay, they're probably going to try to rebrand to Superpower anyway. So I went out to try and get superpower.ai and then I also went and filed a trademark for anything superpower and AI related. Really? So I called my IP attorney on like a Sunday morning and he's, you know, in Nantucket, like, you know, with his family and he's like, why are you calling me? You know, I don't work on weekends and I'm like, and obviously, you know, that whole world's probably very different than than us where it's a 70 day a week job. But I get him to, you know, pull up at his computer, go home from the beach and file like a whole, you know, basically trademark request for us that that weekend for all

• 9:37Speaker 00

  things superpower and AI related. And I kid you not, the next day on Monday, that company that tried to acquire our, our, our domain filed the patent or the trademark for the same concept. Oh, my God. But I got there 24 hours before. So eventually, you know, when it gets to approval, we can dispute and we'll win that obviously because we we got there first. So that's a lesson in the power of the power of speed. And they ended up rebranding not to superpower because we turned down their their domain request and, you know, got the AI. But the more interesting part of the story was actually how we cobbled together the universe of the complete universe of social handles. So it's kind of like, you know, Pokemon, right? You go from Charmander to Charmeleon to Charizard if you're trying to evolve your Pokemon.

• 10:20Speaker 00

  It's like we went from, you know, the domain to the Twitter handle to the Instagram. Like, we wanted to have the complete, the complete stack, got to catch them all. So, so the Twitter handle was a fun one because we got at superpower on Twitter. It was owned by a guy who had written like an energy book 25 years ago, something on like clean energy, you know, pre, pre Tesla days. And so I went on Amazon, bought his book, sent him an email with a screenshot being like, hey, man, I read your book, thought it was really great and I'd love to buy your domain. Here's some of the things I want to do with it. And he replied back, thank you so much for being magnanimous and buying my book, you know, it's not really selling that well anymore. And

• 11:02Speaker 00

  As a thank you, because I could totally extort you because it sounds like, you know, you're going to be capitalizing this company, I'm going to give you the account for free. I'm not going to charge you. And he changed the password to go change the world, don't be an asshole.

• 11:14Molly O'Shea?

  Wow.

• 11:15Speaker 00

  Like 29 character string. And I was like, okay, at that moment, like, the company is born. Like, that was the moment I realized the power of the mission that we are invoking. It's not just the name, it's the mission of the company. So, you know, we're not just an eponymously branded company that makes you feel something. We also have a story behind the company and a story behind, you know, the hoodie and all the things that we we put out into the world, which we'll get into into in a second. So it was really that moment that I realized the power of the mission that we were getting behind, where I could have easily, you know, been extorted for $50,000, you know, by this guy for his Twitter handle. But he's like, no, I resonate so much with what you're doing. Just take it for free and go, go change the world.

• 11:51Molly O'Shea?

  I hope you gave him some advisor shares or something.

• 11:54Speaker 00

  I should, I should email him back and get him a free membership.

• 11:56Molly O'Shea?

  Yeah, and a hoodie.

• 11:58Speaker 00

  Yeah, and a hoodie. That's, that's great.

• 12:01Molly O'Shea?

  Give back.

• 12:01Speaker 00

  Stay tuned for part two. And then the Instagram was the craziest part, maybe the craziest part of the, of the lore here of completing the package in the brand universe. So, the owner of at Superpower on Instagram was the founder of the Kuwaiti equivalent of DoorDash. So, I ended up calling a bunch of his restaurants, tracking, using some social engineering to track down his personal WhatsApp number.

• 12:31Molly O'Shea?

  Wow.

• 12:32Speaker 00

  To get him on a thread. And he was just like, not interested whatsoever to sell. He's like, I like my username. I don't need the money. Basically, go screw yourself in a nice way.

• 12:45Speaker 00

  So, what we ended up having to do over the course of the next two years was, you know, continue to massage that, that relationship. And I eventually got a colleague of ours, a member of our team who was in Dubai at the time, to fly to Kuwait.

• 12:59Molly O'Shea?

  Whoa, whoa, whoa. You have a team member in Dubai that went to Kuwait?

• 13:03Speaker 00

  Yes. Yeah, he was visiting Dubai.

• 13:05Molly O'Shea?

  Okay.

• 13:05Speaker 00

  From the US.

• 13:06Molly O'Shea?

  Okay.

• 13:06Speaker 00

  Over, over the holidays to see some family. And we get him to hop on a flight to Kuwait to go meet this guy for lunch. So, we coordinate a lunch meeting. And in the meeting, again, it shows you the power of the, of the mission. You know, when you're, anytime you're able to make a face to face, you know, connection and relationship, it obviously changes the game versus just some like, you know, faceless WhatsApp connect. So we got bought into this idea that, you know, him helping us complete the brand universe is a powerful stepping stone to improving humanity. And, you know, as soon as someone feels like they're part of the story, it changes the negotiating landscape. So we ended up, um, you know, figuring out the right financial arrangement that was that was workable.

• 13:48Speaker 00

  Uh, and getting him to offer to, to, to, to work on the, on the handle with us. So we ended up securing him. The full brand universe. And I guess all it took, um, was probably, you know, 50 hours of negotiations and tactics across these, these three different things, you know, the domains of the Twitter and the Instagram, a trip to Dubai, uh, purchasing a book, uh, negotiating with a Singaporean private equity firm. And, and we, uh, we got it done.

• 14:12Molly O'Shea?

  That is commitment, relentless execution and long-term vision. Very impressive.

• 14:19Speaker 00

  Yeah. And fun fact, my dad was in the US military and used to serve, um, he, he served in Operation Desert Storm, uh, before I was born.

• 14:26Molly O'Shea?

  Oh, wow.

• 14:27Speaker 00

  In Kuwait. So, um, it was a fun story for him too, to tell him that, uh, you know, we, we made things full circle and got the domain from a, from a Kuwaiti.

• 14:36Molly O'Shea?

  Going global.

• 14:37Speaker 00

  Going global. Let's talk about the hoodie.

• 14:40Molly O'Shea?

  Let's talk about the hoodie. I want to talk about the hoodie. Can, can you just explain this? Because I think it was a very strategic and interesting, I love merch. Merch is great. We just had Ariel Zuckerberg on. She also loves merch. Merch is really important, but you created like a social wave with the hoodie and you strategically did it with certain people. I'm very happy. I got early access to it. Thank you very much. I got a couple of people to buy it because I'm just so influential. But could you just share more about it?

• 15:09Speaker 00

  Molly, you're an influencer.

• 15:13Speaker 00

  Okay. So the, something we think a lot about internally is this, um, idea of concavity versus convexity. Right? So a concave curve, you know, the first part of the parabola, uh, it basically, um, you know, the, the idea of your concavity basically states that if you

• 15:34Speaker 00

  Make something, you know, nine out of 10 versus eight out of 10, you're going to get diminishing marginal returns from additional unit of time. So we didn't want this to just be another merch drop. In fact, I don't even consider it merch. I consider it like an extension of the soul of the company. And an opportunity to, you know, give people a sense of identity when they are, you know, joining the superpower, the superpower community. So with that in mind, we actually started with the narrative and the story before we even got into the physical, the physical product. And there's this bigger idea of just how, you know, the institutions that be everything from like, you know, pharmaceutical industry and incentives to the other problems in the

• 16:15Speaker 00

  food supply chain, agriculture, big chemical, you know, are very relevant and topical for people right now. And it's, it's not quite yet as prevalent in our understanding of clothing. So we started this narrative like, you know, clothing might be making us sick. The, you know, the clothing industry is broken. And here is just a, you know, a complete antithesis to that. It's literally like the healthiest hoodie ever made. And you might think, you know, hoodies, which are nice and snuggly and comfortable, you know, are good for the soul, but they might actually be perniciously impacting you if they have a lot of toxic dyes.

• 16:48Molly O'Shea?

  Microplastics.

• 16:49Speaker 00

  Yeah, exactly. Polyester, these things, they basically leach, you know, nanoplastics that literally get inhaled as you, you know, move the fabric. So it's, it's just not so, not so grateful. So we started with a story. So we didn't actually sell a hoodie or drop a hoodie as much as we dropped a story and, and a vibe and something that, you know, people could associate as part of their, their, their, their identity and tell a story about, right? It's not just, hey, I'm wearing this hoodie and it says a brand on it. It's no, there's a story behind this, this hoodie. So we're selling, we're really, we're selling a story. And that's what enhanced the, the, the virality of it.

• 17:23Molly O'Shea?

  Every detail of superpower is super intentional and also quite intense. Like I think that's very commendable and very interesting. Not many companies have that kind of commitment to it.

• 17:39Speaker 00

  Or convexity.

• 17:39Molly O'Shea?

  Or convexity to the brand. And the brand is important. The story is important. You guys are dedicated to the story. I know. The start of Superpower is actually a very personal story for you. I don't know if you feel comfortable sharing about it, but I'd love to learn more about your personal story and journey and how it led to founding the company.

• 17:59Speaker 00

  So before, um, before I get into the story, and you'll see why we're doing this.

• 18:03Molly O'Shea?

  Mm hmm.

• 18:03Speaker 00

  Um, as a result of what happened to me, I have to take these things like every 40 minutes or every few hours. It's an electrolyte shot and I'm gonna make you share one with me.

• 18:13Molly O'Shea?

  Oh, really?

• 18:14Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 18:15Molly O'Shea?

  I love taking it.

• 18:15Speaker 00

  Okay, it's called Quinton.

• 18:17Molly O'Shea?

  Okay.

• 18:17Speaker 00

  We sell them on the Superpower marketplace. Uh, yeah, um, and it's Spanish seawater.

• 18:24Molly O'Shea?

  Okay.

• 18:25Speaker 00

  So the way this works is you break open one end of it, it's a glass ampule.

• 18:29Molly O'Shea?

  Do I have to?

• 18:29Speaker 00

  Try to cut yourself.

• 18:30Molly O'Shea?

  Okay.

• 18:31Speaker 00

  You hit it really hard, yeah, yeah. Um, and if you spin it upside down, the water's not gonna fall out because gravity will, you know, do its thing. But, um, it's, it's from an aquifer in Spain and, uh, pretty much like untouched by humans. So no contamination or toxins. And there's a, like a plankton and algae population, uh, in this water body that has resulted in the water being very trace mineral rich and nutrient dense. So the trace mineral content in this electrolyte shot actually like very closely mimics the natural trace mineral composition found in like our blood albumin. So more or less what that means is like, it's really good for you. It's very hydrating, um, you know, uh, mineral rich. And you can even use it as like saline, like I've gotten IVs of this stuff.

• 19:13Molly O'Shea?

  Really?

• 19:14Speaker 00

  Before, yeah.

• 19:15Molly O'Shea?

  Expensive.

• 19:16Speaker 00

  It's a little expensive, you know, these things cost like a dollar or so, an ampule. But, um, if you break the other end and put it in your mouth, you'll get like an immediate electrolyte boost.

• 19:24Molly O'Shea?

  I'm not that strong.

• 19:25Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 19:31Speaker 00

  There you go. A little salty.

• 19:35Molly O'Shea?

  Definitely very salty.

• 19:37Speaker 00

  Very salty, but very hydrating.

• 19:38Molly O'Shea?

  Very refreshing.

• 19:39Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 19:40Molly O'Shea?

  Very refreshing. It complements the liquid death.

• 19:42Speaker 00

  There we go. It complements the liquid death.

• 19:45Speaker 00

  And, uh, the reason I have to take this is because I actually don't have a large intestine. Which in the primary function of the large intestine, um, you know, is, uh, number one to like hold your stool. But then number two, uh, is. In your bacterial population, but it's also to regulate electrolytes. So, you know, not to be too graphic, but we run a healthcare company, obviously. But the reason why your stool is supposed to be a little hard is because your body is actually pulling water out to rehydrate the rest of your body and calibrate your electrolyte balance. So I'm sort of like missing that entire process within my body. Because I almost lost my life due to just a handful of intricate,

• 20:27Speaker 00

  poor health incentives and healthcare failures, which ultimately is what catalyzed the company. So this is something that I have to do as a personal practice to maintain my hydration and my sanity. And it's not that fringe, a lot of like Olympic athletes in triathlon and marathon runners will do this stuff. Rather than carrying around a big flask of water, they'll just have a few electrolyte vials with them to rehydrate.

• 20:52Molly O'Shea?

  Yeah, much more efficient.

• 20:54Speaker 00

  Yeah. So in my case, you know, I'll be brief with the story, but the TLDR was, you know, prior life, I started a multi-hundred million dollar software company in my early twenties. And I made the classic mistake of putting my, the pursuit ahead of health foundation, which is something that I think far too many entrepreneurial and ambitious people do. Because you just don't know any better, right? And in my case, I wasn't sleeping properly. I kind of lacked the tools to take control and know what was happening in my body, number one. But also number two, like deal with hard things. Now I have like a much different perspective on stress and ability to reframe.

• 21:34Speaker 00

  And I've, you know, done a lot of work on, I guess, like the subconscious patterns that run my life. In order to, you know, deflect and better calibrate myself when stressors do emerge. Because building a company is just like the ultimate Herculean task. So that was something I lacked in it. Obviously caught up to me, got stuck in the hospital for many months. Had to get a handful of surgeries and obviously lost part of my stomach. And the core reason for this comes down to health system incentives. So in America, Close to 85% of health system revenue comes from two sources. Do you know what those are?

• 22:12Molly O'Shea?

  Tell us.

• 22:13Speaker 00

  Pharmaceuticals and surgery. So, most health systems and hospitals have vertically-integrated infusion centers, pharmacies, so they're capturing margin on the pharmaceutical side of things. And then they also have surgical centers, right, where they perform surgery. Like, if you have gallstones, the main protocol is typically to get your gallbladder removed, right, which is a nice, probably $100,000 billable event, plus all the post-op care and follow-up visits. Versus recommending something that might be a little bit more of a holistic root cause approach to understandable why are there gallstones forming in your gallbladder,

• 22:52Speaker 00

  instead of just saying, "Well, let's cut it out as a solution." So, again, this is an example of where the incentives are misaligned. So, in my case, with a hyperinflamed colon, dealing with autoimmune disorder, Crohn's disease was my diagnosis, never once was there an attempt to understand the root drivers of what results in disease. And this is one of the flaws of the myopic specialized system we have today, where everything in medicine is relegated to organ system specialists, or doctors who have to go through a lot of advanced training to become a cardiac expert, or an endocrinologist, or a gastroenterologist, versus taking a step back and looking at the

• 23:33Speaker 00

  whole system holistically and figuring out, "Well, where are things going haywire, systemically or cellularly, versus just looking at your aspect of health in a silo?" And in my case, because to hammer everything's a nail, the gastroenterology team that I was being seen by, they were effectively, willfully ignorant to things that were happening in other parts of my body, because all they look at is that one organ system or aspect of you. So, the fuller picture was missed as to what was driving the diagnosis in my case, which was probably some combination of dysbiotic microbiome, too high of a toxin load, a dysregulated central nervous system, mitochondria that were impaired in their functioning,

• 24:18Speaker 00

  nutrient imbalances, a few genetic mutations that gave me a few predisposals, which you can mitigate with the right supplement and lifestyle strategy. And that was never considered. It was only, "Well, you have this presentation, our intervention that is FDA-approved and considered..." Standard at the hospital, when it's going to bill us the most money is this surgery or this TNF alpha immune system modulator, which is like a called a biologic drug. It's a class of biologic drugs that modulator immune system. They make they generate like 15K a month and you are on them for life typically. So very good business model. If we look at it from that perspective, so those were the only solutions afforded to me. And never once were they trying to uncover the root cause of what happened as opposed

• 25:02Speaker 00

  to when I got out of the hospital and discovered the world of concierge medicine, where if you have capital and you're in the know in America and the world, you can basically get access to a private medical system or private health system, health system where you can work with doctors who are not accepting insurance, pay all cash and they will look at you holistically because they've been trained in what's called like functional medicine or holistic medicine or cellular medicine where they don't just look at again specialties in a silo. They consider the unified view of everything that's happening and how all the interconnected problem, all the, all the different problems are interconnected together, the root cause of what's ultimately driving your, your, your disease and then systematically checking the box on each of those in order to get you back to full health and peak state.

• 25:45Speaker 00

  So that was what happened to me and it obviously inspired the company because once you realize there's a whole parallel world out there of a better way to do medicine that is holistic, that isn't reactive, that considers the full picture, that considers the complex interactions among different organ systems and cellular processes that drive in a disease or make you not feel as good as you are, you can't unsee it. And it became very obvious, being a technologist and a brand builder, that there was an opportunity to basically productize this model and take what the best physicians in the world have figured out and turn it into code. Number one and number two, wrap it in a brand and a story and a mission and a narrative

• 26:25Speaker 00

  and a fight against the incumbent forces and incentive, you know, misincentives that be in healthcare to ultimately change the status quo of health in America, eventually the world, when we go global, when we go to Kuwait. And that's, that's, that's what birthed the company.

• 26:44Molly O'Shea?

  Wow, that is, well, I'm happy that you're doing well and you're healthy. I can't imagine how hard that journey must have been and how frustrating it would be to have to go through all that and reveal that, oh, you actually don't have to take the hard route that would cut you open and do all these things, but take a holistic route. And you're young, too. Like, you're fairly young, and that is a systematic problem in the US.

• 27:10Molly O'Shea?

  Being misdiagnosed, or being diagnosed early on with something and getting all of these practices put on you that might actually affect you for a really long time and not know how to treat it, or go more natural path, functional path, that kind of thing.

• 27:26Speaker 00

  Yeah, and it's, you know, if we just think about it from first principles, you know, the body's a system. So why is medicine not holistic and consider things as a system? It really comes down to, actually, the constraints of,

• 27:44Speaker 00

  you know, I think, two things. One is that the medical paradigm was architected in a world where our understanding of science was much more limited. And if we go back to this idea of, you know, convexity, I think we are now, especially in 2025, at the beginning of the exponential jump of the J curve, where human knowledge about science and how the body works is only exponentially compounding. Meaning that, you know, gap between the understanding of the world when medical, when the medical system was created, and what we know about science now is only exponentially growing. And that's obviously a really big, big, big gap. But number two, it's actually the fact that we are constrained by the limitations of the human brain and our ability to compute.

• 28:30Speaker 00

  Because what is a doctor really doing if you break their job down into like a, you know,

• 28:38Speaker 00

  into a really simple view, it's, they're computing between a few databases. They're, basically, healthcare is, a doctor's job is an informatics problem, right? You're computing between, when you're a doctor and you go see a patient, you're computing between a database of what you know about a patient, what you know about medicine, and what interventions you have in your toolkit. And you're just triangulating between those three different databases, right, to ultimately help, help treat the, treat the patient. And that's overly simplistic, right? Obviously, there's a lot of circular references and things that get really complicated. But at very simplistic level, that's like the basic computation of medicine and of healthcare.

• 29:15Speaker 00

  That obviously means we're constrained by what humans can compute with. So that is why we have architected this system where people specialize in each of the different aspects and organ systems or specialties of health and modern medicine today because you can only learn so much. Really, really tough to be as deep in cardiology as you are in endocrinology or gastroenterology or neurology or any of these other specialties. But with the advancement of foundation models, compute is no longer a constraint in medicine, which has opened up this market opportunity and this portal for healthcare to really be

• 30:00Speaker 00

  built as a product. And for us, if it is an informatics problem and compute is now a solved problem, then theoretically, there's an opportunity to build a new medical paradigm from the ground up that does not rely on specialties and does not rely on a system that was created when our understanding of science was much more nascent and does not rely on the constraints of the human mind and its ability to compute and only store so much medical information. That is the kind of wave that we are riding and building upon it. That superpower is a paradigm in which AI solves a lot of those problems.

• 30:34Molly O'Shea?

  I think that's a great answer for why now. I want to share a couple of stats and data points because I'm always shocked by this and I revisit this a couple of times every now and again. Okay, so you share a couple of stats in the superpower manifesto that I think are just really glaring. And then I'll share some more from Casey Means because wow, oh my gosh. So 88% of people are metabolically unhealthy.

• 31:02Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 31:03Molly O'Shea?

  8,000 chemicals exist in the US food supply.

• 31:06Speaker 00

  That don't exist in Europe.

• 31:07Molly O'Shea?

  Obesity rates have more than tripled since 1960. Americans put on an average of 168 chemicals on their bodies each day. Oof. Female fertility infertility is at record highs. Male testosterone and sperm count are at record lows. Okay, now we go to Casey Means. Oh, my gosh, these, these ones are pretty scary, too. Seventy-four percent of adults are overweight or over be or obese. Fifty percent of kids are overweight or obese. And by the way, like 120 years ago, there were no cases reported, so it's very crazy. Seventy-seven percent of adults are unfit to serve in the military.

• 31:50Molly O'Shea?

  Fifty percent of adults in the country have prediabetes or type two versus 1% in 1950s. Thirty percent of teens have prediabetes. Wow, that sounded really fancy.

• 32:03Speaker 00

  Part of this is we have better, um, you know, telemetry now and, and, and ability to measure this type of stuff.

• 32:09Molly O'Shea?

  Yeah.

• 32:09Speaker 00

  But it's still damning.

• 32:11Molly O'Shea?

  Oh, it's, it's, I mean, you could see it, you could see it anywhere. Go walk around the airport or something.

• 32:16Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 32:16Molly O'Shea?

  People don't look well.

• 32:17Speaker 00

  They don't look well. And this is, you know, part of the, the, you know, beyond my personal story. And, and maybe they're interrelated, but just the why behind why we're doing, what we're doing. It's, it's the number one thing we screen for, um, as a, as a company is mission obsession. Like when I literally go to the airport, I flew into LA the other day. I'd like, I see people who clearly have fatty liver, you know, clearly have way too high of a toxin load, clearly have, you know, cortisol and just too high of a, too much inflammation in their face. Or they're not metabolically healthy and you can tell it visually. It just makes me viscerally sick.

• 32:51Molly O'Shea?

  Yeah.

• 32:52Speaker 00

  Like it makes, I genuinely feel sick in my body, uh, sick from empathy for these people. And it's, it's such a systematic challenge. And, you know, beyond a product, the superpower, we're, we're trying to, you know, offer a, a message, uh, and, you know, sell hope really, right? And, and sell is even the wrong word. It's more just, you know, we are genuinely aligning ourselves with people and trying to help them. Create a sense of control and data creates control.

• 33:22Molly O'Shea?

  So we have Make America Healthy Again, Maha, Brian Johnson, and more of these kinds of brands and advocates that are sharing stories, they're sharing actual discrepancies in the systems and what actually might be the root cause of what's going on. Can you just explain what do you think the biggest failures of traditional medicine are? And maybe, could you explain how superpower is attacking all of those at once and what you're offering to the user?

• 33:55Speaker 00

  Again, we've touched on a few key themes during this chat. The power of brand and storytelling and mission-driven, and the mission-driven nature of a company and how powerful that can be.

• 34:12Speaker 00

  Convexity. You build as big as your vision. And I'd add another, which is, you know, the team you build is the company you build, right? Almost, close to a dozen of our founding team members. Hannah, who runs design, shout out Hannah. Max, who is my co-founder. Kevin, my other co-founder, our CTO. All former venture-backed founders. And they've all seen some shit.

• 34:46Molly O'Shea?

  Yeah.

• 34:47Speaker 00

  Or, you know, just like know what it's like, you know, to eat glass and have to go through, you know, the tough motions to birth something into existence. So if the teams you build is the company you build, and we've set this, you know, again, convex bar for talent, where, you know, someone who is a nine out of 10 higher, a 10 out of 10 higher teammate, you know, is going to be exponentially better than a seven or eight out of 10 person.

• 35:17Speaker 00

  And we're building a team of this caliber because the mission demands it.

• 35:21Speaker 00

  Then ultimately, the company you build will be a function of that initial DNA and that initial starting group. So beyond getting too tactical, I would just say, you know, look, any company can take any number of directions over months and years, you know, roadmap can change to be flexible. Uh, but the reason we believe we've, you know, will earn the right to build an enduring company that lasts all of us, uh, and a brand and a product that really helps people with health is that we started with the right people around the table and we'll continue, we'll we'll continue to to attract that. Um, the other lens I'd add is just the, the flavor of the skill sets of, of the team. So we're certainly, uh, I think a much more Silicon Valley native, like product and engineering

• 36:05Speaker 00

  org than, uh, anyone else who's really circling the, the healthcare space. And, you know, in healthcare, typically, I think, you know, you have healthcare insiders or experts who team up with technologists to build their, their, their, their company. That's kind of been the paradigm of building, you know, healthcare and digital health over the past few years. I think we've yet to see a

• 36:27Speaker 00

  very engineering native team, like our entire engineering team is formerly like DevTools, you know, like Y Combinator DevTools engineers as, as an example. Teaming up with the health subject matter experts in the, in the scientific community to build something. And that's just, again, a very different flavor of initial company DNA that will ultimately help us flex into a direction where we're building like a much more unique and differentiated product experience than anything else out there that, that exists. So what we're trying to reverse engineer is the patient experience, uh, you get at a high-end concierge clinic. So when you go to one of these clinics, they basically do three things really, really well. Number one, uh, they centralize all your data and test your whole body. Right? So they don't leave any stone unturned.

• 37:11Speaker 00

  They'll look at everything from like genome to microbiome. Uh, they'll call every doctor that you've ever visited throughout your life to centralize all your medical records and put it all into a nice one big file for you with, with a bow.

• 37:22Speaker 00

  We basically do all that automatically and at super low cost because we get the, again, the volume discounts of doing it with scale and automation. Second is the really good doctors will help you make sense of all that data. And the more prolific ones, you know, the more convex doctors that I've worked with, they will actually spend like three or four hours with you on a whiteboard, connecting the dots across everything that's happened in your health. Were you born c-section or vaginally because that can impact your microbiome from birth all the way to, did you have mono or Epstein-Barr virus before age 14? Because that can permanently alter your DNA and your immune system. How did your grandparents die? Do you have an afternoon slump? You know, what gene mutations do you have? You know, what's your estrogen level?

• 38:04Speaker 00

  All these things matter and it's really tough today to try and triangulate insights from all that data to get an understanding of, you know, what is your health today? Why is it that way? And what is your trajectory ultimately? And how far off are you from your baseline of what could ultimately have you feeling in order of magnitude better? Which most people don't even realize is possible because our brain is so good at acclimating to, you know, the baseline, right?

• 38:30Molly O'Shea?

  I just feel like this every day. Why do I need to change anything?

• 38:33Speaker 00

  You don't realize it's actually mediocre relative to how you could feel. And as soon as you start to make some of these changes, you can't unsee, right? Or you can't unfeel that lens. But that's step two is we make sense of all that. And obviously in a, in a, a human brain constrained medical paradigm, it costs $50,000 to $100,000 to get that level of insight and access and time and intention with a really smart person who's a scarce resource because there's only so many of those really smart prolific convex doctors. So they can charge a lot of money. We can obviously replicate that with AI or at least enough of it where it's meaningful and insightful. So that's, that's step two and what we do. So that's basically to sum that up, it's a system of record, right? All your data, a system of intelligence. So mimicking the brains of the world's best doctors.

• 39:17Speaker 00

  And then we're three, on the member experience is a system of action where we're actually building tools, software, a marketplace of healthcare services and products to put all the things you need to do for your health into practice. Because today, healthcare is just like very fragmented and hard to. Access. We wrap all of this in a membership that today looks, you know, a little bit like test your whole body, centralize your data, get insights on what's happening and then have tools to, to, to, to take action. And for most people, even the base version of what we built today is exponentially better than anything they've ever had because we test about like 10 times more labs than your traditional annual physical, which is very lacking relative to what

• 39:56Molly O'Shea?

  What are those labs? Just so people can understand.

• 39:59Speaker 00

  Thyroid, which, you know, is really, really important for your metabolism and the, and the state of your body. Metabolic health, getting ahead of cardiac problems. AZ on your pod last week was talking about lipoprotein A and it being elevated. This is a super important marker. That basically means you have a genetic predisposition to things like heart attacks and strokes that you might be completely unaware of because it's never tested for in a traditional annual physical. Toxins, nutrient statuses like zinc, which, you know, are very important for things like proper hormone production. Hormones is another one. So we really look at the full picture and all these things I'm mentioning are basically not checked in a traditional annual panel, which is only really looking for the presence of active disease. Like, do you have immediate risk of death, heart attacks, strokes?

• 40:44Molly O'Shea?

  What's your blood pressure?

• 40:45Speaker 00

  Exactly. What's your blood pressure? Right? So it's very limited and very, very, very, very limiting.

• 40:51Molly O'Shea?

  Right. I think I want to understand a little bit more on the onboarding process and what it's like for a user. So if, if they're coming to superpower.com, what do they start to do immediately? Actually, you know what? You guys have a large waitlist. Let's talk about that. I think the last time I checked, it was over 100K people on the waitlist. So can you talk about how you've accrued? I think we know that. So like you have a big brand and that kind of thing. But how, how are those people that are getting off the waitlist? How do they get funneled into the beta or the real product? Like, what does that look like?

• 41:21Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, we start by getting all your past data. So we pull in your medical records. We ask you a lot of questions to make sure we really know you. And, you know, this is the problem with, I think, a lot of testing companies today, is they just kind of give you these cookie cutter insights versus taking into account, you know, some of the things I mentioned earlier that are really important, right? That status of potentially your microbiome. Did you have a lot of antibiotic usage as a kid? All these things really impact us permanently. And it's important to know that. So we capture all that data. We send you to a local partner lab. We have locations with partners in most major cities where we can send a nurse to your house, which most people prefer.

• 41:55Molly O'Shea?

  And do you just like pick and choose from different things to test? Or are you recommending a suite?

• 42:00Speaker 00

  We have a standard panel. We have a suite, a standard suite of panels that again is more comprehensive than your annual physical. And then most members add on things like a microbiome test or toxin testing or cancer screening, which if you're over 35, probably good to do at least every five years according, you know, based on our superpower research team.

• 42:19Molly O'Shea?

  Do you have one of those full body scans?

• 42:23Speaker 00

  We're working on it. Yeah.

• 42:25Molly O'Shea?

  Those are cool.

• 42:25Speaker 00

  Yeah. Yeah. And yeah, your results come back pretty, pretty quickly. And we, we use a team of AI plus humans to help you make sense of all this and give you a software product that, and a dashboard and a platform that synthesizes everything, makes it easy to digest and easy to take, take action from.

• 42:43Molly O'Shea?

  I've been involved in functional medicine and health for a while. When I was younger, my mom had thyroid cancer, so I've been seeing a doctor for this for a while because then it made me neurotic and then now I'm obsessed with health. So I've tried everything out there. Like I've tried, like, you know, using a traditional concierge doctor to going online and doing it myself. And I much prefer that because now I'm neurotic and I like to take control. But there are plenty of other.

• 43:13Speaker 00

  You're not neurotic, you're proactive.

• 43:15Molly O'Shea?

  Thank you. So there, there are a couple of other companies out there like Function and Parsley Health and specific ones. So how does Superpower differentiate itself against those? And, and the competition?

• 43:28Speaker 00

  If you truly have a vision for a company and a brand that you think will outlast you, then you reframe competition as the only competition is the task itself. Because what you're trying to do is fundamentally so hard. And one of my co-founders, Max, and I, shout out Max.

• 43:48Molly O'Shea?

  Shout out Max.

• 43:49Speaker 00

  Shout out Max.

• 43:50Molly O'Shea?

  Wish you were here.

• 43:50Speaker 00

  He should be right here. Next time. You know, when, when him and I were, were thinking about working together, we had this interesting conversation of, you know, what's, what's, what's one of the most ambitious things we could do in this lifetime? Either separate or together. And we came to this conclusion of, well, you can either build a city or a new healthcare system.

• 44:13Speaker 00

  Both just like hugely daunting, complex and multidimensional tasks endeavors.

• 44:23Speaker 00

  And we decided to start with the second, the latter, which is the healthcare system, which you know, in any big city, you have a healthcare system or you know, local health system. So the way I think about competition is because we're thinking so big with where we want to take company.

• 44:43Speaker 00

  I'm not even concerned necessarily with what anyone else is doing today because I'm taking the multi year and multi decade, multi decade view.

• 44:51Molly O'Shea?

  Focused on the mission.

• 44:52Speaker 00

  Focused on the mission. And then our other co-founder, Kevin, you know, he hails from Amazon in a prior life. So he brings a lot of, you know, Bezosian philosophies. Shout out Jeff.

• 45:02Molly O'Shea?

  Let's get Jeff on the pod.

• 45:05Speaker 00

  Yeah. In into the, into the business as well. So yeah, for us, like, you know, we kind of have blinders on when it comes to, to, to everything else that's happening in the market. So focus on the mission, focus on the customer, build the best product. And, you know, longer term, from the foundation that we're building on, there's a lot of interesting business models that get, that get unlocked.

• 45:25Molly O'Shea?

  Yeah.

• 45:27Speaker 00

  Some companies that, you know, I do look up to are, and again, some of the biggest companies in America, United Health and Kaiser. And what makes them really special is they are, you know, known as what's vertically integrated pay providers, meaning they have a healthcare provider. So like the doctor combined with the healthcare insurer, which is the payer. And in that model, you can unlock, you can unlock a lot of synergies for obvious reasons. So yeah, because of the model and the, you know, data-driven health pop from our building with superpower, longer term, one day, you know, I'd believe this will give us a unique underwriting advantage because of the data that we are

• 46:08Speaker 00

  accumulating to be able to build a similar type of business, whether it's vertically integrated house joint partnership or, or something. I think that because today you can't really get anything that's, you know, outside the norm. Again, the pharmaceutical, the surgery, the, the, you know, insurance reimbursed, the simple physical lab tests, which are very subpar as we've established, covered, and you have to pay, pay, pay cash or out of pocket. We're going to see this decoupling where I think, you know, People are going to be okay paying for emergency health insurance. But then there will be different new innovative models to help cover the fact that there are a lot of things that move the needle on health that today you have to

• 46:51Speaker 00

  do completely, completely out of pocket. And TBD exactly what and how this is gonna, this is gonna look. But you know, that's one of the big angles that we're, that we're thinking about is, you know, what does the biggest health, consumer health company in the world look like? And it's probably some

• 47:06Speaker 00

  combination of

• 47:09Speaker 00

  becoming the fintech layer and owning the, you know, insurance and the underwriting, the ability to actually cover and figure out, you know, the, the risk of how do different interventions and proactive health measures and things you do to take control, you know, ultimately, uh, in a cost effective way.

• 47:31Speaker 00

  Help both your bottom line and the patient and the member that you're trying to, to, to serve. So.

• 47:36Molly O'Shea?

  So how does the business model work today?

• 47:39Speaker 00

  Yeah. So today it's a membership. So people join superpower. It's a few hundred dollars a year.

• 47:44Speaker 00

  And they get access to the platform twice a year, full body testing. So that there's again, never any gaps of understanding in terms of what's, what's ultimately happening in, in your body. And, um, you know, because we have a marketplace and ecosystem of referral partners, there's, um, you know, quite a lot of monetization opportunities as well. And we want to be very incentive aligned with anything that we are, are recommending. So trust is sort of like the tantamount north star internally that we, we orient every product decision around is just maintaining member trust. Like we, people are truly, we revere the fact that people are entrusting us with, with, uh, you know, with their life and with their health.

• 48:28Molly O'Shea?

  So Jacob, we've covered pretty much everything I could think of. To close it out, I want to know what you're most looking forward to this year.

• 48:37Speaker 00

  I'm just most, most excited about getting the product in the hands of the people who need it most.

• 48:44Speaker 00

  In a few years, we're going to have millions of Americans superpowering their health. And we, uh, we finally have the capital, the team, the partners and the right primordial soup to do it. So couldn't be more stoked to be serving this mission.

• 48:57Molly O'Shea?

  Amazing. Great way to end it.

• 48:59Speaker 00

  Thanks, Molly.