Medsider: Learn from Medtech and Healthtech Founders and CEOs - Solving the 'What Next' Problem in Health Diagnostics: Interview with Vero Bioscience CEO Paul Coletta

Episode Date: September 14, 2026

In this episode, we sat down with Paul Coletta ( https://www.linkedin.com/in/paulcoletta ), the co-founder and CEO of Vero Bioscience ( https://www.verobioscience.com/ ). Vero's OrganAge™ assay measures the biological age of each organ from a single bl...

What next dynamic? So what Vero is trying to do with their product we're calling VeroCompass is bridge that insight to an intervention at the organ level. Even at the cell level, our technology gets down to cellular resolution, telling you which organ is the most vulnerable, why it's the most vulnerable, giving you an intervention that we think is evidence-informed to address that vulnerability,

and then measuring for efficacy. that's closing world. That's what we feel is really needed and what's going to be sort of game-changing about what we're bringing to market. Hey everyone. In this episode, we sat down with Paul Coletta,

co-founder and CEO of Vero Bioscience. Vero's organ-age assay measures the biological age of each organ from a single blood draw and its Vero Compass platform turns that reading into a targeted action plan. Paul built his career on storytelling and consumer marketing,

starting with a decade at Disney before leading brand and product marketing roles at MTV Networks, He then went on to build popular food brands, including Jamba Juice and Pinkberry, and spent a decade as CEO and chairman of Urban Remedy. Here are a few topics we explored in this conversation. First, what separates a game-changing health product from one that delivers information alone?

Second, how do you turn company values into something that shapes how a team operates? Third, best practices for building visibility and relationships with investors before needing capital. And last, how do you keep a board engaged without letting it run the company? Before we dive into today's episode, a quick heads up that the full Medsiter interview archive has officially moved over to my personal platform at Scott Nelson Live.com. Our popular courses are now available there too, and they're free. Speaking of courses, if you're a founder or CEO preparing to raise capital, you should check out the fundraising cohort. This four-week live workshop combines small group sessions with real-time feedback to help you sharpen your investor story,

build a targeted investor pipeline, and run a focused fundraising sprint instead of a never-ending slog. Over the month, you'll walk away with an investor-ready narrative and deck, outreach scripts that actually get responses, a refreshed LinkedIn profile, a simple content plan that keeps you on investors radar, and a repeatable system for running your raise. You can join the waitlist at Scott NelsonLive.com forward slash courses. Again, that's Scott NelsonLive.com forward slash courses. All right, let's get to the interview. All right, Paul, welcome to the program.

Appreciate you coming on, man. Thanks for having me, Scott. I am very much looking forward to this conversation, especially considering one, your wealth of startup experience, right? But also, you spend a ton of time and I would say some pretty iconic consumer brands, right? And I'm now building a very kind of science-oriented, you know, health, medical-oriented startup. So I think that's a very kind of very unique blend. So I'm definitely looking forward to digging more to that. So with that said, I recorded a very short bio. It's a very abbreviated bio at the outset of this episode. But let's start there.

Let's, you know, give us the, give us like the one to two-minute, you know, elevator pitch on your your background before starting Vera. My career journey certainly hasn't been linear, right? I've always kind of gravitated to things that inspired me to build something that was useful, valuable. But it started when I dropped out of my first year of college. This is 1983 because I had a more compelling learning opportunity that led me to join Walt Disney, the Walt Disney company. And by the way, dropping out of college. This was much to my father's disappointment. He was the chairman of the physics department at my university. So formal education mattered, I think, a lot more to him than it did to me at the time. But I spent a decade at Disney. I think it was a great decision. It was sort of my,

I think of my decade at Disney as my education, kind of my foundation. And I spent a decade there as an entrepreneur, which was a small group that Eisner and my boss at the time Steve Burke had put together to explore ways to extend Disney and the brand into new lines of business. So it was a really incredible opportunity to be an entrepreneur in a Fortune 10 company at the time. And Disney is really where I learned the power of storytelling. You know, how do you connect with people emotionally and build products that people actually fall in love with. And from there, I continued my path in entertainment, Viacom, working on extending their brands Nickelodeon, MTV, Paramount, then as Stent with HP, working in more of an engineering environment responsible for product

marketing. But my big shift was a move to food about 15 years ago, something I'd always been passionate about. And so I built food brands, Jamba Juice, Pinkberry, Palm Wonderful, and then 10 years as CEO of Urban Remedy, working to reimagine our very broken industrialized food system. And happy to tell you more about that if you're interested. But that's kind of the arc of my not so linear career. Yeah, I'm looking at your LinkedIn profile, which we'll link to. It's a little frenetic. Yeah, a little frenetic, but also like I'm looking at all these logos, right?

And it's like, oh, I've definitely seen that one at Whole Foods. I've definitely seen that one, very familiar with that one. It's like it goes on and on, right? So it's cool. I don't get to interview a lot of people that are building, I would say, health companies now that have the level of kind of consumer experience that you do. So I think, and I actually think we're going to probably see more of this, right, as health and wellness becomes not only more kind of consumerized, I would say, but like you and I both know,

like there's such a burgeoning trend with more people, especially with AI, you know, definitely taking more ownership over their health. So I expect to see more founders, more CEOs, maybe with a bit of a background like yourself, right, with a ton of consumer chop. So with that said, tell us, we're going to certainly get into a lot of different topics in this interview, from fundraising to how you identify an idea maybe that's worth going after to, you know, early stage kind of prototyping and R&D stuff. But let's talk at first about Vero, Vero, bioscience. That's the URL as well, Vero, V-E-R-O-Bioscience.com. We'll link to it in the full write-up as well and for the program. But give us like a high-level idea of kind of what this is, what you're solving for, for those

that, you know, have never heard of the company. Yeah. So, you know, just connecting the dots to what we were talking about, two threads that ran through my career. One is, standing consumers and telling stories that move them. And the other was this deep curiosity about health, starting with my own. And those two threads eventually came together in what we're building at Vero. And Vero is probably the clearest expression yet of what I've been moving toward my entire career. So the journey started when a friend of mine, now co-founder, Marcus Okumas, knew that I was interested, deeply interested in how. health and my own biology, and he offered me the opportunity to try this technology that had been

developed at Stanford over several years in their neuroscience department by Professor Tony Weiss Coret, who's well known in the world of proteomics, and is also now my co-founder and head science for varro. And it was an assay or a blood test that was able to tell me the relative health of each of my organs by measuring proteins. We have about 25,000 gene coding proteins in the human body. This test actually looked at about 11,000 of them and was able to tell me the relative health of each of the organs by measuring gaps in age, estimated gaps in age between my chronological age. I'm 63 at the moment. I was 60 at the time I took this test. But it said that I had signatures of accelerated aging in my kidney, which I have to tell you, I found it interesting,

but I didn't believe it because I'm one of these optimizers. It's always looking at my blood. And I went back, my kidney markers, my traditional markers were all asymptomatic. They were all green. My creatinine, my GFR, everything looked good. I had someone with a ultrasound sound device, a concierge physician, wand my kidney, and I had a large renal cyst on my kidney. And I thought, wow, now, renal cysts for somebody my age are not completely unusual, and in this case, wasn't dangerous. It was benign, but it is definitely a sign of aging. And that got me super curious, like, how do we use a technology like this to predict disease?

and I'll get into it in a minute why age and disease are so related to one another. But how do we actually predict disease and keep our population out of this sick care system? We don't have a health care system. We have a sick care system and we have a wealth care system. There's not really a true sick care system and I think it's a very difficult thing to fix this sick care system because so much of profits are aligned with managing disease. And that's what really, got me interested in starting Vera with Marcus and Tony. Super helpful overview. Yeah. And I'm right there with you. Like I, just to touch on that, I grew up in, I would say, the traditional device space, most of it in the cardiovascular arena,

but all reactive, right? So think thrombectomy catheters that suck out a clot out of an artery, to catheters that break up calcium as an example, right? All needed, but very reactive. And then when I started Juve in the kind of the red light therapy, most people know it as red light therapy, but it's photo biomodulation. I got introduced to this whole new world of like preventative, you know, consumer driven health, if you will. And it was like pretty eye-opening, right? Where it's like, I believe in this. You know what I mean? This is what more people should be doing, right? And hopefully it would resolve a lot of, a lot of healthcare issues. So I'm right there with you, right? With this huge need around, around being more proactive about your health.

So the Vero Moonshot, Scott, is ending age-related chronic disease. And I just, I'd love to tell you, you know, a little more about that. But that's the moonshot. How do we end age-related chronic disease? And I'm here to tell you we can do that now. That's the exciting thing. That's what has my team pumped up and my investors pumped up to go bring this to market, to translate this science out of Stanford's lab.

You know, we were able to secure the exclusive license to commercialize this technology. It actually bring it to consumers where we can make a difference. in people's health trajectory. That is, without a doubt, a moonshot. Right? So if you and your team can pull this off or even get us closer to meeting that need, that would be a phenomenal accomplishment.

But I'm on the website now, and there's a waiting list. So like if I'm a consumer, I'm kind of leaning in to like what you're talking about, right? I want to learn more. How exactly do I access this technology? Is it through a traditional blood? I mean, would I access it in the early stages

through a traditional blood draw. Give us a sense for kind of what this consumer slash patient kind of pathway looks like. Yeah, ultimately we will be a direct-to-consumer clinic, an at-home clinic. But today, we're not available. We will be, I hope, direct-to-consumer by the end of next year. If the listeners go to varrobioscience.com, they can join our waitlist. We have several thousand people on the wait list right now that we're, hoping to bring a subset through in the next quarter through in the way of IRB studies with

our clinical partners. And we have two clinical partners now. One we've announced, which is biograph. So if you're a member of biograph and we're on our waiting list, you'd have the opportunity to try this under IRB. But I'll tell you how the test works. It's a simple blood test, one vial of blood. Again, we're measuring about 11,000 of your 25,000 proteins. That goes off to a proteomic lab. We get the raw data back, and then we run it through our intelligence models to give you this organ age estimate. These are the gaps in age, biological age, or the better way to say it, the health of every organ. And we're measuring that through age gaps between your chronological age and the estimated age of that organ.

This model was trained on 45,000 people, a subset of the UK Biobank over 17 years. So it has an incredibly predictive window. So if we took your vial of blood, we'd say, okay, Scott, I hope this isn't the case, but you're 50 years old or whatever, but unfortunately your brain is 60 years old. And that is a high correlation, the age of an organ. or the age of a body has high correlation to disease risk. We would then recommend evidence-informed interventions at that organ level. I can give you examples of those. And we would remeasure in a one-to-three-month period to see if that intervention was actually efficacious. Was there a positive

organ outcome from that intervention? And that is a big idea. This idea that we could, can bridge a health insight to a targeted intervention, actually action, and then measure the response, the biological response is what I like to refer to as closing the health loop. And so many companies are out there right now giving you health insights, but they're not actionable. I mean, I recently took a blood test that said I'm 13 years younger than my chronological age. And while that is a great vanity metric, I feel really good about it. I don't know what to do with it. What next dynamic? So what Vera was trying to do with their product we're calling VeroCompass is bridge that insight to an intervention at the organ level. Even at the cell level, our technology gets down to cellular

resolution, telling you which organ is the most vulnerable, why it's the most vulnerable, giving you an intervention that we think is evidence informed to address that vulnerability. and then measuring for efficacy. That's closing the loop. That's what we feel is really needed and what's going to be sort of game-changing about what we're bringing to market. Game-changing, like, oftentimes sounds cliche, but like that would be pretty game-changing, right? Because like you and me both, like, I love like all of the activity in the, you know, in the, let's call it the wearable space, the diagnostic arena, right, the consumer diagnostic arena. Lots of cool activity, but you're right. You like you hit the nail on the head. There's this missing

part, right, where it's like, what do you do next with that information? Create information. We've never had it before, right? It maybe at the scale. But what do you do next, right? And, you know, being able to get people closer to, like, actions that drive results, that's pretty powerful. So where's where's very out? You mentioned, like, possibly by the end of 27, this will be available to consumers. Give us a sense, kind of for your, you're in, it sounds like your, maybe ongoing IRB studies currently. Yeah. So the next challenge is really making, so we've got this incredible scientific validation of our assay, our frontline assessment. Again, validated in 45,000 people. It was on the cover of Nature Journal. It was a pretty, pretty breakthrough, I think, discovery. And it attracted a lot of

interest in what we were doing. The next challenge is making it clinically validated. It's one thing to be scientifically validated as a surrogate, biomarker surrogate endpoint. And that's what we've done already. And that's very well documented in several papers we've published. The next is to make it a clinical tool. And the way we're going to do that is we're going to, under IRB with our two clinical partners, I mentioned biograph, we're going to announce the next partner in a couple of weeks. We're going to actually work with small cohorts of 50 to 100 people. And we're going to, in one cohort, focus on brain and the other on art. We are going to measure, clinically validated biomarkers of health today, things like VO2 Max or brain imaging,

volume metrics, occupancy scores of the brain in the case of brain. We're going to take the Vero assay, we're going to intervene at the organ level, and then we're going to remeure your VO2 max or your MRI and take another varro assay and see if there is a related correlation. If there is, and we believe we've got sort of signals that we can do that, we just finished a signal study, we're going to be publishing next week. Then we can become a clinically validated biomarker of health. That is the gold standard. That's really where we're headed. If we can prove that this scientifically validated surrogate endpoint is also a very useful clinical tool, it's huge. A lot of your listeners, I think, that probably understand this,

physicians might say, yeah, I want that. I want that. And so we don't really want to launch until we've got some real strong signals that we are clinically validated. We want to become the physician's gold standard biomarker of health. Yeah. And one that's clinically validated. Yeah. So one of the things we like to say is you're only as healthy as your oldest organ. They are only as healthy. And this organ-specific, you know, what we are doing is measuring and optimizing health at the organ level. It really is, I think, where the science is moving, where the market is moving. Yeah, I like that phrase because it's, it's, it brings a smile to your face, but it's very true, right? I mean, you could be the healthiest individual in the world, but if it's just one key organ,

one critical organ that's failing, that will likely not result in a good way or have to, certainly have some pretty significant downstream ramifications. So with that said, again, Vero Bioscience is the website. We'll link to it in the full write-up, but V-E-R-O-Bioscience, just as it sounds, varro bioscience.com. But Paul, let's use the next half hour or so kind of going through, I would, you know, some core functions, right, that every, every startup, whether they're chasing a moonshot like you are, or if it's kind of maybe maybe a little bit lower on the totem pole, so to speak, you know, has to go through if they're going to, you know, try to experience any semblance of success. So,

You know, we'll touch on maybe some R&D, commercial efforts, fundraising, et cetera. But I want to start more kind of with what you saw early on, right? You mentioned Dr. Tony, is it Weiss Corre? Is that his name? Tony Weiss-Coree, yes, at Stanford. He heads the lab that developed Dark Tech at Stanford. Take me kind of back to that time. It seems like initially you were a little bit skeptical, but you thought, look, there's something here.

You've built a lot of, a lot of, like, really, you know, been involved in a lot of iconic consumer brands. as I mentioned before. So was there anything else? Like what caused you to be like, you know what? This is not just kind of a cool idea, but this is like, this is worth like dedicating the next, call it 10 plus years of my life

towards trying to make this a huge success. Yeah, my co-founder, Marcus and I, he lived in Florence and I was there for the summer and we just started a cool little conversation in his backyard around what if. You know, he had already been working on commercializing the technology. for drug discovery.

There wasn't really a full court crests on the potential consumer application to this technology. And we kind of came to an arrangement that we'd go out and share the opportunity with a few investors that I had built relationships with in the past to see if there might be some interest in it.

And that's how we started. Let's talk about translating this into a D to C company in CF&E investors, might be interested in learning more and maybe raise a seat. Now, that went much better than I had ever imagined. I had started a conversation over maybe a year or two with a pretty well-known investor, Benocoastal Adventures.

And he had tried to recruit me into a couple of his health tech companies because he knew I was interested. And each time I kept telling him, you know, I want to do my own thing. And he has this famous question. He didn't just ask me. He asks, I think, a lot of entrepreneurs that he wants to work with. He's like, what would you do? I think he said, what would you do with $25 million if I gave it to you?

And that was the Willy Wonka ticket. I was like, let me get back to you. Can I get back to you? Can I have six months? So he was the first one that I went back to with this idea. I kind of like, that conversation with Marcus over the summer, I was like, I have an investor, I think, would really be interested in this because if you know Vinod, he's into this whole health tech space and is back some of the biggest and best health

tech investments. I think it was three weeks into my seat. This doesn't happen ever for me. I think I've raised over $100 million in my career. This has never happened to me. Three weeks into my raise, I'm in IC with three tier one companies. And Benode calls me, calls and says something like pencil down. I've got a, it was a verbal term sheet. Here's the deal. And I was like, well, wait, I can't do that. I'm a nice C. I want to wait and see what. He's like, no, what would it take to just say yes? And I told him and he said yes, and we were done. So we had a $6 million seed round with Kostla and we were off and running. Wow. Which was pretty cool. Were you already sort of bought in or was it like that strong of a signal from the node that you were

like, look, like, this is, like, we got to go, like now. Like, no more kind of, not that you were sitting on it, per se, but like, did that give you sort of even more fuel, right? Oh, yeah. Yeah, I mean, he's smart and he's got a guy working for him, Alex Morgan, who I just, who's heads sort of the health section. And I spent some time with Alex, and Alex already knew of the science and really gave me a sense of confidence that this was real science.

I am not PhD or MD. And I want to talk about how that was a curse and a blessing in a minute. But to hear from guys like Alex Morgan and Benaud say, this science is really solid and we think your vision is a good one was very affirming. And, you know, a lot of this game, this zero to one game is, you know, conviction. You know, investors don't create the conviction. You do. And you've got to bring it into the room.

And when they're like, yeah, you know, here's six million bucks. Yeah, sure. I'm human. That's like, okay, maybe there is something here. Let's go. That's so true because, right, it's sometimes, especially in those earlier stages, right? It's easy to kind of doubt yourself, especially if you're hearing no a lot or, you know, sounds kind of interesting. And you do hear you know a lot.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I hear 50 knows for everyone. Yes, this was a very unusual experience to have. you know, some big tier ones go, we're going to, this looks hot. Let's let's, you know, they were in I see. Three investors were tier ones were in I see within weeks. Yeah. That's pretty huge for that just, that just never happens. Yeah. It probably will never happen to me again. So yeah.

When you think about like other, I guess other kind of key, key kind of startup lessons like that, right, that you've got to bring the conviction to the room. You know, draw on like a lot of your, your experiences, right? Whether it's earlier in your career or at the, you know, the laundry list of, you know, kind of well-known consumer brands that you build. Anything else that, like, you're really trying to instill at Vera in the early stages here? I mean, just lessons from the trenches around fundraising. Is that your question? It doesn't have to necessarily be fundraising, but, like, just in terms of, like, you know, whether it's culture, whether it's team building, kind of as you think about, like, really kind of getting Vera off to the races here.

Let me say a few more words on fundraising, and I'd love to talk about team and culture. Those would be the three I'd want to spend the most time on. You know, fundraising is ultimately searching for aligned conviction. I use that word conviction. It's not this universal approval. I mean, most pitches, as you know, are dead-ins. They don't fit the funds mandate, check-size, stage of growth. So you are really out searching for this aligned conviction.

And, you know, you need to make the opportunity clear. Why this matters, why now, how it becomes a product people want. The right investor probably already has some version of your worldview. You know, your job is to find them, give them enough evidence to strengthen that conviction in not only the product, but your ability to uniquely realize the vision. That's the first thing I'd say. The second is that raising capital is deeply relationship-driven. You know, I have never raised a dollar. hasn't come through some form of trusted introduction or existing relationship. A warm intro. Capital follows trust much more than founders want to believe. Yes, the deck matters. Yes, the story matters. But before you spend, you know, another hour perfecting slide 17, you know,

you should spend it figuring out who can credibly get you into the room. So important. You know, I know you like to. ask this question if you were advising your younger self. I was listening to some of your podcast. So if I were advising my younger self, I'd say start building those relationships years before you need the money. Don't wait into your fundraising to meet investors. Socialize yourself and your work very early. Yeah? Love to talk about building teams. Hey, everyone. Let's take a quick break. Quick reminder that while we're cooking up something new for

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Again, that's Scott NelsonLive.com forward slash courses. All right, let's jump back to the interview. Before you get there, just one other follow-up. It's more of a point slash question. So I'm listening to you. I'm fortunate enough to like really, really be nodding my head here, right? Because it's like I've, you know, lessons learned over the past 10 plus years. I can see you've been there.

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, certainly I would by no means in some sort of like fundraising extraordinaire. but definitely would very much agree with your sentiment there. But for those that maybe don't have the experience that you have, right, raising capital and maybe don't have the relationships, don't shy away from this, though, because one, it's true. You 100%, like, it's absolutely true, whether it's new capital into the company or building out a syndicate around existing investors, et cetera, like really, really, like, tapping into

those relationships is crucial. But even if you don't have these types of relationships, that doesn't mean that you can't begin to build those now, right? I mean, that could be as simple as, and you don't need some sort of fancy website and you like all, you could simply start just posting on X, posting on LinkedIn, right, with your experiences, your thoughts on the world, et cetera. And that often begets other conversations, right, whether it's a DM or whether it's someone commenting on the post.

And it's like, that's the sort of stuff that you can do earlier in your career if you'd never done this. And that's just one example, of course. But, but I couldn't agree more with like that, like, it's very rare that you're going to close a significant round of capital off a cold email, right? Yeah. Another way to say that is build your platform. Build your platform.

You know, go out. Take the opportunity to speak about things that you are knowledgeable and passionate about, you know, conferences and boast your perspectives, your unique perspectives. The only real network I'm on is LinkedIn and I use it all the time. It's been a way for me to build my platform around the things I really care. about and influence. That's, you know, my definition for leadership is the ability to influence needed chain. And I'm passionate about that idea. Like, how do you lead? You influence needed change. That is what leadership is. And your platform is an opportunity to do that, to do precisely that.

That's a great way to think about leadership. It's really, it's very, it's very, it's very spot on. You know, when you think about what you know how what successful leadership is defined it it really amounts to you know changing something ultimately right moving something forward right which involves change etc but but let's jump to let's jump to to team building right because you've built a ton of teams in your career too and i'd love to get your thoughts on what either what's what hasn't worked or what's really worked and what you're trying to you know what you're trying to bring bring forward into into vera as you think about building up the team there the most important thing you can do is your zero to one team that if I look back over my career, the thing I am most proud of are the teams I built and the

cultures that we built together. So one lesson I've learned is stack the deck early. I made the mistake early on of not bringing that one or two rock stars on the team because I was worried about what I'd have to pay them and would it be too early. Like, stack the deck early on talent. And when you identify talent, here is a rule that has served me very well. Look for patriots, not mercenaries. Now, what's the difference between a patriot and a mercenary? A mercenary is out there fighting for the biggest check. They don't care about the outcome. They care about the income, right? The patriots fight with their heart. They care as much about the outcome as the income. And so the rule that has served me so well is this idea of looking for patriots, not mercenaries. And aim high.

Look for people that are much smarter about what they do than you are, you know, and start by surrounding yourself with people that really fill in on your gaps. You know, really the areas, you know, I'm not a, let me talk about Vero. Like the most important hire for me at Vero was my head a product. Somebody that had been there, done that zero to one in this environment of digital product experience. And I did a global search, host of Leventures talking about a value added investor. They brought their people team in to help us find our head of product. And we ended up hiring, you know, out of the entire search, we had a number one pick. And it was kind of like, can we even get this person. This person has such an incredible, you know, previously worked at meta, built

tools like audio, audiobooks. That was one of the tools she worked on. Her name is Talley. She's a rock star. I have seven rock stars. I'm just talking about the very first one. And, you know, she's come in and in a year and a half has built our MVP, hired an amazing engineer. And she's really my, She's really my partner on building this product at Vero and has been just a joy to work with. So, you know, this is an example of just aiming high and make them an owner, make them, you know, give them some real skin in the game. And, you know, the question I ask in every interview is why? Why Vero? That's what I want to hear. Yeah.

You know, why Vero? You could do anything. Why would you want to work for Vero? And I want to hear their passion behind sort of the. mission of what we're doing. And that's inspiring. I mean, I don't care if you have a gold-plated resume. If your answer to the why Vero isn't there, you're probably going to lose me. Yeah. I want to circle back around to this concept of stacking the deck, right? And I think just to kind of really double-click or emphasize what you mentioned there, you've got a world-class investor

in Coastal Ventures. And your first hire, like, you're bringing, I mean, you could have just, you could probably work with a recruiter, right, of like a really good recruiter. but you also brought in KOSLA as well to really support that. And I'm sure you probably did it across the board, right, for your entire team right now. But I just, it stands out because it showcases the importance of your point, right? Of stacking the deck and really, really prioritizing that early team, right? It's foundational to building, you know, to building the culture. Mm-hmm.

Yeah. You know, they, just to go back to value-added capital, they didn't just bring in their recruiter, okay? Their internal recruiter. they brought in the head of their product operating team. They have operating teams. They have a marketing operating team. They have a product operating team. They have an engineering operating team who was the former senior product person at Google.

And so they put that on my interview team and helped me identify someone that I quite honestly didn't have the technical skills to assess. I could assess them for fit and team and motivation. but I couldn't really assess them technically, and this is what a value-added investor looks like. It's in there, you know, helping you make good decisions. On this kind of topic of team building, the same sort of framework sort of applies at the board level, right? You sit on a lot of, I would say,

boards of very meaningful companies. Obviously, you're building out a board or built out a board at Vero. What do you think is, you know, one or two of the most important things in really not only aligning with your other board members, but really like fostering a healthy function at the board level that actually drives the business forward versus the opposite, right, which is, you know, negatively impacts the company. You just put your finger on it. I mean, a great board should make the company better, not make the company harder to run. And they should bring value beyond capital. And I mean,

I would just say at Vero right now, we don't really have a board. I'm happy to say. We're in this, like, very small, formative, you know, I've only got a team of about eight people. Venode hold the board seat, but he doesn't sit on boards. He, you know, will spend an hour with me every two or three months, which is incredible, but these are not board meetings. When you're building your board, look for people who bring something you don't have, relationships, operating experience, deep knowledge of the market you're going into, and think beyond BCs, you know, think to independence and or strategic investors. Good example of this in my time running Urban Remedy. I ran Urban Remedy for about 10 years. And I think it was in our Series B. We brought Whole Foods into be an investor. And they put some meaningful capital and a few million dollars in during that B round. But what was most valuable is they were willing to put one of their division presidents on our board.

And that became incredibly valuable to our growth because we no longer were having a conversation with Whole Foods, who was our biggest distribution partner, that wasn't strategic. It wasn't like what's the lowest price you'd sell us this product at. It was like, how can we make this work together? And it was huge. It was a huge part of the success of Urban Remedy. Was that strategic investor? So if I'm talking to some of your startup founders out there, think about who your dream strategic investor might be.

And don't tell yourself that it's not possible. You know, figure out you probably know somebody that knows somebody that knows somebody that knows that strategic investor and might be interested. And they are also great preludes to exit. That's the other way to think about it. You know, they've got a seat at the table and they may be the perfect exit partner for you because, you know, this one plus one equals three. That's what you're looking for.

That's a super interesting or important point, I should say, because most of us think about boards as, oh, this institutional firm owns whatever, 15%, 20% to the company. they get a board seat, right? And sort of like thinking about boards from that perspective, but the real value comes in what you just mentioned, right? Like if the end goal is, is we, or the most, one of the most important needs to drive the business forward is we need to be on the shelf of every Whole Foods across the country, well, what could be really value added there, right? Someone very influential inside Whole Foods sitting on our board that's very close to the company and can give us insight, right? I mean, you know, the president of Whole Foods picks up

the phone, calls the buyer and says, this is not a vendor. This is a, a partner company. Wow, that's just, that was a dream. But you know, the other thing I want to say here is you have to, when, you know, I've managed some larger boards. You have to manage the board, okay? The board does not run the company. There's a difference between governance and management. The board's role is governance. It's not management. The CEO manages the company. So my job is to give them the right information, be very open about what's working, and more importantly, what isn't, listen to their advice, but ultimately, I make the decision. And I love to bring my senior team into board meetings, and that's usually the first tutorial I give them. You are not asking permission

in this board meeting. You are telling them what we're doing, why we're doing it, and then you're asking for advice. But you are not asking. And I think it's a mistake early founders make is they think the board's making decisions. Their job is not to make decisions. It is not to manage the company. Yeah, and I would choose your board members as carefully as you choose your senior team. You may be sitting around that table for many years and, you know, speak with CEOs and founders of prospective board members at portfolio companies that were challenged. Find out how that board member was during tough times. You know, when things are going well, great.

All these board members, you know, lots of value out of, but when things are tough, you really want to hear a story or two about how that board member operated, how helpful they were during a really tough time in the company. And every company, even the most successful ones, go through it. So do your references on board members, definitely. Not the ones they're sending you to.

Do your backdoor references. Yeah. That's the important point, right? is like it's easy to kind of gloss over and just take their references, but do a little homework there, right? Or maybe not a little, maybe a lot of homework, right? And find references that they didn't offer up. That's really important.

When you've got a board that's been around the table, right, and it's seen even the ups and downs of the company, but is still there. I think it's such a testament, right, to the quality of that board. I was actually at an event just recently with a company that's kind of been through that, right? And I think the board directors that actually attended as well,

which is interesting in and of itself, I think they've been there for, gosh, probably six, seven years now through all of the ups and downs, and there hasn't been much turnover at the board level. It's just like, that's a really, really good sign, right? Probably some healthy board function. Yeah. We can talk culture for a moment? Yeah, let's do it.

Let's do it. Yeah. I always like to start with a definition of culture, you know, because everybody has a different idea of what corporate culture is. You know, I like to say it's not a ping pong table or, you know, free lunch. A culture within a company really is about a group of people with an aligned belief system in pursuit of a common goal, aka the mission, right? It's the how we get this done, not the what, but the how.

How do we get this done? And I would encourage every founder to document their values early on because, you know, the group of people with an aligned belief system, aka values, you know, what is it that we believe in? How are we going to operate? Getting those documented early on, I think, is super important. And I've done that in different ways. My favorite example was at Urban Remedy. I think there were like 10 people.

And I said, I want you to write on a piece of paper with one word, how we operate today. You know, we had only been, you know, in existence for a short period of time and throw it in a hat. And then I got all these words back. And I created this like word cloud with my founder, Nika. Her and I were just sitting there in our little plastic card table, which was our office at the time. And we like put this word cloud together. And the biggest word was family. And I thought, wow, they didn't understand the exercise.

Family is not a value. And then I realized I didn't understand this group of people. It was a family with all the good and bad aspects of being a family, a small family. And some of them, and I didn't know this at the time, were actually related. So it was interesting. But one of the values I've liked to instill in every company that I've run is this idea of embracing change, the word change, and adaptability. Because I think that in the future is going to be the real important thing is how do you change?

How do you take in new information and adapt and pivot? Any great company has had to do that and needs to do that. And so that would be an example of one of my favorite sort of values that has served the companies I've had the opportunity to serve well, which is this idea of embracing change and not just embracing it, but influence. it back to leadership. If something needs to change in this company, be a leader and get in there and influence it. It isn't simply the job of the CEO, you know. And so culture is about values. Culture is about values. It's about being aligned in how you do the work you do. And super important. And then keep it alive in the company. It's one thing to have it and learn about it in the onboarding.

it's another thing to keep values alive. And one of the ways we've done that is we have a monthly all-hands meeting. And we encourage everybody to give an example of how we did or did not live of value over the last 30 days. And you know it's really good when somebody calls out a value we didn't live. And I mean, that sounds like not something I want to hear of it. I'm like, okay. You know, hey, Paul, explain to us. was how the decision we made last week didn't live up to the value we believe in of X.

And I'm like, wow, thank you for that question. That's such a good point because, right, we all talk about like sort of culture is this idea. It lives and breathes, right? It's sort of ever flowing through a company. But that's a great example of like how do you actually kind of package that up? Yeah, keep it alive. Package it up into something that's a bit more tangible. It's like, hey, hands-on meeting.

Let's talk about specific examples of us living our. values or not or not, right? Because the not examples, right, or the not good examples anyway, is maybe oftentimes better learning experiences from those, you know? Exactly. Yeah. I know we don't have a ton of time left, Paul, but I want to leave a few minutes for this, this rapid fire portion of the interview. But again, varro bioscience.com is the website, V-E-R-O-Bioscience.com. Let's fast forward to 12 months from now. Take us to like kind of late summer, early fall of 27, what are you, like, what are you most excited about? What would be like absolutely killer if we could fast forward and this thing was going on at Vera? Let's see. Three things would have

happened. We raised our Series A, which I'm just kicking off right now with an investor that is every bit as value added as the one we currently have. So we've got capital. We have launched our MVP into these IRBs with live consumers. And we're learning and iterating at a very fast pace. And we're preparing to launch direct-to-consumer, this AI at-home clinic, this will be a subscription, annual subscription, where you measure and optimize your organs to hopefully keep you from age-related chronic disease.

And that, I think, you know, would be a big consumer launch in the fall of 2027. Those are three pretty... Oh, another one. And we have clinically validated Vero as a tool, meaning we've associated positive organ outcomes with our Vero assay outcomes. So we have become the gold standard for organ aging and organ health. That would be a huge. I think that is, I feel very confident about accomplishing that by the end of next year. Yeah, four pretty important milestones.

By the way, if you're listening to this, you've got to check out. I mentioned the website a couple times, but sign up for the wait list. I mean, this is absolutely like, I mean, if you're into this stuff, which I expect you probably are, definitely get on the waiting list. I mean, this is a very, very interesting technology. And I think a step, certainly a step above maybe not to knock, you know, rhythm and functional health, but kind of a step above kind of what they're offering. So we only got a few minutes. I'll maybe combine kind of the last two questions into one because you sort of touched on the advice that you give your professional self. maybe frame that up for other entrepreneurs, right? If you could go back in time and maybe learn one

lesson or tell yourself one lesson from a professional perspective as an entrepreneur, what do you think is one of the most important things that you'd tell yourself? I used to think big and think I had to act big. So here's a big, here's a small one. You know, big, but start very small. One of the biggest mistakes I made is thinking about size of market too soon. You know, What you really want to do is have, you know, back to my lesson at Disney, you know, and that was big, obviously, but you want a few people to love you, love what it is you're doing, have what you're doing be essential and value added to their life and then figure out how to expand from there.

And you know what I've often done, and I'm doing this at Vero. I'm building Vero for myself. I am the end of one. I am the end user. I am confident there are enough optimizers out there. to start a business. At HP, we read a book, Clayton Christensen, I think, is his name. He's sort of the father of product lifestyle marketing.

And he says, think about a market like a bowling alley. I'm not a bowler, but you don't try to hit all the pins. You try to hit the head pen as hard as you can. And if you're successful, it'll knock down the other pens. That's the extensions of the market. So think big but start small, try to build something that. a few people would really, really love, and only then think about expanding it and keep it simple. Keep it as simple as you can. I did none of those things when I started. So that's a big

piece of advice I'd give my younger self. It's a great way to wrap it up. It reminds me of Kevin, is it Kevin Kelly, I think, that wrote the book, 1,000 true fans, you know? Yeah, which is, I think speaks to your bowling. I've never heard the bowling alley example, but that's a really good one as well, you know. So by the way, that wasn't my example. That was Clayton Christensen's example in his book. Yeah, but it made a big impression on me. Yeah. This is, this has been a fun chat. I know we're up against it. But for everyone listening, I really encourage you to check out VeroBioscience.com. We'll link to it in the full write-up. If you're new to the, new to the show, we include these longer-form summaries of the interviews with our, with our guests like Paul that share a lot of,

like, really, really important insights in learning. So definitely encourage you to check those out. But Paul, thanks a ton for doing this. I appreciate it. Thank you, Scott. Yeah, I'll have you hold on live. But for everyone listening, appreciate your attention as always, until the next episode goes live. Everyone, take care.

Hey, it's Scott again. One quick thing before you go. You see, I love bringing you insightful conversations with the best founders and CEOs of medical device and health technology startups. But here's the thing. I'd be super grateful if you could help me reach even more ambitious doers who share our passion.

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