This Week in Startups - Oura CEO Tom Hale on Hardware-as-a-Service, navigating ZIRP, journey to CEO & more! | E1812

Episode Date: September 19, 2023

This Week in Startups is brought to you by… Embroker. The Embroker Startup Insurance Program helps startups secure the most important types of insurance at a lower cost and with less hassle. Save up to 20% off of traditional insurance today at Embroker.com/twist. While you’re there, get an extra 10% off using offer code TWIST. Lemon.io - Hire pre-vetted remote developers, get 15% off your first 4 weeks of developer time at https://Lemon.io/twist LinkSquares. Life for in-house legal just got a whole lot easier. From contract creation to execution and more, LinkSquares is the go-to for all your legal needs. Learn more at linksquares.com/twist * Today’s show: Oura CEO Tom Hale joins Jason to discuss his journey to becoming CEO of Oura (3:02), subscription-based business models (7:05), navigating ZIRP (39:37), the challenges of scaling a hardware business (45:00), and so much more! * Time stamps: (0:00) Oura CEO Tom Hale joins Jason (3:02) Tom's journey to becoming CEO (7:05) The significance of subscription models for business operations & product innovation (11:28) Embroker - Use code TWIST to get an extra 10% off insurance at https://Embroker.com/twist (12:57) Oura's subscription-based business model (23:04) Cultivating positive habits & Oura’s advanced tracking features (26:26) Lemon.io - Get 15% off your first 4 weeks of developer time at https://Lemon.io/twist (27:47) Leading a company and instilling core values (34:51) The impact of pausing marketing & harnessing the power of virality (38:20) LinkSquares - The go-to for all your legal needs, learn more at https://linksquares.com/twist (39:37) The ZIRP phenomenon and the challenges of scaling up (45:00) Finding a strong product-market fit (53:35) Merging personalization with consumer-focused approaches in healthcare (1:03:45) Oura’s company culture * Check out Oura: https://ouraring.com Follow Tom: https://twitter.com/tomeghale * Read LAUNCH Fund 4 Deal Memo: https://www.launch.co/four Apply for Funding: https://www.launch.co/apply Buy ANGEL: https://www.angelthebook.com Great recent interviews: Steve Huffman, Brian Chesky, Aaron Levie, Sophia Amoruso, Reid Hoffman, Frank Slootman, Billy McFarland, PrayingForExits, Jenny Lefcourt Check out Jason’s suite of newsletters: https://substack.com/@calacanis * Follow Jason: Twitter: https://twitter.com/jason Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jason LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasoncalacanis * Follow TWiST: Substack: https://twistartups.substack.com Twitter: https://twitter.com/TWiStartups YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/thisweekin * Subscribe to the Founder University Podcast: https://www.founder.university/podcast

Jason 2.0. Well, actually, this is Jason 1.0. You just never met him. Jason 2.0 was the fab bastard. I used to run marathons. I'm a 6-degree black belt and take one to, you know, it was like a workout maniac. Then for 20 years, I just ate like a couple of pints of ice cream extra a year

and added two pounds a year. For 20 years. Isn't it like pernicious how it happens? Sneaks right up on you, doesn't it? Oh, boy, does it? Oh, boy, does it. And now I'm reversing it. And it's been freaking fantastic. This week in startups is brought to you by Mbroker's startup insurance program

helps startups secure the most important types of insurance at a lower cost and with less hassle. Save up to 20% off of traditional insurance today at Mbroker.com slash twist. While you're there, get an extra 10% off using offer code twist, lemon.io. Need to speed up your product development without draining your brooker. budget, hire vetted engineers from Europe at lemon.io. Go to lemon.io slash twist to get 15% off for the first four weeks. And link squares, life for in-house legal just got a whole lot easier. From contract creation to execution and more, link squares is the go-to for all your legal needs. Learn more at link squares.com slash twist. All right, everybody, welcome to this week.

in startups. My guest today is Tom Hale. He's the CEO of ORA. And interestingly, as you probably heard there in our cold open, I have been getting in shape. I had an ORA for a while, then I lost it. But I'm going to be getting on a new one because I'm getting healthy here and I'm tracking my rest. I'm tracking my sleep. But Tom was brought in to ORA in March of 2022. We had the original founder on this pod. Of course, this week in startups. Of course, we had the founder of ORA on. But they brought Tom in because, hey, listen, he, listen, to scale this business and hardware is so hard. But you do have a movement around the world of quantified self.

People realize that if they take their health into their own hands, the outcome is going to be better than just relying on the reactive health care system we have here in America. So welcome to the program, Tom. Oh, thank you, Jason. Appreciate it. Good to be here. Great to have you. Thanks for taking the time. I know you're super busy.

So, listen, you've been in the industry for a while. You were a chief product officer at Lyndon Labs. Yeah, back in the day. Of second life. Metaverse 1.0. You were at home away. That's the people who did VRBO. I think that was an Austin-based company, was it?

Correct. Yeah, I remember those cats. They're doing great. You're on the board of cars.com. And you worked at Adobe. SBB, so, you know, as a senior vice president in a bunch of different roles. So tell me, why did you take the job at ORA? Everybody knows ORA.

This is this weekend startups. They know. It's the ring you wear, tracks, your sleep, temperature, a bunch of stuff. But we'll get into all that. But why did you take the job? Because, listen, you heard in my preamble there, hardware is hard, man. Consumer hardware is particularly hard. A lot of competition.

Consumers are finicky. High churn rates. It's just hard in general. So why'd you take the job? Yeah, it's funny. It's a personal story, really. The fall of 21, you know, we'd sold a company I was working at, and it was in the process of being unsold over the course of that fall. This was momentive, otherwise known as Survey Monkey, we sold it to Zendesk.

And a variety of factors conspired to have it becoming unsold over the course of that fall. And I was losing sleep. It was good friends with Zander Lurie. It was brutal. And in fact, I had lunch with Xander, Lori yesterday. Yeah, big, big ring fan. So, yeah, we were, you know, it was a very stressful time and I had some family stuff going on. And honestly, for the first time in my life, I'm a championship sleeper.

First of my life, I'm losing sleep. So a typical, you know, resilient, grit-filled kind of person, I'm going to figure out what to do about it. So I start researching and I come across this thing called the horror ring. I think, oh, I should really check into this, look into it, get the product, and I fell in love with the product. and partially because it's a beautiful product well made, it works, it delivers on the promises, great high quality data, you know, invisible in your life, very different from the other wearables. I've tried, I've tried them all. And I just was, I was so convinced I did something kind of uncharacteristic, which is I kind

pushed myself into it. And it turns out they were doing a search at the time and doing a search because, honestly, the company had been a little bit of success and maybe a victim of its own success. It was, you know, growing so quickly, having to, you know, ship hundreds of thousands of rings, deal with people all over the planet, customer support, scaling, sales, marketing, the whole thing, that they really needed someone to kind of come in and put their arms around it. So I came in, and they said, you know what, we're not looking for someone like you. You don't fit the profile.

You know, software guy, subscriptions, big data, machine learning, you know, your background. We want somebody like consumer products from Nike, something like that. second. The thing you described, though, somebody, it sounds like, you know, having a data science background is pretty good if you're going to run aura. So that was the argument I made. And I just said, hey, listen, I think you guys are making a huge mistake. And over the course of the search, I think I kind of convinced them and stepped in. So it is, you're right. I think it nailed it. It's a, scaling opportunity here. And it's also a business model transition. You know, I think we, we shipped it over into subscriptions. That's something I've been working on, more or less my entire career.

I mean, you know, back in the day, when I worked at Adobe and before that, a company called Macromedia, it was about shipping boxes of software. I mean, we ship CD-ROMs with, you know, software on it. And we switched over to subscriptions relatively early. Of course, Adobe's famous for that. And they were kind of following in the footsteps of Macromedia after they acquired the company. And quite frankly, I felt like this is a really interesting model because you might say hardware is hard, but hardware plus software is a really differentiated proposition and a much, much better business model. Yeah, and Adobe might be one of the greatest examples of people doubting the subscription model. Adobe was a famous for giving you that creative suite with hundreds of dollars.

They printed money. Every two years, new version comes out. You get the new CD-ROMs. That was the DNA of the company. It's a big check to buy the Adobe Creative Suite, but it's worth it if you're in the creative arts, you're a designer, developer, front-end developer, whatever. But they went to $20 a month or $30 a month. And now that business has skyrocketed.

Yeah, skyrocketed value. Yeah, subscriptions are powerful. And so I think applying subscription to hardware. Beyond the fact that, you know, you get paid money every month and you start the next month off plus or minus wherever you were last month. But why are subscriptions otherwise valuable in terms of the operation of a company and the development of a product in your mind? It starts with the customer value, right?

Because the whole point of software is you're constantly releasing it. And even in these days of mobile client apps and cloud apps, all that stuff, you're constantly iterating the product and you're able to release it over time and you're able to add value to it. And so in some sense, you're matching the monetization of that product with the delivery of value. Whereas, you know, old model is, hey, we're going to sell you this software. Maybe we'll charge you a maintenance fee. But in subscriptions, it's ongoing. And by the way, the customer has the choice to say, hey, are you still delivering for value?

So at WARA, we have a subscription model. It's tied to a piece of hardware. You buy the ring. You know, it's something that you wear on your body. It's beautiful. A couple hundred bucks. Three, four hundred bucks. Three or four hundred bucks, depending on which, you know, finish or, you know, scale you want.

And the whole premise is that, you know, your data is being monitored 24-7 and it's being captured and, you know, insights are being presented to you. It's not just all the data that you're getting. It's actually, you know, we're doing machine learning and kind of insights over to kind of give you something to let you know what's actually going on because, you know, you may not be an expert in your body. It's a learning journey you're going on. And that value delivery aligns with the value capture. And that business model is really interesting because, of course, the challenge of hardware is that you end up engineering something and then shipping it. And you're kind of like,

well, you know, we're going to change it. We have to wait 18 months before we can ship a new version of the hardware. Well, that's not true today, right? You can actually deliver software value. You can deliver daily if you want. And so look at your Tesla. I mean, I don't know if you drive a Tesla, but you get you do. You get an update. And it's like, by the way, you know, now you can have Apple music. Oh, by the way, you now you can, you know, we've changed the navigation to do this. And you're like, wow, the reason people used to upgrade their cars is because the software got clunky.

And they'd be like, this is so frustrating. My friend got the new Prius. I got to get the new Prius to upgrade the software. Yeah. And I guess, you know, part of the genius over there from the Tesla team is just constantly delighting customers with new things. New capabilities. What is it?

Six bucks a month for, for, for $10 a month a month? Yeah. It's really interesting. I think there's an interesting kind of question here. around like, well, what's the right kind of ratio between hardware and software? And I think where we landed and I get all credit to the team here, because I think in many ways, this was something that, you know, I walked into the beginning of the transition about six months before, was really to sort of think about the ratio of software monetization to hardware monetization. And the way I think about it is that like you, you buy this device and you

buy this device because you like it. You're thinking, you know, it's going to be great. I can wear it with my, you know, my Rolex. I can, if I'm a woman, I can wear it out. I don't feel like have a piece of technology on my body. You know, it's 24-7. It weighs four grams made of titanium. It matches my other jewelry. All this kind of stuff that's very like specific to the hardware. Then you start learning and you go on this journey of like exploring your your physiology,

learning what it means to be recovered and what it means to have a good night's sleep, you know, this sort of activity that we all do, but no one's particularly good at because when you're sleeping, you're asleep. You have no awareness of it. Yeah. And that value, you know, it's about you going on a journey to like almost listen to your body and to learn how to really listen to your body through numbers and through insights and through changes. The ring itself and the software learns you. It learns your baseline.

Classic example. One person I know, his body temperature, and we track body temperature on the ring is one of the metrics. His body temperature normally is like 97.5, right? So when he goes to the doctor and the doctor puts a thermometer in his mouth, says, hey, listen, your temperature is 98.6. You know what he's got? A fever, right? Because his baseline is 97.5.

So the thing is, we're not all the same. Medicine is practiced on the averages, but this is really about like you and your voice and your performance. So that idea of being able to deliver value over time and having you go through journeys, you might go through a sleep journey. I'm not sleeping, so I need to like figure that out. How do I do that? Well, stop doom scrolling.

Stop paying attention. Netflix. Don't drink alcohol. Don't drink a lot of water. juice before you go to bed, avoid sugar. All these things are really basic and you can sort of experiment your way into it and realize what works for you. Because you know what works for you, Jason may not work for me, may not work for someone else. It's what works for you. And you get the metrics to support it because we all know what's measured is managed. All right, listen, we work

with super early stage companies at my investment firm. It's called launch. I'm talking pre-series A, right? We're talking seed stage, friends and family. And you know what? At that stage, maybe they don't have insurance yet. In fact, just recently, we, we, we're talking pre-series A, right? We're talking to see, had an amazing startup. They didn't have D&O insurance. If you don't know what D&O means that basically protects your directors and officers, directors, board of directors, officers, the people who run the company, your management team. So what do we do? We send them right over to Embroker. Inbroker is business insurance built specifically for startups. Inbroker's single application helps startups get four quotes for four lines of coverage in 15 minutes. They connect you with one of

their expert brokers for unmatched service, and that goes beyond your policy. Okay. We use this at all of our companies. It's easy, peasy, lemon squeezy. And if you're not getting insurance, you know, at some point you're going to have to get it. So let's make that point today. Right now, this weekend, tonight, just go to in broker today with the code twist and you'll get 10% off their startup package. How do you get the startup package inbroker.com slash twist? That's eM-B-B-R-O-K-E-R.com slash twist. make sure you use that code twist for 10% off. That also more importantly than getting the 10% off, that shows them that you're listening to this week in startups.

So we love in Broker. They've been amazing in terms of supporting our founders for years. And of course, this very podcast. Great job in Broker. If you can measure it, you can manage it. I mean, you work at SurveyMonkey. It was a, yeah, you're trying to get information on your product, etc. So six bucks a month, $300, 400 bucks up front.

Have you consider, is that ratio feel right to you? Or do you think you need to offer, you know, people the $30 a month like Woop is doing or some other folks are testing? Oh, you know, they drop their price a little bit. Oh, yeah, 20 bucks a month. Yeah, I think it's pretty pricey. Yeah. Yeah. I, you know, it's funny.

I think our premise on that is that you don't want it to be something that people have to think about. Got it. You know, six bucks a month, two cups of coffee, whatever it is, you know, call it a penny a minute, you know. you know, so little money, you just don't want people to think about it. And I think the subscription fatigue is a thing. You know what I mean? I mean, I, you know, we all feel it. So I think what we really wanted to do was to price it in a way that, like, just makes it easy. And the truth is is that if you've invested in the hardware, and this is a really interesting, I think, maybe point, maybe for your folks who are thinking about pricing models,

you've invested in the hardware. And because you've invested in the hardware, you're kind of invested in the outcome. And so you're willing to really give the subscription, like, you know, the time to invest to see if you get the value. from our perspective, the company has to deliver the value to you. We have to deliver features and capabilities. And so over the past, you know, basically 12 months since we introduced subscription pricing. We've introduced, you know, SPO2 detection, workout, heart rate, body clock, chronotype. What's SPO2? Oh, some blood oxygen. If you remember during COVID, people were measuring their blood oxygen.

Oh, right, right. You can do that with a, or I didn't know that. Yeah. So we measured it overnight and give you a really good reading. Sleeping disturbance. What is your chronotype? Now, what are all the things that, you know, you want to do to customize. You know, some people actually don't want to do a certain amount of exercise. They want to minimize the amount of exercise. Period prediction. Connection with natural cycles, which is an FDA cleared, I'm sorry, FDA approved contraception for women, you know, using your temperature to let you know where in your cycle you should

and should not be having sex. You know, new reporting, reports hub, sleeping score modifications, polyphasic sleep. Have you heard of polyphasic sleep? I haven't heard of no. We're down the round of the hole now that you're going down all, you know, all into health. They think about this. So polyphasic sleep is people who sleep multiple times over the course of a night. Like they might go to sleep early and then they wake up in the middle and then they go back.

That might be me. Yeah. Like, and, you know, famous Thomas Edison was famously polyphasic sleep. And there's debates about. I get to, uh, you can drop science on that. Yeah. Yeah. Great.

So we track that now because that's a, that's sort of a case where like, you know, most sleep trackers don't even know about polyphasic sleep. And we're really conscious of. And so we gave you that data visibility. So that kind of constant delivery of value and new capabilities being delivered in the product, in addition to the data and the insights that you're getting because, you know, your health doesn't stay the same, right? Your health changes. You lost, you know, what did you lose, 40 pounds? Yeah.

Your metrics, your metrics are changing as a result of that. And so being able to kind of have the system learned the new, you know, whatever, you want to call it Jason 1.0 or Jason 3. Jason, back to Jason 1.0, yeah. 2.0 is fat Jason. Now I'm Jason 3.0. Jason 3.0. You know, you want to get that, those differences showing up in your metrics. And the thing is like, of course, that the system needs to relearn you because you're a different you. And that value delivery aligned with subscription. I think that's the key.

It's very different than, say, your typical kind of piece of hardware that people, I think most people have an expectation they buy a wearable. And that's kind of what it is. And then, you know, six months later, they've thrown in in their, in their jewelry. because they've gotten all the value out of it, and we're continuing to add value. We are like, I think it's shocking to me. The retention on this product is off the charts. Really?

Off the charts. You know, we have at 12 months, 88% of the people are still in the app checking for data. We have people who have been wearing this product for seven years. Wow. They've gone through three generations of value. I think women in particular, who are tracking their cycle,

tracking their health, thinking about how their body is changing, changing, not just on their cycle where hormones are dropping, you know, in a pretty predictable way over 30 days, but in their life from, you know, the onset of menopause to the child bearing years to perimenopause to menopause. We'll probably see LTVs measured in decades. That's a really different product. Is a major part of that, the fact that you know the temperature is temperature a super important vector? Because, you know, I don't get, I don't think I get my body temperature for my Apple Watch, do I?

It depends which one you have. And also depends on when you measure it. I mean, perfect examples. Like, one of the things that people really enjoy about the rings that it kind of disappears into the background, right? You don't really have, it's not clamoring for your attention. It's not another digital mouth to feed, like, you know, saying, hey, please plug me in or, you know, put me on the charger.

It just sort of goes in the background. You get a seven-day battery life. You know, you put it on. You don't think about it. You check the data when you need. But it's constantly there, 24-7. people wear this product in a way that allows the data to kind of just be environmental and passively tracked. And then the algorithms can work on the data and present the information back.

What are you doing when people lose this thing? That's, you know, it's so easy to lose. Well, speak for yourself. We don't actually get that many people losing them. But, you know, it's a small item, you know, whatever it could call them. We actually do make it possible for people to contact us if they want and we can give them a little bit of help to get back up. Oh, okay. Very good.

Yeah. They get back to the game. Yeah, they get bent out. of shape when they don't have their data. Yeah. And can you use the device without the subscription or it's required to get the subscription and do you give people like a certain number of months when they first acted? Super interesting.

And I think I grew up on freemium software, right? I mean, serving rookie's classic. It's like the, you know, the OG freemium software product where you get a ton of value and then, hey, you want to do something extra. You sort of switch over into the paywall. This product is different. And it's different because it's not a freemium product. and that's because it's a hardware product.

You know, what a Framium product is in hardware, it's a company that's going out of business, right? Yeah. Because hardware has a physical cost and you have to ship in places, and if it has a warranty issue, you have to take it back, and then you have to refurb it. There's those sort of economics that make it difficult to do a Framium model. So I think with the innovation here,

and you saw this because I think Fitbit famously had a hardware model with Freemium attached to it, and it's not super successful. You know, one, two to three percent. It actually pissed me off and it made me leave the Fitbit. ecosystem after seven years. Yeah. Because I was like, ah, you've trained me. I bought so many of these things.

And now, like, you're deprecating the product. And I just felt like I was, I was baited and switched. And I think it's very hard to change it once you've, you know, taught people how to do it. Also, their hardware kept breaking. And that was the biggest problem I had was just, it wasn't a very, I was, I was replacing it so often that I had, like, ongoing streams of them, like, every year it would break. And I'm like, I'm buying the top ones. I bought this for all my family.

Like, why does this keep breaking? The build quality was terrible. Well, you know, it's funny. I mean, you talk about losing your aura ring. You know, you'll probably find it at some point, you know. And like, you know, it'll still be functional. But like, we've had people put them through the wash and still functions, right? And we've, we've had people, you know, they've run over them with their car on asphalt.

It's still functions. And that's because it's made, you know, it's titanium. It's really, it's a very strong build. It's finished company. You got some amazing engineers and folks building the building the, product. But, you know, maybe to your point, you know, this notion of a business model, it's a little bit like there's some expectation and training that you have to do with your customer. You have to educate them. I think this is super relevant for every startup, especially

one who's disrupt because you've got to get people thinking in a new way about the value that you deliver. Most people are trained to think, oh, I buy a hardware product. I use it once. I use it twice, I use it three times, but I don't pay again for it. Yeah. Peloton, I think, maybe showed us the way that, like, if you buy a piece of hardware, We're like, there's things that you might reasonably expect to pay as you use it as it goes along. Yeah, and they seem to have provided some decent amount of value in terms of the courses. Yeah, because you're, and you have live courses. So they keep adding, like, if you're really into this, like they have yoga and stretching.

I have the tread. I just reactivated the tread. The only problem I have with that product is the dark patterns. I don't know if you're aware of dark patterns. Sure. You know, you try to, you sign up for the Wall Street Journal or the New York Times. it's the easiest subscription you ever did. They'll subscribe you instantly.

You try to unsubscribe. You're on the phone and wait times and then they try to convince you not to. And now it's gotten so bad. This is what Lena Khan is. She's cracking down on. Yeah, the FTCC. I think it's a good place for her to focus her energy

instead of trying to stop things that, you know, are minor acquisitions because it really does cause consumer harm. And I was telling the Peloton team, like, why can't I open the app up? and pause it. If I'm away for the summer and I'm not going to use it for three months, why do I got to give you $128 or $26? Why can I just pause it? And they're like, you can call us and pause it. I'm like, really? Really? That's what you want me to do? You literally made the most sophisticated treadmill and bike and the history of bikes. And then

Tonal was the same thing. And Tonal doesn't have a pause feature. So I'm putting both of you on blast. Tonal and Peloton right now. Get your axe together. Dark patterns make me not want to use your products. I mean, it just, it's just so gnarly. Yeah. I hate Equinox and I would never go to Equinox again because you got to, you got to win the customer, you know, you got to deliver the value. That's what it comes down to. And quite frankly, I think you got to also match the value delivered with the value captured, right? I mean, six bucks a month, you know, honestly, I have a hard time when anybody complains

about that. You said that's two coffees, by the way. I don't know where you're buying coffee these days, but cheap and cheap. If you're in the Bay Area, about seven, eight bucks is when you, when When they present you with the tip after you bought a $450, $20 a bottle. $1, $2 or $3 for a tip on a $4 coffee. I'm like, I'm a general. I'm a little crazy right now. Do you know what's funny? I don't even drink coffee anymore.

That's one of the things that, like, you know, you think about what are the products that have really changed your behavior in your life? Like, I mean, you can count them on the fingers of one hand. And I'll tell you something. I used to be, and this is, this goes back to kind of the personal story about aura. So I used to be somebody who drank coffee, probably twice, you know, a day, maybe two to three times a day, always.

And then at the, you know, in the evening, it falls. asleep, I drink a glass of wine or have a beer or something to kind of take the edge off and drop in sleep. Turns out, that's terrible for your health, right? Alcohol is a poison, basically, and the way your brain metabolizes alcohol is basically poisoning yourselves. Coffee is a stimulant that also works by basically, you know, it's not just about creating alertness. Caffeine does create alertness, but it also, you know, it upsets the way your body wants to sleep. It slows that process down. So I was in that state. I've been sleep deprived for really, 25 years.

And I went cold turkey, stop drinking alcohol, stop drinking coffee. And it was literally like walking out of a black and white movie into a color, you know, technical color movie.

I was like, oh my God, what is this feeling? And I was like, I need to be involved with this company because of the impact that it has. And sleep is one of these things.

It's like a good night's sleep, it makes a difference the next day. Your clarity of cognition, you know, your energy level, your mood, your ability to handle stress. Sleep is this really.

It's like a powerful. drug that is available to you for free. You don't need a prescription for. And the thing is, of course, over the long term, sleep affects all these things with your health in a material way, whether it's Alzheimer's or cardiac health. It's one of the eight factors that the American Health Association sites as, you know, what are the things you can do to reduce the risk of having cardiovascular disease? It is really implicated in diabetes. It turns out that sleep regulates in some ways the two kind of hormones that manage whether you feel hungry and whether you feel false. And so if you're not sleeping well, you're going to be snacking and you're going to be having less willpower to resist snacking.

And then you're also going to like, you know, you're not going to feel full. So you'll eat twice as much and maybe have, you know, a quarter of the of the saity of feeling satisfaction. Boom. It's extra waste. Yeah. And so when you figured out you were to use the aura, the aura, you get a sleep score of some type. Like a. And yours went from what to what after taking out caffeine and booze.

Well, let me check. You know, it was pretty dramatic. I think I was kind of in the 60s and, you know, I went up into the 80s. But really, the score was there, but it was also, I felt just dramatically different. I'm part of this new found bio thing where I got like a coach and I'm going through my health. And we're running three tests for me for sleep. One of them's like eyeglasses, another one's a supplement and just a couple of different. Oh, and then one's going to be a warm shower for five minutes.

before I go to bed. And so I have like three different tests. I'm testing each of them for four days in a row. And then he's like, you got to get yourself an order a whoop or something to, we gotta start tracking your sleep. And so I'm in the process of doing all that because he thinks that's like the first place to start to sleep

in terms of health. And so, or one of the first places to serve. It's the foundation. I mean, you know, in many ways it makes other parts of your health journey just that much easier to manage.

And sleep, of course, is this incredible, incredibly positive thing in many ways. for your short term and your long term. Imagine this. You got an idea for a tech startup. You're going to change the world.

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Lemon squeasy at lemon.io slash twist. Let's talk about operating a company coming in to take over from the founders. and lead the company. When you come in, I've heard this, it's a great line in a book I'm listening to right now in Audible about like you don't want a cannonball into the pool. You want to just slowly walk into the pool

when you're the new leader. So what approach did you take? Did you cannonball into the pool and give a big speech day one? Or did you slowly walk into the pool? I think this is true. And by the way, I've been an entrepreneur and investor and been in small companies of my own

and also in small teams inside of bigger companies. And so one of the things you've got to recognize is that if you come in, you've got to learn the topography of the organization, right?

You got to know who knows what's up and who knows what's down. And you got to, in this case, companies really finished company. You know, you described Harpreet as the founder. Yeah.

He wasn't the founder. Company was founded in Finland. And in fact, one of the dynamics was this sort of U.S. and Finland dynamic in the company. And, you know,

one of the first things that I said I was going to do was, you know, within a week of starting I was going to go to Finland. I was going to go to the fount of this product and said and, you know, be like, hey, listen, you guys invented this thing. Let's let's talk about that.

So entering very carefully, I think the irony of the whole thing is that about three days after I started COVID, hadn't had COVID the whole time. Wow. Yeah, I got COVID from somebody in the office. I was so glad to join the company, you know, kissing babies and shaking hands. Got COVID. And I was like, I need to go to Finland. And my colleague was like, you're not going to Finland. You got COVID.

We're not letting you fly. So I didn't know, but, but yeah, right, you don't cannonball in. You pay attention. You listen. You see what, what plants are going. You know, you start to look around. It was an interesting time, too, right? It was, you know, the Ukraine war was a couple months in.

The stock market had really started to melt down. Yeah, it was the end of days. It was the end of days. It was end of days. It was assuming, you know, it's not your team. A friend of mine recently took over a company that was. was that scale and he hadn't hired the team and they didn't not all of them were fans of his in your case you might have come in a little more neutral a less polarizing yeah but i'm curious

like how you um just get to know the team like what approach do you take how many employees did they have when you joined you know 4 480 something like that so you're not doing one-on-ones or 480 people that's just none of hours in the day so what is the approach did you do like skip meetings where you skip over the manager and meet with their team. How do you... You got it. I mean, I think you know, you pay attention. You go to meetings, keep your mouth shut.

You use your ears. You look for patterns. A lot of what I think people do at operating at scales, they're looking for patterns. You know, they're making assessments. You know, I started adding people team. One of the first hires I made was a chief people officer, right? Because that person's job full time is to make connections and understand the landscape

of the team. second thing I did was look at the intellectual property base and understand how how what the longevity of the intellectual property was. And then the third thing I did was I started to really like understand where the I innovation was coming from. And it turned out that Finland, Finland was really the fount of the innovation. Most of the sales and marketing is in the U.S. Most of the R&Ds in Finland. So making sure that we were connected there and that those people, you know, understood that as innovators, you know, they're the value creators in the company. Let's make sure that they're appreciated.

So we started doing something. And I think this is important for anybody's startup or scale operator. You start to think about the company culture, right? What is the culture? We're a wellness company. Okay, so wellness is part of the culture. It's Finnish company. I don't know how much you know about Finland, but, you know, they have sunlight, you know,

during the summer, but they don't have sunlight during the rest of the year for some of these folks. We're living, you know, close to the Arctic circles. So there's a very important culture of, like, you make, hey, when the sun shines. It's like, you know, you're going to go out there and enjoy in the summer. So you've got to have some respect for the culture. But at the same time, you have to think, what do you want to change about the culture? What do you want to drive about the culture? We have an incredible set of values.

Our values are, you know, embedded in the product. Like the product should be invisible. It shouldn't be, you know, begging for your attention or asking to be charged. So those are values in the embedded in the product, but also in the company. We have values of collaboration. Finland is, you know, a big part of the threat of the culture of this company. It's a socialist country. It's really oriented.

around a collectivist vibe. It's respectful of nature. There's all these values that are permeating the company because of the people, right? So you start that. Well, what do you need to do? You know, you got these great values. You got, you know, aim higher or Ubuntu, which means, you know, we do things together. You've got, you know, we earn trust.

Trust is incredibly critical. We're a health care company. We're managing your health data. You have to trust us. We have to trust each other. So these values are critical. And one of the values that I think, you know, honestly, we really need to establish was this one of like, hey, we're going to.

We're going to look at this problem that we're facing right now with Ukraine war and meltdown and, you know, we're spending money because, you know, there was a marketing push. They raised a bunch of money. They're spending a bunch of money in the company. And we said, like, we're going to talk to people and ask what I want. So I went around and asked somebody, woman who ran the science organization in Finland. Her name was Hellie. Brilliant. And I said, hey, Heli, like, I'm a new CEO.

Like, what should I be listening to? Tell me what you think. She goes, Tom, you know what we want? Black coffee. no sugar. And so we created a ceremony, and this is maybe the advice for your listeners and founders, we created a ceremony called the black coffee meeting. And the black coffee meetings where like, you're not, you know, you're not blowing smoke.

As Americans, you know, I think we have a tendency to want to see the bright side and be optimistic and see what the opportunity is. And they said, just give us, you know, tell us the truth. And don't sugarcoat it. How are we doing? What's going on? Well, the good news is we were doing great. But you had to earn that trust because if you are doing,

great and you say you're doing great, but no one believes you, then, you know, what are you? So, um, and this was going right into that. These are candid, right? Yeah. They're candid. Oh, they're, they're blunt, you know, they're blunt and taciturn. And they're also very funny as, as a, as a group. They actually have a good sense of humor.

I like it. That sounds good to me. Yeah. So, but so then just going back to your, your question about how you come into organization, you got to respect what's there. You got to know what's there. You got to assess what's there. And then you got to think, what are the, what are the, what are the, what are the other

ingredients that you want to live in here. Hey, you know what? Wellness is wonderful, but you know, what's really great? If you want to have a mission-driven company that wants to change the world of health from, you know, interventionist health to prevention, guess what? That works if you're a successful business. If you're not a successful business, you're never going to reach that mission. So for one of the first things we did, connect the idea of the mission to the idea of measuring the company. We're a product that measures you and gives you data. What's the, what's the aura ring for the company? How does it measure the company? What are the measurements that we want to to pay attention to. What is it telling us? What are the insights? That big, big unlock for everybody.

Yeah. And so getting through 2022 hard. I don't know if you did a riff. I assume you had to do some kind of a riff or get this, you know, spending under control. I had to stop hiring cold. I had to put my foot right on hard on the brakes. And I was like within 30 days, right? Like stop hiring. Had to figure out where we needed to hire. We were spending on marketing. I mean, we were running. commercials and you know you I went to a bar I hadn't even started the job I went to a bar saw a commercial and I was like wow first of all I don't go to bars second of all yeah there's a commercial on the chances of those things intersecting like that's a bullet hitting a bullet in a civil war battlefield yeah but it turns up they were advertising a lot so it wasn't a surprise

at all that I saw out in a bar any sports event was it working was the advertising even working or it's you know it's hard it was but it's you know it's a lot of money as you know so so so so you know very early on a couple months in I'm like listen we're going to stop spending money on marketing. Let's see what happens. I was like, no, you can't do that. Business is going to fall apart if we stop spending on marketing. No, no, no, let's just see.

Trust me, it's okay. So we turn the money off a little while. Business goes down a little bit, but, you know, not too bad. And I said, well, let's try a little next month. Let's take it a little bit further. Take it down 30%. Business goes down a little bit. It doesn't go down 30%.

Maybe, you know, five, 10%. Next month. I said, let's cut it off. See what happens. Cut it off. You know what happened? Best month we've ever had. Oh, what explains that?

Well, what explains that? So we learned two things. One, we learned the power of referral, which is, this is a product that people love. And if they see you wearing it, they're going to talk to you about it. It's got that property. Yeah, that's what, we call that real world virality. Real world. Yeah, exactly.

Real world virality. People love talking about, what's your score? Jason, how you doing? How do you sleep last night? Tell me what your readiness. People want to, like, they want to talk about it. They want to understand it. So what we saw was that that referral business was the flywheel that was driving.

the business. Really interesting. Passion for the product. Wonderful. Second thing we learned, and we introduced a capability in the product, which was an integration with an FDA- cleared digital contracept basically uses your temperature, if you're a person who menstruates or a woman. Your temperature fluctuates over the course of your cycle, and it tells you what phase you are in your cycle when you're, you know, when you're dropping an egg and you're fertile, like your temperature drops. It's very clear. And we worked with. with this company natural cycles. And in the past natural cycles,

you had to take your temperature with a thermometer, right? And you had to do it right as you woke up, because you may not know this, but your temperature changes over the course of the night. It lowers as you get to sleep, and then as you wake up, it rises. And so as you, if you take your temperature after you've gotten up and walked around,

you might get an elevated temperature, which, by the way, might tell you that you won't get pregnant, but you will because you take your temperature too late. So aura captures your temperature overnight. It relays this to the natural cycles, app, the natural cycles app algorithm looks at it and says, hey, you know what, you're not going to get pregnant, so, you know, feel free to procreate as you wish. Or you have a real risk, so don't do it. You know, this is a red day. This is not a day for you to have sex. And quite frankly, you know,

what turns out young women who don't want hormonal contraception, who, you know, are trying to listen to their bodies, are trying to understand that. They love this product. And it solves a big pain point for them. So those two things, referral and an integration drove our business to make the best month ever. And we're like, that's an insight. There's your one. Yeah. Life for your in-house legal team can be so hard chasing down signatures, pouring over contracts, toggling between all the different tools, the back and forth with the sales team. It's brutal. And legal stuff, oh my God, bane of my existence, right? It's just so much. It's a deluge. But it doesn't need to be that way. All you have to do is use link squares. It's the first AI-powered end-to-end contract

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all kinds of downstream problems. Do it right. Linkswheres.com slash twist. And then when you start turning the marketing back on, it's like, you know, you're running tests and you can be more thoughtful about it. You know what you're looking for. That's right. Yeah. And, you know, it's one of the problems with the ZERP environment, the zero interest rate phenomenon, is, you know, you can get in running a business a little bit sloppy and you can not be as thoughtful and strategic. And, you know, organizations want to grow. So you got six people in marketing, you know, how many people do they get next quarter? They want or in PR or support. It might be the same thing.

You don't get rewarded. And this is where you coming in as an operator is so important. I think especially taking over from founders. I've seen operators understand that you had to reward people for being more efficient. So whoever got a promotion for going to their boss and saying, you know what, we're 12 people? I think we can be like nine. And these three things we can automate and these four things we can deprecate. And I think we'll be great and nine is the right number.

Like, whoever comes to their boss and says that, you have to be an operator who comes in with fresh eyes to do that. That's correct. And quite frankly, I think, you know, as you point out, the zero interest rate environment really is a, it's a moral hazard. Say more. Well, no, I think you already framed it, which is that, you know, in a world where there's no costs because you have unlimited capital, there's no differentiation between a good idea and a mediocre idea and a great idea. And if you can sprain a problem, you're going to end up saying, well, I'm going to try and pick the. very best idea. You might not be right all the time, but you're going to get it right more often because you're going to spend more energy to do it. And if you create an environment that

says, you know what, that's a good idea, but we're only interested in great ideas, you're going to get more great ideas. That's the key. See, I think you nailed it. I may have set the table, but you know, there's a really big difference between good and great and great. And, man, during this ZERP environment as an investor, you know, an angel investor and seed investor, man, the number of okay ideas I saw getting good valuations or great valuations or just being allowed to exist in the world and get continued funding without product market fit was just confounding to me. And then what that does is it kind of dilutes the talent pool.

So you got like some, you know, and it's not meant to hurt anybody's feelings, but, you know, somebody who would be a great 10th person, you know, on the Warriors is now a starter, right? And they're the lead, you know, of the A team. They're really kind of not meant to do that. And so they're going to fail. Of course they're going to fail. And now as these companies start to shut down, you start seeing that. person who was really great at marketing or really great running the customer support team,

they had been the CEO of their own company, now they're back to going to a strong team and being the CTO, you know, whatever, head of customer support. And, you know, that makes the world run better. But man, it's been weird to watch the change. And you and I have been through this how many times? Well, see, I've been through it twice now. I feel like 2008 and 2001 are burned into my brain. I have had a recognition from that. So I definitely feel like this is my third. Yeah. It's funny. You heard it here first. There's this notion.

I think maybe Elon Musk is the progenitor of it, which is, you know, and so maybe it's the Musk hypothesis, let's call it that. Sure. The Musk hypothesis is like the square root of the number of employees in the company is doing 20% or 80% of the work. Right? This idea that like the balance of work is not evenly distributed across an employee population, right?

He cuts, I don't know how many people out of X. by the public reports I'm not there anymore I just kind of hung out for the first month people kind of overestimated what my role was

I was just hanging out and you know helping on the margins but I think it's 85% 80 85% yeah and it's arguably the product is now moving faster

so we're in month nine of the transition he took over on Halloween I remember the Halloween weekend and I think he's released more

features in the last, this year, then maybe they released in the last two or three with 15% as many people. And so, you know, say what you will, you could disagree with the decisions, but, you know, it turns out all those people can slow a team down because it's network theory, right? You have so many nodes that need to be coordinated, you know, in any network. And then, you know, the value of the network increases with the number of nodes, but also the amount of traffic that's required and the, you know, the orchestration and coordination costs around individual parts of those nodes or maybe even the possibility of something going

wrong because the two nodes, you know, that they don't talk and you end up with, you know, something doesn't make sense or you have to watch out for that. I think there's some real truth to that. We'll see, I think for sure. But, you know, the good news is that like, we're not at a scale where that's a problem and we don't certainly have to test the musk hypothesis at this company. I think we, you know, we've got a tiger by the tail. Business is going great. And the product is great. I mean, you know, we should be talking more about the product and how awesome it is, but, you know, people know it. Yeah, I mean, it's established itself. It's pretty interesting how it established itself. It's not an overnight

success, but it's pretty close to it. I mean, the people who are in the quantified self and who care about this kind of stuff, you know, they're just over the moon about it. It reminds me of we have an investment in eight sleep, a small one, but people who lock into that product, and again, it's got incredible retention like ORA does, you know, if you get that product market fit, then, you know, the wind is at your back. When you got there, how strong would you say product market fit is on a scale of like one to an iPhone or one to a Tesla, you know, being the greatest product market fit you could get in product land? Maybe the iPhone is the greatest product market fit. I think for sleep, right? It was definitely, you know, it was a home run. You know, maybe it's the

iPhone of sleep, whatever. You want to call it down. 10 of 10. 10 of 10. And then I think for kind of sort of daytime activity tracking, you know, that was some of what the product has been working on. You know, you think about kind of workout heart rate. The product now has the sort of capability to give you chest strap accurate workout heart rate. You're kidding me, really, because I am so disappointed in my Apple Watch's heart rate monitoring. Yeah. Because I go on hikes and then I, you know, I know my heart rate is really high and it's like, yeah, we're not even recording your heart rate right now. I'm like, why? Do I tighten this thing? Do I clean it? Where do I position it? I never get a good heart rate

It's very difficult, actually, it turns out, because what you're doing is you're measuring from the wrist, and there's a weaker signal here, probably 100 times weaker. It's blood flow returning to the heart. It's capillary action. You've got hair, darker skin, and all these technologies work with light shining into the body and then refract it back. And so you've got noisy refractions from bone and sine you. By contrast, the finger, you're on the leading edge of the pulse waveform. Boom, your heart pumps. Blood shoots down an artery, goes right here.

the artery itself, a couple millimeters away from the skin. The skin underneath it to the artery is a uniform tissue. And so you get like a clearer signal and a stronger signal here. Now, of course, the big challenge is motion artifacts. And so for us famously, workout heart rate is incredible for cycling, for running, and for walking. And that's because those motions are relatively easy to kind of do the noise cancellation of the signal. It makes it very easy to capture that. So you get a really, really clear signal.

And we've had it tested and validated against, you know, chest bands, which are really using electric pulses and understanding how your heart. That's the best consumer. That's the gold standard. So in many ways, you know, we kind of scope the problem to be like, hey, we're going to get that really, really well. But of course, what people have been read to expect is like what they want to know their heart rate at any moment in any condition, in any sport, in any motion. And the reality is that we've said, no, it's more important to be accurate than it is to be like, oh, well, we can give you a bad reading if you're doing judo. Yeah. But, but, you know, and the people want, people want the heart rate.

They want to look at their heart rate. I think we've been trained. Be like, how's my heart rate doing right now? Am I working out hard enough? That's actually not the most important thing. It's about how much time you spend with your heart rate elevated in different zones. And so the accuracy of tracking is really critical because you don't want to inflate that. Peter Attila thing.

Now I'm 52. I don't know. I think we're in a similar age group. And he's always talking about, is it zone two? We got to get to. Zone two. We got to be zone two. Yeah.

I like zone three. I like getting a little sweat on. I like that 130 beats, whatever. He's telling me, say, at 120. So I'm out there running with Antonio Gracios. And he's like, we're going to run for 90 seconds. Then I'm going to walk for 90 seconds. We're going to run for 90 seconds.

I'm going to try to keep it right here at 128, whatever it is. And so I've been doing that myself and you're trying to spend a lot of time. And it turns out actually exercise isn't the solution. And I think you learned this. It's about what you put in your body, right? Yeah. Because if you can exercise all you want. Yeah, you cannot run away from calories.

I can tell you that. I tried. I tried to run away from Hagenas. It did not work. It's a system. I mean, OZEPIC is going to make it all easy for everybody. It's just those Empic's going to solve the problem. But, but, you know, it's a really important point, which is that, again, you want to understand what it is that really works. And it turns out actually recovery is super important, right? Yes. I think for many years, people train. Like, I just got to train more. Train harder. And the truth is, if you don't recover, you don't build any resilience. Your body doesn't recover. Your training doesn't matter. It doesn't improve your, your ability to perform with endurance or strength, you do have to stress. This is a great one. I think stress is so important for performance because if you don't stress your body, you don't put it outside of your comfort range. So, you know, you're getting out of zone too.

It's good because it teaches your body to be resilient when you push. You know, you change your exercise. You do different exercises and that change your body. Cold plunge. You put your body under stress. This is Peter Atia, like to the, to put your body under stress. You get resilience. working on now and then yeah and then I'm working on the recovery and so I'm doing this tart cherry

juice I'm doing all I got everything dialed in and I'm trying to get to they told me I do a hundred grams of protein a day as I because I'm coming off the Wagovi and stuff and I'm going to go on to build muscle mass time and because you can't build muscle mass from it turns out on this Wagovi Ozempic stuff it's hard to build muscle mass um because you're starving yourself obviously but now that I've got the fat off my body or most of it I can start doing the weights and that's the thing about Zampick and Wogobis actually resetting your brain's knowledge of what normal is for your body

because that's the dynamic, right? The dynamic is that there's a regulator. Did you do it? Did you try it? No, no, I've never tried it. But I've been studying it a lot and it's a little controversial, obviously. Lots of people are like, hey, just give me this thing. It's a pill. It's going to make me, you know, thin.

And there's some real truth to that, but there's some, you know, there's potential risks. I think you got to, yeah, definitely, this is not health advice. Talk to your doctor, you know, do it thoughtfully. But I can tell you, my experience has been I had an unhealthy relationship with portion control and snacking. And this drug goes right at that where you stop snacking because you don't have this hunger constantly.

And I used to eat, I'll be totally honest here. If you get a regular New York pizza, I'm going to have four slices. I might even try for a fifth. I was at Gavon, as we say in Brooklyn. Now I eat one slice, one slice, maybe half of a second. I have a little salad. I have the two glasses of water. I'm full.

I'm full. You try to eat, this happened to me two or three times. You try to eat that second slice or third slice, God forbid, of pizza when you were on a Ozempic or Wagovi or any of these things. You will run to the bathroom and you will vomit. I didn't mean to be graphic. It happened to me three times in, you know, two years of doing this on and off. Then when I came off of the stuff, they said, hey, you're going to lose, you're going to

do this these studies. Oh, you're going to bounce right back. I didn't bounce right back. I had like three pounds. but I carried the behavioral change with me which is I don't need to eat four slices or five slices of pizza. What am I doing?

It's that's lunacy. Just eat a slice, have a glass of water. Maybe you want one or two more bites. That's enough. It's enough. Change my relationship with it. So now as you go back into like growth mode, this company,

there's a lot of talk about late stage companies. We're out of the ZERP. You guys benefited from fundraising in ZERB. You got a pretty healthy evaluation there. I mean, you raised $100 million or more at an $800 million. You're kind of in that unicorn category. A lot of companies like yours, maybe you're not worth what the last valuation is,

but you got this bright future. You're now responsible for getting this valuation, either back to where it was or, you know, thinking about the next round of funding or what the outcome for this company is. How do you think about that? Because when you got this job, they're looking for a CEO. There's got to be one or two outcomes here. It goes public or it gets bought by somebody. I don't think about that.

Do you know what I mean? I just don't. I just don't because I think you start making the wrong decisions if that's what you're thinking about. Now, of course, it's hard not to have it in your mind. But the point is that you got to build a product and a business. You build a product that's great. People want it.

They'll pay for it. You're going to have a business. You've got to grow it. You're going to take it international. You've got to find new channels of distribution. We just entered Best Buy this year. You've got to find new markets. We're in Japan.

You've got to think about what your next product is, not just the next version, but like are you going into other, you know, adjacencies, what are your opportunities? You got to think about the big market. Turns out the big market here is the healthcare market. $4 trillion of spend in the United States, you know, 10, 20 trillion around the globe. The way people do, health is crazy. It's intervention-based. The incentive in the U.S. is to, you know, get you to be tested and then give you an intervention.

So you get over-prescribed and you get over and, you know, you get over-tested. You don't learn anything. And the thing is that there's all this change that's happening in the industry where people are learning about themselves. You know, if the, you know, 2000 to 2010, you were learning from WebMD about things that only doctors knew about, well, that's all been democratized. And, you know, in 2010 to 2020, you know, you're learning about all the ways that you can intervene, you know, whether it is, you know, get into Zone 2 or eating. And now I think there's a cycle, what is, what is my body? What's my personal data telling me? And I think that's where we are

today, where you now have everything you need to know to really direct your life. And you are, I mean, I'm just looking at you right now. You're an example. of this, right? You're making really conscious and intentional choices. That change, coupled with the idea that healthcare should be personalized and consumerized. Andries and Horowitz put together this great article. It's sort of described that the biggest company in the next 20 years is going to be something that's a combination of a health care company and a consumer company. It's got the appeal and engagement and understanding of consumer mindsets, and it's got the knowledge and science and, you know, understanding of how to drive healthy outcomes. And you put those together and it ends up

being something that, you know, is... The Tesla or Apple of healthcare. Amazon's taking a swing at that right now. They're back and away. Well, yeah, they bought one medical, I guess, and then they're back away. But somebody, you know, I always thought Apple should buy Peloton and just be done with it, or Apple should buy Aura be done with it and start doing, you know, incorporating this. Obviously, they're trying with the watch a bit, but it's, you know, it's not one thing.

Do you know what I mean? It's about transforming an industry and changing that. I don't think, you know, Apple maybe it becomes an insurance company or a provider, or maybe it becomes something else. Maybe somebody else becomes it. But the point is that that, you know, again, going back to your point, like, if I'm thinking about the next try, no, I'm thinking about where are we taking this? What are we trying to do here?

And that's much more, first of all, far more inspirational, far more, far more motivational. And by the way, far more interesting because you're thinking about like, what does it mean that I have seven years of someone's data of literally every heartbeat, you know, not. It's invaluable. So does that mean you're thinking? about other products or other services. You think about, like the size of that data said, by the way, it's not our data. It's our members data.

Okay. That's your data. You know, it's your data. But we find out for you. Yeah. What can we add value for you? Can we give you an insight? It's funny.

I was in Finland talking to the science team and they said, oh, you know, we took data. We've been looking at it. And you should be okay. Hmm. And we should be okay. That's reassuring. You should be okay. That's the finish sense of humor for you right there.

But, I mean, why wouldn't you make a scale? Like, Fitbit eventually came out with the scale. I still use my Fitbit. Sales been solved. I know, but you don't have that data in your repository. But you do, because that data makes its way into Apple Health. You know, the sort of- Does it make its way back to you?

Can you get that? We subscribe to Apple Health. We do this with Google Health Kit. Like, the ecosystem of data is there. And by the way, that's kind of like table stuff. It can come back. Oh, I didn't realize it. We integrate with CGMs.

Did you do a CGM? No, what is CGM? A continuous glucose monitor. Oh, yeah, I did do that. Yes. Yeah, yes, yes, yes. So that data now, like that, you know, ORA data makes its way so you can start to see, you know, what happens as you wake up. It turns out when you wake up, what have you.

Have you? Yeah, of course. Of course. So when you, do you pull that data into ORA and combine it for me yet? Or is that on the roadmap? So we just, we just announced a partnership with three CGM vendors where we're publishing sleep data into them. and then, you know, Nutrisense levels.

Yeah, exactly. There's a finished company called Very. They're super sapiens, which is very. We're investors in Nutrisense. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. They're great.

I think that's this world of like all the data. The data is valuable, but it's not as valuable as the insights and the information that come out of that data. Because, by the way, that's personalized. And in order to be personalized, you have to not just have the data. You have to have the context. What's happening for you, Jason, right now? Yeah.

Losing weight, exercising. Some of those things we can know, some of those things we can't know. You know, are you, are you stressed? are you not stressed? And so bringing the context and the data together with the power of like, you know, unlimited computing basically, right? You know, infinite compute and infinite storage, what are the insights that can be derived both at a population level and at a personal level for you? And then what does that mean for you? Now, what does that mean? I think that's pure science because no one's had a continuous data set, right? For 75 years, medicine was practiced on like,

let me take your temperature once every two years and I'll tell you what it is. Storraine. And then doctors don't know how to even interface with this. And I just did, have you done a pre-novo scan yet? We just hired a guy named Doug Sweeney, and he was the CMO at Promo and Nespo. Yeah. So, I mean, now I got my pre-nova done. I just did the blood test.

That test, if you have cancer, I forgot the name of it. But there's a blood test you can take now. And it's not perfect. They said in 10 years it's going to be incredible. But now it's just sort of on or off. You take the test. It tells you if there's cancer in your body. Then you got to go investigate.

I did that. I just did all my blood work, you know, did my blood work twice. But none of this is coming together yet, you know, my steeped. But it will. You can see where it's going, right? Because if you look at all the things. Who's going to do it, though, because this is Google Health and Apple Health Industries. Nothing for me. Everyone's, it takes time, as you know, that doesn't happen. Health care in particular, because of all the regulatory concerns, all those things. But innovation is taking root. And the things is that data and computing are two of the real ingredients. You know, it's like, data is the new oil, right?

Yes. We know that. But you know what? It's not the same. Like some data is not clean. Of course, yeah. And it needs to be refined. And some data is higher quality than other, you know, and more meaningful.

Some data is not very meaningful. We just talked about heart rate, sleep. It's variable. What's meaningful, right? Like for, I think, in our category and heart rate variability, it's a really important signal. Like, it's a really important. It moves around a lot.

It tells you a lot about the nature of stress. Are you recovered? But it's not the only signal. There's respiration. There's heart rate. There's, you know, resting heart rate. There's daytime heart rate. There's responses.

There's context. There's temperature. There's temperature valuation. There's sleep. There's sleep stage. All these things need to come together and they need to be made meaningful, not just in the, you know, in the abstract or in the general life case, but in the specific case, in the personalized case.

It's not happening fast enough. I'll be totally honest. Well, you know. It's not, you guys all got to get together and have a summit of all your CEOs. I want all the glucose people. I want aura. I want everybody to Peloton. You got to have a summit.

I am convening a summit right now. Okay. If you hear my voice and you're in this space, I am convening a summit. Calling all CEOs. Calling all CEOs. Get your shit together. I want a Manhattan project of getting this stuff before it's too late for me. I'm 52.

Dude, you're not a young kid. You be the Oppenheimer. You be the Oppenheimer. I'll be the General Grove. I am life. I am life. I want everybody to have a longer life. And we're waiting. The pace is not fast enough.

You guys are all doing great in silos. Yep. By the way, like, I don't think anybody would disagree. But the reality is there are some things that you can really affect and there are some things that you can not affect. And the truth is, the basic behaviors that are going to make you healthier, you are doing them. You are not eating crap. You are exercising. You are getting good sleep. That's like 60% of the problem right there. Yeah. Now, okay, maybe you have something, you know, that is a time bond inside your body. I can't help you with that. And no wearable or no piece of software on the line that's going to help you. Out of your control. And by the way, you know, aging, you can affect. it. You can affect it, but that's behavior. You see what this guy's doing? What's the guy's name? Brian Johnson. Brian Johnson's losing his mind out there. I get Brian Johnson back on the program. He was on the program when he was out of shape. He's going to make that into a product. I can see he's already kind of naming a blueprint. I don't know if he's productized it yet, but I think it's going to be a product. People are very angry at him. I'm happy there's a lunatic out there doing this.

I told them I was like, no, people are annoyed. No, you watch the Twitter. I'm sorry, the X. You watch the post on X when he posts up. People are like, this guy's a lunatic. This is unnecessary. It's narcissism. You know what? He's patient zero. Let him do it. Everybody let him cook. Yeah. Because he's going to figure the same position I have with Tim Ferriss. Let him cook. Let them figure out. Revolution. Revolutions happen two ways. They happen short, violent, bloody, the French Revolution, right? Or they play out over decades and you're like, you know, the transformation happens. You're like, wait, what just happened? Like the world has changed. I think this is probably more the latter.

Accepting gay marriage, all this stuff. More the latter, right? More the latter. It took 30 years. And all of a sudden it was like, yeah, of course, gay marriage, weed. It's all good in the United States. I remember when we were growing up, it was like, gay people are getting married or you're smoking weed? Like, put those people in jail.

Now it's like, let's smoke weed while we get married. What do you, what your folks need to know? Actually, I wrote this down because I wanted to make sure it was out there. This is such an important lesson. PR, and this is what we're talking about, right? Because you're saying, oh, it's not happening fast. enough. It's like, well, it is happening, but like not everybody knows and it's not happening equally in the same places and it's happening at different paces and stuff like that. But as a founder,

as a scaling operator, as a company operator, PR is so critical because PR is the leading edge of that change. PR is the education. It's creating awareness, sometimes of the product and the features and the benefits and all that stuff, but mostly the problem, right? People need to see that what you're doing to deliver value is a problem for them or otherwise they don't care. Yes. And so PR, I think, is one of these most incredible ways, which is like, what's your story? Brian Johnson, you know what? He's telling a story about how he's going to try and reverse aging.

That's a compelling story. People writing all about it. Yeah. And you're telling me, we can help you with sleep. Hey, we can help you with your cycle. I mean, we can help you with longevity, understand your body more. This is like, it's a good story. And I think, like, you know, the press isn't the same as when you and I were coming up in the industry.

But you have this wonderful new thing, social media on podcasts. and you get the influencers and you have a long-form one-hour conversation like we just had, I mean, this is like, I think the height of it because you know, you're good on a podcast. I would, this is what I tell all my founders as I invest in them like,

just do a podcast every quarter, do your own podcast, start a podcast with your friends, go direct to the people who use your product and cut out the press because the press is cynical, biased, they're busy, they're underfunded, you know, they've got a whole swat of issues. but if you have a one hour conversation, a two hour conversation, like, yeah, that may only appeal to 5% of people.

It's the 5% of people who wear aura rings. So the ones that matter, the ones who are listening to you, right? They want to hear from you. I think that's right. I'm just going back to like company culture, right, which is like we have, and I told you about black coffee, right? We have another one, which is that we start, all our important meetings. We start with a member story, right? And it's a story of someone whose life has been affected by aura.

I love that. So that connects, gives you the purpose. It gives you the connection. And it's like somebody who's like, you know what? My dad, like he wasn't feeling well and he checked his aura and something seemed really off. And he called his doctor. And the doctor's like, thank God you called me because you would have been dead if you hadn't. And, you know, somebody else discovers swan disease.

Somebody else finds out that they're pregnant because when you, you know, when you get pregnant, your temperature changes really dramatically. Like, what's going on? I was like, oh, you're pregnant. Like, that's one of the most joyous events of a human life. And there it is captured in this piece of software. It's, it's prosaic on the one hand, but it's miraculous on the other. people are connected to that and you know what they do going back to your you know your musk hypothesis right yeah that's what gets people to give their energy and their time and their brain and their good works

and passion and power that's what startups are about people they they believe they can change the world yeah it's hard you got to you got to be delusional man because once you realize how hard it is to push that rock up the hell every day you better be delusional 100 you better have purpose and a mission because it's so hard listen i am so glad that you took the job over there. I'm so glad the products out there. It's helping so many people. Are you hiring now? You got any positions you need to fill? Yeah, we're hiring. All right. Orra. I think you go to aura.com or a career. Yeah, or a ring is the domain. Okay, yeah. So just do a search for our careers and apply. And then everybody go, you know,

and if you're trying to take care of your health, you know, tight is right. Go buy an aura. Treat yourself. You deserve it, everybody. You deserve it. And it's actually a very good experience when I did it because I got one for free and I had bought one. I gave the other one away that I got for free. That somebody gave me a gift bag. But they send you or you send people a bunch of plastic rings so you can try it on. Got to get the right size. You get the right size.

So they send you these dummy rings. You put it on. You can just toss them or you can give it to the next person, pay for it. Then they send you the actual ring. So you don't have to worry about ordering the wrong size. Is that still the case today? You can go to Best Buy and we have sizing there at Best Buy. Turns out that's one of the things that we learned.

We did this partnership with Gucci. Whoa. Gucci, I don't know if you knew about that, but we did a partnership with Gucci. And the day producer ring was the Gucci ring. It was super hot, you know, limited supplies. We sold out in five weeks.

But one of the things that we learned was that people wanted to go to a store because, one, they wanted to look at it. And two, they wanted to see how it fit and how it fit in with their life. And that, like, it's a tactile product. Like, you know, you wear on your body 24-7, you want to feel it. So we sort of realized that having a strategy that brought us into retail where people could both see the product and touch the product. to be educated about the product was really critical.

So Best Buy is the first of our big retail partners there. And that's a really interesting evolution. You know, many people thought, you know, retail's dead, right? It's not dead. It's not dead. People like to shop, it turns out. Yeah. Especially experiential stuff, which you are.

Experient. You should do a pop-up during Christmas, like in a major city. You know, we do. Test that. That kind of visibility is really practical. So we learned that. And I think, again, you know, this is how you build a company. So you make a test.

and you learn what works and you can put wood behind those those investments. So the other thing that we learned was that like people really care about how it looks. Like this is, you know, this is not just a piece of technology, right? It's experience, it's aesthetics, it's design. And how does it fit? How does it look? How does it feel? Yeah.

How does it make you feel? It's a piece of jewelry. Amazing. No, I mean, that is definitely what the Apple Watch realized. And there was some woman there who was really, I've got where she was from. But when she took over the retail story, she really got into, like the bands and stuff like that. And so I know you got like a just a crazy amount of beautiful design. So listen, everybody go try one, buy one. Great product. I'm actually literally getting a

new one this week. So everybody, uh, go try ora. And if you're, if you're looking for a great place to work with a sense of purpose and a mission, go, uh, work at order. All right, listen, congratulations. Nice, Jason. On taking over the job. Appreciate it. Tom. And, uh, good luck with, uh, you know, hey, listen, coming in and running this company now. It's not an easy thing to do. You took over at a hard time, but it looks like the storm clouds in our industry. I don't know how you feel. But I feel like we're through the eye of the storm. Yeah.

You know, like I saw it today, this podcast was sold out for like 10 plus years. Ever since I started advertising on it, frankly. And then all of a sudden we had six advertisers go out of business or just say, can you let us out of our advertising contracts? And I'm like, of course, don't worry about it. We move some stuff around. And then I just, I'm not going to say who, but somebody who was one of those like six. they just came back.

They just came back. So, you know, a year ago, they had to pause. They said, listen, we'll be back. Just, you know, things are a little rough right now. Like when you came in and you turned off marketing. And then I was on their back. And I'm like, ah, I think people are starting to feel a little more confident. Right.

And marketing is one of those things that people turn off if they're, you know, having financial problems or whatever. And then all of a sudden I see hiring coming back on for certain companies that weren't hiring. And then I'm seeing like the marketing trickle back. Those are all good green shoots, right? More than green shoots. Yeah. Much more than grain shoots. When you got a product market fit, that's a nice thing, you know?

It's a strong product market fit. Crazy customers. Yeah. And thanks for doing the pot and we'll see you all next time on this week and startups. Bye bye.