#94: From Startup to Grown-Up: Jonathan Wolf, co-founder and CEO of ZOE - The growth of a founder, the most important leadership skills, and how to raise 7 million euros in 3 weeks.

Spend time with other founders. So I actually do a, like a regular meeting with a set of other CEOs and I get enormous value from it. And it's not like the direct advice of this exact thing they've done. It can be very lonely to start something run your own. And so spending time with other people who are going through that same journey, who aren't competitors, who are living through and realizing how almost everything that you're struggling with, half of them are dealing with. And also every time you meet, we meet up as a group. Half of them are feeling great and half of them are feeling miserable. But what's funny is it changes. So it's not always the same. And so now people are really high and the next time they're low. And also the funny thing is it isn't related to like how fast the revenue is growing either. Like, sometimes people are like really stressed when it's growing really fast and like calm when it's going low. So I would say spending time with other founders, you learn a lot. But above, I think it just helps you to calm down.

Welcome back. This is from Startups you'd grown up. My name is Alyssa Cohn and today I'm thrilled to be joined by Jonathan Wolf, the co founder and CEO of Zoe, the science driven nutrition company improving the health of millions. Jonathan's path to founding Zoe started with a success in tech. He was not a founder, but he was an early employee and he helped scale a company to a $2 billion IPO. After that, experience took a sabbatical and we talk about how it was actually a very tough time for him because it was so unstructured and he didn't know if he'd find his new mission. During this period, a serendipitous meeting with a leading scientist sparked an idea and so he co founded the company Zoe to get it off the ground. He raised about $7 million and we discussed the process he went through to do that in just a few weeks. In our conversation, Jonathan shares what why being naive about an industry can sometimes be your biggest advantage. How he built a powerful flywheel combining breakthrough science, a growing community, and personalized data to fuel Zoe's growth. We also discussed what Jonathan had to unlearn about leadership, especially when it comes to clarity, vulnerability, and building trust inside of a growing company. We also get a little bit into nutrition and the microbiome. So you're gonna learn a lot about leadership, entrepreneurship, health, and the realities of building a mission driven profit company. So please enjoy my fantastic conversation with Jonathan Wolf, co founder and CEO of Zoe. Jonathan, welcome to the show. I'm so excited to have you.

It's brilliant to be here.

I'm thrilled to have you and specifically Jonathan. Everybody on this podcast knows I'm a health nut myself, and this is a health company. You're the co founder and CEO of Zoe, the science and nutrition company on a mission to improve the health of millions. I cannot wait to get into that. But you were working in tech startups for, I think, like, 20 years. What happened to your. What was the transformation? How did you go from there to. To. To founding Zoe?

I feel like you're aging me already before I've got into, you know, the. The first. The first minute. But thank you. Yes, I'm quite old, is what you're politely saying.

Experienced.

But if you're listening on the audio, I'm in incredibly good shape because of the food that I eat.

So super handsome.

If you're. If you're on video, then just imagine, like, a better version of me. Really? So. Well, the answer is a series of unexpected decisions and choices through my life, I would say. So There has definitely never been a master plan. But you're quite right. I've been in tech a really long time. I really studied physics. I got into the Internet sort of when that started, pretty much in 2000. And prior to Zoe, I was actually part of the team behind a company called Criteo. So I joined that company of Chief Product Officer back in about 2008. And when I joined, it was 30 people. I had no revenue. And seven years later, it was 2,000 people. It was more than a billion dollars of revenue. It had been public on NASDAQ for a couple of years. It was about a 2, $3 billion market cap business. So I'd been through this amazing hockey stick that sor. Everybody dreams of when they're doing startups. And I had got increasingly disillusioned with it, sort of after we'd gone public in the last couple of years and realized that it wasn't sort of sufficient for me. And I think I had increasingly sort of felt, there's something that's a bit wrong with this. So the company actually started in France. It was started in Paris. That was where the technical founders were from. And so almost all of our engineers were in Paris. And by the time I left, there were about 500 engineers in Paris. And they were probably like the smartest engineers in France, because when we started that, there wasn't even like a Google or a Meta or anything in Paris we were doing these very, very complicated, like AI machine learning, we called at the time, problems. So we're getting all these brilliant engineers. And what they were doing was they were doing advertising technology. They were helping to create personalized ads. And so what they were trying to get was for people to click slightly more often on ads in order to sell slightly more shoes. And I just sort of increasingly came to this view there wasn't anything wrong with that, but there was somehow something wrong with society that we were taking some of our best and brightest people and they were spending their years getting you to click slightly more often on an ad. ALYSSA and so I decided that it was time to leave. I took a sabbatical and I really had no idea what I was going to do next. But I think I knew two things. One, I really wanted to use this new machine learning, what we now really call AI, and I wanted to do it for something that seemed like it had a bit more purpose. But other than that, honestly, I was a bit lost. And if you'd met me in the year after I'd left, I think you'd have seen me quite miserable trying to figure out what to do with my life. And, you know, Critia had been very successful. I didn't suddenly need to get a job right away. And so those things that almost give you, keep you grounded and give you purpose. And I was a workaholic. So my job has gone away. Like I haven't got to get a job right away. So all of these things have pulled away. I just got divorced. So like everything was sort of like slightly loose and I was like, I don't know if I'm going to find something to do. Maybe I'm never going to find something to be motivated and excited about. And entirely by chance, I ended up meeting my co founder, who's a guy called Professor Tim Spector, who is an amazing scientist. He's actually one of the top 100 most cited scientists in the world. So, like the real deal, incredibly impressive. And I met him, not one to one, but I just went to a talk and listened to him on the stage because he'd just written his first book about the microbiome and the microbiome is a trillions of bacteria inside your gut. And Tim had been doing these amazing study of twins. He actually runs the largest in depth twins study in the world. He's been following 12,000 twins for 30 years to understand how genes and environment shape outcomes. And he'd written this first book and he was up on stage and I was just blown away by everything he said. And he was basically explaining that the most important thing that's going to shape your health actually isn't your genes, it isn't your upbringing. It's these microbes inside you and you can change them. And he'd been doing this through basically exploring big data in human beings with his 12,000 people. And a sort of light bulb went off in my head. I was like, so we could apply The SoR of AI tools that we've been doing on the Internet to something much more important to human health. And that was sort of the idea. The start of Zoe was this idea. And the next step was trying to convince Tim to actually come and do it with me.

There's so much to say about that. My goodness. So, like, first, I want to go back to. You took a sabbatical. And everyone's like, the sabbatical is so great. And actually your life's not great. Sabbatical is not good. It, like, you know, kind of removes structure from your life. What was that like when you were miserable? I mean, obviously going through a divorce, you had on in transition. I'm just curious. Can you give us, like, one insight for how did you kind of, like, what did you tell yourself? Or how did you handle that? Or, like, what did you cling to during a period of, like, wandering in the wilderness?

That's a great question. And I hadn't done any therapy at that point either. I've done quite a lot now in the last few years, and I've got really convinced that I was brought up in an environment which was really all about ideas. And then when I did physics, that's also more all about ideas and logic. And so I was like, everything is just something that you ought to be able to solve. And if you just come up with the right idea and tell people and convince them, they'll do it. And I think one of the things I've learned slowly, Alyssa, is that relationships with people and what they really care about and what motivates them and what drives them is so much more important than this. But it's taken me a very long time to get there, and I would say that I hadn't made any progress, probably at the start of the sabbatical on this. I think that firstly, I had my son, so that was probably a really big grounding. So that was really important and creates structure. And so that bit was, like, really clear. I want to be a good dad. That. That's really clear. I had some specific tasks that I'D given myself. So I was like, I'm going to not look for a job for six months. I'm going read some books, I'm going to do some activities. I'm going to intentionally create some space because I know that it will be hard. That worked quite well, actually, because that felt again, like I've created something. It was when the six months was up and I had to figure out what to do, then I think it became very hard. And, I mean, if I was going to advise my younger self now, I would say you've got to be willing to, except that it's more of a process and be less fixated on the end goal. And this is what I discuss with my team all the time. And so, like, there are times when things are very difficult and you've. If you define everything by whether or not it's successful, the only thing that matters is the outcome. You're almost saying your entire life doesn't matter except for one or two events. And what's funny is, having been through some of those, those events go past really fast. Like, I was on, you know, when you went. The day we went public and, you know, NASDAQ does this, like, that's quite fun. But then you wake up the next day and, like, life is still continuing. So I think feeling that, like, the journey that you're on is something that you really value, that the people you're with you really enjoy, that you feel like what you're putting in is really good. So, like, are we doing really good work? Are we approaching this? We talk a lot about a scientific approach at Zoe. That's really important, and that's not just doing the science, but that's even thinking about changing the app. It's like, have you got a clear hypothesis? Have you thought about how you want to do this? Then it's not just whether or not you're successful, it's whether you're actually doing something the right way. And for us, the company is very mission driven. So that's also really important. The fact that you're trying to improve the health of millions, I think carries you through a lot of difficult periods. So if I was advising my younger self, I would have said it's all right not to have something to do, but I found it very difficult. My parents are both workaholics. I think I grew up with this assumption that you're, you know, that work is the most important thing you do. And so to suddenly not have work, it's almost like part of you has been sort of cut out and like, do you still have any useful purpose in life? I think I was, quite honestly, I was quite depressed by the time I got this. I was like, I don't know if I'll ever find something. Maybe I'm just like, what am I for?

Yeah, it's so hard. But, I mean, I think we go through that and then that sows the seeds of kind of future insight and knowledge like you've been talking about. But it's still a hard time. And I think that people don't always appreciate. It's like a little bit like, when you finally get everything you want, why aren't you happy? It's very challenging, actually, for people.

I think it's so true. I think I. I had always assumed there were a set of things I had to achieve, and if I achieved them, I'd suddenly be happy. And I definitely spent, like, my 20s and 30s basically trying to get the approval of my parents. I don't know if this will resonate with anyone listening to this podcast, but, like, I love my parents. They loved me. But they're both very successful. Work was very important. And I always felt like if only I did more and I was more successful, I get more of their time. I've now realized that that's not really real and I'm carrying this. And also they'll be proud of me. And I realize, excuse me. I realized, you know, they are proud of me, but it doesn't change the internal voice, which is constantly saying, you know, you're not really doing quite well enough, and if only you did this thing, you'd achieve it. And I think what's funny is, even when you achieve the things that maybe you set out earlier in life, you realize that those aren't really the things that suddenly make you happy.

Yeah.

I think that a level of financial security is incredibly appealing. And I would. You know, I think anyone listening to this who doesn't have that will say, well, that would make a huge difference. And I think that is true. But in terms of deep levels of happiness and contentment, it's not the. I really think it isn't like, I got that achievement and it's done. It's something about living your life each day in a way that feels in line with your values or alternative. You're living your life and it's misaligned with your values. I think you've got this deep discomfort no matter what.

Yeah, I think that's important. Lessons for everybody to kind of like, it's like the journey of A lifetime in some ways. So in that wandering in the wilderness, you stumbled into a lecture with Dr. Tibbs Spector and I think it's so powerful that you had this very, I would just say the big entrepreneurial insight. You know, it's like he's on stage talking to you. I've read about the famous, his different various twin studies, very interesting. But you suddenly had this entrepreneurial insight. Aha. We can make a business. Was it the first time you really experienced yourself as an entrepreneur or are the roots of that earlier in your life?

I think it's a great question. I think that it's the first time that I've really been an entrepreneur, but I've always been a problem solver and I've always been someone. My wife describes me as a questioner, which basically means no matter what she says, I say why? And I ask really annoying questions that challenge this when really I should just take the trash out. Right. And so I do think that this sets you up very well to be an entrepreneur because you tend to question everything around you. It's why I ended up becoming like I, where I ended up running products. I think these things sort of line up. But this is the first time and I think the answer is it had never occurred to me. So partly that is probably my age, I've just turned 50, so sort of people did not sort of start tech startups as just like a thing that you would do when I was 25. And I think that has really changed, which I think is wonderful. So it's definitely something that's more open and I think that I was probably on this, like, yeah, but I've got to go make my mum and dad like proud and that's got to jump through more hoops. And so I don't think I was sort of there. And I think what happened is that I joined this very early stage startup. I really enjoyed it. I wasn't a founder, but I was close to that. I joined when we were 30 people. It was very early and I saw that is such fun. Clearly the only other thing I can do next has to be something like a startup. And then when I started to talk to people with existing startups, I realized there were two sorts of startups I could find. There were startups that were doing amazingly, in which case their executive team was good and there wasn't like a big space for me to step into it, or there were startups that were really struggling and then I'd look at them be like, but I think I'd rather just sort of do this from scratch. So actually I think it was very hard and I wanted to go and do something, I think very early and create something. So I think it was the first time and I was not at all sure that I would come up with something new. And I think what happens is, what I think is true for most successful entrepreneurs, which is I didn't suddenly come up with something that I had no knowledge, awareness of at all. It came out of this combination of my background in sort of machine learning and sort of very large scale data and having also done a lot of things around sort of consumer Internet with this interest in nutrition and then meeting somebody else, Tim, and suddenly seeing how that can fit together. And it was a rather wild leap. I think there's a reason that nothing like Zoe exists and that's because anyone who's actually been in nutrition science would have said, well, that's totally impossible to do what you're doing. You're crazy. And I spent the first four years trying to convince, you know, many different nutrition scientists, many of whom now work with us, to come and get involved because they're all like, you're mad. You know, we said things like, well, we're going to need to do a study with a thousand people to give us all of this data and we need to deliver that, you know, in 18 months. And they're like, well, that normally takes about seven years. Like, you're mad, that's not possible. Or we said, well, we need to create a way to score any food in the world in real time and personalize it to you. And they're like, well, that's not possible because food is too complicated. And so I think my total lack of knowledge about nutrition science allowed me to step in and imagine this was possible. And if I'd known a lot about it, I think I'd have just seen all the difficulties that I now know about. I'd be like, oh, that's a stupid idea, I'll go and do something else. So I think there's like this interesting mix where you need to know enough to be able to pull this off. And so I think, you know, some experience is often helpful in an entrepreneur. We talk all the time about 22 year olds who start companies, but in my experience it's much more common that the entrepreneur who's successful is already into their, you know, 30s or 40s or 50s, and actually they've had some real experience in a business and running things and managing people and thinking through some problems. They also understand Often and the problem that they're going into in some way. And so I think I brought some skills, but I was also incredibly naive. And I think the other thing is we've talked about my side of this, but when I met Tim, I managed to get this introduction to meet him and I went to meet him in these beautiful offices in King's College London. It's St Thomas's Hospital, which is on the River Thames opposite the Houses of Parliament in London. So if you've ever seen like the picture of Houses of Parliament on, you know, some TV show, that's pretty much the view from his office. It's. It's amazing. And so I came in and I said, you know, I heard you talking about the way that everybody's microbiome is different and that means that we're all going to respond to food differently, but also that we can change our microbiome, we can improve our health. And the challenge is you've got all of this data, you've shown this, but you don't know how to tell anybody exactly what to do. And that's really where we can use AI to actually at scale for everybody, get the experience, as if you're talking to, like the world's best nutritional scientists just for you, and guide you, Alyssa, to how to improve for you, for your goals, for your microbiome, where to go, and we can actually do tests for everybody and get your own data and your own microbiome and use this. And Tim very politely said, well, you know, that sounds really interesting and I would be interested to do that, but that data doesn't exist. To build that first algorithm, we'd have to do, like, what would be the largest nutrition science study in the world, to get all the people to give us all of this data and look at their responses. So that's what it would take. And so he said to me and my other co founder, George, if you could do that, that'd be sort of interesting. So I said, well, how much would that cost? And they said, and Tim said, well, that'd be about 7 million euros. And so we left and went away. Tim told me many years later he thought he'd never see us again. He was just like, that's what it takes. They're never going to come back. Anyway, we came back like two or three weeks later and said, we've raised the money, so can we do it? And Tim was like, oh, heck. Well, I guess now I'm committed. So basically, from Tim's perspective, he sort of didn't think this was going to happen, but then we'd raise the money. Like the science was really, he was very excited by the science, he's a scientist. So we went ahead and did it and that was the start of what's become the largest nutrition science study in the world. We completed that, that first study within 18 months. We actually had two papers in nature medicine that came out of it, which is amazing. But it was also, you know, it's also just a series of happy accidents. I think if Tim had known that we were going to come back with the money, I don't know whether he would have really signed up for it. He had a full time job at the time. So I think there's always a lot of luck in these things.

Incredible. Wow. I mean on the one hand luck, but on the other hand it sort of just goes to show you that whole the Steve Jobs quote about, you know, you can trace your life backwards because you were preparing for this by getting, first of all, you prepared for this by being a part of a startup and seeing the successful part of the startup, startup, not all the miserable part of the startups that don't work out, but the successful part of startups and knowing that you could do that because you'd already done that pretty much. Also you, you really, for you, you're preparing yourselves for yourself by getting involved with machine learning, which is now we're calling AI, which wasn't available 25 years ago, but is available now. And then you prepared yourself through just getting older and wiser and I think probably getting your head on straight about like what you're kind of goal in life was. So that's like fascinating to me because I think that we are doing all this preparation in the background without always realizing it. But the second thing you said so well, you said many things, but like another key point, the notion of being naive to the industry. So I had Elon Twig on the podcast who focuses on travel and I've also talked to the founders of Flatiron Health, none of whom had experience in the industry when they went to reinvent the industry. And the point about that is they all said I would never have done it if I had known how hard it was going to be. And so like being industry naive, but having a lot of background allows you to approach it something differently. So then when everyone says you can't do that, you're like, oh, how come we can't do that? And then you're so naive that you are able to jump in.

I think that's exactly right. And I was incredibly lucky by the scientists who've been involved in this. So Tim is absolutely world class. We also got involved with a professor called Sarah Berry who told me that I was completely mad when I explained we were going to do the study. She had done already at this point, about 30 randomized controlled trials with human beings of different nutrition interventions, which is very rare. There's very few people in the world who've done that. And I said, but normally her studies were about 40 people because nobody does anything in nutrition science, really large numbers of people, because it's both too expensive, but also then they've got the technology to sort of support that. And so when we explain, well, we're going to do a thousand people and we're going to do, we're going to measure everything around them. Like, we're going to have blood sensors and motion trackers and they're going to record through an app everything they eat and they can take photos of it. And she was like, well, that's impossible. That's going to take you like five years. And she pretty much told me that everything we were going to do was impossible for the first five years. And it's only in the last three years that she's finally like, well, okay, maybe we can possibly do that. But I think I'm very lucky to have the. I think. I guess the important point here is like, no one person makes anything work. The question is, can you somehow coax a team to come together of outstanding people with amazing domain knowledge? And I'm sure in the examples you're talking about as well, I'm sure that they brought in people who had all this expertise in these areas. And it's that sort of combination of a bit of being naive, sort of believing in. I'm fundamentally an optimist. Like, I believe when someone says this, maybe this is my question again. When someone says it can't be done, I'm also like, well, why not? Are you sure? Like, is it like a law of thermodynamics that can't be done? Or is it just difficult because that feels like two very different things. And is it difficult because it's like an unimaginable amount of money? Like, you know, you could, could build a tunnel between New York and London, but clearly it's like just too much money? Or is it just difficult because no one's really tried to say, could you get this personalized nutrition advice? Could you actually improve somebody's health and could it really make a difference? And the Answer is no, you can. It's hard, but it's not impossible. And I think what's interesting is I think these things work best when somehow the incentives to solve this in the past haven't really been there. So there's this huge problem with healthcare, which is there's this enormous incentive to support the development of new drugs, particularly drugs for very common diseases. And even more so if they're sort of long term lifestyle diseases like diabetes or obesity or something where high, you know, blood pressure that lots of people have and they're gonna keep having for a really long time. And in that situation, it makes sense to spend maybe a billion dollars to develop a drug all the way until it's ready, because then you're going to make a lot more than a billion dollars as you sell it. And so we do create amazing new drugs. And although, you know, lots of people say negative things about the pharmaceutical industry, it's important to recognize that there are a lot of drugs, you know, people are going through. I have friends who've been going through cancer recently. And the drugs that are available now are amazing compared to what was available when I was younger. And so the. But the incentive is there to allow that, even though it's very expensive, when you look at lots of other areas, and I'm just going to stick within sort of health and nutrition, we have a huge problem. So if you think about nutrition, it is now clear that the food we eat is the most important thing that you can do for your health. Alyssa There is nothing more important. And there's other things that are important, like sleep and exercise and all the rest of it, but there's nothing more important. The challenge is that there is nobody who is interested in actually running a study to understand whether or not eating more avocados is going to make you healthy, because nobody has a patent on the avocado. Nobody has an avocado trademark. So if they do all that hard work to prove the avocado works better, then basically everybody else will just sell some more avocados. And so there's nothing there to support that science. And so the only science that's historically been done in nutrition is either funded by governments or funded by big food manufacturers and government. Investment in nutrition science is great, but if you look, the amount they've spent on it is tiny in comparison to the amount that's been spent elsewhere in health, despite the fact that nutrition is by far the biggest thing that's going to shape health. So there's been this incredible absence of that and the way that the science is funded, it basically all comes down to funding very small studies on a very specific mechanism that will all be wrapped up within the cycle of a grant. And so you would never do something like Zoe, where you're going collect hundreds of thousands of people over eight years and just growing and growing. It's just not something that sadly governments have sort of funding is set up for. And then the other big pool of money that's been going into nutrition from big food is in my opinion, deeply tainted. And this is really, this, we're basically seeing the same story that we saw with tobacco manufacturers in the past. They're mainly just funding research to confuse people and make you believe that this like highly processed food, which doesn't look anything like the food that we used to eat, and where there is increasing evidence that some of this is causing us very, very deep harm, isn't the problem at all. And actually it's really just that we're not doing enough exercise or you know, really you just need some more protein or any, the rest of it. So that's actually created a lot of confusion because there's then all of these studies have come out that are not really set out to achieve the right goal. And so I think what's interesting is then in a way the playing field was very open. If you say, well, we would like to go and do something new that is going to be large scale, that's going to approach this in the same way that you would think about something sort of in the Internet, which is we want to collect more and more data and if we can get enough data we can start to actually understand how to compare you with all these other people who are like, you understand how the food you eat is linked to your mood and your energy. You know, we've now published more than 70 peer reviewed papers in some of the most important journals, scientific journals in the world. And partly that's because I think we have some really great scientists working with us. But the biggest part is we have this amazing data set that we've been building and it's allowed us to do things like understand like individual microbes and how they're linked to your health and how they're linked to your food, which is only possible with very large numbers. And that's only possible because nobody has sort of thought about doing this in the past. And it's also, I would say, because a lot of people are really interested in doing this sort of community science. So one big thing with Zoe is that most people who come and do Zoe, choose to opt into the science and to make their data available to the scientists to do this research, because they recognize that they're not only going to get value back for themselves, they're going to help to push forward the science to help others, but also that new discovery will come back and help them in the future. And so I think I'm very excited about being able to use technology and data in a positive way, because so much about what we read is the way in which, you know, Instagram is ruining us and ruining our children and all the rest of it. So I would like to believe you can also use it for good.

Right. Oh, my gosh, so much there. And I'd love to hear about the study because. And I just want to lay the table for people. So what Zoe is. And fill in, in the gaps for me, Zoe is this sort of personalized nutrition sort of kit. So you get this kit and you eat these biscuits and you track your blood sugar and you track your stool. You sort of send the stool sample in, and then somehow you get an analysis of, you know, your microbiome and what's, you know, working, what's better for you and not good for you. And then I assume that people are then sharing with you their data of what they're eating and how they're going on track or off track. And that just feeds into your data overall. So I think my question is, how did you get started with the study when you didn't have this whole flywheel? And then, by the way, am I right about your business? Like, are there. You want to fill in the gaps? And how is it now continuing?

Well, let me tell you a little bit more about Zoe, because I didn't want to jump in too soon. I can, you know, I know that you want to hear about it, but let me tell you a little bit about that, just because that's some very exciting news for anyone who's listening to this in the States, which is by the time this podcast comes out, we'll actually, we'll have launched a free app in the US So anyone in the US can download Zoe for free and get access to basically the results of eight years of the largest nutrition science study in the world. And critically, get this ability to understand what's really in their food. And the reason why we've done that is that Zoe is very, very well known in the uk. People in the UK who are listening to this, a very high chance they've heard of us and hundreds of thousands of people have been our members. But like millions of people listening to our podcast, and lots of people in the US if they've heard of us, probably have heard of us through the podcast. One of the things we have got more and more interested in is the impact of processed food on health. And it was not something that I had thought about at all when I started, Zoe, I was really interested in just like, well, what, in a sense, what is the best food that I need to eat? And the realization that, that so much of what we're told is just wrong. You know, I was brought up in a world where, you know, eating high fat food was bad for you, for example, and we know that this is garbage where I was brought that really what matters is counting calories. We now know that counting calories not only doesn't work, but for 80% of people, like, repeatedly trying to follow calorie counting is going to lead you to put on more weight than you never did in the first place. So, like, there's an amazing number of myths around the food that we eat. But increasingly, what we've realized is probably the biggest danger for us as human beings living in the developed world is this high risk processed food that we're eating. And the challenge is that not all processed food is risky. So olive oil, for example, counts as a processed food. It's not like an olive. It's been squeezed and squeed out and filtered. And by the way, like a Greek yogurt, or yogurt, as you would say, is also processed food. Right? That is definitely not milk. It's been fermented, it's gone through its way. So that also counts as a processed food. But so is, you know, a Kellogg cereal of any sort. So is a candy bar with 50, you know, 57 different ingredients.

Doritos.

Doritos is a brilliant example of that. Right? From what is that versus, you know, a potato that's been fried in oil. What we've increasingly seen is that we are creating food that in no way represents the sort of food that we used to eat in the past. And we are now starting to understand that it's not just that it's high in sugar or it's high in fat or it's high in salt. Actually, it's having a deep impact on our body. Probably the biggest way it's doing that is through the microbiome. So basically, when we're eating food, we're eating these microbes inside our gut. And we now understand that those microbes are central to our health. So if you are feeding your good microbes. They create all of these chemicals and they're like little pharmacies inside your body, creating all of these good chemicals that come past the gut wall inside your body and they go into your bloodstream and they go everywhere. So they go to every cell in your body, they end up in your brain, elicit everywhere. And if you've got those good bugs, they're supporting your positive mood, they are helping to reduce your inflammation. And so they will have an impact on your heart health, they will have an impact on reducing dementia. But they're also, in the short term, they can have an impact on your energy, your mood, your sleep. And if you shift that and you can shift these microbes quite fast, you can feel the impact of changing food in just a few weeks. However, there's a negative side of this, which is, sadly, there are also bad bugs. And you know, what a surprise, these bad bugs love the sort of junk food that is increasingly part of our diet. And they have like the negative effect. You know, they're also just trying to get on and eat their food, but they're creating a lot of chemicals which create inflammation in our body. And what we now know is this processed food, which is now a huge part of our diet in the us, in the UK and Canada, but increasingly now, even in places like France or Italy that we like to imagine eat like a perfect diet, are having a really bad impact on our microbiome. And as a result, we all have microbiomes which are, are really sick compared to sort of microbiomes of our grandparents. And that is a profound problem. And to fix it, you can't just pop a probiotic. We need to understand how to shift what we're eating. But that's difficult because everything is processed. And it's not realistic to say you won't eat processed food. And by the way, I just gave some examples, right? Like a Greek yogurt is not going to cause you a problem for the vast majority of people. It's probably actually going to be rather a good food. And so we've been working for a long time to create a risk scale for processed food. And what that means is how can we allow you to understand for anything in the supermarket whether it is a high risk food, like a low risk food, or actually no risk at all. And we can now do that. We've created that and we decided that we want to give this away for free because it is so important to shift the way that people eat. And one of the biggest challenges that People have said to us is that generally people who've been doing Zoe with the kit where they actually measure their own microbiome and their blood sugar, they love. But it's a significant cost and not everyone can afford that. And so what we decided to do is we're giving this app away for free. It allows you to take a photo of any meal, uses some really brilliant AI to identify what's in it. You can also just snap a photo of, you know, anything, jaritos, whatever you want in the supermarket and immediately get a view of what's inside that food. So how good is it for you? What is the risk processing? And therefore if you were sitting, if you're walking down the aisle of the grocery store, you can literally just look at two different peanut butters and you would be amazed. You could have a peanut butter which is highest risk and you can have a peanut butter which has no risk. And on the front they basically say peanut butter.

Yeah. So that's a lot. First of all, I'm going to say from bottom of my heart, preach, Jonathan, preach. It's so true, everything you just said. Again, as a health nut myself and kind of coming to terms and kind of learning about, I think how we've been misserved by just the government who I think is well intentioned about what's healthy and what's not healthy, and then misserved maybe less well intentioned by big Food, you know, understanding what goes into our body and how it affects. It's so important and coming back to though that you all have done this, this research. As an entrepreneur, did you sort of just think, let's just get started doing this research or, and, and how did you actually start the research before you had the membership, but now it feels like you have a flywheel with the data of people sending you. So on the one hand they can take a picture and, and they, you and you'll tell people it's high risk or low risk. And people who are doing this personalized, they have part of your, your process and they're in your membership. But then when people opt in, you get information back from them on what they're eating or like how it's affecting them. So that creates a flywheel of information that you continue to use to improve your product. Right?

Correct. So there's been, there's been like a, a pathway to get to here. So like it's incredibly exciting to, to be here, but there was a pathway. So I think if I, if I take you back to that first story of my Meeting my co founder, Tim, and he said, well, you have to go and do this science study before we can start. So the first three years, excuse me, for the first three years, there was no product. We were just doing science. And we were lucky enough to raise the money from investors who are willing to sort of believe in this long.

Term vision and say, I want to cut you off. Who invested in you. And it wasn't lucky because you had to go out and do something. How did you raise that first $7 million?

So the first 7 million came from a combination of angel investors, many of whom were people that I had known, and the second was from an amazing lady called Marie Ecklund, who was actually one of the original investors in Criteo, which is the company that I had been in before. So I'd known her for a long time, she knew me, and she was fundamentally doing what I think every really good early stage venture capitalist was doing, which was really saying, I'm going to make a bet on this team. And the problem seems sort of interesting, but who knows how they will evolve it?

Yeah, so that's how you make. Okay, so great. So then you have the $7 million, you got to Tim and you said, tim, we have the money, let's go. And then how did you set that up, you know, to. To make some. Because again, like we do clinical trials and it actually is like 40 people. How did you. What was the vision and how did you actually make it happen?

So, so I think the vision here was if we were going to be able to do any sort of machine learning or AI, we needed to get to much bigger scale. 40 people doesn't get you anywhere. So that first day was 1,000 people, and that was a thousand people. Didn't sound that much. But every one of those people actually had to come into the lab and spend an entire day hooked up to all sorts of machines, measuring their blood at like 10 intervals, feeding them the very early precursor of the cookie that you mentioned before that we've been feeding to everybody who does the test kit today, which is like a way to deliver a very standardized meal at breakfast and lunch, and therefore measure exactly what's going on inside your blood. So what happens to your blood sugar, what happens to your blood fats? And, you know, cholesterol is the one that we know very well. What happens to, like inflammatory markers, what happens into all sorts of other things. We can measure in the blood and then send you home to record everything that you're eating, have a blood sugar sensor on your arm so we can see what happens to your blood sugar every day, continue to get you to take blood tests repeatedly at home and send them in and record everything with an app that we built that allows us to see exactly what you're eating when you go to sleep. You also recorded your energy and your mood. I mean, we got you to give you everything. And so people did that for about a week to 10 days. And that is an immensely in depth study. And no one had ever tried to do anything close to that scale because previously you could only have done that in the lab. And so what had changed was the fact that because of these new technologies, the mobile phone allowing you to record everything you're eating, to take photos, these blood sugar sensors that you can now take remotely, which had been developed for diabetes, you know, motion sensors that we're used to from, you know, Fitbits, all these sorts of things suddenly allowed you basically to collect the same sort of high quality data remotely that historically you could only do in the lab. But what's interesting is that was just a thousand people. You know, our microbiome database is now about quarter of a million people. But that first 1,000 people was such a big great. Sorry. It was such a big breakthrough. We ended up having a paper published in Nature Medicine. Nature Medicine is one of the very top scientific journals in the world. So most scientists listening to this will know that getting a paper in Nature Medicine is a bit like winning an Oscar. Most scientists in their life will never have a paper published in Nature Medicine. It's sort of the thing that you dream of. And so to get that published in Nature Medicine about the first understanding of microbiome and food is a sign already of like, how much of a breakthrough this was. But now we're at a scale which is like 250 times larger. And what happened is we evolved from this study where we're paying for everything ourselves. We're doing this in the lab and saying, well, actually, could we now transition to something where we can almost put the lab in a box and anyone who wants to become a member of Zoe can buy the test kit. It's about $300. £300. You get actually all the core things that we were doing with that initial study and therefore you get these measurements, like your own microbiome, like your own blood sugar response, like what happens with your, your fats in your blood. But then we can compare you with all of these other people and therefore we use that data, comparing you against everybody else to predict how you're going to respond to all of these other foods. And so exactly as you've said, Alyssa, it sort of starts to create this flywheel where actually what we understand is getting better. And I think the area where we've seen that most is the microbiome. So I think we've just got more and more convinced about how central your gut health is and how central these bacteria are. And that's because as the data has grown, we started to see stronger and stronger links between the state of your bacteria, the state of this gut microbiome you call it, which is just the name for all the bacteria together. So really, really strong links between the state of microbiome and the food that you eat, and also your health. And increasingly now we're getting to the point where we can see individual bacterias that are linked to individual foods. So we actually published a paper last year where we have found a bug that is only inside you if you drink coffee.

Oh, my goodness.

Are you a coffee drinker?

I am a coffee drinker.

Is that a good bug or a bad bugter? It's not a bad bug. It's not one of the best 50 in terms of impact on health. But it is a bug that you will only if you drink coffee, there's going to be lots of that inside you. And if you don't drink coffee, they'll basically be none. And that's because there's a lot of fiber in coffee. Lots of people don't know that, but actually, for the typical American who's drinking three cups of real coffee, that might be like 40% of all the fiber they eat in the day. So the coffee is good. It's not good that that's 40% of the fiber. If that's your diet like that, you need a lot more plants to be really healthy. But interestingly, it's an. It's this example of the way that there's no one good food. You can't just be like, this is one magic food. And as long as I eat, you know, blueberries, I'll be fine. Because each of these different bacteria, if think about them a bit like animals in the zoo, right? When you go to the zoo, there's all these different animals. The zookeeper has to give them different diet, right? Each of them has these different things that makes them healthy. And what's interesting is it turns out the bacteria inside our gut are the same. They can eat a bunch of things, but they all have things that they prefer and they respond to well. And so if you want to Support all those 50 good bugs, you need to have a lot of different foods. But what those bugs feed on is they feed on plants above all. And above all, they feed on, like, the cell walls of the plant, which we tend to call fiber, because, you know, sort of the sugars and the starches tend to be digested by you before they make it down into your gut, which is sort of like the end of the digestive process. But what's interesting is we can't digest a lot of things, and so these bacteria are there in order to eat all the stuff from the plants we eat. And when I say a plant that can also include. That's not just broccoli, right? That could also be nuts and seeds and spices. It's beans and chickpeas. All these different sort of things. Like, we can only digest parts of that. These bacteria can then digest the bits that we can't. And then they create these amazing chemicals that support our health. And until very recently, you never needed to worry too much because our ancestors just ate, like, a diverse diet of all the things they could. There was definitely lots of plants and fiber because we didn't know how to refine it down to, you know, a bagel. So we didn't have that problem. It's only very recently that you can be in an environment where you can eat this ultra processed food, this highly processed food, and where we're seeing very little of the sort of plants that we used to eat and used to be a core part of our diet, they've now become very, very small part of it. And so that, that.

Wow, that's so fascinating. Of course, if you came to my house, you'd see all the plants. Cauliflower, broccoli, all the plants. But I understand. And that's unless everyone thinks this is turning into a health podcast.

Right.

I promise you we're going to get back into the business journey. But I think it's so important as a message for everybody to hear that you can take control of your own over your own health. And that actually these things, what you put in your mouth, really makes a difference. And I'm just curious, did you know at the beginning we're going to do a membership model? Because what I think is unique and interesting about Zoe, it's not just one to one, like, I do the thing and, you know, you. And like, I do this thing, I find out what's going on with me, and that's it. It's this whole membership model. And I, I would even dare say, probably community model. You even said community science. Was that part of the business model initially or did that kind of evolve as you. As you evolve the business?

That was actually. If we went back to the original pitch, it was in the original pitch. And I think that comes from sort of my background at this previous company. I mentioned Critio, where we were already doing machine learning, sort of AI, and it rested on data. And basically, as the company grew and we got more data, we got better and better at, in this case, predicting the exact ad that you would look at. And so I think when I looked at the problem with nutrition and listening to Tim, it was really clear the big problem was there's not enough people. Nobody's willing to fund these studies with a hundred thousand or a million people. And also people aren't very interested in doing those studies for very long, because what am I getting back from it? So if you could create a model where suddenly you could end up saying, we could go from a thousand people to 100,000 people to a million people to tens of millions of people, and you can make them feel like there's something in it for me. So I want to sort of provide that information, and then by getting more of that information, we can actually do the science better and understand what's going on that you just can't collect at smaller scales. We're suddenly going to be able to have breakthroughs. And I think that looks a bit obvious now because AI, obviously in the last couple of years with ChatGPT and everything else has just broken through mainstream. And it's sort of obvious to everybody that suddenly they collected so much data, you know, downloaded all the data from the Internet and it was all magic. I think that was less obvious to most people eight years ago, but I think because of my previous background, it was really obvious to me that if we're going to solve this really hard problem about nutrition and food is incredibly complicated, you would need to find a way to scale far beyond that initial study. So that initial study was going to be enough to give the first advice to everybody to say, right, you've got the first advice, now come and join. If you join, you're going to get really much better advice than you've had from anybody else about what to do. But if you go and give us your. If you give us a sample of your poop, right, that's what's required in order to get a microbiome sample. I don't know whether you've discussed poop before on the podcast, but I'm afraid.

No, this is the first time.

There you go. So you have to give me a sample. Then I'm going to give you this amazing insight to what's going on inside you. But also that is going to allow us to do this science that's not being possible. And then when we learn that, we're going to be able to give you better advice in the future. And so we always had this idea that there's a sort of positive flywheel, but a transparent one. We talk about transparency a lot as a value at Zoe, and that's very important, I think, in terms of how we try and run the company, in terms of being open and honest with each other. But we also think it's really important with our community about trying to be open and honest. And so, you know, we had some challenges last year, and again, I tried to be quite open and honest about the fact that we grew incredibly fast the year before last. We hired a lot of people, and then we realized during last year, you know what, we've hired too many people too fast, and we've got to reduce that. And that was very hard thing to go through, and it was very hard to be open about it. But we sort of felt we had to be because that was sort of the values that we'd built the business on. And it's worked really well for us because I think it's sustained trust in Zoe and who we are. And so, yes, this has been there from the beginning is the idea that there would be a flywheel. I think. I don't know if I ever believe we could really make it work. So it's pretty cool that we are here. I think the other thing that was here from the beginning is this idea that we would need to work with many of the best scientists in the world. And if we're going to do that, we would have to actually publish science. And that's very unusual. We talked about pharmaceutical companies earlier. One of the things that is a real problem with pharmaceutical companies is they hide all of their research because that is the basis of, like, their barriers to entry. So they're working on something for a long time. They don't want to publish anything until it's reached a point when they've got the patent and they've got to go into these tests. But our scientists don't really care about any of that. What they really want to do is publish a brilliant paper in Lancet or the New England Journal of Medicine or wherever. And they want really great data to discover something really interesting with. And so one of the things that it took me a while to understand at the beginning, but I got there is like, if you want to have these great scientists, they need to be able to publish. And so we had to build something very unusual, which was a model where we actually share an enormous amount of our data, sort of for free. And we publish, we now publish more than 70 peer reviewed journals, so peer reviewed papers. And what we realized is we can find a way to do that because actually we want people to understand how important the science is. We want them to understand the importance of nutrition, the importance of lifestyle. The fact that, you know, if you went from the worst diet to the best diet, you will get at least another decade of healthy years. Like, that's profound. And so actually this has really just helped to support, I think the awareness of Zoe. In the same way we launched a podcast, was not an obvious thing to do when we did it three years ago. It's actually gone on. We're now the number one nutrition podcast around the world. I never would have guessed. And it turns out people are really obsessed by health. Alyssa. That's part of it. But the point is we've realized it's a great entry ramp to Zoe. And this new free app that I'm talking about, again, we think is not only going to allow people who could never afford Zoe to use it, but we also think it's a great entry ramp. We think that people will use it, they will start mindful eating, start to understand what's inside their food. I think most people will be pretty shocked within 24 to 48 hours and then be like, actually, I'm interested in getting deeper into this. I'm interested in starting to make a. Make a change.

Yeah. Oh, my goodness. And I love how you also mentioned specifically the scientists because you have to realize that people have different incentives and different motivations for doing their job. And engineers want some things and salespeople want some things and scientists want other things. And so it's so important as a leader, I'm sure you can relate to, to figure out what do people need and want from their jobs and then provide opportunities for them to get it.

Totally. I think the other thing I would add on that is this is the first time I've done something which is really mission driven and it's not just something we say. Like, it's something that's really important and that has a profound impact on how people are at the company. So one of the things I've seen is that people stay at a much higher level than I've seen in any company, any tech company that I've been in previously, and there's this general feeling like, you know, engineers in your company, they only stay for like, 18 or 24 months and they go all go somewhere else. We don't really see that. I'm not saying that nobody ever leaves, of course people do. But actually, the level of retention has been really high and the level of motivation has been really high. And I think that's because most people want purpose in their life. That's one of my sort of discoveries, is that we are all told this stuff about how you should chase getting money or whatever the high status thing is, but actually, really, really, we're brought up by our mum and dad when we're little and told what is good and bad and wanting to feel that what you're doing is good. I think this is a very deep motivation for people. I think most of us aren't doctors or ambulance drivers or, you know, firemen or whatever. Like, so it's not really clear whether we are doing something very good in our life. And so I think for a lot of people at Zoe, and it definitely applies to me, you know, I'm none of those things. To suddenly feel like you're actually doing something that makes a difference is very powerful. And we have a lot of people contact us and they say, literally in these words, zoe changed my life. And I have never had that in my life before. Alyssa and it's incredibly powerful. And if you actually meet them face to face, it's a bit embarrassing because I'm not used to know even how to deal with it, but it is amazing. Like, it makes me feel really proud and on, like, the dark days. And I have a lot of dark days when, you know, we're still burning lots of money. It's not clear that we can make this ultimately into a. Into a business that's really going to work, that is motivating. And I think that for a lot of our staff, when, of course, people still, like, your boss can still be really annoying, right? And things can be difficult and someone could call you up and say, well, what about this other great job? I think that the mission is a very important part of that, but only a part. Like, it doesn't replace. My wife is a doctor and she's worked in the National Health Service here in the UK and she's told me plenty of stories about toxic workplace. Despite the fact that you're trying to save lives. Right, so. And hated it. So I think mission alone isn't sufficient. I think you need to also have an environment that brings you joy.

Totally. And if not brings you joy, at least isn't like toxic every day. That's really what causes burnout, right? It's not so working too hard. It's that the work you're doing is too hard because there are people getting in your way or your boss is like mean or political or your colleagues are political or something. How have you thought about. Wait, so first of all, how many employees do you have now?

About 180.

180. And you've been around for how long?

For eight years.

Eight years. Okay. So eight years journey of your own startup, you know, a big handful, 180 employees when you were starting out in your own, you know, in your own startup. It's like me and George and Tim. Yay. So, you know, we're doing a study. Yay. You know, to now where you actually have people who rely on you and benefits and like, you know, people quitting and bad bosses. How did you. How have you kind of changed your perspective and grown as a leader in kind of that eight year journey?

It's a great question. And I mean, the first thing I think is I immediately feel a bit embarrassed when you say the word leader because it feels. I recognize that I am, but I feel embarrassed by it because it feels very grand title and like it's asking a lot. And so I think that tells you already that I find myself a little bit uncomfortable. It's not naturally where I jump to. I think of worrying that I'm going to immediately become pompous and overbearing and all the rest of it. But I think I've learned a lot about it that I didn't understand even when I was managing 5, 600 people at Criteo before. And I think part of it actually is to become comfortable with being a leader. And I think that that has been my biggest learning, which is that I'm a people pleaser. I want the people who work for me to be happy, all of them across the company, but particularly the people who are directly working for me. Because I know that I've often been really unhappy at work with the person I'm working for, and I think he's an idiot or I'm miserable because I can't do this thing. And I want the people who work for me to be happy for deep reasons that we can get into, but definitely come all the way back to my childhood. So I want people to be happy and happy with me. And so I Think naturally. I'm really anxious about just telling people what to do because I'm worried that then they'll be upset. So every time I think where I was historically was like, I know that we need to go and build this thing, but I sort of say like, I'm thinking of doing this and then basically I'll just keep arguing with you until I've convinced you this is the right thing to do with the idea that, that once if I can convince you it's the right thing to do, then you'll be happy to do it. And thinking that that was sort of the right way. And also having read a lot about how, like, it's really important to empower your employees and all the rest of it, I now think all of this is wrong. And I think what I've learned is this comes really from a discomfort with the idea of being a leader and not recognizing that it's my job to decide what things are, just a decision. And I'm ultimately going to decide in what things are. The things where I don't have a decision and the team is going to figure it out. But the worst thing is actually really to have decided what you want to do and that you're going to do sort of pretend to your team that's working for you that there's a discussion. But actually all you're trying to do is just keep talking at them until they listen otherwise. And actually, I think really leadership, I've learned, is to recognize that if you're going to just make a decision some of the time, like, you know, the buck stops with you and you say like, I'm very interested in feedback. I actually like teams where people have quite different perspectives. I really enjoy that sort of challenge. You know, that is a bit like the family dinner table I grew up with, with everyone arguing all the time. So I like that input. But I think what I've now realized is I have to be clear as CEO that am I taking that input? Fine. But if I'm then going to say like, I'm going to make a decision, then I'm going to say thank you. I've heard all of this and I've decided that this is what we're going to be doing and that I'm comfortable with the discomfort that maybe the person who's reporting to me and running product or finance or marketing might disagree on that, but that's okay because disagree and commit is required for a really high functioning organization. And I would say that's my biggest learning in leadership is to recognize when actually I just need to make a decision and to be a lot more comfortable that when. The truth is. And I actually, I don't find it hard to make a decision. When I find it hard is to tell somebody I've decided we're going to do this. And I think I am on a path. I'm getting better. What I have noticed, interestingly, is that the feedback from my team is exactly the opposite of what I feared. We do a lot of 360 feedback at Zoe, so I get a lot of feedback from my team as well as from the board. And interestingly, they're much happier with my leadership now than a few years ago because actually they feel I'm really clear. I've said I've made the decision so they have confidence about the direction and where we're going. And at the same time they do feel like I'm listening to them. So it's not like I'm not listening to those perspectives before a decision. And it also doesn't mean that I'm not delegating things, but I'm being really clear about which of those things. And I would say that is my biggest learning. And I think that is relevant to anyone who's managing anyone. It's not just for a founder. Like, it's as relevant for everyone in my team. And I think anyone listening in a bigger company, and that has come out of about three years of therapy and coaching.

That's what it takes, man. Yes. And that's. I could not say more strongly. Yes. It turns out that actually people want us clarity. They do want to be listened to. And research proves that. Actually they'd rather you listen and disagree than not listen and agree, which is very counterintuitive. But more fundamentally, people look to their leaders to be clear and then they lose faith. People are not clear. But that insidious. I'm going to try to get you to agree with me. I'm going to pretend I'm not trying to get you to agree with me, but actually I am. It never works. People always see through that.

I think that's exactly right. And I think the other thing that I've learned, anyone who works with me will say, Jonathan asks all the time, what did you hear? And so that's a question that I ask all the time, which is also something I've been taught around this concept around active listening. And so one of the things I ask that all the time, because I say something and I ask what do you hear that playback? We talk about a lot is to show that the other person has heard, right? So it's not the same as agree, but it's heard. And often what you find is two things happen. Firstly, often that playback turns out not to be very accurate. So you realize that there's a lot that's getting lost in a conversation. And so I think it's very easy. Probably everyone on this call is like, you know, I'm smart and I understand things and I listen and I nod. Once you start to do that, you realize, wow. So when I play it back, I realize that I didn't understand everything the other person was saying. Because actually, like, words are not very precise and it's hard and there's lots of them. So often you play back and they're like, yes, sort of, but this other thing. And so one of the things that happens out of that is often a lot of disagreement falls away because you start to realize that there's a lot more agreement, really, because people are getting upset about what they're not agreeing about. But I think the other thing that is works really well is the other way around. So if you are doing this act of listening to someone who's working for you. So let's say I. I'm like, I really think that this screen should be green. And someone is coming to me and they're saying, I really, really think it's blue. If you say so, you know, Julie, what I'm hearing is that you really think this screen should be blue because that fits better with what we've done elsewhere. If you then say afterwards, like, thanks, I've decided it's going to be green. What's amazing is that Julie is so much happier just because she realizes you did hear her, because she feels like, okay, Jonathan, A is the boss. B has other context. But because I've been heard, I'm actually okay with his decision to do something else. And so we push that very hard within Zoe, about this idea of trying to do active listening. I try it really hard at home. Alyssa. I have to say that I find it hardest with my wife. She would tell me that I'm rubbish at it and I'm not effective. So for anyone listening, I would say, try it first at work. It's like, a lot easier. Then try and bring it to your more distant relatives. Finally try and bring it into the home. And if you pull it off at home, it's like, apparently it's magic for your relationship. But I haven't managed to get there yet. It's definitely like the. It's you know, that's the hardest. Why are you just repeating what I said? You're not, you know, you're not really listening to me, but I'm really convinced that, like, a lot of people are like me, which is, again, it's like you're quite needy, really. You want to feel like you're being heard. You're worried about whether somebody is upset. And so it's amazing how much just sort of feeling heard is much more important than actually someone agreeing with you. And I think if you've been brought up like, I study physics, right, and it's very sort of. You do data science. This all seems mad. Surely this is just whether it's right or wrong. What's interesting is this works better with engineers than with anyone else that I've seen, because they're often not very good at this sort of communication. It sounds a bit judgy, but on average, it is definitely true that all the engineering teams I've worked with are sort of more introverted than sales teams or marketing teams or customer service teams are amazing at just doing this naturally. And so often they're, like, upset about something, you don't know why. And then you play back what they've said and they're like, oh, you've heard me. Okay. No, I'm fine. Then that. If. If you've heard that I thought it was blue and you go for green. Like, I feel really good because I was just so upset that you're not listening to me. And I. I'm, you know. And actually, even though I'm super rational, really, I just wanted to feel heard. So I would say being heard, being confident to take the lead. And then I think the other thing that's really important is trying to be transparent. So I think that's also a huge change, which is. I try to be a lot more honest about my anxieties. What I'm not sure about that maybe it won't all work out. And I think that's really hard because I think as a founder, you feel this immense pressure to make this successful, right? All these people have given you money, and often it's not just some vc. Maybe it's like your friends and your family. And I think as a founder, often it's quite hard to separate your company from yourself. So you sort of feel like the success of Zoe is also really like the success of Jonathan. And if this fails, I'm a failure. There's an enormous amount of pressure. And you also feel like, but if I possibly tell anybody that I'm worried about it or that maybe it won't all work out, then everybody will quit. No one will work. No one would be willing to be a customer. Like, it'd all be a disaster. And if I tell my investors I'm worried about anything, they'll, like, want to replace me. And so I think I at least had all of those fears. And speaking to other founders, I think these are quite common. And one of my surprises is being more honest about how you are feeling is an amazing thing for your team. Like, when I am more open about the fact that I'm worried or maybe that there's things going on at home. Right. Sometimes you turn up at home and turn up at work, and the truth is you're not on your best form because you're really anxious about something that's happening at home with your parents or whatever it is. And actually that transparency, it feels scary for me. I feel very vulnerable. It's not an easy thing for me to do. But as I've done more of it, what I've realized is it massively increases actually the confidence of the team because they start to believe that you would tell them also if in fact you are about to run out of money next week or the thing isn't working. And also because they're probably having half of these concerns as well, because part of the definition of a startup is it's not guaranteed. And so I think trying to be more open about that. So I said to you at the beginning, like, normally I'm the host, not the speaker on the podcast. I'm a bit anxious. Like, I have all the control, like, as a host. And here, I don't know, maybe I'm just rabbiting on about something totally irrelevant. Everyone's bored and I won't even know. So I tried to share that at the beginning because it made me feel a bit better that I have, like, shared that anxiety.

My goodness. My goodness. First of all, this is fascinating and so helpful. So you're doing a good job. Thank you. And also, I think it's just so honest about, like, the. The journey of a founder and what that's like. And the truth is that when you are able to share what's going on, just to pick up on your last point, people trust you more, period. And leadership is really about trust. Jonathan, I know we have a hard stop at the top of the hour and I want to make sure to ask you my two final questions, which.

Is, oh, go for it.

I. What do you wish you had known earlier on your journey?

I think, I wish I would have known that you don't have to be perfect. I think one of the challenges is we bring up our children to just jump through all these hoops for the first 20 years of their life and everything is about do you get it right? And it starts all the way with toilet training, right? There's no room for error. You're either getting it right or you're wrong. And that's all of these things. And think about learning to write right, you're not allowed to have a really bad A, you've got to get it right. So I think there's this thing of everything needing to be perfect. And if you are quite academic, which I was, and which many people who've gone to university and go on to do well in their careers, did well at school, you're sort of being taught that everything has to be perfect. And that's actually terrible basis for most of the rest of your life where actually you don't need to be perfect and you need to be doing a good job of the things that are really important. And you also need to stop worrying about this external validation about whether you're perfect because actually that starts it was really helpful as you were growing up and now actually it's a real problem that you're really trying to say like, what would my mum and dad say about this? And however much you love them, that isn't really what should be deciding what you're doing anymore. It should be like, well, so what is it that I want to do and do I need to be perfect at that in order to beat this other thing? So I would say not having to be perfect.

Love it. Brilliant. And then 60 seconds. What advice do you have for other founders as they embark on their journey to grow into leaders?

One piece of advice, spend time with other founders. So I actually do a, like a regular meeting with a set of other CEOs and I get enormous value from it. And it's not like the direct advice of this exact thing they've done. It's actually, it can be very lonely to start something, run your own thing. And that could be as true if you are like self employed or a 10 person company or a 10,000 person company. And so spending time with other people who are going through that same journey, who aren't competitors, who, who are living through and realizing how almost everything that you're struggling with, half of them are dealing with. And also every time you meet, we meet up as a group, half of them are feeling great and half of them are feeling miserable. But what's funny is it changes so it's not always the same and so there are people are really high and then next time they're low. And also the funny thing is it isn't related to how fast the revenue is growing either. Sometimes people are really stressed when it's growing really fast and calm when it's going low. So I would say spending time with other founders you learn a lot, but above all I think it just helps you to calm down.

Amazing. Oh my God, Jonathan, Such a great conversation. Everybody should go out and download the free app for Zoe and go get more interested in your microbiome. And Jonathan, thank you so much for joining me and for talking about what it's like to be a founder.

It was such a pleasure. And if I give one other plug, since this is a podcast, if anybody is really interested in nutrition, then I would definitely also encourage them, as well as downloading the app, to take a listen to the podcast. Because I think we've managed to get this amazing set of scientists to talk about nutrition.

Where do they find the podcast?

So that is just Zoe sciencenutrition on whichever podcast you are listening to right now.

Love it. Thank you Jonathan.

Thank you. That was such a pleasure.

Thanks for listening to From Startup to Grownup. If you like what you heard, give it a review on Apple Podcasts so other people can find it. And if you know of a founder or someone else who is meant to be on this podcast, drop me a line through my website alyssacon.

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