#94: From Startup to Grown-Up: Jonathan Wolf, co-founder and CEO of ZOE - The growth of a founder...

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 there are people who 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 all, I think it just helps you to calm down.

Welcome back. This is From Startup to Grownup. My name is Alisa 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 the 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 why 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, nonprofit 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, 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 was the transformation? How did you go from there 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, uh, politely saying.

Experienced.

But if you're listening on audio, I'm in incredibly good shape because of the food that I eat. So, um, super handsome. 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, Lisa. There has definitely never been a master plan, but you're quite right. I've been in tech a really long time. I originally 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 as Chief Product Officer back in about 2008. And when I joined, it was 30 people, it had no revenue, and 7 years later, it was 2,000 people. It was more than $1 billion of revenue. It had been public on NASDAQ for a couple of years. It was about a $2-3 billion market cap business. I've been through this amazing hockey stick that sort of 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, uh, 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. 'Cause when we started that, there wasn't even like a Google or a Meta or anything in Paris.

They—

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 the 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, Alisa Cohn. And so I decided that it was time to leave. I took a sabbatical and I really had no idea what I was gonna 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, Criteo 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. Like, which, 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 gonna find something to do. Maybe I'm never gonna 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 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 trillions of bacteria inside your gut. And Tim had been doing these amazing study of twins. He actually runs the largest in-depth twin 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 the sort of light bulb went off in my head. I was like, so we could apply the sort 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 you're like, "It's not great. Sabbatical is not good." It's 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 a lot going on in transition. I'm just curious, can you give us like one insight or 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 like ideas and logic. And so I was like, everything is just something that you ought to be able to solve. And, you know, 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, I've learned slowly, Alisa, is that like 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 wanna 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 gonna not look for a job for 6 months. I'm gonna read some books, I'm gonna do some activities. I'm gonna intentionally create some space because I know that it'll be hard. That worked quite well actually, cuz that felt again like I've created something. It was when the 6 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 accept 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 sorry, 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, uh, 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 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, 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. Yeah. So if I was advising my younger self, I would've 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 suppo— 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. And I— 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'd 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 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. 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 like 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 alternatively, if 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 a, the journey of a lifetime in some ways. So in that wandering in the wilderness, you stumbled into a lecture with Dr. Tib 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, the, his different various twin studies. Very interesting. But you suddenly had this entrepreneurial insight. Aha, we could make a business. Was that 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 will describes me as a questioner, which basically means no matter what she says, I say, why? And then I ask really annoying questions that challenge this when really I should just take the trash out, right? And so I do think 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, 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 gotta go make my mom and dad like proud and that's gonna jump through more hoops. And so I don't think I was, 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, I was close to that. I joined when we were 30 people. It was very early and I, I saw that is such fun. Clearly the only other thing I could 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 'em and 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 could fit together. And it was a rather wild leap, And I think there's a reason that Nothing Like Zoe exists, and that's because anyone who's actually been in nutrition science would've said, well, that's totally impossible to do what you're doing. You're crazy. And I spent the first 4 years trying to convince, you know, many different nutrition scientists, many of whom now work with us, to come and get involved. 'Cause they're all like, you are mad. You know, we said things like, well, we're gonna need to do a study with 1,000 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 7 years. 7 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 'cause food is too complicated. And so I think my, 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 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, uh, there'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 scientist just for you and guide you, Alisa Cohn, 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, you know, that's what it would take. And so he said to me and my other co-founder George, you know, you know, if you, if you could do that, that'd 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. And so we left and we 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 2 or 3 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 raised the money. He like, the science was really, he was very excited by the science. He just answered. 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 first study within 18 months. We actually had 2 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 gonna come back with the money, I don't know whether he would've really signed up for it. He had a full-time job at the time. So I think there's always a lot 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 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, not all the miserable part of 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 really, for you, you're preparing yourself 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 your 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 Ilan 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, I don't— 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's— she had done already at this point about 30 randomized controlled trials with human beings of different nutrition interventions. Vincenz, which is very rare. There's very few people in the world who've done, done that. And I said, but normally her studies were about 40 people because nobody does anything in nutrition science with really large numbers of people because it's both too expensive, but also they haven't got the technology to sort of support that. And so when we explain, well, we're gonna do 1,000 people and we're gonna do, we're gonna measure everything around them, like we're gonna have blood sensors and motion trackers and they're gonna record through an app everything they eat and they can take photos of it. And she was like, well, that's impossible. That's gonna take you like 5 years. And she pretty much told me that everything we were gonna do was impossible for the first 5 years. And it's only in the last 3 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 the, 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 like 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? It 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, 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 now 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 the ins— 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 going to 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, if 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 gonna 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. Alisa Cohn, there is nothing more important. And there's other things that are important, like sleep and exercise and all the rest of it. 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 like 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. 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 collect, you know, hundreds of thousands of people over 8 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 of 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 dataset 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 want, I'd love to hear about the study because, and I just wanna lay the table for people. So what Zoe is, and fill 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, 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 this study when you didn't have this whole flywheel? And then By the way, am I right about your business? Like, are there, you wanna fill in the gaps and, and how is it now continuing?

Well, let me tell you a little bit more about Zoe, 'cause, uh, I didn't wanna jump in too soon. I can, you know, I know that the topic about, uh, 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, in the, in the, 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 8 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's 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, 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, through, through the podcast. Cars. 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, like what is the best food that I need to eat? And the realization 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. 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 ever did in, in the first place. So like, there's an amazing number of myths around, around the food that we eat. But increasingly what we've realized is probably the biggest danger for us, you know, 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 squee'd 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 process. So that also counts as a processed food. But so is, you know, a Kellogg's cereal of any sort. So is a candy bar with 50, 57 different ingredients.

Doritos.

Doritos is a brilliant example of that, right? From what is that versus, you know, a potato that's been free 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're 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, Alisa, 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 really sick compared to sort of microbiomes of our, of our grandparents. And that is a, 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 gonna 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, we can now do that. We've created that and we decided that we want to give this away for free because it is 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, 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. It uses some really brilliant AI to identify what's in it. You can also just snap a photo of, you know, anything, Doritos, 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, in, you know, 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.

Water.

Yeah.

So that's a lot. I love, first of all, I'm gonna 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 And then you get information back from them of 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 a, 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 3 years is there was no product. We were just doing science, and we were lucky enough to raise the money from investors who were willing to sort of believe in this long-term vision and say—

Yeah, 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 Ekland, 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 gonna make a bet on this team and the problem seems sort of interesting, but who knows how they will of all of it.

Yeah. So that's how you made, 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, cuz 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 we was 1,000 people, and that was 1,000 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, 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, 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. 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 1,000 people. You know, our microbiome database is now about quarter of a million people. But that first 1,000 people was such a big break— 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 that, you know, getting a paper in Nature Medicine is a bit like getting a— 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, 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 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, 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 how— 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, Alisa Cohn, 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 your microbiome and the food that you eat.

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 me online through my website, alisacohn.com.