E371| Hamish Grierson - The Hire We Made 10 Years Too Late

They start next Monday. Oh, fuck.

Why did it take us so long to hire that, that role?

Storytelling, creative genius, understands how to talk emotion. And it's always such a difficult hire. They are orthogonal in their, in their perspective. We've, we've missed the fact that storytelling is no more or less important. Venture capital is killing Innovation. Tear your business apart for fun. He's like, man, you— do you realize that you've picked the double black diamond? More people to be in the pub at lunch. Dom, thanks for having me on. I'm Hamish. I am the co-founder and CEO here at Thriva. For those of your audience who don't know Thriva, We are a 10-year-old, currently UK-based, but about to expand into Europe, health tech business. We focus very heavily on helping people to live many, many more years in great health. And actually, practically what that is, what do we do to do that? It's a health tracker that you don't wear. So we look at your blood test over time. It's the most important data source. It tells you actually how what you're doing every day connects to what's true inside your body. It's just very hard to know that unless you look at your blood. And it's all about giving people this quiet confidence, focus on the handful of things that really matter to them. And just what we see in our customers, it just gives people this sense of being on the front foot. And when you feel on the front foot, you just feel a bit more prone to make those handful of better decisions every day. And those, as we were saying earlier, they compound over time. And so we also have a B2B side of the business where we have, having built the sort of infrastructural capability, we make that available to some fantastic partners. So we work with everyone from the NHS to Superdrug to Void. Yeah, there's a ton of partners that we work with as well.

And it's not a, you know, this is do-it-yourself at home, right? So, and it's not, you know, you go and get a blood test at the doctor's and some nurse comes at you with a syringe. It's It's not that. It's, uh, well, historically it's been what, prick your finger, and now it's a suction thing on your arm which doesn't— you don't feel a thing. Like, it— that— I mean, it's fab. Yeah, having been a customer, having been a customer for, for forever.

Um, yeah. Preaching to the choir. Uh, and thank you for your custom, Dom. Yeah, so look, the whole thing really is about recognizing that if you can't lower the barriers to entry And of course, convenience and accessibility are kind of the cornerstones to any product these days, then you're going to fail because this is something that people are not doing today. And thankfully, awareness is getting there. But how do you do that? How do you make it so that this clunky, literally painful process gets turned on its head and you can do it from home on your own and it's painless? And that's, you know, where we've landed today.

Well, do you know what? There's an interesting thing I did with my kids the other week. which was that we were having a chat about injections and they both said they were terrified of injections and they hate them. And so it just so happened I had some of your lancets kicking around and I went, it doesn't hurt. I don't know what you're talking about. It doesn't hurt. And they're like, what do you mean it doesn't hurt? I said, injections don't hurt. And they're like, no, no, they do. They do. You know, because they watch TV where people are terrified of injections and it sort of sucks into their brain. So I—

Yeah.

I jabbed them. And they went, well, that didn't hurt. And they went, well, that didn't hurt. I went, I know it doesn't hurt. And they're like, oh, I'm cured. Like, because now I have deliberately been injected by my dad with nothing. But they stood there and they were shaking and it's like, there you are, I've done it. And they went, oh, hang on. So they're like, oh, I can go to school now and be the only child in my class who isn't scared of needles and injections. That's amazing, Dad. You've given me a superpower.

It's a bit of a rock star feeling, right? It's not something you've kind of got to carry as this boulder for the rest of your life. Good on you, Dom. I like the technique. There's definitely this thing where, I don't know, 20, 30% of people have some fear factor associated with a blood test, right? Because it typically is both very unpleasant and large quantities of blood. And it's totally human, that fear factor, because no one actually is programmed to enjoy the sight of your own blood. Literal, keep you alive type thing. The second thing though, that's probably less obvious, is that there's also a fear factor associated with starting. It's subtle but incredibly powerful. And in effect, when someone does a first test with Thriva, they're taking an exam. They wouldn't maybe talk about it like that, but there's a thing that they end up thinking they could fail at. And We have had to work really, really hard to get people to understand, look, it's really simple and straightforward to do it, but it's going to get over that hump of sort of sitting with the anxiety incredibly fast. And so one of the really interesting things we've uncovered is that we have speed as the thing we hear in 90% of our reviews. We don't really talk about it. We don't really market speed. But it's incredibly quick. Most results, unless you're testing omegas, are back within, I think, 24 hours of you sending it back. It's really quick. What we've realized is that speed is fundamental to alleviating anxiety quickly. That is the thing that they thank you for.

I was reading an article this morning when you said fear about sales and this exam thing. The article suggested that the reason that people know that they should make outbound calls, you know, like, or follow somebody up, is because they might say no. And so it's the same with starting a blood test. Somebody said to me, oh, I don't know why you do that. I'd rather not know. What do you mean you'd rather not know? Which seems as bizarre as when people say, I'd rather, literally rather die than do public speaking. And you're like, so you're at the funeral and you would rather be in the casket than be given the eulogy? No, surely not. Right? You know, it's like—

Yeah.

But it's illogical, but People go, I'd rather not fail than do it. Yeah, it is. It's real.

It's really illogical, but it's a forceful human truth. We can wish that it wasn't there, or we could deal with the fact that it is.

Is that the biggest thing you found out early that you didn't know before you started? What was that?

What was the biggest thing that we learned developing the infrastructure? in the UK was incredibly hard to build.

Because you're first.

Yeah. I mean, we were first, but we weren't, for example, the first laboratories, obviously. So there were huge, very well-established laboratories. And so naively, we came into the industry thinking we will effectively just be able to sort of API in the component parts of this ecosystem, and then just focus on the technology layer, right? We're going to build great UX/UI, good brand, you know, it's going to be wonderful. And, you know, You sort of run through a room with low beams hitting your head on every single one of them for about 2 years while you build out this infrastructural set.

That is such a good visual, banging your head on low beams.

With quite low ceilings. If I go to live in them, I might knock myself out of the way. Yeah, so, you know, that I think was probably the earliest, biggest lesson. And as I say, it turned out to be one of the kind of cornerstones of value because it's really difficult to build that stuff, and people come to us because we have.

What is it that you know now that other people don't know, or what is it that people think that you think is bollocks? Is there a—

Yeah, I've probably got a handful of things maybe in this category. The first, given that no one seems to be drinking in their 20s anymore, And no judgment, just a sort of observation of reality. Um, I think we need, uh, more people to be in the pub at lunchtime. Really specifically, uh, I do feel like I should unpack that given I run a health tech company. Really specifically, I think that the, the, the thing we're seeing is the marginalizing of creatives and the, uh, the diminishing Opportunities or environments where they can get out what they need from a day. And so, I'm sorry to sort of borrow from the most obvious popular analog here, but, you know, Don Draper, whether it was the, you know, drinking at lunchtime, or the lying on the sofa in his office, or the, you know, basically going AWOL for weeks at a time. I think what we have unwittingly done Is to, in a world of sort of anything and everything is both measurable, optimizable, and therefore theoretically improvable, we've missed the fact that storytelling is no more or less important than it ever was. And it's always been really fucking important. And so I think what we have started to see is this sort of smothering of the creative process. And the assumption, because, you know, you can make something look beautiful literally in the click of a, you know, Claude prompt window. So the difference between great ads and crap ads used to be aesthetic in some senses. That's gone. That's actually for a long time been largely dead. And therefore, I think the power of good storytelling and understanding how to connect has gone from always important to now absolutely the definition of likely success.

And so, what do you do?

How do you get that out of people? Well, one thing I can tell you is that the Don Drapers of this world don't do well if you make them sit at a fucking desk for 8 hours a day. That I'm sure of. So, I think that's one. How do we get more sort of environmental stimulus, possibly literal stimulants, into people who You know, they need that. They need that expansion of mind.

Okay, like that. Pub trade would be happy with you as a—

Well, declining industry.

Yeah, Labour want to increase our business rates so that they can give money off the pubs so that hopefully there'll still be some around.

Yeah, quite. So the next 2 I sort of feel, uh, are somewhat, um, juxtaposed in a sense, but, um, I'll say them anyway. So we were talking a bit about this before. I think that venture capital is killing innovation, more specifically, some really important corners of innovation. And having come up through the VC route myself with Thriva, I speak from some experience here. And I will say, I'm not down on the importance of venture capital where it's relevant.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I think that what we have, uh, have seen over the course of the last 25 years is that if you are an innovator of almost any kind and you are immersed in the sort of innovation discourse or system, doing something new has become synonymous with raising venture capital. And the reason that I think it's having a negative impact on innovators and innovation is that you have to ask yourself the one question when you're thinking about raising venture capital, which is, is this capable of being a fund-returning-sized venture, e.g., a unicorn?

Yeah.

If the answer to that is no, there's a lot of people I've spoken to who tell them they just don't start. They just don't get going. And the number of brilliant innovators who might be sitting on a $5 million turnover, $10 million turnover opportunity, that they just don't lean into, I think is tragic. Like, for me, that is a sort of economic bedrock-style opportunity that the dominance of VC isn't helping with at all. And so, if you— there's a brilliant book called Lost and Founder. So, I'm slightly jumping ahead to my suggestion. But Lost and Founder actually lays the maths out as to whether or not doing VC makes sense.

Yeah.

Most of the time, it simply doesn't. You know, if you happen to be sitting on an opportunity where market demand is yanking this thing out of your hand faster than you know how to build it, or you've got to build something incredibly high IP before you can monetize it. VC has great application in that regard. But, and, you know, there are some fantastic VCs out there in the world, and we're very lucky to work with some. But it frustrates me that there's not more celebration. Thank you for the work you do on this pod in doing just this, Dom. But there's not enough celebration. There's no— Um, nowhere near as much popularization of the, oh my God, you own 80% of a business worth, you know, doing £5 million of turnover, £10 million of turnover, £20 million of turnover. Like, that is amazing. If you get, if you get to that, you're still one in a million, right?

Yeah. Well, you, if you do the maths, if you, if you pay yourself, we did the math, I did the maths recently. I think it was if you pay, want to pay yourself £750,000 a year, which is not bad, and you're, and you're 50 and you want to live to 90. Then you need to sell your business for net $10 million. And so that's, you know, and, you know, lots of the clients we work with are sort of 8 to 12 years old, not VC-backed, exactly that, you know, how do I exit this business and get my $10 million? Used to be $5 million 20 years ago, whatever it was, but now it's $10 million. But, you know, that's a number, right? Get that, never have to work again. Now, there is a problem, which is what are you going to do with your life if you never have to work again? But that's a different story for a different day. But you're right. Yeah, totally. But you're right. So when you started, you thought this was a billion-pound business, and so did your VCs.

Absolutely. And I still think that it has the capacity to be that. And the kind of, sort of life stage personally, and scale of opportunity that we believed in meant that I think we were right to choose VC. But it's really having been through it, and then talked to a ton of founders. Yeah, it's always the way, right? You the stages that you're at, you then, I suppose, having been through them and looked back, you end up talking to a bunch of founders at the stages that are sort of coming up behind you. Yeah, I just don't think that the fact that the VC PR machine is as dominant as it is, is a good thing. Because if you simply run the maths, what is it, 1% of funds are responsible for basically propping any returns in the industry up, and it's getting worse. Right? So, the hyperscalers are— the hyperscaler returns reality is forcing capital upstream, right? It's forcing it into later-stage companies because they're the only ones really that are demonstrably going to be chucking out the kind of return profile that everyone's after. So, inherently, it doesn't really make sense for most companies, clearly. And yet, yeah, I just wish there was some sort of alternative that was just as sexy and just as supported and just as popularized. But there ain't. Yeah.

And it's not going to be the government because that would just kill it. Okay. What else? What else? Do you have anything else? Do you have anything else?

I've got one more.

Yeah. What's your—

End up on the VC tracks. I got one piece of advice that in retrospect I think was absolutely terrible. And it was that, I can't remember who gave it to me. So, if you're ever watching this and it was you, can you call me up and admit to it, please? So, the piece of advice was, raising money is a numbers game. So, the more people you pitch, the more likely you are to raise funds. And so, dutifully, I buggered off into a quiet corner and built a very, very long list of investors and went about contacting them and networking to get into their diaries. If I try and give you the sort of 2 approaches via analogy, That is a shotgun, widespread, lots of shots on target. The alternative is a rifle, where you choose very carefully, you spend your time selecting, and you have a very, very deliberately small number of conversations. What I would say is, both options evidently can work. However, one is immeasurably more painful than the other. Because actually, what you typically find is that the VCs who have a thesis in your sector, And have something interesting to contribute. You're going to end up talking to them if you pitch 123 investors like I did, but you may have had to pitch 120 people who were never going to invest in you first. So just to put that into fairly sharp reprieve, what that means is you're going to get 120 highly educated, highly opinionated money managers who know next to nothing about your sector, tear your business apart for fun, only to tell you that they're not going to invest in you. And woe betide you be fairly competent and articulate because they'll probably give you a second meeting, right? So that's 240 times that you're going to have your business torn apart. The alternative being carefully go and find the people who are going to, at a minimum, have something actually useful to say about your business. Um, because they're sectorally relevant or super, super specific go-to-market tuning or something. So my experience with shotgun, my wish for others is rifle. Yeah.

Because it, it feels as though the effort to do the second is, is, is more than to do the first, but people are forgetting the 120 meetings that they wouldn't have needed to have had. Yeah.

That is unfortunately, um, I think what's responsible for driving the behavior in the direction because it's much, much easier. And you feel more worthy being in a pitch room as opposed to sitting on your laptop and, like, really developing an independent thesis and having a really, frankly, what feels like a much higher-risk set of conversations. Because if you've got 5 people on the hit list as opposed to 120—

It comes back to fear again. It's the— you feel like the first one is less dangerous, but in fact, if you go in, if you don't put the time into getting it really crisp. Do you know what I was thinking? I was thinking about your John, Don Draper and pub thing, right? Because one of the things that I see all the time is that companies want to sell the thing that they've bought, that they make. And for them, it's really clear that it's useful and valuable. And then they're trying to sell it, and they don't have product-market fit, and they just keep slogging. And in fact, what they haven't done is they haven't gone— they haven't done the— I was doing the exercise yesterday with some people, that sort of jobs to be done thing. and go, yeah, if I was the— if I was the customer, how is this valuable? What would— what problem does it solve? What pain does it take away? They don't do the work. So they just go, blah. They're not— they don't— they don't do what Don Draper would do, is like, how do you make this emotionally compelling? How do we craft an offer? How do we make it hard to say no to? Which is effort. And so they go, here's the thing, and they try and just— let's just do more blah at more people and hope that somebody can spot the nuance and purchase it.

There's a sort of weird, I think, again, slightly counterintuitive Silicon Valley-derived steer, which is, you know, CEOs are encouraged to fall in love with the product, right? To obsess on the product. And, you know, if the product's good enough, people will just buy it. And actually, what you find in every single successful startup that has ever been is that people fall in love with the customer problem.

Yes.

Now, it might be that to build something that is good enough that you'll dominate the category, You need to focus like mad on the quality of the thing you're building. There's no doubt that that's true. But there are many, many, many more examples of people building something that they are very clearly able to articulate how it solves a customer problem than there are build it and they will come, wonderful, well done me. And the problem is that when that happens, you get massive confirmation bias. The fact that you just happen to have, like, once-in-a-generationally good timing gets missed.

Look, when people get lucky, then it's never— then they never admit to that. They never admit to the good luck. The bad luck people can point to all day long.

Well, yeah, do you know, it's funny. I don't know if you listen to a podcast, um, by Guy Raz called How I Built This. Truth be told, I haven't listened to it for so long because I just— you just keep hearing and hearing the same, the same themes from different founders across the paddock. And I think the most interesting are always 100% tuned into the 50/50. We executed unbelievably well, but my God, was there a ton of luck?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

That, I think, is sort of unmissable.

Well, if I look at, again, clients that we've worked with for a long time, many of them have had existential threats that they weathered, and then, you know, just a dollop of good luck where somebody rings them up out of the blue and gives them a massive contract that they didn't Even know that they were in, you know, yes, you make your own luck because if you hadn't did a thing and you hadn't done all these other things, they couldn't have found it. But yes. There are 3 types of CEO when it comes to AI. Which one are you? 10% use it every day, 20% think it's the devil, and the other 70% know they should be doing something, but they haven't got a clue what. I ran my own company through CEOFriend, a board of advisors, CFO, marketing, investor entrepreneur. I gave it my real competitor list. It came back with an angle on my market I hadn't spotted in 20 years of doing this. It doesn't hand you a blank chat box. It hands you a report, and then you argue with it. Run your own competitors through it at ceofriend.ai. The first month's free with the code. The link's down below. ceofriend.ai. And what, um, what if you think back about hiring? Is, is there a role that you've— just to pick your brains on other people coming up behind you. Is there a role that you hired and you think back now and you go, oh, fuck, why did it take us so long to hire that role? And maybe it's— is it something that took something off your plate or something accelerated growth? I don't know. But what's the—

So truth be told, I think we're just about to hire them. They start next Monday.

What are these people going to do?

Shout out to Mark. So, uh, maybe unsurprisingly, this builds a bit on Um, the sort of industry-wide frustration that I observe in, in kind of creative terms. The, the, the answer directly is, in essence, someone who sits in that, um, storytelling creative genius, understands how to talk emotion, not practicality, um, but can do that in a way that is not wafting around in an office with nice ideas and can actually print it into the business.

Right.

And the brand resonates that and changes reflectively over time. So, it's taken us a very long time to get to that. So, the reason that I think it did is there's this, again, sort of scientific-orientated optimization solves all problems undercurrent in technology businesses in particular, where you do have a ton of data and you do have brilliant people who can interrogate it, and you've got Super robust learning cycles that mean you can iterate really quickly. It sort of assumes that when you apply that stuff, you will get out something that is great as a consequence, i.e., the right kind of customers who love you for the right reasons. It's always such a difficult hire to decide to spend the money on, because you cannot easily, or as easily, tune your ROI calculation. Because you just have to believe that all of these other things that you're doing are suddenly going to be sort of transformed. So that's part one. Part 2 is actually knowing how to hire them is difficult, because it's not the same as many of the other processes and people that you've got.

And is this— would you historically then have got this from an agency partner, that storytelling, or was it something that you or your co-founders would have been doing?

Co-founders. Originally, then some agency input, and a little bit of internal capability from probably the one member of the team who was sort of more in that mold, sort of design and creativity. And you can literally see them in the office. They just, they think about the world differently, and we just desperately need that. They are orthogonal in their perspective holding.

And is this— so how did you— so what's this person's job title? They're not chief storyteller or—

So it's, it's, it sounds quite Don Draper-y, but they're director of product marketing.

Okay. Oh no, that's, that sounds completely normal. At Pier 1, uh, we ran a pro— I ran a project, uh, um, and I said, look, we don't have any product marketing. And they're like, what do you mean? And I said, well, we're building stuff, but nobody's worked out what we should build and why. It's just like, we're building stuff. Um, and once you've built it, Yeah, well, then we've built it and then marketing and sales are trying to sell it and it's like, it's not the right fucking product. Nobody wants it. It's at the wrong price. And, you know, we just didn't, we just, to your point, we just didn't love the customer problem. Like we had nobody who loved that. And so if that's the, if that's what product market, and I'm with you, I think that's what product marketing is, you know, I don't know, but it's not, I mean—

Like, I didn't see the gap in product and marketing. And it turns out there is a discipline and it is product marketing. So yeah, fingers crossed, we're onto a really good thing there. But yeah, it's taken us a hot minute to unlock that realization.

And the other markets, where are you off to next? Is that a secret still, or?

No, we announced that. So we're heading for Germany next. And Germany because, well, a couple of things. One, I think North America is fairly saturated and Europe by comparison is just a ton of white space.

Okay.

And Germany is good because it gives you a little bit of a hub and spoke opportunity to the wider, um, sort of DACH region. Um, and it's really exciting, you know, it's, uh, it'll be the first time we've gone into, into new waters.

And are you, um, are you leading that? You got somebody else leading that?

Well, actually, it's interesting. We took the view in January that we were going to deliberately hire a A bit of a Swiss Army knife, and just let them run point on the internationalization front. But the one person that we thought would be absolutely apex for the role took a different role. Weirdly, we're still working with them now because we now partner with that company. But when that didn't work out, we thought, actually, we're just going to do this internally. And so, I'm less and less involved as it's sort of drifting down into— um, the experts in the functions kind of picking stuff up. Um, but love it. Yeah, I mean, it's just so exciting getting to go out and start meeting suppliers. And yeah, it's a new thing for us.

Very, very good. What, um, what holds you back? That we've talked about the storytelling. Is it market growth? Is it, is it competition?

I think historically, this is going back for the first sort of 6 to 8 years, I would have said it was market And the one certainly clarifying reality to having been at this for a decade is that we were early. There just wasn't the sort of awareness in the category that there is now. And so whilst the category is now very evidently there to be had, and there's a lot more VC money pouring into the category because people do see it, I think the thing that probably holds us back the most is still There's a barrier to utilization, which is cost. And so there's a, if you sort of track adoption rates, I think they're going to correlate fairly closely with cost. We're doing, I think, a pretty darn good job of compressing costs over time. I think we've already probably brought them down by 25% of what they were originally. But I would like to be able to give this away for 20 quid. And at the moment, it's a you know 140 quid per per instance type reality.

There's it's funny because there's there is a misconception that your test isn't as good because when I speak to a doctor, when I speak to a doctor, they go, "Oh no, that's the prick yourself at home thing." Da da da da da. We need to get you in. We need to get you down and have a blood draw. And then the results are every time that's happened, the results are exactly the same. And it's like, why am I going to? Why am I going to London to get jabbed when I could just do that in my kitchen? come on, the test results are the same. You're talking bollocks.

You're absolutely right. No, you're absolutely right. And look, I don't know in truth, Dom, whether that's a barrier to growth for us particularly. I mean, I would say in the long run, both that perspective gets updated to reflect the science, and also, um, I don't know that it's the thing, as in the, you know, the credibility question. I don't think really that's the, the biggest, um, handbrake for us because actually it's It's so both in terms of product and positioning, quality, it's anathema. When you say blood test to someone, they've got this white coat, NHS reactive, got a problem already, pain, faff, inconvenience. That's the sort of mental model. And with us, it's almost the antithesis of every one of those things. It's fast, it's intuitive. You will understand exactly what the results mean. You'll be able to do it from your kitchen counter on any day of the week that You know, you have free, you get the results back quickly, so you're not left in limbo. Yeah, so I think that in a sense, whilst that sort of doctor perspective is a bit of a laggard view, it is going to catch up.

Yes.

And do you use—

so why Germany? Like, you know, just as opposed to maybe Holland, where it feels like it's a little easier?

Part of the answer is The thing that we do on the actual test analysis side, as in a big centralized multimillion-pound lab facility, it is not a universal competency. And so we had to work pretty hard to identify where a fantastic lab partner would be that could support us. And to be honest, we could have gone almost anywhere in that region. Holland arguably may have been slightly preferential. But we really found only, you know, one or two labs that could do what we needed.

And which means that there is no competitor at the moment in Germany doing what you do?

Not really, no. I mean, I think that there are—

Is that not still like, you were early here, but does that not feel like Germany's like miles behind?

It's certainly behind the UK. I would say that there are, well, it depends which category. So just to frame my answer slightly more specifically, we're going to take a B2B-first approach in Germany.

Oh, okay. Right.

Goal will be to take some of the partners that we're serving here, who we know have either operational capability in Germany already, or they want to go to Germany next themselves. So we will be able to say basically same integration, Broadly the same contracting structure, even we're just going to turn you on in that in this new geo that that you want to get into. So there's a little bit of that. There are a handful of competitors in Germany on the B to C side. No one's at scale. I would say this because I'm hugely biased. I don't think anyone's done a good job of building a great experience or brand on the B to C side. But it is earlier than the UK. So the I guess the quid pro quo is it's less. competitive, but it's also earlier in terms of customer adoption. So, you know, I'm hoping that that means we're just early enough, but not so early that we'll be hanging around for 10 years waiting for it to happen.

And do you— is doing D2C in sort of health tech harder than D2C more broadly? Is that what you've seen?

Yeah, it's incredibly difficult.

It is.

Someone did Wise, now based in the Valley. I think he's Finnish originally, a chap called Ari Tuller. I've only spoken to him once. Every now and then, you meet the person who's sort of been doing something in your industry for longer than you have, and they have all of the contacts that you've got, even though you've never met them. It's sort of like meeting one of the oracles of the industry you're in. About 10 minutes into the conversation, he was like, man, do you realize that you've picked the double black diamond of businesses to try and do? I was like, oh, where were you?

Where were you? Where were you when we were thinking this up in my kitchen? You could have persuaded me then not to start.

Yeah, well, quite. Talk about the value of ignorance. Yeah, so it's very hard. It's regulated and you cannot get it wrong. This is not a, sorry, sent you someone else's results. are bad. You know, like, the degree of quality as a bar is extremely high, and we defend it rigorously. So there's regulation, there's, um, both physical and digital product, there's, um, the fact that we're asking you to pay us to actually bleed for the cornerstone part of the process. It's just a, you know, it's a very difficult business.

And does the Does the doctor review of the results, is that part of the regulation or is that part of your product but doesn't need to be there?

On a technicality, you don't have to have a doctor looking at results. But we very much believe that the sort of anchor point of the experience is how well or badly have you helped someone understand what that information means? Do they understand what to do about Do they know in an appropriate way, i.e., not in a panicked way, but in a sufficiently clarifying way, what to do if something is serious? You know, all of those, we take a fairly firm view, are very well served by having a human in the loop. And sure, parts of that will be advantaged by unleashing some technology on them, but equally, I don't see that going away anytime soon.

And what, um, what You mentioned a book earlier on. What other books have you read along the way that you found helpful?

So, the answer to this, if you'll indulge me, Dom, is maybe not quite so discreet, but I'll sort of back up to give you the long run at it, and feel free to just cut all of this out if you just want the answer. The thing that I found personally. This must have been the better part of, I don't know, 8, 7 years ago. I had, like all studious startup CEOs, fallen into reading all of the nonfiction startup books, from Lean Principles, Zero to One, Hard Thing About Hard Things. I mean, there are, like, 10 books that are the bibles of startup world, or VC-backed startup world. The Mum Test, excellent book. I was also very into sort of personal development, still am. Read a lot of Tim Ferriss, and I found myself having preregistered for Tools of Titans, which was the book that he was writing.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

And I hopped onto Amazon. It was a very odd experience. There was exactly one review of this book, and the review read, And it was anonymous. I wish I could remember who was behind them. The review read, have you ever noticed how none of the people that Tim Ferriss interviews read nonfiction? They all read fiction. And I sat there. It was one of the few sort of lightning bolt moments in my sort of personal development journey. I closed the browser window and sat there feeling like an absolute prune because I just hadn't touched anything of this sort of creative stimulus fiction for a really, really, really long time. And maybe I'd sort of ticked the boxes that I needed to tick and amassed enough knowledge and confidence to then feel like I had permission, or I could give myself permission to start exploring fiction again. But I've never looked back. And yeah, I'd still pick up some nonfiction, but I have delighted in getting back into Fiction. My favorite book, probably because it took me 3 goes to get into it and turned out to be one of the most wonderful books I've ever read, was Dune. And my second, I actually read last summer, which is the Three-Body Problem trilogy by C.S.

Lewis.

And there's a little bit of that on Netflix. And I actually think that the Three-Body Problem trilogy is To my take, one of the most expansive, fascinating takes on the human condition and the species at a very macro level, but also sort of built with such wonderful kind of inter-character relationship stuff. It was just a complete one-off. I thought it was masterful. And I've thought about it probably on a weekly basis since.

That's— do you know what? The reason I asked the question about books is because I read a lot of books. And when I go and open Amazon, it's like, here's a list of just shit that, you know, like the top, the bestselling books. I'm like, no, I don't want to read any of those. I'd much rather— so I've seen the— I guess I've seen the show advertised on Netflix and never watched it. But I'm gonna go and get the books.

Honestly, I don't think you'll regret it for a second.

Yeah?

I mean, it's just— I think I'd actually watched a bit of the Netflix first and thought, well, there's a bit of a risk that I've done this the wrong way around. But someone whose opinion I really trust said, no, no, no, this is its own thing. You've just got to read all 3 books. Astonishing. You can Tell me, I think it was absolute trouser.

Yeah, no, but the one question I haven't asked you is, what is your, uh, well, not what were your blood results, but, you know, how often do you take your bloods and what's your work-life balance like? And, you know, are you, are you a poster child for your own stuff?

I test my blood, um, probably once a month, once every couple of months sometimes. It depends a Okay. What's going on? I mean, look, I fell in love with health 15 years ago and I'm not clinically trained. And the reason I think I fell in love with it is I started reading and learning what sorts of tools and techniques are available to all of us that don't cost anything or require a very modest investment to improve how you feel, how much energy you have, how much resilience you carry, How much immune function strength is there? All of these things, how much cognitive capacity. So, I do a lot of that stuff still. So, I do jump in a cold plunge in the mornings and I do tend to not eat until lunchtime and fast for a bit. I have a mushroom coffee, often a normal coffee afterwards for clarity, but I'll sort of start with adaptogenics. I'll do a bit of mindfulness. usually in chunks, and then I'll let it go for a bit. Am I a poster child for our product saying all of those things? Yes, because I also do drink beer, and I do eat burgers occasionally. And squeezing a workout in and lifting some weights, I do with my 3 kids kicking about in the morning amongst absolute fucking pandemonium. And so, a really, really important The most important thing for us as a brand is doing health in the real world. Like, it's hard. It's just hard. We're wired up to want to sit on our backsides and eat rubbish. And, you know, the whole point of what we're building is to make you feel that sense of quiet confidence that you know what's working. Are you doing just enough of the right stuff? And, you know, when you're on a good streak, Knowing that it's working and therefore having that motivation to continue. And I benefit from that massively myself. It's a good litmus test. If Thriva went away tomorrow, I would be— I'd have to go and buy a competitor's product because I'm, I'm, I am so reliant and, and in love with the data that I've now got on myself.

We recently collaborated, as you know, but the viewers might not, that we did some tests for our clients. One of our clients found that he had high cholesterol, which he had been blissfully unaware of. And he had no idea that you could go and do your own blood test rather than go to a doctor. And so, you know, awareness is still, uh, is still low. And, you know, you got a test and now he's off to get that sorted out. Have you had any, have you had any like amazing stories in of your employees where you've spotted stuff and gone, I mean, you obviously have had millions of patients do it, but are there employees where you just go, oh, look?

Yeah. And here's a fascinating one, I think, and I really hope he doesn't mind me sharing this because it's tough.

Just don't tell him you've been on, he'll never listen.

Well, he quite rightly, I think, is both proud of it and talks about it openly. So we hired a Doctor. Now, actually, doctors are not usually in front of the queue of people looking after themselves, somewhat paradoxically, but it's true. And he did his first test with us, and I don't think I'm overstating it by saying that we were pretty much fundamental to him starting the journey that he's now on. And the journey that he has been on is Absolutely incredible. I mean, he just looks like a completely different human being. The amount of new positive habits that have stuck, and he's done it the hard way. This is not with GLP-1s on board. Not saying that GLP-1s on board makes life totally simple, but yeah, it's just been immense watching How he's used the data that is coming out of Thriva to orientate his life in a way that has been pretty revolutionary. Yeah, so yeah, I could give you a bunch of other examples, but Lucas's in particular is just super impressive. Love it.

Very good, very good. Hamish, thank you very much indeed for coming on. It's been fantastic to chat with you today.

Thank you very much for having me. Yeah, very much my pleasure. Thanks, Dom.