The Quiet Revolution in DNA Sequencing | Nucleus Genomics

I think we are in the age where there will be a trillion-dollar consumer healthcare business, and that business is going to be integrated in the entirety of someone's health data on the platform. I'm not just talking about your Apple Watch, your Whoop, your Eight Sleep, your Levels. I'm also talking about diagnostics, lab tests like sequencing, epigenetics, blood tests, urine analysis, et cetera. There will be that platform, and genetics is a huge part of that. If you were going to collect the single most consequential piece of health data about someone, you'd collect their whole genome data. DNA is the foundation of your health, and I think that's something that actually gets often missed.

Welcome to Sorcery. I'm your host, Molly O'Shea. Today we have Kian Sadeghi, founder and CEO of Nucleus Genomics. Nucleus is a health platform designed to integrate your DNA into your daily life. Nucleus uses whole genome sequencing, which reads 1,000 times more DNA than other tests, helping you uncover how your DNA influences many things about you, from your risk for heart disease to your IQ and more. They've raised more than $18 million in venture funding to date, with the last round led by Alexis Ohanian of 776, with additional investors such as Peter Thiel's Founders Fund. A special thank you to Corey Levy, founder of Z Fellows and investor in Nucleus, for the introduction. This is a really fun conversation, and we uncover all things genomics, health, and their recent product launch, Nucleus IQ. I hope you enjoy. Hi, Kian. Thanks for joining us.

Hey, Molly. Thanks for having me.

Well, I know you just got off of a very popular X Live with Alexis Ohanian, Delian, a couple renowned scientists. And this was all to discuss the launch of Nucleus IQ. Yes. Could you share more about this? What was the live about?

Yeah, absolutely. The live was an amazing space for our lead investors, our scientific advisory board, and kind of customers, et cetera, to all come together and talk about the public launch of Nucleus IQ. I think we heard some amazing anecdotes, not only from sort of the Silicon Valley tech investors, but also from more classical scientists, traditional geneticists, both super excited about the release of Nucleus IQ. And I think the reason for this, why across expertise there's such kind of unanimous excitement is because Everyone is excited about Nucleus's mission, which is integrating in genetic insights into everyday life. We mean that from the individual health perspective, which is about looking at your DNA and predicting your future health. We mean that from the generational health perspective, making sure you can use your DNA to have healthy children. And then of course, the one, the only thing that we're talking about today, which was personal discovery, using your DNA to learn amazing new things about yourself that you didn't know, such as your IQ or longevity. And so I was, you know, doing a demo of the Nucleus IQ report. It was a little buggy though. So maybe I'll do it again now, Molly. What do you think?

I think you should do it. Do it again.

Oh yeah? Okay. Yeah. So what I was saying in the, in the, in the livestream was that, you know, Nucleus IQ, the function of it is not to predict your IQ score. The way it works is it basically tells you people with similar genetics to you, how they tend to score on an IQ test. If you want to get your IQ score, you should take an IQ test. If you wanna understand the genetic contribution to your IQ that we can measure today, I'd then recommend doing Nucleus IQ. So I'll share my screen here to my kind of Nucleus portal. I think this is super cool. Here we go. Screen. I'm gonna share this. So this You can see my screen, right, Molly?

It's, yeah, we can see it.

Okay, amazing. So here, first off, yeah, I'm higher genetic risk for schizophrenia and a couple other things, which is pretty interesting. I think I've released some videos on that publicly about kind of going through those results. But you can see here, IQ, it's brand new report. So if you're a Nucleus Premium member, which is if you bought our DNA kits, you actually get access to this. So I'm gonna click on this. The first thing I wanna highlight is actually this disclaimer here. I'm not gonna go through each of these points, but I just wanna reiterate that the goal of the new— of Nucleus IQ is not to predict your IQ. It's to tell you your genetic contribution to your intelligence. So I'm gonna continue the report. Beautiful graphics here. As you can see, people with my genetics tend to score higher on an IQ test by around 6 points. I think this is super fascinating because a lot of people don't even fully recognize that at the frontier of science, we do already have associations with genetics and intelligence. And we really believe in giving these insights to customers. If you come down here, you can see a genetic score. So what this does is this is taking, you know, over 550,000 DNA differences and combine it together into a score. The higher the score, the higher people with similar genetics to you tend to score on an IQ test. And the lower the common genetic score, polygenic score, z-score, all those terms work, the lower this number, then the lower Um, someone tends— the lower score someone tends to get on an IQ test. Um, so I'm above average. I'm very curious to see. I think my sister just sent me a text saying that she was actually higher than me and she was completely bantering with me in, in my DMs. I think she was 99.1 percentile. Uh, I think mine was, you know, 97 percentile or something. So I guess she wins this one, Molly.

Oh, there you go. The, the sister usually wins.

Yeah, that's true.

Okay. So within the Nucleus IQ, uh, analysis itself, could you just break down all those elements again? So what are, what do you, what is the consumer getting out of it?

Yeah, that's a good question. So what someone's really going to see is the genetic contribution to their intelligence. So basically the higher the score that you have, the higher the genetic score, um, the more likely, the higher you perform basically on average on an IQ test. Um, this is super interesting because we received a lot of blowback, there's a lot of controversy on that these sort of insights shouldn't be in the hands of consumers, shouldn't be in the hands of people. There tends to be an opinion of certain scientists, ethicists, as well as sort of the public policy bureaucrats that people shouldn't have access to frontier genetic insights. They are sort of, they deem themselves as the brokers of genetic insights. And from our perspective, we believe anyone anywhere should have access to your own data, your own insights, and so much more to learn everything about that the DNA has to say about them.

So why, why is that controversial? I know that Nucleus itself was kind of in the crosshairs of a couple of different articles that were put out on the web from researchers from MIT and from Harvard. But could you just break down like, why is that controversial at all?

Yeah, that's a good question. I think there's a A lot of historical baggage, first and foremost. And then moreover, I think that in medicine today, people tend to think that information without any very clear clinical guidelines should not be given to a patient. And the thing with that perspective is it's a very paternalistic perspective, and then kind of paternalism can kind of become gatekeeping. So I think they view it as dangerous, as something that given to someone could really dramatically affect them negatively, not positively. So for example, if you give someone a schizophrenia genetic risk, they won't understand it. You know, it's, it's, it's something that will, you know, kind of mess with the psychology, et cetera. We, I think, believe that one is there should be no broker of genetic insights. No one should decide for you except for you what access, what information access you get. Moreover, we think that we can build better and better communications to explain people the kind of nuances of these scores. If you look at our reports, for example, I'm sure they don't look like any other genetic reports you've seen, right? I think they're quite tasteful. They're extremely thoughtful. They explain everything to the customer. You can get as deep as you want in the results. And we also employ, I think, scientifically sound different kind of methodologies to make sure that Um, some of the criticisms that have usually been thrown on some of these scores, um, don't actually apply because Nucleus has such a kind of comprehensive, um, and accurate and whole genome, uh, assessment of someone's disease risk as well as their traits.

Within your score in particular, and I know you, you posted this on Twitter, but you ranked pretty high in schizophrenia. And I'm sure that was kind of shocking at first.

Yeah.

Could you, I, I think the nuance is really important. Um, Even when you're receiving these scores, as you've mentioned, like, could you just break down, like, even though you scored high on that, why you're not very concerned?

Yeah. So someone can be very high genetic risk, but still be very low overall risk. Let me actually share my screen again and show this because I think this is an important point. So if I come here, I'm gonna go back to the summary section, right? Go to my higher genetic risk. You see it's sorted by genetic risk. So I click view, view full report. The first result that a customer sees is that one, they don't have any really bad DNA differences, variants that dramatically increase your risk, which is good. Then we analyze these other kind of DNA variants to determine someone's risk for schizophrenia. And you can see here how even though I'm dramatically higher genetic risk, right, 2.48, I think is in the 99.3 percentile. My overall risk is 1.43%, and this is actually very much by design. There's a reason why we show the overall risk first and then the genetic risk after, and that's because this is the result. And as you can imagine, a 1.43% is a very low overall chance. So you can have a very high genetic risk but still a very low overall risk. And this is, I think, one of the care. This is some of the care that we've built into the platform where instead of just giving out these raw scores, which can cause a lot of potential stress to a customer, by integrating it in with other non-genetic information, we're able to provide people much more holistic and complete assessments of their risk for different diseases. By giving someone overall risk, it helps, I think, ground the genetic scores And I think that's a key feature of Nucleus.

And we all like to freak out, so that'll help us freak out less. Exactly. So within that though, you were talking about IQ and IQ tests. I think it's important to understand the differentiation between intelligence and IQ and IQ tests. Silicon Valley is just so obsessed with IQ. I'd be really curious To break that down and understand how you're measuring IQ with Nucleus and then how, you know, you can take any sort of consumer IQ test online. Like, I'm not gonna lie, like, I'm kind of obsessed with that too. I think it's really interesting. I have this like brain training app and I track that and I think it's cool. But like, what is the difference between that and then also intelligence?

Yeah, so, you know, as a genetics company, what we do is we show people their genetic contribution to intelligence. And, you know, you're right, we do use the word intelligence and IQ a little bit interchangeably. It's actually a thing in the literature. People tend to swap these things. Technically, the definition of IQ that we sort of use is sort of kind of a lowercase g or general intelligence. That's sort of what the researchers are trying to gauge in the paper that we use to build the models. The thing is though, all the different kind of measurements of intelligence, they tend to correlate, right? So, you can kind of somewhat interchangeably use these terms even though they're not exactly the same thing. Regarding Nucleus specifically, we want to show people how their genetics contributes to their intelligence. We are not necessarily at this point, you can't from genetics predict someone's IQ? And actually what a lot of people don't realize is you'll never be able to. And the reason for that is because 50% of intelligence is environmental. The other 50% is genetic. So even if you built a perfect genetic model, and we actually show this in the reports, even if you built a perfect genetic model, you would still have error bars in the prediction of someone's actual IQ, which I think is pretty fascinating. So That's kind of how the, the Nucleus IQ works from our perspective.

Is there anything like surprising that you noticed within the test so far that you've, uh, collected from the small cohort that's been using it?

I, I think it's funny how people kind of interact with each other on the scores. Um, I definitely think there's a lot of kind of friendly banter. I mean, I've, I actually just checked my phone after the, uh, live chat and every single person basically was texting me, what, what was your score? What was your score? What was your score? Right? It's almost like, I don't know, like if we, you know, take a test in high school or something, everyone's like, oh, what's your score? What's your score? What's your score? I thought that was I thought was pretty funny. As mentioned, my sister actually had a higher score than me and she was absolutely dominating me in the group chats, the family group chats. Both my dad and my sister had higher scores than me. So now that they're like, oh, these models really work so well, I'm like, oh, I'm sure they do. I'm sure they do. All you have to do is tell someone they're intelligent. They're like, oh, this is legit. This is 100% legit. Which I thought was pretty funny.

Hey, we'll get right back to the conversation after a word from our sponsor. Sorcery is brought to you by Archer. I'm genuinely amazed at what Archer has been able to accomplish. Archer's goal is to transform urban travel, replacing 60 to 90 minute car commutes with estimated 10 to 20 minute electric air taxi flights. They're safe, sustainable, low noise, and cost competitive with ground transportation. Archer's Midnight is a piloted 4 passenger aircraft designed to perform rapid back-to-back flights With minimal charge time between flights. Learn more about how Archer is set to open up a new world of opportunity for passengers by providing safe and efficient access to people, places, and events across the communities they live. Visit archer.com.

The, the, the thing that I think is also interesting is that people are kind of getting more familiar with the idea that there can be a genetic contribution because I think a lot of people don't understand that this research exists at the frontier and a company like Nucleus is removing the access to the gatekeeper so that everyone can get You know, their genetic intelligence score.

So I'd love to actually draw that out a bit further and get into the overall history of genomics, consumer genomics, and why there is such a gap and a large opportunity now. I think you said before that Silicon Valley, the Silicon Valley model of genomics is from 20 years ago.

Yeah. So 23andMe, when they got started in 2006, right, 23andMe is the companies everyone always heard of. Um, 23andMe, the cost of actually sequencing all of someone's DNA, you know, getting the entire read of it, not a small fraction, all of it, was around $10 million per sample. Obviously way expensive, way too expensive for any company to actually leverage that technology. So instead, um, they opted for a much more naive technology that looks at a small snippet of someone's DNA. And that technology has not changed in 20 years, which is crazy. It's basically stagnant. The genetics industry is basically stagnant for 20 years. And so people's understanding of genetics is, oh, you know, does my pee smell like asparagus? You know, oh, does, you know, you know, where am I from? Which I think it's time that we employ far more sophisticated technology, which is what we do. That cost of $10 million has now come down to $399. So instead of $10 million per sample, it's now $399 per sample on Nucleus's website. And using this powerful new technology, we can get the entire read of someone's DNA, which means we can provide much more accurate assessment of someone's genetic risk for diseases and their traits. And then this gets to our meta point, which is we believe in integrating DNA into everyday life, right? We believe in using it not only to predict your future health, not only to make sure that you have healthy children, but also for personal discovery and even how your DNA affects your metabolism and drugs. Those different buckets I've described historically were tens of thousands of different genetic tests. Today they're just one. I think that's such an amazing opportunity now for us to seize, to scale up whole genome sequencing and give everyone access to technology that used to only be in the hands of the very, very, very few or no one. So I definitely think there's a paradigm shift in genetics and at some point I think it's gonna combine with AI to build even more sophisticated I'm very excited.

Do you have any sort of sense how many tests have been sold, like globally over the last couple of years? Like, do you have any sort of idea how many people are buying them?

So 23andMe has a database around 15 million people. Ancestry, I think it's around 30 million. So let's just say 45 million. Let's just say 1 in 6 people, I think, in the United States approximately have probably done consumer genetic tests. Of course, that doesn't include, that doesn't include clinical genetic tests, right? So I would think that's a good ballpark number. But of course, the United States is 300 million people. And the other kind of side of that is sure, that's a lot of people, but why did hundreds of millions of people not get their genetic testing done? Right? This is information that could save your life. If you— there was a great study that showed millions, millions of people have a DNA difference right now that dramatically increases the risk for breast cancer, colorectal cancer, two diseases that are preventable. That there's very clear evidence-based recommendations that could prevent these conditions and greater than 90% don't know it. That's the problem when genetics isn't integrated in clinical practice. Life-saving insights, right, that Nucleus can give you. Insights that you can get from a swab. There's, it's, it's not even like it's, you know, there's a blood test that's a needle or anything. It's a swab. You could swab your cheek and get a result that could save your life, yet millions of people don't know. I mean, that's, that's I think pretty crazy. And that's the only thing Nucleus is going to tackle head on.

And why is that? Why don't doctors start to implement that within their practices?

It's a yeah, you know, doctors are actually not trained in genetics. They they they a lot of genetics is not yet integrated into standards of care, and a lot of medical schools are still catching up on thinking how to integrate genetics into patient care. So it's it's a big problem. I think part of that is a job for Nucleus to not just educate consumers. But also physicians. It's a two-pronged need that's that you know we can offer society.

Do you have any sort of sense if that ninety percent will trend down? Trend like where do you think that trend will go? I mean, I think given COVID, everyone became super super conscious of their health and their family's health because of. You know, one pandemic and you didn't know how it was going to affect you. So I'm just really curious if you've seen at all, at least since like 2020, if there's been like a shift in sort of the mentality to do more understanding of underlying predictive and preventative health.

Absolutely. I think we're in the age where there will be a trillion-dollar consumer healthcare business, and that business is going to be integrated in. The entirety of someone's health data on the platform. I'm not just talking about your Apple Watch, your Whoop, your Eight Sleep, your levels. I'm also talking about diagnostics, lab tests like sequencing, epigenetics, blood tests, urine analysis, et cetera. There will be that platform. And genetics is a huge part of that. If you were going to collect the single most consequential piece of health data about someone, you'd collect their whole genome data. DNA is the foundation of your health, and I think that's something that actually gets often missed. Where someone might take a lot of supplements, or maybe they take a blood test, or they're doing some sort of other optimization, right? It was funny. I saw this tweet that said something like, you know, you can follow Brian Johnson, but then you know you'll still die of cancer from your genes. And you know, on the one hand, it's it's pretty funny because it's like if you think about any disease. Just like with intelligence, actually too, there's a genetic component and then there's an environmental component. And any disease you can think of, everything from breast cancer to schizophrenia to coronary heart disease to age-related macular degeneration to hypertension, there's a large genetic component. So what that basically means is that kind of regardless of your environmental kind of decisions, you still have to understand the kind of initial baseline risk assessment, right? For some of these DNA differences that really increase your risk like a BRCA1, BRCA2, you really, you know, your diet won't get yourself out of necessarily getting the condition. You need to take other sort of clinical evidence-based recommendations. So this is something that we think a lot about at Nucleus and we're excited to kind of integrate in DNA into people's— into people's lives. Again, that's the mission.

I guess to push on that though, like, are you seeing more adoption within consumers or Has the COVID kind of awareness started to wane off?

Yeah, I think so. I mean, I, I think if you look around, you know, Huberman, Bryan Johnson, Peter Attia, I think almost a good kind of heuristic for culture is like, who are its influencers? And there are health influencers. There are, there are people whose job it is to basically say, here's what you can do to prevent disease. Here's what you can do to live forever. We're happy to be a sponsor of Bryan Johnson's Don't Die conference. September, and that conference is an amazing opportunity for all the people who kind of follow Blueprint Diet to you know we're the official genetic testing partner to actually get their DNA sequenced. And so I think there's definitely momentum, you know across I think the entire country. I also think to some extent it probably skews a little bit younger, but I think it it kind of transcends generations too to some extent. People are more curious about their health. People want to live longer. People want to prevent disease. People want to measure what was previously unmeasurable. And Nucleus, you know, lets you do that.

That's awesome. That's really cool that you're sponsoring that event.

Yeah, we can't wait.

Well, I know we're getting a little deep, but I would love to, you know, just go back to the beginning and talk about you, Kian. So in terms of the founding of the company, you started the company at 20 in your bedroom. Yeah. You're now a Z Fellow and a Thiel Fellow, and it's been a couple of years. So could you just explain and share how it all began? What was the founding story?

Yeah. So, you know, the story of Nucleus actually begins unfortunately with a personal tragedy. My cousin went to bed one night and she didn't wake up the next day. She died in her sleep. At the time, I asked my parents, you know, how does this happen? How does this happen? They kept saying, oh, bad genetics, bad genetics. Didn't understand what that meant. Eventually though, I started studying genetics and what I realized is that, you know, disease can be viewed more as a problem to be solved versus like an inherent property of human beings. So, I joined one of the first do-it-yourself genome laboratories in the country where we engineered yeast to make them illuminate. We added bacteria to make them resistant to antibiotics. And I started thinking about how do you combine this kind of depth and beauty of biology with the irritability of programming because the, you know, the life cycles are so long in the lab. So with that in mind, I went to Penn where I studied computational biology. And, you know, there was a distinctive moment in, I think, uh, Bio 221, which is genetics class at Penn, right? This is before I dropped out. I was there for around a year and a half before leaving. Um, and the chairman of the biology department, who was our professor, he pulled up the chart of the decreasing cost of sequencing. And you can see from this chart, it used to cost, you know, a billion dollars to sequence the genome. And then At that time, a couple years ago, it cost a couple thousand bucks. And I thought to myself, what is the world going to look like when that cost goes to zero? I thought to myself, there's a delta between what is and what's going to be possible. And that was the inception of Nucleus. So I dropped out of school, I moved back into my bedroom in Brooklyn, and I got to work. And oh God, boy, did I work.

And so what did that entail? Like, what, what was the early innings? Like, what were you working on?

It was a lot of very deep work in kind of statistical genetics and computational genomics to figure out how do you actually build such a piece of software? What, what are the actual underlying algorithms that you can use to analyze DNA? Um, I think there's a, there's kind of different ways of thinking about this. Like, you know, there's a, there's a concept in, you know, CS about like breadth-first search, um, versus depth-first search. And I feel like you have to go kind of very, very deep and then kind of build yourself all the way back up. So like you can read a newspaper and then pretend like, oh, I understand the space. I read this newspaper. Maybe you get a little bit more technical, a little bit more technical, maybe even glance through a research paper, right? But you don't really get it. I think what you have to do instead is you have to go extremely deep, so deep that you have almost what I think is this intellectual foundation. This, uh, you end up at an intellectual frontier. Then once you're at the intellectual frontier, you realize that how much space there is to build and that you can actually productize what you know and execute on what I described, which is building the gap between what exists and what could exist. So there was a lot of independent research. I think I filled in like 18 different subject notebooks of material. I still have those notebooks. It's actually in a safe. As I put this on Twitter, it's actually one of those kind of my most prized possessions. And then eventually, thankfully, I, I, I need to raise money. And, you know, there was a lot of stress, whatever, whatever. I need to raise money. My parents were not happy, let's just say, that what I was doing. And then thankfully, Corey from Z Fellows wrote the first check.

That's amazing. And I know that they're all sequenced in the US. You use US machines. So how did you source and pick your lab? And what was the process for that? Like, how does this all work?

Yeah, so yeah, we sequence everything in the United States on US machines. We have a collaboration with Illumina, the largest sequencing company in the United States that we use to power our genetic testing infrastructure. We set out to find a laboratory that was high throughput, right? Could process basically a large number of samples that was obviously CLIA, basically gold standard. regulatory approvals that also, you know, was just kind of a great partner and can, you know, scale up as needed. So we actually ended up working with a laboratory in Boston. And then, so there's basically a deal between Nucleus, the laboratory in Boston, as well as Illumina. And, you know, it's been a great partnership so far. We're successfully, you know, processing whole genome samples as we speak.

How many have you guys done to date, or what, what are you looking to do by the end of the year?

Oh, we've done a lot in just a couple months. I think by the end of the year, I mean, it's, it's hard to say because, you know, these things are— we, we expect things to grow exponentially. I like to say internally that the metric we use is, um, half a million samples, because half a million samples is the size of the largest whole genome database in the world today, which actually isn't that many samples. It's kind of interesting if you think about it. Half a million samples, you know, there's 7 billion people in this world. That's nothing. No, not at all. Right. So I always like to think about the company. How long does it take to get half a million samples? I think we can actually, I think 2 years from now we can get half a million samples. 2 years from today, I think we could do that.

That's a great goal. Um, to break that down again, could you just go into the different analyses that you do? I'd love to just understand this because I know that there is like a whole subset of different things that you are actually analyzing and the ways in which that they affect whether it's our health or predictive, like, kinds of measures we could take to even IQ. I'd love to get a deeper understanding of everything that you're offering.

Yeah, so we provide analysis on right now around 20 diseases. That's actually going to be going to hundreds of diseases in the coming months, right? So I think the way of thinking about the product is kind of 4 main buckets. The first is You know, predicting your future health, right? What is encoded in my genes for, you know, insert diseases? It could be cancers, it could be neuropsychiatric diseases, it could be, you know, ocular, you know, eye diseases, it could be heart conditions. We test for all of them. That's the first kind of set of analyses we provide. The next is on traits, right? Not just IQ, but, you know, height, longevity, muscle strength, you know, extroversion. These are analyses that I think a little bit more about personal discovery. That give you access to the frontier of genetic insights that currently, um, you know, really only exist in the literature until now. Then there's generational health. It's so important that you have healthy children. And I was saying this, you know, earlier in the livestream, hundreds of millions of people, hundreds of millions are a carrier for genetic variants where if their significant other was also a carrier, their baby would at risk, you know, 25% chance risk approximately of having a disease. Think about that. That's amazing. Vast, vast majority, I would probably guess, you know, 95% plus, probably even higher, 99%, they don't know it. They have no idea. And so that's another— that's the product we're gonna be launching soon, um, for family planning. So, you know, people can have healthy children. And then of course, lastly, is also how people's DNA affects their metabolism of different drugs. Um, so this is kind of the way we're thinking about building the platform now. Eventually we'll be the most expansive. We'll basically provide all these different analyses to customers.

That's amazing. I think given this is an investing podcast and that's what the audience is, I'd love to know the business model behind it. So are you going to continue to evolve and add more analyses? Is that where you're going to make some extra money off of each customer? Like, I know there's a one-time payment for the initial test. Like, how are you thinking on growing the business and then also the revenue per user?

Yeah, so I think a couple things on this. One is that the value of the DNA data is obviously great. And to be clear, we don't share anyone's genetic data unless they explicitly consent. But to improve our models and give people more and more insights, obviously having a larger whole genome database is extremely valuable. We do charge a one-time fee of $399 for the DNA kits and then $39 for a yearly subscription. That has to do with the fact that we're adding far more analysis and we've just added IQ, for example, to the platform. I think the thing that's actually so interesting though about Nucleus is there really is no such thing as a genetics company. And that sounds kind of crazy coming from me. I'm a founder and CEO of a genetics company, right? I built this from my bedroom. Why am I saying that? And I'm saying that because genetics is always one piece of the puzzle. So the question for a company like Nucleus is, how do you build a real-time consumer-centric health platform where the entirety of someone's health data exists and actually kind of improves because it's all in one place? You can imagine a platform that goes, hey, Kian, as a 24-year-old male living in Brooklyn, wow, you had super high LDL levels in your last blood test. That's actually no surprise because you're in the 95th percentile for your high cholesterol genetic risk. We found people with similar, you know, sex, age, and genetics as you saw this percent reduction in their LDL levels. Doing this specific workout that's tracked by your Apple Watch. All of a sudden, you see how we bring the pieces together in a way that people are kind of heuristically doing already. If you go into the different subreddits, biohacking subreddits, you can see people already starting to bring together their genetic insights with their blood tests, with the other kind of lab tests. How can you actually build software that supports that? And that becomes a real-time business. And how can you also, I think, how can you How can you actually think about gen— you know, healthcare much more holistically? Uh, that's something a lot of people get wrong. It's like there's this test, that test, this test. It's, we wanna bring it all under one umbrella. So that's kind of the meta point, I think, for, for Nucleus.

Great. So you're gonna add more integrations as well?

For sure.

That's fun. So in terms of the team, um, Kian, how big is the team and what is the makeup of that?

Yeah, we're a pretty small team actually. We're only 14 people full-time. We have—I mean, I think I like to joke that half has a PhD, half is under 25—which honestly, it's like approximately true. So we have a chief scientific officer who used to run one of the largest D2C academic projects for providing kind of innovative genetic analyses to customers. Lasse Fogerson. We have a You know, people who used to work at the National Human Genome Research Institute and do their communications. For Warner runs our communications. We have people used to actually do comms at Ancestry, right? Ancestry Health, the former technical director of genomics at LabCorp, many, many others. But the we have a very deep bench of kind of technical talents across you know science, communications, you know, and beyond really. I mean, because the amount of our technical bench. It's not just about the bioinformatics, the statistical genetics, also even the communications. It's also about, you know, the engineering, the full-stack development, the systems architecture, right? So in terms of kind of complexity, if you want complexity, you should come to Nucleus.

I would say shout out to your comms team. They're amazing. They're like super, super thorough and they've been a pleasure to work with.

Oh yeah, that's very nice though. Okay, that's great.

Yeah, yeah, they're wonderful. But in terms of other kind of partners that you have around the Nucleus So, do you have any partnerships now? Are you going to be doing more? Like, what's— where are you at with that?

Yeah. So, we have a collaboration with Illumina, but that's more for powering our genetic testing infrastructure. We don't currently have any formal partnerships. I definitely think that we've had a lot of inbound from different prospective B2B partners and we vet them very carefully to decide who, if we want to work with them, because our pricing and our speed and our analysis and the fact that we follow the gold standard regulations, it's just so N-of-1 for a genetics company, especially a whole genome company. Um, but it's definitely something that's top of mind that I think we're going to do.

That would be great. Okay. Do you have any other kind of growth plans for the year, for the next 18 months? Like, what are you thinking? Any other special announcements? We got more product launches?

Oh, we do. We have, we have a lot more product launches. Um, we are actually going to be launching a family forecast module pretty soon. I think that's going to be very exciting. So, you know, I mentioned hundreds of millions of people are a carrier. We actually are building software that people see. Not just kind of how their DNA affects their future risk, what their future health will look like, but also how it affects their children.

Wow, that'll be fun. That's cool. Yeah, it's like the full suite. And then I know we're like we're almost wrapping up now. So I guess to wrap it up, two more questions. But what are you most excited about for you know nucleus?

I just think seeing the platform scale up to add all these more analyses is going to be so exciting. I think people. are still kind of becoming acquainted. And I think intelligence is a good example of this, of, wow, like, there's actually like, because there's a whole genome data and, you know, we've sequenced all your DNA, the kind of results we gave you now is just the beginning. And I can't wait to add the hundreds more diseases and, you know, kind of delight the customer in that fashion.

So exciting. Well, do you have any other asks? Are you guys hiring? Are you guys looking for anything particular? Yeah,

we're always hiring. We're looking for engineers. Any good software engineers, please let us know.

Okay. So shout out to software engineers that wanna work at a very complex company.

Exactly.

Okay. Well, Kian, it was a pleasure to have you on and congrats on the product launch. I'm super excited to try it out and see what my scores are and see if I win in my family group chats.

Thank you, Molly. Thank you so much.

There's no shortage of podcasts and deep dives into the secrets of VC, but the truth is that the world's best venture firms and GPs at their helm still remain an enigma. VC is as much of an art as it is a science. Other shows focus on the now of venture or even the last 10 years, but what separates the most enduring and generation-defining firms is the subject of a podcast called Turpentine VC. From the Turpentine Podcast Network. On this season of the show, you'll hear from Ben Horowitz, Alfred Lin, Mahmoud Hamid, and more. Subscribe to Turpentine BC for the rare and revealing conversations that can only be had investor to investor.