The sport of entrepreneurship & the business of health 🏃‍♂️ | Andrew Steele

There was nothing but challenges. This is startup life. This is exactly it. There was almost no point where it wasn't a challenge or wasn't an existential crisis that we were going through about growing a business. This is the life you choose when you're an entrepreneur. So made our lives exponentially harder. We were doing things on an absolute shoestring budget the whole time. Millions of rollercoaster challenges over those 5 years. That's the sadistic nature of becoming an entrepreneur, I guess, you know, so.

This week's Millennial Master is Andrew Steele, Olympic medalist turned founder and CEO at Stride. Once an elite athlete running for Team GB, Andrew swapped the track for the world of health tech startups. He co-founded DNAFit, scaling it to a global team, selling it for 8 figures, and even taking the business public on NASDAQ. Now he's on a mission to make proactive health the new normal with Stride, his new startup, bringing biomarker testing, digital coaching, and genuinely tailored supplements to the masses. In this episode, we talk about why resilience is a founder's real edge and how you can learn it, how to bootstrap to 8 figures and scale across continents, and how to bounce back, reinvent, and stay motivated after every win or miss. Millennial Masters is brought to you by Jolt, fast, reliable web hosting built for founders. Whether you're launching a WordPress site or scaling an app, Jolt gives your project a rock-solid home starting from just £3.95 a month. You'll get 99.99% uptime, uptime, support in under 30 seconds, and flexible payment options including Bitcoin and Amex, so you can rack up those points while you build. Get your first 3 months free at jolt.co.uk. Smart hosting for people building what's next.

Andrew, welcome to Millennial Masters. How are you today?

Good. Yeah, good to see you. Thank you. I'm here in, uh, Lisbon in Portugal, and it's a little bit cooler than it been recently. So yeah, good days.

Well, it's one of those hot days in the UK, so I guess that makes up for it. But let's not talk too much about the weather and go straight into it, because I'm wondering, how have your track days shaped you, especially with the Olympics competitions, and how did they translate into your entrepreneurial mindset?

You know, you can only really answer this looking backwards, I think. I don't think at the time, or when you're a sports person, you realize kind of what sport does to you. I've got a very strong passion at the moment where I'm very, very interested in the overlap between the character traits you get from sport and the character traits that we find in entrepreneurs, right? So there's, there's very strong and well-researched soft skills and traits or personality traits that early-stage investors in technology often look for in early-stage founders, right? So when they're looking at a new business at the very earliest stage, it's very hard to assess if a business is actually going to be a good business idea. For example, is renting out spare airbeds on your floor in your spare room a good business idea? Not necessarily, but it became Airbnb. And what the early stage investors in that business and many other businesses do is they look for, do I think these people in front of me, these founders, are they going to find a way to make this success? Having researched a lot of that now since I've worked in tech for the last sort of 12 years or so is actually so many of those character traits are so similar to the skills you get from sport. And I've got a project called Sport First that I work, you know, hard on nowadays. And I'm very, very passionate about, which is trying to encourage sports people to consider being a founder or a path of entrepreneurship as a transition route for them outside of sport, rather than just trying to find a corporate job somewhere when they retire. And so I think there's a lot of overlap in the resilience, the lack of fear of failure, obviously the ability to work as a team and also work individually. And there's so many sort of soft skills that sports people have, which they don't realize they have until it's too late often. So I'm trying to sort of foster that. I'm a big, big believer in that overlap for sure.

Let's get into those then. So you mentioned team spirit first. Let's see what are the main traits that you think translate well into entrepreneurship based on your research and experience as well.

So there's some of the obvious ones, right? Discipline, you know, ability to take direction. Normally you've got a coach or a sort of manager that's going to tell you what to do and you've got to take that well and not be, you know, too proud of yourself to not take direction. You've also got to be able to work, you know, if you're playing a team sport, you've got to care about you as an individual, but you've got You've got to care about the team as a whole. And these are very obvious. I don't think these would surprise anyone. I think these are like for like. But the other bits I find really interesting is this kind of lack of fear of failure, right? Or the willingness to just try and not know what's going to happen. So every time—

or appetite for risk. Yeah. One way or the other.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it is a risk appetite, but actually takes a little bit— there's a nuance to this, which is not— obviously there is great risk appetite in sport. You have enough service, but there was an ability to just go out there and put everything you have on the line when you do not know what the outcome will be. You have no guarantee that you will win or lose or any certainty at all. And so when you're a sports person, I was an athlete, right? And I would train literally a whole year for a single moment. Normally that moment would be the qualification competition before the major championship. So before Olympic Games or World Champs. And then if you made it, then that single moment would be the Olympic final, for example. And you have no way of knowing how fast anyone else will run or what other environmental factors may conspire to ruin that opportunity for you. Maybe you get poorly the night before, but you still kind of will go out there and give everything you've got and put everything on the line. And outside of sport, it's very hard to engineer that type of environment. It's very hard to ever even practice the idea of like, hey, I'm going to just dedicate everything to a single thing and hopefully it comes out and it gives me an output that I want from that. So I think that's like an overlooked thing. And there's also the fact of like, dusting yourself off and trying again, right? You know, like every time, if you're a professional football player, you'll play every week and you can have a horrendous loss and be hated by millions of people if you lose that game. But what you gotta do is the next day you gotta turn up in training and you gotta train again, and then you gotta play again next week. And I think these kind of lesser studied pieces are almost more impactful. And there's one fascinating other piece is when I looked into what these sort of early stage investors look for in founders, they often look for almost a— in fact, Paul Graham, founder of Y Combinator, described it, I think, as almost being a little bit naughty, like willing to sort of just push the boundary a little bit, take a risk which might be frowned upon a little bit, just a little bit cheeky enough to like try and find the avenues to growth or to success in business. I think in sport, of course, you see that, you know, you see athletes or cyclists undercut another cyclist and plots, you know, it's the edge of the rules but isn't against the rules or doing the unethical thing. I think there's that kind of like cheekiness that you need to be a successful founder to go, you know what? Yeah, I am going to run this ad, which is like a little bit derogatory about our competitor, or I am going to be a little bit ruthless in the way that I go to market for this. And I think so sports actually gives you a little bit of that kind of ruthlessness as well, you know? So I think it's— you have to be a little bit different to stand out. Yeah. And it probably goes back to your piece on risk, right? You have to be willing to just like, hey, this is probably not the most comfortable thing to do, but I'm going to take a risk, whether that's like, I don't know, chasing down a celebrity and trying to get them to take your product or whatever, right? You know, and bypassing the security. I've done all sorts of things like that over the years in growing businesses. And sometimes you've just got to look back on that and go, you know, that was probably worth a little, you know, getting a slap on the wrist for or asking for forgiveness afterwards, you know. But yeah, I think there's so many overlaps that I think traditionally sports people have not considered like entrepreneurship or being a founder necessarily the obvious next step. And rather than going to a boring corporate role, I think Many more should probably follow this path, you know.

And was it then this cheekiness in a way that got you to co-found your first venture DNAFit via one email and no startup resume?

Well, I mean, maybe, I mean, good question. So the story of that is basically I got one day, I got an email from somebody who was looking to commercialize or get feedback on the type of genetic science, the type of research looking at the role of genetics in response to exercise. Of course, I was a sports person, so I was a reasonable subject to study in that respect. And what happened for me is at that time in my life, I was 27 years old. I just missed out on the home Olympic Games in London 2012, and I was facing a very uncertain future. I had no higher education because I kept on deferring my university place and running faster, and before I knew it, it never happened. I had no work experience at all. I literally had no work experience. I'd never done anything but run. And, um, and I certainly had no money. In fact, I had very much minus money. I had about £22,000 of credit card debt at the time because I'd pursued this home Olympic Games with everything I could. And then, so I was really stuck. I had no opportunity, right? I had to be very, very open to anything which might present itself. And I had a good experience, so taking this test and looking into these roles and my genetics with this scientist and this guy who was looking to commercialize it. And any other time in my life, I would have just forwarded that email to my agent. And said, hey, see if you can make some money out of this. Like, is there a deal to be done? Because I was at this sort of hard, like my back was against the wall. I was in a corner. It's about what can I do in life? I think I just engaged a bit more proactively and positively there. And for some reason, I felt I had permission to give product feedback on this. And I had no experience in this. I don't know what made, gave me the gall to say, hey, this is how you should sell this thing. But I did. I wrote back, said, by the way, I think people like me would buy this if you could package it in this way, or you can present the results in an app in this manner. And of course, I guess being the receivers of that email, my now co-founders from that business would say, well, well, well, you know, yeah, let's get, let's speak to this guy a little bit more. Let's, let's follow this path. And so long story short, that sort of, um, maybe that cheekiness or that just willingness to try and give some feedback, which I had no evidence that I should give, led to me co-founding a company and actually changed my life. You know, there's a big butterfly effect from just that single email. Um, and led me, you know, to, uh, all sorts of crazy successes and milestones over the next 10 to 11 years after, after that emails.

Yeah, because from what you're telling me, you saw yourself in a way as the ideal customer for that particular product, and you embraced it to shape the product to be able to, for it to be commercialized to other people like yourself.

Yeah, I think looking back at it, you can very easily sort of, I think at the time, it wasn't that deep, you know, I just sort of, all right, sure, I'll look at this. And then I found it quite interesting. And then I sent my thoughts, you know, and I did, I remember I did hesitate about sending that email with my feedback because I was like, well, who am I to give feedback here? These are experienced business people and, uh, you know, genetic scientists, they don't need my thoughts on this. But thankfully I did because obviously that unlocked kind of the pathway which changed my life after that. So yeah, I have this, this theme, which I always talk about. And I first got this from, um, a book East of Eden by John Steinbeck. And there's a phrase in there, which they talk about this idea of having the permission to try. So like not being, you know, or the permission to try to succeed as opposed to the permission to succeed, right? And I think there's a lot of that and sports people maybe, you know, have this within them too is when you turn up on the start line of Olympic final, like who on earth are you to think you can compete there against Usain Bolt or against anyone else? And of course, you have to give yourself permission to try and I think a lot of the when I look back, a lot of the pivotal moments in my life have come from when I just gave myself like the permission to just try this thing or to say this thing or to present this, this science in a certain way, which I didn't know if I was necessarily qualified or educated enough to do so. And just see what happens from that. And thankfully that, that one email did unlock a pathway which fundamentally changed the course of my life from sport.

So how did you pitch it then that you ended up from responding to an email with feedback to becoming a co-founder founder of the business?

So, I mean, just organically, right? You know, evidently, I think when you're in it now, I've done it many times. When you start early stage thinking about making a business, you kind of, you know, you just take any advice or any impact you can get from anyone. And I think Harvey, my co-founder at the time, sort of said back to me, well, it's clear you have a good understanding of commercials and, you know, and of market, which I didn't. Um, let's chat further. And then we got on and we thought about it and then we did a little bit of work on it and then before we knew it, it was a business and we'd, we'd go founded this thing, right? So it's not always by design. I think almost nothing is ever by design, right? It's by sort of just making the best assessment of the options presented in front of you at the time and progressing and putting one foot in front of the other. So can't claim any sort of grand goal or design when I started this. And I'm probably no, no, can I be, um, because I'm the business with me, but thankfully we did. It sort of took on a life of its own. Before long, the business had reached a team of about 60 people and we offices in South Africa, in the UK, we'd won amazing awards over the next 5 years, like Fast Company named as one of the most innovative companies in data science in the world alongside NASA and Netflix and WeWork at the time. And eventually, yeah, 5 years later, we were acquired for an 8-figure sum. And that was a, you know, a massive milestone, a seminal moment really, because I remember signing those documents in the lawyer's office. And I thought back to 5 years prior. When I was like—

I wanted to ask you, you said 5 years as it would be just a blink of an eye, and it possibly looks like that for many people when they look back at their career. But I'm sure there were loads of challenges along the way in those 5 years of scaling and marketing and growing the business in order to get to a point where you would get it acquired.

Well, I mean, yes, probably when you think about that, every single day was like a lifetime, but somehow 5 years went, you know, in an instant, right? There was nothing but challenges. This is startup life. This is exactly it. There was almost no point where it wasn't a challenge or wasn't an existential crisis that we were going through about growing a business. This is the life you choose when you're an entrepreneur. So listen, tons of challenges from handling things breaking down in the lab, from handling unhappy customers, handling competitors, launching new products and getting ahead of us. And also we never raised funding for the business, right? We self-funded, bootstrapped this business entirely. So it made our lives exponentially harder that we were doing things on an absolute shoestring budget the whole time. Myriad millions of rollercoaster challenges over those 5 years. I don't know, that's the sadistic nature of becoming an entrepreneur.

You just didn't know exactly what you were getting yourself into, but you had all the skills from the athletic side in order to tackle some of these challenges, including some of the resilience and mindset, right?

Launching a startup is never the sensible choice. It's not, it's not based on facts. If you base it on statistics, in fact, it's a terrible idea. Launching a new business. But of course, everybody, I think it's a quote from Jeff Bezos, everyone thinks they're going to be the one in a million person that pulls it off. It's the first success. Sometimes you will be, you know, that's, that's the point. Sometimes people make a success out of things. And I love the pursuit of that., you know, I had no right to be an Olympic athlete, I think as well, even, right? I never considered myself that physically talented. Um, you know, and somehow I managed to sort of, you know, one of the ones which, which had a success there and eventually I won an Olympic medal. So remarkable really. And, uh, and I think that's the mindset you've got to have is that like, yeah, the chances might be extraordinarily slim, but I'm excited about this enough. I've got this almost emotional need to do this, to see if I can be one of those rare chances of success, as opposed to if you look at everything in life in just the statistical nature, you'll never do anything exciting, you know, you'll never do anything rewarding.

So, um, yeah.

And if you don't try, it certainly never happens.

Yeah.

Yeah.

There's a really good way of putting this is that the worst thing that can happen is you start a startup and it fails, but from that you learn so much and you become a more employable employee anyway. You know, if you need to go down the traditional job route, certainly if you're a younger person earlier in your career, I think there's nothing better you can to do than try your own venture. If that excites you. If it doesn't excite you, then it's probably not the route for you. But if it does excite you, I think starting your own venture, starting your own business, a startup, whatever you call it, even if it's a, doesn't need to be a tech business, doesn't need to be anything that needs venture scale. It can be an incredible coffee shop, you know, it can be a sandwich shop, whatever. Starting your own thing is only going to give you incredible learnings. It'll either give you good success financially, personally, emotionally, whatever. But it may, if it doesn't, you will give you learnings about what you enjoy, what you don't enjoy, how to run a business, and it'll give skills and tools, which will make you a more employable person for somebody else's job in the future too. So I think, I think certainly if you're younger, there's almost no downside to trying it in my opinion. If I think about this now, I'm thankful I did. Even if I found myself applying for a corporate role now, which hopefully I will never have to do, I will at least have like a remarkably sort of broad set of skills because I've lived it and operated businesses up to from, you know, from nothing to to a billion-dollar valuation, actually. So it's a very worthwhile thing to do on a personal basis, not necessarily based on the statistics of success chance, you know.

That's what I wanted to get into next, Andrew, because once DNAFit was acquired and you stayed on with the business, you in a way became an employee of the business as the chief product officer, and you were tasked with with scaling the new bigger business across Europe, Middle East, and Africa. How was that transition? In a way, you didn't have the same, I don't know, maybe financial worries month to month. You didn't have the payroll to worry about. You had more of a singular focus on developing the product and scaling it and getting it out there in more places.

So yeah, we were acquired by a company called Pranetics. They were a Hong Kong-based health tech company that were VC-backed at the time. And actually the deal we did was, um, they acquired us, DNAFit, but we became, and it was a part cash, part share deal. So actually we became sort of the owners, uh, in part of, of the group. And we continued to keep the DNAFit product live as one of our products in the suite. And almost the entire DNAFit team became the Prodetix EMEA team. And that was a really good balance for us because we ended up getting some good strategic guidance and some capital support from our ownership from Hong Kong, from Danny. But we were also able to still be a startup. No, we were still the same team doing the same things with similar products. We learned a lot and we got some extra capability, which allowed us to build our own lab. And we built other tests and we, you know, we expanded what we did. We weren't corporate, right? You know, like it was still very much like our culture and our team. So that was a really good balance. But of course, you know, naturally you grow things that things do change as a business grows, a business with 100 people should not feel the same as a business with 5 people in the team. And that would be very odd if it did, and it wouldn't do very well. And eventually we reached an enormous scale, you know, 350 central staff in the UK, 700, if you took into account like a wider network. And then, of course, you have to work in a different way, you know, I can't just like watch—

And I want to ask your reflections on that, because you obviously started from 5 people or a small amount of people initially. Initially, before you have been acquired, you said you were at just around 100, and then you went and grew the business to 350 and 700. What are the different stages in business, and how do you look at staff, and how do you keep connected with so many people and keep the mission alive across hundreds and hundreds of people?

I think it's very hard and you probably have to be a little bit intentional about it. I think as we grew, I did worry about like our culture, but the interesting thing is that a large part of our growth came during COVID So we're all entirely remote. Yeah. Vast majority of the people I've never met in person. It was a really fascinating dynamic to get. And I used to worry a lot about this. Like, hey, do people enjoy this culture? Are we still cool? Have we still got a good business here? And actually, since I've moved on and I catch up with people that did work for us, they still sort of reflect on their time at Panatics when we were this big, huge business, super, super positively. So I think it has to come from the top, evidently, right? You have to have ways of working which feel genuine and authentic, and you're not just like barking out direction. And the thing I probably think about is in sport, you have to have this sort of North Star guiding mission. And you alluded to it just there in your question to say like, what are we actually trying to do here? Does it have meaning to people? And hopefully you by naturally attract people that join that are aligned with that meaning. And whenever you do have like sort of, I guess, like fissures in the culture or challenges internally from an HR perspective, it's normally because there's been some disconnection between what are we all actually trying to achieve and that not filtering down to those individuals or to that team. I can't say I know perfectly how to do this. And there was others in the team that probably were much more appropriate to think about about the intentional steps we took. But from my side, like, I always just tried to genuinely just be who I am, you know. And I am— I'm a— I'm very good at certain things. I'm very aware of what I'm not good at, and I'd be very clear on that, you know. I'm not very good at, like, building out processes and adhering to those and being so disciplined in terms of workflow, reporting, how people— things. I'd like to be very, very direct and human, and I'm very uncorporate in that manner. And I think being quite aware of where your strengths and weaknesses are as a leader probably allows you to have leadership, actually, in that respect, and know, you know, where you need help. And I always like to think, if I look back on this, even when we had a very, very large team, I'm more comfortable when I'm like almost in the trenches doing the actual work with everybody, as opposed to just setting a direction and like waiting to catch up on it a week later. So maybe more like a captain of a sports team, as opposed to the manager of a football team. I like to be on the field. Yeah. I probably, you know, there's probably people could listen to this who used to work for me and probably think, oh, this is absolutely, absolutely rubbish. He was awful at this or something. But, but that's the, That's sort of what interests me more is being like part of a team working towards something as opposed to just barking out. Yeah. Yeah. That's just who I am.

Right.

And others, it doesn't mean that's the best way to lead, but for me as who I am, that was more authentic for me to actually be, you know, in the weeds every day.

And for a startup mindset as well.

Yeah. I mean, maybe because I've never done anything else, right? I never had a job still. Right. And I've never really worked in a structure where I didn't have permission to do anything. Eating of that, you know, that's on the plate, right? So I could, I'd like to know how every single thing works and be competent enough to almost do every single part. Not that I would be the best, but competent enough to potentially just do it. Because then I know how to grow, how to fix things if they're broken. And that's, that's definitely a startup founder's mindset. If ever there was one.

You have to understand all the processes, even if you don't write them, you have to understand how things work in order to be able to hire hire people to do those jobs, which was my next question around hiring and developing culture. At what point have you stopped being involved in the day-to-day hiring of people, and then you had to get people under you to hire their own teams and build around what you've already established? And how was, in a way, letting go of that process?

So that probably mostly occurred after we had sold the business and joined the new acquiring party as we scaled a little bit. Really probably only meaningfully happened once we hit sort of the scale where we were growing from, you know, 80 people to 300 or so people in an 18-month period. And then at that point, yes, there were new faces would appear that I had never come across and didn't know and hadn't been introduced to and played no role in the hiring. Yeah, probably was a little bit uncomfortable. In the first instance or so. But later on, I saw how people are working great. And, you know, we get on and we speak to each other in a normal human way. And we work together on things. And I guess you can only learn to accept that through experience and seeing that that works very well. But also, I just physically couldn't have possibly, you know, had a play in every hire that we did as you go. So you're forced to let go from that. But I can't say I've got any, you know, wise insights or, you know, processes to say how to do that well. As always, I think in every part of life, you end up just making the best decision you can with the choices you've got every day in front of you. And hopefully that leads to some sort of forward progression over time without ever having this sort of grand design or your big thesis around what you do and how you do it.

But with lots of hiring comes a lot of firing as well. And when you get to that point, you perhaps can reflect on the early days when the employee started or in the interview, and you can possibly notice some red flags. Has that been the case for you? Are you now to a point where somebody says something or answers to a question in a different way and you know they're not going to be a fit for your business?

I mean, I probably don't have a hard rule on that, but I would say like, what I find when I hire great, when I've hired great people and they've joined the team is that I've immediately felt they were authentically themselves in the interview or upon first meeting. They were willing enough to answer honestly if they didn't know something, they were willing enough to just share a random personal story of nothing completely unrelated to the role or to the job, and that they weren't trying to impress me almost. They weren't trying to sort of make an impression. And that resonates with me because I almost feel like if you can have a personal connection with people, it means you can both work on the same mission together. And that's the most important thing for me is that I can be myself and they can be themselves and you can be authentic to say, I haven't got a clue what to do here. Like, how are we going to figure this out? Or, you Yeah, I think I know what we should do here. Follow me on this if I don't know what to do. So I think probably when I look back, anything that sort of puts me off in a hiring decision is probably when it feels like someone is just turning out a practiced answer on something which they've maybe read.

Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Like I just really like to try and get to the core of the person and know if we can work together because ultimately the thing which really harms you is not normally lack of skill. Skills. Like, skills can be learned. I literally have no skills when I started working, you know, like no, no learning, no experience at all. What you can't do is fix like a, you know, a personality clash, right? You can't really work meaningfully with someone if you just don't align with them or don't get on. So I hire for that culture first over everything, I would guess, and connection first over everything, um, would be And maybe I'm a terrible hiring manager in that respect, right? That might be to my detriment. But the people I enjoy working with have always been those that I would happily spend time with, you know, outside of work and be honest enough to say, I haven't got a clue how we're going to fix this. Let's all just figure it out together. And not need to be too polished or too rehearsed.

And continuing the Pranetic story, you shared how the business scaled to 700 people around the world. And then the major point was when you had an IPO on NASDAQ. How did that feel? What was the moment you knew that it was going to happen and what happened afterwards?

Yeah, it was quite a milestone. So I guess probably like a couple of years—

comparable to an Olympic medal. Yeah.

Yeah.

Maybe it's the, maybe it's the Olympic medal of the business world, you know, a NASDAQ IPO at least. So I'm glad to have experienced it. You know, honestly, I think I was still more in the day-to-day, just operational of the business to think too much about what that meant. Also, we, you know, we had our group CEO, Danny, in Hong Kong, who led mostly on sort of the fundraising and certainly on the capital markets piece there as we grew. But it was certainly very exciting, you know, to think about, but it also changes a lot about how you work naturally, you know, as a public company. Or even preparing to a public company, you can't be as scrappy as you once were as an early-stage startup. And I, but being honest, like I think that, that was quite uncomfortable for me. I like to just be able to say, right, we're going to do this and we're going to do it however way we'll learn on the go. But naturally when you get to the public markets, there is a higher bar for how you do things. And so even in preparation for that, it took some learning and adjustment across the whole company. But I did go, I went to New York for the day we listed on the NASDAQ and we had a little poster up and my face was one of the places on the poster there in Times Square. And I remember I attended this fascinating mystery dinner party the night before in New York, completely unrelated to the listing. And there's a lot of incredible people attending this. And I was really proud to be able to say I'm here in New York because my company, you know, is going public tomorrow. And everyone's like, wow, you know, that's a real achievement, a real milestone. And I think on paper, yeah, it's good to look back and say, well, yeah, I was lucky enough to make it to Olympic Games and eventually be awarded an Olympic medal. And the work I've done in health. I guess you can point to this external milestone of the listing on the NASDAQ as a real sort of testament to the quality of the work we did as well. So yeah, no, it was exciting to see my face on a poster in Times Square. And it's a great thing to be able to almost like validate the work you did by saying, yeah, we reached an IPO with that business as well, because we all worked very, very hard for a very long time. So I'm glad to be able to have reached that milestone for For sure.

So what happens after you IPO? Not a lot of people will get to experience that, especially entrepreneurs who start things from scratch and bootstrap them like you've done yourself for many years before that. So what was the experience like afterwards? What changed and what didn't change?

I think overall, you know, what didn't change is probably, you know, the mission of the company and why any of our technology existed. And you'll see the company today, I'm not involved with Prenetics at all nowadays, but they're doing incredible things in consumer health. And I think consumer health has definitely been, was my passions over the years. But also, I mean, I think what really changed is, you know, it was at the end of an era for us that had been, for me, it had been just over 10 years since the end of my sporting career. So it was a natural break. And it was a time when I started to think about, you know, what might come next outside of that entity.

And I think that was by that point.

So yeah, it was, it was, yeah, it was in 2022. So yeah, I was for sure I was in my, in my late 30s. Right. It was, uh, it was absolutely a natural time for me to think about what was next. So, I mean, really there was, um, I think companies will change, of course, when they go public and they have to talk about their forecast and their forward ambitions. They have to not talk about their achievements and certainly certain quarterly earnings calls, et cetera. So naturally it was very different. And I think we just reached a natural point where actually I was just after the listing and actually before the listing, I had been thinking about this as like, well, I'll probably move on, you know, after, after this listing and take some time off. Primarily, I wanted to take some time off. It'd been a long 10 years of building startups through to that thing. I needed some time to breathe. And I actually think it took me about a year to really decompress after I moved on.

I was about to ask, many, many founders after they sell their business, they say they're going to take some time off and do this and that. But you very quickly find them back in the saddle of doing something else, which is what you did in less than a year, you Yeah, just under a year.

No, I took some, did in the, in the, I took a little bit of time off and then I had, um, a few sort of consultancy and advisory pieces of work. I was a fractional chief product officer at a health concierge business. Um, and, uh, and on the board of a couple of others. And, and while I enjoyed that, I actually found myself deeply unsatisfied at not building something. Like, I found, you know, really, I'd get very anxious. I didn't find it very easy to just give, like, meaningful advice to others on their business. I wanted to actually help them do it. And so I had this sort of, this dichotomy of, let's say, like, I'm very happy to be paid and do about 7 days of work a month, you know, and have a sort of semi-relaxed life and so on. I had a young child at the time and so on. But actually, I really just couldn't help escape the fact that I really wanted to be in the weeds building something. And that's, um, like I've been brainwashed by my sports career, my startup success to just go again. What I ended up doing was, um, again, being sort of open to opportunity and a few things conspired, which led me to co-found Stride, which I'm sure we'll talk about. But really it was driven by this kind of deep unease with not physically building something every day. Um, and that, that was, uh, I feel much more comfortable even going through the uncomfortable parts of building a business. And that's, that's where, that's where I'm currently at right now in the midst of that.

So that's how, that's the, in a way, how you got into building a new business and Stride, which is your, your main activity now. Let's just call it that.

Yeah. Yes, I'm pretty much full-time now building Stride. So Stride is, I'd call it a preventative health membership. And this was driven by by one, I wanted to build something. Two, I felt a little bit dissatisfied that we never quite delivered on our promise and what I thought we could have built in the previous two businesses in DNAFit and Prenetics. And thirdly, I was kind of watching the world of health, um, as an outsider at that time and seeing that there'd been a huge shift. Whereas when we first started DNAFit, anyone, if you talk to anyone about health, they either considered health like going to the gym and doing some fitness activity, or they thought it was something to do with their GP and their NHS. So yeah, if something was— if you're trying to tell someone, hey, this is a worthwhile test, they say, well, if it's so good, why aren't the NHS giving it to me for free? And certainly across Europe, that was sort of an endemic opinion. But then over those 10 years since the start of DNAFit, there'd be so many sort of strong cultural, technological, societal shifts. The ubiquity of everyday people tracking niche biometrics through wearable data, right? You couldn't, Everyday people who are not athletes at all now track these biometric data, which are, would be so niche for me even as an Olympic athlete 10 years prior, right? The ubiquity of this sort of niche health.

Which ones are you talking about? Are you talking about smartwatches and bracelets for your heart rate and—

Yeah, let's think about, you know, the Oura Ring, the Whoop Band, whatever device you choose to use. People are tracking their sleep stages now. When I was an athlete, if I want to track my sleep stages, I have to go to a dedicated sleep lab and sleep there and wear all these sensors, have a camera watching me overnight. You know, it wasn't possible just through a good-looking ring, right? Or people are worrying about their heart rate variability, which was like a super niche physiological insight, which only like you would look at in a lab environment as an athlete too. And I don't think at the time, if you told anyone, hey, millions of everyday people who aren't athletes will find this interesting and track this all day, every day in, in 10 years' time, they would've gone, are you mad? Of course not. They don't need to do that. So this sort of ubiquity obviously, us tracking niche biometrics speaks to a proactivity amongst general people to care about their health and not rely on a health system. And I think that's the biggest sort of technological shift. And if you think about media, right, mass media now, like one of the biggest podcasts in the world is the Huberman Lab, and that's Andrew Huberman doing 3 to 4 hour deep dives on extraordinarily niche, like, health protocols, right? And You couldn't have forecasted that either. So I think this isn't the gene, you're not going to go back in the bottle. Everyday people, wherever they're at in their health journey, whether they're just beginning or they're super advanced, going to care about like proactively tracking and measuring their health and taking control of that. And they're going to do that with or without their nationalized health system or a health insurer. And that's what I was particularly emboldened by with Stride and why I wanted to make it a bit more ambitious, which is to say, we're going to look at all the biological data we can reasonably and we're going to give you that over time and we're going to give you the outputs from that or the handholding to live healthier. I think what we had been guilty of at DNAFit and Prenetics was giving people a test, giving them some good data from that, and then basically saying, you're empowered with your data now, off you go. It's up to you to live healthier. Basically saying we're delegating their health to them without actually telling them what to do. And so I think a lot of digital health companies have been guilty of that over time. With Stride, I'm trying to do this where we actually hold your hand for further, right? So we've got all this data, but what for? To help you live healthier. So how are we going to do that? Well, here's a human that you speak to who's a qualified health practitioner who speaks to you through how to embed this into your life. Here's a supplement which takes into account all those other things we've measured and helps you meet any deficiencies. And here's a digital platform which makes it super clear for you as to like what you should try and aim to do every day. And, and that's that confluence of like lab data, humans, a digital platform and like tailored supplementation is the powerful overlap where we are trying to sort of build with Stride basically.

So it's a more holistic approach rather than just, uh, yeah, like you said, doing a test and sharing the results with somebody. And it also provides more recurring revenue, I'm assuming, as well through the supplements and the other offers that you have.

Have.

Yeah. I mean, that's a, you know, on a purely sort of commercial basis, DNAFit was in some ways a terrible business because we sold the DNA test. Your DNA never changes. And then we had to basically—

it's a one-off. Yeah.

Yeah. It's the most one-off thing you could ever have. Right. You know, your DNA will be the same from the moment you're born to the moment you die and beyond. And so we had this amazing business considering that, that we built and every month we had to win more customers than we won the month before, like exhausting way to do business. Naturally, that's a limit. With Stride, I think first it was about like, I think the business that wins in this space will be the business that actually improves people's health over time. And then working backwards from that, of course, you get great recurring revenue if you can ask people to join on a membership and so on. But primarily, it's like, actually, my strategic bet is that can we— we will actually improve people's health. And to do that, we need to regularly interact with them. And of course, then the commercials support that. So they say it's a little bit sort of the other way around is that rather than say, hey, we could sell some great products now and then figure out if we can make a good business. I think we can make a good business if we can give people the tools they need to actually be healthier in a year's time or two years' time. And therefore they'll stay with us for a long time and pay us more over the, over that period of time. We are a business and we've got to make money. But if you think about it that way around, you're creating a business which is meaningful to people as well as having a good business model underneath it.

It becomes part of their lifestyle, I I guess.

Yeah. If I had to summarize what I'm trying to do here is I'm trying to make tracking your internal biology a habit. So I'm trying to make it an everyday lifestyle that you think about what's going on under the hood. In the same way, if you think back to, um, there's a very good case study in this is Whoop versus Fitbit. So of course Fitbit was sort of the first movers in the wearable space, right? Very big successful business. And Whoop were like a coffee cat that didn't have a watch face, right? You know, you could buy Whoop and you bought the hardware the same way you bought the Fitbit hardware. But both of them, I think at the time suffered from this incredible churn. After 3 months, people have stopped wearing the device. They feel like they got their insights and they move on. And what the, I think Will, the founder of Whoop, I think he's told this story in a couple of podcasts. So I'm sort of secondhand telling his secondhand. So I'm sure there's plenty of corrections on this, but they took a gamble to move from a hardware purchase model to a membership model. And I think that probably gave them a hit on revenue in the short term, but it reframed why you buy the product. It stops people thinking of it as a one-time purchase. And it made them think about this is a lifestyle. I'm now going to identify as somebody who tracks this as a lifestyle, as a habit, as who I am, as a brand signal to others in my social group as to who I am. And you see it today. If you wear an Oura Ring, you're proud that you wear that, right? And you're happy to be asked on, oh, what are you wearing there? What are you tracking with that? So you're saying with a Whoop band, And I want to do the same for your internal biology from these biomarkers that we test with Stride and reposition getting a lab test. It shouldn't, of course it shouldn't be a single time thing that you should of course track this stuff over time and stay healthy that way. So that's what we are doing nowadays.

Yeah, because you mentioned the national health system in the UK and across Europe, but from, from your experience and from mine, just getting regular lab tests on the NHS is not a case unless you have an actual condition already that you're tracking, such as, I don't know, say diabetes. But if you are a healthy person, or in a way aging, and you want to improve your health markers and prevent a lot of things happening to you, you can't really get that so easily through the National Health System or even on private healthcare without paying additional funds.

Yeah, I mean, and I don't think that's a bad thing, right? You know, these systems are not set up to say, hey, we're just going to luxuriously give you all of this data and insights without any symptomatic or suspected things to look for. I think it's absolutely fine that they don't do that. Of course they can't afford to do that on a sort of single basis from a single payer, like someone like the NHS. Probably needs to be proven out elsewhere, probably through the private markets, through a business like Stride to say, If you give people this data in this way and you can see the whole picture over time, you can reduce the incidence of XYZ conditions and therefore probably reduce the cost to a payer system of managing those conditions. So, you know, the NHS was not set up to make people just be healthy in their everyday lives before they acutely unwell, but it is burdened by the cost, by a huge majority of its cost burden comes from managing the conditions that come from not living healthily and well before you're unwell, right? So whether it's diabetes, whether it's—

whether it's smoking, whether it's obesity, sedentary lifestyles, etc.

So the NHS is having to foot the bill for managing those, but it was not set up to be your personal coach, right, before you were unwell. So I think likely the solution, or whoever solves this, will probably come from outside of that system. And I would like to one day be able to prove the efficacy of giving someone access to a system like Stride in reducing the incidence and therefore the cost of that to somebody else down And that makes the economic case for then possibly partnering with health systems across the world. Yeah. And I think it won't be as simple and it will have tons of nuance and won't be black and white, but maybe some forward-thinking government somewhere that maybe has a smaller population, has a, is easier to validate this type of thing, will take a preventative approach to healthcare. And have the, I guess, like have the will to see that through downstream 5 to 10 years later. Did it make an impact to their efficiency of spend on their nationalized health coverage? And I'm sure it will. I think we'll think we'll probably look back at this point in time, this consumer health revolution as the tipping point in the same way there was a tipping point when smoking started to go down, but it took like 50 years for that to really come to fruition. I think we're at a tipping point now where self-ownership of health is actually going to transform healthcare spend, but in 50 years, we won't necessarily see it in the next 5 years. You know, it's going to be a long-winded, long-borne-out process to see this. But I do feel like we've reached a kind of tipping point as Western societies go, at least.

And Andrew, when you co-founded Stride, you went on a different route from what you've done before, if I understand correctly. You didn't bootstrap it as, as you've done with DNAFit. You took a different journey, maybe some of the learnings that you've had from your previous experience.

No, so we did bootstrap strategy. We've just recently closed our first external funding just over a year after trading, but we did completely bootstrapped.

Congratulations.

So we went again for right or wrong. I say, I don't know. I don't even know if I was even deliberate about that. We just started because we felt like we could start. So, um, so I don't know if that was a good decision or a bad decision yet, but either way, we've learned a lot by doing it. So we launched, we've reached, you know, £4 million plus in revenue in the first year and completely bootstrapped. So I'm really proud of sort of what we did there.

There.

What we did do though is we've been very, because we're bootstrapped, you end up sort of selling whatever you can as soon as you can. You know, this is the life of a bootstrap founder. You'll follow anywhere that you can make some money or make some revenue. You just go for it. You don't think big strategic bets. You just sort of follow the money. So we were ready first with this high-quality supplement we made. So we made this supplement, which is a liposomal liquid. It's a single sort of 30ml liquid shot, which has good sort of foundational daily nutrition and it has some goal-specific add-ons. It comes in, but it's also interesting because it's made from what's called liposomes. So that the molecules of the nutrients in there are encapsulated in these liposomes, which are very efficient at passing through your gut barrier, which basically means you have better absorption. What they call bioavailability is very high. And actually we were ready with that first. So we tried to sell the supplement first and we had some success, but the supplement world is like crazy.

So it's a crowded market.

I mean, yeah, it's, it's not even crowded. It's just like a wild west. There's like nonsense out there. There's high-quality stuff, there's cheap stuff, there's expensive stuff. There's no correlation between those two, those four markers I've just discussed. Most people still buy it in store in like dusty health shops or pharmacies where they can't tell the difference between any one nutrient or dosage, let alone between the different brands. So it's a, it's a crazy world and, and brand matters a lot. And I think you've gotta spend and work hard to just break through as just the supplement. And thankfully we got ready with the rest of our product stack, like, you know, in pretty short succession. And before long, we'd kind of built this, as we now describe it, this kind of multi-omic preventative health suite, which has a DNA test, a microbiome test, a blood test, a biological age test, the supplement, the human expertise. And now we're trying to make sense of all that into a single membership. So we kind of always iterated, we learned on the go and you sell whatever you can sell as soon as you can sell when you're a bootstrap founder. So, um, some of it may look like it was by design, but really it was just about what was ready and how can we make some revenue ASAP is generally the, uh, the underlying feeling.

But then you decided to raise funding. Funding for Stride in order to scale it faster or to develop new products?

Yeah, a bit of both. We had really good traction as soon as we started selling, but you know, I was really astonished.

Which is a good indicator when fundraising.

Yeah, yeah, for sure. So I mean, as soon as we started making revenue, it grew much quicker than I expected. And I realized almost to the point we were talking about before, there's a moment, there's a societal shift company. And if I don't capitalize on this, we may lose out. So I've started the process of fundraising and then, yeah, we're lucky enough to have closed a small amount of money, not a huge round, but it's just giving us enough to go a little bit quicker, faster, and make sure that we're not creating any major gaps in terms of our products or in R&D. So we need a bit more team, we need a few hands on deck, we need to do a bit more hard work on the products and the R&D, but we also need we need to grow. And we need to get this idea of Stride and the products out to more people quicker. And so that's why we've taken on a little bit of funding now, very small round, especially relative to our revenue. And I'm sure we'll look to raise more in the future. But for now, we're just focused on getting sort of the next milestone, which is the single membership going for us.

And what was the experience for fundraising? Obviously, before you were acquired, and you went through the IPO, so it wasn't necessarily the same, the same route. How did do you find going out there and pitching yourself and the business and its future prospects in order to raise capital?

Yeah, it's been a funny experience. I've never really done it before, right? And you learn a lot about how to describe the business. So if nothing more, what I've taken from this fundraising process is by a process of erosion, you end up getting down to the core of what you're trying to achieve because every day, every single half hour slot of your day, every day for month is describing and selling the business to somebody. So like you spend so many hours saying, this is what we're doing. This is what we're trying to achieve. Can you help us? And what it does do is it does give you this clarity. You get down to the kernel of really what you're doing. I didn't know how to describe Stride at the start of this fundraising process. You know, I was like, well, we're a lab test and we've got a supplement and we, I was sort of listing out what the product features were. And then over throughout that process, you end up kind of eroding down to this core of like, what are you actually trying to achieve here? And you're trying, we're trying to achieve this sort of diagnostic diagnostics-first membership. It's diagnostics preventive health membership, making tracking biomarkers a habit. And I wouldn't have got to those clear phrases, I don't think, unless I'd gone through the fundraising process as well. So that's been an upside of it. The other part is like, you've got to be very sure about what you're doing and how to do it, because what ends up happening is, of course, you're trying to raise money from people. And every single fund you reach has different levels of experience in their fund. They have different type of people there who have either been operators or haven't been operators. And you've got to be clear that you don't sway your vision just to try and lean into like what you think they're going to like. And it's quite easy when you get a no or many nos, as is the case, and 99% of them are nos, is to say, well, actually, maybe they're right. Maybe it's not, you know, the right thing. And I think what I'm really focused on now is I've raised some money. Money, but I've really got to make sure that I don't get too almost waylaid on the mission, right? Because 99% of them also said no, and I'm not necessarily sure I agree with why they said no, but I don't want to be too swayed by that. I'm going to learn from that, take the feedback, but still got to be clear on the mission. Yeah, you could easily doubt yourself. I think very much every time I got a no from an investor, it felt to me the same as when I used to get, if I missed out on selection for a major as a team, but as an athlete, right? The same thing. I, you know, I've done this. I missed out on many, many competitions, and also I was lucky enough to be selected for many competitions. But every time you didn't make the cut, it felt like a, you know, someone else was saying you're not good enough. And every time you get a no from a VC, it does feel the same. And you've got to be able to like take it, learn from it, brush it off, and move on. And I think like that could crush you if you, if you, you know, I'm so glad I had this sporting experience of going through that feeling before.

That's the resilience.

I don't think so. Yeah, yeah. It's the resilience, the sort of lack of fear of failure, and maybe just single-mindedness enough to keep pressing on.

And speaking of resilience, Andrew, when you scale a business at such a high pace, we've had pandemic changing everything around the workforce, IPO, acquisitions, new startups, bootstrapping, fundraising. How do you keep yourself grounded and motivated to keep through? Are there any particular habits or routines that you practice religiously or that you revert to when things get too much?

Well, I think at this stage of my life, one of the things which helps you keep grounded is I have kids and you've got no choice. Work has to end every day at a certain point and some crisis can be going on with the kids or some more important thing happens and that forces you to have perspective, right? Um, when I was an athlete, I had to, I had to, I didn't have children when I was an athlete, but I had to find the same balance because I learned pretty quickly if I got too caught up and my whole brain got taken up with everything about performance in sport, I didn't perform right. And so I had to have, find headspace, I had to find some clear white space in my brain to think about other things or relax or do something else. And so I think the same as you grow a business, it can be completely all encompassing. And when you're a startup founder, your identity is in sort of— you cannot remove your identity from the quality of your work, right? You are a startup founder. That's who you are all day, all night. That's what you do, and that's your identity. But somehow you've got to find a way to make some little space to think about other things. And when you've got kids, it's a bit easier because they force it on you because they'll want their dinner laid out in a certain way, and they'll lose their minds if it's not in that same way or whatever, right? So you're forced to like think of these other sort of more trivial matters, which of course aren't actually trivial, they're real life. That's the whole point of it all. But that actually helps. And so the stress of sort of raising children at the same time as starting a new startup, actually, it's probably net beneficial to give you perspective on what you're doing. Of course, it makes it all a lot harder as well, right? But that's it. The second piece is like, and I need to do better at this too, is I don't do enough physical exercise now, even though I was an Olympic athlete.

I was just about to say, I think possibly you're not a lot doesn't compare to the usual not a lot of exercise. No, no, no.

I would push back on that. Now I've managed to get to, my youngest daughter is just over 1.5 years old. So I'm starting to sort of emerge into normal life in the next couple of years. But even getting half an hour a week to go for one one run or a jog. It's been super hard. I've moved country, I've built a startup, and I've got two kids. But I do find that any of the anxiety I have or decisions I need to make, if I manage to get a run in, I can make those decisions. Somehow it compartmentalizes things in my head, or it lessens the anxiety that was, you know, I've built up into this, you know, tycoon in my head about— tycoon, sorry, in my head about what it could be or could not be. Exercise for me helps me make better decisions and handle like the hard parts easier. And trying to make time for that is a balance, and you've got to find a way to compromise your actual hours of work during the day, especially when you have kids, to give yourself some time to do that. As I'm learning, I think the more I'm able to give myself that time, actually, the better I can be at work when I am at work. But it's not a black and white thing. So every week is different. I managed to run this morning. That's a midweek run for me, which is quite rare. So I'm trying to sort of exercise 2 to 3 times a week now, and it does make me better at work if I can find the time to do so. But sometimes you have to compromise, you know, work, early stage startup life means that your health will take a backseat sometimes, even if you're building a health business. That you say about, it's about telling that line.

That's the irony, right? Yeah. Yeah.

The irony, I'm building a health business where I'm advocating for people taking control of their health. And sometimes the building of that business means I can't take control of my health. So it's about finding that balance. And I don't think there's any easy route to it. It's always uncomfortable, but I do find if I do exercise I'm much better cognitively at making the decisions I need to make for the business, as well as, you know, just being healthier at the same time.

And you mentioned Andrew Huberman, and he's a big advocate of cold baths and plunges. Are there any particular fads or things that don't work for you, or you've tried and you wouldn't recommend?

I'm very pragmatic when it comes to this stuff, right? I don't, I don't have a cold plunge. I don't have the luxury of time to like spend what time I do.

So most entrepreneurs won't like, no, exactly.

Well, a lot of these advocates of this health optimization, generally the podcasters, men with time on their hands, normally maybe without children, their entire life. Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Single men.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. Without kids that have grown up or not with young and also their entire living and their content and what they do for a living is based off them doing that, right? And I think I'm probably moving towards that as the way we live, but Stride needs to grow a bit more. We need to get more, you know, we need to get a bit bigger before I can do that as part of Stride. So that's a luxury and I would love to be able to do it, but I don't have the ability to do so right now. What I do do is, I've always been a very good believer in just being very simple on like doing 2 or 3 changes or things that you care about. And I try to eat enough protein and I try to eat enough fiber. I don't deny myself much when it comes to nutrition as long as I have adequate protein and fiber intake. And people often overlook, like, almost this additive way to eating is that rather than saying I'm not necessarily restricting myself from not eating that, but I am making sure that I have adequate fiber. If I, if I have adequate fiber in my diet, I don't crave sweet things or bad food. And if I do exercise, interestingly, I find it easier to eat healthily. It's like a brain switch. So when I'm I find it much harder to be strict with my diet and vice versa. Right. So almost like the whole thing sort of comes together. I can't control my sleep. I got two young kids. Sleep is out of my control. I'll take what I can get when I can get it.

It's going to be a while until you get that back. Yeah.

Yeah. I think, I think give me another year and a half and then I can probably at least like predict, generally speaking, I could get, you know, this amount of sleep, but this is my point, right? Life happens. And I don't think you think you can think of health in a silo. Like, health has to be working with what you have at the time. For me right now, health, true health, optimal health, would be doing 3 workouts a week. Like, that's table stakes for most people, but that's because that's where my life is right now. And if everybody has these different constraints in their life, which nobody is like, you know, unless you've just recently exited a business, you've got millions of pounds and you have no partner and no children, you've got all the time in the world, nobody has the perfect environment to be healthy. And I think what I care about with Stride is making it as simple as possible for people to take what steps they can within the constraints of their environment right there. And that's how you actually get healthier. It's like today the choice I'm making is, hey, I'm not gonna eat those biscuits. I'm gonna eat an apple instead, and I'm gonna add in this fibrous veg. Right. And you might do nothing else for 4 days after that, but when you do get the opportunity, you make the best informed, like healthy decision you can. And I think that's what actual health means, cuz everybody's got a reason why they can't. So it's like, find out where you might be able to make that little gift for yourself of making a healthy choice here and do that as consistently as you reasonably can. Over time, that will become, that will grow and that will scale. And before you know it, you'll be like, hey, I'm a load healthier than I was 3 years ago. And so that's probably the best, the health journey I'm personally on right now. And I think is the case for a lot of our customers at Stride as well.

Andrew, one question that I like to wrap up my interview with is when we get a bit introspective, although we went back through a lot of stuff. Already, but you've achieved success in athletics and in business, you know, Olympic medals as we compare them on both sides, on and off track. But a lot of people know that success doesn't come without sacrifice. So I'm wondering, what were the biggest sacrifices you had to make to be where you are today?

So I think from that time as a sports person, you don't realize the sacrifices you make because it's all you've ever known. A lot of sports people hold themselves up and say, I sacrificed, you know, I didn't go out with my friends and get drunk. I didn't eat all those donuts. I didn't, uh, honestly, did I really make that sacrifice consciously? No, because from 8 years old, sport was what defined me. And so I just kind of did what I needed to do. What I did set across sacrifice was actually my professional career. And I think in sport, I made a big sacrifice. And maybe it wasn't the right sacrifices. I didn't go to university, I didn't get any work experience. And I regret making that sacrifice. Actually, I think I could have done it both. Now, obviously, things have worked out for me. And so it's very easy to point at me and say, well, you know, well, look, maybe the fact you didn't go to university is why you were a successful entrepreneur. Maybe it was, but it made things a lot harder for me. So I did sacrifice other opportunities by pursuing sport. And I I wouldn't have done it any other way. I wouldn't have given up on sport, but I think I did sacrifice like making my life that little bit easier by just having a university experience and even the social group from university, or by having some work experience to point to when I found myself in that tough spot in my life. But the truth is the obvious sacrifices, not drinking, not eating food, you know, missing out on like young people's social life. I had much richer experiences anyway, and I didn't— I don't consider those sacrifices. I traveled the world. I've been to 53 countries. I've made friends who live all over the world through my sport, and I've experienced kind of the sharp end of emotion that people would never experience in their lives thanks to sports. That really was a gift as opposed to a sacrifice for me. When it comes to entrepreneurship, you absolutely sacrifice like milestones in your life. You can't predict when you might be able to buy a buy a house. You can't get a mortgage because the way you're paid is too low or too weird because your startup has to not pay you one month and then pay you double the next and so on.

And it makes the deposit so much higher.

And so, yeah, you just, you know, there's, there's many, many of these sort of, you know, what you do with the startup is you defer gratification for potential bigger gratification one day, right? You're basically deferring the ability to go on that holiday or buy that house now, or predict what your income will be in a few years on the idea that maybe one day you'll get a much bigger payout or a much bigger sort of milestone that you reach. And somehow that aligns with my sporting background. You know, there was a big goal that you're working towards. You don't know if you'll make it, but if you do make it, it'll be really worthwhile. So I've sacrificed a lot of that kind of normal life progression. You know, I didn't manage to actually live with my wife for many years because I was training and so on.

Right.

You know, so you do sacrifice those things and you have to sort of catch up afterwards once you have an exit or you, you know, finish your sporting career and all these things. So I probably sacrificed those less, less obvious pieces, but the more obvious sacrifices sacrifices that people think of from a sporting career, actually, I think are the opposite, that they're not sacrifices at all. They're actually privileges to have experienced.

So sacrifice can be a privilege and absolutely no regrets by the sound of it. I think that's a great way to end up today's conversation, Andrew. It's been really interesting to, to hear your story so far. And I can't wait to see what you're going to do next with Stride and where it's going to take you.

Thanks for having me, Daniel. Glad to have shared the journey. And yeah, if anyone wants to check out what we do at Stride, feel free to find me on social media or on LinkedIn or head to our website, which is getstride.com.

I'll include all of these in the show notes. Thank you, Andrew.

Thanks, Daniel.

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