I have a fridge over there in the office full of peptides, small molecules, proteins that I will inject myself with. If you go to my home, I've got three drawers with maybe 100 bottles of supplements, right? I'll take anywhere from 10 to probably 70 supplements a day. So, you think of it as a way of maximizing your health as you go through this extraordinarily difficult journey.
He calls it exogenous support. In a world where companies move faster than the humans running them, some founders are finding new ways to push the limits. For Max, that means turning his body into part of the experiment. My lifestyle is working against me. The hours I work work against me. Stress works against me. So, how can I lean a little bit on exogenous support because of how extreme the rest of my life is?
At 25, Max Marion has raised over $30 million to build one of the fastest growing health tech companies in Silicon Valley. His company's superpower is trying to bring longevity and precision medicine to everybody, not just the elite. I know kung fu.
Speed matters far more than stealth or execution matters far more than ideas. Before superpower, Max was a law student who ranked first in his class until he started to rethink everything. He dropped out, obsessed over performance and started building toward a new kind of healthcare. There's only one framework I think about in the context of company going and it's this idea of velocity. It's a vector with direction and magnitude, right? The magnitude of the vector is speed is iterating and testing and being in the arena. It's very hard to get to quality by sitting there and thinking and constantly delaying things. Inside Superpower, that obsession with speed became culture. Like people are in here at 3:00 a.m. on a Saturday night dejing and having fun and someone's off in the corner coating, right?
It's a 150,000 person weight list in 6 months. Having a weight list that was like self growing and as a result we grew that pretty quickly and a weight list is revenue, right? So we basically had revenue before we launched the company.
I dislike investors who are like we going to sell in 6 years and yeah if we sell in six years we'll probably fail like
Yeah but this is a long haul right
Yeah if if we succeed we're we're still doing this in 20 30 years if we sell for a billion dollars in 3 4 years we have failed it's not what we set out to do
When speed becomes a mission you forget what normal feels like. Max Marion is living proof that obsession takes you further but not for free. This is episode 5 of Speed.
Max, it's awesome to be with you and have you on Speed. Thank you so much for taking the time. We haven't launched publicly about what format is yet, but we wanted to start talking about some of the things that we were really passionate about, right? Companies that are building really quickly, companies that are doing that at extraordinarily high quality, companies that are managing somehow in all of that to stay close to their customers as they scale. And I think that Superpower is a really great example of all of those things. As a co-founder of Superpower, you've already achieved a lot, right? You went from zero to 150,000 weight lists in like six months. You have acquired companies before your series A. Every launch you do gets millions of impressions. And I want to dig into all of that. But first, maybe we could start a little bit with you, right? You've been very public about fact that you're building a hundred billion dollar business, right? As a founder, I know the toll that that's going to take on your health. How do you think about that and how do you balance those two things?
I think there's a goldilock zone for health. And I think that if I'm too unhealthy, the company suffers and the mission suffers and we can actually do less. And then if I'm too healthy, all I do is health and I don't have time for the company anymore. Right? I know a lot of people are very healthy who don't work and surf every day and spend three hours in the sa and like no fuck you're going to be healthy if that's all you do. So there's there's a goldilock zone and I think a lot about finding that goldilock zone.
The other thing I think a lot about is health as a tool for human performance, right? How can it help actually increase the amount I can get done to make it easier to achieve the long-term mission?
So, if you go to my home, I've got three drawers with maybe 100 bottles of supplements, right? I'll take anywhere from 10 to probably 10 to probably 70 supplements a day. I have a fridge over there in the office full of peptides, small molecules, proteins that I will inject myself with and other team members will inject themselves with with the goal of optimizing health and increasing performance. So yes, will my health suffer? Um, but at the same time, I will do what I can with health to make sure it actually makes achieving the mission easier.
So you think of it as a way of maximizing your health as you go through this extraordinarily difficult journey?
Yeah, it's just like the my my lifestyle is working against me. The hours I work work against me. Stress works against me. Time to focus on health works against me. So given all of these external factors, how can I also le how can I lean a little bit on exogenous support or compounds because of how extreme the rest of my life is? The rest of your life is amazing. You probably don't need any exogenous support. If the rest of your life is chaotic the way mine is, exogenous support makes it easier to still be healthy.
You've been talking a lot about the intensity with which you guys are building here, right? Beds in the office, people working, you know, six, seven days a week non-stop. What does that level of intensity do for the speed at which you can move? Like how do you think that actually, you know, manifests itself?
Speed is really contagious. The second speed starts going down, it doesn't go down a little bit, but it goes down a lot. And the second speed goes up, everyone feels like we're working on a sports team. We're working towards something. It becomes more fun. Ironically, the time when the team is having the most fun is often the time when they're working the hardest. One of the things I believe is that speed matters far more than stealth or execution matters far more than ideas. And the reasoning for this is simple. It's very easy to come up with a good idea. Chbt can come up with a good idea. You find good ideas everywhere. The thing that's really hard is like great execution. You see very few companies execute very well. Let's look at a company with like an average idea and great execution. RAMP, right? Everyone has known about this idea for decades and yet ramp comes along and becomes a $22 billion company in six years. Why simple execution and speed? So I think a lot about speed is probably the number one most important thing that we do as a company.
How do you think of that then in relative to the innovation that that is required in your space, right? Like if you think that the age-old way of solving poor health has been a reactive way of just going to the doctor when you're sick or waiting too long and ending up in the ER, right? So, so there is a lot of innovation in what you're doing that takes time. Um, so how do you balance that or how do you think through that?
There's only one framework I think about in the context of company building and it's this idea of velocity. And if you look at what velocity is, it's a vector with direction and magnitude, right? The magnitude of the vector is speed. how fast you move and the direction of the vector is whether you're pointed in the right direction and whether you're focused on the right things. And what you're kind of getting at here is innovation requires direction. Now, uh there's two ways to get direction. One is to sit there twiddling your thumbs thinking about things.
The other is to move really quickly and assume that action produces information. So, in certain respects, speed actually allows you to arrive at the better direction. It's not the only thing. You still need to be strategic. You need to think deeply. you may need to make the right decisions, but it tends to be easier to do that when you have the data that comes from taking action rather than if you're just sitting there twiddling your thumbs.
This sounds like you're going to put the team through a pace and a standard that that most companies don't adhere to, right? And and that then becomes a very difficult thing to screen for in the people. So, I'm sure there've been people that have come and gone on your team that just couldn't keep up, right? How do you how do you manage that? How do you try to sort of screen for that in the people that that you have and how quickly do you move people out that can't keep pace?
We try to find people who have done uh who have always been the best in the world at anything they've done and anything they've set their mind to. And typically if someone's done that before with everything they've done, they're very hardworking and they're very smart. So that's important. Um we're quite explicit. We tell people before they join here's the expectation. This is the culture. this is how we work and it's going to be really fun. Like people are in here at 3:00 a.m. on a Saturday night dejing and having fun and someone's off in the corner coding, right?
And and people are having fun, but that's that that's the nature of the environment.
Um a lot of the team when they hear that uh end up being young um partially because um you just have this extra fervor and energy a lot of the time to commit to something like that when it's the expectation. And uh then the to the other part of your question, we we will move on from people quickly. Like typically we know within a week whether we want to work with someone. Often we'll contract to hire us. We'll say let's start on a contract and then we'll see where we want to go. Other times we'll hire right away and we realize we made the wrong decision. It's not necessarily that the person is bad, but often it's that the person isn't right for the kind of culture that we have and for the the how how hard it is going to be to achieve the mission.
So, so clearly a skill that that you have developed slash been born with has been engineering momentum. Do you recall a time in your life when you realized that that was something that was deeply important to you and that you had a natural aptitude for?
I've always been just personally obsessed with productivity and speed. I always think about how I can do more per unit time. Part of why I use health to enhance capabilities because the idea is health allows you to do more per unit time. That said, the obsession with speed that we have today is a new phenomena. I don't think I was like this before building the company. I think it's more that I sitting in the weeds of of the company, thinking about what's actually going to allow us to work as effectively as possible, really quickly realize that if we champion speed as a cultural principle, we get so much more done, right? And and uh I I would contend that just about every single great company on Earth, particularly in highly competitive markets, is one that obsesses over how much you get done per unit time. Elon is the classic example, right? Elon has there's all these stories of someone going to Elon and saying, "This is going to take us a year to do 12 months and Elon says great, do it in a month." That's what he says. And when the person is forced to do it in a month, they typically find a way. I often think constraints breed creativity. And we'll try to do that within the company as much as possible. Someone might come to me and be like, "So, this is going to take two months." I'm like, "Great, let's do it in two weeks." Like, what would have to be true to do this in two weeks? And the second you ask that question, assuming we have have to do this in two weeks, assuming there's a gun to your head and this has to be done in two weeks, how would you do it? And there's nearly always a way, right? You do less, you focus more, you cut unnecessary requirements, you realize that you need fewer steps or less process, and you move faster. So, we try to make speed this this like cultural um principle that pervades every single team.
Often uh where companies fall off on that is that they just start to do things of lesser quality, right? and and and there's loads of companies that are moving fast and they're just producing fuck right? And so so the skill has to be speed plus plus quality. So to talk about a few of the things that that clearly you guys have done extraordinarily well, right, I mentioned it at at the top of the the interview, you got from 0 to 150,000 weightless signups in 6 months. Can you talk a little bit through like what were the tactics there that engineered that to happen and how did you launch so quickly at such high quality to enable that?
So, first on the quality point, a lot of people think that speed and quality are opposed. I'd contend they often go hand in hand because the most reliable way to get to quality is speed, right? Is iterating and testing and being in the arena, it's very hard to get to quality by sitting there and thinking and constantly delaying things. The second something is launched in the market and creates a forcing function for speed as well. So I actually think quality and speed often go hand in hand on how we built a 150,000 person weight list in 6 months. The first thing was really strong brand foundations. Um right from the start we invested in a domain name, a set of beliefs, a beautiful visual identity, a viral website. So that was the first thing. The second thing is we would launch often. We would find something to announce, something to launch, and make a lot of noise around it. And when we launch, that means everyone announcing all at once, all at the same time with PR, with a viral launch video, getting our friends to comment. It's possible to get several million eyeballs for free just by launching, right? If you were to buy several million eyeballs, that costs a lot of money.
Yeah. um on on on the weight list uh when when someone signed up uh there was a thing that said you're number 5,000 on the weight list. Refer a friend and we'll push you up to this position. Yeah.
So we had this viral referral metric as well that allowed us to like push people up the weight list for referring friends.
The other thing we did is lots of viral drops. So we uh launched for example the world's healthiest hoodie. We said clear clothing is toxic. It's harming health. Enter superpowers world's healthiest hoodie. And we amplified that through creators. We did the same with like a baseball card biological age drop. We really really invested in Twitter and LinkedIn. We brought in a lot of micro investors for like 1k checks, 5k checks and said we'll give you access to invest in superpower if you amplify us on Twitter etc.
So all of these things meant that we had this echo chamber of effect of appearing in lots of places building verality having a weight list that was like self growing and as a result we we grew that pretty quickly and a weight list is revenue right. So we basically had revenue before we before we launched the company.
One of one of the tactics you mentioned there which I think is really interesting for other founders to to learn about is the rollup that you did as you mentioned right like a lot of micro checks that enable people to amplify that. This isn't something that's done very often right. Um it tends to get a lot of push back from larger investors. Um it creates for a complex cap table. What are what are some of the ways that you were able to handle some of those objections that you got from people or if you got any at all?
We would just tell our investors why this helps the company. We'd be like so part of the company strategy is to bring hundreds or dozens of people around the table who can amplify us, who can make introductions, who can open different doors. Um and uh that's what we said to investors. And every round we did, we would carve out around 100 to 300K for these small checks. And what we also would do is between rounds, we would open up another couple hundredk for these small checks. So every time I would meet someone who's helpful, I would say to them, do you want to put in $1,000, $5,000? We're happy to if you're down to help a little bit. And as a result, we have so many people helping us. Um, and uh what we would often do is make that as a little bit of a discount to the most recent capital raised. And I don't get why every single founder doesn't do this. It makes so much sense. It's pretty easy to do. you're always going to be meeting people anyway to bring them into the company. It gives you a ways to actually get closer with them. So that that's one of the things we do.
It's a beautiful tactic. Uh I saw your post on X uh where you were expressing frustration that people that had invested then go and work for a competitor and refuse to sell their shares on the other side. So So obviously there's some risk involved and that person's probably no longer receiving your investor updates. But uh uh it's it's an interesting tactic. Uh, another thing that you touched on which I think is really interesting is encouraging everybody or maybe forcing everybody across the team to become a uh, brand advocator in their own way.
I think that um, a lot of people have fear. So there's this idea of like so many people I know want to create content and it's like they and they don't do it. I'm like why aren't you doing it? And typically what I see is perfectionism. They're constantly obsessed with learning how to create content. And they keep putting false requirements and false things in the way of actually taking action. And the best formulation I've ever seen for how to create content is Mr. Beasts. He said in a podcast, "If you want to be the next Mr. Beast, for the next 50 days, post one piece of content every single day." And I bet you of every single person who listened to that podcast, zero did it. Maybe one did it. Right? People just don't take action. People are very scared. So I actually think the right formulation for how to actually get people to create brands is just get them taking action even imperfect action and then you can iterate then you can learn. The thing you're referring to is this memo we have internally called becoming a platform brand and we have this memo that says um typically at a company what happens is you have the founders becoming brands and we said well what if instead every single person at the company have the opportunity to become a brand. Now we don't have one uh personal brand as a pathway into the company. We have dozens. So we really encourage the team to do that. Again it's hard. It takes time. But when people are passionate about it, we have seen that definitely help.
One other thing that I thought was interesting just to to round off the kind of tactics of of combining speed and quality was, you know, you put out a back call a while ago to to create the next Hubberman or or Adia, right? And that was something that you wanted to invest in and help create. Um so clearly the the uh media creator angle is is a big bet that you guys are taking. Um where did that come from and and and how did that come to be in your mind is so important as as part of your strategy?
Content is so so so so underpriced and I think paid media, paid marketing is going to die and I think the primary channel that's going to actually work is owned media, right? It's crazy how someone like Brian Johnson can get millions and millions of views every single week for free and uh that requires investing in owned media and typically what owned media looks like is someone who has become a brand. So we made this call for the next human or a tier, someone who wants to be the next one of these people to allow us to help them get there. And a lot of people are starting to realize that content is this important. I think that a lot of people talk about it. very few people take action. We want to take maximum action that actually recognizes the importance of owning media and owning content and actually being a brand. I think this theme we're going to see is Silicon Valley meets Hollywood, right? Silicon Valley technology, Hollywood media. Andre is a uh canonical example of this, right? They're a media company as well as a venture firm. They're doubling down in media. A lot of their investments are in media. Um I think it's um one of their partners is starting a Hollywood studio, right? Um uh Mark Andre was inspired by the CIA found them when when starting the fund and I think we're going to see this more and more. Media is distribution. Uh LA is distribution technology and Silicon Valley products.
Let's talk a little bit about your customers, right? Um when when you think of okay superpowers customers, you know, who are they today and how's that going to change into the future? Yeah. So, there's kind of three ways we think about this. Who do we want to be for? Who buys us the most? And who loves us the most? And they're actually all all three different.
So the group that um who we want to be for right from the start, we said we want to make the best of healthare accessible to everyone. That's what we said. We want to democratize access to the best of healthare. And we continue to say that. We say we want to create a membership that the majority of Americans own. And we're really really maniacally obsessed with that mission. Um, Amazon did it and the majority of Americans have an Amazon Prime membership. Apple has done it. The majority of Americans have an iPhone. Uh, Netflix, Spotify. It's like, how does Superpower become a membership? We're $16 a month, $199 a year, similar price that the majority of Americans own. That's what we anchor around.
The group that loves us the most, uh, women between the age of typically 32 and 47,
What do you think is driving that?
Uh, I think that many of them are starting to notice the effects of aging. Hormonal changes, weight gain, changes to aesthetic appearances, progesterone imbalances, metabolic health challenges, um, thyroid hormone imbalances and many of them haven't actually tested their full body and many of them are into um, holistic care or want to be into holistic care. So when a product like Superpower comes along that shows them what's going on at the root of all of these problems they're starting to feel and notice and then tells them how to actually take action that's really powerful. Right? 3 months after signing up or 3 weeks after signing up they can feel like their life has changed. The and they they evangelize like when when these women sign up they evangelize us. They gift it to their friends. They talk about us. Group that has been the easiest to acquire is men between the age of 25 to 35 right. um think people are quite interested in fitness and health and and gym culture.
Are these people that typically need the lowest level of intervention?
Yeah, typically. Okay. Many of them want things on the optimization side or on like the performance and the prevention side,
But they don't tend to have as many actual health problems going on,
But they sign up, they're health curious, they're willing to experiment. They often have a wearable, an Apple Watch or or a ring or a Whoop band, right?
So, they're they're the group that are the easiest to sign up. Yeah,
I think that's going to change. I think it's going to shift in favor of of that that female demographic soon.
In order for you guys to achieve the mission that you're setting out to achieve, it will mean that you need to touch the people that are the least likely to be looking for this sort of thing that require the highest level of intervention. Um, how do you think about reaching those people? Is that something that you want to focus on now? Not at all. Is it the early adopters still? How are you thinking about that?
Yeah, if I look at like what we do, we have a membership that's 16 a month. Um, all data in one place, an annual physical, blood biomarker testing, um, 24/7 access to your medical team, uh, uh, 20% off everything in the ecosystem. 20% off supplements, 20% off pharmaceuticals, 20% off diagnostics. If you look at this group of people you're describing, many of them get an annual physical each year. It's a common experience for Americans. Many of them have a primary care doctor, right? And we can perform a lot of those functions. Many of them buy supplements or have bought a pharmaceutical or a GLP1 or have bought some sort of diagnostic test before. Maybe not the diagnostic, they bought many of these things.
So if you look at all of the components of our membership and ecosystem, they're things that this group wants. The question is how do we actually show them that superpower provides this in an effective, cheap, costefficient way. So it's a it's more a change in their way of thinking about it as opposed to actually changing the behavior because a lot of the time they're already doing it.
Yeah. I think a lot of the behaviors that someone can do within superpower they're already doing in a more expensive way.
Right. And the question is how do we educate people that superpower can do this? How do we find different entry points into superpower? Maybe what we say we're not doing this but maybe what we say is um oh you're on a GP1 today with him. Hims targets many of those people.
