Okay, you want to practice one more time?
Perfect, man. Amazing. Okay, so let's get it started. Hi, Max, how are you doing?
Hey, Dasha. I'm excited to be here.
Thank you so much for letting me come to your new office space, by the way, and congratulations on this. So I think six months ago I interviewed you for Forbes when you announced your $30 million Series A, right? How have things changed since that moment, and Superpower?
Gosh, I feel like the mission is more the same and true than ever.
Everything else feels like it has changed, right? Yeah. What used to take us maybe a year to build, we can now build in a month, which is really exciting, because that means we can actually have a vision for the future and make it happen.
When we spoke, we were $500 a year. Now we're $199 a year, and we do around three times more than we used to do. So it's an incredible offering. When we spoke, we were in waitlist mode. We had around 150,000 people on the waitlist. Now we don't have a waitlist, and we have thousands of people coming through every month. And we're growing quickly. The team has probably tripled in size. We have a new office. So a lot's happening.
Yeah. How many are you now?
45. Yeah. And you just moved into a new office space. We're going to show it later, right? Will you give me a tour?
Yeah. Let's do it. We call it the world's healthiest office. And potentially the world's funniest office as well. The secret to a funny office is just hire Australians.
Do you have many Australians in your team?
More than half of the team's Australians.
Is it like intentional or accidental?
Oh, yeah. I'm an Australian supremacist. I'm trying to build the Australian mafia.
Oh my god. Okay. So if you're not Australian,
Good luck trying to get hired at Superpower.
Okay. But yeah, a lot of things you mentioned — that it is now so much faster to build things. Why?
I think a big part of it is cultural. I think part of it — if we look at moving fast, there's probably three things. One is: do you hire the right people?
And we set the bar not at good, but insanely great, right? And when someone is good on the team, one of the number one conversations I have with our team is, 'This person is good, therefore we're going to have to fire them.' And the reason why is the bar has to be insanely great. And the second there's one person who doesn't meet that bar, they drag the whole org down, and it becomes harder to bring on insanely great people. So the first part of shipping fast and doing great things is just bring on great people, great people to work with great people.
The second part is culture. And the way I think about culture is: do we understand the principles of velocity? And I think of the principles of velocity as: are we questioning every requirement? Right? If I'm told something takes two months, my response is always, 'Okay, well, assume we had to do this in two weeks — what would have to be true?' Because there's always a two-week solution. We just have to understand the trade-offs.
Part of culture is deleting process. And then part of culture is creating an environment where it's fun to work hard. Most of the team is in here on Saturday and Sunday, at least on Sunday. And that's not because they have to be. We don't tell people, 'Here's when you have to be in the office.' Instead, what we do is we hire great people and we say, 'Let's just have fun. Let's work together. Work alongside your friends.'
And then probably the final part of moving fast is constantly increasing cycle time. So having urgency against a certain goal, right? I said to the team two weeks ago, 'We're going to complete our end-of-year roadmap in the next two weeks.' And on Friday, we completed it.
Oh my god. Were they excited?
I think at first a mix of like fear and excitement and trepidation and disbelief, and then in retrospect everyone's like, 'Whoa, this is so amazing. We've shipped so much. The product's completely different.' And we did it in two weeks. So I think now they're excited.
Yeah. But, you know, it's funny — when I asked you this question in mind, I thought you would tell me, 'Oh, it's because of all these new tools available. That's why we move so much faster.' But it wasn't your answer. It was about hiring and culture.
Oh, it's all about people.
Yeah. I think tools are trivial. People are what matter.
And also another question here: you mentioned that we can ship everything in weeks, or so much faster. It's a matter of trade-offs. So how do you prioritize things?
Personal life, or for the company strategy?
Well, in general, but let's start with the company strategy.
Yeah. So I think of it as there's typically one thing that matters more than everything else. And when we find that one thing, how do we make sure that just about every action within the company is supporting this one thing? Last night at midnight, I sent this video to the team. It was just a little Loom, and I said, 'Here are the two things that matter for the company right now.' And the gist was: if what you're working on day-to-day does not support these two things, it probably is not important enough. And that's really important, because there are very few things that matter. My job is to identify them and make sure the company is oriented around them. That's prioritizing. At the same time, 20% of our time is going to go to the incremental, the experimental, the next bet. So 80% on the core, on the priorities, and then 20% on the experimental.
Mhm. Does it mean — like, let's say if I'm your employee, I look at my calendar and I have a lot of meetings. Meetings fill up your calendar pretty fast, and you tell me, 'Okay, here are the two things, Dasha, that we have to focus on,' meaning I cancel everything and I just focus on these two things, and I leave only calls that are related somehow to making these two things possible?
So the way I think about it is: everyone will have the one thing that is their individual priority, and they have to get that done. I don't care how they get it done. All I care about is whether that is getting done. And to get that done, you can say no to things that are not that. In fact, you're encouraged to say no to things that are not. Now, sometimes you're going to want to say yes to other things, which is okay. It's fine for us to do some other things which support another team or support an emergent priority. That's okay, so long as your most important thing gets done. And it's never an excuse. You can never say, 'I didn't do my most important thing because I did these three other things.' I don't care. You can do whatever other things you want. They can be great, but it cannot come in the way of the most important thing.
Got it. Okay. So you're pretty strict — a strict leader here.
I just think it's very easy for people to get in this world of productive procrastination. They don't think they're procrastinating because they're doing work, but it is procrastination because it's not the most important work. And tasks tend to be exponentially distributed. The most important thing tends to be like 10 times more important than the third most important thing. And if we genuinely believe this is true, we have to get that important thing done. And we will say this to people: we'll say to people like, 'Don't go to a meeting if you don't think you're going to be productive. If you're in a meeting, do other work. I don't care. So long as you're present for the meeting and contributing in the ways you're meant to, if you're doing other work, I don't mind.' We're not going to have arbitrary rules. Our job is to get the task done, not to say here's all of these arbitrary rules.
I see. That's very cool. And I have a quote — your Twitter and LinkedIn are very fun to read, so I highly encourage everyone to start doing this. 'So raising capital isn't what matters. Hype milestones don't count. It's easy to get addicted to hype and think that capital means success. It doesn't.' So what should we celebrate then? If not rounds raised, what is success for you?
Building something great that millions of people use. I think Silicon Valley is addicted to the hype, addicted to the fundraise. There are people who build companies purely for the ability to get a headline or say, 'I've raised this amount of money.' It doesn't matter. There are so many companies that have raised money that are not doing great things. There are so many companies that have raised money that have failed. The important thing is: are you building something that matters and scaling it to millions of people? Now capital helps you get there. We don't celebrate the capital. We celebrate the thing we built, or the thing that allowed us to get capital, the thing that capital is going to allow us to do. That's what's worth celebrating.
I will often have people come to me and say, 'Oh, Max, congrats on this and congrats on that. It's so exciting.' And my general response is, 'We have done nothing yet.' Like, the more someone congratulates me, the more annoyed I get, because I'm like, 'You think this is good, and I think this is not good yet.' So you can tell me this is good, but it's not going to get through, and it's just going to make me annoyed, because we're not there yet.
So, what are you happy about? What milestones, like customer?
Yeah, we put out a survey to our members the other week, and we asked them, 'How does this compare to your primary care doctor?' And 93% said it's far better or life-changing.
93% said far better or life-changing.
Well, that's something to celebrate.
Which is crazy, right? And that's worth celebrating. We had our first cohort renew, and our retention data came back, and it was way better than we expected. That's worth celebrating. We did a bunch of data science work, and we saw the member outcomes: and 88% of members improved their vitamin D between tests, and 83% improved their A1C, the diabetic marker. 83% are less diabetic than they were. That's incredible. Like, that stuff is worth celebrating.
This is amazing. So some real, actual things that your product helped them to achieve, right?
That's what makes you happy.
Yeah, totally. We didn't start the company to raise money, right? We didn't start the company to get headlines. A lot of people are confused here. Oh, Silicon Valley. I joke that Y Combinator has become the new McKinsey, and that the hacks, the status seekers, the ladder climbers — they used to go to your McKinsey of the world. And now they start a tech company. And they don't start a tech company because they authentically want to create something in the world. They start a tech company because it's the thing to do, and I'm very distasteful of that.
See, interesting. Okay. And, you know, I wanted also to talk about your crazy numbers that you had when you launched Superpower, like back to six months ago, right? So you had 145k people on the waitlist, you had like 1 million views on the launch post — that was like super wild — like 100k website visits. How did you do it all? I mean, you haven't even launched yet at that moment, but the numbers are wildly crazy. What's your secret?
Yeah, it's so interesting you say they're crazy, because in my mind I'm like, yeah, they're better than most people's numbers, and they're not that good. Like, the bar should be: why don't we have 5 million people on the waitlist? Why don't we have 10 million people visiting the website? I think that my general contention is that the best of what is out there in the world is maybe a 6 out of 10. And that's a really empowering piece, because it means that if you're the best in the world, you're still 6 out of 10, and you can be so much better, right? It's always possible to be better. So that's probably the first general framing. Now that said, I think what we did was useful to progress the company forward.
The foundation of all of that was building a brand that stood for something. The way I think of brand is not how do you look, but it starts with what do you believe? So before we had a landing page on a website, we had a manifesto, and that manifesto said, 'Here's what we believe about the world,' and people rallied behind that. Then we tried to express the brand through an award-winning, visual, beautiful website. The first one was — our current one's not; our current one we're going to fix — but the first one was a distinctive visual identity that stood for something that was emotional, and then all sorts of viral marketing drops in the world. So we gave our early members like these baseball cards with their biological age that they'd post on Twitter. We created something called the world's healthiest hoodie, which was a hoodie of fully organic cotton, non-toxic. They sold out in a few minutes. People relisted them on eBay and GRA for thousands of dollars. So we did a bunch of these marketing drops as well. That helped create awareness that translated to waitlist signups.
Yeah. But like a little tiny question here is, like, I talked to some founders even about like Superpower, and they're like, 'How did they do that?' Because like before our launch we were struggling with actually letting people know about this launch. So even like if we take the world's healthiest hoodie, right — how did you encourage people buying that? Yeah, you mentioned that like you have a great website, everything, but you still need people to find it out.
Yeah, I think the first part is making sure you have a good idea. Right. And I think something doesn't inherently go viral. Something goes viral if it is reflexive with culture and with an idea that already exists. If you look at Mischief, they specialize in viral drops. The way they think about virality is: you take an existing idea within culture, you inject personality or point of view, and then you push it back at the world. And we see this with most things that are viral.
Right. You might have seen the Timothée Chalamet video going viral yesterday. Timothée took an idea which exists in culture, a Zoom video, injected point of view, and he pushed it back at the world. Clearly, their launch video was a skit of The Social Network — took an idea in culture, injected point of view, pushed back at the world. A hoodie — hoodies exist within culture. This idea of microplastics and toxins exists within culture. We took those two ideas, we combined them, we injected our point of view, we pushed it back to the world. So when you play with culture and you actually have an idea that is strategically sound, it's far easier to go viral. So I don't think you can make anything viral. I think you actually need an inherently viral idea, and then you have to think about how to execute the virality.
The three things that need to be true to execute virality are: distinctive visual identity — it has to look captivating in some way; distinctive verbal identity — word choice really matters, a small change in word choice drives a big change in outcome. People do not appreciate this enough, but words are probably more important than visuals. And then the third thing which has to be true is when you launch, you need a core nucleus of people amplifying it, right? You need some sort of existing distribution to launch into.
Okay, that's almost like an ideal template to launch a viral video right now, which is like super cool. And, you know, another big part that I want to ask you about is hiring. I think like your hiring strategy is very special and unique, and I don't know how did it get into your head — like, who advised you, or how did it all happen — but I want to talk about it more. And, you know, I have another quote of yours today; I have so many. And this one: 'It's crazy to me how few people actually aim to hire best in world, but aiming to do so often makes it possible to do so.' Right? So basically you're talking about like hiring underrated 20-year-old people and so on and so forth. So can you tell us a little bit more why? Like, when I talk to different founders they all say, 'Oh, we need this superstar, we need this superstar,' and they really want to hire some exceptional people, but they also struggle with that. And then people who are trying to find a job — they also struggle, because they don't understand, like, 'Okay, I'm not ex-Google, not Instacart, not Airbnb, so what do I do?' So how do you look at hiring?
We thought we hired some of the best people in the world, and we had to fire most of them. So we clearly did not. I think it's very, very, very hard to hire someone who is already the best in the world. And the reason why is if they're genuinely already the best in the world, they're running a billion-dollar company. They're being paid millions of dollars a year. You can't hire people who are already best in the world. It's basically not possible. What you can do is try to predict who is going to be the best in the world. And that means finding people who are young but brilliant, and who have extremely steep growth curves, and identifying them early, right? We have a bunch of young people on the team who in several years' time will probably start billion-dollar companies. We can't hire them after they've started a billion-dollar company. We can hire them before.
So I obsess over this idea of how do we find people who maybe haven't done a lot yet but are inherently really brilliant, have very steep growth curves, and how do we radically empower them? Most of our leadership team is under 30, and we didn't start that way. We had a bunch of 30-year-olds and 40-year-olds and older people, and they were good initially, and then very quickly the 23-year-olds became better than the 40-year-olds. And the reason why is those 23-year-olds are the kind of people who are going to create incredible companies on earth, and they have insanely high slope.
How do you identify them? What is their — what should be their signal?
I think typically they have done exceptionally well at most things they've set their mind to, in a slightly idiosyncratic or spiky way. Right? If someone's just done well — like they just have good high school marks and university marks, and played competitive sport and got a competitive job — that's kind of interesting, but it's not spiky. It's not interesting. Instead, we look at someone who has done exceptionally well. They did well in high school. They have high IQ. They're conscientious. They're winning hackathons or math competitions. They're designing, but then they have some spiky things to their nature. They've typically started a company. They've typically put something out into the world. They have some sort of nonlinear nature to their path. That's what we look for. So: incredibly smart, typically with some sort of spike in the direction of having founded something or stepped out of the traditional path. That's probably logically how I articulate it.
To be honest, when I'm actually doing it day-to-day, it's more a feeling. And the feeling is: do I enjoy chatting with this person? And if someone frustrates me, I've learned that that is my intuition saying that there's some sort of talent gap. And if someone is really interesting and I want to keep chatting and I'm learning things, that is my intuition saying this person is really talented. And three years ago, I didn't trust my intuition that much, right? Because I didn't have the reps. Now we have hired dozens of people, and after you do that you start to get the reps and see: was my intuition right or wrong? And I've learned that this is what — it's not right in all areas. It's wrong in a bunch of areas. In this area it's nearly always right. So I've learned to trust it.
Do you talk to all of the new hires? Like, are you deeply involved in the interviewing process?
Yeah. We won't hire someone unless I've spoken to them.
Okay, that's incredible. And you also mentioned that the key to success of these people is not only these people, but also how you empower them, right? So how do you empower these young ambitious people?
My view is: give maximum context, maximum direction — not at the level of do this task, but around this is what's important for the company — and then give these people maximum freedom to make things happen, and say, 'Go cook, go make something happen.' And that is a really high-variance approach in the early days, because you're giving people without a lot of experience a lot of freedom. And in the early days that creates a little bit of a J-curve effect. You go down the payoff curve for a little bit, because these people are learning very quickly. These people do learn, and you go up the J curve, and they become incredibly talented far faster.
So we try to make everything public. I share board meeting notes with the company. I share investor updates with the company. I'll record a Loom video once or twice a week and share it with the company, and it's basically like, 'Here's what I'm thinking. Here's what matters right now.' Let's just share those thoughts, because if you have that context, then you can start making decisions. We try to have a flat hierarchy, as flat a hierarchy as possible. I tend to believe senior is an arbitrary construct. We basically don't have titles. We try to say everyone is the name of the function: if you're in product, you're just called product; if you're in design, you're just called design. Right. And a lot of the small things add up to giving people this sense of empowerment.
I love that. Now, this is very interesting. But another question. So, you mentioned that probably most of these hires will start their own companies, right? Is it kind of like — does it hurt when you invest a lot in people and then they leave? Or are you okay with this idea, and it actually makes you even more proud if your employees will go and start incredible companies?
Well, I think if we look at many of the greatest companies on earth, they tend to have the most founders within them who have started other companies, right? So it's kind of inevitable: if you hire enough talented people, some are going to leave to start companies, and that's fine. Like, that means we probably hired well. At the same time, it's incumbent on us to make sure that the best people stay. And that means giving them more empowerment, more scope, making sure they're having fun, and giving them a ton of equity.
Yeah. And I think you also mentioned somewhere that overpaying is better than underpaying. Can you tell me a little bit more about that?
So typically when you overpay, it means you're paying two times more — two times more than average. That's what overpaying means. But paying two times more allows you to get someone who is 10 times better. So it's like you pay two times to get someone 10 times. And you're like, 'Hold up, there's a five times arbitrage in here.' So one of the best — because pay scales linearly, whereas talent scales exponentially — so one of the arbitrages is actually finding someone overpaid, because it typically means that they're going to be 10 times... they're paid two times more but they're 10 times better. So there's maybe something in that.
Okay. Now this is very interesting. Meaning that — and this is true for your company, right? It's for all the employees. So meaning that like it's a little bit more investment into payroll and all of the things, but it still pays off, right?
Yeah. Again, it's a scale, and depending on the role, there are times when you do not want to overpay. Like it's like, 'Okay, we don't have to for this role.' But I think for the roles where you can have an exponential talent distribution — the best engineers, the best product, the best designers — that's where you want to overpay.
Yeah, that's amazing. I think that's actually pretty cool. And, you know, I also overheard that not only do you have talented and ambitious people, that Superpower also has one of the most good-looking teams in San Francisco. Is there a special criteria that you check as well? How did it happen?
Well, if you're healthy, you look better. That's true. Like, we know that's true, and most of the team is pretty healthy. I think we're a pretty high-taste company. We have a distinctive visual identity. And if someone's high taste, it tends to mean they also care about how they look. So maybe that's part of the correlation. So maybe there's some things in that. I'm also being slightly facetious with that remark.
Yeah. No, but that's okay. But that's actually true. So, you know, it's good to bring some fashion to San Francisco, and also to look at healthy and good-looking people. I definitely agree with you here. And, you know, talking about health, right? So that's what I wanted to ask you next: about this era of personalized health. What are you building? What is your bold mission? So can you tell me a little bit more about that? And how do you see the future of health?
We are building a new healthcare system, and the reason why is because the existing one is not actually keeping people healthy. It's not preventing disease, and it's not enhancing human life. Right. It's well documented that it's failing. If we look at what a new healthcare system looks like, we believe that we have to empower people to have access to the most advanced diagnostics, advanced therapeutics, and AI to tell them what to do, rather than human doctors. Right. So fundamentally, we want to build a new system that gives everyone access to the frontier of medicine in the lowest-cost way possible.
Yeah. And I think you also call it like kind of like health on autopilot. Is that the right term to say that?
Where the world is going is to what I call opinionation, which is: once an AI has sufficient context on you — your data, your preferences, etc. — it can tell you exactly what to do. And if it has enough context, it will be right, and we will follow it. This is true for health as well. So the strong-form implication, I think, of AI for human health is that everyone has an AI that puts their health on autopilot. It tells you what to do, it orders everything for you, and it's right every time because it has full context. We're not quite there yet, but that's where we need to get to.
