Okay, so we have a new episode of Legends and Leaders, and today it's great to have Max here. Max, you're behind a company called Superpower, which is supposed to give you superpowers in your life, make you healthier, feel better, understand how your body and your system works. And you've got an interesting subscription model and a whole system that you developed here to help people with their lives and to understand what's really going on with them and with their systems. So I'm excited to have you here and to get into your story.
Awesome. So Max, just kind of going back to the beginning, how did your interest in entrepreneurship and kind of health and wellness and that space begin? Was this something you were always passionate about? Did you have your own health journey beforehand? What led to this journey you're on now?
I was starting all sorts of companies from when I was a little kid. My first was a Minecraft server, of all things. I used to charge people to access a Minecraft server, and they would pay me to access perks like slashfly. Then I would sell all sorts of random things on the playground at school, mainly dropship things from Alibaba. Everyone thought it was amazing back then. Alibaba was unknown. The idea that you could access these products that everyone wanted at good prices was unknown. I think I was buying products for like 10 cents and selling them for $10, and no one had any idea. And that was playground businesses, and then I continued to start all sorts of different things.
So I think for a lot of my life I thought about, okay, what are companies I can start? What are problems I can see and solve? At the same time, during this period, I went through basically from age 8 to 18, I went through a long period of misdiagnosis. I had chronic migraines, chronic sinusitis. It would take me three hours to get to sleep every night. I had surgery, was told to medicate for life, and no one knew what was going wrong.
And I ended up, as you do, becoming a health geek, trying to just fix myself, right? I would try literally everything under the sun. Some of the things I tried were comical and crazy, but when you can't sleep at night and you feel sick half the time, you really want things to change. And I ended up getting to the bottom of what was going on by finding someone, what I call a 10x doctor. And they made me realize there's a big gap between the best of healthcare, the kind of healthcare Jeff Bezos might have, and what most people have access to. And I've believed that for as long as that gap exists, someone or some company has to come along and close it. And the only way to close the gap was going to be through technology, not humans, not more doctors. And that was the impetus for Superpower. We started around the same time as the large language models came out, because I saw an opportunity to close that gap and give everyone access to the best of healthcare using technology.
So what did Superpower start as? What was the initial thinking?
What was the initial idea for Superpower? Like, what were you going to try to build that was going to help people?
I started with the idea of how do we build a new healthcare system.
I think it's really important to start with a big, grand, long-term vision and then reason backwards from that. And that was the big, grand, long-term vision, and I believe that fundamentally that would have to be driven by an AI doctor that knew everything about you and everything about medicine, and can connect the dots to find out, one, exactly what's going on, and two, exactly what you can do about it.
And then there's a question of where do we start? What's the starting point today? Yes, that's step 10 or 100, but what's step one? And initially we were like, well, let's start with high-end concierge medicine and then slowly bring the price down and democratize that. And then we realized, hold up, when you start at a high price, you start making decisions for the high price model, and it's hard to bring the price down. So instead let's start with a low-price membership that is really valuable, starting with 100-plus blood biomarker testing twice a year, and then let's just keep adding to that membership over time, and keep adding and adding, similar to Amazon Prime, right? Like, it started kind of good, and they added so much that every single person had to own the membership, and now it's the way people shop. I think that's analogous to what we're doing. Start with a membership that's inherently valuable to a subset of people, and just keep adding and adding until it's so valuable that every single person has to own the membership.
So the membership idea, like, what did it entail initially? Because like now it's pretty robust in terms of what you have. Like, what were you thinking was the base level you could offer for this membership?
Well, initially it was a $10,000 high-end concierge medicine experience, which was full-stack everything, all diagnostics, all care, etc. Now it's a $499 membership that provides honestly most of that same 10k value at $499. It includes twice-annual blood biomarker testing, 100-plus blood biomarkers. We'll assess, we'll allow someone to get additional testing as well: gut microbiome, toxins, cancer screening. We'll connect the dots across all of this data alongside all of your past medical records, your personal history, family history, and wearable data, and we'll say here's exactly what's going on at the root cause, and then we make it easy for someone to take action. So we have this ecosystem that you get as part of the membership. You get 20% off every diagnostic, supplement, pharmaceutical, and then you have access to a medical team and an AI. So you can text the AI, or you can text your medical team that perform doctor-like functions. And that is the 499 membership: testing, connecting the dots, and then the ecosystem to allow you to take action.
So you built this AI from scratch, Max?
We sit on top of foundation models. We don't own GPUs and train our own models.
And how did you kind of think about like building the AI and, like, you know, kind of just coming up with how it functions and everything? Because you mentioned you were kind of creating the company at the same time when modern AI, what we're talking about today, was even just emerging.
Well, in the early days, when I was exploring this pre-ChatGPT, I was looking at all sorts of different modalities: knowledge graphs, large vector databases, ways to perform inference on top of them. The magic now is language models do a lot of the heavy lifting, and the question is what is the support we need to provide on top of or around language models? And that is data aggregation, right? We need to get maximum context on the person possible: pull in someone's past medical records, upload labs, facilitate new testing. We need medical knowledge aggregation, right? We need to capture the latent knowledge in the brains of doctors that's not on the internet and not in ChatGPT. And then we need the system of action: ChatGPT cannot prescribe, it can't diagnose, it can't order you products, it can't refer out. We need to build that as well around the AI. So large language models do a lot of the heavy lifting, and then we support it with data, medical knowledge, and the system of action.
Yeah, I mean it's a fascinating model. It's really comprehensive. Do you see this replacing the doctor, Max, or is this something that works alongside the typical kind of doctor setup people have?
Yeah, in time it will replace a lot of the functions that a primary care doctor does. And then there'll be some functions that are still distinctly human, and for those we will refer out.
Do you think you're going to need like an in-person option, like kind of having your own in-person setup, you know, to help people, or is it just going to be online kind of going forward?
No. No plans to do so anytime soon. We don't need it at the moment because everything can be done from home. If something is required in person, we'll just partner with an in-person facility.
Mhm. And so you're able to create these personalized plans for people with everything that they need just from kind of understanding them and who they are. Does it take a long time to build the customer profile and to understand what they're up to and what they have?
Not really. Like, we get a lot of medical records from people. They give us a lot of information during the survey. After you see 100-plus blood biomarkers, you can get a pretty good sense of what's going wrong. And then a lot of people choose to add on other testing, like their gut microbiome or toxin testing or cancer screening, and that gives us even more data. And then they tell us how they're feeling and how they're going. So all of that tends to mean that we're able to get a quite complete and comprehensive picture of someone's health very early on.
Wow, it's amazing. So you're able to not only diagnose and kind of understand, but you can predict too. We can do both.
Yeah, like, look, we still have some way to go with prediction, but what we're trying to do is, one, get to the root cause, see at the root what is resulting in the problems we see today in your data or that you report on. And then in time, how does the aggregate of all this data allow us to predict in a way that humans can't and health systems can't?
Mhm. And do you think that by having like a subscription service and having people really committed to their health like this, that's going to improve health in general because of the level of commitment there is today, and the kind of, you know, the time they need to put towards something like this? And do you think that's something that will really make people healthier as well?
Gosh, that's my hope. It's part of why we're here and why we're doing this. Yeah, I think the reality is that if you equip people with data, access, information, if you reduce prices, if you build an interconnected ecosystem, if you create a culture that supports healthy living and make that the thing that people look up to and idolize, the idea is you start to drive health outcomes, right? If you can get to the root of what's going on, if you can recommend exactly what someone should do, the idea is you start driving health outcomes. Again, I got into this because I had problems that were not being solved by dozens of doctors, and it seeded this belief that something has to change. And with more knowledge and more information and more data, we can actually drive better outcomes. So yes, we do that a little bit today. I think we still have a long way to go in terms of driving outcomes. But where we want to get to is that a member of Superpower is far healthier than someone who has never come across or used Superpower.
So why did you name it Superpower? I mean, I get kind of the meaning. Maybe you just want to expand on it a bit more. And also, how did you get the domain? It's a great domain to have.
The domain was a fluke. We got it for a really good price. We were offered almost 20 times more just a few months later. And the naming, the fundamental idea is like, how can health feel more like a Nike or an Apple?
