Welcome everyone to our first ever podcast for Elevated Retreats. We're going to be interviewing the world's best companies, the founders of the best companies in the world. They're building, they're innovating, they're challenging, they're breaking barriers. And today, I'm proud to announce and invite Max Marchione of Superpower. Max is the co-founder of Superpower. They're democratizing longevity. They closed earlier this year their Series A. Max, welcome to the studio. Before we begin, I have to ask, what's your superpower?
Oh gosh. Well, excited to be here. I think I'd call it almost like intuitional pattern matching and pattern recognition. And I think that inflects in many different directions. I think one of the directions is inflecting in the context of talent. Right? My fundamental belief is that the company we build or the team we build is the company we build. Right? And identifying amazing talent allows us to build an amazing company. I think intuition and pattern matching also inflects in the direction of strategy. In many respects, what a company has to do is work out the critical path to getting towards a big grand long-term vision. And that's strategy. And a big part of working out the critical path is thinking analytically, seeing patterns, not reasoning too much from dogma as well. So, I think that's one of them: pattern matching, or intuition and judgment.
Fantastic. So, you know, in starting Superpower, walk me through that journey before you started Superpower. I mean, I noticed that you were in school, you dropped out of your final semester, and then you worked in investment banking, you worked in venture, and then you decided to start Superpower. Walk me through what that journey was like.
Yeah, so around 3 years ago, I left my job in investment banking, and I was running two small companies at the time. And I was always of the belief that when I find the one thing I want to focus on, I just want to do the one thing. Right? I look up to founders like a Zuck or Jensen who literally do one thing for 20 to 30 years. And my view was let's just find the one thing I want to spend 20, 30, 40, 50 years of my life on. And the second you say you're going to spend 50 years of your life on something, you have to believe a few things. For me, there were three things I had to believe. One is I wanted to work on something that was deeply personally meaningful. There are a lot of problems that I would just obsess over on the weekend, constantly think about, that had been a through line throughout my life, and health was one of them, partially because I had experienced a lot of challenging health experiences when I was younger. The second thing that had to be true was it had to be something that was globally meaningful. It had to be an idea that actually pushed humanity forward. I think there are very few ideas that actually matter for the world. And again, if you're going to work on something for 50 years, and that's the fundamental premise, then you want something that matters. And then the third criterion was anything I worked on had to be able to support at least a hundred billion-dollar company. Not that we had to get there, but there had to be that potential. And again, if you're going to do something for a long time, you'd hope that it can compound. Right? And there were really two ideas that had infatuated me most of my life. One was the idea of building a new city, and the other was the idea of building a new health care system. And I decided the health care system came first. So, here we are. I moved to the US. We started the company around two years ago. And now we're a little bit in and learning as we go.
So, you mentioned something really important. You wanted to either build a city or focus on health care. And obviously health care is paramount to a good functioning city, right? Longevity is also key. I mean, you want people to stay with us longer, but also live meaningfully. You don't just want them to live and just survive. And we see that a lot today with the aging population. They're in the hospital, they're, you know, not getting the right care, or they're just in their sickbed, right? So, longevity means a lot of things to a lot of people. What does longevity mean to you?
I think longevity is the number of experiences you have throughout your life. And the reason why I like a definition of longevity as related to experiences is because of a simple thought experiment. Which is, a lot of people say longevity is just how long you live. But the reason that definition fundamentally crumbles is if I said to you, 'You can live forever, but for the rest of your life you need to be in this chair. You're not allowed to do anything. You're not allowed to speak to anyone. You are fed through a tube. Do you want to live forever?' Obviously, no. So, you realize that some component of longevity is related to the experiences we have over the whole of our life. So, I think the number of experiences we have over the course of our life defines longevity. Now, if I look at what actually contributes to increasing the number of experiences, it looks like putting yourself out there. It looks like living. It looks like being energetic. It looks like actually having a high-quality life, high-quality health. And then it also looks like living a long time. Right? In general, if you live to 150 rather than live to 60, you're going to have more experiences, you know, get more out of life. So, that's probably the best definition I have of longevity today and what really matters.
So, in the context of building Superpower and starting that journey, right? What were some of the roadblocks that you faced? Obviously, there's potential legalities that you had to work around as well, because this is a truly new concept that you're thinking about, right? You're building a business in a box and that you're providing to people. And I also noticed that in the context of longevity, this was something that, you know, billionaires would invest millions and millions of dollars because they want it, but now you're trying to provide that to the masses. How did that come together?
So, in terms of roadblocks, I try not to really think in terms of roadblocks. I think typically the only roadblock is your individual competence and capability. Right? Like Elon doesn't have many roadblocks because he's very competent. Now, he can do things a lot of other people would struggle to do. And I think that it's really easy to point to external roadblocks and be like, there was this external thing and that's why I couldn't do it. I think that's a very disempowering frame. So, my general tenet here is that the only roadblock is my individual capability. And that was a roadblock in the early days. I had little idea how to build a venture-backed company, how to grow quickly, how to structure a system or a company capable of executing very effectively. My decision-making was worse. Those were the roadblocks in the early days. There's the external things people would call roadblocks, like regulation or the health system and all of that. That's really just a derivative of my own individual competence.
In terms of the second thing you said, which is this idea of democratizing access to the highest quality medicine. One of the fundamental beliefs in the early days of the company is that there was a big gap between the best of health care, the kind of health care that billionaires have access to, and what most people have access to. And our fundamental belief was that we had to close that gap. Right? And if you look at it, okay, how do we close this gap? Health care costs 100,000. How do we make that cost 100? You can't hire doctors. That's the first thing you realize. If you're stuck in this paradigm of hiring doctors, we're stuck in this world of very high costs, equivocal quality of care. Very few doctors have the computational bandwidth or the storage to actually be the billionaire doctor, so to speak, the genius doctor. So, we really quickly realized that if we actually want to bring the best of health care to everyone, we have to use technology. And the second you fix that belief, the only way we'll get the best of health care to everyone is with technology, it changes the kinds of decisions you make. And one of the trivial ones is like where we're building a company in San Francisco. Of the first 30 hires, 10 to 15 were engineers. All right, that's not common in health care. It's not common if you try to replicate a concierge medicine clinic. It is the decision you have to make if you say the only way we're going to democratize access to care is with technology.
That's fantastic. And in starting off, and I want to just, you know, take our viewers who are probably thinking about starting a venture and so on and so forth. It could be scary. I've started a venture and I remember all the things that went through my mind. You know, you have a stable job. It's like you're leaving that behind and now you're starting something new. And in your case, you're almost like pioneering because you're, like you said, it's a health care company, but you're not hiring doctors, right? And so leaving all that behind, and for you also, you're leaving your home in Australia, coming to a new country, you're coming to San Francisco and just starting from scratch. You've got your founders. Walk us through that story. How did that come together? What was going through your mind when you were doing that? And maybe talk to some of the viewers listening in, saying, you know, how you overcame some of those decisions that you would have.
Yeah, well, if we look at health care today, every single year it gets more expensive. And up until GLP-1s, lifespan would go backwards every year in the US. Right? At least in the recent future on the lifespan front. So, what we quickly realized is, hold up, the health system today is not working quite the way we want it to. Right? It's getting more expensive and arguably worse. And when you see this, you're like, okay, what we immediately realize is if all we try to do is replicate the existing system, we're not going to actually materially change human life. We're not, right? We're just going to be another player in an existing system. So, the second we realize that, we say, okay, well, we have to assume that the existing system is actually a local optimum. It's not the global optimum. It's not the pinnacle of where we can get to. Let's assume it's imperfect. And now we're in this really empowered view, empowered world of saying, 'We can recreate. We can actually think from first principles around what health care should look like if it was fundamentally built today.' Right? So, that's kind of how we think about the rejecting dogma point.
And then on your second point about moving to the US, it's really brutal when you move here as an outsider. You know no one before, in San Francisco in particular. Worth is largely related to what you've done rather than who you are. I was the same person 3 years ago, but I hadn't done that much 3 years ago. Right? So, it's brutal. It's hard. I think there's often a storm before the calm is what I say. And I think founders just have to push through. I see a lot of founders in what I call the J-curve period. Right? Before things get good, things get bad. And now because I've experienced that J-curve personally, when I see founders at the low, I'm just like, 'This is normal. This is kind of what you should expect. There's always the storm before the calm.' So, I think that's just something I've come to learn and recognize.
So, you know what? Let's talk about that. What was your lowest point in building, if you can talk to that? And how did you overcome that? How did you get out of that?
I don't know. So, the lowest point was just before starting the company. Right? I think I got trapped into listening to others too much. A lot of people told me why what I cared about wouldn't work. There was a lot of dogma. I lost sight of the fundamental reason why I was interested in health and started thinking more logically about what would work. I started thinking more about how to architect the system rather than obsessing over the fundamental reality of what customers want and what the world needs. And as a result, I oscillated between different ideas. I didn't really have clarity. And the way I was wrongfully trying to solve clarity was by sitting there twiddling my thumbs and thinking. I think typically the way you solve clarity is taking lots of action. Right? With a very small team in a very capital efficient way, taking lots of action. I love this idea that action produces information. So, if I look at the way to clarity or the way out of the low, it was primarily that it was taking lots of action to get information to define clarity. Clarity facilitates the ability to raise capital. Capital allows you to start building a product and hiring a team. And then the more action you take, the more clarity you get. The more you can start to point the ship in the right direction, so to speak.
Wow. So, since you've launched, walk us through that journey. So, from the time you launched last year to the point you've gotten to right now, what were the key KPIs that you guys would have? Like, how do you evaluate success? What is success to you, at least in the early innings of the business? Because I know and understand it's going to change as you hit certain milestones. So, what were those KPIs that you set for yourself, that this is what I wanted to achieve? And how did you achieve those for the business?
Look at what we did versus what we should have done. What we did was far more reactive. Like, oh cool, here's where we want to go. Here's the mission. Therefore, let's move towards that. I think the thing that I underpriced is the extent to which venture capital works on a milestone-based system. Right? The way you unlock capital, which unlocks product and team, is you get to a specific milestone. I think until now we've done a very poor job of actually defining milestones. If I was going about it again, I would say, well, the one-year milestone is how do we get to a minimum of 10 million in revenue in one year. Right? The two-mil milestone is let's do this. And I think that you need to understand the nature of the business you're building and the kind of milestone that unlocks capital, because if you're trying to build something big, it's going to be expensive, and often the company that wins is going to be the company that accesses capital, because capital is reasonably fungible with talent and product and the ability to invest in the future. So, I probably didn't do that well enough. If I look at what is true at every stage of the business, at the seed, the thing that primarily unlocks the next step in the journey is largely the quality of the team and the quality of the idea in the market. At the A, the primary input into the next step of the journey is revenue. At the B, it's probably a combination of revenue and unit economics. And I think every so often you can do what we did, which is be lowly opinionated in the path forward and instead just obsess over building a good company. I think that strategy will typically lose out towards the highly opinionated one which sets specific milestones you want to hit.
Fantastic. Now, for people that are just starting off in building their business, capital is also super important. But one of the things that I've personally also learned in my journey as well is it's who you also invite to your cap table. It's also the investors. So walk me through that sort of journey you had. Did you reject investors as well? Or did you allow a lot of people to come in? What was your decision-making criteria when you brought in some of the key investors you have in your business that funded your idea?
There's a couple of things we look for in investors. One is the strength of their brand, because the investor's brand changes how we can attract talent in particular, and also attract incremental capital, and that's important, particularly the talent point. The second thing we look for is who is the individual at the firm we're working with. Right? I think a lot of people think about, 'Oh, I want to work with this firm or this firm.' But there's high variability within a firm depending on the individual you're working with. The third thing that matters to us is price. Like, we will typically lean towards the investor who offers us more money at a higher price. A lot of people disagree with that strategy, but I think fundamentally that means that you can dilute your company less to hopefully get the same and get more, right? And I think that the high price strategy is a riskier strategy. It's a higher variance strategy. It means that there's more expectation and onus on you to get to the next milestone. Yeah. But I do think it means that you've got a lower cost of capital for your business. So we care about that as well.
Fantastic. And the next part, obviously capital is important too, but team. Building that team, I mean, that is the nucleus of your business, shall we say. So what are you looking for in your key hires? Are you and the other founders involved in the hiring process, or did you guys just have one person designated to hiring people? Are you guys actively involved with that? And what are you looking for? What are the competencies you're looking for? Because I noticed that, you know, as I was talking to a couple of people on your team, you actually don't look at age as a barrier of entry, right? So what are you looking for when you're evaluating the talent and when you hire people?
We want to find someone who's best or second best in the world at something. And that can be they're best or second best in the world at that thing today, or we think they're going to grow into being one of the best in the world. Right? That means we have an insanely high talent bar. If I look at one of the reasons where we've had to let people go, it's not because they're bad, it's because they're not amazing. And the second you have one non-amazing person in a team where the bar is A plus, everyone feels it. It has the primitive impact of that person's work being worse, but more importantly has the derivative impact of impacting everyone else. So if I look at the kinds of people we hire, I could loosely group it into two buckets. One is the seasoned operator who is already one of the best in the world at something. They tend to be a little bit older. They tend to have a lot of experience. They tend to have a lot of optionality. The other is the really brilliant young person, right? The 19-year-old, the 20-year-old, the 25-year-old who for their age has done things that are absolutely extraordinary. They're the kind of person who will probably build a billion-dollar company one day. They're the kind of person who when they're 35, the cost to hire them might be $50 million, right? So, you can't hire that person when they're 35. And we try to obsess over those people, radically empower them, assume that even if they're not amazing today, they're going to have a really steep growth curve if we lay the foundations of culture to allow them to do their best work.
That's fantastic. So, and I think that's pretty bold. Like you mentioned, you know, hiring a 19-year-old, hiring a 20-year-old. A lot of companies shy away from that because especially as a startup, you're kind of wondering, well, what can they add? But you're actively hiring people that are young and that may not have all the requisite skills, but as you said, they have that A+ mentality towards growing the company, which I think is super, super important. You said when you build that initial team, right? You hired, which is very atypical of a health care company, you actually ended up hiring engineers. More engineers, right? So, besides that engineering team, what would be the next important hire or group of hires that you would have besides engineering?
I think it's very hard for us to say engineering matters, then ops matters, then product. Like, it all matters. And I think instead what we ask is what is the key constraint in the company right now? And what is the best way of spending money to alleviate that key constraint? Sometimes the way to alleviate it is actually do nothing, instead just work hard with the existing team. Sometimes the constraint is engineering resourcing. Sometimes the constraint is product quality. Whatever the constraint is is how we think about hiring, and that changes depending on the stage of the business.
