Thomas Iwasaki - When Science and Healthtech Move at Different Speeds

Uh every product team has that moment. Someone pitch a feature and says, Sometimes they are right.

Sometimes they are very wrong.

I am Marco Benitez. And I am Jonas Ducker, and this is This Feature Will Safe Us, where we dig into the decisions, debates, and occasional disasters behind building great products. Let's get into it.

Yeah, I I love to start.

Jump in.

So I really want to hear from you about blood work or wearable.

Okay. I'm I'm ready to get into this. I just wanted to make a disclaimer before we kick off that all of my answers are as an operator and a product person in this space. I don't have a clinical or science background. So these are my views, not advice, um, and taken from my experience. But here we go. Blood work or wearable. I work for a blood work company, but even so, I would say blood work. I think the wearable helps you with observational data on the stuff you know you should be doing, exercise and sleep. But blood work has the capacity to give you the insight into constraints inside your physiology that can actually improve those factors and and the way you feel. Awesome. Are you a wearable user yourself? I've got a whoop.

I've got the the bicep right now. Awesome, awesome, awesome. Well, on that note, then uh performance or longevity.

My view on this is that longevity is actually downstream of performance. I think performance leads to, or a performance physiology leads to, all of the behaviors associated with longevity. More activity, more energy, better recovery, being social. So longevity is downstream of performance in my view.

So probably that leads me to also the same thing, which is prevention or optimization for you?

I really don't think of these as trade-offs. These these for me are maybe more of a framing to the individual and what is most motivating or what matters most to the individual. They're definitely related.

Um between those two brands, Nike or Adidas, favorite one. Ooh. I gotta say Nike.

I mean I've seen that you worked at Nike before, so I spent a couple years in Nike, so I gotta stay true to the brand. Both both companies are in Portland, and I've got plenty of friends at both, and and both are doing amazing work.

Yeah. By the way, did you read the book from Nike?

Shoe Dog? That's required reading. Yes, I was asking about is it required people have to read it when coming on board? I'm pretty sure I got a copy of that when I signed on and yeah, whipped through that. But uh the Nike story is really inspiring.

It is.

It must be sad seeing Nike drop out of the SP 100. Was it this week or was it last week? I don't I don't know.

I think it was last week.

It's hard to it's hard to watch, but you know, I'm I'm holding out, and I think there'll be a return to glory. It's a really, really good book. I I haven't read it. Uh shouldn't I? Yeah. You have to, you have to.

So data or discipline?

I think discipline on this one, behavior change doesn't happen without personal discipline. And people have been thriving for decades without sleep scores, so discipline all the way on this.

I agree.

Going a bit back to kind of performance, VO2 max or resting heart rate, which one tells you the bigger story, the bigger picture of a per about a person?

Tough choice, but I'd say VO2. It's a capacity metric and shows what your physiology can do. I think heart rate probably offers more day-to-day insight, but VO2 is, in my view, the more interesting insight if you can get that for yourself. Should we ask now what your VO2 max is, or is that too personal? I actually had a lab tested VO2 on my most recent birthday and it was 70.2. Oh my goodness, it's really really good, honestly. Now I'm like, now I'm like, man, I shouldn't have I shouldn't have done that. Now I have a a standard I have to maintain.

That's but how old are you?

I turned 34 this year.

Oh my goodness. You are so young. So that's great. But are you are you into cardio sports then?

Yeah, lifetime as a soccer player, and that's definitely the foundation, but have certainly gotten into running and things like that. That's awesome.

I uh I have a one for you. It's like uh peptides. Trans or something that would change the game in the health industry.

Dangerous territory commenting on peptides. But I mean there's there's certainly value there. And the fact that the GLPs are peptides, insulin is a peptide, you know, these are certainly proven in some respects now the the emergent class of sketchy internet peptides. I'm not sure what will emerge with long-term validation out of that set, but you have to imagine that it's something that comes together over the next few years.

Right. Good answer. On a similar note, like lab data, and there's obviously a good kind of introduction into what you guys are up to. It was the company. What's what's that one lab test you would recommend everyone should do at least once a year?

Tough to choose one, but something that we feel strongly about at Vitality is omega-3 status. It's not tested as widely as things like vitamin D and Peritin and other key markers, but omega-3 status has broad implications on your sleep, your recovery, your cognition. And most people are are writing a little bit low, and even people taking omega-3s on a daily basis don't typically have a concept of if their dosage is making the right difference.

Maybe on that note, you can actually tell us a bit more about the company. Short 30-second introduction of what you guys are up to, and yeah, from there we can dive a bit deeper then.

Sure. Vitality is a platform that tells you what physiological constraints are keeping you from feeling and performing your best and gives you a plan to remove those constraints. We do it using blood work and biometric data, and the platform is primarily built for coaches at this point to guide their clients, but it's also available for consumers, and we are actually now working with a number of partners who are using our interpretive capabilities via API.

It's really interesting because nowadays I think everyone needs to have some help to structure your health. Because it's like you you hear so many places health, health, health, peptides, and then you have to go through laboratory, AutoQuest is doing so many, you know, it's targeting all the time, saying that you have to check your biomarkers and everything, but it's you need someone who can help you to understand everything. And if I understood well, that's exactly what you do in your platform, right?

Yes, I think testing is available everywhere these days. You guys probably heard Apple announce their partnership with Quest.

Yeah.

You can get labs, you know, order labs on your watch at this point. So the testing is everywhere, but interpretation is the big gap that we are focused on. Once you have that data, what does it mean for you personally? And how do you translate that data into a prioritized plan or prioritized agenda instead of getting lost in a list of 10, 15, 20 out of range biomarkers? And so our system seeks to uh deliver systemic analysis that helps individuals understand constraints like cognitive support, low energy availability, gut inflammation, oxygen delivery, and put that lab data into a much more relatable format that's easier to get to work against versus tackling a list.

The idea is just to have the first level of health, or you are planning to go further with I don't know, clinics, with doctors, help doctors to understand or have like the summary of the patient. What's the big goal here?

So we are not Vitality is not built for clinical environments today, meaning we do not provide a medical interpretation or medical interventions. So the DNA of our business is performance, specifically working with high-level athletes. And our vision is to bring those standards for optimal health to a broader audience. And so that doesn't typically end up in a doctor's office, but it does end up in a health coach's hands, a registered dietitian's hands. We do have some longevity clinic partners, but that's about the spectrum where we're working, folks who are pushing for optimal health outside of the medical system. That's awesome.

And then from a product perspective, how is the product really coming to life from the coaching side? So if I'm a coach, performance coach at a gym or performance coach at some facility, like how is the product experience from that lens? And how much is it different for the coaching side versus the direct end consumer that you said you also have on your platform?

On the coaching side, we deliver a dedicated coach dashboard that essentially packages our blood work interpretation and programming tools into an efficient workflow for the coach. So we know the coach is busy. We know that their business is a function of how many clients they can handle. So we don't want to make it take twice as long to support a client. So we've worked very hard to build efficiency into the lab ordering process, done in a couple clicks, the analysis done automatically, the programming, you know, built in a guided workflow. And so we've aimed to deliver a very efficient package that handles all of the administrative type work and puts a very clear coaching narrative and guidance in front of the coach that they can then deliver in the context of their conversation with the client. That experience for individuals looks similar. We often think of the individuals who use our platform as self-coached. These are the type of people who you know are running their lives like a coach. And so the the core of this experience is very similar, but for the coaches, we've wrapped it in a set of workflow tools that make it really easy to administer with their client roster.

On the same note, what was your previous experience to start working on the problem that you are solving today? Why was that first thought for you to start building vitality?

So my background is not in, I don't have a clinical background or a scientific background. My way in was is sports. I was a soccer player through college and a bit after college, and have spent a lifetime of personal interest and experimentation on training, nutrition, recovery. And so my way into vitality was actually a super lucky and timely introduction to Dan Garner and Andy Galpin, who are the founders of the business. So I was fortunate to be introduced by a friend to those guys right at the moment when they were contemplating how to turn some of the methods and the analytical tools they were using inside of their private practice with pro athletes and CEOs and the like. They were kind of contemplating, hey, we've got 15 years of practice, we've got a proven set of methods here. How can we make those accessible to a broader population? And I just happened to be introduced at the right time. And, you know, my career so far had kind of led to that point. I'd spent a decade or so building software businesses, both in a startup capacity, but also as mentioned at in some time at Nike. I felt like I had the skill set to complement what those guys were trying to achieve. So we built a great working relationship, and that's turned into a great partnership. And all in all, I just feel fortunate in terms of how it all came together.

That's awesome. Um how do you go about the actual development of the product coming now into this new role back in the time as the CEO? And you have obviously many wet heads to wear as a CEO, but like how do you go about actually getting the product off the ground? How's your approach to building product at Vitality? Maybe you can share a bit more on the actual behind the scenes of what it means to build out that product and bring it to market. Sure.

So the it's never easy building a meaningful product, but we have a lot of tools to build with at Vitality. And what I mean by that is we've got a deep scientific bench and scientific arsenal to pull from. Now, the challenge and kind of the answer to your question, Jonas, is science is not a product, and leading with science or leading with solutions is problematic. And we have we've gotten caught in that trap a few times. And so when we think about building a product at Vitality, we start with the user problem that we are aiming to address and aiming to solve. And we use that problem to then focus the science that we bring as a solution. And building that into software, the software development side of it is well structured, and we have some great engineers, and we're fortunate to have a great designer. So the daily workflows of product development are something that we've built and refined. But I think the the thing that's different about Vitality is this balance between science and user problems. And the lessons we've learned is hey, keep the user problem in focus, use that as a lens to focus science so we don't get caught in the trap of leading with or solution first thinking or science first thinking, which is appealing because we can do a lot of cool stuff. But uh yeah, it's it's some time up front to focus on the problem.

Yeah. Let me go deeper over there because we know build things are really difficult. We know you have to take so many hats and you will hear so many feedback from different places. So you have the founder who is telling you something, you have the data scientists, you have also investors, maybe, you have clients, you have so many points that give you a lot of feedback. How do you handle all these structure to build the next step and also taking account the long-term vision that you have and the founders have about this product? So how do you handle everything?

I don't know if I can answer that in one sentence here, but it's you have we have time. There are there are a lot of competing priorities from stakeholders, exactly as you say. And I think one other force that comes into that equation is what's happening in the market. So we would start vision first and product first. From a vision perspective, there's kind of the the lofty version, which is we want to provide a clear, personalized definition of optimal health to every individual. And so that is one filter that we can run things through, translated in terms of into terms that help drive our product decision making and kind of manage stakeholder interests. What does that vision actually mean practically? It means everything we build should help an individual feel or perform better in 30 days. So we try to distill principles that we can use to evaluate varying interests and understand their relative value in our context. So maybe we're weighing a new scientific breakthrough that we generated through analysis last week versus a feature request that's come in from 20 coaches versus an investor that just wrote us an email about peptides. You know, we're using that type of principle to evaluate those things against one another. Is this going to help the individuals that we're supporting feel better and perform better in 30 days? And that principle doesn't always lead to prioritizing science. You know, it can lead to user experience improvements, it can lead to copywriting, it can lead in a variety of directions. And we try to use tools like that to cut through the noise of everything that's possible.

I mean, in the end, obviously science is also not what's really selling, right? Like it's it's maybe part of the solution, but in the end, you need something that the client really wants. And they probably never really want just the science. They want the outcome, the the proof of that the science is really really working. Now, 30 days, to take this as an example, is obviously a I mean, I love the idea and I I think it's it's somehow just a rule of thumb that guides you a little bit, but obviously 30 days is kind of like a short, short term, right? So is there a danger that you then neglect things that could be more positive impacting the user in the mid-long term? Or is that really just a guiding principle for you to focus on from a product development perspective, features, etc.?

Sharp question. There are certainly a a number of improvements that we aim to support that take longer than 30 days. So I think that's you know the internally branded principle, but the concept is what we hold close. And to give you an example, the protocols that our platform delivers are actually scheduled in 13-week or three-month increments. And we recognize that many of the things we aim to support do take a longer duration to drive adaptations in the physiology, like reversing a micronutrient deficiency through supplementation. That can take 90 days. And so we recognize you can't make magic happen, but the idea of always working to improve the way somebody feels and performs is the spirit of it.

I love that. I mean, it's a it's a good guiding principle of like we want that short-term impact, even though we know like, you know, some things might take obviously longer, longer periods of time. I want to change slightly gears here and go back a bit to the coach and looking at the coach from a perspective of, okay, it's your buyer persona. In some degree, it's also your user persona, but then there's the end user as well, obviously. And now the ecosystem around a coach, at least from my experience, is often they're not the most technical people necessarily, and they're also not that interested in the tech component because they're more interested in the actual, you know, coaching, consulting, being with the client side of things, put on top of that time constraints and that they already use a lot of tools. Like, what is your thinking around that challenge of breaking into the ecosystem from a tech perspective and that tech ecosystem that is surrounding a coach? Like what's what's your approach? Is that API integration way that you just briefly mentioned in the beginning? Is that a promising further next step for the company?

Yeah. Well, first thing, the life of a coach is not easy. They are busy and they are dedicated to helping people, and there's a lot of a lot in their way managing software tools, managing client acquisition alongside coaching the clients that they do have on their roster. So time is at a premium, and we always have to deliver something that fits in a coach's practice in an efficient manner. And to your point, they're juggling software tools, and we recognize that we are an additional software tool added to the mix. So we are continually looking to streamline our own experience. We build our software user experience in as simple terms as possible. We have actually swung and then swung back on how much information and education we put in front of a coach. And I'll give you guys another principle. We actually kind of when we think about our coach user experience, we try to deliver it in a narrative format. And what I mean by that is the coach is hosting a conversation with the client. It's based on the client's life. We want to deliver a narrative that the coach can deliver directly into that conversation. So we're focused on delivering narrative value for the coach as our as our way in, as opposed to delivering an analysis or a dashboard that they need to kind of parse and understand. We prefer to deliver a clear narrative that they can just pick up and take into that coaching conversation.

That's awesome.

I I think it's it's almost in the same line with the coach because we used to work a lot with the coaches and we know how much they are doing with the end users and also using all these tools. So my my question for you is how do you incentivize the coaches to use your platform? Because I I can see a lot of value. But then when they have so many tools. Right now it's like uh, oh my goodness, how can I use another one? So do you have like any type of incentives with them? Or how do you hear them at the end of the day? Because also probably they have like feedback for you.

Oh yeah. They've always got feedback. So from an incentives point of view, it's a balance. We understand that before a coach signs up with Vitality, they already have a practice and they have to. And they have clients and they've developed formulas that work. So we're entering that picture. So from an incentive perspective, there's kind of the face on the face incentives. Adding vitality to your practice can allow you to charge higher ticket prices. So drive more revenue from the client base that you're working with. It can position you as an expert in your area or in your field. And many coaches are actually interested in continual learning. And through using Vitality, we provide a way for coaches to increase their knowledge base and level up as they go. So those are kind of the type of incentives that exist surrounding our product. But to the same token, back to the time spend and the tool management. I mentioned APIs earlier. We are seeking to integrate the experience into existing coaching platforms and existing coaching experiences such that there's less of a burden to sign up, pick up, learn a new tool, and more direct access.

So if you are an API, you basically have to be attached to the software that the coach is using. But how do you recollect the feedback if you don't have the direct conversation with the coach? Because at the end of the day, that feedback is going through the software, the other software platform that they are using. How do you handle that?

We're working on this. So today, today, a coach still has to sign up and register with Vitality, even if they are going to use Vitality embedded in a third-party experience. And part of that is we're still in a stage right now where not every coach who applies for access to vitality gets access. So we still run a gate in terms of who the coach is, what their background is, what kind of clients they're working with to make sure that there's a good fit there. So coaches are still coming through Vitality, even if they end up using the tool in an embedded format. In the future, we are going to hope to unlock that path a little bit more. And that's going to come through work with our embed partners and figuring out how to streamline but keep things safe.

I can see great partnerships there, like companies like Trainerize coming to mind, future, like be it on the administration side of things, right? Where there's an angle of like providing these tools to the coaches where they already live. And then even in these platforms that already provide one-on-one coaching, like a future like some of the other ones in that realm. I think that's that's great, great angles and partnerships for sure.

Yeah, we're excited about building with some of the companies you name.

I see a smile. Yeah, yeah, it's awesome. I don't know if you can share already something, but like if not, we will we will have to have you come back on a later date.

Yeah, we're gonna we're gonna have to revisit that one, but you'll see some things from us over the next six months or so. That's great. That's great.

You mentioned there before, like one of the challenges you faced was almost like over-educating, over-presenting information. I think we all know this from using wearables, from lab tests we've done as well. Like sometimes it's too much information, and as an end user, especially, you kind of get confused. By now, it's almost always easier to just upload everything into cloud, chat GPT, and try to get some help there to figure out where are the you know highlights and points to pay attention to. Which obviously you have the fortune that there is a coach somehow involved, which is the person you you're selling to. But like when did you know, okay, we have to kind of reverse backwards here, like go backward and reduce the information shown, reduce the education? What were these first signals that you saw? Okay, we have been overshooting here.

So this has been a lesson that we've learned several times over. I think the best example is actually something that is less in our platform and more something that I've observed quite a bit, which is yes, you can get 100 biomarkers tested, but when you're looking at that report, you get immediately lost. And I have seen many, many times over Dan Garner host a conversation with an individual following a blood test, where that conversation highlights one, two, maybe three biomarkers and the personal impact of those markers on the individual based on who they are and what they're trying to do. And the behavior change and results that come out of a five-minute conversation focused on two biomarkers blow away the results and outcomes that come from an individual receiving a lab and kind of parsing through a long list of markers. So that insight that a well-delivered personal narrative driven by biomarkers, or frankly, not even driven by biomarkers, just driven by the impact to the individual can have the most impact. That's essentially what we're trying to build into our product. And so the first versions of our product looked much more like the lab report. We got to observe in practice what that felt like, coaches stumbling over a client asking a question around, you know, what is GGT? We we had to get ourselves out of that. We do not want to have to deliver a physiology education to our coaches. We don't want to hit the confidence of the coach by receiving questions that they're not going to be able to answer. We don't want them trying to deliver clinical style guidance. And so most of the work that we've done over the last year is to build a layer above the biomarkers. You don't even have to look at the biomarkers in our platform, build a layer above the biomarkers that delivers those relatable constraints that I was speaking about earlier, things like sleep disruption that give the coach something confident to hold, a story to tell, and then a program to follow.

That's awesome. I can almost see kind of like this. I've seen this with like clinicians now even starting to use their own platforms where they, when you go there, they make the intake of your kind of medical history. Sometimes they pull from existing data sources out there. Sometimes they just do it via like the questions they they ask you. And I do see based on certain kind of results that they do actually use some AI tools in the background to look at the data and help them really figure out what are the highlighted parts of it, et cetera. Is that kind of how I have to imagine your thinking around this as well? Like facilitating further the information to the coach that the coach can shine by having these type of AI engines that help figuring out and flagging the important thing in the data? Or how do we have to imagine that layer that helps the coach really shine? It was their users in continuous.

So we actually aren't using AI within our analysis today. That's not to say we won't in the future, but we rather than AI, we've actually built a layer of interpretive models that evaluate biomarkers in clusters and in specific relationships and allow for us to deliver what we call systemic constraints. And systemic constraints are those relatable things. They are low energy availability, gut inflammation. So very relatable concepts that actually happen to represent more and deeper insight than individual biomarker flags. So we're building that layer. It's pretty elegant in the way that the science here has actually enabled us to deliver a simplified user experience for the coach. And so once you have those constraints, that's where the narrative structure that I mentioned previously comes in. And the narrative of our product is roughly we took a look at your physiology. 100 plus biomarkers went into this analysis. We ran a systemic analysis of the top limiters or top constraints holding you back today from feeling and performing your best. You are carrying a sleep disruption constraint and a low energy availability constraint. We're going to get to work on those with a protocol directly targeted to those constraints based on how they show up in your physiology. So we're building that narrative structure and the science kind of inserts the key pieces, meaning the constraints and the protocol recommendations or the interventions.

That's interesting because at the end of the day, it's like everyone is trying to find ways where you can have context on the data side. So it's not only the raw data as a tilo or as only one value. You need everything and then you can build the context. And I do believe it's a it's a lot of value over there. But that leads me also to this new trend. Do you think that longevity is like a trend? It's a hype, or it's part of this value that you your company is trying to build on top of that, or it's trying to go through the same, you know, goal to, you know, help people. But longevity at the end of the day, I I'm still missing the part of if it's a trend or if it's something real. I do believe it's real, but at the end of the day, it's how healthy you are, right?

So my riff on this is kind of like, I think longevity is great because it mo it does motivate people. But what does it mean? I don't know. If the way to tell if your longevity protocols and the pills you're taking are working is how long you live, then you won't really know if any of this stuff works until the very end. So I like it as branding, I would say, for proactive health, but I think it is being misused in many cases as a marketing point to sell products with a outcome that can't necessarily be verified.

I agree with you. I think everything is more like prevention because longevity, you never know what that means. But you can you know about prevention, and what you're building is exactly that. It's prevent. It's like, hey, I have all this information, I can help you with this XYC, I can give you some flaggings, and then do something. Of course, it will be at the end of the day, you will have a long life, and that's perfect. Yeah. Right?

So Yeah, hopefully a long, a long life where you feel great instead of a long life where you're fixated on red biomarkers and what they might mean for you.

That's awesome. I want to almost switch back to some rapid fire questions here. Like when when building for the coach, like what's the thing you most hate about building for coaches? And what's maybe the thing you most love about building for coaches?

Well, I'm gonna start with love. We love partnering with coaches because they have dedicated their lives to helping individuals. And that's just a great partner, a great buyer and customer to have. What I hate is man, hate's such a strong word here. I'll use the word challenge. Go for it.

Yeah.

I think the challenge that we see is is often it's easy to get a coach to sign up. It's hard to get a coach to confidence to integrate vitality into their practice. And that confidence is actually not necessarily a factor of using the tool or believing in the tool. It is a factor of adding dollars to the price of their offering. So that's the biggest challenge. I don't hate it, but I think it's something that we spend a lot of time on with coaches is actually how to integrate vitality to your practice, how to price it, how to package it. And it's just something that comes with the territory that we need need to work on.

So that means it's more or less around education, also?

In a way, around education, but it's more about a coach's sales, sales experience, sales confidence, and capacity. So that ends up being a secondary problem set that we work on quite a bit, even though you know we prefer to be focused on the tool itself.

I just had a thought actually this morning. As Marco said, I'm currently out in Germany and I just signed up for two weeks now at a gym here, and I thought about the pricing differences I see in Europe versus the US versus Latin America versus different places. And it actually got me thinking this morning around like how few we actually spend on fitness, performance, well-being if we put it into a context of other things we spend on. So a few days before I had the fortune to be on vacations and I thought about like how much do I spend on just a random dinner one evening going out for dinner to people, versus how much am I willing to spend on a gym coach membership on a monthly basis, which is actually every day, you know, like helping me be better, feel better, be more confident, you know, be a healthier person, etc. And it kind of got like it stuck with me. Like, and I feel that's what often obviously like the coaches' fear of, hey, we're losing clients, we're losing out on potential deals. But I think if you package this up in the right way, and you really go out there confident about showing what you can do and how broad of a scope of tools you actually have at your hand, going from lab data to wherever data tracking, to nutrition and training plan guidance, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. It's actually a massive toolbox a coach, a gym, a facility is bringing to you where people should be willing to spend a lot more than we we we have as the average ticket of a gym member or coach.

Absolutely. Oh, yeah. Yeah, the that balance. I mean, it's different for every consumer, right, within their financial means, but certainly there are categories of life where we are spending a lot of money when in fact that same individual would state that they care more about their health and fitness and wellness. And I'll use that to make a comment on how we're thinking about that issue from a product perspective at Vitality. So baked into that like coach sales confidence challenge for us is the fact that today most coaches are ordering labs through Vitality, and labs have a there's a high cost. Labs are expensive. And so that is what drives the majority of the price increase. But that doesn't necessarily mean labs are high margin. So when we think about this world where millions of people have lab test results this year that didn't have lab test results three years ago, we are really thinking about all of the latent value inside of those underinterpreted tests and how we can do what we do best and sell the narrative explanation and the plan to improve based on those results, as opposed to being the company that sells you the lab test first and foremost. So we have some work in the pipeline, and the goal is to get our coaches to radically transform the conversation they have with their clients and give them one question they can use to open the conversation, which is do you have recent lab results we can use to take a look under the hood and improve your program and add some personalization to your program? If we can get coaches asking that, then they've automatically opened the conversation. And if the person has lab results, great. Upload, let's get to work. If they don't, then they're already in the conversation around what value can come from that. And we have pathways for the coach to then confirm and close the sale if they if they can't.

I believe it's really smart because uh at the end of the day, if they can open the conversation, it's great. And if the coaches feel confident that they can answer all the questions because they have your tool, I think that's really powerful because it's like uh they will trust on what you are saying to the end user. So I think it's really important. My only concern is about patients paying, because normally the end user doesn't want to pay anything. Because at least here in the US, it's everything around the coverage of your insurance policy. So insurance is always moving the needle in everything because one time per year you have the right to do the laboratory testing if you have a good insurance cover. But if you don't, you are not going to pay for that. And that's the big struggle, I think. It's how do you handle and I I I believe that you have the answer saying like, hey, we can prevent so many things. But it's like uh we as uh uh different companies need to work through that problem. And I think also that's why government tried to put this access program, trying to help them to understand that prevention is everything. So Medicare is going to pay for those laboratory testing and try to handle it through all these programs and companies to use the information and improve people's lives, right?

It's complicated. It's complicated, no doubt. But the flip side of all the the sales challenges we kind of spoke about are the individuals who are paying money for somebody to coach them, their wallet is open and they are motivated, and so we're trying to navigate to a segment of the market where people are participating. And whether they bought their lab test through Apple, whether they got the results through insurance through their doctor, whether they buy it through their coach, we want to be where those results land and become meaningful.

That makes a ton of sense. I I want to switch one more time back a bit to the kind of management of the different expectations and and like kind of like the dilemma of okay, we are somewhat a science-backed company that really wants to stay true to that. At the same time, we are a startup, and as we all know, as a startup, you have to go at startup speed. So you have to make progress, you build a product, you need to build product that actually sells, that has an impact, that allows you to grow, to get to milestones, to keep raising money, and there is a certain kind of pace to it. Like when when when thinking about this kind of dilemma of okay, product but science, but product making extra impact and and and creating growth, how do you how do you go about like finding the right balance there? Is that swings to one and to the other a little bit more for certain kind of seasons? Or like can you balance those three all the time in the same way? How do you think about that?

So we think about our roadmap in two distinct lanes. And one of those lanes is scientific work and development. And we think about that on a longer time horizon. Obviously, we try to move fast, but things take time. The performance constraints that I mentioned previously, the models for those took the better part of a year to develop. So we have that lane of our roadmap. Science, again, in service of the user problems that we're trying to solve, but it's harder to rush that. In fact, you you can't necessarily rush that in some cases. So we have a second lane of our roadmap around coach adoption and value. And that is something that is much more regularly scheduled into monthly or even bi-weekly releases. And those two, those two roadmaps travel alongside one another. And as science matures, the pace at which it's moving gives us the ability to basically go all in on science when we have a breakthrough to deploy, but still pace the product and release regularly with high value features and um improvements along the way. So two lanes to the roadmap and it's a dance, but a lot of the scientific development doesn't draw on our software engineering resources or design resources. So it allows us to kind of keep that moving at all times in parallel.

That's awesome. And then from a team structure around that, is that the same team though, heavily involved on both of these lanes, or do you have almost like separate teams working on those different different lanes?

There's a separate team working on the science. When that science reaches readiness and comes into the product development pipeline, then yes, we have engineers that overlap and and pick up the model development and the other pieces. And it's all about kind of scheduling that alongside the other work, which there's your kind of startup juggling right there. But we make it happen. That's awesome. That's awesome.

On that note, I mean you mentioned already a few things you are working on, but any major milestones, anything you can share of like next big things that are coming from Vitality?

Yeah, one, the one that we just shipped, and then a little bit more on where we're going. The performance constraints that I keep mentioning, those were shipped fairly recently. And I don't think that I've fully taken the time to explain why those are a breakthrough. The performance constraints, they not only simplify and deliver blood work interpretation in a narrative format, they allow you to program based on systemic constraints instead of to biomarkers. And what that means is you address root cause issues instead of downstream flags, essentially. And they also let coaches parse lab results at an extremely high level. An example that I actually saw last week is a very active individual, results showing some metabolic markers flagging and some insulin resistance flagging. But in fact, that client had a low energy availability constraint. And the insulin resistance markers were actually the body's stress response to the low energy availability. And the the solve for everything was actually to increase caloric intake. And so the performance constraints deliver that insight value directly to a coach so that they can parse a lab result that otherwise you can imagine. You may have gone into carb reduction, supplementation around insulin resistance, calorie reduction, when in reality the driver behind those markers of insulin resistance was the body's stress response to being underfueled. So performance constraints are just a huge breakthrough. That is the scientific breakthrough this year. We shipped those recently. What are we working on next? We're working on broad utility for every lab result that's out there. So it means that we're adapting our models to work with a standardized set of markers that we think is broadly available. And so we're building some new interpretive models that we think improve the accessibility of our platform and allow you to bring results from anywhere. That same work's also going into our APIs, and we're very excited about taking our interpretation into a range of third-party platforms. Coaching platforms, like we spoke about before. We're close to go live with some telehealth operators who are using vitality interpretation. We've got some early work with sports organizations. We are in the MBA, the NFL, the MLB. So we're trying to broadly support interpreting lab results that are out there instead of selling the lab test itself. And we want to just be what we call a biomarker intelligence layer as broadly as we can.

Awesome. I'm very, very excited to see the next steps with Vitality, definitely. And before we leave, we need to ask you one question. And probably you have already answered that question, but I I want to hear from you. What feature will save us?

Anything that gets people's heart rate up. Anything that gets people into heart rate zones four and five on a weekly basis. If we can do that, I think you're really helping people.

Thomas, thanks so much for jumping on. Really appreciate it. Yeah, thank you guys. Really fun. Really fun.

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