Dr Elina Berglund is the CEO/Co-founder of Natural Cycles, which she has grown to 2M users. When every other app seemed to be free — she made a brave decision: She charged her users a monthly fee. And it worked...

0:57 - The Birth of Natural Cycles 2:57 - The Decision to Charge from the Start 3:47 - Building Trust Through Pricing 4:23 - From Personal Struggles to Public Solution 5:52 - Creating the Fail-Safe Algorithm 6:32 - Collaboration with CERN Colleagues 7:13 - The Human Body: Complex Beyond Measure 8:37 - The Promise and Challenge of Wearables 10:16 - Understanding User Behavior 11:04 - Gaining Regulatory Approval 12:26 - Secrets to Growth and Marketing 13:43 - The Challenge of Direct-to-Consumer Healthcare 16:02 - Data-Driven Decision Making 17:13 - Instincts Versus Data 19:01 - Staying Honest with Data 21:20 - Calibrating Communication for Investors 22:30 - Benefits of Being Profitable 24:08 - Data as a Superpower 24:59 - Overcoming Negative PR 27:13 - Future of Contraception 29:30 - Impact of Roe v. Wade Overturning

Links

Natural Cycles: https://www.naturalcycles.com/

Dr Mustafa Sultan: https://www.musty.io/

Konstantin started Kaia Health after paying $50,000 to cure his back pain at an elite pain rehab centre. It worked. But it seemed stupid. Why did this need to cost $50,000?

Kaia Health has since raised $125M and helped 625,000 users.

0:00 The 90 second story

1:22 How did he grow 20% every week?

2:15 Market timing is everything

7:43 We never put pressure on this making any money

10:51 How does an app cure back pain?

14:43 US vs Germany for digital health entrepreneurs

16:40 Go to market of Kaia Health

19:51 Why raise so much money?

24:57 The hero license

Links

Kaia Health: https://kaiahealth.com/

Dr Mustafa Sultan: https://www.musty.io/

Jon Ronson is one of the most interesting people alive today — period. He’s the author of the Men Who Stare at Goats, So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed and The Psychopath Test — which spent 10 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. His two Ted talks have been watched 20 million times, his books have been brought to life by George Clooney on the big screen, he has written screenplays for Netflix blah blah blah. Don’t believe me, listen to a pitch Jon wrote for ‘the Psychopath Test’. If you are not dying to hear what happens next — then, I don’t what to tell you…

0:00 Jon's pitch for the Psychopath Test

1:41 Jon's story

6:00 Strategies Jon used to bypass career gatekeepers

7:03 Would Jon Ronson be on Substack/podcasting

12:05 Does Jon Ronson pay attention to analytics? Post mortems

16:26 Startup philosophy applied to storytelling

19:08 Writing Advice from Tim Ferriss: Jon's opinion on doing interesting things to write better

24:59 Does Jon Ronson like being famous?

28:49 Analysis of 'The Psychopath Test' pitch to Ira Glass

37:30 Should you make decision based on what would be a good story

38:48 Jon Ronson's habits for creative success

Max Parmentier is the CEO of Birdie, a Series B AgeTech startup who have raised $52M from the likes of Sofina, Omers Ventures and Index Ventures — and captured 10% of the UK market whilst currently scaling into Europe.

0:00 Intro

2:37 Shopify vs Amazon model in AgeTech

7:26 Product pivots: D2C never wins

11:56 Predictive AI AgeTech

13:58 I pitch an idea to Max

19:34 Lessons building Birdie

24:13 Leaving money on the table for purpose

Links

Birdie: https://www.birdie.care/

Dr Mustafa Sultan: https://www.musty.io/

Tom Wicher is CEO of DrDoctor — who have served over 20M patients and just raised £10M in their recent Series A round. But he spent the first 7 years bootstrapping, and diverged from his colleagues: Opting for the slow and steady gentle disruption path. Why?

0:00 Gentle disruption beats move fast and break things

3:36 Picking a problem in healthcare

5:44 Behavioural change theory

7:52 Stop treating patients like kids

10:30 Systems-level efficiency vs personalisation

13:02 Why don't patients show up for their appointments?

16:02 Overbooking: Learning from airlines

18:54 Carrot or stick: Motivating health behaviors

22:35 There's no big conspiracy in healthcare

26:24 PIFU model of patient booking

28:14 Sometime it's better not to empower patients

31:16 Habits/frameworks that have helped Tom succeed

Links

DrDoctor: https://www.drdoctor.co.uk/

Dr Mustafa Sultan: https://www.musty.io/

Drug discovery is becoming more expensive and producing less results than ever before (Eroom's Law)—why? One of the ballooning costs are clinical trials. Pharma/biotech often outsource their trials to CROs (contract research organisations). But many CROs are incentivised to make trials as bloated and inefficient as possible. That means more money and less results. Meri Beckwith is building the anti-CRO: Lindus Health—to solve this problem.

0:00 Intro

1:39 The big problem in drug discovery

4:10 Why do CROs exist?

7:24 The incentive problem in drug discovery/CROs

10:57 Pharma are anti-startups

12:11 How much a clinical trial costs

15:11 How can you compete with big CROs?

17:26 Are you going to build your own drug pipeline?

18:56 Lessons from VC to Founder

23:42 Brand/PR/Positioning as a biotech startup

29:03 Billion dollar ideas in bio/health

31:33 Habits that have helped Meri

Links

Lindus Health: https://www.lindushealth.com/

Meri Beckwith: https://twitter.com/meribeckwith

Mithi Thaya: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mithi-thaya/

Dr Mustafa Sultan: https://www.musty.io/

Rewind.ai just raised their Series A at a valuation of $350M. Investors include Andreesen Horowitz, Reddit’s Alexis Ohanian and OpenAI’s Sam Altman. Rewind sits on your computer and phone, and watches everything you do. Then you can ask it questions like: What was that really great Mediterranean recipe I looked at last month? Or I’ve got a call with a client next week, can you summarise every interaction I’ve had with them? But here’s where it becomes even weirder, powerful. They’ve announced the Rewind Pendant, a small audio recorder that sits on your chest. Rewind will be able to listen in to every conversation you have. You can ask it: What birthday present should I get for my partner? Did they drop any hints? Or how many arguments did we have last year? Pretty Black Mirror, right? Once you get over the ick however, you realise that this is correcting a lagging human function. Just like the cursed amongst us wear glasses; tools like Rewind will repair our broken memories. I spoke to Dan Siroker, Rewind’s founder— 0:00 Intro 1:54 Lessons from the Obama Campaign 3:28 How to use science to make your startup succeed 8:21 Privacy concerns 17:00 Rewind.ai as a brain-computer interface (BCI) 20:27 Forgetting is important for human wellbeing 22:26 Societal impacts of perfect memory 28:42 Rewind's tech stack 31:56 The existential risk of startups using GPT 35:21 D2C is harder than B2B 37:49 Leadership lessons 40:31 Perils of being a second time founder 46:44 Is any publicity good publicity? Links Rewind: https://www.rewind.ai/ Dan Siroker: https://twitter.com/dsiroker Dr Mustafa Sultan: https://www.musty.io/

People are wearing Apple Watches to their wedding days. Has this whole 'quantified self' movement gone bananas? Is any of this data actually useful? I spoke to Maitham Dib about this. He's building Vital (YC21); a startup which makes all wearable/lab data available to other startups/companies. 0:00 Wearable data is mostly useless 3:22 The case for wearable data 6:37 Wearable data is mostly useless 8:06 Wearable data is useful 10:16 The big opportunity with wearable/lab data (startups) 14:15 Naivety as a superpower (Paul Graham) 15:45 Why building Vital is so hard 19:31 Pros/cons of an infrastructure play in healthcare 20:51 How to enterprise sales 24:09 Lessons from YCombinator 27:32 The benefits of being an immigrant Links Vital: https://tryvital.io/ Dr Mustafa Sultan: https://www.musty.io/