Leadership Under Pressure: Prioritization, Team Fit, and the Founder's Dilemma

In this episode of Leadership Quotient, Lindsay Guzowski, CEO of The Crucible, speaks with Tony Medrano, CEO and Founder of LongevityPlan.AI, about the realities of entrepreneurship, leadership, and building resilient organizations. Drawing from decades of experience as a founder, executive, and AI entrepreneur, Tony shares lessons on navigating failure, aligning incentives with investors, prioritizing what truly matters, and assembling teams that outperform through complementary strengths rather than individual brilliance. The conversation also explores how emerging AI tools are changing leadership while reinforcing that curiosity, adaptability, and strong judgment remain enduring competitive advantages.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome to Leadership Quotient, a podcast by The Crucible, where we explore how leadership teams and investor-backed companies are built, aligned, and scaled for impact. I'm your host, Lindsay Gazowski, and in each episode, we'll talk with the people shaping value behind the scenes, from operating partners to investors to advisors to C-suite executives, about what it really takes to drive performance through leadership. On today's episode of the Leadership Quotient Podcast, I chat with Tony Medrano, CEO and founder at longevityplan.ai, about readiness for failure, the asymmetric risk profiles of founders and VCs in a deal, and quieting the urgent to get to what is necessary. Tony, welcome to Leadership Quotient. I'd love to hear the story of how you found yourself in the world of entrepreneurship. You have a fascinating background where you've gotten to ride the waves of many of the uh most impactful and emergent uh areas in not just modern business, but also technology. So give us a little insight into how you got into this space in the first place.

SPEAKER_01 1:22

Yeah, yeah, great question. Um, so I started my first company while I was a grad student at Stanford. Um I was two years into the JD MBA program, you know, law and business school at the same time. Um it was 1999, the height of the dot com, you know, boom, and got together with two engineers that were just recent grads of Stanford on campus, as as one does at Stanford, I guess. Um, and we we started a company. Um, and it wasn't a dot com, it was a mobile infrastructure company. Um, you know, raised our first round from SoftBank Venture Capital, uh, who has a you know long history of making big bets on platforms and long-term, uh long-term vision, um, and grew the company to 120 people and raised a second round. Uh it was a fascinating ride. The technology that we invented is still part of um the app store and the mobile app ecosystem, you know. Fast forward to 2006, 2007, and Apple and Samsung were developing their app stores with you know the technology for the smartphone. We we started with that, you know, being able to see the future, which you kind of can at Stanford and Palo Alto. That's one of the advantages of being up there. Um, we were just a little too early. So we had a great ride for three years, built a great company, some great technology, but ended up having to shut it down in 2001 with the dot-com crash, with 9-11, with the markets crashing. We just couldn't raise a third round, even though things were going relatively well at the company. It wasn't the time to run a platform. So I learned right away on my first adventure, because this was, you know, uh between undergrad and grad school, I was a naval officer. The Navy paid for me to go to undergrad because I grew up in a blue-collar town in LA County. Um, you know, never sent a kid to Harvard before in my my high school's uh existence, right? It was sort of foreign to people out there. Um, but the Navy paid for it. I had a wonderful time running a firefighting department on a destroyer, and then went to Stanford and started my first technology company. So it was a big jump. It was pretty um pretty aggressive. But uh I learned a lot about failure. And uh Stanford brought me back to the business school for five years to teach a class on that entrepreneurial um failure, if it will, because that's really part of the journey. Is you have to be ready for that if you're gonna take big risks. You know, they're they don't uh the chances of being successful, I think the you know, back of the envelope is usually 10%. And I I think that's about right, especially when you're making big plays like trying to build the first mobile app infrastructure. Um, it's gonna be less than 10%, maybe. Um, you know, uh you only hear about the successes, but things I learned was that um not everything's under your control. Things like market, you know, forces come into play when you least expect it. Um we raised, we got a term sheet signed for our second round at a $275 million valuation. Um, but the term sheet was ironically signed on the day of the all-time high of the Nasdaq. And after the term sheet was signed, then you have to negotiate the documents, you know, for um young entrepreneurs out there, right? You get term sheet signed, it's like a letter of intent, and then you got usually four to six weeks to get all the lawyers involved and you start getting your hundred pages of documents signed. Well, during that time, the market crumbled, going down 5% a day. You know, it was an ugly crash that maybe a lot of people um, you know, some of the viewers weren't even born yet. But I certainly made made it in time for the first crash. And um, because not everything was under our control and because the company was running so well, you know, Stanford said this is a great case study and wrote a case study on me and that adventure that I um, you know, I still refer to today because there's some things for entrepreneurs about uh, you know, not everything's under your control, but also venture capitalists have a portfolio and you as an entrepreneur don't. So a lot of times they'll encourage risk taking um more so than you wouldn't naturally as uh as a businessman with all your eggs in one basket. Um so since then I've been a little gun shy of making big plays with venture capital money because I know the risk quotient's gonna be up. And you know, personally, I've made more money um in smaller deals or being a vice president of a larger company. Um, you know, being a founder um and raising venture capital is uh is a big risk. Um, but I've I've been having a blast. So that was my first entrepreneurial venture. After that, after we closed it down, I went back to Stanford and finished up my degrees and then started a normal career as like a VP of sales, because that was my skills is doing deals with companies, um not you know, not selling e-commerce, not as a product manager or technologist, but I like building companies and finding unique ways that big enterprises can benefit with startup technologies, because I've always been on the startup side.

SPEAKER_00 7:02

That makes sense. And I think what you said about the risk profile for the entrepreneur being vastly different than the risk profile from those investing money is a really important point, but also one that isn't talked about all that often. I think entrepreneurs assume and you go through the process of getting funded or, you know, selling your business depending on what stage you're in, and you're finding a partner and you go through all this and they tell you how much they're going to work with you and support you and be, you know, the person in your corner. But the to your point, the risk profiles are different, the incentives are different, and the outcomes, frankly, are different for the two parties, even if things go well.

SPEAKER_01 7:46

Yeah, I mean, so many of those things. There's a misalignment. And it might not seem that way at the beginning when things are nice and the weather's great outside, but when things change, you know, they have preferred stock, and you as an entrepreneur have common stock, so they get paid first. Um, sometimes they have other preferences that they get paid a certain amount first. So that's money off the top. Um, they're investing in you. If they put $100 million in, well, you know, they're gonna take that back out. So you don't get anything before if you sell the company for under $100 million. You know, I'm oversimplifying. But um, you know, they won't necessarily tell you those things. Maybe your lawyers will, but you know, everybody's kind of amped up on endorphins when they're signing the deals. And then when the market changes, something you can't control, um, the numbers change. And maybe, you know, they were in there till death do us part at the beginning, but uh, five years later, um, you know, that's what what happened to us, right? Is uh they they um incentives are just completely different. And and they also have their bosses, they have limited partners that were then at that time not able to make their capital calls. So their investors were flaking out. So it's just it's a you know, it's a domino effect. And you know, we saw that again in 2008, right? So I've been in I've been in every crash since I've been alive, I guess.

SPEAKER_00 9:12

Yeah, I 2008 actually was inspiring for me to go into the private equity world because I kept seeing all these businesses. I was working for a very large industrial supplies company, kept seeing all these small businesses that are were either undercapitalized and therefore were in a lot of trouble, or we're just really poorly run and needed someone to give a little more structure. And a friend of mine indicated that, well, a lot of people go out and buy these companies and it's called private equity. And so that's great.

SPEAKER_01 9:45

It was probably a great time for a roll-up. You could get companies at half price, right? Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 9:49

Absolutely. Gave people a skewed sense of valuation, though, because the private equity guys then thought you could buy everything for those lower, uh, lower multiples for a little longer than that was truly the market.

SPEAKER_01 10:02

It's true. And the interest rates were so low that they could just lever up and you know go crazy.

SPEAKER_00 10:06

Yeah. So you were incredibly successful as a VP of sales and CEO, head of sales for some of these organizations that were, you know, at various stages of their life cycle, but with a little bit more um runway behind them. What inspired you then to go back into the founder seat and take another stab at that true entrepreneurialism?

SPEAKER_01 10:39

Yeah, it was a combination of factors, and there's sort of two different areas. One is, I'd say, subject matter expertise. Um, so I had been in, I started an artificial intelligence company in 2016. I all in on AI, on um, you know, enterprise, business-to-business, conversational AI. I'm not a graphics guy, I'm a words guy. And you know, we started a company for chat optimization before the Transformer, before Chat GPT. And again, too too early, didn't make money, but I loved it. I love math and optimization and stats and then language. Um, you know, combining those things and making that uh making humans smarter with AI is fantastic. We did that for health and wellness brands, um, large enterprises. Um then after that, I went to a molecular diagnostics company, my first time in in healthcare as a vice president of business development. And that company, you know, I wasn't a founder, it was just their first business person hired. Right. Um we went from zero to a billion in revenue with a B in three years. Um and I sold 500 million myself and in ARR to companies like Google, NASA, the NFL, NBA, Conical Phillips, Netflix, you know, Silicon Valley, Big Sports, and then government. Um, those were my three three verticals. Since I was there from the beginning, I just amassed great accounts and got great referrals and um you know built the company. We went public uh via Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley IPO um 2021, uh, 22. Um and uh even though I'm not a scientist, I like to talk to scientists and doctors. You know, they're they're smart, they're they're usually nice, um, they want to help people, and I kind of like that. So I I liked explaining science to um generalist executives, not working at the IT level, but more on the biochem type level. Um, and it was just fun. We were helping people during a time of crisis with a spectacular product. It was the best, best on the market. So I had a medtech experience in in that. And then in the meantime, I was running Iron Man triathlons. I was challenged by a classmate of mine at Stanford Business School, who she had run 15 of them at the time. Um for the world championships this year. She's super good, right? World, world class. Said, why don't you do one of these with me? And I said, sure, I'll do one. It was kind of a dare. She didn't think I could do it. Um, but I did. I buckled down and ran the you know, 140 mile race, 16 hours, right? All in a row. Um with the separated shoulder that I was hit by a car six weeks before and had to swim with one arm two and a half miles in the ocean, right? That's just a start. That's the the smallest part, you know. Um, bike in one gear for 112 miles because I couldn't reach down to change gears on my truck tri bike. Um, but I found the obstacles really neat and I liked the optimization and sort of overcoming things in a gritty way. Um, so I got really, you know, got into fitness even more. Um and, you know, about a year or two ago, I started to see the wearables take off and the fitness AI industry really start to boom, which is what really what I was waiting for. I don't, I don't like um sick care. I like proactive health care, you know, and um preventative, you know, preventative maintenance, right? Um, rather than waiting until things go wrong. Because that's how I've always I try not to go to the doctor. I try to fix things myself through diet, nutrition, exercise, right? And and um help others do that. So I was helping others train for Iron Man's and giving a lot of advice and finding a lot of just fun there. So I started longevity plan, my current venture as CEO, just because of the subject matter expertise and that I was good at being an entrepreneur because I can sort of do all the things, but I'm not great at anything. You know, I'm not a molecular biologist by training or an orthopedic surgeon or a corporate lawyer, you know. Um, but I can kind of dabble and get it done in an entrepreneurial way, and I still have fun doing that. So all those things together uh made it just uh time for me to drop everything and start a company like I was, you know, 25 again.

SPEAKER_00 15:30

Well, I think you have a lot of high-level skills that and traits that indicate success in leadership, you know, clearly tenacious, the concept of overcoming obstacles, that intellectual curiosity you bring, there seems to be a resilience and a grit that you're just inherently bringing to all your activities. What else do you see as traits that whether they're resonant in yourself or in others with whom you've worked, traits that you find particularly important for strong leaders?

SPEAKER_01 16:06

Um well, the first thing that jumped into my mind was prioritization. And I think as an entrepreneur, especially if you're bootstrapping and you're at the really early stages, the zero-to-one stage, which is I think the most important for a founder, because that's where, you know, I'd say even 95, 99% of companies fail, almost before they've even started to be companies yet. You have to figure out what to do first. Because if you don't get the order right, everything you, you know, um, you might have the great idea and all of the things assembled to do it, but you have so few resources, and time is a resource, as is people, that'll work for you, that if you don't do things in the right order, you'll miss out on something and it just changes your path and then it shuts down other options. So you so constantly looking at optionality and figuring out what you can do later, what decisions are changeable, uh, what aren't, um what uh, you know, the time versus money equation, you know, do I want to spend, you know, precious dollars on this or spend precious time, or how can I get by with a three-quarter solution, maybe for a short time, and then sort of uh leapfrog that to a better solution. Sometimes people in big companies just can't do that. They're used to everything's got to be perfect because my boss says so. And that's fine. That's what the job is when you're, you know, at NVIDIA making semiconductors, right? It's it's very very different than if you're starting a longevity, you know, wellness business from scratch, uh, you know, like I am. There's a bunch of different ways to peel the onion or, you know, however you want to say it.

SPEAKER_00 17:52

Yeah, I like that that highlight because prioritization, I think a lot of people, um, and I think it's true whether you're in the zero-to-one stage or whether you're in an investor-backed company further along because the whole period is going to be fairly limited regardless. And that that sense of what is important, what is urgent, and what should we be working on, those don't always line up. So it's making sure that you figure out which of those needs to be addressed now.

SPEAKER_01 18:25

So many urgent things that pop in too that are unfortunate. And you know, maybe another one is how to quiet the noise of the urgent and get to what's necessary. Gosh, you know, I wish I think everybody wishes they could do that a little better.

SPEAKER_00 18:43

Yep, I completely agreed. Um so when you've constructed teams in the past or tried to work to optimize the teams that are around you, how do you think through that? How do you assess those with whom you're going to work and figuring out where you guys need to improve, mitigate, um, leverage, et cetera?

SPEAKER_01 19:08

Yeah, yeah. Great, great question. Because the teams are so important, just as important as you know, capital and technology, maybe even more so, because that they can teams can create capital and create technology, right? It doesn't happen vice versa. Um, I look at it like just pieces or building blocks is how do they work together, both from a skill set, from an experience level, and then um from a personality level. And, you know, with somebody who is motivated and who really likes what they're doing, even if they don't have the perfect skill set of everything you would want on paper, in my experience, they can usually get the job done. And then there's a multiplier, too. They just add so much energy to other people. They'll help with you know, recruiting, a little extra motivation, you know, maybe you get 5% sort of additive, you know, from them just across the board. Much better than your, you know, brilliant jerk, right? Um, and there's a lot of those people talk about hiring for culture, but so many companies, you know, especially the venture-funded ones, in my experience, that they tolerate or even maybe want some brilliant jerks because of the skill set or because they are the investors are in for a they have a time frame. They want to exit in three years, so they want to hit the gas pedal and they're gonna you know run over grandma to get there. Um, and sometimes some, you know, some brilliant people will. And that might not be what you want as the founder. So I think thinking those things through at the beginning and say, what kind of company do you want to build? And then getting the right people on the bus at the you know, at the first stop is I think the most important thing you can do.

SPEAKER_00 20:57

I so at the crucible, that's what we found to be the most predictive um elements of success is does the team work together? Is it a team that can make each other better? Or do you have people that have you know outsized arrogance? Um, which by the way, it's the number one uh what we call contaminants, but it the number one issue in destroying value in a company. It's not just that the person's gonna fail, your whole business is gonna be less successful if you bring in someone who is overly arrogant.

SPEAKER_01 21:33

Um I totally agree. And how how many companies have you looked at in that in that data set? What what was your process like or your research like?

SPEAKER_00 21:42

Oh, sure. So we um initially started with a group of 3,500 investor backed executives and started there and looked at what traits were useful to make that those people work. You know, where did they add value to companies? What traits made sense and which ones didn't? And what do you want to measure that could be useful in some environments but is irrelevant in others? And where do you have things, intellectual curiosity, pattern recognition, a sense of urgency that you know, resilience that truly matter across all executives in these, you know, entrepreneurial to middle market companies? Then we said, okay, got it. So individuals we can look at, but that's not enough. Um, you know, you're an athlete. There's a team that matters. Even for an individual sport, the team behind you matters.

SPEAKER_01 22:39

And you're happier, more excited, more energized, all those things too. They're hard to quantify, but they're they're there.

SPEAKER_00 22:46

Exactly. So then we started looking at measures of spread and um cohesion amongst the members of the team. So, do you have people that generally approach problem solving in similar ways and provide enough difference that you're injecting that with a solid sense of contrarianism that can produce better results in the long run? Are you finding people who are structurally misaligned to their bias for action? If you have a CEO who does not have particularly strong bias for action, and yet some of the other members on their team do, you find a lot of very frustrated executives.

SPEAKER_01 23:25

Yeah, yeah. I've I've I've been there. Um that's a surprising amount of companies. I think that the, you know. And it maybe it happens later too, that the CEO gets that way. Once people have resources, their fear of loss is greater than at the beginning.

SPEAKER_00 23:43

Yeah. And we went through and and started measuring teams. And so, you know, we've worked with gosh, dozens and dozens of companies at this point and are upwards of you know, 7,000 executives that we've worked with to see okay, what what works and what doesn't for you and your teams. And now we're in the process of working through that same process for sales teams because that's another group that often has a lot of dysfunction that is not necessarily identifiable through an interview process.

SPEAKER_01 24:18

So yeah, yeah, absolutely. Um yeah. It's complicated there with the incentives and territory sometimes and egos and you know, all the things. That's right.

SPEAKER_00 24:31

Yeah, there's there's a lot there. And it's it's fun because, you know, at my core, I'm a stats person. You sound like an optimization person. It's having that sense of, okay, but what do the numbers tell me, as opposed to what does my flawed brain tell me is a real challenge. And I think that that's one of the areas where a lot of leaders they're seeking people that seem good or that match past patterns, as opposed to thinking about what does this situation need for now and the future to help make all of us better.

SPEAKER_01 25:07

Yeah, yeah. Or seeking a less threatening alternative or one that maybe is aligned with their their own plans versus challenging with new ideas that that's always always difficult. Um, I mean, in a sales organization or just in a in any organization, I've found is that the founders often come with such strong ideas about what how things will be that their um actually I forget the statistical term, but their confirmation bias is you know, they're just waiting for that and everything else they think is a bad idea when it may not be. Somebody's playing the devil advocate, like you mentioned earlier in in different words, but um it's not appreciated until it's too late. That's fascinating.

SPEAKER_00 25:56

As an entrepreneur, how do you force yourself to look past your own biases? And I'm particularly interested because of your background with this eye toward optimization. How do you think about you know ensuring that it's not it's not filtered through what Tony sees and really is what's best for the business?

SPEAKER_01 26:20

Um, you know, I I think I've been this way since at least since my first days as an undergrad at Harvard, I realized all of a sudden that there were a lot of people smarter than me. I didn't necessarily grow up like that as a kid. Um, but when I went to Harvard, I was like, oh my God, you know, yeah, I should just listen. Um and I've taken that with me as an entrepreneur to especially with, you know, technologists, you have lawyers and bankers and and other people, you know, in product and in sales that are talking to the customer right then. They cannot only be more intelligent than you, but have deep experiences in that industry. And then relative insight. If they're talking to a customer, right then, they're getting the latest intel from the ground floor. Um, so I just like listening because um, well, it also comes from me being a military officer. You've got to listen to people, they know more than you, their lives at stake. You know, people think the military is top down, and that's just really in the movies. It's about listening to your troops and the information you get and making sure everybody, you know, lives to fight another day. So find there's a sense of realism there that is maybe lost in Silicon Valley where people are shooting for the stars and okay with disasters. Um, so for me, it's been, hey, what what's what's the best answer? You know, maybe because I'm I'm inherently lazy too. I'm kind of tired from doing all the things. I don't need to do all the things. If somebody has a great idea, let's hear it. I'm the arbiter of great ideas versus the the one who comes up with them all. And then it's easier to implement when it's somebody else's idea, no matter who it is, even if you kind of seed them to coming to that idea, then they want to do it more than if you just tell them what to do. Um so it's just my style. Um yeah, to to like the devil's advocate, to like alternative, you know, contingency planning for me is always just a big thing because one idea might be the right one then, but what if? And there's a lot of what ifs, you know. I I learned that from my first entrepreneurial venture, but other ones too. Um can't control, can't control the FDA, can't control COVID, my you know, uh medical diagnostics company that uh you know certainly influenced, influenced us political decisions, government funding, all kinds of things that are way above your ability to control. So it's good to have people that are generating ideas on your team. So they're not all waiting around for you to come up with ideas. Um good.

SPEAKER_00 29:07

I also love that someone else describes themselves as inherently lazy. Uh I say that all the time and people laugh at me.

SPEAKER_01 29:15

I mean, I I think as the sales guy, you know, you gotta look for the biggest bang for the buck. I mean, I don't think you know, lazy you can't call it an Iron Man lazy, really, but sort of. I don't want to run an extra mile. I'm already running enough. I don't need to like do more. Um, it's it's optimization, right? Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 29:32

Yeah. Yeah. So speaking of optimization, um, peptides are a hot topic, but I'm not sure that most people really know what they're talking about. Give us sort of the primer on what it is and what's cool about what you're doing with them.

SPEAKER_01 29:49

Yeah, yeah. Well, um, so peptides are chains of amino acids. Um, and amino acids, I think we've all heard about them, the building blocks of proteins. So if you want to think about uh like a Lego, a big pile of Legos on your floor, each Lego would be like an amino acid. You put, you know, a couple dozen of them together and you've got a peptide, then you put peptides together and you've got proteins, right? You know, and not all of them build muscle, like we we all know about proteins, but there's about 150 different peptides that are manufactured naturally by your human body. Um, they do all kinds of things. They uh repair your skin, they you know, regulate mitochondrial growth, um, they help with uh hair, um, they um release growth hormones so you can you know repair yourself, sleep better. Uh GLP ones like Ozempic, we're familiar with, they reduce your appetite, and some of the other newer GLP ones will help turn glucose into energy more, or uh, you know, the the newest one in phase three clinical trials, retitrutide, will actually impact three receptors and help burn fat, especially uh visceral fat that's around your liver. Um, so peptides can be, you know, simple, really targeted ones, like insulin, for example, is a peptide, you know, collagen, which we're all familiar with as a peptide. Um, but then there are a lot of ones that sound like, you know, like a Star Wars movie, you know, BPC157 is one of my favorite peptides. Um what it does is it's derived from a human gastric juice that they found um that repairs uh muscle, tendon, ligament, um, and gut lining. Um and athletes use that to help repair themselves. Um I had myself had a torn meniscus since my military days, right? Heard it during military service uh 30 years ago. Used BPC 157, you know, injected subcutaneously, a little tiny, little tiny needle, um, for two weeks and fixed it right up. It was a nagging injury for 30 years. Um, and now it's unnoticeable. Um, it was a small tear, but it was something that it would swell up when I, you know, when I run 20 miles or whatever, it would it would be noticeable, um, or walk down the stairs after even a five or six mile, you know, because I'm I'm 55 years old now, right? Um, but I'm still out there competing with the 20-year-olds. Um, and I will have to say my my um as a maybe it's a plug for BPC 157, but uh I just did my biological age and it came back as 28 yesterday. So I've had like the best day of my life because I've got, you know, I can say I'm I'm 28 again. Um, and that's in part, you know, sure, there's diet, nutrition, and exercise, but the peptides, what they do is they just tell your body to do things that it was doing, like it was 20 again. That's really the purpose is to is for signaling. They're not like injecting, you know, steroids or testosterone, where it's an exogenous compound that you're putting in your body to override systems. They're just saying, hey, repair, you know, um processes. Think like you're 20 again, and and things work a little better. Your hair grows a little thicker, your skin wounds heal a little, you know, your collagen gets produced better, your mitochondria becomes more efficient and replicates more. Those are all different types of peptides, but um it's a you know uh a very interesting field for kind of geeks like myself who like to optimize, learn new things, and then experiment. And I can experiment on myself as a you know, as an athlete with many injuries, um, who feels comfortable doing the research and then training really hard to see how it plays out. Um, because I like uh I like what it's done for me. I've lost 30 pounds in the last 10 weeks, too, in addition to fixing up my knee and doing those other things. So I'm back, I'm back on training for my fifth Iron Man now. Um, I thought I my career might be over, but I don't think so. I think I got another decade left. Um I'd say, you know, thanks to peptides, really.

SPEAKER_00 34:32

Um and so with longevity plan, is that intended to help people understand how to do this optimization using an AI layer? Or how how does that all play out?

SPEAKER_01 34:47

Yeah, well, exactly. So um what we have built is uh a digital twin platform. So um think of it as personalized data lakes that ingest wearable data, EHR data, um, lab work, um, whatever other you know data um is available to us. Yeah, peptide usage data, right? Um put that in an individual individual data lake and then put a Gentec AI on top of that to mine that data for um the individual's optimization. Now at this stage, um we're still building the platform. It's nice to have a coach or a scientist involved because it's still not that, you know, not as user-friendly as we'd like to make it, but it's getting there. Um and there's a lot of data. If we all, you know, most people are using wearables by now, but just the amount of data in a in a whoop is is incredible. And they're doing a wonderful job. But you incorporate use of, say, five peptides that change your HRV, your resting heart rate, your body fat percentage, and all kinds of other things. And now you've got clinical level data and thousands of individuals. Well, our goal is to not only help the individual with this digital twin we've built of them, um, but to provide information to the scientific community to really help everybody learn about peptide usage and optimization because that's that's one of the weaknesses. There's a peptides have been around for decades and been prescribed to millions of people, but there's not that much clinical research on many of them. On many there are, like the GLP ones, obviously. Sure, uh Logosempic and and Wagovy. Um, but other ones have just been prescribed for, you know, to burn victims for knee injuries, um, and not gone through phase three clinical trials. So we want to provide that research while helping people. And the digital twin idea itself came from my work with the NFL. Um, you know, it was used in power plants and by NASA in the 70s, you know, to model complex systems digitally so people could do preventative maintenance and optimization on a twin, not on the nuclear power plant, you know, sort of for obvious reasons. But take that metaphor, roll it forward to an NFL player who's maybe getting paid as much as the nuclear power plant, you know, is worth. Um, and they they had the financial incentive to digitize everything about those players, right? Get MRIs and look for, you know, stress fractures before they happened, as well as optimizing nutrition and and other things. Um we wanted to democratize that, make it available to everybody like us with their wearable data plus a little more, and then make it unique by incorporating peptides in those usage because it is so unique. They do such different things that it does change, it just adds dozens more variables to an optimization equation. And the levers are pretty strong, too. You know, you can just like I said, lose 30 pounds in 10 weeks and feel great and not have it be a stressful thing. That's a big lever for a lot of people. You know, that's why you're seeing the Ozempic, you know, folks out there and then healing a knee injury, right? Another big lever. If we can get more people healed up and healthy, extending their health bands and making them happier, that'll that'll just make us happy. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 38:42

I love that. And it sounds like you guys have not just a great scientific approach behind that, but also a human-centered approach as you guys are pushing that forward.

SPEAKER_01 38:53

Yeah, we really like to be human-centered. We're we have more fun that way. Um, you know, we're not venture-funded, right? I'm I'm self-funding this and um it's refreshing because we're able to go a little slower and be a little more careful. I mean, I'm sending out gift baskets today to our our newest customers, right? Personal for for me, you know, and it's it's neat. Um, and you know, I'm sure I'm doing it out of love, but also I want to learn from the customers. It goes back to listening, like we talked about earlier. I want to hear what their problems are so we can help them with those. Um, and sure, we want to charge them for it, but we also want to help because solving problems is how you start a business and how you have happy customers that stay with you forever. And that's what we want.

SPEAKER_00 39:37

Um great. When you think about the skills that are going to be needed by leaders as you know, this world progresses, you know, new the agentic AI, the different optimization tools, the you know, globalization of both talent and resources in various capacities. What do you think the skills are that people are going to need to develop or the traits that are going to be inherent in those who are best positioned to succeed in the that, you know, bright and future world?

SPEAKER_01 40:11

Yeah, yeah. Great, great question. Super important one. And I think my my answer is is um something that's both stayed the same and it's really changed. And I think you'll you'll understand what I'm getting at is uh I think it's the ability and willingness to learn really quickly new things. And for me, that's what they told me college was about, learning how to learn, right? Um, so it's not a new thing. Um, but I've noticed that a lot of people, I don't know, maybe it's over 40, or maybe it's all people, sometimes resist learning new things. They've got their way and they say, you know, that's the way I'm gonna do it. Well, you're gonna be out of a job then, and you shouldn't complain about it, is my answer. Because, you know, what like wow, the the amount of new things I'm having to learn is only accelerating. And now here I'm talking specifically about AI tools that help you run a business. Because, you know, I um our team is tiny, um, especially when you compare it to you know, 20 years ago, I had to hire a team of 100 to do things. Now we can get away with just three or four. And it's better that way because people know more and they can do more with tools, and it's faster. So you're seeing these companies being created really fast. And, you know, things like Chat GPT, I'll use because we we all, I think by now, you know, most people are pretty familiar with it. But you can do the research of 10 people there, and then you can do it systematically and refine it and make it even better than employing a whole research firm to do it or a marketing department to write copy for you. Um, when you can keep that all, you know, the strategy internal and then actually change quicker too. You don't have to convince a large amount of people and teach them about a change. You just do it. And I and um, but you've got to learn the tools. And they're maybe they're easy if you're 18 and you grew up in an AI world, but for people over 40, they've got to get over their resistance to learning these things if they want to succeed in an entrepreneurial endeavor. And that goes to hardware, those types of AI tools. I mean, one of my favorite ones now is really simple, but whisper flow. Um, it's just transcription. You just hold down a button, put the cursor in any application, we'll Word doc chat box, and talk. And gosh, you if you use it, you can go about five times faster than if you were typing and make less typos. It's spectacular. Um, so that simple tool that you know, maybe that saves me a half hour a day, especially for a sales guy who is constantly writing emails to people. It's a lot easier to talk them out. Um and and obviously the LLMs, I think, speak for themselves. The quality of research that you get is to me unfathomable. Daily preparation for meetings, in-depth. I mean, I'm writing in-depth scientific journal type articles once a week about peptides, about AI. And um, I'm doing that primarily myself with a lot of use of all the different LLMs, you know, sometimes having them check each other's work and find scientific journals that are related and solve problems that uh would take months before.

SPEAKER_00 43:41

And that wraps up another inspiring episode of Leadership Quotient. It was a pleasure having Tony on the podcast and benefiting from his insights. To our listeners, if you found this conversation valuable, be sure to subscribe to Leadership Quotient wherever you get your podcasts. You can also learn more about The Crucible and how we're helping investor-backed companies align leadership teams for scale at thecrucible.com. We'll see you next time for more real conversations on leadership, talent, and value creation.