Ari Tulla - Elo Health & "Smart Nutrition"

Hey everybody, welcome to the Future of Fitness, a top-rated fitness industry podcast for over three years and running. I am your host, Eric Malzone, and I have the absolute pleasure of talking to entrepreneurs, innovators, and cutting-edge technology experts within the extremely fast-paced industries of fitness, wellness, and health sciences. Please stop by futurefitness.co to subscribe and learn more. If you are obsessed with the health and fitness industry like I am, then you'll love FitInsider. It's a free newsletter packed with industry trends, news, tech, startups, and much more. I've been a subscriber for over four years now, and it's my go-to, trusted source for staying informed and getting the in-depth information that I need. Anthony, Joe, and the team do great work. From wearables to health optimization to the latest updates from companies like Woop and Strava. FitInsider is one of the few newsletters that I actually look forward to seeing in my inbox. Plus, the platform also includes a weekly podcast, jobs board, investment fund, and resources for health tech operators. Check out the latest issue and subscribe at fitinsider.com. That's F-I-D-T Insider.com. Hey friends, if you follow this show, you may have picked up on my passion for heart rate variability when it comes to recovery, performance, and longevity. I track it religiously and I'm always looking for ways to improve. Over the past few months, I've been taking this new supplement called HRV Plus by mode and method. Over that time, I've experienced significant improvement in sleep quality, faster recovery, and an objective uptick in my average HRV. About two to three points on average. That's a big deal. HRV Plus is the world's first expert-curated, carefully sourced blend of all natural micronutrients to optimize recovery, increase performance, and boost heart rate variability. Formulated by some of the world's leading experts, HRV Plus combines their proprietary hemp extract with omega-3 oil, magnesium, and curcum extract to target inflammation, improve sleep, and supercharge our endocannabinoid systems. I encourage you to give it a shot. Go to modemethod.com and enter discount code ERIC15. That's modemodemethod.com and enter code Eric15 for 15% off. Go get it. We are live. All right, Tula, welcome to the future of fitness. Hey, thank you. Great to be here. Yeah, it is great to have you here. You, my friend, have a lot of experience uh at the executive level and startups and so many things. I if you know my due diligence on you this morning, it's really impressive. And I'm excited, of course, to talk about Elo and what you're doing now. And yeah, there's just a lot to unpack with a gentleman like yourself. So I guess we would start with uh, or if you don't mind, just give us a summary of your background if you can do that um in a few minutes, and then we'll we'll get into all the other topics that we're gonna cover today.

Yeah, Eric, let's go. Um so my name is Aretulla. Um I'm originally from Finland, uh, the small northern country in in Europe that most people have never been. Um highly recommend go in in summer, not in the winter. It's too cold and too dark. Um, but um I got into into tech very early. Um, so I did two things as a kid. I was uh playing with uh with computers and then I was playing hockey. Um and um I never became a hockey player, but luckily the other thing worked out, and I became a tech entrepreneur for the last uh quite a few years already. And um with that background, I've been able to uh be part of uh building um maybe six new businesses from ground up uh in in startups and in big companies. And um often people neglect the idea of you know, you go to a big company and and you build a new thing there. I mean, that's called uh entrepreneurship, I think that's the word. And it can be more difficult at times than to do it on your own, in your own company, because uh big companies are really uh tough to get money on anything new, and it's even tougher to get anything new uh past the pipeline when everybody can say no. So I think um I I learned a lot when I was at uh uh two big companies uh and and built new things there. Uh but yeah, so I spent my time in in Europe first and and and did the stint in in I was in London, uh, worked in um in Stockholm, in Finland, in Helsinki, um did quite a bit of work in Asia at Nokia, uh the small Finnish uh cell phone company that some people might remember still. And uh and then uh about 15 years ago I moved to Silicon Valley, and at that time I was working for Nokia, and um I was uh kind of running the Nokia's uh games unit here and uh the kind of game publishing unit and then um uh building apps for the first uh smartphones. This was before iPhone and Android, so it was a fun time to be um at the biggest uh cell phone company in the world and seeing the Apple and Android basically eat our lunch. Sometimes you learn a lot when you go from a $300 billion company to $7 billion exit. And um that was a painful time, but you know, you you learned a lot. And last 12 years I've been an entrepreneur, so I built a uh this is the third company now in the space of healthcare. Um two first ones were um uh called Better Doctor, a Doctor Finder company, and then I was running another company called Quest Analytics, that um is still uh fairly big uh big play in uh doctor network management design. And um and the last company that of course you you love the most because you know it's the newest side is called ELO and focusing on uh on turning food from the cause of disease to to medicine.

Yeah, that's great. And you know, I want to ask you since it's you know it's fairly top of mind given when we're doing this this interview, and I was looking in your LinkedIn feed, you were at the Consumer Electronics Show, and you had some uh interesting takeaways. And I'd love to hear you know some of the highlights uh as you walked the floor there. What were some of the things that stood out in your mind?

Uh man, I loved it. Um that was the first time at the CES for I think 12 years. And um, I mean, it's uh it's a mayhem. I I had been there many times before. I was helping to, you know, write some of the stories that Nokia was getting out back in the days, and um, and then it was different because you are kind of the key uh main uh event and you had a keynote and whatever, and I wasn't speaking, but I was helping to kind of get the story out. And now I was just browsing through myself and spent about a day and a half walking the aisles, and there are three, four thousand companies solding the wares, and a lot of you know silly new innovations um and a lot of like really exciting new things that actually are gonna be impactful in the future. Uh, but it's just massive. There are 200,000 people, uh, seven of the big hotels were full of stuff. And um, I was super stoked to see all the stuff around EV, uh electronic, you know, uh not just cars, but also you know, motorcycles, bikes, and and uh and a lot of wearable devices, um, a lot of you know new health tech ideas that uh were really exciting, um, quite a few different uh exercise uh equipment and and stuff like that. We are kind of really seeing this idea of uh everything becoming smart. And and of course, I'm trying to build a smart nutritional company myself. But I was there really to learn. And the second uh reason I was there to kind of follow up one of the one of one of my portfolio companies, I'm a small investor in, they were launching the US launch in in CS, and they became one of the best of Sew companies. And uh what a what a great time! You know, they they they launched the first ever electric superbike, and it's it's a bike that has 200 horsepower, it goes to 60 in two and a half seconds, and uh it goes 230 miles in one charge. I mean, just insane machine. And uh and what a what an awesome end for the sew. You know, the um I was there with the guys on the last day and they were high-fiving, they had sold ton of the bikes, they got you know 200-300 media hits in the big media. Many of you guys might have seen the bike, it looks like a freaking throne bike, there's a hubless motor. But the beautiful thing was that uh at the end, I think uh uh a few of the guys from the Patterson uh car museum in LA, they walked in and they said that we're gonna have your first bike, the prototype, in our museum. And yesterday I saw photos that the bike is now at Patterson on a main place next to Fissor and next to Tesla. Uh, think about this. The guys launched the first thing, and now it's in the most prestigious museum in the world for cars and you know motor vehicles. So that was a pretty big ending for the show.

Yeah, that's extraordinary. That's amazing. I mean, gosh, what timing? It's gotta be. I mean, where do you go from there? Like if you start your company like that, right? Like the it's it's such a hot start. It's like, oh man, that's exciting. Well, um, great insights. And you know, I've heard from a couple other people, there's a lot of interesting uh technology, but definitely the electronic, the EV sector seemed to be dominating for the most part because it's got so many different, you know, um, I guess it's become a spider web of products, really, but what people can do with it.

Yeah, like Kitty Agand store now because I mean you it used to be you can buy the uh the fiat or the or the BMW or the bolt or the Tesla. And and now we're gonna have hundreds of options. And um, I think we're living a cool time. If if you like cars or moving your body on with electric or motor vehicles, I mean, it's gonna be a great time to be alive in the next decade.

Yeah, one of the ones, uh one of my clients, Shane Farmer, he sent me the uh the moon bike, which is like an electric uh snowmobile. Essentially, it's like a snow motorcycle. And he's like, you gotta get one of these. And I just may. We'll see. Uh, it looks pretty fun. I mean, it'd be a lot of fun to have up here in the winter in Montana. Um, well, let's let's shift to the the kind of the primary topic here. Uh all right. I uh food is medicine, right? And that's I've talked about it on this this podcast number of times. It's obviously not a uh it's been around forever, right? I mean, uh let food be that medicine. Who said that? Was that uh it was some Greek philosopher. Anyway, I can't believe I'm blanking on that, but it's the the concept's been around for a long time, but it just hasn't hit home, especially in Western culture, right? Is we we treat food as, you know, um it's gotta be quick, right? It's gotta be tasty, it's gotta be convenient, and it's gotta be cheap. That tends to be uh what what we focus on here in the Western states so uh or in the western you western countries. Give us your insights. Like, what does that mean to you? What what's the history of of food and our relationship with it as a society and what are you guys trying to change?

Yeah, it's a great question. And I think you know, um we we don't really know what uh what Hippocrates said, you know, 2,000 years ago. Um there was no there was no Twitter then. But you know, let's let's you know take the hearsay that you know people say that he said it that you know food is thy medicine um and you are what you eat. And um I think we we have forgotten that mightily over the last uh last you know 2,000 years. And now I think it's finally coming back a little bit because we have gotten us in such a difficult uh uh dead end as a society. We we spend uh about half the healthcare cost today globally in management of the lifestyle diseases that are mainly born because of your diet and how you eat. Of course, you know, stress has an impact, uh, lack of sleep has an impact, um, lack of activity and exercise has an impact. But I think the food is by far the most uh uh clear, evident culprit that is causing people being obese, people having type 2 diabetes, people having heart disease, people having hypertension, and many, many other things. Even many cancers, I think, are likely because of the of the way how we are eating. And um we in the US, of course, are in the forefront of this mess. I mean, we we tend to be the most innovative, we tend to lead in many cases, and we are now leading big time in um in the obesity crisis. And kind of with the obesity crisis, all the rest are coming along. So we didn't really do well with the COVID because uh we have a lot of people who have uh health conditions that were underlining that uh then COVID you know made even worse, and then many, many people died, and we all know somebody who died, and that of course sucks. So the the challenge I think is that we we spend half the money today, about $2.5 trillion, $2,500 billion a year, on management of chronic conditions, while at the same time we are subsidizing things like uh corn, soy. Uh if we even pay people the SNAP, which is the you know food subsidy program, we half the money is almost going in unhealthy processed food and soda. So we spend like you know, 70 billion or something like in in subsidizing people to eat bad, and then we pay another 150 million at the back end because they get sick in healthcare systems. So we're just doing a lot of silly stuff today, and um, and nobody really has the um ability to say what to do. I mean, it's a very complicated problem, and it would require government intervention, it would require you know taxation, it would require labeling, it would require a lot of things that we will not do. There's no way you can get anything through today in uh in DC. So the challenge, I think, is now that what can we do as a society? We can, of course, take control on our own life and we can try to make the right decisions. But it's not easy. The other thing we can do, we can start building these grassroots level things like startups and um and different you know organizations who are trying to make a difference. Um so those are two things I can see that are gonna be making the change. Us and making the right decisions, and then us all listening, I think many of us, who are trying to build new things and that have an impact on making people healthier. Um, but you can't expect the government or the society to fix this, it's just uh not gonna happen, and that sucks, but you know, um that's why I think it's so dire where we are. And I mean, why do we why why do I say that you know the food is now kind of killing people? It's because you know we have created food to be highly processed uh spuff, it's not really food. Um, it has no resemblance to like real like whole foods often, and it is optimized to be addictive to poison to you, not only for your body, but for your brain. We have this cocktail of sugar, fat, salt, and many other things that we add together and it becomes as addictive as heroin. And that's what we now feed to ourselves and to our kids. And and that to me is maybe the biggest single challenge today in the in the food system that we are actually you know starting to feed our kids when they are you know two, three, four years old with this uh poison. And we have a hard time avoiding sugar ourselves and avoiding the processed food as adults, and we might not have eaten that food when we were young. But think about if you start to feed it from the very beginning when you were born, you will be addicted for life and it will be even more difficult to change. That's why the younger generations today are actually unhealthier than the older generations. So if you take like an average 40-year-old today and compare it to an average 65, 70-year-old, you can see that often the 70-year-old is healthier than the 40-year-old. Of course, the 40-year-old is not as broken yet because they haven't had so many miles to run and get sick. Uh, but the underlying conditions are there already. So we I think we have a crisis, and we this should be a national emergency in the in this country, as it has been already pronounced to be in Singapore, for example. They said we have a national uh emergency uh because of the obesity epidemic and diabetes.

It's it's it's really interesting. I mean, I um a friend of mine is uh Chef Dr. Mike, he's he's got a PBS show, and he's been speaking a bunch about, you know, trying to get the this stuff, right? He comes at it from a different approach, but the same thing is you know, ultra-processed foods are are are really causing all kinds of havoc in our lives and our societies and our communities, right? And we all sat through, it was about uh 25 people who sat through a lunch presentation or dinner presentation that he gave. We were asking questions like, well, what do we do? I mean, first of all, the food companies, right? We're gonna look back at this time, just as we did it to big tobacco. And, you know, they're they're selling us, they're getting us addicted to crap. And it's really bad for us. Um, but what do we do? Like, how do we change that? Like you can't, legislation's not gonna happen anytime soon, right? No one's gonna, you know, no one's gonna lawyer up and go after big food. Uh, I haven't seen anything like that yet. So, what how do we change it? And it really seems to come from the ground level, kind of like you're talking about, is we have to create the command, the the knowledge, education, and then the change as as communities, and then that goes up, right? If we change what we want and we demand different things, then then maybe we can make a difference in this. But it is, it's horrible. And it's so like I don't understand why it's so uncomfortable for people to talk about, right? Like, hey, if someone's overweight, right? Let's just say it's like, okay, they're not healthy, right? But our society's finding this web of ways to like embrace that as if it is, and and it's just making it worse. And I don't understand where that comes from, but I'd be curious on your insights on like that particular part of the issue. Uh, you know, why why do you think that is as a society?

Yeah, I mean, I think we are, it's a really difficult um uh question, and um, and um, I think you know, you're gonna be vilified if you you know say something else, then I mean the idea of your point is that you know we are now normalizing the fact that uh a human being is a different size. So we are changing the way how the layout is in restaurants. If you have seating that is kind of fixed seating, you know, the the seating is becoming wider. Like you probably heard about that. Some uh fast food chains had to change the the layout of the restaurant because people couldn't sit anymore in the in the table and the chair is too close. So that's a few examples that I are kind of ironic in a way, and scary, of course. The sizing of you know the the seat on an airplane has becoming bigger now, wider because of this very problem. So those are just a few examples that are interesting uh examples. But yeah, I mean like we we normalize it mainly, I think, because the underlying fact is that uh being overweight or being obese is not about being lazy or not having the self self-uh kind of ability to control yourself. It's it's really more of an uh it's an illness. It's uh more like a mental illness or more like a chronic illness that you know we need to treat as a an illness, not as a you know, you are you are somehow weaker than other people. That that's the worst thing. We we have done enough uh saming of people who are overweight uh for long enough time. And it happens usually when you are a young child already, and then you grow up in that world where you are you know you are labeled as somebody who is overweight. And that's very, very harming for the person long term. Um but now I think we are slowly getting into the grips of the whole idea that uh obesity being overweight is is a chronic condition, that we need to treat in the same way as we treat uh heart disease. And and when we do that, then we are changing a little bit of the approach. And the approach is definitely not you know um to do a miracle diet and eat, you know, soup of kale or soup of uh gabbits for five days a week. That's not gonna be a solution. It's not gonna be one fasting that you fast for five days and then you're done. Like, no, it has to be something more fundamental. And just because the powers are skewed up against you, if you think about the food, is really addictive. It is really something that you know you are craving like you are craving the cigarette, or you are craving like you are craving the uh opioid that you might be addicted to as well. So, how do we change that? It it's not as easy as saying that you know, um, you know, buy the light products on the aisle that are high on sugar, low on fat, um, or pick a one diet. It's much more complicated. And that's kind of what we are trying to do a little bit at that at Elo is thinking like, how can we make it easier to do the right thing? The world is stacked against you. Every time you open a TV and you turn on the ball game, check out last next time you're gonna watch the playoffs next weekend or the Super Bowl. How many apps in the Super Bowl are ads that are things that you should actually eat? I think the answer is zero. Everything that you see there are gonna be things that you should never eat. Everything that you see when you walk to a grocery store and you look at the aisles near the gas register, near the entrance, middle of the aisles, end of the aisles is stuff that you should never eat. Everything that we have bombarded by advertising is something that is not good for you. And even if you you Go to a restaurant, you look at the there's a you know stand on the table, on the on the table, like the special items or whatnot. All of those things are likely something you can mirror eat. How can we how can we not do the things if those are the things we see the most prominent around us? How can they be bad if they are allowed to be marketed, not only for us adults, but also for our children at the daytime TV or the kids' channels? Like it's just that's the problem. Like we we can't believe this can be so bad if it's all around us, it's been advertised to us, it's being kind of promoted left and right every day. So that there's that problem. Like, how we can't be better than we are in an environment we have today.

Yeah, it's uh it's infuriating. Sometimes I want to scream. And uh, you know, I look at the problem and you know, you do watch funny, you watch football or whatever sports on TV, and it's all it's like pizza, right? It's Coca-Cola, right? It's all these commercials, and it looks good, man. I want a pizza when I'm watching it. Like I want, I'm like, I didn't know I wanted cheese in my crust until I watched these commercials, and then I'm like, I really want that right now, or chicken rings, whatever it may be. But uh so explain to me what is it exactly that you do at LO? Like what is the maybe walk me through a um you know consumer experience and or however you want to describe it. I'm just uh I want to hear what it's like.

Yeah, so um at LO we uh we're trying to build a company that is um we call it smart nutrition. So you have a you have a smartwatch, you have a smartphone, you have a smart home, you have a smart car. Like I said, at the CES, everything is becoming smart somehow. Uh smart means in um in our lingo, it is personalized, it's made for you, somehow personal to your need. Uh it's precise, it is science grounded, it is real in the sense that we have real evidence what we are doing. And lastly, it is proactive, it gets better over time. So it learns about your body's uh response to the nutrients we give, and then you know it's it's it gets better over time and so forth. And also, I think you know, over time we when we do more uh products that you want to taste, so also the taste and the experience gets better over time. That's kind of the smart nutrition idea. And um at ELO, we have now started to build products that are based on your body. We are trying to collect data from your body. Think about the blood, uh, biomarker data, uh, wearable device data like recovery, HRV, uh, sleep, uh, activity. And then, of course, we also look at your health record and your health conditions and so forth. We turn that with AI into the right plan of nutrition. And then what we do, we are delivering you the nutrients uh in different ways. The first two products are now live. We have uh supplements, so we we send people uh, you know, every 30 days, you know, daily supplement packets that have the right supplements for you that are based on your body's needs. Um, simple idea in that case is basically finding and filling your nutrient gaps. We all have gaps that we don't know. We find them and then we help you fill them. And then the second product we added is uh uh smart protein powder. Um it's basically a protein product that we are looking at your body's needs and we are looking at your activities from the last 30 days, and we design every 30 days a new protein product for you based on what you have done in the last 30 days. So if you use Strava or Tonal or Peloton or Apple Watts or Whoop or whatever you do, we take that information in and we design your custom made protein based on that. And then we can also add custom boosting into protein. We call them boosts, maybe it's a good name, maybe not, but we can add basically uh vitamins, minerals, we can add uh different amino acids, we can add different active ingredients into the protein powder directly. So you don't need to have them in a pill form, for example. Uh, and you can buy that in a whey, or you can buy it in a vegan pea. Um, so that's kind of idea. We're trying to kind of uh bring people products that are easy to use, um, and kind of turn some of these things you have in your nutrient on autopilot. So, how often you forget to have, you know, uh or refill your supplements if you have like vitamin D or FIS or whatever you have in your cabinet, you know, you run out. How often do you remember to buy a new one? Um it's kind of messy. Or how many old bottles do you have of these vitamins and minerals? How many times you bought something when you heard, like, I don't know, Tim Ferriss or somebody talk about a new thing? You know, it might not be the right thing for you at all, but you know, you bought it because you know you believe in it, or somebody told you about something. Um, 100 million people eat today's supplements every day in the US, and nine million nine hundred and ninety thousand of them don't know what they're having and why. Because they've never been measured against it. There's never outcomes. So, like the blood testing in our case, we do the blood testing in the beginning, and then we do periodic blood testing to validate that the outcomes are there. If they are not there, then we are adjusting the dosing. Maybe there's something underlying that is more uh more difficult to fix. Like I have a mutation in my vitamin D metabolization. I don't by I don't get vitamin D from the sun like you do. Um, I I deposit iron like most people don't. So if I have too much iron, I can die. I mean, those are good things to know in my my DNA, and we validated those with our ELO uh blood testing that I actually have those conditions that my DNA said that I might have. So there's a lot of interesting stuff that happens through it. Uh, but the real goal we have is to is to move more and more into uh into meals and and food and nutrients broadly. But we started with the supplements and protein because those are the first products that people really wanted. And also we can really validate that this can be done. Like we can test you, we can give you nutrients, and then we can test again and show you that there has been an outcome that is positive.

So if I'm getting this straight, alright, so I would sign up and it's all uh it's all centralized through through an app, right, which is iOS right now. It sounds like Android is coming soon. Um I sign up for it, I get my blood work done, um, I sync my smartwatch or my devices, whatever it may be, tonal whoop, like you mentioned. Um, and then does it start to give me uh meal plans or new or suggestions on what I should be eating, and then it fills in the gaps essentially with what I'm not getting through the supplementation. Does that sound accurate? Like how how what does the app do? That's I guess what I'm trying to ask.

Yeah, yeah. So I think there's a there's a there's about a million and a half uh apps that are doing meal plans and recommending people to do APNC. Um none of them work. I mean, we many of us probably have tried uh things like uh My FitnessPal and others where you can try to track your food. And you know, it's really fun to do for five days, but on the 15th day, you know, like you're giving up because it's too difficult to comprehend, too complicated. Um, so I don't think people need another list of what to buy of on Cross Restore or what to what to eat, uh, or another recipe app. I think there are enough of those. So we try to avoid ever being an app or system that is like recommending you um just a you know PDF, uh like many many people do. So how it works is that you you can sign up on the LO website, LO.health. Um you you pay uh monthly fee uh for the supplements, it's uh $99 a month for the protein is $59 a month. Um in supplement case, uh in the beginning you receive a blood test that you you do in order to understand what are your deficiencies. We test about 12 biomarkers, we look at your lipid panel, think about cholesterol, LDL, HDL, we look at your A1C for diabetes biomarker, we we look at vitamins D and B12, and we also uh look at homocysteine for inflammation and some minerals like uh like iron. And those are the kind of the common things you would get if you go to a pretty high-end conscious clinic. Um we take the data, we we go through a health questionnaire. If you want, you can connect your Apple Health into ELO. And while Apple Health, you can connect all these different devices uh to ELO directly. And it's secure and safe to do it that way. You don't need to worry about data, you can always turn it off if you want. So we wanted to make it very uh user-friendly and also very secure. So we don't want to have a you to integrate directly all the devices you have because then you can forget something and we get data that you might not want to give us. So that always then manageable in the LO app. Once we have analyzed the data, we we send you uh the first batch of uh supplements um for one month, 30 daily packets. And then at the 90-day mark, we're gonna retest your blood, and um, we will basically uh reconfigure the plan and show you the outcomes. Um on top of that, we decided to add also a dietitian. So uh you're gonna you're gonna have a session with the dietitian for about half an hour on the Zoom, like we are talking today, and um you know they're gonna go through the data for you, they're gonna go through the plan for you, and you can have a dialogue with them. And in the app, then you can communicate with your coach or dietitian, how we call them, uh, on a daily basis if you want. Some people are sending them photos of their meals, some people are sending them photos of products they're trying to buy or thinking of buying, and then they have this dialogue. It's like having a coach in your app for your nutrition. Most people have never had that, maybe 99% of people have never had an interaction with the dietist and nutritionist. These people are experts at what they do. They have a you know, master's degree in nutrition. They have studied about four and a half years more than any doctor has about nutrition. So you can really have like somebody in your corner to help you when you have a question. And of course, you know, um the the the diet, the codes there really not to, you know, they can help you to kind of eat the eat the pills and you know, eat the powder. That's pretty easy. But they also can help you uh if you want to optimize your diet, optimize a breakfast, and give you practical tips. And of course, then the LO app can you know bring you knowledge about these topics that you are interested in. So that's the supplements and the protein is about the same, except you don't need to do the blood test in the beginning. You just need to go through the questionnaire and connect your wearable devices or apps, whatever you have. We basically support everything today because Apple Health is supporting everything. So you can any device you have, you can connect to Apple Health and you can connect to Elo, and we can give you then recommendation and dosing and design the product. And what I really like about the protein myself is that um, you know, I'm a pretty active guy. I do a lot of cycling, I do rock climbing, I still compete at old age. But um I do a training like uh yesterday I was doing um a hundred mile bike ride, and um right after the I was tracking on Strava. You know, it if if you didn't track on Strava, it didn't happen, of course. So anyway, like after the ride, I get notification in my phone that you know now the protein recommendation is ready, and it tells me how much protein I need after my my long training. And that's a pretty handy thing to have, because we kind of know how much protein you need, but not really. But sometimes we take protein when we don't need it, and and having too much protein too often can cause issues like uh like cancer growth.

Interesting. So at the end of the day, if I'm um I'm signing up for the app in you know the nutrition consulting and then the the supplements and the protein, if I'm if I'm all in, what is a consumer paying per month for something like this?

For for supplements, uh including the the testing, uh including coaching and the supplements monthly, it's $99 a month. And you can cancel anytime you want. And for the protein, it's $59 a month. Wow.

That's uh that's really affordable, you know, for the most part. I mean, I think for a lot of people, um, I mean, nutrition coaching as an industry, um, you know, from what I've seen too, you know, if the the more you charge, sometimes the better the results you get from the consumer because or they the client because they're more committed to it financially, right? Uh, but that does create a barrier for a lot of people who um yeah, who just aren't willing to invest in something like that or just you know have too many other things to concern about. So that's really I mean that I mean that's that's a really good price point for democratizing this type of service for people. So yeah, I applaud you for getting it to that point. That's what that's that's excellent. Um and are you guys looking to partner with other companies? I mean, it seems like something that would be a great um, you know, complement to like a a health club chain, right? Who doesn't have nutrition coaches on staff or you know, other things like that. Like, are you guys looking to partner with other people in the industry, or are you gonna go out and kind of prove the model on your own and then see what happens?

Yeah, a great question. I think uh about first on the on the pricing point. Uh I mean you are so right about the fact and you know I live in San Francisco, um, and there's uh there's pockets in countries like in LA and New York and and in the Bay Area where you know people are willing to pay uh a lot of money for nutrition. There are many people in my area who have have the private chef who comes to their way every day and brings the food. And that price is not like ridiculously high. I mean, like we know we don't talk about like employing somebody full-time, but having somebody who works with maybe 10 families and is making food for them. You know, we talk about maybe maybe a couple thousand bucks a month or maybe maybe a bit more. But it's not like an insanely high price. But the bottom line here is that we if we want to help people, uh, we need to put the price points down to a level that they're gonna be quite affordable. And today, if you think about the hundred million people who do supplements today, they spend about 40 to 50 dollars a month on the supplements. So, yes, we are double the price, but we also do the blood testing that you know, you know, you could you're gonna pay 400, 300 bucks a pop if you go to Quest or LabCore. And as you said, if you get a dietitian and you want to have a session with them, an hour will be around 250 bucks. So it kind of adds up. And of course, we can we can do it more efficiently by using you know the app and using some you know AI at the back end and optimizing the process. So um I think the price point is is as low as we can today, but of course, in the long term, we hope to go even lower, and the economic scale will will help there. Um on the partnering point, um, I think you make a great point. And there's a lot of opportunity for companies like ELO to work with um with different entities like uh like you know, fitness community, um the health coaching community, the nutrition coaching community, and and many other ones. And there's actually a lot of interesting discussion that we are having at the back of the back end. Um however, at the moment, we really wanted to build a company that we want to be uh direct to consumer first. We want to sell to people like you and me, who are quite demanding and who know what they want. And if we are able to build a product that, you know, let's say 50,000 people like us here are gonna buy, we have built a really good product that can be then scaled to millions of people at the B2B side. So I think there's a no-brainer that you know this will go to employers, um, this will go to health plans, this will like to go to Medicare, Medicaid in the end. Once we have sewn as an industry the outcomes, and of course we at LO we have to expand beyond supplements and powders into real nutrition that will have a bigger impact on the human health. Um, because I you know I built two companies before uh in the B2B big healthcare, and uh it's interesting in the way that in the end the consumer might be the user of the products you built, but you are selling to the middle management in uh in um Aetna or Humana or United Healthcare. And I'm nothing I I love the people, there's nothing wrong with them, but they are not understanding what the end customer needs. And often it's really, really difficult to you know build the build a product in that environment. That's why often when you think about healthcare, the products they suck, they're just horrible to use.

Yeah, yeah. That's the uh yeah, that's the sounds of the city, man. Um yeah, I don't know. I'm hearing the like most quiet part, and I don't know what's going on. Yeah, I don't get a lot of sounds in whitefish. Um what about like scope of practice? And here's what I mean by that. Let's say uh blood testing uncovers a significant gut issue or you know, some something like that, something that supplements in protein and you know, uh a video call can't really handle. Uh what happens with that? Do you just simply say, hey, go contact doctor, or where do you what do you do in those particular cases? Because I'd imagine there's a lot of things that people that you'll uncover that people had no idea.

Yeah, I I think you make a you make a really good point. And and we have been on purpose um focusing the testing, the biomarker list today, into the ones that um uh are pretty commonly known. And there are many other biomarkers we're gonna add in the future that are uh less frequently tested. Think about like uh like PSA for men, uh prostate cancer screening that you can do now on an at-home collective test. And that can be very scary because you know, if you have a high value, you have a likelihood of having cancer at that very moment. Um, so we haven't put those tests online yet because we want to build a very, very solid uh network uh at the back end that we can really help people. Because I mean we are here to help people in the end. We are not here to you know uh tell people something negative and then let them hang on their own. So, how does it work today? And and this is maybe a good information for people who haven't really been trying out at-home blood testing before. Um, so at-home blood testing means you you prick your finger normally, you you bleed about you know five, six, seven drops of blood into a different you know, collection device, and then you send that device to the lab, and the lab will test it. In a similar device as they do uh if you go to your your quest labs or your hospital lab and they do a benny puncer, they use the same type of message. So and uh the results are roughly equal. I mean, blood testing is not as exact as you might think, even if you do a penny puncture. That's another story we can talk about. But the point is that uh you you take these um these biomarkers, and every time we send a kit to a person, there has to be a doctor referral. So we have a real MD in the mix and the loop. Every time we send a kit to anyone, and every time we test the kit, there's another doctor in the loop. So it is equally uh stringent to do a testing at home than it is to do at the at the lab level. There's a real lab that is a GLIA certified, they have gone through all the hoops. Our process of how do we do the end-to-end sending and you know, boxing and everything, same thing. Data privacy, same thing. There's a lot of you know red tape that goes into doing what we do. That's why you don't have many companies like Yellow today, because operating is really, really uh difficult. And if we have a we call we have green values, optimal values, we have yellow, warning light values, red values, and then we have black values. Black value means that we will immediately give you a referral to a doctor that you can talk to. It doesn't happen that often with the biomarkers we have today, uh, but that's a real situation and has happened now many times already, where we think that that person might be uh there's a life-threatening situation. So we have to get the doctor involved immediately.

Yeah, yeah, I don't want to see just the black notification that already strikes fear in me a little bit. Um I'd like to switch a little bit to the business itself. I mean, you have some some great news, you know, um, that happened over the last few weeks as far as uh, you know, a huge milestone for the company. So maybe can you give us a little insights into like you know, funding, size of employees, I mean, anything you want to give as far as you know, revenue numbers, anything, whatever you feel comfortable sharing, of course. But yeah, how's how's the business so far?

Yeah, so LOS is kind of a fun company to to operate because you know we are we are indeed a C space. We have now a few products in the market, we've been around for two and a half years, and um, we are kind of starting to hit the hit the momentum in a way. So you are in a phase where we've been learning and you know building, and and now we are moving from learning and building into operating a real business. And um, and we are seeing a nice velocity on you know some weeks we have we have you know uh 100, 200 people coming into Elo as new members, which is a really great pace. And we are a bit limited by the way how we uh operate because you know some things are not yet fully automated, so we have to kind of scale slowly. We can't take 100,000 people in one day because there's not the lab capacity is not enough and so forth. We need to kind of scale everything slowly. Um we raised about five million in uh in 22, uh mainly from uh from uh CEOs and operators and athletes and stuff like that. And and last week we we raised $10 million a round from from uh some some pretty big VCs. And um, and I think that makes us to be one of the few companies in this space that are really now moving forward. And I think it will make us one of the one of the leading companies in this new space of uh that we call smart nutrition, but we can also call it personalized nutrition and so forth. There are not that many companies who have been raising money um today. And um I think we are the first company in the world today who has two products live that are optimized based on your blood biomarkers. There are, you know, I think one or two other companies who do uh some type of you know supplements, but we now have the supplements and protein. And as I already alluded, I'm we're gonna have many products coming in the coming years. So we will be more of a marketplace where you can get curated products based on your health conditions and to keep healthy or stay healthy to even reverse the conditions. future. So yeah, I'm super excited. And you know, of course, we have a lot of doom and gloom news. You know, we talk about recession, we talk about all these things. And now having you know funding is is a great um I think validation that you know this market is real. And also that you know what we have built is is pretty exciting. And you know people really like uh what they have gotten. And we our retention rates are really high. I mean people who get into LO, I mean many of them stay for a long time.

Well that's great. Well congratulations on the fundraise. I mean that's you know as we were discussing prior to recording is it's uh it's the environment for uh fundraising isn't quite like it was over the last few years. It's definitely much different now. So that's that's a that's a huge accomplishment and like you said it does you know uh very much indicate that you're in a good position I think.

I asked this question generally uh as you know spirit of collaboration and for for people listening but what what what do you need right now as a company like what's what's important to you uh as you're growing I think um uh the the beautiful thing about being D2C and um and working with uh real people so keep in mind we we have a half an hour zoom session with most of the people who sign up to Elo so we get a lot of learning so for us it's all about um how do we fast track how do we speed up our learning so anyone interested about Eloh um you know sign up test it out I mean give us feedback we would love to hear all of that um if you have some great ideas on how to collaborate and partner send me a note I'm easy to find I would love to talk to you and um and maybe we are not ready to partner today but you know uh I believe in getting to know people and working with partners all the time. We are also looking at new innovative uh nutrition products and and partners we have we don't create our own uh pills we don't have our own kitchens we don't have our own protein factory so we partner with the best people in the market we've been now finding five or six partners already if there are more happy to talk to you uh if you have innovative supplements I mean that are really well validated by data and science let's talk about it I'm really excited about that and and of course you know we are starting to hire people so uh check out you know LO carriers I mean we will be hiring quite a few people this year um from uh you know dietizens to uh marketers to to to product people and so forth um so those are I think the big needs we have but you know it's all about having the feedback loop learning as fast as we can.

Yeah it's an excellent point. Uh one more thing actually I I do want to cover with you because I'm looking at your hat. Do good. What is that? What is uh it's it's something that's uh you know I guess your side hustle if you can even say that right?

Yeah it's it's a it's a side hustle. This is actually uh it's a hat from a company called Kotopaxi. Um they are they are a clothing company that uh they have a line of uh do good and um it just happens to be that you know our family office that we invest uh from is called also got do good so I'm kind of I'm a I'm a very you know cheap person inside so I don't want to build my own swag so I just buy the do good hats from them directly and I don't I don't think they mind. I talked to them already about it and they were like high-fighting me. So yeah we we have this small um investment office at here where we invest in uh in companies doing good uh companies focusing on human performance and um and it's been really really interesting journey for the last decade uh to do that as a as a hobby and um and we've been able to work with some really really great companies that uh are making a huge dent in in the world. You know some companies like uh like Aura uh ring was one of the early investments we did and then you know some people might know uh you know Thrive Market and and QDX and uh and Verda Health and and and and Levels Health and Super Sapiens and others that are really interesting new companies in the space of human performance and uh all working in some way to to quantify our body and then help us to make better decisions.

Yeah it's it's such an interesting time it really is it's a really exciting time I think so I've been in this industry the fitness industry which I think is now being you know kind of swallowed up by the health and wellness industry really and just this time of all the the innovation and the technology and the insights and be quite honest the brain power that's coming into into this sector is really I mean stuff that would usually be like Wall Street types or Silicon Valley types like yourself, you know, are now coming into health and wellness and it's it's really uh it's really changing the game it's accelerating everything really quickly. So it's it's awesome to to see what you're doing here. If people want to get a hold of you or if you want to send them somewhere online um where would you like them to go?

Go go check out uh website we are at elo.help not ello.com but elo.helph and um you can find ello also on on the social mediums at lo.help and um I'm easy to find Ari Tula I mean Google my name I'm the first 50 baits is me. There's only one person with the same name so I'm I'm not uh Tom Smith or or something like that. I'm easy to find right on.

Well thank you so much for for what you're doing and I appreciate spending uh you know better part of an hour chatting with me and explaining it and hopefully uh we'll get you back on in about a year and we'll hear about all the cool updates that you guys have added to uh to your program there. So yeah it's been an absolute pleasure ladies and gentlemen Artula cool thank you so much hey wait don't leave yet this is your host Eric Malzone and I hope you enjoyed this episode of Future of Minutes if you did I'm gonna ask you to do three simple things it takes under five minutes and it goes such a long way we really appreciate it. Number one, please subscribe to our show wherever you listen to it for iTunes, Spotify, Catbox, whatever it may be. Number two, please leave us a favorable review. Number three, share. Put it on social media, talk about it to your friends, send it in a text message, whatever it may be, please share this episode because I put a lot of work into it and want to make sure that as many people are getting value out of it as possible. Lastly if you'd like to learn more get in touch with me simply go to thefeaturofitness dot co. You can subscribe to our newsletter there or you can simply get in touch with me as I love to hear from our listeners. So thank you so much. This is Eric Malzone and this is the feature of fitness have a great day.