Jason Moore - Spren & The Future of HRV

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. People age at different speeds, and generic annual blood work doesn't properly evaluate your biological age, but Insight Tracker does. Insight Tracker is a truly personalized nutrition and performance system designed to extend your health span and slow down the aging process. Created by leading scientists in aging, genetics, and biometrics, Insight Tracker analyzes your blood, DNA, and fitness tracking data to identify where you're optimized and where you're not. You'll get a daily action plan with personalized guidance on the right exercise, nutrition, and supplementation for your body. Add Interage 2.0 to any plan to calculate your true biological age and see how you're aging from the inside out. For a limited time, get 20% off the entire Insight Tracker store. Just go to insight tracker.com forward slash future. That's insight tracker.com forward slash future. Welcome to Future of Fitness.

Hey Eric, thanks, thanks. I'm happy to be here. Um glad we are able to do this.

Yeah, I'm sorry we got to miss each other at Ursa. Uh, you know, I guess COVID trumps uh travel nowadays. So I was unfortunate uh you weren't able to make it. I was I got to talk to you know some of your team and you know we're gonna talk about today uh I guess the company, you know, Elite HRV, formerly known as Elite HRV, now Spren. You can explain that that whole thing during the conversation. Uh but we're gonna talk about HRV too, which is one of my favorite things. I mean, if there's a health marker I truly uh use all the time and believe in and think is not it's undervalued really within the industry, in my opinion. Uh not enough people know the you know how powerful it is. It's it's heart rate variability. So I'm gonna stop talking. I'm gonna let you tell a little bit about your origin story. How'd you get to be you know CEO, founder of Elite HRV and now Spren?

Um so I I was born passionate about HRV. Um, I'm just kidding. But um basically uh so like people often ask too, like, how do you get into HRV even, right? So um kind of the overview of the story is that um I have a tech background, I've uh got an extensive history working with lots of different types of data and using data to help people make better decisions in a lot of in actually different industries. And so um, but that combined with my passion for health, fitness, and wellness and kind of human performance side of things, ended up leading me towards biomarkers as kind of an interesting area of research for me. And uh, long story short, is that um there was a period where I was a fitness coach and I was thinking, oh, I may either open a gym, I helped some friends open some gyms, um, uh, and I was getting more and more holistic with my practice, like realizing, oh wow, stress actually impacts your fitness or your motivation or your results or your recovery, and so does sleep, and so does alcohol, and so does nutrition, and so do your relationships, and so do all these things. I was trying to piece all these things together, and then I'm like, okay, I have this background in sensors and data and decision support software. Um are there things we could measure about the body that would make it easier for me and my clients and my loved ones to get better results and to know that it's working, right? Know that your efforts are working, what's working for you, what's not working for you, et cetera. So that kind of led me to research on heart rate variability. Um I kind of heard some people talking about it in the coaching world and then dug into the research and started networking with the researchers and and people who were doing the uh kind of early innovations on it, and decided that at the time there was so much power that the research was showing in this biomarker called heart rate variability, but there really wasn't a super accessible way to for the average person to measure it. And I think other people around that time saw the same thing, and there was a couple of different tools that came out, including this one called Elite HRV, that um I created uh with my my friend who was my original co-founder, um, and we just put it out there uh so that people more people could get access to high quality HRV data. And that was sort of the whole origin there. It was just like something I wanted for myself, something I wanted for my clients, and the research was showing that there could be a lot of power to it. And uh there wasn't really like a grand master plan behind it. It was just like cool biomarker, cool data. I want to make this accessible to more people, including myself. And that's how it all got started.

Right on. Uh who out of curiosity, who were some of the people that the when you were researching, who are some of the people that you were looking into their work?

Yeah, it's a good question. So like it it ended up branching into several different domains. Uh, you know, I think I have like to say hats off to Joel Jameson because uh that guy did a great job of like bringing a lot of the sports science to um and the exercise science uh across many different topics, HRV included, to a lot of people. And um so he's an inspiration to me. And then also uh getting in with the sports teams themselves and seeing that there was actually like one of the first uh groups that we ended up engaging with was um High Performance Sport New Zealand and also um the Scottish and English rugby uh national teams. And the sports scientists and uh exercise physiologists in those places were doing some really cool work um looking at using HRV and things for performance. And so I did a lot of learning um talking to those like practitioners in the field that were also doing research, uh, following people like Andrew Flat and Mike Esco and Dan Pelouse and Martin Boucher on the research side. And um and then also uh realizing that HRV expands into you know other domains besides like physical exercise. Um and so uh following like Dan Quintana and Andrew Kemp on the psychological side of things and um yeah, trying to dig up all the different names that come to mind.

Uh yeah, that's a that's a lot of names.

Yeah.

Yeah, it's uh so uh I'm gonna pat myself on the back. I normally can't fire off names that readily from the top of my head, but um lots of people kind of have inspired me on this journey. And then early on I will say too that I was kind of novice in the beginning, uh, you know, and that I actually learned a ton from the people who were using Elite HRV. So the very first version of the app is embarrassingly terrible looking. Um and basically all it did was pull data out of a chest strap and display it to people. And there was some really like rudimentary kind of algorithms uh to just you know do what research was showing could be done. And then as people used that and were come they were like comparing it to ECGs or like doing their own research or uh saying, oh, I'm like a self quantified self-person, I'm gonna try this experiment and see how it goes. And in a nutshell, I ended up personally talking to over 15,000 people in those early years and just soaking up all of these anecdotes and all of these research that they were doing and organizations they were connected to. And now we've had partnerships with over 100 universities and research groups, and there's been um nearly a hundred plus studies published on our platform, and uh it's been amazing learning for me. And at at its core, I feel so grateful because that's like what I enjoy doing most with my time is like learning cool stuff. And so um, anyways, that was a bit of a tangent, but I just wanted to highlight I've learned more from uh or I've learned even more from all the people we've collaborated with in the using using of our tool uh than I did in some of those early research that I did.

That's the beauty of it, right? I you know, anytime um you know I've ever had the ability to coach or you know train people, you know, I I always feel like the value I get back from those people is more than what I provide them because you're learning so much through their experience and you know their trials and tribulations and growth. And I, you know, same goes with you know that the end user of technologies like this. Maybe we should back up for one second too. So for people who are listening, I mean I've had a couple podcasts on heart rate variability, just so they don't have to go back and listen to all of them. What is heart rate variability? How do you define it for um you know our listeners?

Yeah, so like in its kind of most basic form, it is variation between your heartbeats. And so um, as your heart beats, let's say it's 60 beats per minute, it's not a metronome. It doesn't beat once per second. Um it actually beats more like there's like 903 milliseconds between this beat and the next, and then 1,112 milliseconds between that beat and the next. And um, those those variations between beats are actually not entirely random. Um it's uh there's a lot of systems that push and pull on the heart. Uh one of the notable ones is the autonomic nervous system. And so as your body is responding to stress or recovering from stress or activating digestion or sexual function or um muscles for performing physical exertion, um, pupil dilation, blood sugar, all these different things, the autonomic nervous system is also regulating your heart rate. It's um increasing it, decreasing it. Another angle there is that as you breathe and you inhale, and there's systems in the body that affect what's called respiratory sinus arrhythmia, and without going like way off into the weeds right away, is that um things like blood pressure and your uh respiratory rate and inhales and exhales also slow down and speed up your heart uh rate pretty much constantly. And so um interesting thing that the research showed, and then later we helped kind of amplify and build on top of, is that um specific patterns in this variability of your heart rate actually correlate to uh real-world, you know, specific things, either behaviors or outcomes that you're looking to achieve. And using software and sensors, we can actually get super accurate um insight into what's going on in the body, not invasively by looking at HRV. It's like a it's like a proxy measure into all of these complex and amazing processes going on in your body all the time.

Yeah, it it is really cool. I mean, the more I dive into it, you know, I was telling you, I'm uh I I use the Morpheus platform so we talked about Joel Jameson. I I use it every morning. Uh, you know, I just unless I'm you know camping or traveling or something like that. When it's when it's convenient, I use it. When I know I can, you know, spend three minutes getting a good report. And it it does it, you know, other ones I'm not gonna downplay Whoop, but I just feel like when I use Whoop, it wasn't as accurate, didn't make as much sense. And but some of these other ones are a little bit better. Um and I notice it like the way I feel, there's a direct indicator within my HRV score. Uh the way I trained uh when I when I get sick, when I got COVID, there was a noticeable drop, noticeable drop um that took a while for my HRV to recover. So there there is, I mean, there's truth in these numbers 100%. And you know, uh, you know, one of the challenges I want to talk to you about, Jason, is like I know over time uh the variation in how you get heart rate variability, a lot of V-word in there. Uh there it's different due to different sensors, how the platform uses it, right? There's different ways to read it. You know, how how has that evolved over the last five years so that you know we can get to maybe some common numbers that we can use across platforms that that makes sense? Is that even doable in the future or where where are we with that factor?

Yeah, it's a great question. I would say honestly, that that has been like maybe one of the areas that has sort of plagued HRV over the last decade as more people have learned about it. Um I'm I'm excited to see more people discovering it. Um honestly, I think it adds a ton of value, and it's not just because now I'm running a company that helps people measure it. Like that's I came to it looking for value myself, right? And um but it is a complex marker. Accuracy of the data does matter a lot, and um and comparability or and knowing what you're looking at matters a lot too. It's not enough to just say, like, oh, your HRV is this, right? Um and you got it from a random sensor and you measured it at a random time of the day, etc. So I think the good news is um coming back to your question, is that these things are starting to uh become more consistent. So one on the data collection side, lots of different sensors are getting a lot better. And so um wearables are getting better, they're getting more accurate. Um, and um there's other options too, like camera technology that are really uh getting a lot better, and that's something that we've been working on as well. Uh anybody that's followed our story knows that we harp a lot on accuracy uh over the years. But the good news is every across the board, accuracy is getting a lot better on a lot of different devices. So that's pretty exciting. And um, but then when it comes to actually like figuring out what do I do with this data, right? Is um there's a couple layers to unpack there. One is like which of the like dozen different indices that that are called, quote, HRV, do you look at, right? So like Apple Watch gives you one thing, you know, uh Aura uh gives you another thing, um, and you can you can really go down the rabbit hole on all these different statistical measures that are called HRV. And uh the industry has really rallied around this one metric called RMSSD, and I won't go into the weeds on like how to calculate that or whatever, but um the good news is that there's a lot of really supporting evidence that this one marker of HRV uh can provide a lot of value with short uh measurements, and um, it's also one that the overnight wearables tend to focus on now too. And um so that's creating a little bit of comparability. One challenge with that metric is it's logarithmic. Now, again, not to like give a deep math lesson to everybody because I'm stretching the limits of my own math here, is uh is basically what that means is that uh as it goes up, it actually goes up faster. It's kind of like an exponential curve in a way. So when you start getting to higher numbers, the the scale of each leap is different than when you're at lower numbers, and that makes it kind of hard to interpret. And so basically it's like, oh, if you're going from let's say um 30 to 35, that's uh not the same as going from 70 to 75. Like that five-point difference is much smaller in that 70 to 75 range if you're just looking at RMSSD. Now we're getting pretty deep here, so I want to like zoom out for a second and just say like the good news there too is that um there's another layer of interpretation on top of HRV, and it's starting to become a little bit more automated and making it more accessible to more people. And that's things like a readiness score or a recovery score, or being able to pull out, oh, how psychologically stressed is this individual at this moment? And of course, when you're presenting it to an average person, you're not gonna like slap them on the wrist and say, You're so stressed out, Eric. Yeah, right. But uh but but in essence, like stop stressing out. Stop stressing. But in essence, like having that extra layer of interpretation on top and being able to be confident that the underlying data is sound and and robust uh allows the average person to actually get more meaning and value out of the data as long as you can sort of trust the chain at which the data came from, right? And so uh that's something we've been really passionate about over the years. When I started out and I kind of told you that story of like we were just taking chest strap data and like showing it basically to like you would in a research paper. Um our early adopters were willing to go read the research and figure out what does this mean. And then later we created a course, we created coursework that was like educating people on how to interpret your data. But over time, we we actually innovated uh using data science and our own research in collaboration with uh universities and research groups, algorithms that could automate that interpretation for you. And that kind of gets later into the story of like how this is evolving over time.

Yeah, there's two things when I look at uh biomarkers, but HRV specifically, right? Accuracy is really important. Like if it's not accurate, it's just medical entertainment, right? You're just kind of playing a little game and you know, you don't know. And that's you know, the the rub and some of the the objections I have against some a lot of these wearables is that you know, like for HRV, if we talk about it now, the they're not taking it at a specific time, they're just taking it random times in the day. And you know, when someone people are doing random things at that time, they could be sleeping on their side, they could be on their back when those make a difference, right? In those readings. Uh, the other thing is friction, right? So right now there is like even what I do, it's only you know, I put on an arm strap, I sit in bed for three minutes in the morning as soon as I wake up and I take my my HRB. That alone is enough friction for most people not to do it, right? You have to be really sold in on the value of what you get out of it to do that. It has to become a habit, right? But for most people, most consumers, like I geek out on that stuff. I like it. I like to know my numbers. Most people that that's an issue. So I know you guys are solving for both those, you know, the accuracy and the friction. So maybe explain, you know, how you guys are solving for that and what evolutions have taken place recently within your business.

Yeah, yeah. So, you know, I think we maybe um admittedly have been like very careful with how we have talked about accuracy and quality over the years, which is why the vast majority of our data came from chest straps, right? People were telling us every day, like, I love this data, I love the insights you're giving me. I wish I didn't have to put a chest strap on first thing in the morning when I woke up, right? And so for the long for the longest time, we saw like, okay, there are companies that are willing to compromise a little more than we were on the accuracy of the data. Um, but in essence, they were also able to reach more people. And so that's kind of an interesting trade-off to think about. And in the past, I've taken pretty hard stances like, oh, like the accuracy is the only way to do this. And I and I think that the accuracy is a thing that you don't want to compromise easily on. But reaching a lot of people is important too, because a lot of people need help. Now, the good news is that us taking a hard stance on accuracy for so long actually allowed us to uh then develop algorithms to unlock devices like the camera of the phone and like PPG-based devices and stuff with higher degrees of accuracy because of having so so much longitudinal data and hundreds of thousands of people using clinically validated sensors on our platform uh tracking these biomarkers. So after processing billions of these biomarkers, literally billions, um, and and working with our user base and with research groups and things, we've actually, you know, in 2018 we came out with um a PPG based device called Corsinus. And I know folks can't see this, but basically it's like you clip it on the end of your finger. And uh this was a step forward in convenience from the chest strap for our audience.

It's essentially looks like a pulse oximeter, right?

Yes, yes, it's very similar to a pulse oximeter. Um it It's specifically designed for HRV. So we've got infrared, green, and red um uh emitters, and then top and bottom uh sensors. So uh and and but you know like the thing is with this is this was designed for our audience's specific uh needs, which is that morning check-in or like a periodic check-in throughout the day if you want to do some sort of biofeedback or breathing exercise, for example. So it's something that you can easily like pop on your finger and do a measurement, but you're not gonna wear it around. Like I'm you can see mine has a slot sticker on the bottom because of my toddler. But uh the like we we had the uh special edition, by the way. Um we've had people ask, like, hey, can I go swimming with this? Or like you know, something like that, and we're like, no. And uh so, anyways, coming back full circle of like what you're saying is like how this has evolved and accuracy and different types of devices, um, we have always been what you would call device agnostic and uh with caveats. So the we've developed algorithms that are really robust for detecting is the signal coming in a physiological signal that you would expect a human being to have under certain circumstances. And the the cool thing about developing those algorithms is it makes it really easy for us to take data from many different types of devices and know if it's good quality data or not. And so that has allowed us to remain device agnostic, but then that also allowed us to develop um our own detection methods that were extremely robust. And so now we're able to use the camera of the phone, either touching it with your finger, um, or other innovations that we have in the pipeline for that for the camera, that are very robust, very accurate, they're comparable to chest straps. Um now, not under all circumstances, you can't do gymnastics in front of the camera yet and get an accurate HRV score. But that's the same limitation that pretty much any wearable would have. You can't you can't really get HRV today while exercising or moving unless you're wearing a chest strap or or an ECG-based adhesive or something like that. Um but it's getting way more convenient and um yeah, there's options now.

So with camera application, um so I just place my finger on the camera and it takes the HRV score. Do I have to do it in any certain time of the day? Like how how exactly does that work from the consumer standpoint?

Yeah, it's a great question. So um this this gets into the second half of the story, which is sort of like what are you doing and what you know what are you trying to do? And um for most people though, they use it first thing in the morning, kind of like that morning daily check-in you were talking about, where you just wake up, touch your phone's camera for 60 seconds, um, maybe a couple minutes, depending on if you want different metrics, and uh get things like a morning readiness score, um a baseline indicator of your psychological stress. Uh, we have other insights that we've developed that help people kind of you know uh detect if they're at risk for getting ill in the next 24 to 48 hours, stuff like that. That's the that's the main way people, man. But um you can also use it for check-ins throughout the day, um, breathing exercises, things like that.

That's the key. I mean, the phone is there's no friction with the phone. People carry the phone around with them all the time. Most people, unfortunately, uh, you know, will check their phone first thing in the morning, and it's right by their bed. So, you know, it's like uh I always use the ring doorbell, right? Like that the people already have doorbells, right? And now you just put a camera on it and you add a little bit of technology. There's really no shift in in what the consumer has to do to utilize it. And same with why the you know the Apple Watch is probably gonna win it all out at the end of the day, is because you can you can we can do everything with the Apple Watch and they just keep adding more functionality onto this thing. I don't have one, I'm a Garmin guy, but um so let's let's talk about the business for a second because I think that's really critical because you guys have made uh you know formula uh you know you still have the brand Elite HRV, but now you're Spren. Explain the difference, like what's going on, how are you guys uh shifting within the market?

Yeah, so like most people know us as Elite HRV. You know, if you look in the App Store for HRV, you'll find Elite HRV right there at the top. Um and uh SPREN is basically an evolution of the near decade of research and development that we've done. Um it's answering a couple questions that uh Elite HRV helped uncover for us, which is uh how can you make this more convenient and accessible to more people while not sacrificing quality and accuracy of the data? So that's where Spren Vision is what we call it came from. Um and Spren is S P-R-E-N. SPREN vision is what we're calling our camera technology, and it's sort of uh allowing you know the phone camera or in the future other types of cameras to extract biomarker data uh for you more conveniently with devices you already have. So that's Spread Vision. That's one element of Spren. Um and then the other side of it is kind of what we call the the so what side of all of this story, which is you know, you're tracking this data about yourself and you're like looking at the data and you're like, okay, so what? Like, what do I do now? Right. And um and so, you know, in the early adopter phases of elite HRV, people would go do a bunch of research. They'd actually read studies on HRV and they'd self-educate and they'd like dig into the weeds, and um it was kind of um, you know, we were doing the same thing, we're all kind of learning together. As we started reaching more people, uh, people were like, hey, look, I'm busy, I've got kids and a job, and I'm trying to also stay fit, and I've got uh, or maybe like they're uh recreational or competitive athlete, but they still have all these other life demands they have to deal with. I don't have time to like sit around and read research all day. I just kind of need to know like what's the status of my body and what should I do, right? And so um there's a there was an evolution to this story, and ultimately it kind of culminated with a shift in the business um and away from just talking about HRV, which has been a cornerstone of our story and it's something I believe is a pivotal to the story, to talking more holistically about you know uh the body and you know, biomarker signals and feedback from the body, and then how that translates into behavior and outcomes in the real world that you're looking to achieve. And when you start kind of going down that route, um, you know, you incorporate other data streams, but you also have to answer that question of so what? Right? And so we were finding ourselves going down this path of like trying to become experts on everything, basically, because we're like, oh well, so you're tracking this data about yourself and you need help figuring out what to do. Generally, we can tell you a lot, right? Like you need to move more, you need to uh manage stress, you need to have good relationships, you need to get sunlight, you need to not eat inflammatory junk food, you need to eat more whole foods, micronutrients, you know, all this type of stuff. Um but when you get into the specifics of someone's life, you're kind of like, well, Eric, what are you into right now? Like, you know, you're you're this age, you're this um, you know, physiology background, um, you have these family history, you've got these goals. Like right now, you might happen to be into um breathing exercises for mental performance, or or maybe you're trying to improve your friend time if you're like a CrossFit enthusiast or whatever. And uh we were finding that the general guidance that we're able to offer people, while it was still adding tons of value, uh, could add even more value if people were calibrated around something more specific. And so the long story, not so short, on that is that Spren actually is the it's a symbolic evolution of elite HRV towards partnering with other businesses who actually serve really specific and valuable things that people are wanting to do. And so um an example of that is one of our partners called Ritual Fit. Uh, they help busy people do short hit workouts, basically, that are like high quality uh movement patterns and um HIT workouts where you don't have to think you can just put your earbuds in and it actually audio guides you through a HIT workout, and it's for normal busy people, so you don't have to be an athlete or anything. Um the the challenge with doing HIT workouts regularly is that you can easily burn yourself out, you can do too much, um, you can uh you know you may not know like, should I go lighter, should I go harder, like what should I do? So what they've done is they built a whole algorithmic engine on top of our ability to measure HRV and recovery, where you just wake up, you open the Ritual Fit app, you scan your finger for a minute, and it actually algorithmically tunes your whole workout for you. Even the audio cues change during the workout. And yeah, it's pretty amazing. So you put it on and you just put your earbuds in, you just do this workout, and it if um and it's like, hey, because you're a little bit depleted today, we're gonna go for quality and form here. We're not going for reps and intensity, right? So I want you to do like, let's say it's like a Tabata, 20 seconds of squats, but just try to get like your three best air squats, right? Like full quality uh air squats. So you're still moving, you're still promoting blood flow, you're actually getting some active recovery in addition to getting your heart rate up, uh, but you're not burning yourself out because your body today isn't ready for that. And that's a completely different story than telling somebody, here, go over here and measure your data in a silo, and then go find an app to use to do some whatever you're trying to do, and then you have to mentally map like how to translate that data into that training experience, or you have to like convince them to do some sort of API integration, and then when you get into that, like that app is kind of like, well, I just you know spent fifty dollars to acquire this user in customer acquisition cost. Now I gotta send them over here where they're gonna have to like pay for this other you know app experience and use this other app experience. So my hard won you know, customers you have to go to this other place um and do all this mapping of themselves. So long story short, not so short, so that's a that's a common phrase in my uh my uh vocabulary is long story not so short. Um is we just started being able to create this win-win-win situation where a business wants to offer more personalized and better experiences to their end users, and they also want to be able to demonstrate quantitatively that it's working. Because let's be honest, you have a thousand hit apps you could choose from out there. Um how do I know this is the one that's gonna work for me? Right. Um, so showing progress is also motivating, but then personalizing it as well provides a much better experience than giving cookie cutter solutions. The end user or the the consumer or whoever uh is benefiting from all of that, and we're benefiting too because it it's part of our mission of reaching more people and making it easier for them to get better results with less effort, which is like our underlying DNA of what we're trying to do.

That's fantastic, Jason. And yeah, that was good. That was great. Take a breather. Um it personalization is a mega trend, right? It's one of the buzzwords that we have within the industry now. And I think health data. So there's a couple of things that get me really excited, right? Personalization is one of them. And uh, you know, the merge, the you know, how quickly and well, and I mean we don't have to rush to do it, but how do we get you know integrated into the healthcare system as the fitness profession? And that that's what that's what I'm super keen on. Um, and it seems like you know, obviously having accurate data, uh that data, you know, for the medical profession to be able to adopt it, they need you know, it needs to be peer-reviewed, it needs to be published, right? This this stuff needs to happen in order for it to truly be adopted, and then we can tap into all that and you know, the insurance money and the the Medicare programs and all kinds of stuff. It's a very bright future, and I think it's happening. It's really exciting. Uh how does your particular niche of you know your health biomarkers that you guys work with? I guess we can specifically talk about uh HRV, how do you see that assisting in that integration into the health biometrics?

Yeah, so um yeah, this is a really fascinating topic. If you if you dig into the research on HRV, you see that um a lot of the early decades of research were on sports and on um medical trauma. And so um HRV, you'll find HRV research around you know um uh heart attacks and births and injuries and recovery from surgeries and stuff like that. And then you also find it in sport performance where you know people uh have a team of physiologists helping them figure out how to run faster, jump higher, you know, uh go longer, etc. And so um that's kind of where a lot of the early evolution came from. And interestingly, you can almost see a preview of the way that like fitness and wellness and medical would later converge because the reason why athletes and sports teams were early adopters is because they were starting to look more holistically at how the body functions than the average person was, right? So, like, oh, it was no longer okay to just be like talented at your sport. You had to also train very scientifically and recover very scientifically, and you had to manage stress and nutrition and all of these other things, active recovery, et cetera. And so they were looking for ways to get better and measure things, and they found HRV because it's a very uh holistic metric. And other biomarkers, when you bring them into the picture too, create an even more uh clear picture of the body as a whole. And medical kind of has the same uh motivations in a sense, in the sense that when you have trauma in the body and you're trying to recover, I know that unfortunately, at least in the US, the like third-party payer system presents some hurdles in uh addressing things more holistically. But um doctors can see uh that when you eat well and you get rest and sleep and you address these other things, you actually have better medical outcomes. You have better recovery from trauma, you're more likely to have a full recovery, you're better you're more likely to not have relapses or whatever of your condition, et cetera. And so when it comes down to fitness and wellness and then the convergence with healthcare, that same trend is happening now where um let's say you're a coach and somebody's coming to you for exercise advice. Well, now it's like it's no longer cool enough to just say, like, here, do this, do these workouts. You're you have to ask questions like, oh, like how's your nutrition? Are you supplementing? Like, how's your sleep? Right? Like, what's going on in your life? And um, oh, you're taking these medications that actually impacts your exercise and your results too, and your recovery too. And then similarly on healthcare, healthcare is by necessity getting more holistic outside of the trauma space, where it's becoming there's a lot more interest in preventive care, there's a lot more in uh interest in kind of you know how all these things fit together, basically. How does your behavior impact your actual health care or sick care, um, depending on how you label it? And so, because of the nature of this holistic, the interest in being more holistic, it also can get more personalized. And so I think it's really difficult to do anything personalized if you don't know anything about what this person is doing and what's going on in their body day to day, and all of that data and information actually allows personalization. Because in absence of that, the only option is to have essentially a one-on-one personal trainer or personal health coach that's talking to you every day and or working with you, you know, several times a week. That's the only other way to get real personalization, you know, uh holistically at least. And so, anyways, I don't know if that directly answered your question, but to me, those are like pressures that are kind of contributing to like what can we measure about the body and how how what does that tell us across all of these different domains?

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Yeah, for sure. Yeah. So um, you know, uh it's an exciting time, I think, uh, for the business because um my entrepreneurial orientation has always kind of led me to be like, what more can I do? How how can we reach more people? You know, how can we really push the envelope on building better and cooler technology? And in the past couple of years, I have learned a ton from uh for the first time working with investors. And so early on, we just bootstrapped the company to profitability. We were completely self-sufficient and growing at a pretty um, I think, like uh, I would say by many measures, it was a success uh in that in those days as well. But we always wanted to kind of reach more people and do do that. So uh we took on venture capital. Uh first we got a couple of angel investors, and I will say that like raising that first uh $800-ish thousand dollars was extremely painful. Um as I learned, I learned how to do fundraising. I learned what are what do investors actually care about in the in a business, and um what patterns have they seen that didn't work when it came to scaling a business to reach more people. It was extremely educational for me that first time around. Uh a year later, we raised um another four and a half million, and uh that was much easier. So um ironically, easier to get the four and a half than it was to get the 800K. Uh and the reason that was a couple things. One is we were figuring out um the business and the technology and how to scale it and really help more people in a in a sustainable way that could generate revenue and and allow us to keep building. Um and then the other was we we were learning a lot more about um yeah, uh startups and business and how to like create these um financial incentives that were aligned with our vision of reaching more people and serving them better. Um and then this just now uh we were closing another round. Um it's uh actually at the time of this recording, it's almost closed, so it's uh not a hundred percent closed, but we're bringing in seven ish, maybe plus or minus a little bit, seven ish million. right now and it has been again easier than last year. And um, you know, the reason for that is again, we're continuing to evolve and learn and to get clear signals that we're helping people with a real problem that they have. And ironically, this is like investors sometimes get a bad uh rep for being very like, you know, maybe greedy is a word that some people might uh describe some investors as. But uh ultimately they actually kind of have forced us to really focus on what are the real burning problems that people have that need solving, not just building stuff because we think it's cool. And there's still an element of that because we're still excited about all the technology and things we're building. But it's even better if it's solving a real burning problem for people. And if you can demonstrate that and that there's a lot of people that have that problem that needs solving, then investors are excited to give you money to solve those problems. And at least the ones that we've been able to work with. So we feel super grateful about that. We also have accumulated bigger and bigger names over the years. And so uh our lead investors Boston Seed from last year and Drive this year Drive by DraftKings who is who's an investor in them. Their main name is called Drive. Those uh groups have bought in brought in a bunch of their network as well. We have lots of investors who have created um billion dollar plus companies on their own that are now giving us advice on how to scale and tactical day-to-day advice on how to build and uh sustainable business. And then we also have some kind of famous people um professional athletes and sports uh teams and things that have invested in us um last year and this year that we're really excited about and uh I'll have to uh I'll have to check with the PR agency to see what we can like what names we can drop. I was gonna ask right now give me some names but uh here I'll do the cliffhanger for you is that as of the time of this recording I don't know which names I can say yet but I will send them to you as soon as I know and you can use that as a as a teaser when uh when posting the episode and so um fair enough I'm learning so this is an example of the way that we do all of this is learning our way through it and um there's certain things we never compromise on which is like quality of data. We're never going to put something out that we don't believe in but then there's other things that we're willing to learn our way through. One of those is fundraising and uh you know public relations and things like that. And so I'm a techie product oriented founder CEO. I'm really passionate about exercise physiology sports science um health wellness and how technology can solve those things. I'm learning a lot uh about how to be a good CEO and how to scale a business and and how to work with amazing advisors and investors and team that we've built around ourselves.

So it's part of the journey yeah it's it's always interesting and I I I could go back to a recent interview I did with uh Ollie O'Rati from Tonal and I asked him you know how does it been this you know five year ride that you've been on he said it's like it's like every day I'm I'm learning how to drive an F1 formula you know Formula One race car and I'm getting full speed and learning how to play with the gears and all the technologies and you know so it's I'm sure it's it's a wild ride for you man. One answer for you and then I'll you know two more technically your your co-founder is your wife how's uh how's it been working with your wife I mean that's just nonstop there's no break right you got you're talking about business you're talking about your family you're talking about the dishes right like all the things how how has that ride been how how have you uh navigated the and kept everything civil at home yeah it's a great question and um it's so I'll answer the question first and then if you want I can always spill like 20 more minutes of of of uh context on top of anything but um I will say it's amazing for us and so uh there's definitely pros and cons of being co-founder with your wife for me I feel so grateful to say that it's it's amazing.

Um Alyssa has been uh an incredible mentor to me um she's been also uh uh an inspiration on what it's like uh what results you can get when you work really hard and you stay focused and uh and so she's just insanely bright insanely hardworking and such an inspiration to me and that has carried through into her being a mother um and into her being a wife and a sister and a daughter and all these other things. And so I don't want to get too sappy uh here but I will say that um I'm the type of person that is heavily influenced by the people that I spend time with and over over the years I've become a little bit more of my own person I would say now that I'm kind of bringing my own flavor into the world but especially I I joke that I was I wasn't an adult until I got married. And um and also and then also that um marrying people is not a scalable recruiting strategy either. And so but I happen to uh marry the perfect co-founder for me and I will say that it would definitely not work for everyone. The cons are is that we definitely have a hard time getting away from work. And there are moments where we have to be we have to hold each other accountable to set time aside to just have a human relationship and not it not have it be always about the business or you know um tasks and and to-dos. And so um we've worked through that and we've had challenges and we've dealt with it. You know one of the cool things is we've got all this data that uh helps steer us in a positive direction. And this is not just grasping for straws on connecting like the business that we operate with our own situation. But what you can see is that uh being co-founders of a startup and having our firstborn child Madeline who we love and adore um a little over three years ago is that my HRV tanked after my daughter was born. And the business was picking up and you just add in a baby and your co-founders and so you need you neither one of you can get away from either the baby or the business and get extra recovery. So that was really challenging. But having that data and kind of working together on it allowed us to be very um uh I guess objective with ourselves um you know here's the reality of the life we're trying to live we're gonna need to make compromises somewhere and for us we chose to make it on like we um drink less alcohol we uh we don't have a TV on this is the first time anyone uh publicly is gonna hear this because I don't actually say this usually on podcasts I don't want to freak people out I'm not against watching TV or movies but we don't have one in our house because we just don't have time to watch TV. We we decompress by going outside going hiking going walking playing with our toddler and I'm not trying to be high and mighty about that. It's just the only way that we can have our health and our healthy family and run a high performing business all at the same time. And so uh it's been really interesting to kind of navigate that together and it's brought us closer and I could definitely see where um life circumstances could make that very hard yeah interesting insights man and I you know what I pull from that is that something that I I truly believe in is that data is the beauty in data is the objectivity of it.

Right like you can sit down as two humans who are you know all humans are a little bit emotional. We have our own biases and all kinds of things but when you look at data it becomes objective like okay let's you know disagreements aside let's just look at what's actually going on here and that that interaction can happen between you and your wife interaction can be happened between you and employee it can happen between a coach and a client all of these things right like it's it and that's where you know I don't think data is the end all be all answer to everything. But man it's a great tool when it's used correctly in the right context. And uh that's you know really exciting about what you guys are doing. I love the B2B angle and congratulations on all the uh the fundraising last question for you is what what do you need right now you know if if people want to reach out to you or if you want to hear from people what um what what is important for you right now.

Yeah well thank you well personally to and to tie a bow around this part we just covered my HRV has now actually come back to pre uh pre-fatherhood levels and so having that data helped me uh the business has not slowed down it's only increased in speed but I feel like having the data allowed me to course correct and make decisions along the way where my health is now the best it's been in a long time. Fitness levels are high and the business and everything is going extremely well but not for lack of work. And uh but anyways what's important to me right now is that this is a um like you said it's an inflection point in our story where um we have more resources than we've ever had before to better serve all the people we're trying to serve and um the scalability of our model is it's so much lower lower friction, higher velocity than it has ever been before. And so right now sort of um from a business perspective and from a personal perspective it's like let's pour gasoline on this fire which maybe sounds like a violent way of thinking about it but basically like add add fuel and really get out there and serve people. And so our main focus right now is empowering other businesses whether this is um tech companies or wellness companies or fitness companies um mental health fitness um etc to better serve their clients and members uh by making it easier for them to access more data about the body and serve up more personalized um content and experiences but also show that things are working because like let's be honest improving health and wellness and fitness is hard and it takes work and there isn't a magic pill or magic bullet solution today um and so helping people stay motivated helping them stay engaged um helping them get better results with less effort is a big part of our mission and by partnering with other businesses that we feel like that's like the way forward for us.

Awesome well said Jason uh where uh where do people get a hold of you where would you like them to go online?

Yeah yeah I'm uh you can find me on LinkedIn Jason Moore um Spren is uh the best place to find out more about us S-P-R-EN.com and uh yep you can find lots of info there and get in touch with our team um we're also happy to hear from everybody if you ever want to shoot us an email like either to our support at uh email addresses or info at or whatever it is our team is loves to hear about people's journeys um but yeah we're really grateful as well to just kind of be aligned with our personal values and and the things we get to do every day. So um thanks for sharing this story with the world.

Oh thank you man this has been a lot of fun and I love geeking out on this stuff and and getting insights on where the advancement of it is going and I think it's really valuable for people to sit down and hopefully they don't mind us geeking out a little bit uh because it it is uh it is fun. So anyway it's great having you really appreciate you spending an hour with me Jason congratulations on all the success so far and uh I'm really excited to see where you guys are going. So ladies and gentlemen, Jason Moore. Awesome thanks Eric thanks everyone hey wait don't leave yet this is your host Eric Malzone and I hope you enjoyed this episode of Future of Mittis. 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 iTunes Spotify Castbox 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 we put a lot of work into we want to make sure that as many people are getting value out of it as possible. Lastly if you'd like to learn more or get in touch with me simply go to the futurofitness 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 future of fitness have a great day