The New Science of Aging: Why Your Organs Age at Different Rates with Paul Coletta

Age is the leading risk factor for chronic disease. It outweighs poor diet, tobacco use, and physical activity combined. We are literally programmed to age and die. But what we haven't known until very recently is that aging isn't synchronous. Your organs age at different rates. And often one or two organs become vulnerable long before the rest of you. We usually don't die because our entire body gets old. We die from failure or disease of a specific organ, generally the heart, the brain. And so if we want to understand and manage aging, we need to measure it at the organ level and find the organ aging fastest. You're only as healthy as your oldest organ.

All right, here we go. Paul Colletta, welcome to the future of fitness, man. Thank you. Thanks for having me, Eric. It's uh I'm I've been dying to have this interview. It's been uh I mean that's not a good use of term, but it what you guys are doing is so unique. And uh I love your mindset. We'll talk about the closed loot health system and how you guys are addressing the now what problem and all of your background. It's a fascinating field. And I feel like for our industry specifically, it's something that needs to be on the radar. Because as this evolves and you guys are pushing this forward pretty fast, it's gonna be a huge asset. Like, you know, there's there's just we I talk about constantly, Paul, about like this convergence of health and wellness and fitness. It's all coming into one thing. We can't like separate them into silos anymore. Like it's all one piece that is human, right? What it means to be human and to be healthy and live a long time. And uh, you guys are doing something really cool at Vero. So let's start with this. Uh, we have to define a thing before we talk about a thing. So proteomics, that is the essential core part of what Vero does. I mean, there's a lot of things you guys do around that, but that's kind of the the meat of it. So, what is proteomics exactly? And then part two of that is like, how'd you get into this?

Well, thank you for the question. And I have to admit, about three years ago, I didn't know what proteomics was. And uh and going sort of down this path of learning it, I'm neither MD nor PhD, but I'll explain it as best I can. It's basically the study of proteins. And I've learned that we have something like 25,000 gene-coding proteins in the human body. And what makes them so powerful in what we're going to talk about is proteins are the building blocks of our body. They're the actual bricks of the body. Unlike DNA, which is the blueprint, and unless there's a mutation, it doesn't really change. That measures sort of your predisposition. Proteins are real-time reporters of the function and health of the organs, which is are the components of our system. So super important and a big part of what differentiates what we're going to talk about and what we're building from everybody else.

And how did you uh how'd you get into this, dude? I mean, you have, you didn't, like you said, you haven't been in the health span space traditionally or in the science space traditionally, but you have been have a really strong consumer-facing portfolio of experiences. So yeah, walk us through that journey.

Well, I had made a transition about three years prior to starting this out of something else I was very passionate about, which is health in general, but nutrition, you know, and reimagining a broken food system. And I had decided to take a few years off on what I called my listening tour and sort of like figure out what I was gonna do next. It was a three-year listening tour, and you and I were just talking about traveling. I traveled, and I just sort of opened my mind and my heart to what I wanted to do next. And I had come to the conclusion of two things. One, I didn't want to do food again. I had given, you know, decades to the food industry, and I still love it, but that's not what I wanted to do. I was really interested in playing at this intersection between health and artificial intelligence because I believed it was potentially one of the most powerful things that were happening. And I kind of put it out there to all my friends. And a dear friend who lives in Florence, his name's Marcus Okumas, uh, said, Hey, there's this thing at Stanford, and he knew I was one of these optimizers that was always taking my blood. There's this uh, there's this technology at Stanford, and do you want to go try it? And I said, sure. And I went and I was the fifth person to try what is now the Vero assay, a sort of a frontline assessment of our product. And I took it and it identified that I had an accelerated or aged kidney, and I didn't believe it. And I went to my cardiologist and said, take a look at my kidney. My blood was all asymptomatic, my creatinine, my GFR, all the things we traditionally look at to measure the current health of a kidney. And he said, Yeah, you have a, he he did an ultrasound on my kidney, said you have a large venal cyst, which turned out to be benign and isn't so unusual for somebody at my age. I'm I am 63. It said my kidney was seven years older, significantly accelerated. So I was like, holy shit, we've got something here. Now, Marcus had already been working on, with Tony, my co-founder, we'll talk about in a minute, had already been working on securing the technology to take it out for drug discovery. But he and I started a conversation about wouldn't this be amazing if we could bring it direct to consumer and build what we're calling a predictive healthcare comp uh company, a predictive care company. And it was amazing that this found something that traditional blood didn't. And I that that got my attention and that started this journey.

You know, the uh I want to touch on what the word that I think is really important there is predictive. You know? Because when I look at like all the testing we have available now to at the consumer level, like obviously blood panels is ubiquitous, right? You can get them from a hundred different places and different interpretation platforms and which is great. And it's getting more and more accessible. The price is going down and down, it's excellent. But it gives you a snapshot in time, right? Of just where you're at right now.

Right.

And it's great. You it's a great diagnostic. You can do a lot with it, of course. And then we have genetic testing, right? Which uh, you know, used to be millions of dollars to do. Now it's, you know, a couple hundred bucks. You can get your DNA tested and you can get a report. And that's more of like, okay, this is the cards I was dealt. And then you have all the other stuff, right? We have the gut biomes, like you know, I were joking, like uh, you know, now your toilet can tell you how your gut biome is doing and a lot of different health factors. But none of it is truly predictive, right? It's you you get some information, maybe you can extrapolate out, but maybe give us the lay of the land. How do you see proteomics sitting with all these different uh biometric testing capabilities that we have now? And is it adjacent to, is it complementary to? Like, yeah, what what's the how does it fit into the the big picture here?

Yeah, I think it's complementary in many ways, but I think it's also extremely differentiated. And let me start by just saying our assay doesn't diagnose anything. It is not diagnostic. And most of the tests you mentioned are diagnostic. They are looking for something that is in a current state of dis-ease or discord in the body. This is predictive, and I can tell you a little bit about how the model works. So, again, this was developed at Stanford by my co-founder, head of the neuroscience department there, Tony Weiss-Carey, is sort of the godfather of proteomics and has been, you know, at this for a very long time. His lab developed this assay by looking at a subset of the UK Biobank. So UK Biobank is about 600,000 people. We took, Tony's lab took 45,000 people. These are healthy individuals, over a 17-year window. UK Biobank is 17 years, and measured their proteomic signatures of that cohort. They will, through a simple blood test, one vial of blood, if I took your blood, we would look at Eric's proteins. We're measuring about 11,000 of your 25,000 proteins in that assay. And we're going to look at 11 of your organs. So we're taking proteomic signatures from your blood, we're matching it to people that are your age in that cohort. And then we track outcomes over that population over a 17-year period. So we are looking 17 years out at what happened to people that had proteomic signatures that were very similar to yours. Now, nobody's doing that. That's a very huge data set. That's why it was, when it published, it was put on the cover of Nature Journal and really sort of breakthrough. And it's incredibly predictive because it's looking at disease risk, relative risk at an organ level over a 17-year window. It's not telling you what's going on. I mean, it is telling you what's going on today because it is this real-time reporter. But more interestingly and more important, it's predictive. And it's telling you what is likely to happen if you don't do something about it. Now, you mentioned these, I mean, there are a ton of biological clocks on the markup.

Right, right.

Most all of them are DNA methylation. And you talked about DNA. My friend Eric or my friend uh Dean Ornish always says to me, Paul, DNA is uh your predisposition, but it's not your destiny, right? There's something you can do about it. Proteins measure what's actually happening in your body. And this assay measures what will happen, likely happen, if you don't at the organ level. Does that make some sense?

It makes a ton of sense. I just have a million threads I want to pull on that.

Pull them all.

So what what are so you mentioned 11? What what are what are the 11, if you can name off the top of your head?

Okay, I'm gonna name them and I'm gonna mess this up because it's like if I had 11 children. Okay, it's it's uh heart and brain. And those are the two most important, and I'll come back and talk about why. Kidney, lung, adipose tissue, immune is actually an organ, the immune system. Did I mention kidney? That's mine.

Yeah, yeah.

That's my accelerated organ. And I'm I'm forgetting the others. The ones that we aren't measuring right now that I'm super interested in adding to the assay are skin, our largest organ. You can imagine what skincare companies would do to kind of measure pre-and-post a, let's say, a skin cream. And I'm really interested in women's health. I think there's not enough happening for women's health and like ovary and breast health as an organ is something I'm super interested in. And it's just not part of the assay now, but I think very soon here we will figure out how to bring that in and make it its own, its own clinical tool.

Yeah. Well, we'll put more detail in the notes too. But the uh Okay, so I get a vial of blood. Um, I get this report. Uh it says that um to you know, my wife's non-surprise that my brain is aging fast, right?

Um little a little I know about you so far, I I doubt that, but go ahead.

Yeah, thank you. So what do I do? Like what I mean, it's you know, you and I have talked about this. It's like the I call it the now what problem, which has been, you know, people get delivered up all this information in their wearables and you know, it's alarming like, ah, your sleep sucks. Okay, great. Thank you. Now I'm just stressed about it. But like, you know, if I find out my brain is aging faster than it should be compared to my age cohort, what can I do about it? Like, or is it just something that I have to sit here and worry about?

Well, uh, that's the key to what we're building. And it's what you and I have talked about, and you've I've heard you talk about this the closed, the need for a closed loop health system. In other words, let me define that. Bridging health insights or health data to targeted action. It needs to be actionable. And then here's the big part measuring the response, a validated health outcome. That's the closed loop system. And then a system that learns at the end of one level, your personal biology. We're not talking population, we're talking ERIC. Your biology is learning and you're repeating those assays. You're testing, you're intervening at the organ and cell level. I'd like to get into that because we now have cell level resolution within the organ. And then we're closing the loop by measuring a positive organ outcome or a measured response, the efficacy of that intervention. And if it didn't work, if we don't see it, then we go again. Let's try something else. Okay, that's the closed loop, longitudinal biology learning system that Vero is building. And we're calling that Vero Compass. And we're saying the future of health is not diagnostic, it's directional. It guides action. And the clinician, the live clinician, the human in the loop is a very important part of this. And I don't want to miss that either. We are building this to include a clinician, AI supported, but a clinician in the loop.

Yeah, oh, that's great. And so sticking in this brain health one, if I find out that my brain is aging, you know, uh significantly faster than my other organs, what are some of the interventions or what's maybe what's the experience that you guys have for the user or the consumer that's going through this? Like, am I, you know, going to be stacked up on some medications? Am I going to be supplementing? Um, tell me to go to the gym more, sleep better?

Well, there there are three buckets of interventions that we are curating, I'll use that word, that are going to be very evidence-informed. Some of them will be research grade, but these are evidence-informed interventions. And I'll call out the three buckets. And I'm just going to use my own. I've been working with the Vero Compass personally for about a year and a half. I'll talk about my interventions and what's been working. So the first bucket is lifestyle. And I know a lot of people roll their eyes when I say lifestyle. These are the five pillars of sleep, movement, nutrient-dense food, social connection, and managing stress, right? If you don't get those right, and I think you'll agree with me, nothing else is really going to move the needle.

100%.

You got to get those right. And so let's say, let's take something like sleep. I'm pretty good at getting my seven to eight hours of sleep. I'm I'm blessed. I'm lucky that that's. But my deep sleep is usually around 10 or 11%. And you ideally want deep sleep to be closer to 20% of your total. So it's not just number of hours, it's quality of sleep. And what I'm learning about that is that is really what flushes neurotoxins from the brain and mitigates risk about around neurodegenerative disease. So that deep sleep is critical. And so working with a patient or working with a varomember to increase the quality of that sleep and how you actually go about doing that with some pretty unique uh methodologies. That's one. And that's the lifestyle bucket is what we're working with Biograph on right now. We have a cohort that we're building with Biograph, a concierge clinic. It's our first clinical partner. We're going to announce a second one in about two weeks that is going to be focused on a brain. We're focused on heart with biograph. Uh, but we're very focused on lifestyle with them. The second bucket is supplementation and very N of one stacks, at very particular, these are going to be probably compounded stacks of supplements based on your biology, right? Not, not, hey, take, take five hundred, you know, take uh 10 grams of creatine, which is what I take every day. Take 10 grams of creatine, it's gonna be, you know, take these five supplements in exactly these. And again, we're gonna measure the response. And the last one is the one I'm maybe most excited about. And these are therapeutics, these are molecules, these are FDA regulated molecules, in some cases off-label. So I'll give you an example there. I have seen, there's not a lot of conclusive human studies, but there are quite a number of animal models. And yes, we're not mice, but there is some evidence that I've seen that hasn't been published yet, that trzepatide, the triple agonist, the GLP1, taken in a subminimal, subminimum dose, I'm taking 1.5 milligrams a week, has a very positive outcome on the brain. And I've seen it in my own, my own Vero results. My own Vero results were kind of in the yellow range, meaning that it was a my brain was aligned age-wise with my body. I've moved it into the resilient, you know, we we measure organs' health as resilient, aligned, or accelerated. An accelerated organ is one that's older than your chronological age. A resilient organ is one that is younger. I've moved from aligned on my brain to resilient with this and 10 grams of creatine. I'm taking, that's my stack for my brain. Been 10 grams of creatine, very researched, very safe. Again, trisepatide, very safe. Not a lot of human studies showing organ outcomes beyond its own label effect. You know, we're measuring GLP1s now by weight loss. Like, wouldn't we love to know what's going on in our biology beyond that? And I think we're gonna, I'm very optimistic that we are gonna be one of the companies to show clinical evidence of potentially the impact of trzepatide on brain health. TBD. Yeah. I'm teasing out something we're looking at. I like it. But uh, that's been my stack. That's been my intervention stack, and I'm seeing all 11 organs moving slowly but but solidly up and to the right into the resilient mode. Now I want to talk about brain. One of the things Tony's work has shown is the brain is the gateway organ. What happens to the brain in terms of organ health affects all the organs. It is the most distributed organ in the human body. Maybe you could argue the immune system is also very distributed. But the brain is, and if you go back to Tony's work, is really what he calls the gateway health span organ. And I'm seeing that as my brain moves, the rest of my organs are moving in a positive direction.

That makes total sense. You know, and fundamentally, I think, you know, one of the things that irks me about uh this longevity industry, which I overall think is good. Like we're getting people in a better mindset than like, hey, you just go work out for a couple weeks or a year. And no, this is like a lifelong journey. I think that's fundamentally that mind shift is really important. I don't like the term. I think it comes with a lot of weight. But the issue that I have with a lot of these longevity protocols, right? I'm using my air quotes here, is we don't know if it's actually working. And you can't like, okay, so I get supplements that uh people want me to try out that are longevity-based supplements, right? I'm like, okay, well, if I was gonna pay for this, we're talking about 150 bucks a month, right, over years, if I want. But I don't know if this is gonna work until I'm like 80 or 90, maybe. Right. And then what was and was this the factor that actually changed anything? So I think what you guys are doing here is like, okay, we can actually try these things out and then predict into the future of whether or not this is actually working and if it's worthwhile. But the stuff you're talking about, creatine, sleep, sure's appetite's new, right? I know about that one. But this is all stuff that we've kind of known for a while.

Yeah.

So it's it's important.

Yeah, I mean, prediction with measured response is, I mean, that that's a breakthrough. That is a moonshot, that's a breakthrough through, that's what Vero is working on. And, you know, I I I would come back to sort of the big picture for us. So we've talked about Vero as a predictive health company. We're on a mission to end age-related chronic disease. And we believe we can do that today by measuring organ decline early and then guiding precise intervention before disease transition begins. And, you know, I I uh this was something I learned early on, you know, that kind of can ground us maybe a little in why organ health is the key to improving health span. But what we've known for a long time is that age is the leading risk factor for chronic disease. It outweighs poor diet, tobacco use, and physical activity combined. We are literally programmed to age and die. But what we haven't known until very recent. Is that aging isn't synchronous. Your organs age at different rates. And often one or two organs become vulnerable long before the rest of you. We usually don't die because our entire body gets old. We die from failure or disease of a specific organ, generally the heart, the brain. And so if we want to understand and manage aging, we need to measure it at the organ level and find the organ aging fastest. Understand what's driving it, then take organ-specific action. That's what we mean by organ health. And I like to say you're only as healthy as your oldest organ. Sure. Does that make sense?

Makes total sense. And say that mission one more time because I think that's uh that that's power. That's that's something, right?

Yeah. Yeah. We are on an on a mission. Vero's on a mission to end age-related chronic disease. Okay. Age-related chronic disease. Age-related chronic disease, which is what most disease, we're no longer, you know, victims to infectious disease. So the ways we would die are acute organ failure, not chronic organ failure over a period of long time.

That was my next question is how should we die if we're not too?

You know, like my grandmother did at 101, her heart stopped.

Yeah.

You know, very, very healthy and up until the end. My my grandmother was kind of my my guide into this world of I I'm with you, I don't like longevity health span. I want to die young, only as late as possible. Right? Yeah. Like my grandmother. She died young as late as possible. She danced with me at her hundred, her hundredth birthday party. Like, you know, I mean, she her feet were on my feet. I was holding her up, but she danced with me at my 12th birthday party. Yeah.

Yeah. That's so cool. I I love that mission, man. I really like it. So I mean, do you are are you with me like longevity seems to have a weight to it now where it's a little biohacky. It's a little like well, it's wealthcare, right? Which actually brings up a good topic as well. It's like I think when people think of longevity, they think of old rich white dudes, right? I say this all the time. My words, not anyone else's, but kind of true, right? They think of the Brian Johnson's, they think of like people willing to spend $200,000 a year for, you know, all of the stuff, right? The peptides, the blood work, the da-da-da-da. But it it sucks because if you can't afford it, you're like, well, that sounds great.

I would love all that, but it's just not in my Yeah, I don't wanna I don't want to yuck anyone's yum. Like everybody do do what you're gonna do. But I mean, look, I for one, don't want to live forever. I want to be vital as long as possible. I want to be able to climb Mount Tamil Pius, which is my Marin mountain here. That's my chapel up there. I want to be able to continue to hike to the top of Tam until I'm, you know, well into my 90s. And yeah, I I uh there's a lot of there's a lot of snake oil being sold out there. And I'm hoping something like Vera will come along and kind of separate the wheat from the chaff, right? Let's validate some of these, some of these protocols and some of these molecules to see if they're actually really changing our biology for the better. Uh and but there's just a lot of marketing. You know, my first hurdle is is it safe? You know, I use 10 grams of creatine because it's probably one of the most researched supplements there are. And the second is, does it work? Does it actually work? You know, I have a friend, Jordan Schlein, that would uh often talk to me about safety first, then is it efficacious? Is it working? And then it's a gamble of your money and time, right? Then it just comes down to do you wanna do you wanna gamble that money? And in the US, we don't have healthcare. We have sick care and we have wealth care. No doubt. Right? We have sick care and we have wealth care. True healthcare doesn't exist. And I don't believe that we're gonna fix this broken healthcare system anytime soon. So our goal is to help you leapfrog it altogether. Let's keep you out of it. And the reason I don't see it getting fixed anytime soon, and I hope to be wrong, is because the profit incentives are so aligned with sick care. The pharmaceutical and insurance companies are making a lot of money off of people that are living longer today, but sicker. We are great at managing disease. We're living longer and sicker, and the insurance companies and the pharmaceutical companies are making a lot of money on it. So I don't see it changing anytime soon. So let's keep you and I out of that system all together. Let's leapfrog it and break the progression to chronic disease. That's the mission around Vero. That's that's what we have to do. That's what gets me up every morning and pumps me up about this work.

I'm all about it. I am all about it. You know, I have uh Stephen.

We're gonna get you the Vero assay soon, Eric. You're on my next cohort.

Sign me up. Stephen Powell, uh, who's been around and around this industry for a long time, investor and builder, and uh, you know, he calls it uh he's very mission-driven at this stage of his life, and he calls it consumer-driven healthcare, where it's like it's coming from the bottom up, right? Like we're not gonna push this with the current, we're not gonna push this down through, you know, uh legislation and getting the insurance companies to modify their incentives. I just do, I just feel like that's too far gone. It's just we and I think now what we're starting to see is uh and AI has been a big driver of it too, right? Like people can actually start to get their own, you know, whether it's perfect or not, it's not, but it's getting better. Like people are referencing that first. So they're going to their doctor and they're well educated because maybe they had some blood work done and you know they ran it through ChatGPT and Claude. And and now like this type of stuff, I think is people are willing to spend money or seeing on their health because they realize the alternative is just not effective. Like a 15-minute meeting with your doctor while he's looking on his key typing in his keyboard you know, once or twice a year is just not gonna cut in anymore.

Yeah, and I don't blame the doctors. I mean, they're I never do. They're at the mercy. It's the system. Of the system. Exactly. They're at the mercy of the system.

You guys have been uh some swirling headlines, right? It feels like every few weeks there's something popping up about what Vero's doing. And you know, Tony, you mentioned who's featured uh in Time magazine as one of the top 12, you know, scientific minds in the field of health span. But yeah, walk us through like the last, you know, this year up to date. Like you guys just it seems like every time I look and I check in on LinkedIn on you or something, there's like a new headline coming out. So what's what's going on? It's moving fast.

Well, I think the scientific and clinical community are really what's driving this. They are seeing that there's a need for actionable biomarkers of health. That's what we are. We're not a, again, a diagnostic, but a biomarker of health. And the actionability around this and the measured response is what has, I think, the scientific and clinical community very excited. So, yeah, you mentioned a couple of weeks ago, Tony, my co-founder, who developed, whose lab developed this technology at Stanford, he was recognized by Time magazine as one of 12 longevity leaders in 2026, specifically for this work, this organ health uh technology that we are, that Vero is exclusively commercializing. So we have the exclusive license to commercialize it. And uh, you know, I think the reviews and the papers that have been published maybe four over the last two years in Nature, Nature Journal and Nature Medicine, uh, including a really, I would link it to this podcast, the review article that Eric Topel, who collaborates with Tony. Eric Topel wrote a review on this technology specifically and how it's going to change the future. And his new book, Super Agers, has a feature of one of the one of the chapters in Eric Topel's book is about the Vero technology that we're commercializing. So, yeah, I would just come back. I think my goal has been to scientifically and clinically validate this Vero assay as a tool, as a clinically validated, it's already scientifically validated. We've got all the peer-reviewed science there. We're in the process of clinically review validating it, and then becoming the gold standard for clinicians, as opposed to trying to play the marketing game. We're not going to take this out to consumer in a scaled way, probably for another year, year and a half, because we want to get the clinical validation in place. And that's what another thing that I think makes us very different. There's a lot of investors that have said, let's go get it out there, start selling. We want to, we don't want to get ahead of the science in this clinical validation. Yeah, but this this review article in Nature Medicine from Eric Topel is something I would encourage people to read. That's that's brought a lot of attention to uh to what we're doing.

Yeah, right on, man. You know, uh something we we haven't really talked about is your role within this whole thing, right? Like you come from a different background. Um, you know, you obviously have the scientific mind that you're partnering with with Tony. And uh but you bring a very unique and extremely valuable asset to with your experience. And I'm curious, like, out of all the years, you know, we haven't really talked in detail about your background, you know, with Disney and a lot of different things that you've done. You mentioned the food industry, but maybe expand, like, you know, what exactly are some of the things that you've done? What are some of the failures and the wins of your career? And then how is all this experience that you've accumulated over the years now making sense to you in this new role? Like you're bringing so much value to something that you're so obviously passionate and you know, serious about now.

Yeah. Well, I've always been interested in health and biology, starting with my own. Um, I actually am a college dropout in my first year of college. I was a biology major. Okay. And uh I don't know how much I've actually told this story, but my dad is a physicist and was chairman of the physics department in the school I went to. And uh I was his firstborn, and I was supposed to be this, you know, academic uh protege. And I I wasn't. I ended up switching out of biology to business in my second year, and then I just dropped out altogether. Because I what I understood about my myself was that I'm very much a contextual learner. I like to learn while I'm doing something. And I had this opportunity to join the Walt Disney Company. So I dropped out of college, you know, but much to my father's disappointment, uh, as you can imagine. And I go to work for the Walt Disney Company for a decade. And uh and I was what they called an intrapreneur. Um, I was part of a small group that my boss at the time, Steve Burke, CEO now of uh CBS, wait, CBS Universal? Yeah. He was my boss at the time. I mean, this is twenty, thirty years ago. He had put together a group to explore ways uh to extend Disney into consumer businesses. So Disney's where I learned this power of storytelling, how to connect with people emotionally, build products that people actually fall in love with, you know, and uh I could do a whole separate podcast on that. That was really my college degree, is a decade at Disney, working under people as brilliant as Steve Burke. For that, from there, I continued my path in entertainment with Viacom, working on extending their entertainment brands, Nickelodeon, MTV, Paramount. I was I was VP of brand there. Then I had a stint with HP because I really wanted to get into a tech, kind of a hardcore tech environment. It was more of an engineering environment. There I was responsible for product marketing, specifically for their printing division and innovation. Um, and then my big shift was to move to food. You know, I talked about loving the food industry and health. That's something that's very personal to me. I've always been passionate about. So I spent the next 15 years building food brands, Jumba Juice, Pinkberry, Palm Wonderful, and then my last 10 years as CEO of Urban Remedy, working to reimagine this broken industrialized food system with my core belief that food is healing.

With all this background that you have here, and um because you know, obviously you're you're raising some funds for this, right? And I'm curious, like, how are those conversations with investors gone? Like, you know, I've I've talked to some investors within the uh, you know, health, fitness, wellness space over the year, and they say everything's kind of slow, right? Everyone's very everyone doesn't understand the space. So they're in, you know, post-COVID world versus a pre-COVID world, like things are just a little more um, a little more cautious, I guess. So how are you finding when you're when you're out there talking to investors and and pitching and working with partners and all that stuff? And you're you're bid you're building the business, essentially is your role, right? Yeah. How's that going with something as what seems to be very revolutionary in what you're doing?

Yeah. Well, as you know, CEO and founder, I think I've raised close to 70, 80 million dollars in my career, and you're always raising. And it's sort of a love-hate relationship I have with fundraising. We were very fortunate at Vero, we raised our seed capital with uh Kostla Ventures. And and specifically, it was very this mission that we're on and this technology we're commercializing was very interesting to Vinode Kostla. So I actually took that seed capital. It was a fairly large seed capital round, and I took it because he uh he promised to be personally involved. And, you know, it's the first thing I would say to anybody listening is you really want value-added capital, you know, beyond the capital. Something like this attracted a lot of tier one investors instantly when we were on the cover of, you know, the science was on the cover of nature. It it was a it was a fairly easy round to raise, but finding the right investor, you know, the one that's really gonna open doors for you and challenge your thinking. Because fundraising, you know, it's ultimately searching for aligned conviction. You're not searching for universal approval, right? Most pitches, as you know, are dead ends. They don't, you know, meet the fund's mandate or check size or stage of growth. And so you're looking for aligned conviction, you know. You know, the the right investor probably already has some version of your worldview. Your job is to find them, give them enough evidence to strengthen that conviction and not only what the product, but your ability to you can uniquely realize that vision is. Yeah. And investors don't create that conviction. You have to bring it into the room. Yeah. So we're out for our series A right now. Just started. We've got some really interested uh funds leaning in, and uh, you know, this will be our A round and uh hope to have that a term sheet in place by the end of the year. So anybody listening that wants to, we're only we're only sort of looking at potential leads. So yeah, anybody that wants to make a warm intro, I'm open.

You know, it's interesting. I haven't I haven't talked about this at all publicly, but uh I'm looking to raise some money for the first time my entire career, right? So having questions about yeah. First time. I I I given your background, I I've always been an SMB guy, right? I've always bootstrapped everything. Um, you know, I've never even thought about it, but you know, someone's some people close to me like you should really get some capital and pursue this quickly. And we can talk about it offline. But that that aligned conviction, and it's like, okay, well, how do you find those people, right? Like how do you uh how do you seek them out, qualify them, and then in that same note present something to the way where you're actually pulling that conviction out of them, right? It's gotta be art and science, mostly art, right? I would admit.

Yes. And I mean, it's a great question. And I'll just tell you what I've learned that raising capital is deeply, deeply relationship-driven. I've never raised a dollar that hasn't come through some form of trusted warm intro, you know, an existing relationship. Never. I mean, I can't tell you how many thousands of cold emails I sent out early in my career, and not one of them resulted in a term sheet. It always came from somebody that knew somebody that they knew had this, you know, aligned view of what I was building. So capital follows trust much more than founders want to believe. You know, I like to say the deck matters, the story matters, but before you spend another hour perfecting slide, you know, two or three, spend it figuring out who can credibly get you in the room. And I would say start building those relationships years before you need the money. Don't wait until you're fundraising to meet an investor. So Vinod Kosla, I had been having a conversation with him for almost two years. He was trying to recruit me into the funds, one of the funds to run an existing company. And I kept telling him, no, you know what? I wanna, I wanna wait and and I want this to be my something I'm founding or co-founding. And it was really kind of natural to go back to him and say, here it is, this is it, this is the thing. So that relationship that ended up in a s in the seed capital was nurtured over a couple of years.

It's uh and that's advice I've gotten from advisors too in this particular and there's a lot of people listening to the show who are who have raised money, have tried to raise money, are raising money. You know, it's it's constant in this field.

It is.

But you know, I had this beautiful deck in this business plan, right? And uh I sent it over to Hox. He's like, there's nothing about you here. Like this is if people don't know you or your background why you're here. Yes. And that was and for someone who, you know, I think a lot of people maybe there's a lot of people who have no problem talking about themselves. No problem, right?

I have a question for you. I know you're doing podcasts, but what's your superpower? This is one of my favorite questions to ask entrepreneurs that I'm coaching. What is your and most entrepreneurs can't name their superpower, but what is your superpower?

You know, man, I'm a really good people. Like I generally am very curious about people, and that's whether it's on this podcast or if I run into somebody at a conference or if we're having dinner or if I'm in line at the supermarket. Like, I really am curious about people. And I think that uh curiosity led me down a lot of really cool roads.

Like this podcast.

Yeah. This has been nine years. Yeah. I didn't I paid to do this podcast for five years, Paul. Like, you know, not until the last four years of people were like, hey, I'll sponsor you. I'm like, oh great. Yeah. Sounds great. I didn't know you could do that. Awesome.

Congratulations. Amazing. Well, thank you.

Yeah.

Connect that superpower, connect the dots back to, you know, what you can uniquely bring the world that maybe nobody else can. And if you can convince an investor that that is compelling, the one plus one equals three, the Eric plus the big idea is going to be bigger than the big idea. That's the magic. That's that's and you you're you're looking for that aligned conviction.

Yeah. Well, thank you for the uh free mentoring lesson on record here. That's been awesome. So, okay, let's put put me into the forward. So it's 2026. Let's say by 2030, because it's a nice number. Like, what what's the vision for Vero?

Like, where do you think it's we're still all here, right? Humanity is still exactly. We'll assume that. Yeah. 2030, where are we? Well, we are the gold standard. Vero is the gold standard clinical biomark, clinically validated tool that measures a biological response at the end of end of one level. Like we are your personal compass. Vero is your personal health compass. It's guiding and directing the uh behavior. You know, at the end of the day, that's really what we're selling. We're we're selling behavioral change. It's guiding and and and directing the behavioral change that you need to make to make sure you're, you know, able to dance with your great grandson or great daughter on your 100th birthday. Like, not just be alive, but be vital to the very end. You know, that's and and and not die of a chronic disease, you know, age-related chronic disease. I just, I just think we will look back and see that that happened at this inflection point, whether it's Vero or somebody else, uh, or you know, most likely a collection of technologies that have come together that again drive health span.

Yeah, well said. Well said. Well, a last question I always ask on this show, Paul, is you know, what what do you need help with? And specifically, like when you look at the audience that we have here in the community, you have of you know fitness industry leaders, um, you know, now the emerging longevity clinics, people who are in health sciences, practitioners, like what do you need help with and what would you like to hear from people about?

Well, we're recruiting our member base. You know, it's already thousands. And I would love to get people on our wait list for early access. Um, you know, there's going to be a uh qualification process to do that, but varobioscience.com, I mean, I would love to get that member base up so that we have the right cohorts to go through this clinical validation uh like we're doing with Biograph. And uh I don't know. Uh that's the you know, introductions, companies that we should be talking to as good partners. I'm always sort of keeping my eye out for strategic partnerships that we uh that maybe some of your listeners think, oh man, you know, this would be perfect for Vero uh to validate this, clinically validate this uh this you this tool.

Yeah, I can think of at least a dozen.

Yeah, great.

At least people have been on the show already, right? And then probably uh, you know, hundreds more. Um okay and where would you like people to to go? Do you want I know you're pretty active on LinkedIn?

Yeah, the only I mean find me on LinkedIn, and uh that's really the only platform I'm out talking about this. I'm not on any of these other social media platforms uh for my own health span.

Yeah, I'm I'm the same way.

And go to verovioscience.com and and uh we'll keep you up to date there as well. You know, we're we're gonna have a regular sort of update for people that are sitting on the wait list. Yeah.

Well, you know, Paul, you found yourself in a very exciting place. I mean things are moving very fast. You're sitting on something I think is truly uh special. So, you know, enjoy the ride.

Yeah. Thank you. Thanks for having me, Eric. Really had a lot of fun talking.

Good, good. Ladies and gentlemen, Mr. Paul Coletto.

Thanks.