JacobPeters

LubaJacob Peters, welcome to The Luba Show. You are one of the most visionary, best storytellers and most positive people I know, and it's really great to see you move into the new office. And it's really funny, because it's a full circle for me, because 12 years ago, I actually interned here in this building, at Yelp, exactly. So it's really fun to, you know, kind of go down memory lane, see the lobby. It's one of the first skyscrapers in San Francisco. Dope office. Congratulations.Link

JacobGorgeous and gilded. And gilded. Yes, it's gilded gold, for those...Link

LubaOh yeah, that's true. That's true. The lobby is gold. Yeah, yeah. Well, you're definitely the person that I would expect to get gilded gold offices. Okay, but actually, on a serious note, I want you to bring me back to your origin story. You're from Virginia. Tell me how you grew up. What were you like when you were growing up?Link

JacobWell, I feel like I am not anything like I am now. And I think my biggest conclusion, as I've been on this, I guess I like to call life, like, a consciousness expansion journey, is how much the subconscious is really running the show. Like, truly, truly, truly. It's a lesson I feel like I keep learning every month, every week, harder and harder and more and more deeply, which is the degree to which the iceberg under the surface is really changing the way we process every single piece of information that comes our way. And I think for the first maybe two decades of my life, that was running me on autopilot.Link

It can be a very powerful autopilot. Something I think a lot about is this idea of, like, clean fuel versus dirty fuel. Or, like, what is the subconscious iceberg, if you will, under the hood that is pushing you forward? And in some cases, it can be a chip on your shoulder, subconscious childhood wounds, things that bothered you, got under your skin, maybe things you didn't even really realize were happening at the time and affecting you so deeply. And that can give you, like, a chip-on-the-shoulder energy, which can propel you to want to do things in life, like become an entrepreneur, push the world forward, prove something to people. Or, if you get out of that paradigm, that way of operating, and you kind of understand the subconscious patterns and rackets that drive you, I think you get to this place of operating from a higher level of consciousness, where you're feeling more abundant, in control, loving, and, like, aligning your actions and your interpretations of every moment with passion and something that can really help and impact people, versus you trying to prove something to a wounded inner part of yourself.Link

So the whole thread throughout, I guess, you know, the upbringing in my life, was that I was operating from this, like, terrible place of just lack and protection, protectionism. People used to say I was robotic and aloof. I mean, part of it is maybe the mild Asperger's, which I found out later, in a couples therapy session with my ex-fiancée, that I had. But I think in fact it was actually just me being afraid to show my true colors and my true self and put myself out into the world, because I felt ashamed of who I was, and was very fearful of failure, fearful of judgment.Link

I remember, growing up in preschool, I used to put my backpack in front of my face when my mom went to pick me up, because I was, like, embarrassed for her to see my face. Like, that story is basically, you know, the vibe that I think I carried into early life, childhood, formative years in school, and made me feel like I had to prove something to the world, which is what catalyzed my early businesses. So it's been a dance with the subconscious, if you will. That's how I now choose to look at my life in the rearview.Link

LubaSo I know you've been doing a lot of diving deeper into your subconscious, with the retreats that we've talked about, with all your personal work that you've been doing. But to me, I met you, we were just talking about it, almost exactly to the T, five years ago. Another full circle moment. Yeah, another full circle moment, which was also a time and place, Launch House to Loom, a really fun time, COVID times. And actually, even already back then, you felt like a very abundant and positive person to me. So I know you've gotten the lingo for the subconscious, for childhood wounds and all those things, in the last couple of years. But when would you say you recognized that your drive was coming from a place of lack? When was that moment in time?Link

JacobInteresting. You know, I don't know if it's a moment in time as much as it is a constant tension. Like, I would be lying if I said I have, or ever will, reach a level of subconscious mastery and understanding where the conscious, like, abundance mindset is fully driving the show. I think it's always, like, an oscillation, and you have to be conscious of, like, where you are in every moment. Where are you? Where are you right now? Where am I right now? I think genuinely, I'm feeling like I'm vibrating pretty high. But the challenge is, like, you can get too wrapped up in that narrative, and then the ego is this, like, pernicious snake that, like, you know, invisibly will rear its head, and it'll pop up when you least expect it.Link

But I genuinely feel like you and I are talking to each other as old friends and elevated souls at the moment. And all this, like, you know, can sound a little bit, like, buzzwordy or woo-woo. But, like, I think, you know, one of the interesting things about life is, like, once you develop a language and a framework for things, it's so much easier to become aware. And one of the other ways I feel like I've started to develop this awareness is this concept of interoceptive awareness. Have you heard of this phrase?Link

LubaIt's something related to body awareness, right? Kind of body awareness?Link

JacobExactly, right. So there's, like, psychological awareness, which is, like, what patterns are showing up for me right now? If human meat-computer brains are like a language model that is interpreting every data point from its environment as a prompt. What are the invisible pre-prompts that are running before every single interaction? And in my case, in my old childhood, it was like, you're not good enough, you suck, you have to hide yourself, you're going to get judged, blah, blah, blah. And a lot of those come up for us. So I think part of this work is identifying, what are those pre-prompts running before every situation or conversation or thing that's said to you, and can you get rid of those so that you can embrace reality very neutrally and rationally and abundantly?Link

So that's sort of, like, the world of, I think, subconscious awareness. Then there is interoceptive awareness, which is understanding the biochemical state of your body. And that's obviously what we're all about at Superpower, which is helping people, like, very tactically understand exactly what's happening in your body, subcutaneously, at any point in time. And it's crazy that we just don't have that level of intelligence.Link

LubaThat's why we're here in front of the Superpower backdrop. To really drive the message home.Link

JacobExactly. Our latest marketing message is, like, unlock your new health intelligence. And yeah, I think the ability to tap into that intelligence, like a wisdom, if you will, to know what is happening in your body at any point in time. Biochemically, are you more serotonergic or dopaminergic or GABAergic or acetylcholinergic in a certain moment, which is the dominant state of your neurotransmitters, that shows up with you being a little bit more in fight-or-flight, a little more focused, a little bit more restless and scattered? Are you sleepy? Are you alert, cognizant? Like, all that is directly derivative of the biochemical state. And you can start to get an awareness. Is your glucose spiking, or is it crashing? Are you a little bit hungry? Yeah, yeah, yeah.Link

So it's interoceptive. How in tune are you with your body? And I actually think most of us, just by the nature of our digitally tethered world and our digitally tethered, always-on lives, it's a really hard thing to tune into that. And the way that I found to tune into it is through things like Transcendental Meditation, which, for those who don't know, is, like, a way to basically transcend your normal consciousness and put your brain in, like, a brainwave state like theta and delta. That's something in between, like, sleep and restfulness.Link

LubaWhen did you start Transcendental?Link

JacobI started about six months ago. A colleague of mine introduced me to a Stanford professor who coaches CEOs and founders on the art of Transcendental Meditation. You know, he's worked with, like, Marc... you know, between us, or, I guess not between us, because now this is live, it's on the podcast. It's Dreamforce week here in downtown San Francisco, so everything is Salesforce. And apparently Marc Benioff was a client. I think he's on the website, maybe, so it's okay for me to say that. But this guy is basically legit.Link

And, you know, when I started doing TM with him, he had me, like, sacrifice all these, like, rice grains and a banana and stuff to an altar. He taught me a Sanskrit phrase that you repeat. I'm not supposed to tell anyone, so...Link

LubaA mantra.Link

JacobSecret mantra, exactly. You repeat it, like, 500 times. For those who aren't aware of the practice, you do it, like, 500 times over the course of 10, 20 minutes. And, like, you genuinely start, like, hallucinating, at least for me. And I think the more I'm, like, able to be in my body, interoceptively aware, and drop into this, like, different level of consciousness, and, like, really, really intentionally drop into the experience, the more I literally feel like I'm transcending and in a different consciousness. And it's so weird. And I get these, like, downloads.Link

Even just the other day, and then I'll give you back the mic for the next question. But the other day, I got a download during one of my sessions that was literally my future self FaceTiming me. I, like, thought that I was getting a FaceTime call on my iPhone while I'm in this hallucinogenic state of altered consciousness. And it was, like, my future self telling myself, just keep going. Because I was, like, stressing about the company, and it was, like, him telling me, basically, everything's good with Superpower, just keep going. Just keep going. And that was the FaceTime call. And I'm like, wow, that was euphoric, and not something I would have realized could even happen during a meditation practice. So that's been a bit of my journey with meditation.Link

LubaI totally believe in all these things. And what you said about the subconscious, and your subconscious driving your reality, being true, is something that I've also been realizing in the past year or so. Because one of my recent realizations has been that whatever you deeply, deeply want, like your subconscious want, is what you're going to create in your reality. So if you deeply want chaos, you know, there are some people who, no matter what, there's just always some weird stories that happen to them. Their life is chaotic. It's, like, unorderly. But they almost derive a sense of worth and attention from telling other people those stories. Or there are some people who, you know, genuinely, deeply, deeply want to be super impactful, or something like that, and that's actually the reality that drives their life.Link

So I think that the work of recognizing what prompts or pre-prompts drive our subconscious is incredibly powerful. And in my own journey, I've been trying to figure out, you know, what are those preprogrammed beliefs that were coming out of my childhood, what happened during my, like, high school, middle school, college years? And how do you view reality, as you said, in a more neutral way? Because then you can program your mind in the way that you want to program it, and you can tap into building or creating whatever it is that you're doing out of love and positive emotions, versus out of emotions of lack. So I love that you've been on that journey too. I feel like, as you said, that's why we're on a similar wavelength.Link

JacobYes. And there's... you can also get, like, I think, caught up in the, like, haughtiness of it, yeah? Like, H-A-U-G-H-T-I-N-E-S-S, not, like, hottest. But you can get caught up in the hubris of, like, oh, I'm consciously elevated.Link

LubaLike, better. Yeah. But that's ego speaking.Link

JacobExactly, yeah. So it's like a spectrum, and, like, you start to become too conscious, and then, like, the ego will actually push you too far down.Link

LubaI don't think it's too conscious. I actually think you're starting to become more of an asshole. That comes back to, it's like a midwit curve. Yeah. But I want to still get back to your childhood and your story. So you grew up in Virginia. As far as I remember, your dad was in the military. And then another story that I also remember, slash kind of brushed up on my memory, is the fact that you and your brother were selling Legos. So that's where your entrepreneurial spirit got started.Link

JacobYou know, this is literally not scripted, I promise. But, like, I have this in my pocket, on the topic of Legos.Link

LubaWell, it's funny also, because right before I came into Superpower's office, I went to your place, because we're thinking of filming there, and I saw a giant Lego set on your kitchen counter. So I was...Link

JacobYeah, so believe it or not, Lego is a, you know, I think decabillion-dollar company, maybe bigger, and close to 10% of their sales come from adults, like adult fans of Lego.Link

LubaSo I recently bought my first Lego. It was a giant Concorde plane, and me and my boyfriend built the plane, and now it's standing as a statue in the living room. And it was really, really fun.Link

JacobWe'll have to compare collections later. I mean, I have close to a metric ton of Legos in my parents' basement back home.Link

LubaWow. Okay.Link

JacobIn Virginia, yeah. So it's crazy. And that was our first business, was, like, buying and selling Legos online. And we discovered that there was this entire underground Lego economy, where people were buying and reselling bricks.Link

And it got to the point where actually people realized, Lego sets, if you bought every new set that was released yearly, in mint and sealed box, or dead stock, where you didn't open it and kept it in a warehouse, the price appreciation of these sets, because collectors wanted them, and there's only a limited number, they become a scarce asset. You know, just like a house on the cliffs, or gold, or Bitcoin, they appreciate tremendously in value. So if you kept one of every set, you'd actually, like, beat the S&P 500 by, like, crazy orders of magnitude. So people started exploiting this arbitrage, buying, like, dozens of every set, and having millions of asset value on a balance sheet.Link

LubaAnd how old were you doing this?Link

JacobWe were, like, 14 and 15. Okay, yeah. And we almost actually got shut down by the FBI.Link

LubaBy the FBI?Link

JacobYeah, there was, or maybe it was our local police department, I don't know. I like to be dramatic and say it was the FBI. But basically, we posted an ad being like, we're looking for another, like, 14-year-old boy to help us sort Legos.Link

LubaOh, man. Okay.Link

JacobAnd we didn't think anything of it, because we were just innocent kids, you know, internet hacking. And we get all these, like, texts from, you know, a random number, sending us pictures of 14-year-old kids, being like, do you want this one, or do you want this one?Link

LubaOh, wow.Link

JacobAnd we realized it was, like, a sting operation, because we showed it to our parents, and they're like, yeah, this is definitely the police trying to sting you guys, thinking it was, you know, yeah, like a pedophile. So yeah, we almost got the Lego operation shut down by the feds. But we ended up enlisting another neighborhood kid without the Craigslist ad.Link

So anyway, all that being said, Legos were, like, a massive part of my life, and still are to this day. I don't really have much time to build anymore, but I did just buy Lego's most expensive set ever, which is the Star Wars Lego Death Star. So you know the big circular...Link

LubaOh, I think that's the one that I saw in your kitchen.Link

JacobYeah, exactly.Link

LubaHow much is it?Link

JacobI mean, it's, like, 8,000 pieces. It was over $1,000.Link

LubaOh, wow.Link

JacobI pre-ordered it.Link

LubaBalling out.Link

JacobExactly, yeah, yeah. But don't worry, no venture dollars are burned to finance Jacob's Lego hobby. And at our most recent team retreat, we gave everyone these Lego figures.Link

LubaOh my God, that's really cute.Link

JacobYou get a brick for every year. Year one, year two at the company.Link

LubaThat's really cute.Link

JacobAnd believe it or not, I'm actually coming up on year three next week. So not only is it the five-year anniversary of Launch House, it's also the three-year anniversary of Superpower.Link

LubaOkay, so you were building Legos with your brother, then you were arbitraging Legos. So that's where, I guess, the entrepreneurial spirit came through first.Link

JacobI think when you discover your first arbitrage, it's this, like, incredible moment where you realize there's, like, a giant gap between the current state of the world, or your situation or market, and the ideal. And even something as, like, you know, simple as arbs in the Lego market, are like, oh, I can buy this set over here and sell it for three times as much over there. Or, you know, there's this problem that exists that no one's solving, and I can solve it, and people give me money to solve it. Like, these are arbitrages. Like, I guess the fundamental nature of business building is problem solving and arbitrage exploitation. And that's why, you know, all growth channels decay over time. Or, you know, companies have to launch new business lines to inflect TAMs, right? It's all just about, you know, how long can you exploit the arbitrage for? So yeah, I think your first arbitrage moment is a formative moment in the life of every...Link

LubaWhat did it teach you, once you guys started making money with that arbitrage?Link

JacobHonestly, my thought was, like, people are dumb. Like, they're just basically throwing out these incredibly valuable Lego sets at, like, garage sales or estate sales, or donating them to Goodwill, and you could sell them online for, like, 10 to 100x the price, depending on, you know, how rare the figures were of the sets. And it just baffled me that, like, no one took the time to Google what these things are worth. Now, you could say people are busy and don't really have time, or don't know how to sell it, and that's totally fair, and that's why it's the arb, right? Because there's information arbitrage. But I just found it laughable that no one was googling what this stuff was worth.Link

LubaSo why didn't you guys continue that business?Link

JacobI think I discovered girls. No kidding.Link

LubaIs that what it was? But if you discovered girls, you could have been making more money to impress girls.Link

JacobYeah, exactly. So it's all circular. But I think I started falling in love with technology. So I ended up building this thing with my brother, where we realized that people on Twitter, and this was back in, like, I don't know, 2016...Link

LubaWait, wait, wait. People on Twitter? That's already past your college years.Link

JacobI guess early college years, then. So yeah, maybe 2014, I don't know. They were basically tweeting their flight confirmation details. So they'd be like, oh, I'm going to spring break in Cabo, and screenshot their flight confirmation email. And little do they realize, that's basically a password, right? So you can go and edit a travel booking with just a confirmation number and a last name, which is, like, available from the screenshot.Link

So we went out and, like, built a Twitter scraper to find anyone, just with keywords, that had, like, posted a screenshot of their trip details. And we found, like, hundreds of these things. And people were just, like, you know, dumbfounded that they were allowing internet hackers to be able to edit their trips. And, like, we emailed some of the airlines, like, hey, this is actually a security violation. Someone could go in and change the ticket name, or, like, you know, book a rental car on your behalf. Some of the airlines at the time didn't even, like, have a credit card, you know, extra step to add things onto the booking, so you could fuck with people. I mean, it was crazy what you could do with this information. And now, booking emails, when I get them to this day, say, like, do not share, you know, this is basically private. And they didn't even have those caveats, you know, a decade ago. So that was kind of, like, you know, I think one of the first digital experiments that made me realize, wow, everything is hackable.Link

LubaSo what did you guys do with that?Link

JacobWe won a hackathon with it.Link

LubaOkay. You won. Okay, so that's how you discovered your love for... Yeah, exactly. Okay. So you discovered your love for technology. And then you have been building communities for a really long time, because then after school, you built your first data science community in New York, right?Link

JacobShe's done her homework. Yeah. I was, I guess, 21 at the time, so nine years ago, and this is pre-language models, so a bit of a different era. But yeah, I accidentally started what eventually became New York City's biggest community of AI and data science professionals at the time.Link

LubaI like how you're dropping AI, because now, you know, AI is the talk of the town. Before, it was just data.Link

JacobI kid you not, we never said AI. No, AI is the buzzword, you know, retrospectively added, post facto. And yeah, it was just a side project. After work, me and friends from work would get together and read neural net white papers and convnet white papers in coffee shops and Starbucks and stuff, and friends of friends started wanting to come. We started a group chat. They didn't even use WhatsApp at the time. And next thing we know, the thing balloons to 9,000 people. We have a Meetup.com chapter and email list.Link

And it just became very clear that managing this thing was kind of challenging. And one of our sponsors was Microsoft, for our event space. So, you know, they'd give us 5, 10 grand to do pizzas and host events. And as I get talking to the Microsoft leadership, they're basically like, yeah, we have no idea the ROI of this money we're giving you guys. We just hope that it works. And I'm like, that's kind of curious. That's kind of curious. What if you knew, you know, that this was leading to Microsoft Azure spend? And they're like, yeah, that would be great. So the light bulb started going off that there was basically an opportunity to solve that problem in a really big way.Link

And that's what catalyzed my first ever true business, which was a startup. Not just a startup, a real startup. There was an arbitrage. It's like, wow, you guys are throwing a lot of sponsorship dollars around, and you have no idea how it's, you know, connecting with the bottom line. Let's fix that. And my first company, startup, was born. It was called Commsor, and we were building something like Salesforce, but for community and go-to-market teams, to help them centralize all of their community data and make smarter decisions as an org. It was marketing intelligence, and it was a system of record, which is, like, not too dissimilar to, I think, the system of record we're building for the body, the human OS, with Superpower. So there's a lot of parallels.Link

And that company, in my early 20s, started to grow really fast. Quit my job in quick succession. I did a year as a quant on Wall Street, to spend a little time in the financial world, in the corporate world. Yeah, in the corporate, I did my time. And it was quite a whirlwind of a few years getting that company off the ground. And when the pandemic hit, which is right around the time, you know, a year before we met at Launch House, the size of our market, like, 10,000x'd overnight, yeah, and the company grew exponentially faster. And it's a big company to this day.Link

LubaSo okay, you had Commsor, then it was Launch House, now it's Superpower. With all of the companies, and the current company, you had one or two co-founders. I wanted to talk to you a bit more about co-founder relationships.Link

JacobI've got a lot of thoughts.Link

LubaYeah, tell me more, from all your experience. How do you pick good co-founders? What should you be looking for? What are the traits that are most important? Why did you decide to still build with co-founders now?Link

JacobA lot to unpack with this question. So not only have I had, I guess, three sets of co-founders now, across three venture-backed businesses in the last decade, through Launch House, which is the early-stage incubator we built, we helped close to 1,000 companies, startups, get off the ground. And I think the number one cause of company failure was co-founder disruption or misalignment or differences in vision. I think it's just an incredibly hard thing to do, to bring together a union of, like, sentient, autonomous people to work towards a common mission. Like, it's just a really tough thing to do.Link

And the mistake I think I've made in the past was jumping at, like, the first person that, like, seemed like they would be great to work with on the surface, without, like, really honing my intuition for what a human being is all about. Like, I'll give you an example. My very first, like, business partner, when I started my first company, he was basically, like, one of the first real, like, professional entrepreneurs who had raised some venture money before that I'd ever really met. And I was like, we should start a company together.Link

You know, now, beyond even selecting co-founders, like, just hiring employees, you know, across a few businesses, I've, like, you know, hired and fired, I don't know, hundreds and hundreds. We're so diligent, and I think honed and refined our intuition as to what makes a person tick, and their IQ. You can almost pick up on their IQ in a quick judgment, you know, within the first few minutes. And I think the biggest advice I can give is just, like, hone that intuitive judgment of just, like, how do humans work? You know, how do they tick? Subconscious.Link

It's almost like you don't know what you don't know. So you have to, like, figure out, what are the vectors of reality, right? Like, what makes a human a human? What makes an entrepreneur an entrepreneur? Like, what are the icebergs under their surface? That's, like, a really tough thing to do with a person, unless you, like, hone that pattern recognition across a lot of different people, and, like, really become a student of psychology and understand, like, you know, how does psychology work? How does the subconscious work? You know, what makes someone high-IQ versus not, or high-compute, or, like, high-context-window or high-RAM? You know, what invisible pre-prompts are they running that could be working for or against them? Like, what are their superpowers? Have I met enough people in my life to know when someone is, like, truly three-sigma in a certain skill set or category? How does that compare to me? Do I even know myself enough to be able to understand if there's a complement here?Link

And I never, like, knew any of that stuff in a prior world. I think I just, you know, jumped the gun. But you do have to start somewhere. And admittedly, I probably wouldn't be, you know, where I am right now if I hadn't just thrown myself in the deep end and started making shit happen, even if maybe I have different degrees of strength of partnerships now versus in prior startups.Link

LubaYeah, so I agree with you that you've got to pattern match and you've got to have good intuition for who people are. That all sounds great in theory, and it sounds great to, you know, really get to know yourself, to really be great about reading people, to really be great about having an intuition for who they are. But what would your tactical advice be for how to really recognize whether you work well together with a given person or not, and what are their motivations?Link

JacobIt goes back to this idea of interoceptive awareness, which is, like, become aware of the feeling in your body.Link

LubaHow do you become aware of the feeling in your body?Link

JacobWell, I think first you have to recognize that there are factors working against the ability to tap into that. And a lot of those factors are, again, like, the digital tethering and things. So if you, like, spend a day without your phone, you set this intention of, like, I'm just going to be, like, really in tune with my body. And, you know, you try closing your eyes and sitting down and not really thinking any thoughts, or even meditating, or whatever form of meditation you might try, like, during that day, and just set the intention of, like, I'm going to pay attention to, like, the tiniest little twitch of my eyebrow, or the feeling of the hair on the top of my head. Like, you can start to hone it and reclaim it. It's just a muscle, right? It's an awareness muscle to reclaim.Link

And I think if you start to develop that, you can actually pay attention to how other human beings make you feel. And I think there's, like, a true, like, biochemical wisdom in being able to understand, how does, like, someone's presence and energy make me feel in my own body as I'm interacting with them? And admittedly, like, other business partners, or romantic partners, or people that I've done deals with, or, you know, founders I've invested in through the venture fund, that maybe didn't work out the way I liked, I remember feeling certain things in my body, and my rational mind was like, ignore that, you know, trust the data in front of you. But I actually think that's really crucial data, because we're using our, you know, subconscious, basically, and our biochemical intelligence to understand real data points. It's not woo. This is all just trying to look at the constellation.Link

LubaNow there's a lot more research about listening to your gut.Link

JacobYeah, right. It's an antenna, the gut is. So I think becoming in tune with your body and using that as a way to evaluate, am I going to work well with this person? Like, do I just feel good in my gut when I interact with them? Or is there something weird, or is there something, like, subconscious for me coming up, or insecure, where I can't feel like I can operate as my best self around them? Like, I don't know. So pay attention to that, is maybe what I would say. And I think the people that I work with now, I trusted that gut intelligence, when I was in that interoceptive awareness, when I was deciding to work with them or bringing them onto the team. And the ones that I felt a little funny about, I didn't.Link

And this can even apply to other decisions, like paid ads. As an example, we're starting to do, you know, a significant amount of marketing and putting marketing budget behind creative assets. And if I was given a swath of, you know, a few dozen assets, we basically decided we're going to listen to how we feel and just, like, run the ad that just feels good. You know, when we look at it, it's like, what's creating emotion in you? I even think about this when I write cold emails. I try to sit down and, like, read an email that I just wrote, like, a dozen times, and, like, try to pay attention. Am I feeling the slightest emotional, like, twinge or prick or feeling when I read this? And if I don't, then I edit the email to try to get an emotional response. Because I think the only way you get in touch with someone when they have a cacophonous inbox is to muster up an emotion in them.Link

So this feeling can apply way more broadly than just co-founder selection. It can apply to, I think, your marketing. It maybe is, like, a way to help be more tasteful. And, you know, taste is the big hot buzzword now on Twitter, on X.Link

LubaYeah, I think now a really buzzy way to describe it is vibes. Like, what are the vibes?Link

JacobYeah, exactly. You can talk here about frameworks, and, like, you know, put it on a big matrix. Like, what are the factors that I want to consider to work with someone? At the end of the day, it's like, maybe the vibe is the ultimate indicator.Link

LubaYeah. How do you teach people on your team to listen to what the vibe is, and to tune into their higher intelligence, to the energetic field around them? I'm sure, you know, now the team is how many people?Link

JacobClose to 40.Link

LubaOkay, yeah. Everyone is different. Not everyone is as enlightened and as much on a Transcendental Meditation track.Link

JacobI still don't want to come off as, like, some enlightened guru.Link

LubaI'm just kidding. I'm just kidding. But yeah, how do you get people to get into this mindset? Because I think now in the Valley, it's a lot more accepted, and a lot more kind of driven home, that, hey, this is a reality that we should be paying attention to. Gut feelings are super important. Vibes are super important. And I love that that trend is happening, but not everyone is on that track. And yeah, what's the tactical way to get your team...Link

JacobYou have to give people a language for it. So if you don't know what interoceptive awareness is, you're never going to be able to set an intention around developing it. So, like, you have to have a language for it. If you don't know what testosterone or estrogen are, like what we help you understand with Superpower, you don't know what it's like to, like, feel hormonally dead, you know, or flat, or...Link

LubaSo it's about you bringing the awareness.Link

JacobI think so. I think so. And the way we've done that is, like, at our last team retreat, my co-founder and I did a talk on the strategy, the business and the roadmap, and, like, what we believe to be true in the limit of this market that we're operating in. And how that, if you put it on a pyramid, is, like, the tip of the top of where we're going. But that is built on an understanding of the industry dynamics and the business model, you know, levers and degrees of freedom, which is built on top of, like, our long-term roadmap, which is built on top of, like, our midterm roadmap, which is built on top of, like, our short-term tactical decisions, which is built on top of, like, our operating principles and culture. And then at the bottom of the pyramid, I did a talk about how it's actually built on top of our individual consciousness.Link

So you can actually tie your individual consciousness as a human, right? How aware are you of the way you're showing up, the way your body is performing, to interpret reality and navigate reality? You can tie that all the way back to, like, the future vision of your company and where a market's going to be in ten years. And it's just a pyramid stack. All these things have to build on one another. Because you could have the end-state vision so clear in your head, but if you are not biochemically, energetically and subconsciously and consciously tuned at the bottom of the pyramid as an individual, and then all the 40 individuals in your team are not similarly tuned, they're not going to make the right decisions to implement the right roadmap to then eventually get there.Link

So you have to just have, I think, awareness across the stack. Not just awareness of your body and mind and what's happening in those pre-prompts. You have to have awareness of, like, just everything end to end as you're building a company. So we just wanted to give people a language and a framework for this. So we did a talk on individual consciousness as actually the bedrock for performance and mission achievement at Superpower.Link

LubaSo speaking of performance and mission achievement, you guys have a super cracked, dedicated, loyal team. One, you've attracted a lot of incredible talent. Two, one of your employees, or maybe multiple employees, got a tattoo with Superpower.Link

JacobThree tattoos and counting. Yeah, might be four. We'll see.Link

LubaWait, how come you don't have a tattoo yet?Link

JacobWell, it's a...Link

LubaAre you anti-tattoo?Link

JacobWell, here's the thing. I feel like there's a lot we don't know yet about tattoos. Yeah. Because, you know, I've seen some reports where they've done autopsies of, like, very heavily tatted individuals, and...Link

LubaOh, wow.Link

JacobThey find ink pigmentation in the lymph nodes. Yeah. Damn. So I think it's actually a really tough thing for the body to detox, and it's unknown whether that's good or bad. My first-principles gut instinct tells me it's kind of bad. And a lot of tattoo inks have heavy metals and other additives, which can be problematic for the body. So they can be bad for the body. So I just don't know. I think the scientific jury is still out on how bad tattoos are. So I'm not against it from any sort of, like, you know, weird social signaling reason. I look at everything through the lens of health. I think every decision for me is a health decision, or a health care decision, in a sort of way.Link

LubaOkay, but back to your cracked team.Link

JacobBack to the cracked team. So three tattoos, 42 signatures of the blood oath.Link

LubaWhat? The Superpower... Okay, actually, I saw this on Twitter, on X.Link

JacobYeah, it might have been on X. I haven't posted it yet, but maybe this will be inspiration to do so. So I took a red ink pad and a box of lancets and placed them out in front of the whole team, when we were getting together, last time we were all in person. And I said, this is the mission. And we had a big white poster board with the mission written on it, which is to, like, fundamentally change the trajectory of human health and build the world's best consumer health experience. And I said, the official company policy is to use the ink pad. You can thumbprint it and put it on the board and then sign your name. But I'm just going to leave this box of fingerprint lancets here. And then I went and stabbed myself and full-on thumbprinted the board.Link

And a lot of the team, like, knew this was coming, because, you know, the rumors kind of swirl. 10, 15 people had actually done this before at a prior team gathering, you know, kind of as a fun meme. And a few folks who just did not see this coming, who were a bit newer to the team, were, like, totally flabbergasted. So it was a range of reactions. But believe it or not, we had 100% participation. Like, 43 out of 43 thumbprints, real dried blood on the board. No, I think everyone was probably, I don't know, Hep C vaccinated. So I think we're okay.Link

LubaSo that sounds cool, but what's the attrition of the company been, outside of people that maybe have left?Link

JacobAttrition. Like, we've actually had huge volatility, and that's very intentional.Link

LubaTell me more.Link

JacobSo I think volatility is a feature, not a bug.Link

LubaIf volatility meaning people moving on, or...Link

JacobYeah, people moving on, people no longer being here. And that's a feature, not a bug, because I think the best companies actually have a very large amount of attrition in the first 100 hires, or the first...Link

LubaBut was it attrition where you guys let go of people, or people left intentionally?Link

JacobA bit of both. But the folks who left intentionally, by and large, they self-selected out as a cultural mismatch. And we are, I think, a culture where at least the core team is pretty much working 996. Like, 987, probably, you know, 987, yeah, 997, something like that. There's a few folks with kids, you know, and we can...Link

LubaSo no kids at Superpower?Link

JacobYeah, mostly. Yeah, I don't have kids yet. So, but it's a team of really respectable, entrepreneurial people. So I think we have close to, like, 15 former venture-backed founders, who have worn the scars and know what it takes to build something really, really great. And these folks have really high opportunity cost, where they could otherwise go start, you know, a seed-funded AI company really handily in this market, or do something on their own that could earn significantly more than the salary. But they believe in the mission. They believe in the enterprise value that we can create together, and they want to work with similarly talented people. It's the beautiful domino effect, where talent begets talent begets talent.Link

LubaSo tell me more about how you've built up this cult, mission-driven following internally at the company. Because you've been so good about attracting talent, and I get what you're saying about volatility being a feature, because it sounds like your culture is just so defined, and you're looking for a specific mindset of a person. And yes, probably grind and commitment and dedication and 987 is one of the potential requirements. And if you're not down, you're not down. So that's totally fair. But yeah, how did you do that? Is it storytelling? Is it belief in your own vision? Is it specific tactics?Link

JacobIt's all those things, obviously, but if I had to reduce it to... The better way to think about this is that it's actually a cold start problem. Meaning, I think one of the, like, ways that you get really talented people to want to work together, and then continue to accumulate more talented people and get that, like, compounding advantage, is you have to get the first domino to fall right.Link

When we were building Launch House, we were really intentional to make sure the first entrepreneurs that were coming through the community were great, right? We were very intentional with that, and it set the standard for everyone else that wanted to be a part of the community. If Y Combinator hadn't had a handful of veritable unicorn companies in the first few batches, it wouldn't have... like, this stuff matters, right? So you have to solve the cold start problem.Link

So all the other things matter, and that's definitely what's contributed to this. But I think the number one thing to focus on is just solving that cold start problem, getting the first few. And I think it just takes an extraordinary amount of hustle, intention, and a great deal of empowerment that you can promise them, which is sometimes tough, right? I think it can be hard to go into founder mode when everybody's, like, mega-empowered. But the reality is, if you can create a culture of empowerment, everyone kind of starts to feel like an owner, you know, and go into a lightweight founder mode, if you will.Link

LubaSo tell me about the first few. Who were those first few that defined the culture, and how did you make them empowered? What did they do, exactly?Link

JacobYeah. So my co-founder, Kevin, was Y Combinator batchmates with a handful of technical founders who'd, like, raised a big seed round but never actually ended up getting commercialization on their open source project. And...Link

LubaI believe you met Kevin through Launch House. Was it Launch House?Link

JacobLaunch House. Yeah, shout out Launch House. Kevin's probably the best technical founder to come through the community. No hyperbole. And these guys were really cracked. Kevin was like, they're the first ones I call anytime I have, you know, an infrastructure problem or question. So they're really, really, really good. And I just remember the degree to which we had to hustle to get them across the line. I was talking to, like, you know, wives and, like, families, and, you know, flying all over the country to make this happen. And, you know, pulling every, like, backdoor reference...Link

LubaFor Kevin, or for...?Link

JacobOh, no, no, for the engineers that we wanted to acquire.Link

LubaOh, sorry.Link

JacobYeah. Basically the batchmates. Their company was winding down because they never found product-market fit, and they were, like, going to go get jobs or start a new company. And I was like, we need to go bring them in. So we basically got a nucleus of talent which set the talent bar really, really high. And it just took an incredible amount of hustle. I mean, a lot of, you know, flights and talking to wives and families and making...Link

LubaSo there are people at Superpower with wives and families.Link

JacobYeah, something like that. But yeah, it just takes going the extra mile. I mean, for one, I literally wrote, like, I don't know, an eight-page Notion document, just, like, a love letter, basically, you know...Link

LubaTo get that talent.Link

JacobYeah, to get those first few engineers. Truly, I mean, some of these emails that, like, we will send to people, it's insane. And I think it's a lesson I've learned. Just like I keep learning the power of the subconscious, and how much subconscious programming and invisible, you know, pre-prompts run our lives, the degree to which you can recruit harder than you ever thought possible. Like, you can recruit better than you think you can. You really, really can. So that was a lesson that I learned, and I had never, like, flexed this degree of muscle.Link

And I think to flex that, you really have to be delusional with your belief. And that's another one, actually, is the spectrum of self-delusion. You don't want to get so delusional that, like, you're untethered from business fundamentals, so that you can never make anything reality. You sound delusional. But, like, there's this perfect line where, like, if you're delusional enough, and you apply that to your own self-belief, and the inner pre-prompt that says, I can do this, before you go into a situation, you show up differently in conversations with really talented people who have high opportunity costs.Link

And, like, I don't know. I do think life is a game of inches. And just like, you know, a race winner can make or break, you know, a record just through whether they did a certain amount of training. Like, it all compounds, but then the ultimate result is a game of inches. If someone's on the fence of a decision, like, sometimes it is just the way you guided them to that, which is a result of a little bit better internal programming, which is a result of, like, a little bit better mastery of your biology. And then all those things together compound, and all of a sudden you said the right thing, and it put the light bulb in their head, and now you've put them on a totally different reality path and interpretation of what the possibility could be if you work together. So, like, that's kind of how I think about how this kind of stuff can come together.Link

LubaTell me more about where your delusion comes from.Link

JacobWhere does my delusion come from? I think originally, it actually came from a dissociative protection mechanism, where, like... I love my mom. She's incredible. Shout out, Mama P. But, like, she knows this. Shout out, Mama P.Link

LubaShe's watching.Link

JacobYeah, she actually knows Luba. Funny, actually, that's true. I think she does know. Yeah, she's like, I watched all of her... Oh yes, that's true. Okay. Shout out. We've done an interview before, and she's like, I watched her video. So she'll probably see this.Link

But, like, and she knows this, you know, she likes to yell, and, you know, have her bit. But I feel like, you know, when you're dealing with parents that are, you know, kind of getting on your ass about, in retrospect, you know, dumb stuff that you're doing, you can start to kind of, like, dissociate. I think for whatever reason, like, my maybe earlier childhood programming, or biochemical makeup, made me extremely susceptible to that. So the protection mechanisms, like, became deeply entrenched and, like, really, really powerful. And one of those protection mechanisms was, like, total dissociation, where I just, like, would kind of forget and ignore and tune out. And it allowed me to almost, like, create my own world.Link

And the benefit of that is, yeah, I think when you can create your own world in your mind, it's like a great bedrock for dreaming big and developing delusion. And sometimes it can be a bug, because you think something's possible and it's really not, and you're missing data, and you can be too positive, or overly positive, or toxically positive, which is a problem for me sometimes. But it can also be a helpful delusion that can make you take bigger swings and bigger risks than you'd otherwise be comfortable with, or say things to candidates that otherwise might scare you if they're a risky hire.Link

LubaSo to translate, or to repeat that back to you: you grew up in a family where, if something went wrong or you were misbehaving, your parents would try to reprimand you, and potentially yell at you, and that created a dissociative coping mechanism for you to deal with those situations.Link

JacobWe'll never really know. This is, like, again, my own introspection. I think there's four ways you can, like, deeply introspect and change patterns and programming and behavior. One, which is what we were sort of talking about, is just becoming self-reflective, journaling, taking time with yourself, removing the digital tethering, and just being alone with your thoughts. That can only get you so far. That's a conversation with yourself.Link

Then two is developing the frameworks, the canon and the phrases for things, which helps, I think, foster understanding. Read all the canonical books, the podcasts, you know, just understand how the brain basically works. Like, how does your program even work? Third is, like, facilitated talk therapy, CBT, family systems, internal family systems. I've done a handful of these. Executive coaching, right? Getting mentorship, talking to people, and, like, aggressively seeking out self-improvement.Link

And I think the fourth is, to me, the most underutilized, but the most powerful by far, which is trauma. And trauma, I think, societally, has a very negative connotation. But if you actually look at the dictionary definition, it's a bit more neutral, and it just means, like, a very deep psychological imprint that could be negative, neutral or positive. So how do you create intense trauma to make the brain go, hold up, we've got to find a different way of operating in order to keep moving forward?Link

And I think it can happen in a really, like, random and stochastic way, like psychedelic plant medicine, which I've experimented with, as has, like, half of Silicon Valley. People are doing ketamine therapy and things. But it's random. You can maybe go in with an intention, but, like, you're not going to know what path the psilocybin, or whatever it is, is going to take you. It's so random. And you might come up with great conclusions, because you're, you know, connecting to different parts of the subconscious, but it's still so random.Link

Then there's architected trauma, like positive trauma, which you can do through these facilitated sessions. There's, like, a few of these programs, like Hoffman and ALA, and a handful of these things that...Link

LubaRight. You have recently been to one.Link

JacobYeah, exactly. And a lot of my friends, like, say this is the most transformative thing they've ever done. It effectively helps you confront these things, and it puts you in a lot of, like, relaxed brain states that you wouldn't normally be in, like a lot of group hugging. And, you know, things that sound kind of woo, but, like, it does change your biochemical state. It makes you really able to look inward in a way you're not otherwise able to do.Link

So those are the four ways. And I think everyone should... I think it's really powerful, if you want to be the best version of yourself and the most aware version of yourself, and be able to show up powerfully for a team, or for the best candidates that you want to recruit...Link

LubaBack to the candidates.Link

JacobExactly. Or be able to, like, thread the needle all the way through, from, like, the end state of your vision all the way through to, like, the way you're showing up day to day, and everything in between. Make the best decisions, because a startup's all just a million decisions. You have to get the full mastery of what's happening under the hood. And those are, like, four frameworks I've found work.Link

LubaWhere do you think you got your desire to dream big, to take big swings? Because it's not really recent. You've been, you know, training your mind and telling yourself a different story, but I've known you for five years, and you've always been like this since I've known you, and I'm sure that's been the case before that too. I'm curious if you remember the first time when you were like, oh, what if...Link

JacobIt was less the first time and more, like, I almost started listening to my body. Like, it's so weird. I wish I could tell you the pinpointed moment, but it's almost like there was this deep knowing in me for a very long time that something was incongruent. Like, the feeling in my stomach. You know, I was in high school, and I never really felt like I fit in that much. And I, like, just kind of hated being in the high school clique and stuff. It's why I, like, found more passion in Legos. Same thing in university. I, like, hated the whole... I was in the fraternity, but I also secretly hated it.Link

When I was 21, I moved to New York. I was doing the thing that everyone was doing, which was, like, working in finance. And, like, I hated it. And I just felt, like, this feeling in my body that something wasn't right. Like, the way I was living my life, the decisions I was making, the people I was spending time with, it just didn't feel right. I, like, didn't feel healthy. I didn't feel aligned, if you will. Something was off biochemically.Link

And it wasn't until I met my first original co-founder, at my first business, that, like, I realized, oh, whoa, there's a whole world of entrepreneurs out there. Like, I didn't grow up on Twitter, or, you know, in tech Twitter. I was on, you know, flight-code-hacking Twitter. But I just didn't really have a great, like, set of role models, or I just didn't have, I think, the right people pushing me towards this stuff. So all I felt was, like, confused incongruence.Link

And it was finally when I discovered this real startup world, in the New York startup community, during my first company, and met my first co-founder, that I was like, whoa. I finally feel aligned in my body, for, like, the very first time. I felt alive. And I think it was that moment that I realized, okay, now that I'm, like, congruent, and I've, like, found my people, I've found something I enjoy. It literally gives you biochemical joy. Like, I don't feel sick and confused and uncertain. I feel great. Let's lean into that. And I think the more I leaned into that, the greater the desire to want to learn about every aspect of reality, and life, and myself, and others, and human consciousness evolved. And it's only grown.Link

LubaOn this note, do you believe that people are predestined to do a certain thing? Because from what you're saying, it sounds like your body kind of knew which environments it felt best in. And when you found your crew, when you stepped into entrepreneurship, you felt more alive.Link

JacobYes and no. I think that's, like, a, you know, woo narrative way to think about it, predestined. Because if we had a thought exercise, if you had a quantum computer that could hold the particular state of, like, every piece of matter in the universe, you could perfectly predict everyone's true trajectories, which, like, in that example, free will does not exist. So if that's the case, then, like, everything's actually perfectly modelable, which means you could explain it. So it's like, what are those explainability factors? Or if it's a million little things, and it could all be a butterfly flapping its wings, what are, like, the most sensitive variables, right? And I actually have a framework on this. So let me pull that up. I want to pull it up. Why is it not loading? This is really good. I want to pull this up. This is important.Link

I have this framework for what makes somebody deeply prolific. I think it's your physical environment. So, like, you know, in my case, when I was going through my whole journey, I had a mercury level at one point of, like, 34, and I didn't realize how badly that was zapping my energy and my, like, ability to show up. And you literally lose, like, a standard deviation of IQ points when your body, which has a limited set of soldiers in its immune system army, has them, like, stuck, sequestered, dealing with this toxic stuff that's not supposed to be in the body.Link

So I think we're, like, deeply affected by this physical environment, way more than we know. And the deeper I go in the interconnectedness of the body, and, like, frontier science and functional medicine, the more I see how things like even the chemicals and the nutrients, or lack of nutrients, or, like, nutrient levels you're exposed to in pregnancy, can permanently affect, like, the way your brain wiring shows up. Like, it's so correlated.Link

LubaYeah. Isn't there a lot of research now that even natural versus C-section birth, and what were the things in, literally, like, your mom's vagina, could affect your IQ and your immune system?Link

JacobCompletely. So if you think about that, okay, we know that. And we've also heard things about, like, the mother's oral microbiome, which can affect, you know, the baby, and you can use that to predict things like preterm births and all this stuff. And again, if we go back to the quantum computer analogy, of, like, it being able to perfectly predict how your life ends up if it knows every variable, you can do the same thing with health. So it's like everything's so perfectly predictable. So if you wanted to, like, model the highest-IQ, you know, most prolific individual, you'd want to fine-tune every single aspect of, like, their human existence, from, like, the moment, you know, the sperm and the egg met. Every input, every single one.Link

So if you had to cut it down into eight, it's, like, this physical environment, how that affects you. A lot of it's from birth. It's your, I guess, like, you know, subconscious programming, and this physical environment affects, like, epigenetics and a lot of stuff. It's your programming. Like, what were the invisible pre-prompts that, you know, either told you you could or you couldn't do certain things, or gave you a certain level of self-belief, or chip on your shoulder, or whatnot? And it's, like, your early social circle and network. Like, who are the people around you? Were you surrounded with other folks who had, you know, unique amounts of knowledge and access, or were you not? And all this stuff, like, makes sense mathematically, right? Because if you are around smarter, more ambitious people, you're going to do smarter, more ambitious things sooner.Link

Your knowledge accumulation, which is another one. Like, when did you start? In my case, you know, I'm probably, you know, a little behind. Some of my founder friends are a little bit younger than me, because, like, I feel like I didn't really start feeding my mind the right stuff till I was 20. So it's been a decade. And I'm like, wow...Link

LubaI think you've been doing pretty well for it just being a decade.Link

JacobBut, like, you've got to always wonder, what if, right? If you're really seeking greatness. So, like, what knowledge did you put in your brain? The other is leverage. Like, how much leverage did you have in your life? Because time is just obviously our only currency. So did you do things that gave you leverage? Did you come into leverage? Did you somehow accumulate leverage? Compounding is the other, which maybe is similar to leverage in a way, but I think different. It's more like, you know, leverage is, like, more output for the same amount of input, or less input. And compounding is, like, do you take advantage of the fact that things can grow nonlinearly? And there's probably a few more. But I just think if we start to break down, like, what makes someone really prolific, it's probably some combination of those things.Link

And then last is actually genetics, I forgot to mention. Which is, like, it's just a reality that even if you have the perfect environment, you're perfectly epigenetically fine-tuned, you have the perfect programming, you still just might not have the raw biological meat-computer compute to be able to tackle tough problems, or do high-dimensional, like, spatial visualizations of what a future product vision could be. Like, not everyone has that ability. We all sort of exist on a spectrum of, you know, what our brain is able to do. So yeah.Link

LubaOn that note, why are you seeking greatness?Link

JacobOh, why am I seeking...Link

LubaWhat's your motivator?Link

JacobWell, again, I'd be lying if I said it was, like, you know, perfect, 100% mission-driven. I don't think that's possible. Yeah, I think the ego is a good thing, and it is very powerful, and it helps us propagate the genome, right? But I try to, like, stay calibrated such that it's, like, slightly less ego and slightly more mission, impact, and, like, genuinely changing humanity.Link

And for me, you know, you can read about my health story online if you want, but the TL;DR of it, because I've talked about it on so many of these things now, was, three and a half years ago, I almost lost my life and ended up getting hospitalized for many months. Surgeries, multimillion-dollar bill. Unnecessary, by the way, completely unnecessary. I was a very lucrative billing opportunity for the mainstream American healthcare system, which, by the way, is neither health nor care. So it's a bit of a meme. And I saw what I would never want any other human to see and experience, which is, like, to be faced with your mortality.Link

And now, like, I literally, genuinely get viscerally sick when I'm, like, walking down the street, or, like, even spending time with my coworkers, and I just see them doing things that are, like, obviously detrimental to their health, and they're just none the wiser. And ignorance can be bliss. You don't want to have an over-optimization neurosis and be worried about every little microplastic. There's a net-net to it. You can have too much awareness, to where it actually, you know, starts to cause biochemical cascades of cortisol and too much stress, and you're not living as free.Link

But yeah, I think too many of us in America, in the world, just have no idea what's happening under the hood. And when I'm on a street corner, I see people with, like, obviously fatty liver, messed-up, you know, cortisol face, messed-up hormones, probably estrogen-dominant, high toxins. Thinning hair. Like, all this stuff is really, really emblematic of underlying mitochondrial dysfunction and organ systems going awry. And even hair that's, like, not as, you know, I don't know, thick and refined, as you can tell, it's just nutrient deficiencies. You know, in a lot of ways the hair is just, like, starving for nutrients. So you can just start to develop not just interoceptive awareness of yourself, but a biological awareness of, like, the state of the human condition, and how healthy someone is, just by proxy of looking at them. And I think the really great functional doctors do this, and I like to think I've started to develop that.Link

But it just makes me viscerally ill when I see it. I'm like, oh, I wish everyone was just, like, perfectly healthy, and we didn't have to all be so blind to what's happening. And we could all live longer, feel better, show up better for our families. You know, be aligned. Have as many of those eight boxes of what makes someone prolific checked as possible, so that the world can have more innovation and more things. Like, that's what drives me. And I really feel, like, when I even talk about this, I feel it. Like, it gives me energy like nothing else. So that is what I try to operate from, you know, versus ego, which is totally there, and useful. But I try to make this a little bit more dominant most of the time. Yeah.Link

LubaAnd I feel your drive for it too. And I mean, I remember how you were going through the health crisis.Link

JacobNever want anyone to end up like me. Never. And I wouldn't wish it on, like, literally, I wouldn't wish it on any of our competitors, my worst enemy. It's terrible.Link

LubaYeah, I know that a lot of it is covered. As you said, online, on X, there was a lot of, I mean, you've covered it yourself, what exactly happened. So I'm not going to go there. When you were going through it, what I was most impressed with is your positivity around it. You were just so resilient. You know, you went through multiple surgeries. I think you got your large intestine taken out. And I mean, again, don't want anyone to go through it. Sounds terrible. How did you stay so positive? What was going on through your mind?Link

JacobWell, I basically told myself, if I ever get out of here, I'm going to start a company to fix this shit. Because, you know, seeing, I don't know, like, literally Windows 99-type computers and EMRs next to me, and all the beeping, and, like, it was just the worst user experience possible. You know, I'm a technologist.Link

LubaBack to the user experience.Link

JacobSo I think in terms of user experiences. And, like, every single thing, from, like, literally the moment of ER intake all the way through to, like, you know, the surgery discharge, like, there was, like, genuinely not... And, you know, I think our healthcare service workers are amazing. They're doing the best they can. But, like, the system... and it's a tough, tough industry. I'm not saying it's not. In the world of atoms and complications and an unlimited number of degrees of freedom and things that can go wrong in a hospital setting. I get it. I know why it's tough to do. But the end-to-end user experience was just horrible relative to what I'm used to, which is...Link

LubaBut, you know, a regular person wouldn't be thinking about the end-to-end user experience, being on a hospital deathbed.Link

JacobSo for me, I was like, if I ever get out of here, I'm going to fix this shit. And, like, the company was basically, you know, it took a year to really get it off the ground, or to really start things, a year, a year and a half from that moment. But I told myself, if I ever got out of here, I'm going to fix it.Link

LubaBut were there any tactics or specific tools that you were using to not drop into the victim mentality of, why is this happening to me, while it was happening to you? Company aside.Link

JacobHonestly, it was kind of innate. It was, like, innate that I was positive. And here's the thing. If anyone's curious how they can make it innate, if that's not how you operate by default, go back to those eight factors that I mentioned, and, like, figure out, where are the levers? Because everything's explainable, right? Again, if we had a quantum computer that could hold the particular state of every piece of matter in the universe, like, everyone's health trajectories and life trajectories would be perfectly modelable and predictable. So everything has an explanation. We just don't know everything about how to tap into that yet. You know, we're not masters of every neural connection or every, you know, chemical interaction yet. AGI will hopefully help us.Link

So figure out, what are the things that led to you maybe not being as default positive? Do you want to be default positive? Is that, like, a pre-prompt you want to inject in your personal language model? Are there others you have to remove? Like, I don't know. So I would just go back into your life and your programming, and the whole set of what's made your current state of consciousness and biology, and figure out, what can I do to increase the positivity?Link

LubaI want to chat a bit about the inception of Superpower. I remember being probably an alpha or pre-alpha user.Link

JacobYou're one of our first ten customers.Link

LubaOh, wow, are you serious? I'm honored.Link

JacobYeah. Always.Link

LubaYeah. So I remember getting the blood draw, and there was a doctor concierge. And I've always really been into preventative health care. So I remember, like, ten years ago, there was this glucose drink that you could take to monitor your glucose levels. There was a company. Then there was a company that would create your custom diet based on also some parameters in your bloodstream. So when you started working on this one, I was super excited, because, one, obviously you got out of the hospital, and it made perfect sense that this was the next evolution of your dream and vision. Two, it was just, like, a really dope idea, to get your blood work and get a doctor's opinion about what you needed to fix, if there was anything. And three, I loved the personalization of it. But you were working on it for about a year, I believe, before you met your co-founders. How did that happen?Link

JacobYeah, so the genesis was, after I finally got out of the hospital and went on this big healing journey, I got connected, after my story went viral on Twitter about the health experience I had, I connected with some of the world's best high-end concierge doctors. So physicians who charge 50 to a few hundred thousand dollars a year. They test everything in your body. They spend hours with you at a whiteboard, connecting the dots on all the mechanisms and environmental things that happen. Basically the best version today of this quantum computer thought exercise.Link

And I saw what real medicine was like. That when you get outside the insurance system, and you have a doctor who's incentive-aligned with you, because you're paying him a ton of money, and these are doctors with, like, much bigger context windows and understanding of how everything interconnects, you know, versus myopic specialty medicine, I saw what health care could look like. And it just became very obvious that that is something that needed to be democratized for all.Link

So not only did I have a keen awareness of the problem from my own situation, I now had an interesting example of the future, or of the solution, excuse me. A classic arbitrage, to take us back, right? There's a big gap between the state of American health care, and what I and everyone else is subjected to if they stay in the sick trajectory, versus what, if you have money and you're in the know, you can access. And I think as long as that gap exists, or existed, I thought there is a possibility, or an inevitability, rather, that a technology company will emerge to close that gap and make it as democratized and accessible as possible.Link

So that was how the company was really born. Beyond my frustration, that was the real arbitrage identification point, where the inspiration was lit. And I then realized, okay, if we're going to tackle something this big and ambitious, we're going to need some of the best people in the world. So I had to go and source Kevin, you know, the best technical founder at Launch House. And Max, my other co-founder, who is brilliant. And I'd met, you know, tens of thousands of founders through Launch...Link

LubaWhat was the story of meeting Max?Link

JacobWell, I got connected to him under the auspices of, you two are the most health-obsessed humans I've ever met. He had his own version of this health story and journey. And we had, like, a sprawling, three-hour-long conversation about reinventing... He was building something very similar. He actually was building the same company, competitive, we didn't even really know it at the time, in Australia. And we decided to merge and join forces. And, you know, I met tens of thousands of founders in Launch House, and...Link

LubaHow did you convince each other that you should merge forces?Link

JacobYes. Well, I thought he was, like, basically one of the most brilliant founders I've ever met, across a big data set. So that was my intuition talking. So I was like, okay, I want to work with this guy. This is cool. And I spent a little time earlier, I guess, we talked about how you have to go and hustle and go the extra mile to recruit some people. And I think that's true when there's a lot of, like, you know, inertia sometimes, or real consequences, and trade-offs and considerations and life complexities. But sometimes it's just so effortless, and that's beautiful. And that's sort of how it was with Max and I. We realized there was just an effortlessness to the dynamic, and the shared vision, and the camaraderie, and the complementary nature of our skill sets. And it was almost like the universe had, it felt ordained, in a sense, right? Like, given us one another to try and go fix this brokenness. So it was very fluid and easy, which is different than some of the hardcore recruiting I've had to do, or otherwise done, in the past. And I think there's a beauty to that, when things just, like, really, really energetically and rationally click.Link

LubaOn the energetic and the rational, I want to talk a bit about your personal mission statement and personal values. Right before I came to the office, again, I was at your apartment, because we're thinking of filming there, and I was scouting where to film. I went to your bedroom to see if there was any furniture there, and you had four or five printed-out pages of your personal values and your personal mission statement. Tell me more about why you have it on your wall, right next to your bed. I have some hunches as to why, but I want to hear from you. And what are the values?Link

JacobI mean, just like a company needs values, I think a person needs values. I think a relationship needs values. They're just these amazing anchors and tools to navigate reality, because it's so complex. And for me, they're just, like, anchor points that I've found to help center me and get the best outcomes and performance.Link

LubaDo you reread them every day? Is that why they're on the wall?Link

JacobWhen I wake up, I, like, kind of sleep on my right side. So I wake up, and then they're, like, right there.Link

LubaBut wait, your bed is, like, maybe three feet away from the values, and the font is not, like, 20 or 30.Link

JacobI see the titles of them. I have good eyesight. Hey, I take my lutein and astaxanthin supplements, you know, for eye health. You can get them on Superpower.Link

LubaI don't take any supplements, but I have good... Maybe I should start taking them.Link

JacobTo keep up the eyesight. Exactly. Yeah, we don't want glasses here. No glasses at Superpower, except blue-light-blocking glasses. Yeah. Anyway, side note, I think it's crazy that, like, 500 years ago, before the invention of glasses, people would just, like, go blind, be blind, and, like, live 30, 40 years. That's insane.Link

LubaWell, they wouldn't live 30, 40 years blind, because the life expectancy was 30, 40 years.Link

JacobStill mind-boggling to me anyway, because it's just such a trivial, solvable problem. God bless modernity. So yeah, I stand up, I reread them. So I do have to get a little closer to read the fine print. And number one is health first. First and foremost, if I don't have energetic capacity, I can't do anything. Community first. I've started community businesses. I love bringing people together. I love galvanizing folks around a mission and telling a story. It just gives me a lot of meaning. And I just find life is better when shared. And when I'm not in that, and I'm a little too lone wolf, solo, I get kind of depressed.Link

Congruence is another. So, like, am I finding deep alignment between what I say and what I feel? Like, it's very easy to get cognitively dissonant. Or how detached am I from reality, you know? Like, am I more focused on reality or rhetoric? Is there an incongruence between what I'm saying and the real nature? You know, every entrepreneur has to, like, hype things up a little bit, you know.Link

LubaYou're really good at that.Link

JacobYeah. Well, the best one is authentic hype, right? But, like, you know, where's the line? Where's the line? And I'm trying to think of the others.Link

LubaI think there was love.Link

JacobYeah, love. It's like, again, if we think about, there's this framework of, like, the map of consciousness, which is just how emotional states, or, like, mental states or energetic states, map to different verbs. Love's a verb, I think.Link

LubaIt's a verb and a noun.Link

JacobAnd a noun, yeah. But I think in this case it's a verb, because you're, like, loving, actively, to love. Yeah, actively to love. So I think the higher you are, out of fear of judgment and failure, and the more you're in, I think, congruence with, yeah, just reality itself, and experiencing things as they are, versus telling a story or a pre-prompt, you can be more in love. I think that shows. I mean, it doesn't mean be all mushy and gooey. I actually think I have to show up hardcore as fuck to make this company happen. But I actually think that is love, in a sense, right? If you're just saying, authentically, rationally, sternly, directly, the thing that needs to be said, or doing what needs to be done, I think love can actually be an undertone of that type of operating mentality. So that is why love is one of the values. And the last, which is my personal favorite, is, Luba, guess. Do you remember what it is?Link

LubaI didn't, actually. I didn't infringe on your privacy. I just...Link

JacobYou could have. It's fine. It's believe in magic.Link

LubaOh yeah, I did see it.Link

JacobYeah, believe in magic. So again, if we go back to the example, and I love that this convo has been able to connect all the dots across everything we've spoken about. If we go back to the idea of the quantum computer being able to perfectly predict, if it had all the data points of everything in the universe, and perfectly predict health trajectories, personal trajectories, actions, therefore there's no free will. That's kind of, like, I don't know, just reductionist and cold and mathematical and pragmatic, and kind of kills the fun in life in some ways.Link

So I actually choose to, even though I can keep that mentality in my head, I sometimes like to just operate at a different level of abstraction, which is, fuck all of that. Let me just live in this moment, and, like, appreciate how absurd this existence is, and feel like it's, you know, magic, and that life is conspiring in my favor, and that everything is happening as it should. And synchronicities are not quite incidental. They're destined. Maybe there's a higher power, I don't know. But I think it's actually beautiful to have the ability to think in both minds, which is both the cold, rational, direct, pragmatic, perfectly data-driven and predictable world, versus the a-little-bit-more hand-wavy, spiritual side of existence. And that is why I choose to often believe in magic.Link

LubaYeah, I love that. And I love it, it speaks to the duality of the human being and consciousness. I think the two can totally exist. And if the world was just cold and pragmatic, it wouldn't be as fun. So I, too, choose to have that. I should make that my personal value too, to believe in magic. But if a business...Link

JacobAnd if a business was just too, you know, cold and pragmatic and, you know, cutthroat and hardcore operation, and didn't have the bigger spiritual mission attached. And we, thankfully, I think, have done a good job building both at Superpower. You know, both believing in magic, but also believing in hardcore, you know, operation.Link

LubaIt's a good duality. The believing-in-magic front reminds me that one of your investors is Cyan Banister, who I think is a really great representation of someone who lives in that magical universe, at least from all the interviews of hers that I listened to. And on that note, how do you pick your investors, and how helpful are they? How do you get them to be helpful? Because I think you're also really good at that.Link

JacobSo funny, because I think I've listened to that interview you're talking about with Cyan, and I was like, ah, that's funny, we have the same way of thinking about this. So I think in most startups, it's really hard to have a massively aligned stakeholder community. So if we think about the stakeholders of a business: customers, advisors, partners, shareholders, teammates, the big web of people. And let's just take, like, a Rippling, for example, right? Big SaaS company. I was in the Rippling dashboard... You know, we actually just churned from Rippling to Deel. The founders of Deel are investors in us. But I was, like, in the Rippling dashboard doing some legacy stuff the other day, and I'm, like, this company, like, you know, I'd rate it, like, a two out of ten on the passion scale. You know, like, customers are kind of, like, it's clunky HR software. You know, like, you have basically, like, no alignment across all the stakeholders, right? No investors, like, shouting from...Link

LubaThe individual subconsciousness is not powering the pyramid, right?Link

JacobYeah, exactly. Like, versus, like, at Superpower, you know, we have every stakeholder so excited to be a part of this. They feel like they're part of something. They're all championing the same mission and message, which is, like, let's...Link

LubaI remember, being a very proud and honored and small investor of Superpower, I remember the leadership dashboard for your investors, where you're hyping them up to, I think, retweet something, or get people on board. Really awesome.Link

JacobExactly. Exactly. So what I'm getting at is, like, there's a power that's unlocked when you have... and it's just a mathematical power, right? It's a vector sum of, like, more aligned inputs. If everyone is telling the same story, and there's more people telling the same story, and cohesion around narrative. And we think about virality and just, like, social awareness as a simple function of the number of nodes, the quality or the reach of those nodes, and the cohesion of the message, equals V, virality. That message cohesion can be, like, a massive multiplier effect.Link

Because, like, you know, Rippling has a lot of customers. It has a lot of stakeholders. It has a big N. A lot of those people probably have big mouthpieces. You know, I think some of the biggest investors in Silicon Valley invest in that company. They have huge customers, like Walmart and things. And I just made that up, I don't know if Walmart's a customer, I'm just saying hypothetically, a big customer. But then there's, like, no C coefficient of, like, aligned narrative. It's like, how far can that take you, as far as word of mouth and world impact? Like, no one's talking about Rippling beyond, you know... And it's a SaaS company, so it's a bit different. But I'm just giving the ultimate extreme examples, right? A B2B SaaS company that's kind of boring, and people like to hate on it. And I think Parker is a great entrepreneur. But, like, sorry, Rippling. Sorry, Conrad.Link

But versus, like, you know, a consumer company like ours, that is, like, aligned with one of the things that humans really, really care about, which is their own vitality. And, you know, it's easy to hate on the healthcare system and champion better personalization and prevention. We all have a story, and it's sexy. It's empowerment. You feel good. The feedback loop's immediate. You know, we're all rowing in the same direction. I think you just get exponentially more output when the narrative is aligned and everyone's really energized, even if you have the same number of nodes and the same, you know, reach of those nodes.Link

LubaWho are the founders you look up to?Link

JacobI mean, I respect what Parker has done. Yeah. But beyond that, I mean, I could give the, you know, canonical Elon, but, like...Link

LubaAny of your peers, maybe.Link

JacobYeah, I think I look up to John, the founder of Wander. He's a really smart man. I look up to my friend Justin Mares, who started a fintech company called Truemed, HSA payments, and a brand called Kettle & Fire, which I consume on a regular basis. I'm really inspired by Palmer. I think...Link

LubaPalmer is awesome.Link

JacobAnd yeah, a really cool company, and they've nailed their brand, and have made defense tech a new type of category, and cool. And it's incredibly hard, you know, to build in the physical world, so, like, a lot of product lines. And I think it's just very impressive what they've been able to do. Now, you could say, well, once you get contracts, you know, a lot of stuff's possible. But still, I love the mission aspect of it as well, right? It's a real mission-driven company. So, mission recognizes mission.Link

LubaIf you zoom out 20 years from now, what do you hope people will remember about you?Link

JacobThat he was really kind, and he really cared.Link

LubaJacob, thank you so much for being on The Luba Show. I feel like we could have been talking for hours, so next time I'll book a lot more hours of yours.Link

JacobAppreciate you, Luba.Link