About Fount

‍“The human body is one of the most complex adaptive symptoms out there in the universe.” – Andrew Herr

Andrew Herr is the founder and CEO of Fount, which is on a mission to help everyone look, feel, and perform at their very best. Fount offers a highly customized three month program that's born out of Andrew's work enhancing the performance of special forces warriors in the US Military, including the Navy Seals. To start, Fount gathers more than 100 data points about their customers using in-depth blood and urine analysis to explore their metabolism, immune and inflammatory activity, nutrient levels, liver and kidney function, and even cardiovascular markers. Customers are then paired with an ex-special forces coach who gets to know their goals, day-to-day schedule, and even their family history all before kicking off a series of experiments that run for the remaining 15 weeks of the program.

Experimentation is a huge component of how Fount approaches their work. And it's part of their goal of helping each customer find what works for them. As part of the program, customers receive their own custom supplement packs with exactly what they need to take each morning, afternoon, and evening all sent from Fount's own custom supplement manufacturing facility. At the end of the program, Fount then offers a support program to make it easy to keep the gains you've made and continue building on them. This includes less frequent blood and urine tests, as well as a continuous supply of your daily supplements. Before founding Fount, Andrew spent seven years running the human performance and biotech strategy for the US Military Special Forces. Wired magazine described Andrew's work for the US Military as giving our soldiers mutant powers. Andrew holds master's degrees in microbiology and immunology, health physics, and security studies. He studied at Georgetown's famed School of Foreign Service in Washington, DC.

And he unsurprisingly comes from a highly decorated and long-serving military family. In this episode, you'll learn what Andrew learned enhancing the performance and effectiveness of the US Military's most expensive soldiers, including the Navy Seals, Green Beret, and Delta Force Warriors, what he learned about national security at Georgetown's famous School of Foreign Service, what the US Army's Mad Scientist distinction is, and why Andrew won it twice while he worked for the US Military. Andrew breaks down the components of peak performance, including the cognitive, physiological, emotional, sleep, physical and aesthetic elements, and talks about how Fount approaches maximizing each. We break down Fount's focus on experimentation, why the human body is the world's most complex system, why the same foods, exercises, and supplements either help or hurt different people, and how Fount is building the world's biggest data set around human performance through their work. And we go deep on Fount's layered strategy to optimize the performance of every person starting at the top of the market with those willing and able to afford an expensive intensive program. Today through how they're slowly replacing elements of his current program with software, data models, automated supplements, and more to bring Fount down market.

Finally, Andrew shares all of the lessons he's learned building Fount both as a founder and as a leader.

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Chapters

This episode is our definitive guide to bringing performance secrets from Navy SEALs to the public. In it we cover:

00:00:00 – Introduction
00:03:42 – Human performance and biotech strategy in the military
00:08:37 – The limits of military power for achieving political goals
00:15:22 – Navy SEALs and performance modalities
00:19:29 – Novelty and social judgment are the two great human stressors
00:21:55 – The premise of Fount and its future goals
00:31:07 – The 10 top goals for users of Fount, and the experiments they run
00:37:58 – The Fount user journey
00:42:28 – Coaching, both human and AI
00:46:36 – Using experimental methodology as a founder

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Listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Overcast, Google Podcasts, Amazon Music, Castbox, Pocket Casts, Player FM, Podcast Addict, iHeartRadio, or on your favorite podcast platform. You can watch the interview on YouTube here.

Our Favorite Quotes

Here are a few ideas we'll be thinking about weeks and months from now:

“I realized the military doesn't know it often how to buy services well. You need to build products to sell to them. And so I realized that by actually going and building this in the private sector, we probably could help the rank and file more.”
“I think my experience both in school and working with the military gives me a lot of pause about the limits of military power for achieving political goals. Turns out that the harder you hammer someone, that doesn't necessarily make them want to change their mind.”
“There's a concept called mirror imaging, which is assuming the other person thinks like you do. And that is one of the classic cognitive errors that I see repeated over and over.”
“One of the cool things about working with a community like a special operations community is if you're pushing your body to nearly the edge of what's possible, you really know when something works. You feel the difference quickly. They tend to be the kind of people who notice the little things, which is part of what makes them good and actually part of the reason we hire them as coaches for our clients.”
“Novelty and social judgment are, as best I can tell, the two great human stressors.”
“I would say, not every successful CEO is doing meditation and breathwork. I think most successful CEOs would benefit from doing that, but almost every successful CEO and startup has a great team. And that team is an incredibly valuable piece in addition to just the inborn ability of the founder to grind it out.”
“We can now send 95% of people anywhere in the world with no jet lag. And there's an algorithm that knows how to customize when to eat, sleep, wake up, and take custom supplements we've designed. You follow that. You give it some information. It calculates an optimal program for you, and you can sleep eight hours your first night in Tokyo.”
“You're always going to need specialist doctors for cancer and other places, but it's time to deliver good products in healthcare and wellness. And if we do that and the UI, UX are amazing and it works well, I think that opens the future.”
“I've come to believe that a much larger proportion of the challenges here are information problems and not willpower problems. And if that's true, you'll need to solve the willpower piece. And there's some obviously very smart UI, UX ways to do that. But if you combine that with it working and know people when to give people the right data feedback at the right time, I mean, we see this day to day, we see people transform their lives, and that should be accessible to everyone.”

5 Ways to Dive Deeper

Want to dive deeper? Here the best content we've curated on this subject:

#22 Levels: A Masterclass in Metabolic Health and Real-Time Optimization with Josh Clemente, Co-Founder | Outlier Academy: In this episode, we discuss how metabolism works, the importance of feedback loops, and how your blood glucose levels can shape everything from your energy levels to the quality of your sleep. (59 Min)
#61 Rootine: Building the Future of Vitamins, Micronutrients, and Data-Driven Health with Rachel Sanders, Co-Founder & CEO | Outlier Academy: In this episode, we discuss data-driven health, how the vitamin and supplement industry is broken, and advice for founders. (47 Min)
#88 Eight Sleep: On Sleep Fitness, Sleep Technology, and Category Creation with Alexandra Zatarain, Co-Founder & VP of Brand and Marketing | Outlier Academy: In this episode, we discuss the benefits and pitfalls of working on a physical product, category creation, and sleep fitness as a brand and movement. (63 Min)
All it takes is 10 mindful minutes: This TED Talk with Andy Puddicombe emphasizes the benefits of a short meditation, which Andrew also recommends. (09 Min)
How to Meditate: The New York Times put together a great how-to for getting started with meditation. (17 Min)

Selected Links

We covered a lot of ground in this interview. Here are links to the stories, articles, and ideas discussed:

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Transcript

Daniel Scrivner (00:05):

Hello, and welcome to another episode of Outlier Academy. This week's episode is part of our Outlier Founder Series, where we dig into the ideas, frameworks and strategies used by the world's best founders to build category-defining companies. I'm Daniel Scrivner and on the show today, I'm joined by Andrew Herr. Andrew is the founder and CEO of Fount, which is on a mission to help everyone look, feel, and perform at their very best. Fount offers a highly customized three month program that's born out of Andrew's work enhancing the performance of special forces warriors in the US Military, including the Navy Seals. To start, Fount gathers more than 100 data points about their customers using in-depth blood and urine analysis to explore their metabolism, immune and inflammatory activity, nutrient levels, liver and kidney function, and even cardiovascular markers. Customers are then paired with an ex-special forces coach who gets to know their goals, day-to-day schedule, and even their family history all before kicking off a series of experiments that run for the remaining 15 weeks of the program.

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Daniel Scrivner (01:04):

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Daniel Scrivner (01:58):

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Daniel Scrivner (03:10):

Finally, Andrew shares all of the lessons he's learned building Fount both as a founder and as a leader. You can find the show notes and text transcript for this episode at outlieracademy.com/127 it's outlieracademy.com/127. And you can learn more about Fount at fount.bio or by following FountBio on Twitter. With that, please enjoy my conversation with Andrew Herr of Fount.

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Daniel Scrivner (03:36):

Andrew, thank you so much for joining me on Outlier Academy. I'm thrilled to have you on to talk about Fount

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Andrew Herr (03:40):

Thanks, Daniel. Really great to be here.

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Daniel Scrivner (03:42):

So today, we're going to dive into what you're building at Fount, which is honestly somewhat difficult to describe, I think, because it's incredibly ambitious, but the way that I've kind of thought about it at just preparing for this interview is the world's most advanced health and performance optimization platform. And I'd love to start by just having you share a quick sketch of your background, because that's an important piece of the story. And I want to just kind of get that in first.

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Andrew Herr (04:06):

Awesome. So I ran human performance and biotech strategy efforts for the military for seven years. Everything from helping them design the research and development strategies all the way down to getting Navy Seals, ready to deploy. I ran big clinical trial. So I had the opportunity to do every element of human performance in the military space. And then out of that, I'd be speaking at conferences and executives would come to me and say, "Hey, I get what the Navy Seals, but what should I be doing?" And so I built an executive coaching business and ran training for their companies. So the big conclusion out of those two experiences was when you do intensive customization for individuals, you can get incredible results. But when I work for the military, you start to think about how do you go from a thousand Navy Seals to a hundred thousand army grants.

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Andrew Herr (04:55):

And you can no longer use elite coaches. How do you go from the C-suite to 10,000 employees in a company? And so you start to ask this question of how do we scale intensive customization. And unfortunately, the data that exists today can never get you there. It's these tiny clinical trials, it's observational, nonexperimental data that led us to tell people to eat high carb, low fat, and kind of give everyone diabetes. And so anyways, the data exists today, doesn't work, and so that led me on this longer question of how do we build the right data sets and how do we use them to help people with really the question they want to know the answer to which is what do I eat, take, and do to look, feel, and perform like I want. Just make it simple.

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Daniel Scrivner (05:42):

In that seven-year window working for the military, obviously, it sounds like going and speaking at conferences, having executives come up to you starts making your ears perk up and say, okay, there's a much bigger opportunity for this. So there's a lot of people that are generally interested. Was there a tipping point for you where you finally said, okay, I'm going to take the leap, and it's finally time to literally change everything about my life and become a startup founder?

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Andrew Herr (06:04):

There were two factors there. One was we got some wins in the military environment and I was really proud of some things we were able to change and some things we got funded. And the second piece was at some point that grinding against that bureaucracy starts to make you ask questions about whether this is the best way and not only the best way for me to move my career forward and achieve my own goals, but is it the best way to help the people in the military? And I came to the conclusion that, one, I was cursing in the wrong type of meetings in the Pentagon. So there's some meetings in the Pentagon where cursing is totally cool, and there's a bunch of Marines and nobody cares. And there's some meetings that are everyone's in a business suit. You shouldn't be. So I was starting to lose it with the bureaucracy. And second, I realized the military doesn't know it often how to buy services well. You need to build products to sell to them. And so I realized that by actually going and building this in the private sector, we probably could help the rank and file more.

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Daniel Scrivner (07:02):

It's fascinating. So, obviously, we didn't talk about it in this episode, you have a long military history in your family. You, obviously, then go and work for seven years, but you also studied national security at Georgetown's famed School of Foreign Services and that's one of three majors. You have a triple major. Talk a little bit about what it's like to study national security. And I guess for someone like myself, who I kind of think I vaguely know what national security is, how you think about what national security actually is.

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Andrew Herr (07:32):

So often when I think about studying national security, we think about focusing on their functional areas. So are you trying to understand how intelligence works? Are you trying to understand how to actually employ military forces? Are you thinking about how unconventional or nuclear, biological, chemical weapons work? And then a lot of people also focus on regional areas to understand in-depth East Asia, China, Russia, Latin America. And so there's sort of this regional and functional approach to thinking about it. But at the end of the day, for me, national security is part of a bigger strategy discussion, which is what are your goals as a country and how do you achieve them? And so there's sort of soft power and hard power, hard power being more like military, soft power, being more cultural and economic factors. So how do we coordinate those to protect ourselves and achieve our goals? And so I'm always thinking about it from the sort of strategy standpoint, and then you get into the nitty gritty from there.

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Daniel Scrivner (08:37):

It seems like a discipline or an area that you'd study that then changes how you see the world and it's showing up in coloring how you're interpreting news, how you're interpreting events and developments. How has it changed at all the way you think about either what's going on in the world, or you think about political news, how does that filter show up in your daily life, if at all?

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Andrew Herr (08:57):

I think my experience both in school and working with the military gives me a lot of pause about the limits of military power for achieving political goals. Turns out that the harder you hammer someone, that doesn't necessarily make them want to change their mind. Hitler thought that by bombing London and Britain, that they would give up and obviously the opposite happens. They harden and vice versa. So I think there are major limits to military power. And I also think that a lot of the... It's given me a lot of skepticism about the claims and expertise of politicians, frankly. A lot of the motivations and incentive structures in the government are not well aligned for the country. They're aligned for people to get reelected. And so I think there's a really important filter to always be applying, which is what are the incentives that are driving a country, an individual, a politician, a leader, to make decisions and never forget that those are also influenced by culture.

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Andrew Herr (10:07):

So we go into Iraq and our intelligence agencies thought there were weapons of mass destruction. And part of the reason there is because they weren't in the mindset of Iraqis that they needed... There's a lot of things going on, but one of the reasons is they needed to front that they had some of this stuff, or at least leave ambiguity because they have on their border, the Iranians or an incredibly powerful state on their border. So if you don't get into the mindset of your partner or your adversary, you're going to make the wrong decisions over and over. So there's a concept called mirror imaging, which is assuming the other person thinks like you do. And that is one of the classic cognitive errors that I see repeated over and over.

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Daniel Scrivner (10:51):

So well said. Another bit of your background I found fascinating is that you were awarded the US Army's Mad Scientist distinction twice, which makes me wonder, one, what is that? And then if you can share what you did to get those awards, if that's possible.

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Andrew Herr (11:06):

So there's different parts of the military, but one of the parts of the army is responsible for training and doctrine. Doctrine is how do we do what we do? And so they work with people throughout the national security complex to develop new ideas and spread those throughout the army. And so I was involved with them about how to reconceptualize and think about the future of human performance for the military. And I did a number of efforts with them that they bestowed this half joking, hopefully, half not a distinction of mad scientist on me.

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Daniel Scrivner (11:42):

I'd hope more real than a joke. I want to kind of transition and talk a little bit about, we've been touching on it a little bit, but so a lot of what's informed what you do at Fount came from your experience of working very closely with special operators to optimize their performance. And so I wanted to ask a few questions about that as a transition as we get a little bit deeper into what you're building. And one of the things I wanted to start with is if you could just paint a picture, broad brushstrokes of what you were doing when you were at that position in the military because I understand part of it's obviously R and D related. I imagine part of it's also tactical. What kind of buckets of things were you doing and what did your day-to-day work look like?

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Andrew Herr (12:21):

It really varied and I had a number of different positions. So everything from trying to identify the biggest opportunities for enhancing performance. Turns out, if I make everyone run a little bit faster, there's a pretty big question about how much that translates into battlefield effectiveness. But what if I could make it twice as quick to train people? Or what if I could make people more rapidly understand what commanders were communicating? What if I could make people trust each other better or more quickly? So again, there's very different things that you might want to optimize and knowing which one's you.

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Andrew Herr (13:03):

... very different things that you might want to optimize, and knowing which ones you want to optimize is really important because you need to invest against that, and you have limited resources even with the budget as big as the militaries.

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Andrew Herr (13:11):

Second piece is, what are our biggest threats? We thought a lot about potential future biological weapon threats. Some of those things, I would say, helped me mentally model what was going to happen with COVID. But what are the biggest threats as well as opportunities? And then, the second piece is more on the... All right. How do we take people who have a specific mission and optimize them? And that could be at the very individual scale we talked about with... Think about how do I accelerate the recovery of these Navy Seals? How do I take them and optimize their performance on an eight-hour dive mission? You can imagine what it's like to scuba dive on an eight-hour mission in cold water. This is right at the edge of what humans can do, which is why they're really incredible performers. But there are all kinds of things that could change their physiology in ways you might want to, but you've got to be really careful about unintended consequences. I was working with some fighter pilots and we had figured out there was a phenomenon that was affecting how they felt when they came back from missions, and it was affecting altitude and pressure and other things. And so, some of the initial things we tried with them made them feel much better, solved some of these dramatic cognitive challenges, but lowered their blood pressure a little bit. And there's one group roughly in the world that wants higher blood pressure. I mean, I guess there's some people who have naturally low blood pressure, but almost everybody wants to lower their blood pressure for longevity reasons. But if you lower a pilot's blood pressure, their G tolerance can go down. And so, you have to be really careful about unintended consequences.

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Andrew Herr (14:50):

And then, from those very individual things to how do we optimize the bigger force? And so, I took 450 army cadets and put them through a double blind placebo controlled study on using optimized nutritional supplements to get them performing better during training, and they do much better. They drop 30 seconds off their two-mile run time. They have better mood, and sleep, and energy levels. They're more dedicated to actually the job and mission. So, I felt very lucky to be able to work across the board on these different human performance topics.

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Daniel Scrivner (15:22):

Mm-hmm. I want to ask a question about Navy Seals and potentially, just the way they're portrayed. Recently, I was watching Zero Dark Thirty, and not to say that movies are reality, but I feel like it's generally how Navy Seals are always portrayed, which is as these grizzled warriors that are smart, strong, tough. But I don't necessarily think of them as wearing an aura, checking their biomarkers, eating salad, kind of optimizing all of these softer nutritional performance things. How much of that are they doing, and how much of that is day to day versus gearing up for kind of missions just at a high level?

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Andrew Herr (15:55):

There's been a big change over the last decade plus to bring in these perform... Maybe two decades even to bring in these performance modalities, and I think it's interesting you call it sort of the softer stuff. To them, this is how do I push harder, how do I reach an even higher level? Even within each special operations community, there's an elite group within the group, so you can be the elite of the elite. And let me tell you, everybody who wants to make it into the elite wants to make it into the elite of the elite. And so, people there are trying to push hard and they're getting banged up. I mean, these people, if you look at an MRI of their back, jumping out of planes, high loads, heavy, huge packs through long distances, they get beat up. And so, they need these tools to recover.

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Andrew Herr (16:43):

So, I actually think of these as tools that allow them to push harder, go faster instead of the softer stuff. Obviously, that's really just a framing difference, but to them, it also matters. They're incredibly mission-focused people. And so, I would say they have brought those modalities in because they just see they work.

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Andrew Herr (17:04):

One of the cool things about working with a community like a special operations community is if you're pushing your body to nearly the edge of what's possible, you really know when something works. You feel the difference quickly. They tend to be the kind of people who notice the little things, which is part of what makes them good and actually part of the reason we hire them as coaches for our clients. And so, I would say those are major reasons that they've wanted to integrate these things. Plus, it's become cool, and they're the kind of people who like cool things also.

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Daniel Scrivner (17:37):

They like cool things and technology. One of the things that this is related, that you and I were chatting about before we recorded, is that Navy Seals, from a personality disposition, even quality of life, day to day life perspective are actually very similar to CEOs and other elite performers. Meaning, they might not sleep as well. They're pushing themselves very hard. Talk a little bit about that and whether that was surprising or not for you to find as you were leaving the military and starting to work with more people that were civilians.

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Andrew Herr (18:05):

I think it wasn't a thing that I immediately expected. I wasn't surprised about it, but... We often think about the physical component of being a special operator, but the mental component is the most powerful piece. So, the things that really predict who's going to make it into special operations and give the other units, not just the Navy Seals, some love, too; a bunch of Rangers on our team, special forces and others. These groups are incredibly good at keeping a clear head in making decisions under stress. Somebody once told me a statistic, and I don't know if it's true or not, that at whatever point they were talking to me, essentially, every unicorn had to pivot at least once and a major pivot. And so, if that's true, or even if you just accept that being a startup founder requires making really hard decisions under high stress, then you need that same quality because to get these giant outcomes to survive despite insane odds, you need to be able to be clearheaded and have adaptive thinking under stress.

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Andrew Herr (19:10):

So, it's not surprising at all. To me, the elite from either group, business leaders, special operators, have this incredible ability to handle stress. And that doesn't mean they don't get stressed, but it does mean they can keep thinking effectively. They can make decisions. They can move forward instead of sort of freezing up.

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Daniel Scrivner (19:29):

Yeah. Just on that question. It's a little bit of a tangent, but one thing I'm always curious about is, when it comes to people operating in high stress environments, how much of it is being in those environments long enough that you start to get desensitized and you start to get more comfortable in it? Meaning, just how much of it's maybe, like you spoke about before, the loss of novelty? This thing's now... It's not new to you. It's something you're a little bit more experienced with. And then, how much of it is literally proactively leaning into manager, as you talked about before, doing breathwork, as you know you're about to head into a particularly stressful day? How do you think about those two sides?

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Andrew Herr (20:03):

So, novelty and social judgment are, as best I can tell, the two great human stressors. And so, obviously, somebody's shooting at you is a big stressor, but in general... These like sort of general terms. So, losing novelty is an incredible way to decrease stress, and we see that in military training. They train. They train realistically. I mentioned in our discussion earlier that before they go on the raid of Bin Laden, they build the compound so they can literally train where they will be, and it looks the same. So, again, decreasing novelty is an incredible way to have what might otherwise be the same stressful situation be less stressful. And then, there's things you can do individually. But I would say building teams and other things is the other sort of middle piece, which are; how do we have not only people around us who trust, and trust actually decreases the physiological stress response, but also how do we have resources and other people around us, mentors. I meet with a group of other CEOs and entrepreneurs every week, and that group is incredibly valuable for me not only to get ideas and process challenges, but to have the community that buffers my physiological stress level. So, I would say, not every successful CEO is doing meditation and breathwork. I think most successful CEOs would benefit from doing that, but almost every successful CEO and startup has a great team. And that team is an incredibly valuable piece in addition to just the inborn ability of the founder to grind it out.

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Andrew Herr (21:41):

I mean, one of the things I say, only the future will tell if I'm a successful CEO. Be that like, I will will this business into existence. Come hell or high water, that is my perspective on it, and so my hope is that I'm successful at doing that.

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Daniel Scrivner (21:55):

Yeah. I want to get into a little bit more of what you're building at Fount. I gave my definition earlier of kind of how I think about it. How do you describe what you're building at Fount to others, and how do you think about how it's different from what, I think, many can seem like a crowded field of people that are focused on health and performance optimization? What's unique and different?

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Andrew Herr (22:15):

So, that's what we're doing now and what we'll be able to deliver you into the future. So, just to quickly explain to people what we do now, we run sort of the highest level performance and health optimization programs. We do your blood work for you, track your sleep with wearables, do an intake interview with one of our coaches who are these former special operators or people who train Cirque du Soleil artists, really awesome people. And that 90 minutes, we can go really deep on what your goals are, your day to day habits, as well as go deep on your nutrition, exercise program, your family history, and sort of where you want to go. And so, what that allows us to do is take all these different data sets. Maybe you get a full body MRI as part of the program. Maybe we're tracking your blood glucose levels through continuous glucose monitor.

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Andrew Herr (23:00):

So, again, collecting all of these data sets, using that to design a program. But, I think, the key difference then is not just saying, "Okay, based on your blood and your answers, here's what you should be doing." Saying, "Here's the hypotheses. Here's what we expect or believe is going on. Now, let's run experiments with you at a very high frequency weekly experiments to identify if that's true, and then what the best solutions for you are."

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Andrew Herr (23:28):

So, we run our own custom supplement packaging facility to make life easy for clients, but there are 80 supplements or more that are available to our coaches to give to you, and there is not one of those supplements that's not bad for some of our clients. And that means that you can't give this one size, all fits approach, and the only way today to get to a truly optimized program for you is to run all these experiments. And so, our goal is to make that easy, redo blood work every month, capture that wearable data every day, check in with your coach every week, give you all of the insights and solutions about how to make this easier and to shortcut you, but to really optimize for you.

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Andrew Herr (24:06):

So, that's today is getting you to, again, knowing what to eat, take, and do to look, feel, and perform like you want. And then, the big future goal is, while we run these incredibly optimized programs, we're also collecting the highest fidelity data set in the history of health and wellness. No one has ever collected a large data set with dozens of experiments per person across thousands of people with rich pre and post data across blood work and wearables at this high frequency way.

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Andrew Herr (24:38):

And so, we're incredibly excited to build machine learning models using that data set that can democratize the ability to high level customization. So, you'll get one of our coaches. We'll deep fake them or we'll chatbot them, and they will be able to walk you through designing those experiments, use the data for your experiments to feed it back. But instead of this incredibly concierge model we have today, there'll be a SAS version. It'll be a little less fun. Having a former Navy Seal as your coach is a fun thing to have and actually is really valuable for people, but to make this available to millions of people, we're going to build the AI coaching version of this.

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Andrew Herr (25:14):

We already have the sort of very tip of that iceberg, which are... We make discoveries working with our clients. We can now send 95% of people anywhere in the world with no jet lag. And there's an algorithm that knows how to customize when to eat, sleep, wake up, and take custom supplements we've designed. You follow that. You give it some information. It calculates an optimal program for you, and you can sleep eight hours your first night in Tokyo.

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Andrew Herr (25:41):

And so, we're already seeing that what we expected would happen, happens from the data set. We've discovered new sleep supplements. We have a new product that can eliminate PMS physical symptoms for women in about 90% of women. And so, we have this incredible set of tools that are coming out that we'll launch as products. And then, the long term vision is to really wrap this all up into a comprehensive-

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Andrew Herr (26:03):

... and the long term vision is to really wrap this all up into a comprehensive program that's scalable.

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Daniel Scrivner (26:05):

I love the way you talk about the strategy of the business, because I think it's, honestly, masterful. As someone that tries to spend a lot of time studying what businesses are doing, there are very few founders that I talk to that have this kind of dual layer. We're doing this today, but that's not the envision. We're doing that to enable this. One of the questions I had there was, was that an emergent property, as you started getting into this? And did this emerge in, say, the first year or two of running the business, or was this idea very clear in your mind from day one?

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Andrew Herr (26:33):

I would say it took me about decades worth of work to realize this was the right strategy. Before I ran Fount and after I left the military work, I ran a consulting business where we were doing these one-on-one programs for executives, but without the bigger data goals. But to answer this question about how do we go from 1,000 Navy Seals to 100,000 Army grunts, or from the C-suite to the factory floor, my brain was searching for a framework for how to answer that question best. And initially my thought was designing these one off products and then letting people put products together for themselves. And then over time, I realized there was sort of a way to do it all at once. And that conclusion coincided pretty closely with the starting of Fount and really this big vision we have.

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Daniel Scrivner (27:21):

Well, it sounds like that's partly due to just your love of frameworks. And it sounds like struggling with that question for seven years, and then I imagine many, many years afterwards, of being able to optimize the performance for a small group, but feeling like you could never do it for a big group. And I'm sure you were just left wondering, how would I do that? What would that look like?

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Andrew Herr (27:39):

I think it's really fascinating that health is one of the last places where we expect people to tolerate bad products. When people look at software, if there's bad UI, UX, that's the company's fault, not the user's fault. And so I think, for a lot of people, the reason it's so challenging to lose weight is because the 50th percentile diet they're getting recommended, just as an average, doesn't work that well and it's hard to do. If you can go to a, maybe 75th percentile diet, maybe it works, but it's still hard to do. But if you go to a 95th percentile diet, it's easier to do, it gives you more energy, more focus, more willpower, it's working quickly.

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Andrew Herr (28:21):

And so what we need to do in health is to take these customization and allow it to get us to a point where we can give you a 95 percentile solution across the board and make that scalable. And I believe that's the key to solving heart disease, diabetes, obesity. The majority of disease in America is lifestyle disease. And so that's why my proposition is, if we solve this and do an incredible job of it, this solves the healthcare problem in America. You're always going to need specialist doctors for cancer and other places, but it's time to deliver good products in healthcare and wellness. And if we do that and the UI, UX are amazing and it works well, I think that opens the future.

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Daniel Scrivner (29:04):

And I love that point. I also love that it goes back to your strategy where, if you were to invert your strategy and say, "Let's build first a product that works for everybody. And then at some point in time, we'll go to this small group and be able to deliver those 95th percentile kind of gains," that obviously wouldn't work. You need to be able to start with driving peak performance for a small number of people before you're really able to broaden out. Just makes a ton of sense.

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Andrew Herr (29:28):

Yeah, I think that's right. And also we're in a really crowded market if you want to talk about of okay products that work. They might have great branding and some great elements. There's a lot of just okay products out there to optimize and customize.

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Andrew Herr (29:42):

And then also the problem is, you don't actually figure out what really works. The model we take today, whether it's taking a CEO, triathlete, or a pro-athlete, or the other half of our clients who are people who have never really done this work before, they're kind of want to go from zero to 60. But if in each case, what really works for those people, and that's in resident in the dataset, then these machine learning models and AI coaches will know what really works for people as opposed to a data set with only mediocre answers to those questions can only give you mediocre solutions for the users.

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Daniel Scrivner (30:19):

Yeah, well, I love the idea because it just makes so much sense that most people are stuck in a negative feedback loop. And what you really need to do is find a way to bump them into a positive feedback loop. But the only way that happens, to your point, is that it actually works because then they start to see the gains, which gives them the energy and the momentum, and the desire, and the willpower, to keep going.

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Andrew Herr (30:37):

I think, look, willpower is always an important piece, but I've come to believe that a much larger proportion of the challenges here are information problems and not willpower problems. And if that's true, you'll need to solve the willpower piece. And there's some obviously very smart UI, UX ways to do that. But if you combine that with it working and know people when to give people the right data feedback at the right time, I mean, we see this day to day, we see people transform their lives, and that should be accessible to everyone.

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Daniel Scrivner (31:07):

Yeah. I want to talk about something, I guess a little bit higher level, which is when people come to you and join the program, are there commonalities of what people are trying to change the delta on? Because thinking about myself, I think something that I would work with you on, I'm hoping to starting next month, is just around handling stress and managing stress. Is that common? And what are the commonalities that people come to you and really look for a shift in?

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Andrew Herr (31:32):

Yeah, I would say the top 10 goals are energy, focus, mood, sleep, gut health, longevity, fertility, losing fat, gaining muscle, stress management. I think that's 10, but those are probably the biggest ones people to come to us for. And they're starting in all different places in those categories, from people who are obese, to people who are already fit, from people who are incredibly stressed to want to knock the last pieces off. And that's why it's such a fun group. We get different challenges every day.

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Daniel Scrivner (32:05):

Yeah. I want to double click on the leaning in and focusing on experiments because I think it's very different than what other people are doing. Talk to us a little bit, maybe flesh out a little bit more, why experiments are so important and why you can't just, for instance, look at the data, not run experiments, just kind try to plug in, I guess, the commonality of answers? What gain and fidelity do you get by running experiments, and then how have you threaded that through the culture and the experience of Fount?

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Andrew Herr (32:33):

The human body is one of the most complex adaptive symptoms out there in the universe. And because that's true, even though we know a lot about certain blood markers, or we know about how certain diets may or may not affect you, there's a lot we don't know. My mental model for this, or the way I think of it is, imagine a globe. Medicine today understands everything above 14,000 feet. So the tips of those mountains, they understand. They sort of know the planes are there and they have no idea there's even an ocean. And so we know a lot about a very small number of things, and we know very little about a lot of things. And so what that means is we can use the data to guide what's most likely to help you, but you just cannot predict, with extremely high accuracy, which of the interventions will be most effective there.

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Andrew Herr (33:28):

And it matters a lot because some interventions actually make you worse. And so if somebody gives you 10 interventions to do and you feel better, maybe it's at like three are making you worse and six are making you better. But what happened if you did those six without the three making you worse, and then the one's kind of neutral or something like that?

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Andrew Herr (33:45):

So running these experiments is critical to figure out what works for your body, your goals, and your lifestyle. That's the triple customization. And there's no other way to do it today. I'm working hard to make it so you don't have to do this, but at the end of the day, even actually the machine learning models we're building are not meant to give you the answer. Turns out the data set you need to get the answer is essentially impossible to build, but we can build you a data set that allows you to build coaches, AI coaches, that can help you quickly run a small number of experiments to get you there. That's actually the most efficient way to do it, actually even human and the AI side. So I would say that's the key thing. It's not possible to customize today just based on data. Anyone who says it is giving you a less than optimal outcome. And once you've experimented, you can find really cool patterns. It's fun.

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Andrew Herr (34:43):

And also I think the other thing that's really important is, if you're working with people and you give them something that doesn't work, they're like, "Hey, I thought you were an expert." But we're being explicit. Look, some of these things are not going to work. Some of these things actually may be counterproductive, but the cool thing is when they're counterproductive, that tells us something really important about your body and where to go next.

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Daniel Scrivner (35:04):

Yeah. Well, I mean, to me, it seems like an intellectually honest way to go about pursuing peak performance. Saying there's some things we know, but, one, everyone's an individual, which ties into one of the themes that we've explored a lot on this podcast, is this move... I think of kind the next, I don't know, 20 to 50 years generally as being about a lot of industries and spaces moving from one size fits all solutions and to hyper, hyper tailored solutions. The stat, you've shared it a couple times of how, because we're all biologically so different, we respond differently to different things.

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Daniel Scrivner (35:36):

And it makes me think of had one of the founders of Levels on, and had a fascinating stat that one of the studies that they ran was basically having a large percentage of their user base eat a cookie and eat a banana, and finding that actually for 50%, the banana spiked the blood sugar more than the cookie. And for the other 50%, it was the other way around. And then we had the CEO of Rootine, which does personalized vitamins, Rachel Sanders on. And just the note that, and again, this ties into, here we are today going to Whole Foods or whatever grocery store we go to, getting a multivitamin, when it turns out multivitamins, about 50% of what's in a multivitamin, actually probably isn't what you should be taking, and works against your body or your physiology.

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Daniel Scrivner (36:17):

And so, one, it makes you realize how profoundly broken the optimized state that we currently live in is, but it also just makes it clear that the only true way to optimize anything is to get hyper, hyper personalized and individualized with it.

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Andrew Herr (36:30):

And there are probably some important subgroupings out there, but beyond male, female, young, old, we just don't know what they are today. So I think we'll get there. But the beauty of the way AI works is it's really good at this specific type of problem.

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Andrew Herr (36:47):

And so my COO ran machine learning engineering for Wayfair. He's an AI engineer by training. And so it's really amazing to have somebody like that running operations and building the data collection, and these systems, into the program and into the company, and being ready to use this data and move forward. And then obviously discovering things along the way.

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Andrew Herr (37:07):

We have this new sleep supplement, that for a third of people, gives them the best sleep of their life night one. People who've been waking up at night all their life solves it. For another third of people, it does nothing. And in the last third of people, it makes it worse. And you know what? That's exactly what we should expect. But if I read a study without that framework in mind, it might just say, "Hey, the average effect is zero," which is just not true when we know that... The placebo effect is less... You sort of have a sense of whether it's the placebo effect. If they've tried five things already and none of them worked, and then this suddenly works magically.

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Andrew Herr (37:45):

And so that's where we want to go is what's the right thing for you, what's the right thing for me. And obviously commentatoroly, you just can't get there without these experimental data sets.

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Daniel Scrivner (37:58):

I want to talk for a second about technology, because I know that... We've mentioned constant glucose monitor, which I imagine is something like Levels, an Oura Ring. I know there's also potentially a scale, there's an MRI that you guys have some of your clients use. I think it would be interesting for a second if you could just describe some of the technology that's happening in the program. And then one other thing I think would be interesting to touch on is how it's different using that technology with Fount, as opposed to just using it on your own and trying to draw your own conclusions.

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Andrew Herr (38:26):

Yeah. So we're going to start you with blood work. We're going to get between 100 and 120 biomarkers, in blood and urine. You might normally get a few vials of blood drawn by your doctor. We're probably going to do 12 to 15, so pretty extensive. Second, we're going to monitor your sleep with an Oura Ring. We want to look at, not just your sleep there, but also metrics like heart rate variability, HRV. That's measuring sort of how much stress is in the system, how much sympathetic nervous system activity, it's the fight or flight system. We're going to track body temperature and heart rate at night, and then we're going to get all the subjective variables.

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Andrew Herr (39:03):

... rate at night, and then we're going to get all the subjective variables. If you want more energy, that's a subjective effect. If you want to feel less stressed I can measure stress hormone levels or proxies thereof with things like HRV but we also care about how you feel. And I think sometimes people are like, "Oh, this is subjective, so it's not real." How you feel subjectively is a pretty big part of your life, so I think it's pretty important. And you can also turn that subjective data into quantitative data by asking somebody if your goal is, "Hey, I have these energy dips at 2:00 PM." Well, at 3:00 PM, I want to know your energy levels every day. And that's very easy to collect via app, or even text message for people. So we're collecting that data, and then we're adding things like continuous glucose monitoring, as you mentioned levels, great technology, we're looking at how do we get a baseline and/or identify any challenges via these MRIs companies like Ezra, which do a great job of that.

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Andrew Herr (39:57):

And I'd say the difference is twofold. One, other companies are going to say, "Here's your blood work. Here's what we recommend." But if I just see that you're fasting glucose, or your morning glucose, when you haven't eaten is high, that actually may not be a metabolic problem. You have this stress hormone dump, or cortisol released in the morning that is normal and that can raise your blood sugar levels. And some people it raises it more than others. It's called the dawn effect. And so if that's the case with me, I might have relatively high blood glucose level in the morning and have no metabolic problems, and I need to go after the stress hormone side instead. So, you have to be really careful how you measure that. And there are some other blood markers that can help me evaluate that, but maybe I'm combining it with looking at your HRV. Maybe I'm combining it with the questions you're answering.

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Andrew Herr (40:47):

So again, integrating the data matters. And then if somebody says, "Here's your data, here's your program," you end up with a different problem, which is maybe my omega three levels are low, or my vitamin B12 levels are low. But maybe the issue is not that I don't get enough of it. Maybe it's that I'm not absorbing it. Maybe it's that I'm using it up too quickly. And so again, without running iterative experiments and doing regular retest and designing these experiments, you actually often are treating a symptom and not the actual problem. And then the other thing is often if the blood work says you're either good or bad, if you're good, how do you optimize from there? It doesn't really provide that input. And there, you really need to be running these experimental protocols for optimization.

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Andrew Herr (41:38):

So anyways, a long way to say, it's not just about having the data, it's about integrating the data. It's about using the data to run experiments. And when we put it all together, that's when you discover unique things about people. Now, I think of this client who was having swelling in his legs. It turns out, comes out that mom had varicose veins. Dad had hemorrhoid ... there's this history on both sides of family, of vascular issues, blood vessel issues. And so for that person, when you go after those blood vessel issues, you only know because you had a conversation with them, or you know what questions to ask you have this like dramatic benefit and solve it. And honestly, can't guarantee this, but very likely decreasing long term cardiovascular risk at the same time.

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Daniel Scrivner (42:28):

I love the overview gave there because I think it clearly makes the case for a lot of people can readily get quantitative data and they can try to interpret themselves and make conclusions there. But the quantitative plus qualitative is very different, I think changes the game. And then the other thing that I wanted to touch on is the coaching aspect. And obviously as you talked about before, at some point, maybe that becomes a piece of software that people are interacting with and that people are using. Today, they're physically talking with someone who trained Cirque du Soleil performers, or an ex-special operator. How do you think about the alpha that people are getting from this coaching part of the experience? And then I'm curious how much of it is maybe pushing people, how much of it is more on the mental side, or is it really just having a human that's with you as you're going through all of these changes and experimentation?

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Andrew Herr (43:16):

Like most or questions these days, my general answer is yes. So, I think there's a couple things here. If you have a legal issue, you don't go to law school, you hire a lawyer, because you don't have time and the level of depth and experience you need to do it right, it's not worth it. It's better to pay somebody and you probably want to pay the best people if it's a serious issue. And so why wouldn't you do that with your health? I think it's a crazy concept that we in that way deprioritize our health, because many people aren't willing to spend on it. And so I think one, having a coach is bringing an expert in who's trained and knowledgeable and has the experience, both the book information and the experiential piece of working with people who both are like you and different. And that allows them to get you there much faster.

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Andrew Herr (44:06):

If you go on the internet, you're going to find, "Do A and definitely do not A, and also sometimes we're not sure." And so if it do A, if you do you do not A, and why would you even start with that intervention versus this other one that these other people are touting? You're going to waste a lot of time and a lot of money, so if you have the resources hiring a coach is a really efficient way to do it. Two, it makes the process more fun. I hire fun people. We should all have be able to have a good experience. Coming back to this idea of a lot of health products are bad products. We want to have a good, a great ... not a good product., we want to have a great product.

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Andrew Herr (44:42):

And then the third piece would be, some people really do benefit from the accountability partner piece, the support piece. One of the questions we ask in our intake with you is, "What do you want as a coach, if a one is really warm and supportive, and a five is an RV's ranger drill instructor. Where are you on that one to five scale? What do you want? And we can deliver you anywhere on that scale. If you select a five, please careful what you wish for." But again, I mentioned earlier that we want to customize three ways, your body, your goals, your lifestyle, and body and mind. And so I think at the end of the day, what coaching allows us to do is rapidly accelerate you, support you better and give you a better experience.

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Daniel Scrivner (45:30):

I'd love to close out by just talking about some lessons learned. And I think an interesting place to start would be your experience as a founder. I imagine you clearly spent a lot of time in school, your triple major, triple masters, you then go and spend seven years in the military, as you talked about very bureaucratic, which it sounds like, just who you are, was pushing up against that at a certain point. Then you leave to found this company and now you've been building it for three years. What are the biggest lessons that you've learned and taken away as a first time founder?

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Andrew Herr (46:00):

One of the things about my background that was a gift is having deep technical knowledge. The health space is so complex that it's very easy to be on a path that looks like it should work and there are nuanced reasons it won't. So, I'm glad I have the deep technical knowledge. I'm also glad that I'm not so focused on that it freezes me from making decisions and taking actions and trying things. So, I think that balance is always important for founders of gaining the subject knowledge you need, and also not allowing that to freeze you up because you can never know everything.

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Daniel Scrivner (46:36):

Yeah. And then just as an individual you can think of this maybe as a leader, as you're starting to build out a team. I don't know if you had a team before, when you were working for the US Military, but how do you think about how you have changed and how you've evolved and where you've grown as a leader and as an individual? And partly I ask that because, for every founder, I feel like founding a company is this crucible that you learn a lot about yourself and you also see a lot of the things that you need to improve. What's that process been like for you? What have you learned and improved at?

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Andrew Herr (47:04):

Funny, I was going to use the word crucible also.Yeah. It can feel like that sometimes. When I'm doing things right, I'm using the same experimental methodology to optimize myself as a founder. So on a weekly basis, I work with a coach/therapist, I work with a group of other CEOs, I work with a physical therapist twice a week to keep my body in shape. So, I train for ultra races and I don't want to get hurt. That prevents me from doing what I want to do. So, I am constantly trying to figure out my own weaknesses and mitigate against them. And that could be as simple as I was up late getting something ready for investors, which means I didn't have enough sleep today, which means I need to implement the following protocols today to perform well, or I need to get better at making this specific type of decision.

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Andrew Herr (47:54):

And there the question is, "Why is that what I get stuck on?" And I find that I can figure that out, especially with the right coaching, I can figure that out. And then once I've figured it out, I have a mental model of why that is, and I have tools to solve it. And so I think the key thing for me has been, I need to be better every day than I was the day before. And I want other people around me who have that same perspective. And when I do, then we perform incredibly well. And there's, especially in some communities, this idea of like, "Oh, you talk to a therapist." It's like, "Yeah, I want to get better at what I do. Why wouldn't I use every tool at my disposal to succeed. If I think my mission is important and I care about it?" So, that's my goal. I'm sure my team will tell me, I'm not always hitting the mark and they're right, and I'll try to be better tomorrow. And most days I think I get better and keep going.

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Daniel Scrivner (48:50):

So well said, I also love that it completes this beautiful loop of experimentation of Fount, and applying that to yourself as the CEO and founder of the company. This has been a fascinating conversation. Thank you so much for joining me, Andrew.

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Andrew Herr (49:01):

Thanks so much, Daniel, really a pleasure and look forward to chatting in the future and getting you on the program.

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Daniel Scrivner (49:08):

Thank you so much for listening. You can find the show notes and text transcript for this episode at outlieracademy.com/127 that's outlieracademy.com/127. And you can learn more about Fount at fount.bio, or by following fountbio on twitter. At outlieracademy, you can find all of our other founder interviews, profiling, incredible companies like Forward, Eight Sleep, Common Stock, Varda Space Industry, Superhuman, Primal Kitchen, 1-800-GOT-JUNK and many, many more. In every interview, we deconstruct the ideas, frameworks, and strategies these founders use to build these incredible companies.

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Daniel Scrivner (49:46):

You can find videos of all of our interviews on YouTube at youtube.com/outlieracademy. On our channel, you'll find all of our full length interviews as well as our favorite short clips from every episode, including this one. So make sure to subscribe, we post new videos and clips every single week. And if you haven't already, make sure to follow us on Twitter @outlieracademy. Thank you so much for listening. We'll see you right here with a brand new episode next Wednesday.

On Outlier Academy, Daniel Scrivner explores the tactics, routines, and habits of world-class performers working at the edge—in business, investing, entertainment, and more. In each episode, he decodes what they've mastered and what they've learned along the way. Start learning from the world’s best today.

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