Talks with great people directly from Terra

• Kian Sadeghi discusses Nucleus's bold move to sponsor a Jake Paul fight, leveraging a last-minute opportunity to secure a cost-effective deal.
• The Nucleus logo appeared on a big screen during the fight, creating a viral moment that resulted in over 10 million Twitter impressions.
• Sadeghi emphasizes the importance of founders acting as influencers to capture attention in today's competitive market.
• He shares insights on creating compelling content by starting from the customer's perspective and keeping the message simple.
• Nucleus's strategy led to a significant boost in SEO, illustrating the power of creative marketing in building a generational brand.

In this podcast with Kyriakos the CEO of Terra, Kian Sadeghi reveals how Nucleus captured national attention by featuring their logo at a Jake Paul fight. He shares the story behind negotiating a last-minute sponsorship deal that skyrocketed their brand's visibility. Kian also delves into the art of storytelling and the necessity for founders to embrace the role of influencers to thrive in today's market.

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42,000 Tickets and Zero Ad Spend

Kyriakos: Let's just start there, man. How did you manage to be, I was looking at the cups with the Nucleus logo. We gotta get this on. We gotta get this on. Are we live right now? The largest whole genome database in the world today is around half a million people. The largest in the world, half a million. You can easily beat that. We're competing with Mr. Beast. If you're a founder who's not become an influencer, you're not a good founder. And that might be a hot take, but I think it's very true. I have to say, if you're starting an AI company after you heard about ChatGPT, you're not gonna make it. Come on now, fam. Supposedly, if he actually calls Keith and says, oh, you have to invest in something. Oh my God. I kind of give half, I give my pitch. He's like looking up. Yeah, we're gonna put in 1.5 million. Bro, but wait a second, wait a second. You convinced the guy who raised the money. So he went back to Keith. Supposedly, yeah, that's what I heard. He went back to Keith and then he said, this is a great idea. And then Deleon met me, five minutes. Oh, of course we're gonna invest in this. This is a force of nature. We announced that we were interested in the possibility of potentially buying 23andMe. That was the post. Everybody was posting it everywhere. And actually I was in Singapore at the time. So it's 2 a.m. in Singapore. The number of journalists that reached out 2 a.m. to 6 a.m., oh my God. No joke. Wired, Stats, Wall Street Journal, this journalist, that journalist. I start calling. Hey, Kian knows that. I'm like, what the hell? How do you have my phone? I'm like, this is crazy. You know, put ourselves in it, put ourselves in it. Anything, whether it's the Jake Paul fight, whether it's Don't Die, whether we're buying.

The Photo That Built a Flywheel

Kian: Let's just start there, man. How did you manage to be? I was looking at the cups with the Nucleus logo in the, what the heck, man? How did you? We gotta get this on. We gotta get this. Are we live right now?

Kyriakos: Okay, are we live?

Kian: Yes. Boom. So we start, right? Do you wanna do an intro or we're good?

Kyriakos: No, no, no. Let's start from that point and then I will make an intro. Like the crazy part was in getting Nucleus into the stage there. So how does one do that?

Kian: Well, okay, so it's a mix of absolute relentlessness and luck, okay? So what ended up happening is we got to reach out to potentially working with Jay Leon, who's one of Jake Paul's trainers. And basically, let's just say the initial price they quoted, I was like, no way in hell would we ever do this. This would be the most massive waste of investor dollars ever, okay? One thing that's really interesting about these very large sporting events, and maybe this is a hack to share with the founders, is if it's four or five days before the event, there is absolutely no large corporation in the entire country that has the speed and agility to get a sponsorship deal done, right? Like Coca-Cola, whoever, Monster, isn't gonna call up the Jake Paul team, Netflix, five days before the fight and say, oh, we want a sponsor. Just the legal work itself would take four months, right? But if it's a startup and the decision maker's right here, I can all of a sudden use that as a way of getting leverage effectively to negotiate an exceptionally good contract. And then basically put, it's kind of like what I was saying earlier, you do everything you possibly can, which in this case was, it was actually beyond just a hat. There was a shirt too that unfortunately got taken off, but there was a hat and a shirt that basically the trainer, Jay Leon, had to wear. And the thing we didn't know was, would it actually get picked up by the camera? So it was still a big risk. So we did everything we can. We're really smart with how we did the negotiation. We got the deal done. What was so remarkable is I was there and so I was there on the floor, right? The team was also there. Also, Brian was there as well. We actually invited Brian. So Brian was there as well. And I'll never forget this, the fight starts. And at some point I'm like really, I'm like sweating. Cause I'm like, oh my God, is this actually gonna work? I look over at the big screen and I see Nucleus. And in that moment, there's like this, this mind bendiness. You're like, oh my God, this is actually gonna work. It's like, there's this mind bendiness. You're like, oh my God, like, you know, there's this feeling you get as a founder where something from your mind, it finally enters the physical plane. It was a very similar feeling as to when I first opened up my office, where I said, oh my God, it's real. And so I see my baby, you know, in the big screen, you know, and I'm like, what? And then I take out my phone, the number of text messages I had of the picture of the Netflix screen of the logo. And then I'm like, oh my God, it worked. I looked back up, like, so my company's sitting above, right, I'm on the floor, they're sitting above. I'd look up and everyone's like, yeah! One of the best moments ever. One of the best ones I've had in my entire life. Because it was just this, you know, this kind of, you know, reality bends to your mind. I mean, I can't even explain it. It was unbelievable.

Kyriakos: This is, you know, like, I was just watching the fight because of the hype. And I wasn't interested into the fight at all. So I was kind of seeing it and not seeing it. And then I see the logo and I'm like, how the heck did this guy make it on the screen? How does one make a deal like this? It was crazy. And it was, man, it was so tactical because it was the hat at the moment that like all the attention was there. It was unbelievable. It wasn't actually doing the sponsorship itself. It's what can you place that is so spot on. It was unbelievable. And it's funny because when we were thinking about what to design on the hats, I said, look, we got to put make America healthy again. Because for me, make America healthy again, it's a bipartisan issue. Who doesn't want to make America healthy, right? And so, you know, we put it on the hat. And what was so interesting is the analogy I gave the company. Okay, as I said to my colleagues, I said, you want to put a flea, right, little flea on an invasive species. So the invasive species is going to proliferate and no one realizes that we're sitting right on top of it. Right, because if we just put a logo, people don't know. It's not like it's Netflix or Google or something where we can, you know, actually kind of, you know, have a connection with it. And so when we put Nucleus so that make America healthy again, and I will call this on the record. I said to my company, I said, this is going to end up on Fox News. I said, just trust me. I swear to God, I called it. It was on Fox News. It was on Fox News. And when I saw it on Fox News, I said, this is insane. And then the best part was I go on Twitter and the number, I think there must have been over 10 million impressions, right? Because the number of people that just posted it and said Maha, and then there's the logo. I mean, you couldn't have asked for simply a better viral moment. And the thing is with these moments is these are very top of the funnel, right? They're very much about just building your brand into the zeitgeist because maybe someone doesn't realize today that it was, you know, Nucleus that actually did that. But once you start getting the brand out there more and more, people will connect the dots. And this is how you prime people eventually to build generational brands, right? You have to get these national touch points and you have to escape just the kind of tech bubble. We've done very good, as you know, in kind of getting the hype there. But what I love about the kind of Jake Paul moment is it's really a national moment for the brand. And, you know, there's implications that are really positive that go beyond just conversions. I mean, our SEO absolutely skyrocketed, right? I mean, you can imagine the SEO chart, just shot to the absolute moon, right? Which always helps forever in kind of the ranking of the page, which then just gets more customers on there. So it was truly a special moment. And I think of all the things we've done, that might be the most just artful, truly. Because we've done a lot of different, you know, kind of stunts, if you will, like viral moments. That was just art, it was just beautiful.

Kyriakos: I think we kind of started the podcast in the without the sequence, and I'm going to keep it this way. Speaking of, like, I think that's evident that you have a skill in generating attention. And I can see that from your Twitter, I can see all over the media, that's one moment. But can you advise people on how do they generate attention? What are the secrets there?

Kian: That's a great question. I think that people today forget all you need fundamentally is a camera and a story. I think people sometimes, even founders today, they tend to think, oh, you know, I'm competing with, you know, Natera, I'm competing with 23andMe, I'm competing with Ancestry, whatever. Maybe someone looks at Nucleus and that's what they think. Natera is a clinical genetics company. The reality is though, me and every single consumer founder, maybe even B2B founder, but especially consumer founders in the country, we're competing with Mr. Beast. So it's a complete rethinking of the entirety of just marketing. It's a complete rethinking of, I think, all of consumer startups today. There is no competitors except for getting people's eyes and getting people's ears. That is the fundamental goal of a consumer enterprise. And in other words, in doing that, you need to just make good content, right? It's not even about necessarily explicitly genetics. Obviously, we want to tell the story about the power of genetics, we want to tell the story about the power of healthcare, but actually, it's not even explicit about that. It's about making content people love. And then in making content people love, they eventually engage with the brand. So I would think of it less as like, oh, I'm trying to get attention as much as we try to tell stories. And these stories, we don't feel restricted by sort of an imaginary corporate institutional tone, nor do we feel restricted by, oh, is this too crazy, right? Because our job principally as a consumer brand is to get people's eyes and ears. So whatever we can do to tell our story, regardless of kind of what exactly the message is, is I think powerful. And I would say that, we still want to be sort of on brand. Like there is a world that maybe you make content too crazy, but in the kind of scope of things, 99% of people are making too pensive, they're too passive with the content they make. They don't know, like very rarely do you find anyone that's almost too out there. So it's really hard to be too out there. It's very easy to be too pensive, if that makes sense.

Kyriakos: Yeah. I think it's, we kind of have a very similar philosophy there, it seems. The way I think about differentiation is being original and be yourself.

Kian: Yes.

Kyriakos: And because nobody can be yourself.

Kian: Yes, that's the alpha.

Kyriakos: Exactly, and then I always think of this type of, like I go to this, maybe just, I just go to one event every year, right? Like I just go to health ones every year and I just see everyone there just doing a booth and doing a stand and just waiting for people to come around. And whenever we go there, then what we do is basically, we did, I'll just brief you on what we've done in the last stand there. Like we go to booth and then call Datesleep and told them, guys, give us a mattress so we can give it to people. And then we brought pull-up bars and we made a challenge of steps and pull-ups. And then everyone with suits was coming to a booth of Terra just doing pull-ups. And you'd be seeing.

Kian: Do you win an A-side?

Kyriakos: Datesleep, Datesleep.

Kian: Wow, yeah.

Kyriakos: And it's just hundreds of people doing pull-ups, just lining up, which is, this is the brand of Terra. It's like, it's pull-ups, it's push-ups, it's health.

Kian: Yes.

Kyriakos: So thinking outside of, what is everyone doing? It's like, the anti-mimesis rule, it's very interesting. But on that, you mentioned about content. So how do you think about content? Because many people think, I'm going to do content, but they don't know what kind of content to do.

Kian: I think there's multiple steps to building good content. The first is the most obvious, which is you need a founder who can also be basically an influencer. One of my biggest pet peeves today is when people talk about influencers and they talk about founders. Let's be real, there's only founders, right? There is no difference now. A lot of the technology, especially with AI is becoming somewhat commoditized, and the alpha lies in the distribution. So if you can find a way of getting your audience and engaging your audience, there's tremendous alpha there. Ideally, you build a company like Nucleus, where there's a mix of technical alpha and distribution alpha. That's where I think really the magic happens. But anyways, to answer your question, so first is you have to get someone who is very much emphatic. By my personality, I'm a very animated person. I don't mind going in front of the camera. I maybe even love going in front of the camera and telling a story. So that's the first step. Next is you have to think about sort of, I see this a lot running a consumer business, which is people have specific threads that they start from. Oftentimes, when you know your product really well, you wanna start from, it's a classic mistake, your features. Oh, we're the most comprehensive thing ever. Oh, we're this, whatever. But then the way that people actually look at it is, I wanna be healthy, right? No one says, I want the most comprehensive genetic test ever. Someone says, I wanna be healthy. Someone says, my mom had cancer, am I at risk? Someone says, I'm having kids, I wanna be healthy, right? In other words, you should always start your story with where the customer is starting their story. And that's really hard, especially for founders to do, because you have to basically completely remove yourself from all the technical kind of wonders, what your kind of technical obsession is. And you have to put yourself in beginning from the consumer's perspective and keep it simple. I mean, if you go on our Instagram right now, if you go on our Twitter, the way that we tell stories, we literally write the script for a fourth grader, because no one understands jargon and people don't have the comfort to say, hey, I don't understand this, right? And so first is get the great kind of great storyteller, great founder, a great animated character in there. Next is to have a very simple script that begins with the story of the customer. And then last of course, is to give it your all. I think if you do those two things, and then obviously the video quality needs to be good, the audio should be good, the video quality should be good. You do those things, I think you're in the 99th percentile. Especially because founders still have not picked, it's funny, because I'm seeing more and more on Twitter, founders putting a kind of camera in front of them and starting to do this. And maybe if I'm being a little bit too, kind of looking at the world through my own perspective, I think, huh, are they just watching by content.x? And now they're like, shit, let me get a camera. And then advice to all those founders, get a good camera. I mean, get a good camera, right? This is really nice, we have nice cameras here, nice audio. Make sure you do the basics because that's what people, unconsciously people wanna watch. And so this is how we think about it.

Kyriakos: That's one, like to solve the content problem. How do you solve the distribution problem of that content?

Kian: Well, I think you have to just be completely ceaseless. I was saying this to our director of marketing recently, which is, it's better to, so people always talk about product velocity. So one thing you know, if you follow Nucleus, and I know you do to some extent, and if anyone follows my Twitter or whatever, they see that we're obsessed with shipping as fast as possible, right? We wanna ship a feature at least every week, ideally. And so people always talk about and have a good intuition for product velocity. But I think one of the aspects that gets missed is actually marketing velocity, right? You shouldn't just be shipping every week. The way you tell the story about what you're shipping is equally as important as what you actually ship. You see a company that does this actually exceptionally well is Ramp, right? Yes, they're shipping, but it's as much as a marketing storytelling as it is an engineering problem. And from that perspective, I would rather make five good videos and push out every single day of the week than make one great video once a week. And so I'm starting to reorientate our marketing department to think a lot more like the engineering department, because I put so much intensity, I put so much intensity on the engineering team to ship, right? So like, you know, in Nucleus, we have a channel, the main Slack channel, it's called ship or sell. So you're either shipping or you're selling, that's it. And so I always put so much pressure on the engineering team, we need to move faster, we need to get this product in front of real people faster, because as you know, that's when the rubber hits the road, you actually get the feedback, you iterate, and that becomes super linear. But what I've realized over time is actually the exact same thing is true for marketing, right? If we push out content, the faster we see what content works and what doesn't work, and the faster we get an audience, and then in getting an audience, you get an audience even faster. In other words, that's also super linear. So I like to think now of product velocity, but also marketing velocity. And if we can actually push out, you know, a feature every single week, and on the marketing front, push out a new video every single day, even if the video quality, you know, isn't the best video in the world, it's just like a good video, inevitably you'll win.

Kyriakos: Dude, it makes sense. I even remember videos that you've done with you going to the office. I was just watching you going to the office. I'm like, now I'm thinking about it. It's just the more videos you do, the more you get into the shoes of the person, the more they know your story, the more they know your story, the more they know the product.

Kian: Yes, and I think, you know, what's interesting, today I was actually looking into buying like a food, because I have a problem where, obviously we're really busy, you know, we're founders, and I need like good quality food. And so I was looking into different meal services, right? And, you know, it's really interesting because what I like to do sometimes is, it's hard for me to put myself out of the shoes of the founder of Nucleus because, you know, this is my baby. So what I like to do is, I, when I look for new products, I watch very closely in sort of a metacognition level, what do I do, what do I look for to check the kind of quality of a product, right? And then I try to inductively apply that to how people approach Nucleus. So today I was literally going, and I was paying attention to what I was doing, right? And as I was looking at the, you know, multiple different kind of these food planning companies, what I noticed is the company I ended up trusting the most was actually the one where I could see the founder, I could see where the food was coming from, and it just felt very real, right? So I'd go on their social media, the social media is active, it's alive, it's well, the founder would speak right into the camera, and I could just basically, they would say, this is where the food is sourced from, you know, our salt is from Italy, whatever the hell. And the other ones that were not as clear that, you know, a little bit more maybe cagey, or just, it didn't feel as if I could connect. It felt like it was almost a, you know, it almost, the difference was, it was looking at a painting that didn't respond to me versus an interactive sort of exhibit. That was sort of the difference. And naturally, just by merely the interaction, feeling like I know the founder, you know, I'm gonna buy the product. And so then that got me very excited because I thought about, you know, imagine someone was looking at different genetic testing companies, right? And they went to our socials versus some other socials. I mean, it's not even close. You can see, you know, I'm a real person, I'm there, the buck stops at me, I make sure that the quality of the food, in our case, the genetic testing is there. I make sure everything's, you know, turnaround time super fast. I make sure all our customers are well kept, taken care of. In other words, often you find that people will actually buy Nucleus. And when they buy Nucleus and you ask them, why did you buy Nucleus? They will say something like, I love Kian's videos.

Kyriakos: I think, you know, it's this change. Like if you go 50 years back, you had all of the big brands building some sort of trust and they had all the newspapers that they're using to advertise.

Kian: Yes, exactly.

Kyriakos: Now the, today, like you have just a phone, as you mentioned, just a phone and people don't trust brands anymore. That was just so much easier to trust the person.

Kian: Exactly, and to your point, we don't have to rely on the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal to get our message. To me, when people talk about founder-led comms, it really is, if you take founder-led comms to the extreme, it's a camera in front of the founder that's following the founder 24-7 and basically churning out content. That's like founder-led comms. And then you always control the narrative then. And you can see this kind of, if you take this to the most maximum extreme, look at the presidential election, right? You know, you basically have a bunch of people who built their audiences over, you know, a decade, just going direct to the audience. And it's no longer like, oh, you know, this is some fringe like podcast. It is the media, right? It is how people understand products. Elon, like he posts on Twitter like 300 times a day.

Kyriakos: I mean, yeah, I mean, like Elon's crazy on Twitter. And then you look at these other, even like, you know, politicians, they're just like writing exactly what they think on Twitter. Like, you're just kind of like, it's insane. Like, I think it's hard to appreciate, especially in this new age of media, how much that has changed from even a decade ago, right? And then how much I think the line between founder and influencer is completely blurring. I actually don't think there's a difference between being an influencer and a founder. I think if you're a founder who's not becoming an influencer, you're not a good founder. And that might be a hot take, but I think it's very true.

Kian: Yeah, I think it was Patrick Coulson that said that status lags by one generation. So like for people to understand, this is going to be a lag by one generation regarding the media. Let's say, let's actually go to the pre-history and we didn't speak about Nucleus, man. Like say, how did you think about the idea? I heard about the story, but brief us about that.

The Genesis of Nucleus: From Tragedy to Triumph

Kian: Yeah, so I'm a first generation American. Both my parents are Persian. They actually escaped Iran during the revolution, 79, came to America. My dad actually spoke against the government and the government tried to basically murder my dad. So he literally had to escape. Yeah, it's a crazy story. Wow. Yeah, he came to America. He was McDonald's flipping hamburgers and then he became a doctor. So it's kind of the classic American dream. I was born sort of, I think, with the determination of an immigrant with the opportunity of America. And very unfortunately, when I was around seven, my cousin actually went to sleep one night and she didn't wake up the next day. She died in her sleep. And at the time, doctors attribute to a condition called a long QT, which is like irregular heartbeat can cause sudden death. And long QT is interesting because if you know you have a genetic marker for long QT, you can give someone something called a beta blocker, which reduce their risk of 10X. But obviously you don't know your risk. You don't do anything about it. And so naturally I became very interested in genetics. And I actually realized over time that disease isn't really an inherent property of human beings, but can be viewed more as a problem to be solved. And if you could actually correct for the error that causes a disease, you could, well, cure disease. And so in high school, I actually joined one of the first do-it-yourself gene editing laboratories in the country. There's actually a Wall Street Journal article about this, which is pretty funny. Yeah. And you know-

Kyriakos: How old, 15 years old?

Kian: I was 17, I think, when the Wall Street Journal article came out about this. And basically I'm in a lab and I'm engineering yeast to make the aluminate, editing bacteria to make them resistant to antibiotics. And so I loved sort of the beauty and depth of biology, but it wasn't very iterable. And so I sort of wanted to, because in the wet lab, if you make a mistake while you're pipetting, forget about it. Like you have to do the whole thing again. On the computer, if you make some sort of mistake programming or whatever, it's so easy to just click the delete button, right? And I sort of liked this idea of programming being a conduit for my mind. My mind is very rational, very logical. It's like almost like you could think and then create without even having to move in your hands, really. I loved it. And so I went to Penn to study a computational biology, which is like this intersection of kind of bits and atoms of programming and biology. And literally I was in a Bio 221 class, which is a genetics class. And the chairman of the biology department brought up the decreasing costs of sequencing the human genome, right? And if you look at this chart, so you can think of your DNA as like a thousand page book. Okay? It used to be about a hundred million dollars to read all thousand pages. Back in 2021, when I was in this lecture, it was a thousand dollars. A hundred million to a thousand dollars in basically 20 years. And I thought-

Kyriakos: I heard this before, you saying that, but like what changed? Is this like a specific machine?

Kian: Yeah, it's a machine. So at one point, like, okay, so it actually goes way back. There was something called the human genome project. The purpose of the human genome project was to basically get a reading of the very first human DNA, right? So think of your DNA, you know, you get half your DNA from mom, half your DNA from dad. For a while, we knew there was DNA. We didn't know exactly like, what are the actual letters that make up your DNA? What's called nucleotides. And so scientists basically began this massive government project. It was actually an international project. The United States was obviously very involved in this to generate the first kind of mapping of the genome, right? To get kind of the first read of it. And then at that point, that was a super kind of labor intensive process. And what started happening in the world of sequencing is it basically more and more of it became automated and also massively parallel. In other words, you could start reading the human genome, kind of more of the human genome in parallel versus like reading kind of it kind of linearly, you can start reading parallel, right? And so between this automation and the fact that it became more parallel and also the fact that computation became much cheaper as well. And a lot of the bioinformatics pipelines became much faster just because of the human genome project. All these things came together. And then all of a sudden you just have a cost that's coming crashing down. And so that is basically driven by a company called Illumina, who's one of our partners. And Illumina basically is responsible for generating the raw file, raw DNA file, which then we analyze. Anyway, so I'm in the lecture and I remember seeing this chart and I thought to myself, huh, if this person is a thousand dollars, right? Today, it used to be a hundred million dollars. Obviously this price is gonna go towards zero. Obviously it's gonna be an exponential proliferation in whole genome data. And someone needs to build the application layer for DNA because fundamentally what you're doing here is you're translating atoms into bits. You're taking the entirety of someone's DNA, which exists inside me, inside you and kind of has this molecular profile and you translate it into bits and put it into the cloud. So in other words, someone should build the kind of old informatics and analysis that really makes sense of the data and how it impacts your health. And so I said, well, let me do it. And I actually dropped out of school, moved back into my bedroom in Brooklyn. Let's just say you don't tell Persian parents that you're leaving Penn.

Kyriakos: I mean, that's the same with Greek parents, man.

Kian: Yeah, I know. It's exactly the same. Literally, right? You don't tell immigrant parents that. So I actually lied to them. You know, sorry, God, but it turned out okay. And I told them I was working at the professor at Penn, complete nonsense. But you know, I got to work and I filled in 18 subject notebooks, literally. And I basically realized that I could provide myself the most comprehensive assessment of someone's genetic risk for disease that's really ever been available. And the reason for this is because, again, going back to the knowledge of your DNA is a thousand page book. Because it was so expensive to read all a thousand pages, what would genetic testing companies do? They would look at a sentence. They would look at a paragraph. They would look at one page, right? And that's why-

Kyriakos: So that was until that moment, and everybody was doing that?

Kian: Yeah, literally. So there's actually over 70,000 genetic tests on the market today, 70,000. We combine all 70,000 into one. That's the power of what we do. So we're the world's most advanced DNA health test. So this was the profound realization, which is, wait a second, now that this cost is really cheap, we can read all the data, and then we can run it through, basically, some of the most advanced models that also exist to analyze the data. And so when I told my parents this, they said to me, we're kicking you out of the home. I said, oh, okay. I need to figure out how to raise money. We talked about this earlier.

Kyriakos: Did you know what an investor is at the time?

Kian: No.

Kyriakos: What is an investor?

Kian: No idea. I'm in my, literally, my bedroom. My strength was my imagination, my determination. And I said, okay, well, I should probably text an angel investor. I don't even know what an angel investor was. It's funny, because there was no chat GPT back then, or anything, right? Now, I'd be like, oh, chat GPT, like, how do you do this? But back then, you had to just use Google. I talk about Google like it's antiquated. It's pretty funny. Anyways, back then, I had to use Google, like 30 years ago, maybe like five months ago. Yeah, I'm kidding, five years. It was like around five years ago. And so in doing this, I was like, oh my God, okay. I found this angel investor's phone number online, who's actually Corey Levy at Z-Fellow. Shout out, if you're a founder, to do Z-Fellows. No joke, you found that phone line?

Kyriakos: Yeah, actually, it's funny, because even before Z-Fellows, he had a program, it was called First Text, which is honestly a brilliant program. I feel like someone should copy this. What he did was he had a landing page. It was called firsttext.com, I'm pretty sure. And then there was a phone number, that's it. And he would just text me, if you have an idea, and I'll give you money. And so I texted him, and I had an Android at the time. I texted him, and he doesn't answer, classic. Three weeks later, he, oh, sorry, I have two phones. I missed it, two phones. I thought to myself, who the heck has two phones? Welcome to Silicon Valley. I was like, what's wrong with these people? He said, okay, yeah, let's do a call. I said, oh, okay. So we got on the phone, and I'll never forget this. This was the worst pitch I ever gave in my entire life. Okay, I go, Nucleus says, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Because think about it, it's swirling my mind for a year. 18-subject notebooks, verbal diarrhea, no concept of anything. So I go for 45 minutes straight, blah, blah, blah, blah. Silence, I don't hear anything. I'm not like, oh, do you have questions? No, none of that, none of that. Just directly verbal diarrhea out of my brim. And then I'll never forget this. He says, so, I go, yeah? He says, so, it's a better 23andMe? I'm like, exactly, exactly, that's exactly right. Then I thought, maybe I should just pitch like that. But that's kind of how it's gonna start. And then-

Kyriakos: Everyone's journey starts there, you know?

Kian: It does, man. You assume that the more information I give, the better it's going to be, which is actually, you have to remove all the information at the end. You have to abstract it to be so simple, like what I was talking about in the script. It has to be so simple. You have to really tell a story to the customer. And so he, thank God, he ended up coming in, putting in $100,000.

Kyriakos: Wait a second, man. That's the first investor you pitched?

Kian: Yes, well, no, no, no, no. We actually were rejected by many investors.

Kyriakos: Okay, because I would be like-

Kian: This is the beginning of the story. This is the beginning of the story.

Kyriakos: Okay.

Kian: And then you raised 300K?

Kyriakos: We raised around 300K, yeah. So what do you do? What do you do when you raise 300K?

Kian: Yeah, what you do is, you go to the UPenn Facebook chat and you say, hey, I need a software engineer. I need someone to help me run ops. That's literally what I did. And so that was kind of, that's the beginning of Nucleus. And then we actually, parallel to this, we actually, I was under a pseudonym. I was emailing our chief scientist. So our now chief scientist was building one of the largest DNA upload sites. So it was actually an academic project. What they did was, if you had your 23andMe data, your Ancestry data, you could download it and upload it, okay? They'd give you basically kind of frontier analysis, something called polygenic scores on your data. And I had grown very interested in this project. And so I started emailing him under a pseudonym, actually. The pseudonym was Bob. I should have thought of a better pseudonym, but anyways. And as I was doing this, I would ask him a bunch of technical questions, extremely technical questions. And he was so responsive, answering to all my questions. Why was he answering? I don't know. I think he just loves it. He's a missionary. He loves it. And I said, you know, my name is Bob and whatever. Here are my questions. And he said, oh, okay, this is cool. And he's answering, whatever. And then what I did was after, around this time, so around this time, we have kind of a mock-up of Nucleus, right? So it showed, it was very much a first draft of how it would work for someone to come on the platform and actually get genetic results. And basically I was talking to this scientist for basically over a year. And then finally what happened is I switched to actually, I used a different email account and I emailed him from my Penn email, from my school email. And I said, hey, I'm a student at Penn, okay? And as this is going on, right, parallel to this, I'm in the seed round trying to raise seed funding, okay? And so now we have a mock-up. We have a very small team. And in the seed round, no investor's getting it, okay? In part because I don't think I'm doing a good job telling the story. In part because I think a lot of investors have absolutely no intuition or context for anything that's kind of DNA or even like some sort of like application layer or informatics platform from genetics. Like people have no idea. And so a lot of these people are like pretty software people in healthcare even at the time. Now it's a little bit hotter, consumer health. Back then it really wasn't. A lot of these companies didn't even exist, right? And so we're getting pass after pass after pass after pass after pass. And the last fund that we actually pitched was Founders Fund. Founders Fund is really interesting because-

Kyriakos: Who from Founders Fund was it?

Kian: Well, at the time, the first part was Keith, especially Keith. But you know, Keith's our co-center now. But the first person I introduced to was actually Keith. And so I get on the phone with Keith, Keith Vobori, so people know. And I basically tell him our story. And I'll never forget this because Keith said something really interesting on the call. He said, you know, I just gave a company $100 million to bring down the cost of sequencing. I said, what? And by the way, this is me. I'm in my bedroom, okay, in Brooklyn. We raised $300,000. You know, it's very much, this is infant, right? I'm talking to someone who says, well, I give a hundred million, I mean, a hundred million dollars. I can't even conceptualize it to this other company to bring down the cost of sequencing. I thought to myself, what the heck? Who, what are you talking about? And by the way, don't forget how I got inspired by this. I mean, I saw the chart. He's telling me that prices can go from $1,000, which is what it was, to $100. And he's telling me that he's the one that's backing it. I'm not even sure if I've ever told this story publicly. So you're getting some exclusive stuff here.

Kyriakos: That is nice, nice.

Kian: And so he's telling me this. He says, yeah, yeah, yeah. I say, great, this is great. I mean, this is, I mean, also you have to get founders funding and you have to give Keith credit where credit's due. 99% of the investors I pitched had no clue about one of the greatest technological decreases in cost ever, which is the decrease in cost of sequencing a human genome, right? In other words, the investors simply did not have the prepared mind to realize how extraordinary an idea Nucleus is. They had no idea, right? Keith obviously did, founders fund obviously did. And so I said to him, great, what is the name of this company? I have to know. I mean, if a company's gonna bring down the cost of sequencing my 10X, this is the single greatest thing for my business in the world. And he says, I'm not telling you. It's confidential. But he didn't know who he was dealing with. He did not know who he was dealing with. I said, okay, whatever. I get off the phone. I can't remember exactly how I did this, but I, and I really have to think about this because I actually don't know. I just don't remember how, but I found a patent. Okay, I found a patent and the patent had the name of someone named Gilad on it. It was a sequencing patent for like building a new kind of sequencing machine. And the sequencing machines is the machine that actually reads the DNA, right? And it had this guy named Gilad on it. Gilad, I'm gonna butcher his last name, Omoji, Omogi, whatever. And so I look it up on LinkedIn and I see this guy, stealth startup, went to Caltech, clearly, been around the block. I said, okay, well, this must be the guy. It's a stealth startup. It's a, this is a sequencing patent. His name's on it. I don't even know how I found the sequencing patent, but his name's on it. This must be the guy. And so what I did was, what I did was, you know how like, you can actually text people. You don't need their phone number. You just use their email, but it goes right to their text. It's a very simple hack, but it's honestly has probably returned more for Nucleus than any other hack that I know of. So I took his email and I think I put it in the text and I texted him, hey, my name's Kian. I texted Gilad. I said, hey, my name's Kian. I'm the

The Crazy, True Story of a $1.5 Million Investment

Kyriakos: Founder CEO of Nucleus. I'm really good friends with Keith. Complete lie, I wasn't good friends with Keith. But I didn't even get his attention. I'm good friends with Keith. I'm building a sequencing application layer for a whole genome. We should talk. He ignores the first text. I send it again. He responds, okay, sure. Let's talk. You're friends with Keith? Okay, yeah, sure. Let's talk. Of course, he thinks I'm lying. Oh my God. Get out of me. This is a true story, by the way. This is a crazy, true story.

Kian: Next day, we get on the phone. It's a weekend. I'm in my bedroom. Again, $300,000 raised. It's basically just me. Get in the back, call him. I give him the pitch. For once, this is where you actually want to be technical because he knows his stuff. I give him the pitch. We're going to do this. We're going to do this. He goes, this is a great idea. He says, how much have you raised? He's probably thinking I'm going to say, oh, $20 million, $50 million. We've raised $300,000. What the hell? We've only raised $300,000? He says, how is that even possible? Why are people not giving you money? This is such a good idea. I said, I don't know. Then he says, where did you get your PhD from? I said, my bedroom. I said, I don't know. He said, what do you mean you don't know? I said, I'm going to call your dropout, whatever. He says, what? He says, fine, okay. He says, you know, just, you know, like he's like, okay, let's keep going. He's like, okay, no, I'll call you back later. I'll text you later. And he hangs up the phone.

Kyriakos: Supposedly, he actually calls Keith and says, oh, Captain, rest in peace. Oh my God. Monday, I get on the phone with Deleon. Love Deleon. Five minutes in the call, Deleon's sending me tweets. I said, why is Deleon sending me tweets? Why is this investor sending me tweets five minutes into the call? Did I really butcher the pitch that badly? He said, yeah, you know. And then I said, oh, and then he just interrupts me. Five minutes in, literally. I kind of give half, I give my pitch. He's like looking up. So yeah, we're going to put in $1.5 million. But wait a second, wait a second. You convinced the guy who raised the money, so he went back to Keith. Supposedly, yeah, that's what I heard. He went back to Keith and then they said, this is a great idea. And then Deleon met me five minutes. Oh, of course we were investing in this. This is a force of nature. I said, okay.

Kian: And then the craziest thing is in that exact moment, my mom, love my mom. You know, at this point, don't forget that I pitched 50 investors. They all said no. Okay, my mom at this point was saying, you got to go back to school. I'm not going back to school. I'm never going back to school. And somehow, you know, you have to give it to my mother. And imagine this scene. I'm in my bedroom. He says, I'm going to give you $1.5 million. Me, I have to keep a straight face. In my head, I'm thinking $1.5 million. $1.5 million dollars. Like what the hell? That's a lot of money. And then I said, okay, yeah, yeah, yeah. We negotiate on the post money a little bit. Really fast negotiation. Okay, yeah, sure, sure. Cool, cool, cool. Thanks, bye. Hang up the phone. My mom comes in and says, oh my God, some moron just gave you $1.5 million. Who are that in the audience? I know, it's crazy. And then I said, and then I said, and then also my mother, I said, what the hell? Is this a motherly instinct? Of all the calls, it's weird. It's like this weird things in life, you know, when the moments happen, they happen always a very specific way. It could never happen again. You can't repeat it. My mother, somehow she knew. She knew. How does she even know? It could have been any call. She just came in. She's, oh, they gave you $1.5 million. What the fuck? How does she even know? She just knew. She just, motherly instinct, she knew. And welcome to Silicon Valley, guys. Wow. Yeah, that's how we got started. Wow. Yeah. There you go. Man. That makes sense. This is exactly how you raise from founders fund. And by the way, raising from founders fund, having no reputation is extremely difficult. I realized that retrospectively. Like, founders funds are a firm that they really operate on, sort of. They know people a long time. They have very strong relationships. You know, maybe you worked at Palantir, maybe you worked at, I don't know, some of, you know, Portco or something. You kind of build your chops up. For them to take a bet on me and Nucleus is one of the most sincere and like, honestly, humbling opportunities I could ever ask for. And so when I think about, you know, my life, when I think about Nucleus, sometimes, you know, you have days, you know this as an entrepreneur, hard days. You know, as my, one of our investors.

Kyriakos: Like every day.

Kian: Yeah, exactly, exactly. But some days are much worse. Some days you're at a high. It's worse? Yeah, it's much worse, yeah. And you know, one of our investors says, you sign up, you get kicked in the balls. Boom, kicked in the balls. Boom, kicked in the balls. Everything's boom, boom, boom. You're like, oh. You know, you're like struggling. You know, your balls hurt. And then sometimes, you know, what gives me that really kicking ass is think, you know, people, you know, people believed in me, right? And so, you know, on, you know, kind of, you know, on the, when you're really low as a founder, you know, when you had your really, really tough days and you have to pick yourself up, you remember, you know, people believed in me. You know, I was in my bedroom. I had nothing. I had my dreams. I had my determination. I had my passion. I had my vision. And, you know, someone wired me $1.5 million, you know? And you're gonna die on the court. You're gonna die on the court. I mean, when I used to play squash in college, I was notorious for, you know, if there was a ball that was, you know, kind of closer to the, you know, the wall that you bounce it off of, I would dive headfirst to get it. This is who I am. And so that, I think, is always very, it's even me telling you this story, it's very nice and grounding for me because it brings me back to the bedroom. It brings me back to, you know, you don't have money, right? And then someone takes a chance on you, especially at such a great firm like Founders Fund. And then also Alexis. Alexis came soon and later. I have to give Alexis extraordinary credit to an amazing investor. I mean, he just, I mean, the amount of conviction that he had in me and Nucleus is also exceptional. And, you know, to think where we've gone, we've gone from, you know, bedroom, no product, no formal genetics expertise, really no other colleagues, nothing, to fully live, in production, clinical grade, whole genome tests, regulatorily approved, end-to-end custom genetic testing infrastructure, rapidly scaling, just announced our Series A. Think about now from my shoes. You go founder in bedroom with nothing but a dream, right? You know, I started, you know, you start, you know, you go deep enough in the lab, you go deep enough in your bedroom, you know, it's day 269, you've been working 12 hours a day. You start seeing things. You know, you start talking to the birds a little bit. Think about that in the bedroom to Jake Paul fight on the floor. I look up. I see my baby. I see my baby, you know. Alhamdulillah, I see my baby, you know, right there on the cap, Nucleus. It's mind bending. And to me, that's the greatest intoxication of being a founder. It's not actually, a lot of people talk about all the things being founder, our founders go crazy. I actually think the most intoxicating thing is that you realize you can bend reality to your will. And once you realize that you can bend reality to your will, that you can be right where so many people are wrong, you sort of get this kind of view under the model, but what can't I do? I mean, you have to be careful with that, right? It can drive people a little bit crazy, but I think it's the single greatest fundamental realization that a person can experience. I think it's almost a kind of capitalistic version of enlightenment, which is you feel so high agency because you've seen alchemy, you've seen something was created from nothing, you know? It's such a profound feeling. And it inspires me every day. There is so much push towards founding a company so hard and founding a company is this and that. But man, I am always inspired by things outside of entrepreneurship. Like I always think like, have you been to Barcelona by the way? Barcelona? Like the city? Yeah, I have been. Man, like Sagrada Familia. You have Gaudi thinking 200 years in the future. Like this is going to be built after I die. Yeah. Yeah. Like think about, or Persian empire. Man, like we speak today about the Persian empire. Yeah. I mean, it's a great point. And you know, people always- Like those things are tough, you know? Like I get it. Like starting a company is like, it's incredibly difficult and so on. But man, why not? Like Persians built empires for generations. Why not? Yeah, and I do think, you know, there's this talk these days about how starting, like, you know, the modern day conqueror, the modern day emperor is founders. I do think there's some truth to that. I mean, you know, it's kind of like the modern day Napoleon. What would they be doing? What's up? Maybe they'd be in Silicon Valley. And I think, you know, fundamentally the job of kind of a conqueror is to really kind of, you know, rally the troops and be willing to die on the sword. That's like the best leader. The best leaders will die on the sword. I think that's true with founders too. So it's very much a parallel, right? Like the best companies, the best founders, as much as they shape their company, the company shapes them because it's all-consuming. So, you know, you start realizing that when you build a company, you're building basically a mini society, a mini cult, if you will. And there's emergent property. There's emergent phenomena to the startup, to the company. And the emergent phenomena is something you can never plan for, never anticipated. It shapes you, right? Just as much as you shape it. In that way, your soul and who you are, in a way, your personality, it sculpts and changes to the project. In other words, you know, when you go on this kind of mission to, I don't know, conquer some, you know, whatever city, like it is completely you. You know, it is you. It is you in the, just the purest, purest, rawest sense of the word. I don't know how to articulate this. And that's what I feel like me, in Nucleus to this point, which is there is no separation. You know, it is just like, it is like a, literally, it's like my arm. You know, it's like, you just, it's like inseparable. And I think that, to your point too, is where craft really comes in. Because you look at, you know, artists, you look at, you know, amazing leaders. There's this degree of obsession that then compounds over time, right? Building the Persian empire seems impossible for one person in a room. But once you kind of, you know, if you go out building the Persian empire for over the course of a decade, everything becomes compounded. Your distribution becomes compounded. You know, your relationships becomes compounded. Your leadership skills become compounded. Your technical know-how becomes compounded. Your strategy becomes compounded, right? In the context of kind of a conqueror. And so all these things start becoming super linear such that the speed at which it takes you to build a Persian empire and or to start up another Persian empire is so much faster, right? And so in the startup context, I think that's why someone like Elon can do so well so fast. Because, or Keith too, like, you know, there's so many prolific operators that can spin up multiple companies. And the reason for it is once you basically have that intuition, once you have that experiential understanding and that feeling of what a good startup tastes and feels like, it's much easier just to recreate it. Instead of what took you, you know, that five years it took me to build Nucleus, if I was gonna go start, you know, Nucleus again, it might take me, you know, to do everything just a year, right? Just because of how much time it takes to just build all the kind of human and other kinds of capital required to build a startup. So that's something that I think about a lot as well. And I think that's right for you and me, right? We both started, you know, we're five years in this game. You know, did you guys ever materially pivot? Before it was the history of these companies. Right, yeah. So you've been working on this for four years, right? So, you know, I've been working on this for five years. Think about how much during that time, you know, there was crypto, there was Web3, there was, you know, now there's AI, and, you know, AI's probably the most legitimate one of all of them, but there's so much noise. And I think the companies that are really gonna win are the companies that quietly just went at it year over year of year. And then what happens is those companies become the zeitgeist, right? They become, like Anduril's a great example of this, right? Anduril for a long period of time was absolutely shunned by Silicon Valley. The whole kind of pro-American schtick was sort of viewed as like ridiculous.

Kyriakos: Yeah, starting defense companies.

Kian: Right, but now, oh, you know, it's almost like by the time Andreessen is like, this is an industry to watch out for, right, by the time Andreessen released, oh, the next trillion dollar business is gonna be consumer health business, I knew that three years ago. So if someone's reading that article, and again, it's too late.

Kyriakos: Yeah, I also have this, like, what world do we live in that you have to experiment about everything? Like, don't you have convictions that I want to do X and just go for it?

Kian: Yeah, I think, you know, there's this, I was talking to this with Matt Lanter, the new president of Nucleus, who used to be actually Keith's chief of staff and one of the co-founders of OpenStore. I was telling this, Matt, you know, there's two models for startups. One model is the lean startup method. I think the lean startup method, you know, just so people have context, it's like, oh, I'm gonna launch something really quickly, I'm gonna build it out and get feedback, and then, like, iterate. There's another model which is like, you know, startups are about productions. Like, you're making a movie, right? If you're Tarantino, you're not really asking, you know, will people like this movie? You're saying, I have a vision. I'm gonna spend a bazillion dollars to build that vision, and then, maybe because you're just a master of your craft, you know, people are going to basically love it, right? That model's, and you know, it's funny, because Sam Altman, actually, you know, Sam has had this kind of conflict, and you've actually seen this. I think he deleted this tweet, but years ago, he put a tweet out that said, you know what, I'm actually rethinking my entire model of startups, because YC teaches you to launch fast, you know, and iterate, but OpenAI, I have to raise, you know, a trillion dollars. It's a completely different kind of thing. It's OpenAI was very much a conviction bet, right? When they went into AI, AI was kind of something that was, like, overhyped at that point. It was like, oh, the AI is, you know, not sexy. They went in AI, kind of purely conviction, right? There was no kind of, oh, you should go into AI, and they had a vision. They had a very strong vision, and then, eventually, look how that vision became now everyone else's reality, and so I think that's true with the best companies, Android, you know, OpenAI, Tesla, another great example. Electric vehicles, are you kidding me? It was a sham, right, until Elon came. Even SpaceX, same thing, right? I mean, you're gonna build a private rocket company? Come on. It's, you know, if you see even outside of this, you can look at the story of Arnold. I don't know if you heard about it, but he basically, everybody was telling him, you have to start with a movie that nobody knows you, and you have to start small, and so on. He was like, no, no, I'm going to do real estate, and I'm just going to play in the biggest movie there is, and he was focusing on doing that movie, and when the opportunity came, he did Conan the Barbarian, and then just, it's just then, he just spent, like, the next 10 years being the biggest actor out there, because he had that ambition and that idea in mind. And that, I think, is really important, because people want to be handed ideas. People want to, like, you know, even like if you see the YC call for startups today, right? I have to say it, if you're starting an AI company after you heard about ChatGPT, you're not gonna make it. Come on now, fam.

Kyriakos: Yeah, I mean, these people are, like, the amount of shit I see. It's like, who was tweeting about AI pre the initial launch of ChatGPT? Who? Like, there was whispers about AI, right? Like, from people who knew, they were kind of like, oh, this AI thing is kind of powerful, right? But it wasn't the site, guys. Now I see this AI influencers everywhere and all this stuff. To me, it's sort of a negative signal, honestly. I actually think the best AI, like, you know, there are people who I think are like craftspeople who actually really care. Like, you know, shout out to my man, avifriend.com. You know, like, I go on his Twitter, I'm like, this man really cares. You know, you feel the passion to this screen. It's kind of grabbing you by the balls. It's pulling you in, right? Then I look at some other AI companies, you know, someone dropped out of Stanford or something, and, you know, they're building some wrapper over GPT. I'm like, this is not, this is not, you know, in terms of the kind of the spectrum of lean startup versus, you know, movie production. I want movie productions. I want someone to put their balls on the line. You know, I want, you know, someone to say, I'm going to, you know, build reusable rockets, right? I'm gonna, you know, change human procreation forever, right? Whatever it is, I want some big, bold project because those are the ones that actually matter ultimately, too. Like, I think there's this thing, too, where you have to think as a founder, like, in the end game, if my thing really works, how different does the world look? And I think often, like, that really gets lost. Like, for some people's companies, it's like, okay, this really works. Like, okay, I guess maybe you get better B2B sales, right? But like, on your deathbed, right, is that what you want? I don't know. Is that really what you want? Like, you don't have that much time in this world. Time is very finite. Because of the nature of exponentiation, we've discussed this, the opportunity cost is even larger. The opportunity cost is even larger if you're not doing what you really wanna do. And the number of founders I see who say, you know what, I'm gonna do this thing. It's not the thing I really wanna do, but I'm gonna do this thing because, you know, it's gonna be a good start, whatever, whatever. And then I say, well, what do you really wanna do? They say, I really wanna do X thing, right?

Kyriakos: Yeah, I'm always very skeptical about the steps. Like, why should you have steps? Why do you have steps?

Kian: If that's the thing you wanna do, my God, go do it. Throw your entire being into it. Don't be like, oh, I'm gonna start this other thing that's like stupid. If you think it's stupid, how can someone else take you seriously? Like, you know, it doesn't make sense to me. You need people taking big bets. And so, you know, if there's any founders, any young people listening to this, you know, the Moonshot Project, get after it, right? Because also anything that happens is it might seem completely inconceivable, but if you actually develop your technical chops enough, if you can build and you can sell, you can be enterprising and investigative, right? If you can productize the frontier of science, which science is open to anyone, anyone can do it, you can actually, you can bend the reality to your will. And you don't have to worry about the investors and everything else because what happens is when you go pitch founders fund, when you go pitch your venture firm and you really know your stuff and you're really passionate, right? There's a connection that you have with people, okay? And this connection is unmistakable. You know, when you talk to someone who loves what they do, there is an authenticity to it and sincerity to it that is, you know, that to me is what reality distortion is about, right? Reality distortion is this old concept about Steve Jobs where he would say things and then, you know, reality become distorted. And to me, reality distortion is when there's someone that has just so much conviction because they've done the work, they know exactly what they think to be true and they're giving their entire being into it. When someone has that level of conviction, you know, just go, you know, invest in them, you know, work for them, you know, do whatever you can. And that's another important point, which is, you know, when a founder, too often I see sometimes when someone doesn't know what they want to do, they start something. Baby, boo-boo, go join the founder that is insane, right? You're going to make a lot more money that way. You can go, you know, teeter and do your thing for a couple of years and, you know, go nowhere, right? Eventually you got to, if it's appropriate, fold your cards and go join the founder that is, you know, absolutely ripping. You're going to learn more, your network's going to increase exponentially and it primes you to then actually start your own enterprise, right, in a much more effective manner, which is another thing, right? You have to know when do I join a company, when do I join that super fast growing killer company, which, you know, if you're good at identifying people, which you should be, you can identify, and when you should do your own thing. You should really only do your own thing if it's the absolute burning thing you have to do. I'm getting heated here. There we go, there we go. So look, man, like we, I just want to ask you a hundred questions and we're going to stay here for three hours. Let's see, first of all, like, we didn't speak a lot about the product.

The DNA Revolution: From Bedroom Startup to Series A

Kyriakos: Yeah, we didn't. Let's go to the beginning. Like, what was the product at the beginning? Yeah. What is it today? And where is it in three years?

Kian: Yeah, that's a good question. So Nucleus originally began with this idea that, so we've always wanted to be the application layer for DNA. We're still the application layer for DNA. So the fundamental ethos hasn't changed. Initially we began with people could upload, so there's two kinds of DNA files. The first is like a 23andMe file. So when 23andMe got started back in 2006, the cost of reading all a thousand pages of the book, as I said, was way too expensive.

Kyriakos: Speaking of 23andMe, what happened with the acquisition?

Kian: The acquisition, that was a banger. That was a banger of a post. You know, it's funny, there's a funny story. Should I tell you a funny story about the acquisition? Do you want it? Should we go this way? It's a different way, okay. So, you know, we announced that we were interested in the possibility of potentially buying 23andMe. That was the post. Everyone was posting it everywhere. And actually I was in Singapore at the time. And it's like 2 a.m., okay. And so my director of marketing and I, we sit down and we write this post. Because we're like, oh, it's so cheap, we should do this. So we released this post.

Kyriakos: So cheap means what?

Kian: The market cap was so cheap. It's like $150 million, 23andMe. Yeah, it's so cheap. It was so cheap. It was crazy cheap. And I was like, $150 million, we should raise money and buy this. Like, why not? And so we write this post, we put it out there. First off, one of the funniest things about this was, you know, it was something that we're generally interested in doing. From 2 a.m., so it's 2 a.m. in Singapore. The number of journalists that reached out 2 a.m. to 6 a.m. Oh my God. No joke. You know, Wired, Stat, you know, Wall Street Journal, this journalist, that journalist. They start calling. Hey, Kian knows that. I'm like, what the hell? How do you have my phone? I'm like, this is crazy. I'm like, journalists, they were fascinated by this. You know, the posts blow up on socials, all these things. So I'm taking calls, and I forget this, it's like 3 a.m., I'm like literally dying. Like, my brain is burning, because I haven't slept, right? Because, you know, you're jet lagged, you're screwed up, my brain's burning. And I call my director, Margaret. She's so great. Her name's Hallie. I call Hallie, I'm like, Hallie, I can't do it. Like, I need to sleep. Like, my brain is burning. It's like, it's what, you know, Singapore's 12 hours ahead. So it's, you're all confused. And she says, you just stay your ass on the phone. And this is where you have good, you know, good callings, right? Because then you go, it's like, you're going to call every freaking journalist that's calling you. I'm like, all right, all right, I guess I'm going to do that. So I do it until like 6 a.m., and then I just like absolutely crash. And then articles start popping up on Nucleus, it's going to do this, whatever. So then I send an email to investors. I'm like, look, you know, this is real, this is a real thing. Like, I outline, I basically write a memo. Okay, I write a memo saying, hey, this is how much I think we should raise, how much we should do it, this is how much I think we're going to need, this is how complex I think it's going to be. And we got to actually-

Kyriakos: Wait, wait, wait. So you created a memo to actually acquire them?

Kian: Oh, yeah. I created a memo, I sent it out to investors. And I thought it was a pretty good memo, actually. And you know what's interesting? Because a lot of people don't understand 23andMe's business. And another thing that you realize when you run a specific business is, you don't really see yourself in this way, but you end up becoming the world's expert on it. Like, if you think about it in the world, who can give a better commentary on 23andMe's business? Well, I'm probably up there. Maybe I'm number one, but I mean, it's what we do, right? So it's like these weird things where I realized over time that a lot of the institutional investors, like we went to the different banks, which we did go to the different banks, they have no idea about what actually is valuable about 23andMe. They have no idea, right? It's actually, the data set's not very valuable. People always worry about 23andMe's data, oh, the data leaked, whatever, whatever. The data actually isn't that valuable. It's a very small fraction of your DNA. It's really not that useful, especially for health stuff. It's really not that useful. But what was, so then we started doing this, and then what, so I realized very quickly that I actually had a very clear kind of strategical plan for what I would do with 23andMe, which is fundamentally comes down to, like, a lot of the technology that they use is really old. So the first, and it's the classic innovators dilemma problem, right, where it's a company's built on some sort of intellectual foundation, right? And that intellectual, imagine like a company's a castle, right, and the foundation of it is some technological assumption or some assumed technological limitation, and then you build the rest of the castle, right? When you remove that foundation, the entire castle collapses, and that's a good analogy for people to think about when they ask, why don't big companies do this, right? They, of course, can, but they have to then, you know, destroy their entire world, and that's why the innovators dilemma exists as a thing, and that's why the recommendation to big companies is to, once there's this platform shift, to start actually a startup and to have, scale that startup outside the main company, but then have that company basically eat the market share of the incumbent company. So basically, it's a sort of, it's a sort of, you know, self-cannibalism, and this is actually a really interesting point, which is the best companies always self-cannibalize, and you see Tesla do this a lot. They self-cannibalize their own products, and that's really hard for founders to do, but the best founders are actually able to do that. Side point, that's another lesson that we can talk about. Anyways, back to 23andMe, and so what I would do is I would take it over, I would basically take their technology and basically completely scrap it, because it's 20 years old, it's pretty garbage, and I'd replace it with the whole genome technology. Right, again, to get to kind of what we do, from a single swab, from a single test, you can screen for over 1,000 conditions. That used to be, you know, 70,000 different genetic tests, now it's one. In other words, people come to Nucleus to answer questions like, you know, my mom had cancer, am I also at risk? You know, what drug dosage works best for me? How can I have healthy children? All these applications exist just in one swab, one test. So for me, for example-

Kyriakos: Is this accurate? Like, how accurate can you get?

Kian: This test is, so we're regulated by CLIA and CAP. This test is 99.9% analytically validated, right? So basically, in other words, we've shown that our tests, when we call a genetic marker, we're extremely confident that that genetic marker is correct. So it's highly accurate, and this is why we also did that regulatory approach. Unlike 23andMe, which is a direct-to-consumer test, we're physician-ordered. So a doctor actually signs off on everything. We're actually a medical provider, which means we're also much more stringent, which is the way we take care of people's data, which is really important, right? 23andMe was never HIPAA-compliant. Nucleus is HIPAA-compliant, right? It means we do not show your genetic or project-

Kyriakos: Wait, how did they operate without being HIPAA-compliant?

Kian: There you go. Crazy, right?

Kyriakos: Is this possible?

Kian: They were completely regulatory gray zone, and consumers felt the consequence of that. And so I vehemently oppose that. I never think data privacy and security should get in the way of people getting life-saving genetic insights, and that is why I built Nucleus from the foundation to give people complete agency and control over their data and to operate within existing regulatory frameworks that actually protects consumers, like HIPAA. And that's why Nucleus, by default, we don't share any genetic or protected data information with any third party, one. Two, we do all the processing and testing in the United States of America. I cannot tell you that there are companies that actually send your samples overseas, and or maybe they send them domestically, but they use Chinese machines. Completely unacceptable, right? And then there are companies that actually market themselves as being secure, and then they send it to China. I mean, how can you be secure if you send it to China? Right, and that's like consumers have to be really mindful of what they're actually buying, right? They have to make sure, is it processed in the United States? Is it HIPAA compliant, right? Is it under the CLIA and CAP medical provider infrastructure, right? Nucleus is actually a laboratory. We're actually a medical laboratory. And so we want to take a completely different approach. Anyways, 23andMe did it. So what someone has to do with 23andMe is they have to clean this all up, right? They have to clean the technology up. They have to fix up the regulatory infrastructure, right? The most valuable part of 23andMe actually has nothing to do with their old genetic tests because it's so old. What it has to do with that is actually they own something called Lemonade Health. Lemonade Health is like hims and hers, okay? And so Lemonade Health, you know, they give you the classic Ozempic and a bunch of other stuff. And Lemonade Health was actually responsible for the vast majority of 23andMe's revenue. So that's really interesting, but that's how it did it. And so what I proposed was, listen, obviously what you want to do, and to answer your question of what Nucleus is going to do three years from now, is I want to build a real-time, consumer-centric, quantified health platform that basically integrates the entirety of someone's health data so that it has your whole genome at the foundation, but then adds in your blood, your wearables, you know, full-body MRIs, etc. In other words, the platform should say, hey, Kian, as a 25-year-old male living in Brooklyn, wow, you had super high LDL levels in your last blood test. Oh, wait, that's actually no surprise because you're in the 95th percentile for your genetic risk for high cholesterol. We found people with similar sex, age, and genetics as you saw a 10% reduction in the LDL levels when they did this specific workout tracked on your Apple Watch and went on this specific diet. In other words, it's about bringing those pieces together. A lot of companies say this. The thing that makes us really unique is the genome, the whole genome, all of it, is the perfect foundation to build this data stack. The reason is because it's omni-relevant. It's relevant for every disease, every common disease, every rare disease, your drugs you should take, and your family planning. So in other words, it shapes every single one of your metabolites. So when people say, oh, you know, I exercise, eat healthy, but why is my LDL so high? Or why is my iron like this? All of, you can actually build integrated models that combine your blood and your genetics. And that's something that Nucleus is really interested in because we actually control all the informatics, right? We're not a wrapper of request diagnostics, you know. We'll, we build real tech. We build real technology, right? So in other words, we don't just like send it off to another laboratory to do the testing. We are the laboratory, which means we have much more flexibility in how we can give people insights, which means we can actually tell people how data interacts together, right? So in other words, we can tell you much better how your DNA shapes with your blood. And then this gets to a fundamental point, which it's not about DNA. It's not about blood. It's not about full body MRIs. It's not or, it's and. All these things feed and contribute into each other. If anyone is a modern day quantified health individual, if anyone's following the longevity movement, you know that the more data, the better. You know that, you know, for example, if you get a full body MRI and there's some sort of suspicious thing is one of your organs, that can always be appropriately weighted by your DNA, right? Because for example, if you know you have some genetic marker for, I don't know, breast cancer, prostate cancer, something else, all of a sudden saying that looks, you know, if you're not really sure, like, hey, is this a real thing or not, right? That I have, because sometimes, you know, there's a big problem with false positives and full body MRIs doctors always like to talk about. In other words, it applies a kind of weight to your specific results. That's true precision medicine, right? So I know if something should be actually, is more likely to be actually saying that's, you know, pathogenic and that's, you know, can kill me. Or if I know of just like a benign thing, right? Same thing with drug dosages, right? Your drug dosages should always be based off your DNA. For some reason today, it's just completely missing. And for family planning, right? When you have a kid, you know, God, I mean, if you can swab your cheeks to make sure that you don't pass on a rare disease to your kid, why would you not do that?

Kyriakos: Is this a product you are bringing? I've seen the announcement a week ago that you've done.

Kian: Yes.

Kyriakos: Is the future of dating?

Kian: Oh yeah, dating. And family this?

Kian: Well, this is what's really cool, which is for us, you know, once you realize that a single swab can get you all these insights, you start realizing that, hey, for me, for example, it turns out I'm a cystic fibrosis carrier. No family history, I would have no idea about this.

Kyriakos: No family history.

Kian: No family history, no. Because cystic fibrosis, the way this works is you need two bad copies to give you the disease. So what happens is if you have one copy, you're fine, right, I'm fine, I don't have cystic fibrosis, but it gets passed down through the generations. And what that means is, you know, theoretically, if my future wife is also a carrier, right? Then my baby has a 25% chance of having this life-threatening disease. So the whole thing with nucleus dating was, well, obviously, now that I know I'm a carrier, I don't want to date someone with that, right? If I can choose, I don't want to date someone who's also a carrier for cystic fibrosis. Of course, everyone should do this. I mean, why would you, if you have knowledge is power, right, you know that you're a carrier for a rare genetic disease, you don't want to put your kid at risk for a disease. Of course not. And so that application exists within our broader application pool. In other words, from the same swab, you get all these insights. And this is why the power of the whole genome test is so profound, because suddenly we've coined a term, it's called generational health. Nucleus is actually the generational health component, because DNA is inherently generational. When we give you insight, we're not just giving you insight into your disease risk and your health, we're also inadvertently giving you insight into your children as well. And so when you do a genetic test, you're not just doing it for yourself, you're doing it for your kids. And that's such a powerful thing. There's no other diagnostic or lab test today that you take it and it impacts not just you, but also your children, right? That's not true with the blood tests, that's not true with wearables, right? But it's true with DNA. So really you can think about it as almost a generational planning, right? I like the word generational health because it's like generational wealth. People always think about wealth in this context of, you know, I have to do some planning for it, right? I have money, I have to make sure, you know, everything's okay with the kids. But how about generational health? It's a complete re-imagination of what consumer health is about. And you can think about it like this too, you know, someone does nucleus, they identify maybe that they're both a carrier for a genetic marker, they do IVF, they pick the embryo that doesn't have the disease, they implant the embryo, the baby's born, what is the parent gonna wanna do? They're gonna wanna sequence the baby. So you can see how all of a sudden we're building a universe, a health universe, right? Where we're gonna go from, you know, parents to then children, where's that DNA gonna go? It's gonna go back into the nucleus cloud. So we can continue to support that baby. Also parents these days are putting wearables on their babies, right? They wanna track their baby. But you see the socks, they do socks that measure.

Kyriakos: Yeah, socks too?

Kian: Yeah.

Kyriakos: Yeah, so then where's that data gonna go, right? There's an app, but really the genetics should probably be in the same place with the wearables. And I'm not sure if you saw this announcement in our series today, but we actually acquired Cambrian. Did you see that?

Kyriakos: You know Cambrian?

Kian: Yeah, I was, there's a little question I was about to ask you. What a sp

The Cambrian Connection: A Strategic Acquisition

Kyriakos: Wow, look at that. Let's do it.

Kian: Yeah. Is this acquisition?

Kyriakos: No, we've acquired the old scientist academic product years ago. I'm trying to think. I feel like we acquired one other thing, but this is definitely the most recent. And this is definitely the most kind of public one we've done in that it's very strategic. You know, so you knew about Cambrian. Did you know about Cambrian before the announcement or no?

Kian: I know David.

Kyriakos: You know David? Well, obviously David's just joined Nucleus. Love David, shout out to David. Founder of Cambrian, absolute beast. You know, he was a professional soccer player. Yeah, smart guy. Athletes are the best because you know they're going to die in the field. Anyways, so yeah, David joined Nucleus. We bought Cambrian. What Cambrian did is they took a bunch of different wearables, right? Eight Sleep or Apple Watch. I mean, you probably know them very well for this reason. And they basically would give you new insight into your wearables, into your biometrics, etc. And when I spoke to David, I said, look, David, you know, there needs to be an integration of all these things. I said, we're stronger together. You got to join Nucleus. And he did.

DNA: The Foundation of Personalized Health

Kian: And so now you can start thinking if you're a Nucleus customer, you can get very excited because yes, we're going in this direction, right? We don't, from a single swab, you don't just get analysis on over a thousand diseases, but before, and you know, into your family planning, etc., but also you have that foundation. Or again, I like to say DNA for us is like books for Amazon: it is the foundation. Just wait till we start integrating in these other data layers. Because now we can start telling much more precise and personalized stories about the customer that gives them far greater insight into what they uniquely should do.

Kyriakos: Right, instead of just using your blood, you know, often just your blood, you don't have your DNA. You have no idea what's actually driving a metabolite to be off. It may as well be in your DNA. You have no idea. Similarly with full body MRIs, right? Ideally, you can actually prevent the thing from happening in the first place. You don't want to go and say, hey, you have cancer.

Kian: Yeah. Like all of the health information compounds.

Kyriakos: Exactly. One, two, three, it's just so much more powerful. So much more powerful. And so that's what we're building toward and that's what we want to do. And that's also why we take a very different approach in a lot of businesses in that we want to be the best in the world in the DNA first, right? Like we really believe in the old startup thing, which is like about focus, right? A lot of companies I think are taking the wrong approach where they're, let's throw as much data as we can at the customer. If you bring someone genetics in their blood and they don't talk to each other, what does it matter? Doesn't matter, right? If you have a bunch of, you know, you want one plus one to equal three, not two, right? It's not enough to bring disparate data sources into a portal. That's not enough. You need to be able to integrate the data together. And so that's our core interest as a company, which is how do we methodically and thoughtfully integrate data together and give people more insight.

Integrated Health: The Future of Medicine

Kian: And actually we already do this. If someone knows the platform well, they would know that when we calculate your risk for disease, we don't just take your entire genome. This is one of the most underappreciated things about us. We don't just take your entire genome. We actually combine it with your age, your sex, your BMI, your LDL, your A1C levels, etc., into an integrated model that then calculates your overall risk. And the reason why this is so important is because think about if a male had a breast cancer marker and a female had a breast cancer marker. Obviously, the male's risk for breast cancer is dramatically lower than the female, even though it's the same marker. And so in other words, all our genetic results are contextualized with a series of other non-genetic pieces of information, which means we're actually the first and only integrated health platform that takes the entirety of your DNA and different metabolites like your total cholesterol to calculate your overall risk. And then that also means you can see how your LDL changes, changes your unique risk for a disease.

Kyriakos: So I can actually see today on Nucleus how if I change my LDL levels, my risk for heart disease comes down, right? Which is really powerful because you can start seeing how you can put that, connect that with a wearable and say, look, Kian, you're a really high risk for heart disease, right? Which fortunately I'm not, but let's say I was. Hey Kian, you're a really high risk for heart disease, you know, you got to keep up the intensity on your whatever, whoop, you need to be on level E5 or something, whatever for this amount of time. That's going to help bring down your cholesterol levels. And if you bring down your cholesterol levels by 20 points, your risk for heart disease will come down by 15%. Notice I just told you a story. I started with your DNA. I started with what you're at risk for. I talked about blood and I talked about how, if you, given your genetic disposition, right? So it's unique to you. If you actually bring down your LDL levels by 15 points, how your unique risk will change for heart disease, right? So all of a sudden I'm bringing together blood, I'm bringing together wearables, I'm bringing together genetics. I'm actually quantifying the change of risk for you, not in general population, for you. And that I think is so powerful because suddenly you start creating the foundation of a true personalized integrated health platform.

Funding the Future: The Latest Investment Round

Kian: And I can't keep asking questions, sorry. I think, let me ask you the last one. Or maybe we didn't, I'll ask you two more. We didn't speak about the race, the last race that you've done now. How much did it change from your first one? And why are you doing the race?

Kyriakos: Well, these rounds now come together, you know. We talked about this earlier where, you know, the first round is the hardest, but then after that, you know, once you start getting momentum and you hit some sort of closer and closer to some sort of escape velocity, the investors come. And we had support from our current investors, Founders Fund and 776, NIO came in, you know. Ali and Suzanne are amazing.

Kian: Is NIO? I thought it was an accelerator.

Kyriakos: NIO actually has a later stage fund and they're actually, you know, finding the best, you know, kind of series A companies and putting money into it. Ali is doing an extraordinary job there. He's really good with AI. I usually see him wherever he shouts in all the, have you seen what he's doing?

Kian: Wait, like with the videos, like on LinkedIn?

Kyriakos: In all the hackathons, basically, he goes and runs on stage and shouts. Like shouts, like, have you seen Steve Palmer?

Kian: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Kyriakos: He's doing the same. Just kidding. I caught it. That's iconic. And yeah, we had a bunch of different, you know, angels to come in as well. We had like Amanda Bradford, for example, who was doing a really good job there. So, you know, we had a lot of fun, a lot of strategics in this round as well. And so this capital principally, I mean, we're just gonna accelerate growth. I was gonna keep going. I mean, you know, the largest whole genome database in the world today is on half a million people. The largest in the world, half a million. That's nothing. And there's what, some billion people in this world. There's 300 million Americans alone. I mean, I think in the next, in the next five to 10 years, we're gonna have a lot of people that are gonna be in the world. We're gonna have a lot of people that are gonna be in the world. We're gonna have a lot of people that are gonna be in the world. I mean, I think in the next, you know, you know, I think in the next two, three years, you can easily beat that, you know. And in doing that, you're not just building a genome database, you also integrate with non-genetic pieces of information, which then you can use to better serve customers, which is really important. Because then once you have a database that you can take all these variables together, you can actually start seeing, you know, wait a second, you know, wow, like, you know, the power of a true kind of real-time, you know, medical platform. Because what do you really need to do to build the true precision medicine kind of frontier is you need very large biobanks. What I mean by this is you need, let's say, you know, a hundred million people where all the hundred million people have their genome sequenced and they have their blood, they have their full body MRIs done, they have all their wearables, right? And there's this massive database and these people are longitudinally tracked, okay? And then you can start building models to see.

Precision Medicine: The P4 Model

Kian: Basically flagging molecular abnormalities for the individual prior to any obvious phenotypic signal. In other words, instead of coughing and say, oh, you're sick, or instead of seeing a tumor, I can actually start molecularly flagging it far before someone could take some sort of qualitative metric from the customer. That is true precision medicine. And you already see this today, actually, with something like coming out of Eight Sleep, for example. Mateo is an investor, actually, in Nucleus. And Eight Sleep is interesting because sometimes your heart rate shoots up. You say, I feel fine, it's a little weird. Then you're sick two days later. So already you can start seeing the beginning of these models that are basically predicting far before it ever happened, different diseases. And then that is truly a more of a preventative-based model. Then once you know, obviously, what is either oncoming, you can then basically take the steps to prevent it, circumvent it, get rid of the tumor, whatever it is. And so I like to think of the future as medicine. I steal this from Dr. Leroy Hood. He's the founder of the Systems Institute of Biology. He's brilliant. And he described a medical system that's something called P4 medicine. He says the future of medicine is predictive. So we can actually predict disease risk from birth, which is really through your whole genome. It's preventative. So it's all about delaying the onset of or progression of disease. It's something called participatory. In other words, basically, the consumer is in charge of their health, not the medical establishment. The consumer is in charge of their health. And lastly, it's personalized. And when he says personalized, he means it has the entirety of your health data. So participatory, predictive. Now I'm getting lost in the P's. Predictive, personalized. I lost the P's. People remember already. People remember. I said four of them, whatever. OK, so you take these four P's. That's the kind of medical system that you want to build. And so that is always my model, which is like, how do we build toward this P4 medical system? And I think then again, if you think about what is actually those four P's, whole genome sits at the foundation. So that's why we start there.

Strength and Strategy: A Lifting Challenge

Kyriakos: I haven't asked you the most important question.

Kian: Ask it.

Kyriakos: What's your deadlift?

Kian: What's my what?

Kyriakos: What's your deadlift?

Kian: 225. I weigh 130.

Kyriakos: Kgs or?

Kian: No, no, pounds. 225 pounds. I weigh 130.

Kyriakos: We need to work out together, man. OK, how much do you have? How much do you have left?

Kian: My record is 220 kgs, but now I'm more of a 180, 190 kgs. So how much do you have left? My gym is outside here, so we should.

Kyriakos: OK, so maybe after this podcast, we start deadlifting? What do you say?

Kian: Yeah, sure. You know, you're all about activity. You're all about activity. Terra's all about activity.

Kyriakos: Of course. So we've got to basically, we've been chatting. Now it's time to work.

Kian: Well, that's been fun. Awesome conversation.

Kyriakos: Awesome. And thanks so much for being here.

Kian: Thank you.