Interviewee
Ari Tulla is a San Francisco-based entrepreneur: Co-founder and CEO of Elo smart nutrition service, the company transforming food from the cause of disease. to medicine..
Transcript
Ari Tulla: My name is Ari Tulla. I'm from Finland originally, been living in the Bay area building companies for the last about 15 years now. And my latest company is called Elo Health. It's all about, as you said, trying to to turn food from the course of disease today into your best medicine. I think we all know that, you know, food has a big impact on making us feel better, lighter, heavier, and all those things, but it also has this big impact on making people sick once we eat the highly processed food for, you know, 10, 15 years. You know, many of us are developing chronic conditions like type two diabetes, hypertension and so forth. So we are trying to build a system that can help people take control of their nutrition and make it simple to get the right nutrition, at the right time.
Elisa Muñoz: Definitely new tech How do you actually come up with this idea and how do you meet your co-founders?Ari Tulla: I've been thinking about this idea for a long time from the early two thousands already. So my wife had help issues back in the days and she had thyroid. Thyroid and that led into, you know, autoimmune diseases and these complicated unknown unknowns. We don't know what to do about the medicine. And over the years we realized that food actually became the medicine for her and she was able to lower the inflammation level and get things in check and basically heal herself by, by the right diet. And today, many years later, we have a lot of science and evidence that today we can reverse plant diabetes by food.
We can help people of course lose weight with the right diet and, and do many other things. So there's a lot of evidence today in science that you can do it. So I really wanted to build a company focusing on, on this thing that in my opinion is one of the biggest issues today in, in the healthcare system and probably in the Western countries overall. I mean, in the US today 80% of people are overweight, 50% of adult population is obese. Most people are not gonna live as long as their parents did. And that's a pretty traumatic problem that we have. And I don't think we can address it by only adding more pills and adding more medical devices and, and surgeries.
We need to also do something about the behavior of people. And so I, I've been thinking about this idea for a long time and it felt like the right time today because what happened in the last maybe five years is that the food delivery and you know, food ordering online, it became real. And today half the people order food almost daily in the US online. Second, you know, we have this verbal devices like I have Apple and a whoop and an Aura, you know, glucose monitor, whatever. And, and this became a thing that people are tracking now more about the health metrics on a real time basis. And, and lastly we are able to collect data about our bodies in a new way.
Think about what we are doing at, for example, the blood biomarker testing, collecting blood at home and then you send it to our lab, we test it and we get the same result as you would get if you go to your doctor's office or your lab. You don't need to go there in person. So all those things have been now becoming real and they became robust enough and, and sound from the science perspective that you can actually use them. And you ask about the team. I'm, I've been an entrepreneur for, for 20 plus years already. And in the last 15 years I've been working with a lot of the same people. So I have two co-founders now at AOP, another one of them, Tapio, is a co-founder. We are building a fourth company together now. So we've been going on for a long time. And then the second co-founder is Ism who he came from Apple and Airbnb and, and spent a decade in the Apple design team building this product, something I, so we have a pretty, pretty cool crew I think from the beginning. And then we added a lot of, you know, senior talent over the last couple years. So there are around 30 people in the team today.
And to me it's always about trying to find problems that are real and meaningful for you and hopefully also for other people around you. And then tackle them with all the vigor you have.
Elisa Muñoz: Wow. So it's kind of like a big team. So, talking about competition, what would you say it’s the biggest differentiator?
Ari Tulla: I love building new things and this is six different businesses I'm building now from ground up. And to me it's always about trying to find problems that are, are real and, and finding problems that are meaningful for you and I think hopefully also for other people around you. And then tackle them with all the vigor you have and, and sometimes, you know, you get lucky and you know, you build something that can help you know, people's lives. An, my last company is, you know, they, they have helped hundreds of millions of people in the US to, to find healthcare. So it's a big, you know, powering thing in your head when you start something that then goes on to become a massive thing that, you know, helps people every day. So it's really about building, taking these building blocks and laying them in a new way, into a new structure that becomes a service of a company product. And that's what I always try to do. And I think in our case we are, we are in the very forefront now. Like we are in a ma there in, in a jungle trying to find a path.
Elisa Muñoz: Can you share a little bit more about what progress has been made to date? I mean, since you started the company?
Ari Tulla: Yeah, we've been around for two years and, at the beginning we spent about a year just looking at the idea, trying to find the right type of product. And it took about a year to build it and then get it into the small victory of testing. And we tested it for nine months with a small group of 150 people. And that was a product where we took people's blood, we took the data on the verbal devices and then we turned that with AI in the right nutrition plan and we actually delivered the plan to people with the, with you know, daily supplements that come with your name on that was the first product we built and, and now we have been scaling into thousands of people and it's really interesting to see that, you know, this small vitol that is not the end goal of the company at all. But, you know, we already are seeing that people really like this idea of having access to data, having the ability to get scientifically proven things that they can then eat and then having the outcomes measured every now and then.
So you have to see if that thing you did had any impact on your life. And we also added a layer of real people. So every person is paired with the coats, a dietician, a nutritionist who will work with them one on one and to help with other problems. So we have that kind of baseline now built, we are scaling it now, we raise more money for it and, and we are also now adding more products.
Elisa Muñoz: You're based in the US now, right?
Ari Tulla: I mean, I've been in San Francisco for a long time. My co-founder, one of them is here, another one is in Copenhagen in Europe. And we actually have a team now living in nine countries. We run the company completely virtual and we are hiring globally right now. So we can have many positions open in the next coming months if people are interested. You know, we, we are, we don't mind really where you are. We wanna find the best talent on, you know, the development side, the design side, the product side and operations side. And it's sometimes tough when you have a lot of time zones, but you know, we, we've been able to make it work and I, I've been running remote companies for 20 years plus, so I think I, I know what the problems are and sometimes really tough and, you know, other days, you know, it's, it's just super exciting when you, you have an idea at the end of your day and then somebody will take the idea and make it real on your night. You wake up in the sun. So it's kind of cool at times.
Elisa Muñoz: And last but not least, I mean, since you already talk about your expanding plans and how the team is going to grow in the next couple of months, what is the biggest piece of advice you can give to future entrepreneurs starting on this path?
Ari Tulla: I think I, so I, also have a small personal investment fund that we invested with my wife in, in startups for the last decade already. And as from perspective of being, you know, building things myself for quite a while, being an investor and in some case being also a board member, often being an advisor, I think the key advice that is the most important always is that you, you shouldn't really, you know, become an entrepreneur or try to start a company or even like a start your own hobby business if you don't really care about it. It's not about, you know, it's cool to be an entrepreneur, It's, you know, it's not, if you wanna make money, you can make money in an easier way elsewhere. If you don't believe in something yourself, you can't make it. There's no way you can make it happen. So that is the number one thing. Like all, pick the topic, the area, the thing you wanna do carefully. Because if you, if you do it right and you really care about it, you are invincible, you're gonna win.
Elisa Muñoz: Well this was super inspiring. Thank you so much for sharing this piece of advice and for sharing your experiences with us today.
Ari Tulla: Thank you.
