[CTQ Smartcast] Shaping The Internal Company Culture With Product And Community, With Mohit Kumar
Mohit Kumar is the Founder and CEO of Ultrahuman, which is a metabolic fitness platform that helps one improve their overall health with the help of glucose biomarkers and elite experts.
In this Smartcast, hosted by CTQ co-founder BV Harish Kumar, we have talked in depth about what it takes to start and build a venture in a not so common space, the journey of Ultrahuman and how they're using Slack to build a community of like-minded people.
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(Read the shownotes below or skip to the transcript)
SOME OF THE THINGS WE SPOKE ABOUT
What is biohacking and how it culminated to start Ultrahuman?
How the idea of Ultrahuman was germinated?
Why is it important to include data in health and well-being?
Challenges in building Ultrahuman
Slack community’s role in building Ultrahuman and how it extends to the company’s culture?
PLUS
Future relevance of non-cricketing sports, gymnasiums and multiplexes in India
AND
Mohit’s journey of delivering aloo parathas
LINKS TO BOOKS AND PODCASTS MENTIONED IN THE SMARTCAST
BOOKS
Microbe Hunters by Paul de Kruif
The 4-Hour Body by Tim Ferriss
Diabetes Epidemic and You by Dr Kraft
Why We Get Sick by Benjamin Bikman
PODCASTS
OTHERS
If you enjoyed this Smartcast, you will also like Personal Value Systems And Lessons In Designing Your Life, With Sheetal Rao
TRANSCRIPT OF THE EPISODE
00:00:00
Harish: Mohit Kumar is the founder and CEO of Ultrahuman. Ultrahuman is a metabolic fitness platform that helps you improve your diet and exercise with the help of glucose biomarkers and elite experts. I am a happy user and it has helped me make changes to my eating habits and daily routine based on data that just can't be refuted. We caught up with Mohit to understand the journey of Ultrahuman. What got him started, how he found allies, early investors and early users, how they're using Slack to build a community of like-minded people. Our healthcare system is designed for sick people to get better with the other end of the spectrum, where you have elite athletes looking for ways to find their peak. There's nothing for healthy people, and that's the gap that Ultrahuman is trying to fill. Given the nature of the topic, all statutory warnings apply about not taking anything in this talk as medical advice. Talk to your doctor before taking or trying any ideas that we discuss here. But if you're curious about biohacking and how Mohit embarked on building a start-up in a not so common space, go ahead and listen.
00:01:27
Harish: Hi Mohit. Welcome to the CTQ Smartcast.
00:01:30
Mohit: Glad to be here. Thank you, Harish.
00:01:32
Harish: So we usually start the conversation with a googly or a bouncer, whatever you want to call it, right? I think this one is going to be very easy for you. So Mohit, what do you know about biohacking that others don't?
00:01:43
Mohit: I know that biohacking is for dopamine. I mean, it's a fun way to live your life, apart from just being like, chasing health as a goal. Imagine that you're able to do experiments on the most complex machine that's out there. The most complex machine that's out there in your own body. I mean, you can't do experiments on somebody else's bodies, unfortunately, but you can at least do some experiments on your own. So, that's what I think. I know you can qualify anything and everything is biohacking from all the weirdest things possible. So I have a bunch of stuff in my drawer here that I hope people in India don't know about.
00:02:38
Harish: Great. So you've already piqued our curiosity, Mohit. So what all have you done in terms of experiments and if you can briefly walk us through the kind of things that you've done and was that the journey sort of culminated in Ultrahuman or Ultrahuman sort of triggered those experiments? Do you want to comment on both?
00:03:00
Mohit: I think it's really started or it usually starts for anyone when they have a lot of time at their hands. So in the year 2010, I actually had a lot of time in my hands. Because I had passed out of college. I was working for a start-up that was operating at its own pace and which is fun, by the way, I'm not saying it's a bad thing. It's rare to find such companies that basically have their own pace and basically, they believe in the like, not like anti-culture in some ways. So for me, the advantage was that I had like three days a week that was usually chill, Friday, Saturday and Sunday. And because of that, I wanted to do something, obviously, because you can't really do anything when you're in your twenties. And so what I chose to do was to get deeply into cycling. And the cycling community in Bangalore was really interesting. Back then, we used to have something called and we still have those days, like Brevets. Brevets are long-form racing formats for cycling. So as much as it sounds ridiculous people do 100, 200, 300, 400, 600 kilometres and eventually 1200 kilometres of rides on the bike in one single stretch. So because I had a lot of time, time was an advantage. So I started getting into some of these rides, basically met a bunch of people who were similarly free like me, essentially in terms of their time. And many of them were really interesting as well. So you could either find people who are sub 25 or you could find people who are 35+ there was there are no people in the middle, by the way, everybody from 25 to 35 was busy chasing their dreams, making money and sub 25 and because of their the bodies are well equipped to do these athletic feats and 35 plus because by 35 we realise that money is not everything. So, it was really interesting to meet a mixed bag of people. I was in the first half, the sub 25 group and what was really cool was that given that there was a combination of 35 plus people as well, they were really trying to understand that now I don't have an athletic advantage, right? My body has aged. I have spent 10, 15, 20 years building what I wanted to build financially, but I actually don't know how to basically get into athletics anymore or get into sports or fitness anymore. So, they were trying to actually figure out different ways in which they can essentially hack through their own fitness, health, longevity, whatever you want to call it. But I realised that that was the first culmination of the seed of biohacking in my head and as I said earlier, biohacking could be anything and everything. I mean, it does not need to be only limited to pills and methods that are obscure or basically what some people call a gene therapy sometimes of different types and trying to change your whole biology but essentially anything that helps you accelerate energy in your health. Something that is not as mainstream, like exercise and nutrition and it's a derivative of it that sort of felt like biohacking. So, it felt really interesting because these are the people who were at a very, very early age in India and obviously globally as well. You have seen some similar trends, who are doing their blood work, doing an activity, pushing their bodies and checking how their blood work has actually moved. That's the most basic question of biohacking, right? So, I learned a bunch of those concepts along with those people and things like why sugar is beyond a certain level poisonous for your body? Why does it affect your health and longevity in the long run? And how our food industry is essentially a whole big lie today and it's degrading, it's not improving? Everything in the world is becoming more efficient and autonomous and the food industry is becoming more autonomous, but not becoming better for people. We don't have a war. I mean, potentially we don't have a war right now globally. But why are we eating like there is a World War going on right now and scaling our food like we just care about feeding people and not about the nutritious value of the food? So, those are some of the concepts in the early days, that's how it got started.
00:08:07
Harish: Yeah. So that's a great insight to start with. Just to give listeners an idea of the germination of how things started for you, we should definitely add statutory advice. There's no medical advice that we are going to give in this conversation. So, people need to take everything with the right kind of caution.
00:08:34
Mohit: It's funny how people like us because we are responsible people, we have to give caution. And the food companies don't have any caution markings on their food.
00:08:46
Harish: Yeah. So, I was going to ask you this next question. So, you spoke about how things were in 2010, that's when most of this started. So, what happened later? Did you also spend the next ten years trying to make money and you were busy delivering aloo parathas? Well, now people are making people think twice and being more deliberate about having aloo parathas.
00:09:09
Mohit: I was in the market creation journey to some extent, but yeah, that's not true. From 2010 till 2014 or actually till 2013 potentially it is still like cycling and doing randonneuring. Randonneuring is basically if you can finish all these marathon races within a one-time span. Essentially you get a title called Super Randonneur. So I spent time doing all of these things. And by 2013, I got into this 25 to 35 thing myself. That's why I know it deeply is. Basically, I joined a company called Ola Cabs. We wanted to win the transportation space in India and Uber was growing in India. They had launched recently and it was fun to figure out how you scale an Internet business that too it's a cross-internet business, right? It's not only the internet but there's also offline infrastructure and then there is the internet and how the internet helps something like that. So it was a very interesting journey back then. And so that's what I did. And then as a follow up to that, I started my own startup in the year 2015, which was called Roadrunnr. It was the logistics space, just like Ola was in the transportation space. The fundamental concept is that there is a limited supply that is fragmented and then there is the demand source. And if you can integrate supply and demand in a much better way, you could potentially have better efficiencies and better price advantage. And all that value gets passed on to the consumer. So that's what was the core concept behind starting Roadrunner back then. That's what I did in, you can say 2012-15. And then there was a follow up to that as well, which is eventually merging with Zomato along the way. Food was a huge category for us from a demand perspective and it was obvious that there were synergies with a large aggregator like Zomato. So we ultimately decided to merge with Zomato back then. But food delivery was still in its nascent stages. So, it was fun to build it from a nascent stage to what's potentially a large matured business now.
00:11:43
Harish: Right. So, when did you decide that Ultrahuman is something which I want to start? Did you have a basic problem area? I wouldn't even say a problem statement. Was that what you started with or did you start with the product idea? How did that whole thing evolve?
00:12:05
Mohit: Well, the seeds of the idea were pretty much intended, as I mentioned earlier. But in the year 2019, after the market creation journey that I had with Zomato, my people delivering aloo parathas, I myself was sort of trying to take a break to focus on my own health. And as a result of that, I actually went to this martial arts camp called Tiger Muay Thai. Tiger Muay Thai is an interesting place because it is multifaceted in terms of martial arts. You can meet interesting people who are sort of like not just athletes, but also, you can say weekend warriors showing up at the camp. But because it's a captive space, like basically once you get there, there's nothing else to do because you're on an island and you can only fight for 6-10 hours a day and then the rest. So, I did that for a few months.
00:12:59
Harish: Where was this by the way?
00:13:01
Mohit: Tiger Muay Thai is in Phuket, Thailand. So, I spent a few months there and the interesting observation in the camp was that just like in the year 2010 as I discovered two cohorts of people showing up there. So sub 25 and 35 plus, this time it was similar sub 25 and 35 plus. The only interesting part though was I was in neither of the sects. I was not 35 plus I, I was not sub 25. But I realised that I could potentially get into 35 plus obviously as I age and I age unhealthily, basically chasing material goals or whatever is actually. So when I was there, I saw that there was a combination of these two types of people and again, like the 35 plus folks were also really cutting edge in terms of finding accelerated methods to get healthier, to age or anti-age rather, to some extent. So that again, in some ways overlapped on top of the existing seed of ideas and reinforced the idea that this is really cool, this is really interesting because ultimately the only machine that you have access to is your own body. The most sophisticated machine you have access to is your own body. And this is the one that you can't really change. I mean, if you don't do anything, you can't really change it. You can't really replace it, rather, right? And you can potentially buy a new car and you can potentially buy a new house, but you can't really buy a new body today. At least it's not possible right now. And the other realisation to that was that we know more about our cars and our homes than our bodies, which is very weird because like most of our life experiences also arise from the body that we live in. So that was the core genesis and Vatsal and I, Vatsal is the co-founder and CTO, both of us essentially when I was on this break, we used to talk about things that I could do as our next journey and we used to discuss anything from building something in the remote workspace to basically building like remote tools to some virtual reality stuff, etc. because we had time. So again, time is an amazing luxury to have and I didn't have any agenda, so basically, I didn't have a starting date. So we used to think about these stupid ideas back then and always arrive at like, Oh, what can we do to improve our own health, right? And what's the shortest path or is there a cheat code to health? And over time, it became clearer that what we really want to do is build a cutting-edge health company and not anything else. That was the only thing that became clearer over time. So, that's how the Ultrahuman idea was or it was not really an idea, to be honest. It was this concept that people want to essentially have very interesting information sources to improve their health and very rich in information so as to improve their health. This information source could be external, which is basically having access to athletes globally and their training methods or internal, which is essentially knowing about your own body. And what we did with the last two years is to create an intersection of these two, like external as well as internal.
00:17:13
Harish: Yeah. So, I think what has struck me, Mohit, is that the use of data in sports, professional, elite sports has been around for a long time. And when we look at countries outside India. But even in India, probably the richest sport like cricket, we actually had a guest earlier on the CTQ Smartcast (Sumeet Pai), who was one of the people who was given this job of getting Indian cricket players to get used to that back in 2002, he was part of the squad and the team which won the NatWest trophy. And he used to tell stories about how his job was like getting the internet going for it first, building that trust and then getting to the level of just providing some analysis. And from there, of course, the Indian cricket team has now progressed. But what you are doing is also giving a peek into this data-led, quantified life kind of a lens that people like me have always wanted to have but never had a chance to even look at. Now you're making that more mainstream, making that more available. Is that something that drives you and do you see that acceptance and yearning growing in India?
00:18:40
Mohit: I will answer the second one later which is about whether it's relevant in India or not. But if you look at the evidence of human performance. So, what is human performance? Basically, if you are at seven on the human health scale from 1 to 10, can you get to a ten or a nine or 9.5? That's the human performance scale. But then there are other zones as well. If you're at five, can you get to seven, which is if you have some markers of a disease, an inability to lose weight, basically metabolic disorders, diabetes, etc., or pre-diabetes? I think five might not be diabetes, but pre-diabetes. Can you actually get to a healthy state, which is seven essentially? Or basically, move from a 3 to 5, which is basically you have severe disease and you want to get to a state which has basically lesser severe disease. That's what the person would like. Somebody who has a severe disease does not aim to run a triathlon, right? They will aim for getting rid of the basic problem that they're having right now, or if they are bedridden, they would want to just move around. And 1 to 3 is what the industry services today, which is somebody has had a critical issue there in the ICU or they have a critical disorder, maybe 3 to 5 to some extent as well, right. You go to a doctor and you say that, oh, this is the allergy that I'm having and the doctor gives you medicine, right. So, 1 to 5 is to some extent proven right for general people to some extent. There are some inefficiencies there. But if you go to a good doctor, you will mostly have an answer to your question. And this infrastructure is improving over time as we get access to remote tools. There is telemedicine now, etc. But from the 5 to 10 spectrum, only if you can say 8 to 10 or 7 to 10 spectrum is somewhat basically what's addressed right now and that too not for people like you and me, it's addressed only for that top clubs 0.001%, which is athletes. Not even people who have access to money, by the way, only athletes and people who have access to money, it's a choice sometimes. But then this is what we feel or what we felt was missing. One example of that is when you work with a sports scientist as an athlete, if you're working and the sports scientist is giving you insights about your own body and you work on those insights, there's a very high probability that you will see results if you have access to a good sports scientist. But then there is no parallel to that except the coaches that we have, like the fitness coaches and the physical trainers that we have. There are smarter ways to get fit. There are accelerated ways to get fit. The coaches and people individually who want to take control of their own health would need data to improve their own physiology over time. And we saw data as the lowest common denominator here because anybody and everybody should be able to use it. And you can use it to performance spectrum, which is basically if you want to run a triathlon or basically participate in triathlon or essentially improve your timing there, or you can essentially use it to get healthier, avoid diseases, or you can use it to essentially revert or reverse the disease as well eventually, right. And we set upon sort of building this human health dashboard for your own body. It's real-time access to your own health. So whenever you want to see how your health is trending, just like you see how your money is trending. There are financial tools that can tell you like if you have an iPhone, there is a Stocks App and I'm sure there are parallels in the Android world as well. But you don't have anything that should tell you what's happening inside your body. So that's the closest parallel to essentially how we think about our product. So, just to tell you, the real-time here is the key is what we believe in, right. There is data, there is an immense amount of data out there for people. So, I think you would have probably done like 15-20 blood tests. I would have done like 15-20 blood tests in my life, but unfortunately, I've never actually acted on any of these, because it's a point in time test. I see it sometimes. I may have actually acted on some of these, but usually, the people who get blood tests are either lunatics who essentially want to know about their own body or basically people who are sick. And there's a lot of sick people data, but there's no lunatic or healthy people data, right? So, if you can understand what's healthy, maybe you can mimic it and improve your health, right? We find the same trouble in doing clinical trials, by the way. So, a lot of clinical trials are designed in a way that a control group is usually a select group. Right. Now, what do you have as a control group for healthy people, less sick people? There's no definition of less sick. Either you're sick or not sick. So, there is a definition of health span. Right. So, you potentially can't do any clinical trials. And that's one of the reasons why preventative technology is also not growing as fast is because it's hard to clinically validate it. If I were a pharma company, I would say, Oh, I have this amazing pill that helps you reduce your cholesterol or the bad type essentially. But what's qualified as a bad type today? I mean, might not be the reality, but for example, you say that your LDL is up or your triglycerides are up, and this is a pill that can help you show evidence that you're basically done, right?
00:24:54
Harish: Yeah. So, one thing I have to point out here, Mohit, you may be too humble and modest to not talk about it, but the thing that I've really loved about using the Ultrahuman patch is the whole seamless experience about it. I have heard of others using the same patch that Abbott makes, but they have to sort of download the file, upload it somewhere and then get a point in time data and again, it doesn't really give you actionable intelligence. But the experience that I have with the Ultrahuman patch is phenomenal. And the whole packaging right from the way you send out updates on when what is expected to the experience on the Slack channel is fantastic. This is not a product placement Mohit, this is me talking as a happy fan of the product. But what you were saying earlier brought another question to mind. If you look at people trying to start up today, things like logistics and delivery of food, just to give a very lazy counterexample. It seems very easy to start because they're not going to be too many regulatory challenges and I can just get started. Whereas when you talk about the kind of stuff that you are doing right now, right? The whole space is so complex and complicated, there are regulatory norms to take care of. And there are just basic challenges, like you said, less healthy versus more healthy. How do you even quantify that? So, does that sort of put a barrier to entry for people to go in? Was that a question for you? Is this too hard a problem that I'm going after? Am I going to be able to raise funds? What was that thought process like?
00:27:01
Mohit: Well, the barrier of curiosity to some extent. When you ask a child, what do they want to become? Most of them will actually say, well, I want to become an astronaut. I want to become a doctor. I want to become a scientist. And as we grow up, we trivialise our life goals. Why does that happen? Because we either get too complacent with life sometimes or we don't know, like, oh, this is too hard a goal, right. One of these two. And currently, we live in a society where basically scientific curiosity is not very mainstream. Some people who have scientific curiosity or even political curiosity are either blacklisted or whitelisted in some ways, both extremes, But that happens usually on the political curiosity side. But scientific curiosity isn’t something that lands your job. Now, it potentially has started landing people a job today, which is a great phenomenon, right? But maybe 10-20 years back, that was not the case. And we are living in a generation, which has grown up in the last 15-20 years in some ways. So, this generation of people were basically having the means to survive or success was called financial success back then, the only success was financial success. And for a lot of people, that's still true. This generation is optimised to solve the financial goals first. And this is what I did as well, by the way, which is, I did not optimise for learning new things. I said, oh, this is what I know. I know how logistics potentially work. So, I will go ahead and start something that is simple enough, right? And once I had this journey, I realised that I have a little bit more freedom on my end. By the way, that's all in your mind, right? Because you could do the same thing on the first journey as well. But basically, the way to realise that for me essentially was to use it as a stepping stone. But while I was using a stepping stone, I did not know that it was a stepping stone. I thought this was my final journey. This is my destination. But along the way, given that I was luckily able to read more stuff, I fulfilled a little bit of my curiosity. I was a big fan of books on human biology. No non-fiction novels or other stuff, like business stuff. But I really enjoyed books about human biology or about scientific curiosity. So, some of that essentially helped me in some ways, to get started on this journey of thinking about human health. Like transportation as a huge human problem, we have an energy crisis, a huge human problem, human health is similarly a large problem. And it's going to be a 20, 30, 40, potentially 100-year journey for me if I live that long. So it's a deep enough journey, right? I mean, you can go as deep in any domain as possible. But some domains essentially have much thicker layers of knowledge, right. So, to your question, there is a curiosity barrier, which is if you're not curious enough, then it's not a simple business. But if you're curious enough, then probably this is the most interesting business that you will ever get into. Then you potentially can't fail because you have this mindset that you can do this for 50 years and forever. There's one basic principle about the feasibility of things, right? So, if you do something for 20 years, most probably it will work. So how do you live for those 20 years and how do you ensure that everybody who is on this journey with you will survive for 20 years? That's what we're solving for.
00:31:33
Harish: So I can clearly see when you're speaking, you're really driven by the purpose and the journey. So how easy or difficult was it to get more allies to believe in you and to join this journey. I am talking about both investors and employees. Did they just dismiss you saying you are like one of those lunatics doing the blood work?
00:31:58
Mohit: Some of them, yes, but I think most of them did not. That's a good thing because we are doing something that is very intuitive, is what I believe. There's nobody in the world who doesn't want to feel better. Most people want to feel better, right? And the thing about health is, it is not a comparable category to every category out there because it's a potentially positive impact category that you're building in. So, either there are revolutionary new ideas that have the power of changing societies and basically if your idea has the power to change society, then people who can see the same worldview as you're seeing, they'll actually work on it and they'll say that, oh, I believe in the same world view. And generally, these are people who have evolved themselves. So, we were doing something like that, we are not changing the world view. You are building something that is very intuitive, that having human health data, is very intuitive. There's nothing new about it. There's no innovation about it. There's no invention about it, right? So, we fell in the first category, which is if people could really see through the problem and say that, for example, the problem that we're solving is the metabolic disorder problem, which is a problem of a billion people. And it's not just that a billion people globally feel it. All of us have some degree of metabolic disorders and even if I don't have a disease today, I have this problem to solve for my own health. I can choose to ignore it. That's a choice. The most ROI that you get out of your life is when you are as far away from disease and as closer to performance as possible. Right. So if you invest in a productivity tool, like buying a subscription to an amazing email app, right? Or if you invest in a great car that makes you either move faster or essentially have a great in-car experience, why don't you invest in a platform that essentially, basically makes your health better or gives you the data to make you help, right? So that essentially was the pitch to people as well as to investors. And the first set of investors who actually took the bet were people who actually knew us because it's hard to convince people about anything new. And eventually, we also found people who believed in the same worldview as ours, which was that human health data is important. And the existing folks, obviously, because they were the first believers, they were the first adopters as well. Interestingly, all of our investors are users of the platform as well. So they're not just investing from a money perspective that's actually putting a device on the body and to improve their own performance, right. So that's really crucial for us, right. It's very hard to get something unless you use it. I met a prolific founder of, I think a few years back, and I was in this journey of asking, how do you come up with something that you're passionate about, right? How do you get passionate about something? Do you sit in a room and think about new ideas? He said, No, no, no. That's not what I do. If I'm using what I'm building, if I'm a power user of the product that I'm building, that's potentially the sweet spot for finding the right type of product. Eventually, we all want to do things for ourselves as well, right. So, if you're building for the people, make sure that you're building for yourself as well. Otherwise, you'll find solace somewhere else which is not really aligned with what you want to do, right? So, if you can find a combination of these two, that's actually the best mix.
00:36:06
Harish: Right. Yeah. I think that's a fantastic insight. Do unto yourself first what you want to do to the world. And I think that's working for you. If you are invested and motivated, I'm sure you'll be able to find more people like you.
00:36:24
Mohit: An amazing product management principle, by the way. So some of the best product creators and product managers in the world, build a feature as if they are the user. It's very counter-intuitive, by the way, to regular gyaan which is obeyed by the users, do user surveys and find exactly what works for them and then you figure it out. And those are powerful tools. I'm not saying those are not. But then the most you get is the closest you'll get to an instinctive answer that is correct is when you actually think about yourself and build this. And in most cases, when you put yourself in the user's shoes or I mean, to be simplistic, you become the user yourself. You say that if I were a user or if I am a user, this shouldn't be there or this should be there, right? This feature should be there, which should not be there. So then it becomes very easy. You don't have to convince people about your stuff. You can do the things that you like. This is particularly helpful when you use your own product.
00:37:33
Harish: Right. Yeah, I'm a firm believer of that and we ourselves have taken that approach. It has worked for us in the CTQ Compounds where we build habits for reading and consuming content. So, it actually started off as an internal experiment. We were reading and we started posting about it on our social media channels and people said, we want to also be a part of that, so we did the first figure out ourselves and then we actually opened it up, created a slightly different product. We are ourselves on a streak of 1500 days plus now. So, we know inside out what the users are going through so I can perfectly vouch for that approach of yours.
00:38:20
Mohit: Yeah. It's harder to get a concept sometimes because sometimes we feel that the reason why organisations slow down is that they're just too many thoughts. They're not focused on a bunch of people driving the thing that they like, but it's driven by thousands of people about the things that they like individually or maybe they like it to some extent, but not driven by ten people liking it very deeply, right? So that's the fundamental difference here.
00:38:55
Harish: So coming back to your Slack community, I've been part of the Cyborg Army community. How have you been thinking about Slack as an integral part of what you are doing? And a question that I've always had is, is there some reverse osmosis going on? Are you learning from your users how to think about this? What is happening there? How is the whole Slack community helping you in your journey?
00:39:28
Mohit: I think one of the primary reasons why we started Slack as a community exercise; is I actually didn't start as a community exercise. It started as a way for us to talk to each other. That's what we do inside the company as well. We just talk to each other. In most cases, we will come up with an answer and we realise that we're solving a problem that is complex and variable to the extent that it depends on people, how they perceive it sometimes. So, for example, there is this amazing thesis around health being a belief system, you can believe that I am healthy no matter where you are, by the way, right. But whatever side of the health spectrum you might be, you could potentially say that I'm healthy, right. And what happens is that because you have a belief system, it's very hard to change that because you can't really change belief systems. Instead, you can only talk to people. We started this experiment to ensure that people are talking to each other or we are talking to people. Like the way, we talk internally within our own Slack as well. And what we realised was that over time, people started using this as a fundamental capability to communicate, share ideas, and contribute to a product. So from a reverse osmosis perspective, we see a lot of contribution coming in from people in terms of either the exceptions to the platform that this is what does not work, which is great because that helps us evolve the platform but also understand what works for people to some extent. And also to some extent for people to hang out and discuss their own stuff like if you followed recently started doing stuff that has nothing to do with Cyborg as well, which is we go do these offline meetups and these running sessions and we realise that a lot of people inside the company are passionate about sports in general. And the thing to do with Cyborg as well. So how do we turn that curiosity onto the platform as well? Eventually, we want this to be a place for the first early adopters of the health revolution, basically people who are the original biohackers of India, people who are trying to improve human performance, who want to go to the next level of human performance. Those are the people who we would expect to be a part of this. And that's the only goal around this.
00:42:14
Harish: Yeah. Right. And I think like you said, just bringing them on a platform where they can connect with each other and sort of identity with someone. For example, I have seen a bunch of our subscribers who are into reading. That was the prime identity that I had associated with them. Once I joined, I saw a bunch of them on this platform and I was like, Oh! Then at the core level, I know these are people who are interested in habit building and generally widening their horizons. So now I can relate to that. The idea is this is a platform where they need to be there and that's got nothing to do with either Cyborg or you know reading. But that's who those people are. I think that's what the community is letting us do as I’m speaking as a member of the community here.
00:43:07
Mohit: Yeah absolutely. It's like when you are in a market and you meet a few people around you, right? You have a right to have a genuine conversation at a coffee shop. So that's exactly how we want this to be. It's not a formal platform. It's not something that has got to do as much with Ultrahuman or Cyborg. It's got to do with like-minded people trying to do something.
00:43:31
Harish: And do you extend this to your company culture as well? What do you track there to see whether you are building the kind of culture that you always wanted to?
00:43:41
Mohit: This is a very smart team. I think culture is extremely complex as a problem statement. It cannot really be only measured. It has also to be instinctively felt sometimes. But I think what we really aspire to do individually is that it should feel like your own life's work and not just working for the company. That's what we want it to be. Right. So when does it become life's work? Because like the way we are using the product ourselves and benefiting from it and then getting a chance to build the product that we are benefiting from? If it is happening for you as well, then you potentially have the same gratifying truth for yourself, which is that I like something and benefit from it, and then I get a chance to change it or improve it. So that's core to our culture in some ways, whatever we are building, it does not mean that only the existing product or any other products are going to come. I think products are very temporary in our companies and they evolve over time. You come up with something new and that new thing sounds as shiny as something that was there in the past. What seems interesting as a group of creators is you have the ability to create together. We think of our teams as sports teams because of those reasons, and we look at a soccer team, for example when you are in a match, if a defender gets a chance to score, they will score, right? A striker gets a chance to score. They will obviously score. That's what they are. Most midfielders will also pass on the opportunity, but then they also have specific rules. And it's not that a striker is better than a defender or is better than a midfielder, right? They're all playing their individual positions and they're in a good team. Everybody is gratified about the position of the team. And if midfielders don't work, then the strikers won't be able to essentially execute. Right, and vice versa as well. If strikers don't work, then midfielders will put in so much, but with so much work, it doesn't really work. Right? So, basically, that's the symbiosis that we see inside of the company that we are all in different roles, but our roles are equally important. It might seem that strikers get a lot of attention. They are the people who scored. But that's not always true. And so, the best teams in the world are not so because of the strikers being great. The best teams in the world are because the entire team is well balanced. In fact, we have seen teams where essentially it doesn't really matter how good strikers are. What matters is how good everyone is to some extent.
00:46:45
Harish: So, the last few questions, Mohit. If you can talk about some of the books, podcasts, people that have sort of shaped your thinking, what would you recommend to people who are interested in biohacking?
00:47:01
Mohit: There's a book called Why We Get Sick and it's an interesting read because it talks about how insulin plays a role in your health and how under-talked it is. All we talk about is glucose and basically the effects of sugar, but how insulin plays a huge role. Right. And of course, it is largely driven by sugar as well. But it's important to understand insulin as an independent element and the entire elements of physiology that it affects inside your body. So that's one. Then there is a book by Dr Kraft called Diabetes Epidemic and You, and it's not only about diabetic people, by the way. Don't go by the title. It's about how anybody and everybody is at risk of diabetes to some extent. Diabetes is not just one disease. It's not a switch. It's a spectrum. We are all in some ways basically disposed to it. And sometimes it manifests in different ways in your own body, like other metabolic disorders. So this is a book by Dr Kraft. It's called Diabetes Epidemic and You. And then if you want quick biohacking stuff, I think nothing is better than Tim Ferriss’s The 4-hour Body. I mean, it's still the book that I refer to sometimes. I mean, Tim Ferriss, I don't think there's anybody who has actually done more and achieved more than him in the world of biohacking yet, in a super authentic way, because he's exactly the example of like high performer polymath, trying to do everything in life at the same time hacking their own biology. So, The 4-hour Body is a really interesting read as well. I think lastly if you think about scientific curiosity, basically, how do you actually think about hard problems and scientific problems? And this book is called Microbe Hunters. It's about how different people in their own walks, in their own life, discovered different types of microbes, potentially via serendipity. They were not looking for it. Like how in some ways formulation of beer led to the formulation of different pharmaceutical grade drugs, essentially. So that's why if you read that book, you'll realise how beer saved everyone's lives because the same science is essentially used across all those other types of drugs as well, and it's not really about the methods and tools that they use, but about the mindset. One thing that I realised by reading that book and it's especially mentioned is that it says that you might think a scientist is somebody who essentially has access to a lab and tools and methods and is highly educated in this domain and has years of research behind them. But the most interesting discoveries have happened from people who didn't have access to any of these things. And just by the power of observation. So that's a fundamental tool because our observation essentially trumps almost everything out there.
00:50:31
Harish: So that's a great list Mohit. I will add one recommendation from my side, which is a podcast. This is the Huberman Lab Podcast. We've been tripping over it for the last few months and I would highly recommend anyone who's interested in understanding the human body to start listening to Huberman Lab. I think that's a fantastic recommendation from my side.
00:50:57
Mohit: If you want to add to that, there's the Lifespan Podcast by David Sinclair. That was pretty interesting.
00:51:04
Harish: Alright. We've come to the end of this conversation. But we're not going to let you get away without giving your hot takes on certain things. So what I would ask you to give your hot take on is basically the future relevance of something. I'm going to give you 2 to 3 words, terms, things, and I want your hot take on that. So the first one is, what do you think is the future relevance of non-cricketing sports in India?
00:51:33
Mohit: I would put my bet on badminton. And the reason for that is the sheer amount of new talent that we have in India right now. It's phenomenal. And it's also becoming a micro-culture within societies. Something to become relevant at the performance level has to first become this micro-culture. The other option would have been squash potentially.
00:52:01
Harish: Right. And then with Gopichand also sort of perfected the factory model for churning out these champions is not just one individual player who succeeds despite the system, but actually, there's a system that is working there now. So, I think that is also there.
00:52:16
Mohit: That's a really interesting point. There's a difference between Russian athletes and American athletes, which is like Russian athletes have an amazing system of training. American athletes actually also have an amazing system of training. Indian athletes are the ones who are like the ones with the most amount of grit because they don't have any systems yet, but yes, Gopichand has obviously brought a change, massive change to the system as well.
00:52:41
Harish: Right. What do you think is the future relevance of gymnasiums in India?
00:52:48
Mohit: I think quite simply they'll become more data-backed because what they want to support is bio-individuality, which is different for different people. And all of us will essentially have different journeys of improvement. So instead of having a common method for everyone, there will be common methods because those are important, as a group fitness class is still relevant, but then some interventions are going to be more data-backed and I think that's going to be a big one. And I feel that there'll be a strong nutritional element as well in the gyms because this is the evolution that we have seen across all gyms that have actually survived over the last 10-15 years. Each of these gyms either has an amazing culture or they're very well integrated with the ecosystem around themselves, like the Tiger Muay Thai gym that I was telling you about. It's an amazing case study in itself. It's a street called Soi Tai-ed which is called the fittest street in the world because all the top athletes train in the same street and you'll find all the restaurants that are there catering to similar needs of people. They're all mostly fresh farm-sourced foods, vegetables, meats, essentially. So, everything aligns when you build the right culture. And that's what has happened there as well.
00:54:15
Harish: Right. Yeah. And the final one is slightly left of the field as compared to the rest of the conversation. What do you think is the future relevance of multiplexes in India?
00:54:23
Mohit: So, and I have not been to one in the last two years, so it's a hard one. I just feel that it has to become way more experiential than where it is right now and not the 4-D ones that are usually very bad. But basically in terms of the sound and the virtual experience and let's say having access to all these visual effects. Because seeing content has now become a commodity and seeing anything anywhere on OTTs. What the multiplexes give you is the focus. You are locked in. You can't do anything else. You're just closing your focus. So, it could be an immersive experience. So if you can make that immersive experience better by improving the technology in terms of sound as well as visual technology. And you could potentially see in the next few years that either each one of us land in the same theatre and wear a bunch of variables on our body and then essentially experience the movie or it could actually be brought to your home as well. So, I think there will be a tussle between at-home technology and in-theatre technology for some time. My personal belief is that at-home technology will eventually win. Because theatre is supposed to be a space where you don't interact, right? You can't interact because it will disturb people. So, there is not as much social experience as much as you would like and some elements would also be replicated in a virtual environment.
00:56:22
Harish: Yeah, I can imagine watching a Rocky movie on the Oculus and the exchange.
00:56:30
Mohit: around with a group of people, yeah
00:56:32
Harish: Yeah! That's a nice future to look forward to. But on that note, I think we touched upon a variety of things, from your personal journey to how Ultrahuman has evolved and what is your take on biohacking. And this is a fantastic chat. Thanks a lot for your time.
00:56:52
Mohit: Absolutely. Walking is important. Walking more frequently is even more important.
00:57:00
Harish: So on that note, thanks a lot Mohit!
00:57:02
Mohit: Thank you. Thank you. Harish.
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