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HOUSEKEEPING 📨

I’m excited to ship this piece out for you today. It’s another product I use personally: Superpower. It’s a one-stop AI concierge. It’s such a powerful idea to actually track your health and wellness. It’s crazy to me that this wasn’t a thing much earlier. I, for example, found out through using Superpower that I have high cholesterol. It’s likely genetic, but luckily, they’ve recommended all the steps I need to take to get it under control.

My next scan is in a month or so, and I actually can’t wait for it. Another reason I love supporting this particular startup is that it’s an Aussie-founded startup taking on the world. A handful of my mates work there now, in fact. Anyway, I hope you enjoy the interview with Max here. Ciao for now!

INTERVIEW 🎙️

Max Marchione, Founder & CEO at Superpower

Max Marchione is the Founder & CEO of Superpower, a San Francisco-based preventive health platform built around an annual membership that includes a 100+ biomarker blood panel, ongoing tracking, and an AI-driven action plan, all for $199 a year. The Australian founder built the company alongside co-founder Jacob Peters after the two were introduced at a London founder event by a mutual friend who told them they were ‘the two most health-obsessed people I know.’ Since then, Superpower has raised a Series A backed by firms including Forerunner Ventures and Bain Capital Ventures and assembled a celebrity-investor list that includes Giannis Antetokounmpo, Shaan Puri, and Arielle Zuckerberg, among others.

The story behind the company is personal. Superpower is the company he built, so nobody else has to repeat that experience, and the bet underneath it is bigger than blood tests: that within a decade, most people will outsource the running of their health to a software membership, and that enhancement will be the biggest theme in the next era of medicine. Max made that case publicly in a viral TBPN debate with Martin Shkreli, defending AI's role in primary care against one of the industry's loudest contrarians.

Why are you building Superpower?

I went through a long period of having health problems. From ages 12 to 18, it would take me three hours to fall asleep every night. Chronic migraines, chronic sinusitis, I slept through a third of my high school classes, had surgery, was told to medicate for life, saw probably 10 to 20 doctors, and no one knew what was wrong with me. When that happens, you become frustrated with the health system the way it is. Ever since then, I've been really obsessed with this idea: what would it look like if no one else had to go through that because we have a better health system?

It's deeply, personally meaningful to me. I think health really matters to the world. The current system does a good job when you're sick. It does a very bad job of preventing you from getting sick. It does a good job at surgery. It does a very bad job at actually making people better and enhancing people. And for as long as a system like the one we want to build at Superpower doesn't exist, someone or some company has to come along and create it.

How did the founding story come together?

I was in London hosting a little founder event, and someone I met there said, "You have to meet my friend." He put me in touch with one of my co-founders. He said, "You're the two most health-obsessed people I know."

What was the most difficult part of going from zero to one?

Zero to one is paradoxical because you need to do two things at the same time. One is that you need to pitch the biggest, craziest vision of the future you can, because the primary thing an investor cares about is: can this be big? The second thing is you need to operate and execute on the smallest thing you can, because anything big is impossible to do at the start, and trying to do the big thing probably won't work. So you need to start with the small thing that does work. It's paradoxical in that way.

I think the hallmark of whether founders get through the zero-to-one stages is whether they can do both. Another way of thinking about it is this: there's the long term, which is opinionated. It's not market-aware. It's opinionated and contrarian. And there's the short-term, which is reactive. It's market-aware. It's doing what works. It's doing what's proven in the market. It's not trying to do something completely new, because the probability of that working at the start is quite low. Then, over time, you earn the right to do the next thing, and the next thing, and the next thing, over and over, until you reach that long-term vision where you can actually do everything.

How did you land on the product as it is? And what iterations did you go through?

Honestly, for me, even pre-Superpower, it started with a year in explore mode, where I tested dozens of things: dozens of small companies, dozens of small apps, and many ideas. Met lots of people, tried things, spoke with customers. That was important. It felt like I did nothing that year, and from an output perspective, I did nothing obvious. But what I did do was learn what works and what doesn't, get reps’ understanding of marketing and customers, and start learning the machinery for building zero-to-one motions in companies.

When starting Superpower, the initial premise was: let's create high-end concierge medicine for a fraction of the price. The thesis was similar to the Tesla thesis. Start at a higher price for a select few, then bring that price down every few months until we make it accessible to many.

The seminal moment when we landed on the first thing we were going to really work on was actually more recent: August 2025. Ironically, it was post our Series A. We hadn't even launched at the Series A stage, which was a mistake, but we live, and we learn. In August last year, we launched our $199-a-year membership, which was fully productized, with very few humans in the loop, and very accessible. A great entry point. The belief was that if we wanted to create a membership that every American could own, we needed to set an accessible membership price. Rather than doing the Tesla strategy of doing everything and then working our way down, let's do the opposite, the Amazon strategy of starting with ‘books for us,’ which was blood testing, and then working our way up. I think it's a far more robust approach. Because if you start high and don't create the forcing function to know what it's like to deal with minimal resources, low prices, little margin, and challenging customer acquisition motions, you never build the muscle. Let's create that forcing function as soon as possible, so we don't just throw doctors at every problem we have. Instead, we have to solve it with technology.

In retrospect, I would have been more narrow at the start. We tried to do too much too early. I would have paid more attention to the market. I would have obsessed a little bit more about what works today, and would have been fine doing something lowly ambitious in the short term, with the belief that that's the right stepping stone to get to where we want to be in the long term.

Have your strategic angel investors played any specific role in the company?

Sometimes. We’ve been able to get certain celebrity partnerships we'll go live with soon that would have been hard without having them as investors. One thing I underrate, and this is a classic Aussie mistake, is to underrate the power of the big name. The big brand, you co-sign with the big celebrity, the big doctor. I've always kind of turned a blind eye to that, or almost found it distasteful because it's too showy. The Aussie distaste for showiness and pretension.

But such signaling, or ‘pretension’ as the Aussies call it, is actually part of how human psychology works, and it's very important. The reality is it's very hard to partner with a big-name doctor or celebrity, and the fact that you can partner with them is a useful, dense signal of legitimacy when communicating to the market. I think that's something we did well. It put us on the map to start. And once we're on the map, we can attract capital, team, and talent more easily, and achieve greater efficiency across all of our marketing. It's one of those foundational things that is time-consuming in the early days, but I do think it sets the company up for better talent, better capital, and better marketing.

What is your North Star metric? And anything you’ve found difficult to move?

How much are we shipping, product velocity, LTV/CAC; we think of that more as just ARPU right now. ARPU is a good proxy. Our CAC stays reasonably flat, so if we want to increase LTV, we have to increase ARPU or retention. LTV/CAC is a bit of a catch-all, and then customer love; when customers love us, everything else falls into place. Those are probably the three main.

As for difficulty, our action plan attachment rate, meaning the rate at which members actually buy the protocol through the platform, has been the hardest. If you speak to one of our members, they all say, ‘After I do my blood test, I want you to tell me what to do, and I want you to make it easy for me to do it.’ So we built an action plan, and we've iterated on it multiple times. It was so hard to get the attach rate above 10%, which is measly.

The number is higher now, but it's taken a while to optimize. People come back to us, they engage, and they get retested with us. But getting someone to actually buy supplements or pharmaceuticals from the action plan was way harder than we thought. Engagement actually works better than we thought. General life-cycle stuff, general engagement, making Superpower front of mind, that works quite well to get someone randomly coming back throughout the year. In theory, the actual action plan moment should be a real economics driver, a customer-love driver, and an engagement driver, but we really struggled with that.

Part of it was actually changing the infrastructure around so we could experiment far faster. We were in a world where it was hard for us to experiment, and it was very hard to optimize when you couldn't quickly change things. Now that we've done that, over the next month, we're running a lot of experiments. Another part was reducing the number of clicks and buttons. Part of it is showing the relationship between the recommendation and someone's data more clearly. Vitamin D, for example, is very easy to sell, because it's clear that taking vitamin D increases your vitamin D biomarker. So when there's a clear relationship, people are more likely to purchase. We need to make that relationship clearer, alongside the other recommendations we make.

When should AI replace a doctor? And what impact will that have?

Most people should chat with an AI to get a second opinion. I know many people who have had the AI catch something their doctor missed. Now, the regulators aren't going to want to hear that, but the reality is, doctors miss a lot of things. They make a lot of mistakes. And if the AI gives someone autonomy and empowerment to be more interested in their health, that's a positive thing.

At the level of ‘Do you trust the AI with the supplement or pharmaceutical it recommends?’ that's a matter of individual choice. I personally trust it more than I trust a doctor. Some people might want to validate its output against a doctor. An AI can't make medical recommendations, provide medical advice, or make a diagnosis. So a knowing customer knows those things, and, given that the AI is providing general information, has to decide whether to treat it as medical advice. That's up to the patient.

I think in 10, 15, and 20 years from now, none of us is going to think much about health. We're just going to have a system and AI that runs it all for us. We'll all likely have a membership to an AI software platform that's connected to everything you need: tests, data, therapeutic supplements, and pharmaceuticals. The AI is just going to run our health for us. We input our preferences, goals, and data, and the system does the rest. That's kind of where I think we're going.

In terms of impact, we'll be able to predict disease far earlier. We'll use health as a tool to help people enhance themselves. We'll think less about ‘let's cure sickness’ and more about how health can allow someone to be superhuman.

I do think enhancement will be the biggest theme in health. Can we live longer? Can we have more energy? Can we lose weight? Can we be taller? Can we put on more muscle? Can we sleep better? Can our skin look better? That will all be the domain of health, and it'll be most of what we call health. And then there's the obvious: can we prevent disease? But I think that actually becomes more table stakes once we have massive amounts of data, advanced therapeutics, and really intelligent systems.

💡 Note: I am actually a Superpower user and a huge fan. If you want to get better at being healthy, join me here.

How are you using AI operationally? And how are you fostering an AI mindset?

If you walk by anyone's desk at Superpower, you'll see a Claude Code window on one monitor and their normal work on another. Everyone is using Claude Code. I don't know a single person on the team who doesn't. That can look like building mini widgets and dashboards. It can look like helping with writing. It can look like writing code. It can look like automating things. That's just common for us. We increasingly build internal tools rather than use external tools. We want to get to the point where the AI is autonomous. I don't think we've done that yet. What I mean is: rather than the AI writing an SEO article, how do we have the AI running the SEO function? We're not quite there, but that's what we're working on.

On the mindset piece, the first thing is to hire young, cracked people; they tend to be very AI-forward. The second thing is, we have a guy who runs AI across the team. He champions AI, gets people set up, helps them automate tasks, and shows them how to use Claude Code. The third thing is to try to entrench it within the culture. We did ‘AI Hero of the Week’ for a couple of months, where at all-hands we'd have whoever the AI hero was get up and share what they built. And then probably the final thing is: let AJ just cook cool AI stuff, and other people see AJ cooking cool AI stuff and decide to copy.

How do you actually think about learning?

I'm always consuming information. Always listening to things: podcasts, YouTube videos, audiobooks. Typically listening, because I can do that at the gym, when commuting, etc. I spend a lot of time consuming. I listen quite quickly to information. I try to consume content relevant to what I'm working on. You can learn more if you can consume at the same time as you do, so I'll do that pretty intentionally. I read a lot as well, and then I chat with people. Whenever I meet someone, I'm curious, and I tend to ask lots of questions. I try to learn; what is this person one of the best in the world at, and what can I take away from what they've done and learned? Chatting with people is really valuable. Even when I'm interviewing, I treat it as an opportunity. So many people treat interviewing as a chore; I treat it as an opportunity to learn. Finding more moments to learn and practice, I find, is powerful.

And then just being very obsessed with how do you learn; How do humans learn? What's the machinery? I remember after high school, I took what I called a learning gap year. I wanted to learn many things in that year, and the first thing I learned was: let's learn how to learn. Let's learn how the brain processes and responds to information. Let's learn the foundational concepts. Some people call them mental models, or basic principles of human nature. Learn those things. Learn a little bit about a lot. I want to know a little bit about most things. I don't care to go very deep into much. I'll go deep into the select few things that matter, but I want to know a little bit about most things. I think that helps with overall reasoning.

How do you get the best out of yourself?

Health is important. Make sure my foundations are in check, because when they are, I have more energy, better cognition, and I'm happy and in a better mood. The second thing is being obsessed with learning. I'm always very obsessed with learning and improving. The third thing is giving everything, and giving up most things. Company building is an enormous undertaking. It requires an enormous level of commitment, and I will commit just about everything to it.

The next thing is being open to feedback, very truth-seeking. Whenever someone challenges me, I'll sit there for a moment and try to think, ‘Okay, assuming this was true, what would it mean?’ Then I'll think, ‘Okay, is this true in the past? Is this person classically right about this type of decision?’ I'll try to reason, ‘What's the truth here?’

For example, let's say Adam on our team makes a call around talent. He's very good at talent. Even if I disagree, I'll think I'm probably wrong, because Adam's normally right about this, so let me see why my reasoning might have been wrong. But let's say Adam made a call around brand. I'd think about it differently. In the past, Adam has been wrong with calls around brand that I've been right about. Therefore, I'm probably right. It's a real obsession with truth. The last thing is probably obsessing over the key constraint. Just really obsessing over right now, for the business, what are the select few things that really, really, really matter, and always trying to come back to that.

Extra reading

• Harder. Better. Faster. Stronger - March, 2026

• This 25-Year-Old Wants To Replace Your Doctor With AI - February, 2026

• Superpower's Roadmap (Made Public) - December, 2025

• Max Marchione is 25. He plans to stay that way - October, 2025

And that’s it! You can follow Max on LinkedIn or check out Superpower on their website to keep up with what they’re building!

BRAIN FOOD 🧠 

TWEETS OF THE WEEK 🐣

TOOLS WE RECOMMEND 🛠️

Every week, we highlight tools we like and those we actually use inside our business and give them an honest review. Today, we are highlighting BILL—Your AI-powered financial operations platform.

See the full set of tools we use inside of Athyna & Open Source CEO here.

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