CEO and Co-Founder of Veri - Anttoni Aniebonam

Anthony, big congrats on the latest acquisition with Oura! I saw the announcements. Big news! So I wanted to have the discussion and get into the details of that. But first things first, let's start with the beginning of the story. How did you start Veri? What gave you the idea? 

Yeah, of course. So, my own background is in competitive sports. In my youth, I played football, soccer very wholeheartedly growing up. And that was a huge part of my life from when I learned to walk. The big thing regarding that journey from 5 years old to about 16, that 10-year–almost a decade journey, was when football came to its end and I had to stop due to an injury. I went through a very rough period in my life of having post-surgery complications and not being able to anymore play on that level, which trickled down to issues with my mental health.

And out of all of the time that was freed from not anymore being able to play ball, I actually started like a first business of sorts where I was trying to connect the best minds in the world of performance to people that just were willing to pay for a time to talk with professionals in this space. And that was how I went into the space of metabolic health and overall, like human performance of fitness, went to study life sciences, bioinformatics and to also university here in Helsinki, Finland, which after I was hired to work for a company in the Bay area called Meru Health.

We were using bio-wearables to monitor the effectiveness of the breath work and how that has an impact on your mental health. And that journey taught me a lot of basically building companies in the health tech space. And my co-founder Verne was working for Oura back at the time. So this is like a full circle to him. And one of the tasks that he was working on was the UX layer and like persuasive design, how do we change human behavior through software, like human-computer interaction.

Then when we then landed on Discover's CGMs, I think we were mind blown about two factors. One was that this data is extremely important when we're trying to understand human metabolism. We as humans are very effective at metabolizing carbohydrates, like for energy production and we didn't have any way of tracking and understanding that. So we came back looking at the data saying, “Wow, this data is extremely interesting. Many more people, not only diabetics should have access to this technology.”

But the other thing that we were mind blown about was the fact that basically what the companies at the time were doing with that input, or that output data was very poorly put into context of understanding when I eat this food, these ingredients, this is having this kind of an impact on my metabolic or on my glucose levels and my glucose variability and as well the spikes. And we said, we have to build something here, if not for anyone else, at least for ourselves to understand better all of these different inputs that we're doing, like our food activity, sleep, how is that having an impact on our metabolic health?

So that really became like an obsession to us of like truly understanding that and building software for that. We built it for ourselves in the beginning.

When did the Oura conversation begin? 

We had a partnership with Oura, which we did late last year. We saw that a lot of our users were using Oura Ring. Like a lot of our users, tens of percentages who are using Oura Rings to import their sleep and exercise data into the app. Obviously, that integration was just purely through Apple health. So we didn't have a native integration with them or anything like that. So we were just seeing that source, and we said, “Hey, if we are able to bring some of the insights that Oura is bringing in addition to, are we able to bring a lot more value to our customers?

Yes or no. So that's when we started actually talking with Oura. That was the time when we understood as well, there's a lot of overlapping users between the Oura and Veri platforms.

Then developed into a discussion with Tom if there is something that we can build together, which we can't build alone, given the sheer amount of, overlapping customer data and like input that we have. As we got to know each other, we understood that Oura is moving into metabolic and they want to be able to build an ever more holistic view and picture of human health and be like in the intersection of all of these key moments, what comes to like human health development from 18 to, 65 plus and metabolic.

Until we then made the decision that, Hey, I think it makes sense for the companies to come together. Like this metabolic agenda has grown enough strong inside of the Oura org that we really want to move here. From our point of view, we were at a point where we said, “We are truly interested from a technological standpoint, building something that has not been done before from like glucose monitoring and metabolic sensing point of view”. Oura owns the hardware. So that became like a very obvious discussion then to have and like to bundle in to catering to our audience and, and so on. 

In the acquisition now, how is Veri going to be integrated into Oura? What position would you have, your co-founder, all the team members? Is this going to be like a separate product acting individually, or have you discussed these things? Do you know what's going to happen internally? 

Yeah. So the team at Veri will form like the metabolic squad at Oura. Our sole mission inside of Oura is going to be able to basically develop them, bring this new feature set and these to the sensing capabilities, and eventually to build inside of the Oura value proposition.

So that's going to be a lot of the things that we're going to work on, like everywhere around, go-to-market from like commercial partnerships of working with different partners, right? Oura has taken a huge stance on being the most partnered company in the space of wearables and health. So we're partnering with a lot of companies and trying to grow our sort of like awareness and, just like overall, market awareness through all of these amazing partnerships that we've done with Strava, Open, Natural Cycles, with a lot of these companies that are basically adding superpowers to our stack, but also with the form factor of the ring.

We are adding superpowers to their stack. So a lot of the work that we are going to be doing at Veri is basically being able to build the go-to-market and metabolic-like features as part of Oura's value proposition.

Kyriakos: From an entrepreneur standpoint, how do you reason about an acquisition or exit? 

Very good question. Amazing question. I think there's a few lenses to look at that.

Like first thing is that every acquisition is unique and every founder is unique. From my point of view, I look at this space that we're in from the lens that I basically went through myself. And when I was sick, when I didn't have the help around me, I was lost with not having a solution for a problem. And today we are at a point where there are so many companies out there trying to solve different corners of the same problem. 

I'm a very competitive person, coming from a competitive sports background. I can reason why it's good that there are other companies as well, in addition to you solving this problem, because it's going to basically push the innovation and the solutions forward faster, and it's going to mature the market even further. So when I think about like reasoning the acquisition, I think about it solely from a vision point of view. 

Are we able to a get things done faster from a technological standpoint? Obviously, we know that there are a lot of barriers to entry into this space, and there are a lot of complications that come with the foreign factor of glucose monitoring and so on, as well as the economical or the economic lens to it, which is these sensors are very expensive. And are you able to help more people? by combining forces with someone the strongest Oura.

From these two standpoints, this acquisition makes a lot of sense. And it depends so much on what you're working on, why you're working on what you're working on. But for me, that was like a very clear sign of “yes, this makes a lot of sense”.

You are advising another founder, another entrepreneur who wants to sell their company. What would you advise them? What tactics should they do? What did you learn that they can learn? 

I think it's super important to align on the culture and the values in the company that you're going to. Those might seem soft and secondary to the financial terms of the deal.

But I think that looking ahead, those things are going to be truly important. Cause when you step inside the doors of the acquiree, you have to be very sure that the values and culture that you have developed with your team needs to stay somewhat level because the team will feel horrible, stepping into something that they can't appreciate at all and just don't resonate with it. Then what ends up happening is, the team starts leaving left and right.

And that is a super bad outcome that ends up being like a very, unsuccessful acquisition or  merger of these two companies coming together. So I think that's really like one of the things that I would focus on a lot.

We had a lot of discussions with Tom and with the rest of the C-Suite team to understand: what are the values, how are you working, what are the ways of working. Even though we're speaking of 25 people versus 700 people organization, obviously those things are going to be slightly different in how do you work, but the culture needs to be like somewhat the same. And I'm very happy about the fact that.

The culture is very much similar to what we had at Veri. Like we have a lot of overlapping values of being human first, pushing our boundaries, doing tremendous things, always innovating, as well as transparency. All of these things that we held like very dearly in our company seem to be also true here at Oura, which, I think all of the team is very excited and pumped about.

You should not rush into it. Spend more time just getting to know the top leadership in the company and understand, what is their vision? Like what's their plan like? How do you see it? Because it's very similar to a partnership, right? If you don't understand truly, what problem you're trying to solve, that acquisition will fall flat on its face. So being able to truly understand, what are the KPIs that you're measuring?

By doing this acquisition, what do you want to achieve? What are you expecting from us? What are you expecting that we're going to bring into the house? Having enough time to truly understand those things and not just get excited about like dollar figures and, “oh, I'm gonna make this and this amount of money.” Many people will have time to build a lot of companies and if you work hard you're gonna have a lot of good outcomes. Like they will follow.

You have to basically be able to say, the works that we did a year, all of the opportunities I said no to, I have to be like some level, compensated for all of those trade offs that I took. And I think in approaching discussions with an acquisition or acquiree, you should always have more options than just that one option. If you can't walk away, you'll take whatever is granted to you. So if you are like in a position where you're considering an acquisition, you should probably entertain like a lot of discussions at the same time.

Have a plan A, B, and a plan C. And then, just if you can get the plan A in like terms that you defined at the beginning, which is these are good terms, I'll take the deal if I can take them with this. Then you just walk to plan A. But if you break those, then you should have like plan B and C like in your pockets, to walk away.

Sometimes and often that sort of turns. Like plan A will come back and say, “okay, we're willing to do what the plan B is willing to do”. Having those options, I think is very important in an acquisition situation. Also, it’s going to sound like very unflattering and like harsh,  “good companies, they're not trying to sell, they're going to be bought. So also like that aspect to it, which is you should try and play your cards in a way where someone, the other party is basically saying, “we want to buy you”, and you are not like, “we want to sell to you”, if possible.

From the people I spoke with in the past in this podcast, there seems to be two schools of thought. One of it is that there’s going to be more devices over time, there's going to be more biomarkers, and more information. And the other one is, there's going to be only one device, from one company, measuring all of the information. Which one do you think is going to be the future?

This is like an endless topic that I've as well racked my brains on for the past five years. Is there going to be, like, a vertical or a horizontal play, right? What is going to happen in this space? I think, just singling it out into there being, like, One company. I don't think that's going to be true. I think there's going to be multiple companies. I think that the more interesting question or maybe like a way to scope in: is the market going to resemble more of like a smartphone market or like a computer electronics market? 

You have the Apple of the world that is vertically integrated, right? Apple does hardware, Apple does software. And, that's the end all of it. And then you have the other players that are maybe like bit more horizontal, right? Like you've got, Microsoft that has like the software layer, and then you have all of the equipment companies that are basically them, building the hardware, but then they are lending the software from Microsoft or basically licensing the software from Microsoft. I think that's like the question that remains to be seen. 

I don't know if you read the Andreessen Horovitch blog post about the biggest company in the world. If we follow that train of thought, I think that there's going to be like one company in this space that is going to be tremendously big in terms of just being able to start from like the D to C, move to B, and then move into the value based care, like healthcare model. Being able to do all of these things, successfully be a bit lucky to be able to move across all of these different development points.

And, if we think about it, from a hardware/software point of view, I truly believe that in terms of the economics of the business, like the margins, if you're able to control that whole like vertical integration into building all of the things yourself I think you have a very good shot in this market of being The company. There's not a lot of companies that can truly do that anymore. Like, it's just a handful of companies that have the benefit of having started 10 years ago, like Oura, for example.

Or I was founded like 2010, and they have done very tedious work on the hardware side. And now they're basically being able to like move, towards all of these steps and cause they own like that whole part. But yeah, I guess it remains to be seen. But like where I put my chips is like that vertical integration of owning the hardware, and owning the software.

Because as well, I think like where we are moving towards is like humanity. We have so many companies in like software space, right? And I really truly believe that the need to build very seamless, good software, firmware, and hardware. And if you're trying to put two companies that have a bit different agendas together saying, “Okay, let's try and put these things together and make it magical like Apple,” it's just very difficult. I don't think that it's a coincidence that Apple is like one of the biggest companies or the biggest company in the space of computer electronics.

For my last question, if we go a hundred years into the future and we look backwards, what would you say are the biggest mistakes that we're making today in the space of health?

I don't know if it's a mistake, maybe it's like slow paced. Yeah. But I think in a hundred years, I have a discussion with my grandkids about this space and they are like, “Are you crazy? You were missing out on so many things you could have prevented through technology by adapting this faster.” Maybe not me, but someone who is like resisting to this movement of being able to understand vital data of your body and where you are trending in terms of illness, basically being resistant to this idea.

They’re going to be like, “that's a no-brainer you should have done that like always”. So I don't know if it's necessarily a mistake. Maybe the mistake is that we're not like putting enough resources and moving faster to this direction. But I think that's going to be something that we're going to talk about in a hundred years and say, “Hey, that was a no-brainer. Like, why didn't you just move on and solve like tougher problems?”