CTO and Co-Founder of Function Health - Mike Nemke

Mike, it's good to see you. Welcome to the podcast. I wanted to have this discussion for a while now. And it's also pretty well timed due to the fundraisers you announced yesterday. So pretty excited about that. I wanted to start the conversation a bit earlier though. Green Berets, what's your experience? You spent a number of years there. I have a similar background too. So I would love to hear maybe some counter-intuitive things about the Special Forces.

Yeah. I started my professional career as a Green Beret Army Special Forces back in 2004. It was brutal. I mean, it was outstanding, but as you can probably attest, it was brutal. I learned a lot and I learned a lot about building teams and trust and responsibility and I learned a lot about how to identify individuals who would be good members of my team moving forward. And that has just been such an incredibly invaluable skill as we've built different companies. 

On a special forces team, we have specialties. We have the team sergeant and the commander. We have specialties for the enlisted guys where you have the weapons guys, the dudes who fix the heavy weapons when things go wrong. You have the demolition guys when we need to blow something up. And you have the Deltas, which is what I was, which I was like basically the medic and the surgeon on the team when things go wrong.

But understanding that you can be a specialist while also being a little bit of a jack of all trades and you can distribute work across other people and accept that with trust that they're going to deliver. I think that's key.

My team's motto at the time was “you'll never walk alone”. And yeah, that stuck with me forever.

A lot of this comes down to understanding that none of us are superheroes and accepting you're not gonna control everything and you're not going to always be the center of attention. I have superhuman willpower to force things through, at least that's probably what it looks like to a lot of other people around me. But that comes from lots of reps of just doing incredibly difficult things over and over and over again and accepting that sometimes the sacrifice is gonna have to be that there's just extreme discomfort.

I have an incredible team–our co-founding team, and I'm the CTO. Honestly, if it wasn't for the talent of those individuals and how unique their skill sets and their access and all these things are and were. I don't know that I would have ever taken a CTO role after having run my own businesses in the past. And so I think there's a little bit of humility that has to be baked in and just accepting that you're not always the absolute best person at something specific.

Now getting into Function, like what was the founding story? Like how did you meet your co-founders in the first place?

I think every one of my co-founders is going to have a totally different perspective on this. So let me preface it like that. Before Function, I was the director of AI at a government consulting firm. I've been working on a bunch of interesting ideas and I was really convinced that the world would be moving toward some sort of AI clinician. And so I was working on a prototype proof of concept for that.

And then a friend of mine pointed out like this interesting thing that I had stated several times in the past about lab testing being a massive driver for clinical decision-making. When my friend brought that up, I started looking for companies that were working or founders that really wanted to build in that space or companies that had already started in that space with the idea being that I'd be able to potentially help build that company and then leverage that to build the iteration of what the future of healthcare might be, which would be personalized health.

This was early 2021, I went on the forum, I think Y Combinators or Hacker News and I saw a post by Pranitha Patil. She and Jonathan had been working on it for like a month or two, and they were looking for a technical co-founder. I was like, I don't want to be a technical co-founder, but if I have to, maybe this is a good path. So I hit them up, met with Pranitha. We hit it off immediately. She is just a gem.

And then I met Jonathan, he came to Austin, and we hung out a bunch of times. It became abundantly clear that there was a path here where we could build the future of health for individuals, where we empower them to own as much of their health as possible.

And so that was probably like April of like 2021 that we made the decision to work together. And then we did a little trial period where we all kind of collaborated. And then I think we consummated the deal in like May or June, maybe of 2021 somewhere around there. And then we spent a ton of time just getting everything set up. It probably took us, it probably took us a year or a year and a half just to get the relationships with like the labs built out, data clearing houses, clinicians, clinician networks, building the baseline infrastructure necessary to actually have a product or a business in this space, interfacing with the EMRs and things.

So it was incredibly complex. And it felt for that first year and a half, like we were potentially working on something great, but we had zero real feedback because of how much work has to be done up front. Which, I mean, it's interesting, you're enabling some of that to happen more quickly now for people who are coming into this space.

Mike, yesterday I saw the announcement of the raise you just closed. And it's one of the toughest periods to raise a seed or a series A out, from my understanding. How did you manage to do such a fantastic round? And what are you using the money for? What are you excited about?

We have an outstanding business. That's first and foremost, like whatever the case that looks like we have an outstanding business, and we have outstanding cash flow. We've built an incredible business. That's a testament to the effort of my co-founders, myself to make sure that we did the hard thing early. And so when you have great business fundamentals and then you still have a massive upshot and just ridiculous growth.

I mean, we were doubling in size basically every six weeks for the first seven or eight months on the market. Yeah, it was bananas. So having a co-founding team of myself, Jonathan Swerdlin Pranitha Patil, Mark Hyman, Seth Weisfeld, it made it easy because it, I say easy, every one of these things is incredibly difficult, but it made it much easier having outstanding people who were experts in what they did.

And then we were just, we were ruthless with prioritization and execution. Like we didn't waste a ton of time bullshitting around marketing to feel good about ourselves. We went out and tried to deliver as fast as we could.

And that meant like the first 1400 members, myself, Praneetha and a couple other folks started doing this stuff manually. So like a member would join, we're texting them, we're scheduling them at a lab, we're passing the information to a clinician to sign, we're then securely passing it, and then we're entering that stuff into the lab information. And then we'd build out these 300-page Notion documents–huge up to Praneetha for quarterbacking that–these massive private Notion docs and then members would go in and look at that information.

And then we would get rapid feedback, product feedback, and then iterate and iterate and iterate. And we did that from August of 2022 until April of 2023 for our first, like I think it was about a million dollars in revenue.

So just being willing to grit through that and then executing it just like a ridiculous, like 11 out of 10 execution here on so many levels. I mean, it's definitely not perfect. We're far from perfect right now and we're consistently trying to improve, but I'll be damned if we don't improve and we don't execute at just the top level here. And so I think that when we went in to talk to investors, our revenue was ridiculous for the stage that we were at.

I think we just oozed determination and grit when we walked into that room where they were just like, holy shit, we need to back these people and we need to back them now. And so I think the combination of all of those things because you can have one of those three things, right? You can have a great team, you can have great execution, or you can have the, like just the aura that you're going to fucking deliver no matter what happens. But if you have all three, I think it makes it really difficult for people to turn it down.

We also have a massive industry that we're attempting to bake ourselves into and start to change to empower individuals. And so that's more than a trillion-dollar market. And so that makes this an incredibly large opportunity as well. And so I think that the opportunity and then the bet on those other three pieces is just, it's an obvious play. At least for me, it would be an obvious play.

Incredible. What else are you doing? Like it was a pretty big round. So what else are you doing with that?

First and foremost, we are expanding our team. So product team has already grown from 23 to close to 80, just on the product team. Our marketing team has been like three people, four people for the last six or eight months. And then before that it was one or two people. So we'll be building out a full marketing team and then. We're going to do our best to be everywhere so that everyone sees us. We will fill the top of the funnel.

And so that's really what we're thinking is like we need more people. We need higher, like incredibly high-quality people to come in and help us build world-changing technology. Because once we have table stakes, then anything is possible. And so that's really the plan.

Speaking of wearables, what are your thoughts around wearables, about sensors? How are you going to use that?

For us as a company, wearable data is gonna be more about overlaying that wearable information that you're using on those other applications across your biomarker data as well so that we see more clearly like your blood and your intestine, this is where you are, this is what this stuff means. You know, they could chart actions against that CC like, well, it's improving in these different measurements like with my whoop, my sleep's improving, et cetera.

Well, let's see if like, I don't know, your testosterone and DHEA or whatever are also improving or your cortisol is improving. And so we'll be doing some more things like that. Also, hopefully creating some better feedback loops so that we can ask more pointed questions and more personalized information from people so they can help them build out their own kind of personal data set better so that they can have more insights.

Because listen, the more high-quality information that a person can have about their health, the easier it's going to be in the future as things continue to evolve more and more into this world of intelligence and data science being applied at scale. The better the data set that you have on yourself, the easier it's going to be to improve your own health and have more insights. You can't go back and get data that you didn't capture.

Let's capture as much of it as you can so that when you do have issues in the future. First of all, hopefully we can help you avoid them. But secondly, like if you do have issues, it's easier to understand what that ramp-up looked like and potentially, you know what the manifestation was to help prevent it again.

What should we expect the next year and maybe the next five years?

In the next year, we'll be incorporating a lot of new information. So lots of wearable device data, thanks to you guys. We'll be improving the experience a lot. Our mobile app is coming out probably in the next few weeks, or at least the, the alpha version of it. And then we'll be adding a lot more information from different clinicians, different perspectives. Our overall test set is gonna increase dramatically.

We're about to release another, I think, 50 different types of biomarkers you can test for. I'm really excited about the Forever Chemicals and Microplastics and things along those lines. Hopefully we'll be partnering with some other interesting folks that will allow us to do more different types of diagnostics to give you a better, well-rounded picture about what's going on inside of your body.

Making One Hundred Healthy Years a Reality for Everyone and One hundred Years Into the Future

Super. Mike, your bio in LinkedIn reads, making a hundred healthy years a reality for everyone. What would you say are the two or three things that are the most important things for people to get there?

I think you need to know what's going on inside your body first. And then once you know what's going on inside of your body, and you understand, that it's then taking action against that. And then once you have that information, it's a lot easier than to make educated decisions moving forward. You know, your food intake like, what are you putting into your body? And then how are you allowing your body to recover? So sleep and stress management.

I ask all the guests the following question, which is the last one. If you look backwards from 100 years in the future, what things would you say that doing them today was wrong?

Social media, probably. Social media, Netflix, not spending more time outside in nature, not spending quality time with the people that you care about that are near you. This sounds crazy, but all the things that I measure, I know that my sleep's improved, my heart rate variability, all these things are improved. And a lot of my biomarkers are improved when I am surrounded by outstanding people for a prolonged period of time.

And so having great relationships with family and friends is just so important. And for me, my children, my wife, my extended family, and then just like the amazing friends that I have, that makes it so much, I think, it enriches life. I mean, this is not based on a ton of empirical research, but I think it just improves my health as well. And I think that when we look back in the future, we're going to understand that probably more so than we do now.