Founder and CEO of Supersapiens: Phil Southerland

Phil, it’s great to see you. Why don’t we start with what Supersapiens is today and then transition into the pre-history?

Supersapiens were introducing people to the opportunity to master their metabolism for the desired outcome. Many people think we’re just for the elite athlete, helping them run faster, ride faster, swim faster. But athletes can’t run faster, ride faster, or swim faster if they don’t manage their weight if they don’t sleep properly if they don’t have glucose, or stability throughout the day. 

Really, this 24–7 fitness tool is used to educate you on what everything does to your body from a metabolic standpoint. Then through trial and error, learn of what works best for you so that you can be the best of yourself. Whether that’s giving a public speech, doing a podcast, or going out to set your personal best and whatever competition you’re trying to do. It’s been a good journey. We’ve learned a lot so far.

We’ve made a lot of mistakes. By we, I mean I ,  because I’m the CEO. Any mistakes that the company has made mean that I approve of them. So smarter now than we were at the beginning, excited for what’s coming.

Moving then to your second question of what was I doing before? Yeah, before it was still my job ,  I’m also the CEO and co-founder of Team Novo Nordisk. It’s an all-diabetic professional cycling team. It was a business plan class project eighteen years ago in college. It was the Team Type 1 Foundation, which we began. That’s where I first started using continuous glucose monitoring, as I put it all, type 1 diabetic team to race across America in 2006. We got across the country in five days, sixteen hours, four minutes.

I’ve been a type 1 diabetic for 41 years, but on the first day and a half of that race, I learned more about where I felt best with glucose than I had in my entire career. Well, 140 to 180, I performed the best. We went a lot faster. We set a world record. And it really proved that sport could be a platform to change the way people look at diabetes. And when Team Type 1 started, diabetes was a doom and gloom disease. It was heavily stigmatized. It was a disease of all the things you could not do. 

Through the platform of sport, Team Type 1 and our team of Nordics were proven with good control of glucose, and with good control of your metabolism. What all target customers of Supersapiens have in common is that we all have metabolic dysfunction. We all have the opportunity to improve our metabolism. But with the cycling teams, it was, with good control of glucose, you can do anything. 

I’m really proud of how the world now views people with diabetes. It’s my sporting organizations that have paved that way. Now there are a lot of other leaders and other heroes in every sport, and every walk of life. But you can really say Team Type 1 was the pioneer of that. My athletes team of Nordisk, they’re racing on the tour of Poland today against the best athletes in the world, all with diabetes.

They’re the reason Supersapiens was invented because it was great that we had continuous glucose monitor in our Jersey pocket. But CGM in your Jersey pocket is not data you can take action off of.

I’ve been working since 2009 to get it on the bike computer. It was finally, Chip Hawkins, the CEO of Wahoo Fitness, who hacked it for me. On December 12, 2018, I started riding with glucose on my bike computer. In 15 days of doing that, I learned more about precision fueling of insulin, and nutrition timing than in my entire career.

I gave it to the athletes at Team Novo Nordisk. We went faster and we changed how we ate and when we ate. We changed when we did insulin, all because of having real-time data during activity. To me, it was like the best invention I’ve ever had. Let’s bring it to market. That was February 4th, 2019, when I founded Super Sapiens. 

It was TT1 Products as our company name. You can see I’ve got TT1 Holdings as the shell company for Team Novo Nordisk. Everything for me centers around the first early invention of Team Type 1. Really, it’s using sport as a platform for inspiration, using sport and now data as a platform to validate the importance of activity and let’s get people moving. 

That’s what I love about Terra. You guys help connect so many different pillars of data to help people be the best of themselves. That’s what we need ,  we need an active community because it’s my firm belief in this day and age, more than any time prior, health is wealth. I really fundamentally believe that activity, it’s not the only thing, but it’s the fundamental core pillar of spreading health to society. 

Activity is engaging, it’s addicting, it creates friendships, it creates bonds. And collectively with all of your customers at Terra and all of our partners at Supersapiens, all the athletes that we work with, we can inspire more people to be active and spread that wealth to the world through fashion, which is what it’s all about, right?

Would you say that your personal motivation was what created the idea of Supersapiens? Or did you always plan on building a business behind this?

Both, actually. I’ve been blessed with my career at Team Type 1 and Team Novo Nordisk, and to have owned a professional sporting team for 18 years. I’ve done well, but it’s not something you exit from. As a kid in college, I grew up poor and graduated college with a bunch of student debt, I really idolized entrepreneurs as a kid and saw people who built something from nothing and then either built enduring companies that, one, helped a lot of people and two, made a lot of money.

But also the others who had big exits and then went and started investing in other entrepreneurs and helping them to have their own success stories.

I was fortunate to be blessed with the product. I had the product first. The fact that, again, I own a professional cycling team, and what happens in the Tour de France every year? One athlete balks on one day and his race is over. He has one bad day. Here’s a guy who the rider thinks he’s going to win. He goes into the race and plans on victory. The team thinks that Ryder is going to win. The team owner has been telling the sponsors all their partners and all of the fans that that athlete is going to win.

And then they make one mistake on fueling on stage nine, and all those dreams are done. They lose $350 million worth of marketing publicity because of not taking a $2 gel at the right time in the race. I knew the problem we could solve for that ecosystem of cycling, which is a very fragile ecosystem. Frankly, we came to the market to prevent the bomb. 

That was what we thought we were going to solve. But then in the early days of the trial, we didn’t even have an app. We were putting traditional glucose sensors on people without diabetes. There was this everyday Iron woman who had done two previous Iron Man events, failed in her goal, miserable. Followed every program, and her coach told her she did all the training. Her power numbers said she was ready.

Her running time said she was ready, but she failed in her events. Working mom, full-time job, and managing 20-plus hours a week of training, where she then said not to reach her goals was devastating, psychologically. We put a sensor on her four days before her third Iron Woman, and we saw that her glucose was low. Of course, she wasn’t eating enough because she was doing a full-time job managing her family, all this training.

Her glucose was in the 60s. We said, Jane, for the next three days, eat as many carbohydrates as your body can stomach. She got her average glucose up to 100. Then she did that event, and she broke her personal record by three hours. She said she felt better in the final stages of that run than she felt in any other event she’s ever done a marathon, half-ironman, et cetera. 

She said it was the fueling. It was, I had to fuel my body. I was like, Oh, wait a second. We can help people prepare for their events by helping them guide glucose, and fuel in the days before. We unlock a new wave of value for our consumers. Then the next phase was glucose ability for recovery. If your glucose is going up, then you produce insulin, which increases inflammation, then it goes down, and then you eat food, so you gain weight from that.

By helping with glucose stability, we could help solve for recovery. Then 40 % of our consumers lost weight and they were really happy with the change in body image and they credited CGM for that, Supersapiens for that.

Then the latest nut we’ve cracked was sleep. Glucose stability overnight for sleep equates to a better night of sleep. What is the number one tool for recovery and spore? It is sleep, period. We came out trying to solve this one small problem that only apply to people who rode the bikes for six hours or more day after day after day after day. I could say sometimes it’s better to be lucky than good and be lucky that metabolism is incredibly complex and that there are so many different areas of light that you can optimize with it. 

I’m really proud of the work my team has done. My science team, our scientific advisors, and our partners really help unlock these new value-adds that come with continuous glucose monitoring. We’ve made a big headway so far, but I know there are probably 40 new lessons to come in the next two years, and it’s about finding which of those are most meaningful and really ensuring we dive deep into the learnings so that we can do a great job on the education, which is critical.

Firstly, thanks for sending me the Supersapiens glucose sensors. I noticed that these sensors have the capability to stream in real-time to my phone, whereas I didn’t have this feature when using the regular Freestyle Libre app. Did Abbott create a unique sensor for you?

They created a separate brand for me. And the sensor, it’s essentially the same technology as the Freestyle Libre 2. So five million people around the world are using every day to dose their insulin and manage their diabetes. But what I needed was minute-by-minute Bluetooth. 

They had the capability within the sensor to do that. So that was a software adjustment they made for me with the Libre Sense. That gave us the minute-by-minute Bluetooth, which was key for consistent data readings on your Garmin, on your Wahoo, bike computer, and other places that we wanted to send the data to.

How did you approach fundraising and investors? 

I put my own money in first. This was such a crazy idea that if I didn’t put my money where my mouth was, then who else was going to believe? 

I put a half million in to start hiring the first few employees. I started paying salaries, building the product, getting legal bills done, building the brand, and started working with… I built my scientific advisory board first and then reached out to leaders in sports such as Thomas Dimitroff, who’s the general manager of the Atlanta Falcons, an American football team here in Atlanta, Georgia. A good friend of mine, we’ve ridden bikes for a bunch of years. He saw the value of this not just for his athletes, but the staff of the Falcons. 

These guys lived crazy hours and could he let a $2 mistake lead to losing the Super Bowl at a critical moment? He said he understood the value. He hooked me up with David Brailsford, the principal of Team Ineos Grenadiors (previously Team Sky). R.C. Buford, the CEO of the NBA team the San Antonio Spurs. Brian Cashman, the general manager of the New York Yankees. Those guys all got on board and believed that there was something here. Once I had some players in the sports involved, then it made it easier.

I had a friend locally who went to my kid’s school who put in a $350,000 check and that was a victory. It was a lot of $50,000, $25,000, and a lot of small tickets in the first note that we did. It was a cap of 15 million, 20 % discount going into the A, which we thought, my whole story for the past four years was going into the A. But the A is really coming now. You heard that here first. The A is really coming now. 

In total, I was aiming to raise three and a half. We ended up bringing in four and a half. It was September 17th, the day we launched that I closed the round. I was so happy. It was like, we had a bottle of champagne in the morning. We’re looking at when people started buying products and we still had our first customer, we had our second customer, we had our third customer. I got on with one of my key mentors of many years, Robert Oringer.

He goes, All right. You launched. We just closed the round. I said I’m taking a break from fundraising. He said, No, you’re not.What do you mean? He goes, Your next round starts now. Start having conversations. The iron’s hot.

So I listened to Robert and I started working on the next bit of capital. This was an interesting period because I really wanted institutional capital. And we had a firm in the sports space that we were targeting a 40 million valuation. We thought that the first one was pre-launched. So now we’ve launched, we’re on the market. Let’s raise it a little bit higher. And of course, all valuations were crazy at that time. 40 was a good step up.

For six weeks the word was ,  “Yeah, Phil, the term sheet’s coming next week. Yeah, Phil, the term sheet’s coming next week. Yeah, Phil, the term sheet’s coming next week.” And they did all this while we were burning all of our capital.

On December 19th, 2020, they came in with a good offer of 1.5 million bucks, but they wanted the valuation to be at $19 million. They could take more than that. They wanted warrants to get over 10 % of the company. I said ,  but for six weeks, we’ve been talking about something. Now at the last minute, when you know I’ve got two weeks of cash in the bank, you’re going to offer me half.

This is unethical. Well, what choice do I make? I said, respectfully, I’m going to pass. They said, What? I said, No, I don’t like the way this business was done. I passed and I liquidated the next chunk of my long-term savings, and I put another million bucks into the company. Then we had breathing room. We had two months of runway at the time. The next week, this was January 6, 2021, a small Swiss investment group, Michael Hartwig, Mike Adventures, and others, helped come in with $600,000. 

Then I know you’ve had Eric Min on your podcast. Eric said, Phil, how are you doing? I said, Well, I’m struggling for fundraising. He goes, You need help? I said, Yeah. And so, Eric, early February 2021, Eric brought on about ten of his friends, peers, and investors at Zwift. I did a Zoom call with them. Two weeks later, I had another two and a half million bucks. Once that happened, the Swiss Startup Group, which is now Serpentine Ventures, came in and brought between them and their LPs another million. Then I got a 500,000 ticket from somebody else and a 500,000 ticket from somebody else and closed an eight-and-a-half million dollar round, end of April, early May of 2021.

Then the pain really began. For two weeks, we have money, we are golden. We’ve got this Abbott contract. We’re in discussions with Abbott Ventures. The at-work sales are going to start going up. But we blew so much money on brand and brand awareness with investments in Ironman, Tour de Suisse, and Giro de Italia. The list goes on in places where we spent money on the athletes we sponsored to really get the brand out there. 

Then it became clear in July of 2021 that we’re out of money again. I’m like, Wait, how? Again, this is me and my CFO. We’ve grown together. We’ve learned to communicate together. I’m like, Jay, I need bad news really early. Otherwise, if I don’t get bad news, I can’t make a Plan B. That was a very painful time. I think between Jay and I over the next three months, I know I went to the bank to make payroll for the company three times between July and November.

It was November 19th when the first Abbott check closed. November 19th, 2021, and getting them on board as a partner was critically important. I actually passed on Google Ventures to take Abbott Ventures.

I’m glad I did because Abbott Ventures has been absolutely our best partner to date. But then you’re a company that we had a bunch of marketing events, so we had a bunch of AP. Then we closed on another $6 million round. But guess what? A lot of that’s got to go to inventory and go to accounts payable. So hey, we’re broke again. Then it took another six months to raise the next six million bucks, of which I put more money into that round and I made payroll another three times in that period, going to my bank and putting a home equity line on my house so that I can ensure my employees get paid. 

Then October of last year ,  I finally got my first paycheck at Supersapiens. I worked three and a half years for free. Actually, I paid a million dollars per year for the pleasure of going to work, which is good because I’m heavily invested in the company and I still believe in our growth. So I’m going to get paid back in spades for that money in time. But there were some tough times.

Building a company, I heard war stories from entrepreneurs of this, that, and the other about being at that store. Most of them have been at that store once. They have one really bad moment, and then they bounce back. We’ve been at that store 20 times. People within the company, an investor here, an investor there, my own capital. Just like, no, this product and this vision that we have, we’re not going to let some little bullshit problems, a little lack of capital today end us. 

I believe in the future, I’m going to put my money where my mouth is just at the start and see where we go. We’re just closing our final, now the third $6 million round I’ve done in the last year and a half on the same terms, which I think this day and age is like I’m actually proud of that. Same terms that I closed in April of 2022, closed again in June of last year and closed again now. But this has been the longest and hardest period to raise this capital that I’ve ever been through. Normally, you’re struggling as a founder for two, or three months.

If you don’t make the right pitch, you don’t find the right people, then you’re going to fail. But I’m stubborn. I was a bike racer and I’ve been a diabetic. I was a short kid with no money in college, so I had to fail a lot if I wanted to succeed. I’ve just embraced every failure we’ve made and every no that I’ve heard from potential investors as, Right, cool. You passed. Thank you. That means someone does not believe in me.

Let’s go find the next one who does. I’ve been fortunate that I’ve had enough next ones who did that were here and we’re now planning for our US launch, which I’m super excited about. That’s where the Hawk the Sick turns. The time is now. But time is always now when you’re the founder of the company, right?

What is the future of sensors and what can we expect from Supersapiens going forward?

I think you’re going to see a flood of sensors coming onto the market. You look at Abbott, it’s taken them a long time, but they’re now doing five billion in revenue per year, growing at 25%, I think, with the last earning call, 25 % on the sensor sales year over year. They keep investing in new manufacturing. 

Then there’s Dexcom, who just had their record cover, I think around 900 million. There are these two behemoths of companies that have proven that there’s a market for this technology, there’s models that work. Once you have that there, then others are going to try to come in. Now, it’s going to take time for people to get sensors as accurate as Abbott and Dexcom. Abit and Dexcom have proven the model.

Abit invested so much in manufacturing early, so they’re prepared for global scale. There are companies like Senseonics that have an implantable sensor, which is quite interesting. I’m a fan of their technology. Medtronic has been in the space for a lot of years. Those are four that are commercially available today. You see microneedle companies that are in play.

The question is, can you build an accurate sensor? Yes, a lot of people will be able to build an accurate sensor. Can you build 1,000 accurate sensors? Can you build 10,000 accurate sensors? Can you build 10 million accurate sensors? That’s where it really gets challenging because the amount of investment required to get to the point that you can build 10 million accurate sensors, it’s in the billions of dollars.

It’s going to take someone who’s going to need to be really creative, really smart, and have really good backing to build companies to scale to the levels of added. With that said, I hope they do because that means more competition is going to force every company to get better. That’s going to force the prices to come down, and that’s going to make the technology easier to adopt by a broader consumer.

I feel like I’m in a really strong position based on my relationship with Abbott. They’re the best company out there. They believed in me in 2006 and pushed a small speck of snow, which created a big snowball. Then I came to them with a new idea, which is sensors for people without diabetes.

They pushed that small speck, and now you see the spread of metabolic health. I’m using sensors that are growing like wildfire in the world. I love the company. They like me some of the time, and I try to push to help them to get them to like me more all the time because I know that seven billion people in the world need to be on their sensors, and I think Sports and activity can be the platform to do so. 

Data is key. A glucose graph on its own is like you’re watching a river. But when you throw a stick in the river and you see where it goes, or you put a boat and see which direction. Probably a bad analogy. Data without context is meaningless. When you have just glucose data, it’s interesting. But when you have glucose data in correlation to a meal, then it’s, Oh, you see exactly what that meal did, exactly how long it lasted for me.

Glucose data for exercise is phenomenal. Now you can learn what adjustments you need to make to better levels in exercise. Glucose for sleep. The more different correlations of data that we can bring in because, for me, exercise is the most important.

For someone else, it might be sleep. For someone else, it might be breakfast. For someone else, it might be coffee. There are all these key things that are important to people. For a CEO who’s trying to go close on a massive deal, his or her glucose better be perfect when they’re making that pitch. If not, then you’re not at the best of yourself from a cognitive function standpoint. Learning how to optimize your body for stress, the more you can quantify the data and put correlative factors in, the faster you’re going to learn, the faster you’re going to be able to get more out of the technology. 

So that’s why I love the Terra platform. You were the first we launched the Oura integration with. There’s a host of companies that are partners of Terra that we look forward to working with to help fast-track those correlations going forward. So you’re a master at bringing lots of data in, and I want to hear your story at some point, one-on-one, just on how you got to this place. Then your last question of the future. Look, there are more analytes. Glucose has never been the only thing for us.

We have other analytes in the pipeline. There are other things that are important to users. I think the menstrual cycle, the female body has been under research for all of eternity. We can bring correlative factors in with glucose data and help females learn a whole lot about how to fuel over different stages of the menstrual cycle. They can be the best in themselves four weeks out of the month rather than having a bad week and not knowing why. It’s like an athlete. You have a bad day, you don’t know why. It’s fueling the same. So now we can solve that. 

I think you’re going to see a rise in consistency and power of the female athlete and probably the female entrepreneur once we help optimize glucose and metabolic health around the clock. Other factors, I mean, Abbott’s been public, lactate, ketones, alcohol, and there are other things that we want to put into these sensors and that can help our users get more value out of them. 

My future is that this technology gets down to the kids. I think every six-year-old would benefit from using this. Every 10-year-old would benefit from using this. Every high schooler. I think CGMs, putting the sensor on is not going to cure your metabolic health. It’s the behavior change on the other side that comes. We have a pilot study hoping to kick off in a high school and Germany to see what the behavior change that comes in a bunch of teenagers once they see what everything does to the body. I think we can prevent a lot of diseases by helping educate people on what does to the body from a nutritional standpoint. 

I don’t want to make the world boring. If you like Coke, I don’t want to say don’t drink Coke. But maybe if you want to have a Coke and not screw with your metabolism, maybe you understand, I need to go on a run first. I need to go on a bike ride first. So can we help people quantify the value? Qualitatively, we know the value of exercise. Yes, it’s good for you, but can each person individually quantify the value of exercise in their daily life? So that they have the authority to say, I have to do this, and I have to do it every single day.

And if that fire spreads, which I know can once it’s quantified, then we can have a healthy and active world and an active community. We can lower the drastic health consequences that are coming from diseases like type 2 diabetes, obesity, et cetera. Because most of these can be prevented. And then for those who have them, it won’t be such a shame anymore. When people without diabetes understand all the changes in metabolism that come with a functional pancreas, they get a much better appreciation for what someone with type 2 diabetes or obesity is dealing with in their metabolic disorders, even to me as a type 1 diabetic. 

We can all be united and the ethos of metabolism matters. Collectively, if we support each other, we help each other be better, then we can all be better. We could spread wealth to the world by getting the world active. That’s my dream. I’m not as naive as I was four years ago to think it’s going to happen overnight. It’s going to take time. It’s going to take partners. It’s going to take everyone in this data industry to work together to figure out how to take all this data, manage it, and organize it.

And given to a person on a silver platter, they know how to use it to be the best for themselves. That’s what Supersapiens is all about. It’s not being the best athlete in the world, but in the best you in the world. That’s what we want our consumers to be. That’s what we try to be on a daily basis.