Kalibra.ai CEO: Ivan Vatchkov

Awesome. And what got you into this space? How did you start as a founder?

Personal passion. I mean, my family has a history of health challenges, let's put it this way, and myself as well. And I come from an industry that's incredibly high stress. So my prior identity was in the hedge fund industry, which is pretty much a 24-7 job if you are sitting in Asia because the U.S. market closes at three or four in the morning. And that was sort of something where I knew that I was making a health tradeoff.

And the minute I saw the early markers that I was going to go the way of my dad, who is a type 2 diabetic, I left and I decided to actually figure out how to best extend my health span. And that's sort of the number of years where I am both healthy and free of disease, but I can do all the things I want. So that's sort of what got me started as a personal passion. And just by serendipity, I met my co-founder who had shared a similar passion and is completely different to me.

And we decided to try to reduce health to a math problem, which I guess is what you guys are doing in a manner of speaking as well. So that's sort of the origin story is we actually built it for ourselves and it looks like it's resonating. So we took it from there. That was a couple of years ago.

And as a business, what was the first step you've done?

Rapid prototyping and validation. So we built a user journey around what we think is probably one of the most important steps of the health journey for all of us, which is getting a little bit of a sense of where we are, right? Every journey starts with a starting point and a destination. The starting point is often overlooked. Most of us know more about what's going on in Beirut and in Beijing and in our BMW than we know what's going on in our body.

Now, wearables, of course, fill a big chunk of that gap. But if you look at the overall health picture, wearables are not the dominant part of it. So we thought, what's the easiest way without tedious questionnaires and a lot of lab tests and all that to get a quick read, a quick reckoning of where we are with our health journey? So we partnered up with a health practitioner and we devised something called the 10-minute health assessment, where you go in, you do a blood work draw.

We do a metabolic assessment by looking at your body composition. We do a very basic stress assessment, strength assessment, grip test. And that was it. In 10 minutes, you're out. And from that, we could triangulate quite a lot about you. What's the onset of metabolic disease? How you are in terms of strength or losing muscle, which is sarcopenia if you're aging. What's your hydration status? Is there a big imbalance in your body with respect to vitamins and minerals?

Just making sure that you know where you need to tune up and our premise is keeping you healthy rather than waiting for some sort of a symptom to show up. At that point, you're the domain of the medical system and there's fewer good decisions to be made. So the idea is to give people a starting point, a very intuitive assessment, and then say, okay, look, if I was you, these are the top two or three things I will tackle.

And then we actually give them a playbook. So we did this completely offline with a medical practitioner on Excel spreadsheets and paper. And then when elements of this started resonating, we started digitizing every step of it. And we knew that we needed an operating system, but we needed to figure out what's the most important data set and what's the highest or easiest to get data set and how to combine those. So it turned out to be wearables and blood work and some elements of body composition. And that's where we started.

That's awesome. So basically, you've been listening to users in an offline fashion. You learn exactly what they need, and then you digitize it so you can listen to the users and then get to the point that you can productize all the things that the users want. So that's incredible.

Yeah, we're obsessed with validation. And actually, interestingly, for a startup, that necessitates slower growth. So this whole blitzscaling that everybody talks about wouldn't work necessarily in a journey like this, because we're not interested in getting big data at this stage. We're interested in getting thick data. I want to know everything there is to know about Kyriakos, because the connected consumer is all about uber personalization.

There's an expectation that if I'm providing any form of advice or service to you, I will reflect all the data available about you in customizing that service in a seamless way. And to align this isn't necessarily a slow journey, because it's about 30 or 40 human phenotypes that you need to work out, both motivation and starting point and so on. So that's where we're a little bit different.

Incredible. And then you mentioned that you launched two weeks ago when it comes to the soft launch of the product. If I'm a user, what do I get today and how do I use the product?

So if you're a user today, we have both a consumer and a professional platform. The consumer platform is already in beta. You would get a very simple and intuitive app, today only in iOS, soon in Android, which contains sort of three really ways of interacting with it. Number one is we have a very friendly conversational assistant, like an Alexa, that every day has a very short interaction with you, 30 seconds.

They give you an interesting insight about you. They ask you a question about whether it's a habit or something about your health, and then they'll assign an action. So a typical conversation might be, morning, Kyriakos, hey, I see that your deep sleep was only 39 minutes yesterday. I think we need to improve on this. And here's why. Deep sleep affects brain function. It affects restfulness. It affects aging.

For whatever reason, metabolic health. Tonight I'd like you to go to bed at 9.37 rather than 10.15. And before you go to bed, three hours before bed, I'd like you to not eat anything. And one hour before bed, no screens. Let's try this tonight and see if we can improve on that metric. So the KPI we've set for ourselves is a very, very small increment on your deep sleep. And the next day, in addition to the first conversation, say, hey, did you do it?

Because it's hard to know. And if you did, okay, we've created the first very small incremental step towards a healthier habit and we've created awareness. And we repeat this journey over and over again in all sorts of domains. So that could be related to mindfulness, or it could be, do you ever think about your why, your purpose? Or it could be something as simple as, hey, I see you're running quite a lot in the last seven days.

There are some risks about shin splints if you run a lot. It's also quite inflammatory. Or did you know that when you run, you sweat, you lose quite a lot of salt. Do you ever take salt tablets after you run? So those are little conversations that feel very intimate and personal because they're not a standard user journey. They are based on your own data. And that's sort of the interaction. So that's one level.

The other level is, of course, if we can pick up some of this data from a wearable, we would, that's where you guys come in. That's helpful. And the third level is actually acquiring data that would ordinarily be trapped offline. That could be asking a personal trainer to do a very basic strength assessment for you. It could be asking a medical practitioner to upload some vitals. It could be uploading your entire blood test, which is probably our key differentiator, because all these little markers fall into place to paint a completer picture of who Kyriakos is.

And it's sort of, to use modern language, a 3D digital copy of you that we then use to figure out where the biggest white spaces are, what we need to learn more, but also where we think the highest leverage action is. And for that, we use fairly complex scoring, which we show to the user, hey, your rest is 80 out of a hundred. That's fantastic. But your nourishment might only be 30 because you consume too many carbohydrates or you're not hydrated enough.

Hydration, we can pick it from Garmin, carbohydrates from Karometer, right? Healthful tarot integrations. Then we dress up a journey around this that makes the user sort of the CEO of their own health. So every day they see what the metric is. They decide, do they engage? Do they not? And if they do engage, their score goes up. So there's an element of gamification, but we break it up into very, very small bite sized conversations that ideally you would interact with every day.

So those are the three user journeys. And if you're a professional, we consolidate all the various bits of data. Let's say you're a functional medicine practitioner or longevity doctor or a personal trainer. We allow you to have a real time measurement of your client's health, what we call their Calibra score and know how to personalize for them. One use case might be you rock up to the gym and you went to bed at 3am last night.

Your coach should know not to give you heavy deadlifts or sprints. It should be a more gentle mobility session. Or if your doctor sees that you're not sleeping well and your blood sugar is picking up and your resting heart rate is picking up, then they might ask you, Hey, are you under a lot of stress? Is there something we can do? So that would be the type of preventive personalized care. We call it continuous care that we allow because we don't only dashboard the data, but we provide the interpretation and the scoring so that the practitioner doesn't see hundreds of data points beautifully organized, but we can direct their attention.

Hey, for Kyriakos, it's vitamin D for Ivan, it's his deep sleep. And for Helena, it might be the fact that she is really only walking 300 steps a day. So she's very inactive. Those would be the use cases for both products.

Got it. And the initial users that would want to use your product today, who are you trying to address first?

They are the people that are asking themselves, am I on the right track with my health journey and how would I know? So they are already motivated. You would recognize them by the fact that they probably invested in an expensive wearable. They're paying for personal trainers. They do their own blood work or potentially they take a supplement. Some of those flags show us that there's only not a willingness and a demonstrated motivation, but a propensity to spend on health.

Human beings are quite strange. You know, we'll spend a lot on sort of high value consumer goods to demonstrate status. But to me, the ultimate flex is being very healthy and most of us don't spend enough. So we don't want to spread too thinly and try to find motivation in those that don't have it and perhaps never will. We're trying to find those that are on their way and give them the tools to own more of the journey.

So you would find that person, you know, very active from a sports perspective or a biohacker that's really interested in fully downloading a digital copy of themselves or somebody who's visiting a functional medicine doctor and looking to make a lifestyle change or somebody who's doing looking to really clean up their nutrition, but actually have a means of measurement of whether they're not depriving themselves of some critical minerals.

You typically find those people in three types of locations. You find them in gyms and personal training gyms. You find them in longevity and integrated health clinics, and you tend to find them in nutritionist slash wellness spa hotels. These are people that are saying, I'm making a very conscious choice to be intentional about my health. And there we find we're walking through an open door. That's not a huge cohort of people at the moment, but it's an incredibly cohesive one and very powerful.

So that's who we're looking to serve first because they're the most discerning customers. We can always simplify the product from there, but if we can satisfy that, we call them active advancers cohort. That really resonates with the demographics of where people are going. So younger people don't drink as much. They're very conscious about their consumption. They are conscious about what they eat.

So that's kind of who we target initially, which is why we have the B2B angle. Those people are already working with some practitioners somewhere. That's sort of our starting point. And eventually as we grow and we improve engagement and we validate, we'll broaden this out to a direct to consumer business. But for now, we've got a very, very good engagement on the practitioner side globally. People are looking for a way to homogenize all the data that they have and actually turn it into engagement, which is a problem everywhere in the chain.

People come in, they behave in a certain way when they're at the office, doctor's office or gym, but you don't know what happens to them in the other 165 hours a week that you don't see them. This is the gap we look to fill.

Excellent. And then what should we expect from Calibra by the next year, for the next one year? And then what should we expect for the next five years?

So on a one-year view, our ambition is to find the best practitioners and geographies that will be present. So elements of Asia, elements of the US and Europe, and help them leverage what makes them unique. So a fantastic personal trainer, a fantastic doctor, a fantastic nutritionist, an exceptional sort of wellness spa hotel that really provides a very good integrated health service. Our job is to scale those guys and get their brand out there along with our brand and get them associated with excellence.

So that will take us probably close to a year. And in that period, our product suite will be more or less complete. The consumer app is there. The professional app probably needs another few weeks of work. So from then it's validation and incremental improvement. On a five-year view, we'd actually like to turn health around. I don't like to use the word disruption, rather re-imagining big parts of the healthcare system.

People say this from healthcare to sick care and from research to me-search. We want to give people, those that are interested, the tools to have a better control of their health and how they spend on it and how they engage with their health journey, and specifically give them the parameter of health span and longevity. Help them understand the things that age them faster, the things that wear them out faster, and help them imagine a life of sort of continued health into 60, 70, and 80, and the decisions to make that a reality for each of us start today in their 30s and 40s, not when we're 60 and we have a problem.

So I would say the specific KPIs for that would be, how are clients engaging with the actions that we prescribe? Are we actually rewiring people's habits or not? Rewiring habits is a very, very tough job, right? So if we can move the debate on this a little bit, I think that'll be fantastic. And then making people intentional about their health in a measurable way. What percentage of our clients is improving their Calibra scores?

Is it because they're sleeping better? Is it because their mindfulness is improving? Are we managing to hydrate our clients better? All of that data is naturally stored as part of our user journey. So I would be able to answer in a year's time with numbers, but hopefully in a five year's time I'll be able to answer with cohorts and sort of hacks and little pivotal journeys of what are the things that really matter to the health journey of the bigger population.

So that's sort of the, I think the strategy is in one word, give everybody the highest leverage action to improve health span in real time.

If we go slightly specific for a bit and you see in terms of longevity, what are the biggest three mistakes that you see today? And what are the three best changes that people can do to improve their health and have a longer lifestyle, lifespan?

It's a great question. So I'm going to generalize, but we've seen enough people now we work with enough people to have a good idea. So number one is most people are either dehydrated or deficient in a key mineral and they don't know it because both of those will not give you any tangible sign. You have to be very careful and sort of maybe getting too technical, but track the color of your pee or the dryness of your mouth or do a blood test every so often.

I was looking at some statistics where 80 or 90% of Americans are deficient in both B and D vitamins. Those are absolutely critical, not only for our physiological functioning, but for our mental health. So I would say number one, most people are dehydrated because you need to drink lots of water at the right time and also take enough hydration minerals to retain that hydration. And as a corollary of that in the broader nutrition category, most people are deficient in certain minerals and they don't know it.

Notice I'm leaving nutrition and religion out of this because it's a very long topic and we don't have time. So that's strike number one for most people. Strike number two for most people is they think that time in bed equals quality sleep. You know, okay, I went to bed at 10 last night and I browsed Instagram until 1045. Well, you've already missed a critical sleep cycle. The fact that you exposed yourself to blue light means you shifted your entire circadian rhythm by an hour or two later, which means that you don't complete the necessary four or five sleep cycles, which means your deep sleep and REM sleep are out of whack.

You wake up a little bit tired and you wonder, well, I went to bed, I woke up at seven 30. How could that be? Right? I've been in bed for nine and a half hours, 10 hours. So most people don't equate quality sleep properly with what their sleep hygiene should be. And that's where wearables that really track your deep sleep are very, very helpful. And as a side note to that, I think most people still don't fully interpret the alcohol, the role of alcohol in quality sleep.

They confuse sedative with something that actually makes us sleep well. So those clients of yours that wear O-rings and whoops and the more advanced garments and soon hopefully Apple watches, some experiments that we're running show a very profound sort of lack of understanding. And if there is sort of through the three pillars of the three big unlocks in longevity, they are hydration, sleep and movement.

And on movement, the thing that we find is really, really curious is this U-shaped curve of utility of moving. So if you don't move at all, that's really, really bad. If you overexercise, and by this, I mean excess cardio, that's also really, really, really bad. So most of our clients are obviously very active people. We don't have a lot of couch potatoes reaching out for Calibra and sort of wondering how to go on their journey.

So the type A personalities, they tend to be overexerting on the cardio side. And that has all sorts of implications for their hydration because they have to take, as we mentioned earlier, some sort of a hydration salt to make sure you hydrate properly after a lot of exercise. Excess cardio can mean a lot of excess inflammation, and a lot of people equate fitness with cardio. And while movement and exercise is probably the key longevity drug, it's important to balance cardio with strength and mobility and flexibility.

And most people over-index on the thing that they're good at. It could be running, it could be cycling, it could be some sort of a, because they think excess exertion is what keeps us fit. And elements of that are very true. You know, once or twice a week, you are supposed to blow the lights out and get your heart rate up and do some steady cardio and some explosive cardio for sure. But most people that we speak to, they tend to over-index on the cardio and massively under-index on strength work.

And as we age, that becomes an exponential mistake because you're way under the curve of where you should be for strength. And actually having strong muscles equals strong bones. And as we age, that's the most important thing. That's how you avoid osteoporosis. That's how you avoid bad falls. Strength and mobility would be sort of the third element that I think a lot of people really, really misunderstand.

If you have show notes afterwards, I'll share a presentation with you where we summarize this in a lot more detail in a 15-slide presentation, what we've learned. But those would be the three that I would put on everybody's wall with a big red marker.

Awesome. And is there something we didn't touch and you want to make it up?

No. I think your questions are quite sharp. We're excited to partner up. We look forward to bringing our methodology to more people and I would urge everybody to get a wearable and start the journey. I think fitness and health is a journey we should all start and none of us should ever finish. So onwards and upwards for both of us, hopefully.

Perfect. What activities do you do?

So I used to play basketball when I was younger, which cost me both of my knee ligaments. So sadly, that's no longer available. I find cycling to be a very good balance between cardio and not too much impact on the bones. So my preferred method of cardio is cycling or swimming. Then I try to do calisthenics and weights and a little bit of gymnastics. I find gymnastics to be the purest form of fitness, but it gets harder as you age.

So my fitness regimen is around cardio in the form of cycling mostly, a little bit running and swimming, and then really emphasizing lean muscle mass. Because naturally as we age, we're going to start losing it no matter what. So I'm just trying to get as high as I can initially so that once it gets me, I've got something to lean on.

Awesome. Ivan, that has been a fantastic conversation. Actually, within 30 minutes, you gave me so much more insight. So we have to probably schedule a two-hour or three-hour podcast to do this more extended. But it's been fun. Thank you so much.

It's a pleasure. I don't think anybody wants to listen to me for two or three hours, but if they're interested in hearing more, kalibra.ai, and we'll be happy to.