LIFTS Episode 90 - Building the Future of AI-Powered Nutrition with Rami Alhamad

0:00People think sometimes that as an entrepreneur, as a founder, you're going to be right all the time and you need to be right all the time. The reality is you're making countless number of mistakes, probably on a daily basis, right? But the key is to just be persistent, to stick through it, stick through the tough times and just kind of keep hammering. There are three phases to startup timing. You can be too early, you can be early, or you can be too late. It's clear that slogans don't save companies, products do. I don't perceive MyFitnessPal as our number one competitor. I actually think of ChadGPT as our number one competitor.

0:38Matthew Januszek:Welcome to this week's episode of Lifts. I'm Matthew Januzek, and I'm here with my co-host, Mohamed Iqbal. Mo, how are you doing today? I'm doing great. We're approaching 100 episodes almost. There's been almost two years of Lifts, and we've got a really special guest on today. Joining us on Lyft, someone who's really been at the intersection of hardware, data, and performance for over a decade, Rami Alhamid has been the co-founder, is a co-founder CEO of Alma, which is an AI-powered nutrition companion that helps people unlock better performance, longevity, and well-being. Recently, Alma launched their app and is already the official nutrition partner for High Rocks America.

1:21I can't wait to ask him a bit more about that. before Alma, Rami co-founded Push, the pioneering wearable for measuring strength and power output, which was acquired by Whoop in 2021. He went on to serve as a VP of product at Whoop and then as an entrepreneur in residence at Menlo Ventures, which I think is how Alma came to be. I'd love to speak a bit more about that. By training, he's an engineer. By passion, I think he's a lifelong athlete. Ram and I have spent time together. We've traveled together around the world. We've spent time in the Middle East together. I think we might've even run together once too.

1:58I remember that. So Rami, this has been a long time coming, but welcome to Lifts.

2:04Matthew Januszek:Yeah. Thank you guys. It's a pleasure to be here. I'm excited to go through a bit of your history, particularly I wanted to get some time to understand about push, which I know you've moved on from, but I think that's a fascinating topic, certainly one that's sort of fairly close to my heart. But as I was looking into you a little bit, I normally pull up people's LinkedIn profile. And I saw this motto, which was on there, which was energy and persistence, conquer all things, a Benjamin Franklin quote, which I thought was really nice. And I was just curious, it's been an opener, but tell me a little bit about how that's guided you in what you've done from the sort of startup days with push and now into launching Alma.

2:47Yeah, definitely a quote that I remember the first time I read it, I was reading Walter Isaacson's biography of Ben Franklin, and it was really incredible. It was just like hooked me right away to read that line. And the thing that stood out to me about it is it really represents, I think, one of my few good traits that I really hold on dear to, which is persistence. I think at the end of the day, people think sometimes as an entrepreneur, as a founder, you're going to be right all the time and you need to be right all the time. The reality is you're making countless number of mistakes, probably on a daily basis.

3:25But the key is to just be persistent, to stick through it, stick through the tough times and just kind of keep hammering. um that's one of probably the biggest takeaways i took from my initially five years at university waterloo studying engineering one of the toughest programs in the country and something i took on to my first startup push and i continue to kind of break to the table every day at home so it's a it's a really good line for anybody who's looking to start a business

3:52Matthew Januszek:just on that one i was reading the elon musk um book recently and one of the things that he said which was quite interesting about decision making is that he his whole philosophy is that you just make decisions quickly you don't hold them back and and he he almost admitted that many of the decisions that he was going to make are wrong but the goal is to is to move forward make decisions and then very quickly correct so just just just interesting in your thought uh thoughts about decision making because you're right you know when you're a leader uh you almost sort of have this uh you know thought about yourself that you need to spend time on making the right decision and you know, probably put more time into it than probably what's helpful.

4:32Matthew Januszek:Have you sort of been able to find the confidence in yourself in being able to move ahead using that type of philosophy? It's honestly like, I think my decision making philosophy startup is inspired by a couple of different quotes. One of them is obviously energy persistent, just be persistent, stay the course, push as hard as you can, even if things are not going your way. Another really clever line by Jeff Bezos is this concept that he applied at Amazon. It was this concept of reversible versus irreversible decisions. Basically, really quickly triaging with an instance of, is this decision that we're trying to kind of come to a conclusion on?

5:13Is this something that we can easily reverse? And if so, let's just stop wasting time, take the fork in the road and just go. If it's something that you think is truly irreversible, could have long-term consequences, could be complex to untangle, take a little bit of time and actually invest the proper amount of time to actually decide. So that's something that I really live by. It's just quickly triage. Is this something that I can quickly back out of? In that case, just go. Otherwise, cut and run or take the time and actually invest. Take us back to what inspired Push in the beginning. I mean, you were, I think, way ahead of your time.

5:50Not only is strength all the rage and really has been all the rage, especially post-pandemic, connected strength has gotten the interest of a lot of people. There are probably 10 companies that I can kind of who've tried to emulate the success of Push and kind of what you were trying to do. But speak a bit about, and I think there's a lot of different ways people are doing that. They're doing that with devices like what you've tried. Companies are leveraging AI cameras today to try to quantify strength. Matthew and I have kind of geeked out about calling strength and the free weight area in particular as one of the last white spaces of quantifying when you look at a gym environment, much easier to do at home or in a professional, more controlled setting.

6:32What inspired you to found Push and start the company? So I'm a tech geek at heart, right? Let's just start there. Mo, you and I have bonded about this all the time, right? Like we geek out about Bluetooth specs. That's when you know you're a geek, right? It's like Bluetooth specs become a thing you will spend hours talking about. So true geek at heart, but also I've always loved health and wellness as a sector, as a category. It's an area that I've always felt very deeply passionate about on a personal level. I remember coming out of school and looking at some of my friends working at banks and And then some are working at, you know, oil and some went into defense.

7:11And I started realizing, like, for me, if I'm going to dedicate my life and career and this knowledge that I built in technology to something, I want to put it to something that's actually of use and benefit to humanity. Something that I could truly, like, feel is having that positive impact. I could wake up every morning. If I'm getting punched in the face, I'm still actually enjoying doing. And to me, that's an area that I really felt passionate about. So Push started very simply by me wanting to scratch my own itch. I was an absolute gym rat in my early 20s. But I struggled constantly at the gym and figuring out, you know, past those phase of easy gains.

7:47So what are you actually supposed to buy? How much should you be going up? How do you change your loading day in, day out? And I remember my buddies would be buying programs from people like Mark Ripito and all these like famous strength coaches telling me about them and like Chris Duffin and all these guys. And I started realizing that, okay, these are cool programs, but how is this personalized to me? Right. And I started, I remember having this light bulb moment at one point, I looked at the gym, I still remember I was sitting there, weight platform in front of me, it was just about to do a couple of deadlifts.

8:15And I started thinking, I'm like, man, this is just like a giant physics problem. You've got a physical object, right, that weighs a certain amount of weight, and you're moving it a specific distance. I'm like, there's got to be a better way to understand what people are doing. So I started geeking out about sports science. I literally went on a scholar at google.com, started digging into all the research, what are Olympic teams doing, how are they tracking and measuring, and discovered this whole concept of velocity-based training. Famous coach kind of really popularized it, Dan Baker out of Australia.

8:45But it was actively being used of the world's elite organizations, USOC, Canadian Olympic committees, all these groups were publishing and writing about it. And I couldn't get my hands on this metric. You know, there was just no easy way. There was only one company at the time that I was offering. It's called the Tendo unit out of Eastern Europe. And it was like 1500 bucks for this giant box with a giant ugly screen. And I realized that there is a world where we could take this, you know, we've all got phones in our pocket at the time. We could just put this into a wearable system and actually have it directly use a computer in your pocket.

9:20So that's kind of what inspired me to do it. I started building some prototypes nights and weekends, got really some good feedback. I reached out. I still remember emailing like four sports science profs at the University of Toronto, seeing if any of them were willing to take a meeting. Luckily, one of them did. I'm still friends with him to this day. And Dr. Tyson Beach. And he took the time to sit down with me. I showed him this prototype. He kind of gave me a bit of a nudge, but also like pointed me to areas I need to watch out for. And I just kind of kept chasing it after that. So I was kind of like really the start of the journey to scratch my own itch, find something.

9:54Now, going back to what you said, Mo, you're absolutely right. I was definitely too early. Luckily, I wasn't too, too early. I remember a mentor of mine told me this line is still kind of sticks in my head. He said, there are three phases to startup timing. You can be too early, you can be early, or you can be too late. Those are the options you have, right? And I remember thinking, at the time, I didn't know, but I'm like, I hope to God I'm not too early. And it seems like we just barely made it. I think we were a bit early to the space, but not too early that we couldn't make it. But definitely, definitely it was a bit of a wild ride navigating all those Bluetooth specs back in the day.

10:35Matthew Januszek:It does seem as though it's still fairly early within that space. And I'm reasonably familiar with some of the technology that's out there. And they're also, when you think about going into a traditional gym, there does seem to be quite a few gaps in terms of being able to track it in the similar way you can if you're cycling or running, as an example. How would you describe where that market is today? And what do you think could come? Where would this look like, let's say, in maybe five to 10 years in terms of strength tracking within a traditional fitness environment? Let me start off by saying I've been living under a bit of a rock for the last year.

11:20This rock is called Alma. I'm living under it, and I'm just constantly obsessing about nutrition now and AI. So I'm in a bit of a different space. I have been a little bit out of touch for the last, say, year when it comes to strength training technology. But my general impression when it comes to any type of modality like this or any type of new, really we're talking about as a radical behavior change, right? For people, you know, I don't want to go way back in history, but let's just focus on like digitization and actually getting data out of anything related to fitness. There's a couple of hurdles we need to cross from a technology standpoint.

11:57One is data collection. We need to actually make the data seamless enough to collect. That's step one. And I think tender units started, we took it a step further, we made it 10x better, and others will come along the way. I'm bullish on camera, vision-based systems at this point. I think in the weight room, they make a ton of sense. You've got now like that additional tier of total seamless data collection, right? That takes you a step in the right direction. I think what we're seeing now, and this is where maybe a little bit of what I'm doing with Alma will be insightful, is the second hurdle that I experienced and one of the challenges, the reason Push ended up being more of a B2B2C model than B2C is the data interpretation.

12:40So, okay, great. Now you've got tons of data on every single rep. You have really good sense of this user's readiness. How do you communicate in a way that's easy, that's actionable, and tap into their psychology and motivations? And this is where large language models and AI and what's happening there could be the true final unlock. So I see two opportunities right now. If I was to try to take another stab at the strength training space, I would study carefully vision-based models to see if there's room for a 10x improvement in seamless data collection. And then number two, I would start heavily investing in the data interpretation and motivation layer, right?

13:14Like LLMs are freaky good at LLMs as large language models, AI, chat, GPT, and so on. They're freaky good at tapping into psychology and really rephrasing raw, ugly CSVs and data into something that can make a ton of sense for an individual. And that's, to me, like a huge unlock that we just are witnessing in real time. Before we move to Alma Nutrition, one quick question for you, because this is where entrepreneurs, a lot of us come to this infliction point. And just like timing, you don't want to be too early, early or too late. Selling the company is a big decision. At what point did you know that selling to Whoop or running a process, coming to market was the right decision?

13:59I mean, how would you and what advice would you give entrepreneurs who maybe have started companies and are thinking about exiting? How do you know when it's the right time to go to market? Honestly, I think it's a unique decision for everybody. It's the motivation of what even gets you to start to think about it is a whole topic in and of itself. For what it's worth with push, my general advice is if you're a founder, you've been at it for some time, you're starting to think about different options for the businesses. is if you try to approach everything through the lens of like, I want to sell this business, it can work in certain ways, but I think it actually ends up leading to subpar outcomes.

14:36You're better off just creating a number of options for the business and then seeing which one lays. So for us, Whoop and the characterization of acquisition really was born out of me creating a bunch of options for the business. One was we felt pretty convicted. this is right after COVID hit and we were past that first year, we felt like there was a really good chance at building a B2C business now with all the kettlebells that people had at home and all the gym equipment that people were buying. So we felt an opportunity where we had a lot of data. We had some very powerful validated algorithms, a very strong brand.

15:12We had 150 pro teams at that point, hundreds of high schools on the platform. We knew that we had a product that's reliable, that's battle tested. We built a B2C facing ground, we called it Push Athlete, and we built a completely separate app when we were going down that road. And I was pitching VCs and testing the market on that side. And at the same time, I wanted to see, okay, is there a path for the business where we can partner and license our algorithms to an existing consumer facing company? And I reached out to Whoop and I reached out to a bunch of companies. The conversation picked up team with two major players i'm not going to disclose the other um but we ended up finding that whoop just felt like a much stronger better fit for us and uh we were you know really really happy with the outcome and the time that i spent there afterwards and kind of getting i'm not sure if you can ask this but but looking back would you have held on or still do you think you made the right decision i i think so yeah i i reached this point when i was reflecting on this uh as a as the Whoop team came back and kind of proposed an acquisition instead of a licensing deal.

16:15And I just started thinking, for me personally, I'm a perpetually curious person. It's, again, one of the few traits that I hold on to very dearly is I'm constantly trying to figure out how things work, why are certain things the way they are. And I reached a point, I would say, in my journey after eight years with Push, where I felt like I've capped the learning around the space and the industry for me personally. So I kind of reached a point where I felt like, okay, I really wanted a fresh new challenge doing something, same domain, but just a different problem set that I could kind of sink my teeth into and just restart that early phase of learning and integration.

16:55So that's part of the reason I was really excited about it. And part of the reason it was super exciting is I didn't go into it thinking, I went into it thinking like, okay, there's a wealth of problems and learnings for me as well that I can get out of this experience, right? These guys know a ton about sleep. They have huge data sets to play with and understand, huge consumer base. It could open up my eyes to like things that people really care about in the consumer space. After spending eight years obsessing about what do strength coaches and sports scientists care about fundamentally, right?

17:27Matthew Januszek:When you moved on to Alma, I was just curious to get your thought process and if you created any framework in terms of that decision making, because now this is your second opportunity. And clearly, you must have learned a lot about what to do, what not to do, what type of opportunity made sense, how you choose the opportunity, how you get started the opportunity, so how you get started on a new opportunity. So what were some of the things that were really important before you started another venture? And give us a bit of an overview of what a couple of those initial steps were to move it forward.

18:04Matthew Januszek:Because I think a lot of people, whether that's changing their career, starting up a new business or leaving another one, I think these are really critical moments in what you do and you can quite easily make the wrong decision. And so just curious to understand, what did that look like for you, Rami? Yeah. So I didn't, after wrapping up my time at Whoop, leaving on great terms with the team and Will. I wanted to take some time to really advise my initial plan. And Mo, at the time you and I were exploring, I was kind of looking at the potential of going to the Middle East, spending some time in Dubai where I grew up originally, thinking about opportunities in different parts of the world, understanding the problems that people are dealing with.

18:46I was advising a couple of startups at the time. And I started doing that roughly about six months. just a handful of hours a week type thing, really just mostly trying to de-stress and de-load after eight years of startups. And I realized very quickly that this wave of AI is just too big not to ride. I was constantly finding myself drawn back on my laptop, staying up till like midnight, 1 a.m. My wife was like, what are you doing? I thought this is your time off. And I'm just tinkering, playing with the API, trying to figure out where they fail, what's happening, watching webinars, attending virtual meetups, going to meetups in real life to try to understand what are people talking about in this industry and this new wave.

19:32So I felt a couple of things happen at the same time. So I felt this pull back into this new wave, this new technology modality that could unlock a lot of really exciting things. Number two, I was searching for problems in the health and wellness space. And my initial instinct was actually to try to build a med device, like a health tech product. So I went and I'm happy and I could talk your ear off about this, but maybe for another time. But I spent a bunch of time digging into cortisol sensors, like stuff in the lab, like not things that are actually out commercially. But I started looking lab by lab across the US and Canada and Europe to see what are the new sensor platforms that I could potentially build a cortisol measurement device off of, or what are different ways for us to track new biomarkers non-invasively.

20:21I almost worked back from like, if you've got a wearable, what kind of new sensors do you want to put in? How can you solve problems for people using it? But I realized pretty quickly that all the low hanging fruit has been picked. And at this point, anything you do is going to be a full on regulated med tech device. And I just didn't really want to go down that road. I spoke to a bunch of health tech founders and realized you spend half your time dealing with the FDA, and that's not something I'm particularly excited about. So I ended up thinking, okay, what are other problems in the space? And I was, the best way to learn new technologies to actually try to build with it.

20:55So I was building a bunch of prototypes across a bunch of different ideas that I had. And one that came to me was just nutrition, nutrition tracking. I've used MyFitnessPal and Lose It and Chronometer for years. So I'm very familiar with the space. And I really wanted to see what would it look like if I was to reinvent that whole experience and build something from scratch with LLMs at the heart of it. And I built a couple of prototypes that were actually fun. I shared them with a couple of friends. I remember one of them was staying over. Next morning, I wake up. He's talking to the prototype and tracking his breakfast.

21:31I'm like, oh, that's kind of cool, interesting to see his behavior. And I realized that there might be something here that's worth pursuing. This is around the same time I connected with the Menlo Ventures team. So I had an initial, just a friendly chat, connected with a partner there, Sean Caroline. great, great VC. And I was just chatting with him about what I'm up to, gave him the update. And as soon as he said that, his eyes lit up. And he said, this is something that we've been thinking a lot about ourselves. We've actually been doing this research as part of our labs, which is our kind of internal incubator system within the firm.

22:09So we sat down, we spent a bunch of time on it. And that's kind of how the whole EIR thing happened. And I kind of jumped back in. But to answer your question, I think it's really, for me, it happened very organically. I didn't feel like I was trying to force it. Definitely, there was a couple of like gut check moments throughout the period to see is this something I want to pursue. So for me, what's really important is if I wake up in the morning, five years in, as I'm getting punched in the face, as you usually are as a founder, am I still going to feel like what I'm doing is worthwhile? And is this something that I'm actually like excited feels like it's having an impact in the world?

22:41for me especially after visiting the middle east mo uh when you and i went to dubai and saudi arabia i was looking at macro stats for the region uh saudi arabia is 60 percent obesity rate it's even higher now i was speaking to health care officials there and they're genuinely concerned about how do we solve this problem like diet and nutrition is a huge huge problem i think you know sometimes uh when we're in the space we feel like oh it's all figured out people know how to eat well. Eating well is super hard for a vast majority of people, even for me. For most people, it's challenging. What do you eat every day?

23:17What do you eat on the road? How do you feel properly? Something feels off? Why? All these questions are constantly coming up. So it's a big problem. I knew I could sink my teeth into for a decade plus and still learn and have a positive impact on the world. And then the second question is, why now? That's a really, really important question to ask. I think the most astute VCs will always ask you that question first. Why now? And for me, the answer is very simple. Like I built a prototype. I could see that LLMs are a step-level change. And I knew what was going to happen. A lot of our existing incumbents in the space are going to try to slap lipstick on a pig and just put LLMs on top of their existing product stack.

23:59And I knew that if you build from scratch with an AI first experience, really rethink through, you know, rethink the entire experience through the lens of AI, you could build a 10x better product, and you could build a product that unlocks things that you didn't even know were possible yet. And this is exactly what's happened over the last 10 months. Well, I think when you look at the difference between push and nutrition, nutrition, I'll say it's actually a pretty saturated market around for some time. Unlike when you created it pushed out something that wasn't really here. But I do think that it is also one that is really underserved.

24:36And I've got some interesting kind of data points, but I want to just share a bit about something that like how important nutrition is for me, if a lot of us in the industry into fitness, we have made nutrition a lifestyle. For me, I remember, just like you, I grew up in Dubai, right? We both share that together. And I remember reading Optimum Sports Nutrition in 93. This is when I came to the US, I was 13 years old, you and I talked about this, and it taught me the fundamentals of macro and micronutrition. And these are concepts that most people, definitely not at 13, really get a real foundation in.