Building the Wearable That Gets You Stronger | Miranda Nover, Co-founder of Fort Health

11:58Turner Novak:Should you stick it on the equipment or you'd stick it on your leg?

12:01Miranda Nover:You could do either. I think I find it easier personally to use the magnet. I like to wear leggings in the gym, so a lot of times using the body strap is more difficult for me. But we do produce body straps, so if our users want to wear it around their leg, we can give them those. And when we originally started building Fort, we had a hypothesis that the reason Whoop, Apple Watch and others couldn't track strength effectively was because motion tracking is not sufficient to fully understand someone's muscle fatigue during strength training. So the original version of Fort utilized a different type of sensor called surface electromyography.

12:50Miranda Nover:And this is a type of sensor that you do need to wear locally to the muscle. So if you flex your bicep and you want to measure the strength of that contraction, you can use this type of sensor, but you have to wear it on your bicep. You can't detect bicep from wrist or leg from wrist. Yeah, so originally we thought that novel sensors were necessary to sufficiently track strength training, even in like a wellness or recreational context. I think now our working thesis is that motion is sufficient, but motion only at the wrist is not.

13:29Turner Novak:Okay, so why is that a big deal?

13:32Miranda Nover:I think that if you're going to track strength training and you want to do this for a mass market consumer, they don't want to have to. Like I just said, I like to wear leggings to the gym. Most women do and many people, you know, they don't want to be wearing a chest strap, wearing an arm strap and moving the device around during strength workouts. So originally the device that we were designing would have had to been moved around to the muscle group you wanted to measure.

14:00Turner Novak:It was this big clunky thing.

14:03Miranda Nover:Yeah. First, it was this adhesive sensor.

14:05Turner Novak:It was pretty as big as - You'd stick it on, and then you'd have to -

14:09Miranda Nover:Peel it off.

14:10Turner Novak:You'd rip it off. It was stuck on my arm.

14:13Miranda Nover:Yeah.

14:13Turner Novak:That one time.

14:14Miranda Nover:Yeah. Even when I first showed you on Zoom, it was like a raw circuit board with some adhesive stuff on the bottom. And you were like, is it always going to look like that?

14:27Turner Novak:Yeah, I remember thinking like that's, I don't think that will work. I mean, you probably knew it wouldn't work specifically like that too.

14:33Miranda Nover:But yeah, yeah, I think like there's, so there's definitely two paths for tech in our general niche of like health tracking. You can either become more of like a medical device. And there's a spectrum of like, how much FDA clearance, how invasive, how precise, like what medical claims you want to make. That's on that med device side. So it's generally still still like you're selling into health care. The go to market is very different. The regulatory pathways are very different. And then there's like the consumer fitness angle, which is what we're pursuing, which is, you know, going and competing with whoop, Apple Watch, Garmin, or a ring.

15:13Miranda Nover:And it's a very different like you went on clinical accuracy and supporting you know, patients that have a demand for your product in this health care segment and then in consumer health tracking. You really win on how much people love you and how much you can change their behavior with a product. And we didn't feel like going with this, like, certainly not the sticky thing. And then also not like the bands that you wear everywhere was really friendly to a consumer. But we still think the core problem of strength tracking being really inaccurate or impossible with the existing consumer health trackers is worth solving.

15:58Turner Novak:So why is even strength tracking even that important? Because I can just like go to the gym and just bench, squat and like, you know, write things in a piece of paper or don't even have to track it and probably get stronger. Like, what's the importance of actually like tracking this stuff in the first place?

16:15Miranda Nover:Yeah, there's like two groups of people that would find value from the device. One group is like, they are optimizers. They want to build muscle. They want to get stronger and they want to do so in the most efficient way possible. So with that, it's like, you really want to be able to tell if you are fatiguing your muscles enough to see growth while maintaining good form. So I feel like for a while, before I was this busy, I fell into this camp and I like worked with a personal trainer and I was in the gym all the time and I was super obsessed with my routine and you know I would find myself like trying to go up in weight to get stronger like in my lifts but then I would be like am I still hitting the same like range of motion that I was before like or am I kind of like cheating a little bit and it's really hard to figure out like how much weight I know I want to lift more weight but like when should I increase the weight by how much is my form still good like am i unstable which are all things that a sensor can help do writing in a piece of paper gives you like like logging the data has has an inherent value it's nice to be able to track different you know the graph of how the weight went up over time but you miss a lot of that context of like how someone actually moved and how tired they got objectively rather than subjectively.

17:47Turner Novak:So that's a big piece of what you're measuring is the fatigue level when you're doing workouts and then layering that with actually tracking what they did and how they went and then figuring out where to go from there?

17:59Miranda Nover:Yeah. Yeah, we use motion. So when we were working with EMG sensors, which were the local ones, we could directly see fatigue due to a frequency shift in the data.

18:11Turner Novak:So EMG sensor, what's that?

18:13Miranda Nover:that is the one that you have to wear locally and it measures muscle activation as an electrical signal what's emg stand for surface electromyography so emg is electromyography but we use they also have ones with needles so you like put like this is for like really if you want to access like little muscles in the hand like a wrist or you want to access like subsurface muscles anywhere on the body, you put a needle in and it's the same type of sensor. It's literally just like measuring the potential difference, like between two points in the body and then amplifying that electrical difference in a circuit and reporting out the data.

18:54Miranda Nover:So it's a very simple, like non-invasive measurement when used at the surface. And it's still simple, but invasive when it's used internally.

19:02Turner Novak:So there are tools or devices out there that stick little needles in and you work out with them?

19:08Miranda Nover:Not for working out. It's more for like neurological rehabilitation. So maybe like a stroke patient or someone who is looking to regain the use of like small muscles or like fine motor skills after an accident. Or someone who is experiencing like pain in their joints, like they might go in and get like EMG testing done in a lab. They're certainly not selling those for consumers.

19:29Turner Novak:So there's like the hardcore optimizing a lot of things, tracking things. There's like a different type of sort of like strength interested person?

19:37Miranda Nover:Yeah. So the optimizers are people who like, they want to build strength or build muscle as efficiently as possible. And they're willing to do, you know, a lot of training and devote a lot of resources to that. And then there's this other group that's like, they want to do as little strength training as possible to still be considered healthy. And I feel like these are people like busy parents. people like busy founders, people who do graduate.

20:08Turner Novak:Like when I was in college, I was in the like optimizer, like working out like we, there's just work other me and my friends in college called the Nebraska workout.

20:16Miranda Nover:I remember you telling me about this. It's like, I guess it's

20:19Turner Novak:like the Nebraska championship football team, like the 1980s did it. And we were like obsessed with it. And it's like, just a program for like progressing your bench really fast. And like works really well. And then now I like literally don't track things when I work out, I just go to the gym and it's like bench squat trying to get back into deadlifting and just like other workouts and maybe like play basketball and it's like I'm kind of tired like feeling like I'm going to work out and that's the extent of it yeah there's so much else going on I just don't have time to track

20:49Miranda Nover:it yeah we think that it's really important that what we build works for people like you and like other people in this camp where it's like you like the persona here is like they do a lot of different activities like they probably do go to the gym but they might not go every single week of the year um they play sports on the side they often are parents or maybe they have like some type of manual aspect to their job and a lot of the times like what people would be concerned with here is like if you're missing some type of foundational movement pattern in your training so So like, you know, you might be doing just like bench squat deadlift, but like you would also want to add some type of like pulling movement in general.

21:38Miranda Nover:And this pulling can be good for like if you're doing it like this, it's for your biceps. And if you're doing it like this, it's for your back.

21:45Turner Novak:And you can do like kind of. Oh, yeah.

21:46Miranda Nover:Yeah. So there's like there's these foundational movement patterns and you want to generally like to maintain your fitness and your health. like you generally want to hit most of those on a regular basis but there's such a like lower bar for what you need to do to maintain versus to build and I think like for someone like me like I don't really want to think about what I do in the gym now but I don't want to lose the gains that I made when I was in this optimizer camp so it's like okay like I know I trained legs two days ago and then Pilates or I guess yeah legs two days ago rested yesterday Pilates this morning like I want to know what's left.

22:27Miranda Nover:I don't really want to keep track of this in my head, but I still want to make sure I'm hitting everything sort of evenly. I think there's different times. We were just talking with Danielle about perimenopause. There's different transitions in life where we become more aware of our health and we want to do things to kind of prevent decline when things about our bodies change. Either we get an injury or we have pain or we're going through hormonal changes like and I think those times are also another really good time to keep up with tracking

22:59Turner Novak:as well I feel like too as you get older there's like if you're I don't know I feel like I maybe I've already hit this I'm just like I don't even care if I'm like the most jacked it's just I want to be able to be as healthy as possible like I'll care more about am I flexible yeah right and I feel like that's like a big thing as you get older like let's say you're in your 50s yeah you might just have like accepted like I'm not as strong as I was when I was in college. But there's just like importance of like being able to still like I feel like flexibility and like joint stability. Yeah. Like hip strength is like a in your 60s person like you can just fall and like break your hip and die.

23:41Miranda Nover:Yeah.

23:41Turner Novak:Like that's just a thing that's a way that not super super common but like the older you get the weaker you get in different points of like the muscle. Yeah. you know, like grouping and whatever, like how all works. Like it's a big problem.

23:58Miranda Nover:Huge problems. Yeah. I think like flexibility is more tied to strength than a lot of people think. Like a lot of times it's not that you need like looser muscles. It's that you have an imbalance and you need to strengthen something that's like weaker than the other thing. And it's kind of pulling various parts of your body out of alignment. I think that like I know. So my mom is great about going to the gym and that's who got me into the gym. And I think that in turn now, like, I mean, she doesn't require a lot of motivation, but I certainly like encourage her to, you know, do more with fitness or we talk about what's good form and, you know, talk about different ways of training.

24:39Miranda Nover:And I think I noticed this with like, this was a really common theme from talking to a lot of our users and potential users is like the intergenerational dynamic. It's like if your parents aren't strength training, you start seeing them experiencing falls. You start seeing them experiencing limited mobility and needing aids to do everyday activities. And the impact of that is twofold. Like you're obviously worried about them and their health and want them to maintain their independence. And then at the same time, you also start worrying about like, is that happening to me? And so I think like, I think the product that we are designing, I definitely want it to be, or some version of it that exists in the future to be like the thing that you get your parents when you're worried about them not doing, not being able to be as mobile or as strong as they used to be.

25:30Turner Novak:So basically your like hypothesis or just thesis behind all the things that you're, you're trying right now to do is just that like strength is something that humanity will care more about.

25:44Miranda Nover:Yeah.

25:45Turner Novak:Like a super way to distill it down to the most simple concept. It's like the strength company.

25:50Miranda Nover:Yeah. Strength is a pillar of health. And I think that nobody really owns like the mind share and the market share around like being the strength company. I mean, there's gyms, there's protein shakes and creatine and stuff. But a lot of that is like resembling this like gym bro culture that I think is not really like like yeah I really want to reframe the public's idea of strength as a tool for health and wellness which I think people are generally like coming around to and sympathetic to somebody who might they may like they're like a

26:24Turner Novak:45 year old mom who's a teacher like she does not identify as like a gym bro and we're like I'm trying to think of like what's the opposite of a gym rope. Yeah. But like that person can still like identify with being strong.

26:36Miranda Nover:Yes. Yeah. I think that that person, I mean, the ideal is that they find fun and pleasure and confidence in strength training. But at minimum, it's nice to have guidelines for what is enough. And it's nice to have some type of tool to help you like help take some of the mental load of like planning workouts, tracking workouts, like thinking about what to do. Sort of like a personal trainer, like a tech-based personal trainer. But I think like that's not necessarily what we want to be. Like I think we just see ourselves as like passive tracking and a simple way to check in like, have I hit all of the foundational movement patterns with sufficient intensity this week?

27:22Miranda Nover:I think a teacher, anyone could benefit from something like that.

27:25Turner Novak:So what ways do you think healthcare is changing? Like when you maybe hit on it a little bit earlier, maybe we talked about before we started recording, I don't even remember. But like, I don't know, like I maybe think of, this seems like almost like too abstract of an idea that maybe you wouldn't have, if we go back like in time a little bit, like this seems like a hard thing to like make people like, so like how is healthcare kind of changing to make you think this is going to work?

27:54Miranda Nover:There's a lot of layers to it. There's like the points that we touched on before where like consumers are fed up with rising costs, a lack of preventative care that is accessible either by price or by, you know, location or availability of providers. And then there's like some distrust that COVID really made worse. Like there's there's not always a positive relationship between providers and patients. And it's unfortunate because like I still firmly believe that evidence based medicine is king. But there's a lot of like convoluted incentives in that system that make it really hard for providers to serve patients in a way that it makes both parties happy, basically.

28:37Turner Novak:So how so explain what evidence based care is and then like what the incentives are messed up? Yeah.

28:43Miranda Nover:So when you're a physician and when you're operating in a regulatory environment where you're, you know, FDA controlled, like you're diagnosing and treating actual conditions, you need to perform good science if you're going to offer a product. And then if you're somebody who's diagnosing and treating diseases, like it's on you to be up to date with the literature and making sure that you read the good science that other people produce and you make decisions of clinical care based off of that. But there's also like the insurance landscape plays a big role in what people have access to and where and when they have access to that care.

29:20Miranda Nover:And it makes and then there's hospital administrators and people who run large networks of clinics and healthcare facilities that are in the loop. there's a lot of regulation in the space that yeah like that controls where money goes and the players are so entrenched because everything has to be done by such like bureaucratic processes and like tech has really this is a bit tangential but tech has really like failed to penetrate the healthcare market in the way that it seems like it could. And I think tech bros, like we always think like, we'll just do things more efficiently. Like there's clearly all these inefficiencies, like just pick one, tackle it.

30:06Miranda Nover:And then you like try to go down that path and there's like all these entrenched interests and procedures. And it's like, at the end of the day, like the system, like the healthcare system as it is right now. Like it doesn't seek efficiency, it seeks compliance, which is like, good. For some people, like it's good because like, you know, you're always doing things by the book, and you don't want to move fast and break things when it comes to people's health. But at the same time, it's like also to the detriment of a lot of people. It's like a really, yeah. And there's like The largest example of this kind of dynamic of tech starting to penetrate healthcare, but failing to really fully materialize, I would say, is the EHR or EMR situation.

30:55Miranda Nover:So electronic medical records were kind of introduced as this thing where you can digitize all of the clinical notes and the lab tests and give providers access to data. And it's great because it preserves a record of everything. but it's really like created a lot of extra work and burden for clinicians.

31:13Turner Novak:Oh, really?

31:14Miranda Nover:Yeah. So like the clinicians are like struggling to use this system. That's like, I don't know if you've seen those memes. They usually refer to creative tools, but it'll be like, it's like the cockpit of an airplane. It's like how it looks when I open After Effects or something. I think that that applies with like Epic, which is like the primary like electronic medical records software that like many hospital hospitals use. Like it's like, it's really full featured. It's really intense. Like you have to manually record everything. and there's all these startups that are trying to disrupt that.

31:41Miranda Nover:But it's a system that's very resistant to disruption. And all that to say, tech hasn't necessarily helped healthcare find a lot of efficiencies. And I think it's a very entrenched structural problem. So then there's all of these more wellness-focused products.

31:58Turner Novak:So these are just wellness-focused products is the consumer makes a decision on it based on how they just feel or want versus going through a healthcare, you know, order of procedures, order of operation of how a healthcare, you know, system is designed to diagnose or prescribe things.

32:20Miranda Nover:And those two things like are inherently distinct, but I think that they're increasingly starting to mingle, which I think is a really like if tech can't or has to date like failed to fully penetrate in the actual like capital H healthcare system and then in the consumer market you face issues of like saturation lack of trust because you don't have to adhere to these like medical standards or you don't have to adhere to being an evidence-based product there's data privacy there's so many and just like consumer businesses like you're in venture I'm a founder like we all have heard Like there's a lot of, you know, the revenue isn't stable.

33:00Miranda Nover:The consumers are very difficult to make happy. It's very difficult to make them change their behavior. And you can't like diagnose or treat diseases with consumer products. So there's like a lot of limitations there, both about like the economics of it and like the capabilities of the products. But there is like starting to be more of a like consumerization of actual healthcare products, which I think is driven both by the consumer demand and by like the access to more flexible spending dollars, like an HSA and FSA account, I think is a big driver of consumer spending on wellness products. And then there's also like bills that they're trying to pass.

33:39Miranda Nover:Most recently, like the Choice Act, which gives people access to flexible spending dollars as part of their employer-provided insurance plans. So, and there's all these services kind of like Noom or Headspace. There's a lot of like mental health, like digital mental health clinics that consumers find and consumers choose but are still insurance supported like these insurance supported like a consumer i don't know driven marketplaces yeah

34:10Turner Novak:it's almost like we had to make up new categories that weren't touched by the like entrenched healthcare so like yeah mental health if you think of 30 years ago there was no like mental health You were just crazy. That's how they would describe it. And so it's probably like Calm and Headspace, they created products that just weren't being served by existing kind of entrenched categories and weren't to be touched by regulations. Honestly, you could possibly make the argument that affecting someone's brain should be way more regulated than anything else. Oh, yeah. But the current healthcare system, there's like no way to like provide like mental health support.

35:02Turner Novak:And so it kind of was able to evolve like in more of a decentralized way.

35:08Miranda Nover:Yeah. Maybe that's like the opportunity is like, there needs to be like new categories that

35:12Turner Novak:aren't under the umbrella.

35:14Miranda Nover:Yeah.

35:15Turner Novak:Existing infrastructure of like providing care and support in healthcare.

35:19Miranda Nover:Yeah, there's a lot of interesting takes on this. Where people are inventing new markets, I think that like concierge medical services at the highest end. I know a lot of people who are, you know, high net worth relative to the average American, but certainly not like ultra high net worth, like people in the tech space, like they'll go see Solace Health is one example of this. There's been a lot that have, you know, kind of popped up and failed. So yeah, like that, like the kind of the high end. And then there's like these like blood testing services, Function Health, one of the fastest growing consumer health tech companies, I believe ever, certainly recently.

35:57Miranda Nover:You know, they offer blood testing, which has always been around, but you used to get it through your doctor and now they just offer it through independent labs and they offer like feedback and follow-up space on that wearables.

36:09Turner Novak:Yeah. Cause I feel like blood testing was always like a background of like, you know, you just hit the doctor like, Oh, by the way, we'll just test your blood and like do something. But it was never like a, cause like quest is like the big player. It's like an infrastructure company in healthcare. And Function Health made it like a product that the consumer could interface with maybe. But there was no like, you didn't just like go to get your blood tested just to see what it said.

36:36Miranda Nover:Yeah.

36:36Turner Novak:Like that's not something most people did.

36:38Miranda Nover:Yeah. And even though you could theoretically have like Googled the results before or ChatGPT'd the results more recently, which is a whole other thing. We should definitely talk about like ChatGPT Health, like Anthropics' new health product. like being able to have you know what's crazy this is like I I was at a health care like founder dinner recently and I don't know the exact mechanics of how this works but I'll paraphrase and apologies if I get anything wrong but basically like I am legally like if I want to access my medical records as a consumer I'm like legally entitled to do so but nobody has to make it easy for me.

37:17Miranda Nover:So you a lot of times have to like, go chase down different files, like you got imaging done or blood work done in a different lab, like maybe those files are really hard to access, you have to go in person file some like fax them something, you know, very archaic. But like, if I was to make a company, there's certain hoops you have to jump through, you have to like, employ a physician and there's like fees involved. But like, if I was to be a company who wanted to get access to my medical records or your medical records, like, I could just set up my company in such a way and like it exists in a centralized database online so now I have access to all those things without having to go through the like archaic access procedure that a consumer would have to do to access their own medical records and it's just like up to the hospital system or the doctor's office if they want to like make it easy for you or make it hard for you and like you certainly like don't get them all in one place unless you go to one of those companies who has the access that you can't get as an individual yeah um so it seems like the like chat gpt health and others will probably integrate with some providers like that who like go and get people's medical records and then deliver them to the individual.

38:19Turner Novak:Yeah, it seems like a lot of stuff that's happening in sort of like consumer health, it's not like we're not like inventing new things. It's just we're just like doing things and no one's done.

38:30Miranda Nover:Yeah. That makes sense. Yeah. Yeah, combining services with like a consumer-friendly interface or yeah like just making things available at different times in someone's life when the medical system hasn't deemed them necessary but the person like wants to know more yeah yeah it's very interesting i think that it's a huge market but i think like the products like in order to be durable like it's very difficult to build a durable brand in that space, I would say. There's a lot of competition. And it's a lot of times people will like use one of these products once, like discover behaviors that they need to change and have like a magical moment with the product and really like it.

39:13Miranda Nover:And then once they change the behaviors, it's sort of like it goes out of fashion or like with the blood testing companies, like you only look at the results of the blood test. Like realistically, at most, you're getting your blood tested once a month if you're like maybe on some type of medicine that requires that you get your blood testing once a month. But most people, it's going to be once or twice a year. So how does that company interact with their users in the meantime? Which is one thing we're excited about with wearables. Whoop and Aura have started doing labs, blood work through their platforms.

39:44Miranda Nover:I would assume we'll see more access to medical records in those platforms, integrations with glucose monitors. But the wearable is something that the user can wear every day. And ideally, they're looking at the app every day. But even if it's like once a week, like it's still a product that's rare in the space because it has like it's part of the daily ritual of like sleep tracking or fitness or calories or steps, like whatever it is. It's things that we do on a daily basis or we might think about on a daily basis.

40:11Turner Novak:So you're actually like you're building different devices and like testing everything's like what I don't know where the appropriate time to like start this story or journey of building for but like what made you feel like I could make a hardware company like you could make like something because I, I feel like maybe now we're like at a point where it's like maybe slightly more acceptable or slightly more of like a non insane thing to say like I'm going to be a hardware. a hardware company yeah so it's gotten you like comfortable with saying like oh i'm we're gonna

40:46Miranda Nover:try building a health hardware consumer health hardware like all of those things together or like vcs are running for the hills i can already tell no i i think it was like a combination of things i think so my background is in mechanical engineering that's what i studied in college And then after school, I worked at Tesla doing mechanical design for lithium ion battery cells. And we were designing like it was the first time Tesla had ever fully designed a cell in-house. Like previously, they were joint ventures like the big Panasonic factory that Tesla stood up. A lot of the IP didn't belong to Tesla.

41:28So it was like they were trying to bring all the IP in house and make a bunch of design changes, both on the mechanical side of the cell.

41:37Miranda Nover:So like how everything is shaped and the materials that were used and then also on the chemical side. So it was like a really risky, ambitious project. And I interned when things were really early and I came back when we were just prototyping a cell that later went into the Cybertruck. and I stayed through like the launch of the Cybertruck cell, even though I wasn't there for very long, it like did give me exposure to this like safety critical, really like risky product that had to be manufactured at high volumes without failing. And I think that that made the prospect of developing my own hardware device that's like, it's it still matters immensely to me that this device is extremely accurate and is way more helpful than it is hurtful.

42:24Miranda Nover:But like ultimately, it's not going to like light a vehicle on fire if like the worst this does is like tell you you did 10 reps and you actually did 12. But like at Tesla, the cell, like it has a lot of safety risks. So I think like that was that was one thing. but I also think that like there's a real structural advantage now in the market of doing things that have even just a little bit more moat that like AI can't immediately like do all of the hardware design and development tasks that we need to do whereas like with software engineering I feel like a lot of software products there's still relationships distribution there's still a lot of ways to build emote but like i think it's some of these like less approachable categories are becoming more approachable you know it's like capturing i feel

43:15Turner Novak:like the thesis on any kind of like ai company is like figuring out how to like capture a workflow capture data like unique data yeah and you can argue this is a way to do it in consumer health yeah like i feel like it's still you haven't launched yet right i think well this will maybe

43:32Miranda Nover:this will maybe actually come out like right after you launch so you're still like very earlier and

43:37Turner Novak:like iterating on building all this stuff yeah because it was like a lot of so we've been operational for like almost exactly a year to date and it was a lot of like figuring out

43:51Miranda Nover:like building different prototypes like the the ones that were like you know attaching to the muscle and it was like pursuing a more med device route for the product and then it was like okay we're pursuing consumer um but the thing that we have is very dorky and the iteration speed and hardware it's like it's getting a lot faster and it's it is faster because we're building like a small consumer device it's not going to build like a big crazy machine but it's still like it's it's amazing like i'm now writing a lot of our company's code like my primary role i would say at ford is like you know software and product and like i can just change things like i can just tear the app down and rebuild it if I want to.

44:32Miranda Nover:And there's obviously some time sunk and hassle in doing that. But if I want to tear down the hardware architecture and rebuild it, there's lead time, there's supply chain issues, there's physics that often gets in the way. And it's just like the process is way more friction filled than it is to design software.

44:56Turner Novak:So what are the hardest parts about iterating on and shipping and building a hardware product?

45:02Miranda Nover:I think it's, it's, there's just a lot of technical surface area is the first thing. So like there's mechanical hardware, right? Like the, the case is like a hard good that we make out of plastic. These interfaces between the hard good and the fabric strap are made out of metal because they needed header tolerance. Then there's like the electronics and the sensors that go inside here, the boards. They're very difficult to design and manufacture. And then there's the firmware that runs on the chip in here. And the firmware has to do like a lot of heavy lifting because we need to like store and process data on the device to avoid like sending too much over to the phone.

45:48Miranda Nover:And then there's like the phone app. And then there's like the backend like data processing server and stuff so it's just there's all these like different things to maintain whereas like if you're in a software company you just like don't have half of those things and then i think like the way you can get around that if you don't have the skills in-house it's like outsourcing but then you're working with people who don't care as much as you and who don't like you have to work really hard on communicating your vision effectively to like say a chinese supplier you have to figure out what parts of the process and product design you want to own versus what they should own you want to make sure you're building the right thing before you invest in a manufacturing line i think that's been a big thing for us it's like it would be so much easier if we could work with a manufacturing partner on a lot of things because they have tons of engineers and tons of expertise but then it's like if we tell them to build something they'll do it if we tell them the wrong thing they'll build the wrong thing so we yeah it's it's really helpful that our team was like, I'm a mechanical engineer.

46:51Miranda Nover:My co-founder Paul is an electrical engineer. He worked at Tesla much longer than I did. And then we have another engineer, Zach, and he's a mechanical engineer. So like now I write code and he does most of our hardware design, but we're capable of like as rapidly as one could, like rapidly prototyping stuff and making changes based on like feedback that we get from testing and from users.

47:12Turner Novak:And then so with Paul, what was he working on at Tesla?

47:15Miranda Nover:He did like sensing systems for the Tesla Semi and some other programs. So one of the cool ones was cabin radar, which are like these radar sensors in the vehicle that are they can detect like if someone's having a heart attack.

47:30Turner Novak:Why is that important for the Tesla vehicle?

47:33Miranda Nover:I mean, Tesla is just a very safe vehicle. I and like I think they might have other uses. Like I'm actually not familiar with the cabin radar system at all. So it might have just been a health feature that is interesting to the Tesla consumers, or it might have some other use in autonomy. But yeah, I'm not familiar with how they actually deploy the sensors and use them in the Tesla vehicles. And then I know Zach.

47:55Turner Novak:Are you allowed to say what Zach worked on? Is it like a public thing that's already said?

47:59Miranda Nover:Zach worked on CyberCab.

48:00Turner Novak:Okay.

48:01Miranda Nover:Yeah. there's a lot of different like probably like more mission critical life or death safety

48:11Turner Novak:types of features and products versus like tracking some muscle yeah yeah yeah it's definitely like

48:18Miranda Nover:less intimidating from a safety perspective but there is a like the thing with wearables is like I'm someone who cares a lot about like design brand and aesthetics and like I think that like when I like at various points in this journey I've thought like maybe we should just build like a better looking whoop but like it would be like people will use a wearable that looks bad but it's very accurate people will not use a wearable they might buy it but they're not gonna actually keep using a wearable that looks good but isn't accurate like i think accuracy and having some like type of differentiated metrics that actually work reliably is um more important than having something that's really like aesthetically pleasing in the beginning like i fully imagine that our device will be half the size made of metal like a lot more elegant in its future iterations but like we don't want to devote so many resources so that we want to devote resources to like making sure like the rep counting exercise identification form analysis and the software interface is like really accurate and robust

49:29Turner Novak:first how's it evolved over time i think you mentioned it sounds like it's just it's gotten

49:34Miranda Nover:smaller over time yeah it's gotten smaller and like we've reduced the amount of sensors that we use well so this device actually does have like the emg sensors that we talked about that can do like kind of local sensing that we were investigating as a primary like sensing methodology. So we haven't actually like fully removed them yet, despite like we generally think we want to focus more on motion tracking as a proxy for exercise fatigue and exercise form versus the local stuff. This also has near infrared spectroscopy, which is a optical sensor. So it's like a light based sensor similar to the heart rate sensors.

50:13Miranda Nover:It's again, though, you like you have to wear it locally. So like this actually like is still pretty beefy in terms of like what it has on board. Like it has a lot more sensors and whoop and aura and Apple watch do. We like if we get demand from our beta testers to like use those sensors more like they really want to like wear it locally and get more like more data, more accurate data, more like localized data, we can still do it with this hardware. But if not, our hypothesis is that motion is generally sufficient as long as you're not bound to the wrist. And so we should just make the device smaller and cut some of this extra sensors.

50:51Turner Novak:Yeah, that's fair. One thing you mentioned was you're doing a lot of the software and products of yourself. I remember, I feel like you've been like a ground zero case study of like what vibe coding can do or whatever. Like I remember there's one night in the fore office where it was like one of the earlier versions of cursor where you're like learning to use cursor yeah to make a product yeah so what has that been like i feel like you've been in like grounds you're capitalizing on what you can do with vibe coding i actually feel like i am

51:28Miranda Nover:somewhat so like non-technical people i feel like now could get a lot out of vibe coding and will be able to get a lot more out of vibe coding in the future highly technical people obviously can get a lot out of Vibe coding and they can do more complex like agent orchestration and have these like interesting development workflows. I as someone who's semi-technical I would say like I did some AI research in college but that's mostly like Python in notebooks and like Python deployed on servers it's not like the same as like full stack like it's certainly not writing a mobile app and I did some like data analysis work at Tesla again it's like Python based it's like not soft software engineering in the way that I do now like I feel like I'm an absolute weapon because I had some context for like how computers work like how programming languages work like you know I've been in VS code I'd made like a twitter bot before I've made my personal website before like I am just like so like what I can do I feel like it's just like insane I feel like I'm at the perfect like I didn't really have to actually learn to be a software engineer but I still get so much more out of it than if I was fully non-technical.

52:34Miranda Nover:And yeah, it's evolved a lot. I remember first using ChatGPT when I was at Tesla, I would ask it little Python questions and I could do that and then we got Cursor and Cursor was good at first but I remember it would just lead me down paths that weren't actually going to work. I think when you came to the A4 office, I was trying to set up some streaming service for our data to get from the device through Bluetooth into cloud storage and it was like the architecture was awful it was like so horrible like i it was never gonna work and i kept being like oh we're like 95 of the way there like just one more bug fix like just one more prompt and it like it just like the neither i nor the like coding agent was smart enough to figure it out but now i feel like i feel like there i i'm certainly especially with like opus 4.5 and like claude code with claude code's recent updates like i feel like the So at least like my community of founders has generally like converged on Claude code as a primary tool.

53:31Miranda Nover:And it's interesting to see how like as the models evolve, like different clusters of people go to different things and use different models for different things. There's all this like sharing of different workflows. But yeah, I like, Vibe coding is incredible. It's amazing. Have you been Vibe coding at all? Not enough, maybe a little bit, but I just like don't have anything I need to build. You know what you can do?

53:54Turner Novak:What can I do?

53:55Miranda Nover:you should do some like valentine's day thing like i feel like holiday or like like or like a podcast thing like shweta like one of my friends she did like a tarot deck that was like a vibe coded project it was like which like tech bro tarot readings um but i i'm curious because i'm like i'm certain someone's gonna do like a valentine's day themed one that will be really viral and i haven't come with any ideas that I feel like are viral enough to actually go do it myself but maybe you could that's a good idea we could do something with your kids like your kids are into music production we're just talking about that like yeah maybe you could make them like an interesting like

54:35Turner Novak:synth interface or something yeah my daughter does love coding so they there's this like program that the school does it's called pltw project lead the way and for whatever reason like they do a lot of coding you know like learning to code and it's a lot of like it's some kids program i forgot what the program's called but it's it's not like a cursor or anything anyone's probably heard of but it's like some kind of like you learn to like make the computer do actions and stuff like that and she calls it coding i don't think anyone listening to this would call it coding but like that's how they like describe to the kids where you like make things so i've i've been thinking about like one of these weekends we should spend like a couple hours of like make a game together yeah and like clod or

55:21Miranda Nover:something like that which would probably work yeah i think it would be super feasible i think it helps like the more well this is the great thing about like doing it with your kids too is it's like the more strong of an idea of like the creative vision you have for the project like the easier it is for clod to just like handle the boring stuff so like she can really let her imagination run wild and i feel like then you can maybe translate that into more like executive instructions like you know how it's in what order to do things and what are the success criteria because i feel like that's really important as well like i think we're quickly approaching the time when like prompt engineering doesn't really matter like you can give some like abstract idea to the to the models and how like they'll like the inference will be able to tell what you really mean but i still feel like now like i get a lot more out of it if i'm like specific about like order success criteria how it's supposed to evaluate the success criteria um but yeah like the creative stuff like it's so cool to be able to see people's visions come to

56:29Turner Novak:life yeah one thing you mentioned you said you made a twitter bot what was the twitter bot

56:34Miranda Nover:okay so i this was like pre me having any type of like twitter like i didn't tweet or anything This was like, I guess it was right after college, but it was like when crypto was really popular. And I felt like I, as like a mechanical engineering student and like just freshly moving to San Francisco right in the heyday of crypto, I like didn't know a lot of the words that people would say on like crypto Twitter. Like I didn't understand what they meant. So I made a bot that I could like tag in the comments. And it was like parse the tweet for any like finance or crypto related words and like define them for me.

57:12Miranda Nover:Like I didn't know what like a DCF was either. Like it was like finance, like like a discount, like a cash flow model. Like I didn't know any of the finance words. I didn't know any of the crypto words. So like if it was like a ticker symbol, it would tell me what company was. If it was like a acronym that they use in finance, it would tell me what that was. And if it was like a coin or a crypto like term, it would tell me what that was.

57:31Turner Novak:Okay.

57:31Miranda Nover:Yeah. Nice.

57:33Turner Novak:So you would reply to the tweet? You were one of those people?

57:36Miranda Nover:I would go on the bots account and I would just have it tag itself. And it was kind of like, this is very, an overstatement of its capabilities. But it's like, you know how people now are like, at Grok, explain this. It was like an early primitive version of that. Yeah, I basically invented Grok.

57:52Turner Novak:Yeah, no big deal. And so do you, and you kind of like, so we actually met on Twitter, you use Twitter a decent amount in how you think about being a founder, I guess.

58:03Miranda Nover:Yeah.

58:03Turner Novak:So what's your relationship with it?

58:05Miranda Nover:Yeah, I think it's evolved somewhat. I mean, maybe externally, it probably doesn't look like it's evolved a lot. But I feel like now I'm worse at tweeting, unfortunately.

58:16Turner Novak:So how do you approach Twitter as a founder?

58:19Miranda Nover:I think it's really important to be authentic. This is cliche. I'll explain what I mean. I think that the mistake I see a lot of people who want to engage with social media and use it to grow their platform, like the mistake that they make is they try to tweet LinkedIn slop on Twitter and like it doesn't work. Why not?

58:47Turner Novak:It's just all social media. Isn't it the same?

58:49Miranda Nover:Twitter is similar to like founding a company where like if you're in a bad market even if your product is good it's gonna flop and what I mean by that is like the topic that you're discussing has to be like either the current thing or one of these like evergreen topics and even then if your take is kind of like lukewarm but it's like worded well like I feel like your tweet does well but if you talk about something that like nobody cares about it's never gonna do well even if it's like funny or interesting so I think you have to figure out what the intersection of like things that you authentically care about because like what I meant when I said like people tweet a lot of LinkedIn slop is it's like it's very generic it'll be like oh I don't yeah I don't know they'll be like I'm working so hard Like trying to meet customers or something.

59:38Miranda Nover:I don't know. It's just like it's kind of boring. It's kind of like vague and like maybe the the the like hot topic would be like 996. So even if you're thinking about that, like you have to kind of figure out a way to slot it into like the current discourse or like my co-founder who was trying to get into Twitter at one point and he tweeted something about red pandas. And I was like, first of all, you don't really care about red pandas. And second of all, like nobody else is really talking about red pandas right now. So like it's probably like doesn't have a good chance of success. But yeah, so like something that you know about and then also something that like you notice other people talking about a lot on there is like generally what's going to do well.

1:00:17Turner Novak:Is that annoying though that you like have to talk about the current thing?

1:00:20Miranda Nover:I think you like hit escape velocity at a certain point as in like if you have a following and people generally start to know who you are from like talking about the current thing. you can start talking about other things and it'll still get traction because you have like a core group of people that are now interested in you so like for me like the way that i first had a few like viral tweets was like talking about san francisco culture like specifically dating culture at first because i was like single at the time and i was like dating and i'd observed all these

1:00:54Turner Novak:interesting things that happened back at a bar yeah i think i was like the first week i had It should be something about that. What was that?

1:01:01Miranda Nover:It was like guys in San Francisco will say it's hard to find a girlfriend and then wear a backpack to the bar.

1:01:08Turner Novak:Yeah.

1:01:09Miranda Nover:And I had another one that was like guys in SF say it's harder to find a girlfriend than it is to raise$10 million or something like that. And this was like something that people had actually, I didn't know that it was like discourse on Twitter around dating, to be honest. I didn't see other people talking about it and then start talking about it because other people were talking about it. But in hindsight, people were definitely talking about it. And I had a novel take, I guess, because I'm a woman and because I phrased it in a way that was engaging. And I feel like that format worked really well for me in the beginning.

1:01:46Miranda Nover:But now a lot of the stuff that goes viral is like random, wholesome posts. My mom sent me a cute picture and I posted it and it went super viral. And I replied a bunch of times to my own tweet.

1:01:57Turner Novak:Yeah, you have like a series of like your mom's pictures.

1:01:59Miranda Nover:Yeah. Yeah, my mom, she knows what she's doing. There's actually another one that I didn't tweet, but I probably should. She sent me a really funny picture.

1:02:09Turner Novak:So then what about if you're a founder and you're thinking about doing a launch video? You didn't do no launch, but you just like an announcement video. Yeah, announcement. You're just like sitting in your webcam.

1:02:19Miranda Nover:Yeah.

1:02:20Turner Novak:So like how should, and I think that was like pretty successful. I mean, it wasn't like the most viral video ever. on Twitter, but I feel like it went pretty well. What's the keys to doing a good announcement or launch on Twitter? I think last year

1:02:37Miranda Nover:there was all this Cluey stuff and before that, even Avi, Shipman's friend video was super viral, but I think it wasn't quite... There wasn't this launch video industry until last year with the Cluey stuff.

1:02:52Turner Novak:What's the industry? It was industrial complex.

1:02:54Miranda Nover:It's still an industrial complex.

1:02:55Turner Novak:I'm still like, hey, we're doing a series A launch video.

1:02:58Miranda Nover:Yeah. And I think it's like, I think that that's fine. You can think about it as an expression of your creative vision for the company or whatever. But I personally think there's a lot of ways you can express your creative vision for the company more simplistically. So when I did my simple sitting at a table launch video, I wore a particular shirt. I sat in front of a particular background. The lighting was a particular way. Like I thought about those things and maybe you could intentionally not think about those things. Like, you know, maybe you want to signal like we are just like cracked degenerate engineers and we do not care about any type of aesthetics.

1:03:36Miranda Nover:And we are just like grinding all the time and we want the video to look like that. But I think like there's a lot of ways you can do that without spending 10, 20, 50, 100 that grand like on a high production video. So I think the production, like growth in your business should fuel spending on these types of stunts, not the other way around, in my opinion. I think you should really challenge yourself to have some type of customers or traction before you go and splurge on this stuff. I think a lot of people see it as a ticket to getting a lot of inbound, which it is. But I think you can keep it simple, still get the same level of inbound or approximately the same level of inbound and like not spend 20 grand on a launch video.

1:04:22Turner Novak:Yeah, I remember one interesting one would be Paul Klein at BrowserBase. His first video he did was just like in front of his computer recording a video. He had like a whiteboard behind him. Like his particular thing was he like, like I made sure I had an American flag because he knew that the gundo community would like support the flag so he was like you know that's an extra thing i could do to just like get a little bit more of attention yeah it's like having an american flag in the background which is like kind of like smart it's smart yeah those tricks

1:04:56Miranda Nover:are like so good like um one of my friends and batch mates just went pretty viral on twitter and it was like his co-founder posted like they were trying to sell hospitality software and his co-founder yeah the the co-founder was like i dressed up in a suit and tie to go talk to the like general manager at local hotels to try to sell them software like he was wearing like jeans and a backpack and it like was not a suit and tie but it was like he was wearing a jacket so it was like a sf take on a suit and tie and everyone in the comments was like that's not a suit and tie but they like did really like it's like there's so many little like visual tricks you can do either to rage bait or to just like engagement bait more subtly do you want to rage bait and

1:05:42Turner Novak:engagement bait though because somebody might say like oh these guys are clowns yeah would i really trust the product if they're rage baiting i feel like we've seen like the upsides and the downsides of those over the past year if you've been like kind of observing yeah like should you do that or

1:05:58Miranda Nover:I don't think I should do that. No, I think there's like a certain amount of. Well, there's like a little bit of engagement baiting that I think is fair. I think for us, it's really important that we demonstrate like commitments and like people who maybe we don't like have 10 years of engineering expertise at this company and like, you know, millions of dollars under our belts. but like we want to seem like we could get there yeah we want to seem like we are working tirelessly for our customers which is what we are doing and like i think we don't want to like selling this as a tool to get jacked is like absolutely not how i want to market it i think naturally people that want to get jacked will use Fort.

1:06:49Miranda Nover:I like those people. I am one of those people. But I think like we need to build a lot of trust in our ability to accurately measure strength and then deliver the information in a way that's like helps people change their behaviors. And I don't think any of that really revolves around like a crazy viral moment.

1:07:11Turner Novak:Plus, it's just like the purchase

1:07:12Miranda Nover:price of like one of these apps like if you're trying to sell cluey like you need someone to pay you whatever like 10 20 bucks a month i don't know what exactly it costs but like it's relatively low fee and they can cancel whenever and they're not buying a hardware product and it doesn't measure any of their like sensitive health metrics so like maybe it's better to just like get a lot of top of funnel whereas for something like what i'm doing like i need someone to spend you know call it 300 on my device plus software subscription for a year i need them to trust me to take a their heart rate and to know certain things about their health before maybe even they do.

1:07:47And if I want somebody to do that, we need to establish a different kind of relationship than

1:07:53Miranda Nover:just selling a viral app. Yeah.

1:07:56Turner Novak:And you mentioned something that your friend who had the post with a backpack, suit and tie, was a batch made. So you're in YC

1:08:05Miranda Nover:right now. Yeah.

1:08:07Turner Novak:When did it start?

1:08:08Miranda Nover:It started, I think we're in the third week now.

1:08:11Turner Novak:okay yeah pretty early yeah what what's been like doing yc it's been i mean i honestly love it like

1:08:19Miranda Nover:i think that like i don't know what the sentiment about yc is in like the actual general population but like in san francisco certainly there's like mixed feelings from like people like there's generally like i would say it's generally a positive thing but then there's also like some founders are like oh because of all the launch videos and because they're funding a lot of like kooky ideas you know like what was it like fusion reactors on ships or something or like there's a chat id there was pair id which was like a fork of cursor before and there's um there's a moon hotel in our current batch like because they fund companies like this and people have these like crazy viral moments i think a lot of people they assume every single thing in the yc

1:09:02Turner Novak:batch is just some ridiculous moon hotel yeah i think what i really like about yc is it it

1:09:10Miranda Nover:kills a lot of the fear and hesitation that people have around like launching and talking to users. And I think it's like, you know, I wish I could say that I never had. I'm not really afraid of putting myself out there, but it's different. Like putting something that you make out there and also being an engineer and knowing all of like how the sausage is made and all the things I want to fix and all the features I want to add. But they like really encourage you to like sell while you're still working. uncomfortable, which I think you have to do to have a successful business. Like, I think there's always going to be a point in everyone's business when they're like, they want to add more features or polish something or change the way something works.

1:09:53Miranda Nover:But you need to make money and you need to also like a lot of the times you don't know what the right thing to build is. Your customers do. They're the one who is going to pay for it and use the product. So like a lot of the times, like, I mean, if you know your customers, well, you can make an educated guess. but a lot of the times they're going to tell you something that's like unexpected or valuable so why see i think like it's also just so much fun for me to like go be around other founders all the time because it's like something that like i've always like wanted to be an entrepreneur i've always like i didn't know that that's what i wanted but like now i can identify a lot of like patterns of thinking and behavior and myself growing up that like i can identify as like wanting to be an entrepreneur now like what i was like well i mean this is pretty straightforward forward.

1:10:38Miranda Nover:But like when I was even in elementary school, I had various entrepreneurial ventures of questionable morality. The less questionable, well, I guess they were all kind of questionable. But at that age, like nothing is really regulated. So what I mean is like, I would make paper cranes and I would sell them to other kids in the playground. But the money that the kids were giving me, like we were in third grade. So like the money that they were giving me was maybe like lunch money or like money that their parents had given them. and I got in a lot of trouble for doing that. And then...

1:11:09Turner Novak:Oh, because kids couldn't buy lunch?

1:11:11Miranda Nover:I don't think it was that. Like, I hope that they weren't giving me their actual lunch money. I don't know. I was like really way too young to realize like that that might have been a consequence of the action. But certainly like, they just didn't want commerce being done on the playground. So they sat our whole class down and they were like...

1:11:29Turner Novak:Regulated market.

1:11:30Miranda Nover:No more playground commerce. So at that point, I was sore out of luck with the selling paper cranes. And I changed my business model because in our class, there was like a, like a, what does it be called? Like a lottery? It's like a drawing, like you would get tickets for like doing good things in class. And then at the end, like she would, the teacher would like draw one of the tickets out of the bowl and like that person would get a prize. And so I would take like toys that me and my sister didn't want anymore. And I would bring them to school and I would sell them for tickets because I couldn't sell things for real money anymore.

1:12:06Miranda Nover:So I decided the next best currency was tickets. And so by the end of it, I had like so many more tickets, like probably like 1020x the tickets of like anyone else in my class. So I feel like that was like, and yeah, there was like a million other examples of like things I did when I was a kid that I feel like were what I would now consider entrepreneurial.

1:12:25Turner Novak:Yeah. I feel like maybe one interesting one I had was like I had a lemonade stand in third grade and my brother helped me. And so I think I made, my mom also helped me and like made all the products.

1:12:39Miranda Nover:Yeah.

1:12:40Turner Novak:I didn't pay my mom for any of the materials. She made it all for free.

1:12:44Miranda Nover:Nice.

1:12:45Turner Novak:I made$47 and I paid my brother a dollar for helping.

1:12:49Miranda Nover:That's so funny.

1:12:50Turner Novak:The same amount of work as me.

1:12:52Miranda Nover:That's so funny.

1:12:53Turner Novak:And then I bought Pokemon Yellow version with the money that I got from the lemonade stand.

1:12:57Miranda Nover:Yeah, you were rich. That we had.

1:12:58Turner Novak:Yeah. And it was like, huh, pretty high margins when you don't have to pay anyone.

1:13:03Miranda Nover:Yeah.

1:13:03Turner Novak:But as a kid, I don't know. I was like, hey, Peyton, I'll give you a dollar if you help me. He's like, yeah.

1:13:08Miranda Nover:Yeah.

1:13:09Turner Novak:And then my mom, she was a willing participant in just making cookies. yeah and then i think they probably like bought all the materials too and i just like kept all the money nice like pretty good margins like yeah as a kid we did the same thing with my daughter we had a garage sale and she we like she sold hand squeezed orange juice cookies that we made from scratch lemonade we had coffee and again it was like we just did all the work for her and then

1:13:37Miranda Nover:yeah keep all the money so fun it's so rewarding as a kid i did one where we donated all the money charity and we we made way more money than we would have otherwise just by saying you're donating no we did we weren't lying but like we did donate it to charity but yeah we said like it was actually the premise was free lemonade all tips go to charity so like sure some people would get it for free but most people they would come and just like give us a 20 like a 10 yeah 20 yeah and we like donated it to i think it was calledst francis like some charity in portland oregon where I lived at the time.

1:14:09Miranda Nover:And they were like really impressed. I think we raised like, I don't know, close to 500 bucks. Something like that. Something pretty significant for like a day's lemonade stand.

1:14:19Turner Novak:This was in school, like at the side of the road at your house?

1:14:22Miranda Nover:I think it was... It may have just been on the side. So it was at my friend's house. It may have been on a day when a lot of people in the neighborhood did garage sales all at once. That might have been how we were able to get so much money. I don't remember if it was like just a normal day or if it was like that specific day interesting okay what's your best garage sale find or vintage searching find oh i have so many yeah i think um well the most recent one that was exciting which i i you'll see later it's like this crazy mirror that's like wider than this table is i guess and it we got it for like 25 bucks but it's like shaped like a flower on the outside and the mirror is like a circular part inside the flower.

1:15:07Miranda Nover:This is a really good deal for like 20 bucks for like a giant like crazy thing.

1:15:12Turner Novak:And it's this like furniture vintage store down the street from the office? Yeah. Okay.

1:15:16Miranda Nover:Yeah, it's like almost like a warehouse because like where we're at in the mission, which is like a common neighborhood for kind of like robotic startups or like they have a lot of things that are zoned where you can like manufacture things in the units and you might also live in the units is an interest. Like Paul stayed in our office for a couple months

1:15:34Turner Novak:Does he still live there?

1:15:35Miranda Nover:No, he doesn't live there anymore.

1:15:37Turner Novak:So do you have the whole upstairs area?

1:15:40Miranda Nover:The upstairs is manufacturing now. You'll see it. We have like two 3D printers. We have like a workbench up there. We're trying to turn it into the shop because I got really tired of having so much mess downstairs in the office area.

1:15:53Turner Novak:Yeah, because you walk in, there's just like a squat rack to the left. Yeah. A lot of like tools and stuff just sitting out there.

1:15:59Miranda Nover:We still want it. So the squat rack is still there. Also, we got the squat rack for free because Zach's family like already owned it, but they weren't using it so we were able to just like get that for free like a lot of our office stuff we got for really cheap but our office is pretty nice but yeah so we'll keep the squat rack there and then we have like a desk set up to do like sensor testing basically there and then like hardware in the loop testing like if we just we don't have all the infrastructure set up but like we ideally want to be able to like push code and then have it tested on real hardware automatedly automatically um so we'll do that like lab stuff downstairs but like all the actual tools like soldering mechanical work will get done upstairs.

1:16:35Turner Novak:I know we're doing a board game night in like 52 minutes from now. So we're going to start winding down. But I was wondering if you have any questions for me at all or anything.

1:16:43Miranda Nover:Yeah. So Turner is like so different than other VCs. I think like I really, I want you to share, like I know a lot about like your investing thesis and how you run your business. But like I think that the people, it would be really interesting for other people who might be thinking about starting companies to hear about how you run your fund.

1:17:06Turner Novak:Yeah, I mean, I'm still figuring it out, honestly. I think the most interesting thing is I kind of accidentally also am a media company. And I accidentally became an influencer. I was just trying to get a job in VC eight, nine years ago. And I kind of just became an influencer. And with people following you on the internet, it makes it a little bit easier to do something sometimes. And then it's kind of reached a point where I just realized, okay, that's my advantage. I guess I'm like, I have people that follow me on the internet and a lot of investors don't. And then you can think about it as like, well, how can I lend my distribution to portfolio companies?

1:17:44Turner Novak:And then it got to the point where, especially after starting the podcast, I had friends who were heads of growth at Numeral who was sponsoring this episode. And Nate was like, I've listened to every episode of the podcast. It's so good, can I sponsor the podcast? And I was like, I don't know. and yeah, it might be kind of cool, but like kind of seems like a hassle. Like I don't like, it can't be that much money. Like I don't know if it's even worth it. And then it is kind of like evolved to the point where it's like, oh, I kind of like accidentally started all sub-media.

1:18:13Miranda Nover:Yeah.

1:18:14Turner Novak:Also, so it's kind of like this like two-pronged and yeah, a lot of things that I am investing and I think it's not like the only part of the thesis, but I think about like if I invest, like how can I help out? Like can I lend my distribution? So I guess with Ford, it's like, I don't know, you're maybe selling to my audience that's like, can I help? Or also, do you understand the psyche of the customer? Maybe that drives a decision making of would you invest or not? I mean, I used to work out four or five times a week in college and get married, have kids once a week now, consistently actually do a good workout.

1:18:51Turner Novak:And it's just like you play floor hockey also instead of even doing a gym workout. But you identify with the product and you realize, oh man, that is something. you realize what the customer might want.

1:19:02Miranda Nover:Yeah.

1:19:02Turner Novak:I don't know. It's kind of, it's a lot of investing is like stuff that you feel like you could help or you understand would people actually use this and pay for it?

1:19:11Miranda Nover:Yeah.

1:19:13Turner Novak:And I don't know, it's like, do you think you'll be able to make money? Like, I feel like that's like a big thing that people don't think about is like, you have to make money.

1:19:20Miranda Nover:You don't think about making money in a business. It's crazy.

1:19:24Turner Novak:Well, it's not even just like, can you charge customers for it? But like, is this a valuable company?

1:19:30Miranda Nover:Yeah.

1:19:30Turner Novak:Because there's a lot of things where like you can sell a dollar for 80 cents and you can generate infinite revenue losing money. But you need to be able to think of like, okay, like if I give, if I put a dollar into this company, will I get a billion dollars back in a week? Yeah. Like that's like probably like the ultimate is like invest a super small amount and you just make a shit ton of money really quickly. And then there's like a spectrum of like might take a lot longer. Like you need to put in more money, et cetera. But like ultimately, I think it was just like, can you make money? Yeah.

1:20:02I feel like as a founder, you maybe don't think about that as much.

1:20:08Turner Novak:It's all about like the TAM or like the product, like me as the team. And like people are looking at and thinking about a lot of that stuff. But also it's just like, can I make money?

1:20:17Miranda Nover:Yeah.

1:20:17Turner Novak:That's what the investors are thinking about. I think there's also a dynamic of depending on who you talk to of, you know, will I get promoted if I invest in this company? Because like a lot of the tenure is pretty short. So like the way that might play out in practice is like, OK, I invest in Miranda and like her seed round. And then in three years later or two or maybe like honestly, like three months later, you raise a series A. Two months later, you raise a series B. It like looks like really quick progress on the surface. And me as the investor who did that. My career prospects look good and like I can go from being an associate of the fund to a principal or maybe I can leave and start my own firm.

1:20:58Miranda Nover:Yeah.

1:20:58Turner Novak:And it might not actually matter, like, was Ford successful? Maybe, maybe you are, and it becomes like a public company, or maybe things like crash and burn, but doesn't matter, because I got my promotion. So I feel like there's like, those are some of like the different angles that investors might be thinking about. That's like, it's, it's not the same framing as like, you know, how good is the product? What's the market like? It's the TAM. So it's like a pretty, the way I think maybe it's the most helpful for me, it's just like, like you come to the investors and you're like, here's how we're going to make a bunch of money.

1:21:30Turner Novak:Because that's also what people are kind of trying to answer.

1:21:32Miranda Nover:Yeah.

1:21:33Turner Novak:It's like the investors are going to make a bunch of money and it's going to help their career.

1:21:38Miranda Nover:Yeah.

1:21:38Turner Novak:Because that's like ultimately when you're selling a product to someone, like you're selling like B2B SaaS.

1:21:44Miranda Nover:Yeah.

1:21:45Turner Novak:It's like you're saving them time, you're saving them money, or it's like, you know, they brought this new AI product into the organization and that person gets promoted and becomes like a VP because they like brought in this great software to help the company. So I feel like that's, it's like an angle to maybe think about fundraising that's a little bit different.

1:22:03Miranda Nover:Yeah. They talk a lot about inflection points. And I think like, obviously the reason for that is like it's, you know, the slope is steeper. So the time delta between now and when we're either in theory or in practice going to make some unfathomable sum of money is just like so little, you know, it's like the classic like power law dynamics. I also want to know like what was what were the first things that sort of like did well on social media for you like when did you find like social media pmf and how did you think about that so the probably like

1:22:34Turner Novak:the for the first things i started tweeting about did you use snapchat or do you use it i i don't

1:22:42Miranda Nover:anymore although i have noticed it's coming back oh is it okay yeah so this is probably like the

1:22:48Turner Novak:very early days of it was I started I kind of like wanted to get a job in venture I was like oh I feel like this would be kind of fun how do I like they're on Twitter I'll just like tweet about things I feel like I'm smart about and people follow me and like I'll use it to like build a public track record of saying things and like I'll get a job this is probably like 2017 2018 so the first things I started tweeting about was Snapchat did this big redesign I don't know if you remember when they added stories to the left side of the app and they basically turned into the Discover section into an endless feed.

1:23:19Turner Novak:And Kylie Jenner, Kendall Jenner, I don't even remember who, one of the Kardashians tweeted that, you know, she said something like, does anyone use Snapchat anymore? And the stock dropped like 20 % in a day. And it was like pretty interesting where Snapchat is a product that like pretty much every kid in the developed world, like US, Europe, et cetera, like they use it all day, every day, had about like two thirds the size user base as Instagram. And Instagram was like, there wasn't like a ton of public data around how big Instagram was inside Facebook, but it was probably worth like hundreds of billions of dollars.

1:23:55Turner Novak:And Snapchat at one point traded it at about$5 billion. And people were like, this company's going bankrupt. No one uses it anymore. And it's just because like a lot of like public negative consensus around it. And I was like, that's like so not even like a fair assumption to have. Like literally every kid in the country uses it all day, every day. Facebook is like the best business model of all time and Snapchat is like just a worse version of it. But it's still like a pretty good business.

1:24:23Miranda Nover:Yeah, yeah.

1:24:23Turner Novak:And I think today Snapchat does like 6 billion in revenue. But at the time back in like 2018 people it was worth like 5 billion dollars. People that were going bankrupt. So I started tweeting a lot of like why I thought this was based on like all the data. Like I was kind of like listening to the earnings calls finding different like charts, reports, and like tweeting things. It's kind of like having an opinion on something that you feel is like a unique view.

1:24:49Miranda Nover:Yeah.

1:24:49Turner Novak:And you're just kind of putting it out there. And like a lot of people are like, oh, it's pretty good. Like, hey, maybe this guy's actually right. It's probably similar to today when you just like you come across someone and you're like, oh, it's like a smart thing this person said. So I started tweeting about that specifically. And then also probably like another big thing that worked for me was when Musically rebranded as TikTok, I had like I like really had never even really heard of Musical.ly because I was like in my 20s and there was like a Wall Street Journal article about this like TikTok app and I was like why is there a Wall Street Journal article about like some social media but like I tried and I was like holy shit this is like the best product I've ever used it feels like Vine 2.0 like TikTok when it first came out like it felt like Vine and I was like wow this and the product was really really good And like the thesis with when I was posting a lot about Snap, it was that, oh, wow, they're adding a ton of more ad inventory.

1:25:50Turner Novak:They're basically bringing stories into the messaging section so they can monetize the messaging. So like it was always a big issue with Snapchat was like all people use it for is messaging and like they can't make any money. They added stories to that part of the app. And then they also made this like endless feed that you scroll and they started showing ads in the feed. and it's like that's why it's just such a good business is because it's just you know you get people addicted to their phone and the more they screw like you just keep making money and the interesting thing with tiktok was back in like 2019 when you opened the instagram app or even still so you open facebook and you think of like your phone is like this rectangle and like maybe like one third of the screen is actually the video and then there's like a white bar and it's like Miranda, like your little circle of like your profile picture and the name.

1:26:39Turner Novak:And there's like big section is just like a like button in like the comments. But like the phone, like the apps in the screen space wasn't really optimized. And TikTok, it was just you open the app and it's all the video.

1:26:50Miranda Nover:Yeah.

1:26:51Turner Novak:And the other interesting thing was when you looked at what they were doing in China, you could like shop right from the app and like buy things from the app. And everyone kind of always said like, you know, maybe Instagram could do like you can shop on Instagram. But TikTok was like much more positioned to basically be like a video first amazon or be like like a more visually optimized version of like when you think of like because i think that the thing the instagrams maybe like struggled with at first was we think of like snapchat maybe started like the stories concept and it was like you're sending people video messages or picture messages And then the way it evolved was, you know, you have that screen where you can like pick who you send the thing to.

1:27:36Turner Novak:And you can just at the top click my story and like bolt it onto the story. And it's this kind of like thing that like accumulated over time that you like layered in these different videos and different like pieces of media. And it kind of like told like a story per se. and then when Instagram like literally copied it like like they literally copied everything about it and so they just added these like circles at the top of the screen and that's how Instagram added like full screen video yeah yeah it was like literally a carbon copy of snaps that evolved from this like messaging feature and Instagram they almost like didn't think from first principles they're just like let's exactly clone and do exactly the same thing and you're like why is there's this weird like circle stream at the top of the app and it's still there and then and then there's kind of reels now it's kind of like this frankenstein thing and it was just like i always thought it was kind of fascinating that tiktok was like if you were to like redesign a social media product like native to mobile and video there would be tiktok so anyways i started tweeting about this kind of stuff back in like 2018 19 20 and it was a lot of serious things like people followed me for that.

1:28:51Turner Novak:And then, yeah, there's one point I had a friend who ran a meme account. It's not that active. I won't say the name, but it was like a meme account about like VC and tech. And I started like, I probably come up with like 10 % of the tweets. And it was like slap. Yeah. Like I'd get a thousand likes, which was pretty good back in, you know, six years ago, seven years ago. Yeah. But even then, it was like, you know, inflation adjusted. It was probably like 5 ,000 likes.

1:29:18Miranda Nover:Which is great. Yeah. Yeah.

1:29:19Turner Novak:and I'd be like man I spent all this time like a like a eight hours on a weekend putting out this like kind of insightful thing and like no one cared like like uh you know real relatedly like people just didn't care as much versus like huh I mean like this like dumb meme making fun of VCs and like the founder of a public company retweeted raised venture funding and like probably hated his VCs yeah so I was like huh there's like this weird dynamic that's kind of emerging where you can use humor for marketing yeah and found like smart founders would like identify with it so i started instead of helping my friend with squeeze i would like make them from my own account and i'd like start posting memes and it's it's called shit posting now but like it almost like wasn't there wasn't like a word for it yeah and it worked really well because it wasn't really a thing that people were doing and back at the time it was like a lot of tech twitter and vc twitter was like earnest cringe posting like you would get on linkedin is much more prevalent on the feeds yeah so like you'd see you know we've all kind of seen those like really weird like congratulatory tweets of like vcs like bragging like it was so much more prominent and so all of a sudden i was like an investor that was just like making fun of myself and other vcs yeah founder founders like just identified with it and liked it and it just worked like like i had a hypothesis that if i just kind of lean into this i bet it will work and it was like 10 times more effective than i thought you invented shit posting yeah like i would not say invented it but i probably like made it more acceptable because i like raised a fund off of it and people are like oh this is like a business strategy like you can use memes for like b2b marketing really yeah yeah i think

1:31:08Miranda Nover:it's like an interesting there's an interesting i tweeted like 5k followers on instagram gets you like a discount code with a drop shipping company but 5k followers on twitter gets like a five million dollar pre-seed you know and it's like crazy because it's like i think that this is like inherently this is an interesting concept of like you know having different amounts of leverage for different niches and different platforms but then i also think like there's just like so many i was actually thinking about writing like a sub stack post i'm like too focused on business to do this But like as a side project, I'd love to interview a bunch of my friends who are like micro influencers in different niches and see how different like the lifestyle is.

1:31:44Miranda Nover:Because so many people are like,

1:31:45Turner Novak:And also what's the business model?

1:31:47Miranda Nover:Yeah. What is the business model? How durable is it? Yeah.

1:31:51Turner Novak:Because in some categories, like if you're selling, it's basically like how big is the ACV of the product?

1:31:57Miranda Nover:Yeah.

1:31:57Turner Novak:So if you're selling enterprise SaaS that is infrastructure level, like average customer pays you a million dollars, the content can be extremely effective versus it might be more challenging with like a super small ACB. Like if Apoorva, the founder of Instacart, was like making TikToks try to acquire Instacart users. Like, yeah, the economics on that kind of just changes and like looks different.

1:32:28Miranda Nover:Yeah, the UGC and all these crazy things. Like, I'm actually very excited to try to market like to run the marketing engine for sports at scale. I think it's like not time to pull the trigger on that until like, again, we're like really sure what we're building and we make our beta users very happy. But I feel like that is something that like I'm tremendously excited to do is like leverage like social media at scale to like actually efficiently market a product which has like more challenging economics in terms of like just like consumer products and you currently have like lower acv and you have to get more customers and the customers are more like fickle so there's a lot of yeah that's that's a very exciting thing and i'm also really excited to see what happens with AI, both like AI consumer products, AI devices, like sharing generative AI, like text-based content or like images or whatever.

1:33:24Miranda Nover:It's like, it'll be really interesting to see how marketing evolves with that too. Yeah, I feel like it's going to be crazy. Yeah.

1:33:32Turner Novak:But anyways, this is a lot of fun. Thanks for doing it.

1:33:35Miranda Nover:Thanks for having me. This was great.

1:33:37Turner Novak:And thank you for listening. And thanks to New World Flex for supporting this episode. Put your sales tax on autopilot at numeral.com and upgrade to Flex Elite to get$1 ,000 on your first card using code Turner at the waitlist link in the description. If you like this conversation, please like, comment, subscribe, or name your next workout set after me. If you missed it, make sure to check out the back catalog of over 100 episodes. Tune in over the next few weeks for guests that include Gary Tan at YC, Chetan Putaganta at Benchmark, Jake Stoker at Serval, Mike and Akila at Footwork, and Scott Stevenson at Spellbook, the fastest growing company in Canada.

1:34:12Turner Novak:If you don't want to miss any of these, subscribe to my newsletter, The Split, linked in the description to get each episode plus a transcript emailed directly to your inbox. Thanks again for listening. See you next time.