Venture Everywhere Podcast: Jeff Chen with Scott Hartley
Scott Hartley, co-founder of Everywhere Ventures, catches up with Jeff Chen, co-founder and CEO of Radicle Science, on Episode 12: Radicle Proof in the Pudding
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Jeff Chen is the cofounder and CEO of Radicle Science, an AI-driven healthtech B-Corp providing history's first Proof-as-a-Service solution for non-pharmaceuticals to easily prove true effects. Prior to Radicle, he was the Founder & former Director of UCLA’s Center for Cannabis and Cannabinoids. Jeff has also advised Senator Feinstein’s Office, Governor Hickenlooper’s Office, the Mexico Senate, and the Royal Court of the Kingdom of Bhutan.
This episode is hosted by Scott Hartley, co-founder and general partner of Everywhere Ventures (previously The Fund). In this interview, Scott and Jeff take an in-depth look at what it means to start a new market category, and what it takes to truly differentiate and lead the field in product offerings. Learn Jeff’s contrarian take on effective clinical trials, and hear Scott’s quip on an effective marketing strategy. Listen till the end for superpowers and productivity hacks!
If you liked this episode, please give us a rating wherever you found us and be sure to subscribe to Venture Everywhere. To learn more about our work, visit Everywhere.vc and ideas.everywhere.vc on Substack. You can also follow us on LinkedIn and Twitter for regular updates and news.
Read more from Radicle Science co-founders Jeff and Pelin in Founders Everywhere.
FULL TRANSCRIPT
Jenny Fielding
Hi, and welcome to the everywhere podcast. We're a global community of founders and operators who've come together to support the next generation of builders. So the premise of the podcast is just that: founders interviewing other founders about the trials and tribulations of building a company. Hope you enjoy the episode.
Scott Hartley
All right, well, I'm here today with one of my favorite founders in our portfolio, Jeff Chen, who's the co founder and CEO of radical science. Jeff, welcome to the podcast.
Jeff Chen
Thanks for having me, Scott. And thanks for being one of our early supporters and believers.
Scott Hartley
So today, you know, we want to cover a lot of grounds. I think you're an incredible founder, that is one of the few beacons in our portfolio that are truly creating your own category. Who truly not innovating in a market that existed before but pioneering one off on your own. So maybe tell us a little bit about Radicle Science. And what brought you to this problem in particular?
Jeff Chen
So what Radicle Science has created is this new category of proof as a service. And it's the idea that we want to make proof generation - proof generation on what the actual effects of a product are - a consumer product, it could be an app, it could be a supplement, it could be a beverage. We want to make that proof generation as easy as software as a service. It just works. You don't need specialized personnel, you don't need specialized equipment, you just come to us, you give us your product, and we can generate the proof that you need that's been missing for the entire wellness category. And the way that we arrived at this and the way that I arrived at this is - I started out my career in healthcare, really interested in healing people. And so I went to medical school at UCLA, and also realized that the system itself needed to be fixed. So I was also getting my MBA at business school at UCLA as well, while I was there at medical school.
Jeff Chen
You know, if you asked me what my career was going to look like, I thought I was going to run hospitals, healthcare systems, insurance groups, and that's how I was going to fix healthcare. Well, by the end of grad school, I had realized just how fundamentally broken the healthcare system was. And I got much more interested in finding ways to deliver better health, that didn't involve doctors, that didn't involve pharmacies, and pharma, and insurance and all that. And that's when the whole sector of wellness, nutrition foods, supplements, all of that came into focus. And so, after medical school, I didn't practice medicine, I didn't want to practice medicine in a system that didn't value the right things that I thought it should value. And instead, I started a research center at UCLA, where we were generating clinical proof on botanicals and unpatentable wellness products.
Jeff Chen
The problem was the traditional ways of generating clinical trials or generating clinical proof is using clinical trials is a method that largely is used for pharma to prove their drugs work, but insanely slow, insanely expensive. And it wasn't actually generating the right data that's relevant to most folks. These were very artificial datasets on very non diverse populations. You are like okay, even if we go through all this time and effort, does this data matter? Is it relevant, is it generalizable? So those are some of the key insights that led to the creation of Radicle Science, and with a lot of input from my co founder Pelin her arriving at a similar realization, and her having a Tech Data background and myself having a medicine science background. We decided to create Radicle and start a new category of proof as a service.
Scott Hartley
It's fascinating because in so many cases, seeing the world sort of two through two kind of overlapping lenses often gives you a visibility that others don't see. And so the ability to kind of spot markets, spot tailwinds, spot trends that others don't see. And as somebody that did a dual degree myself across two different schools at Columbia, you start to put the pieces together in a kind of orthogonal way that maybe doesn't jive with the rest of the way that the population sees a particular case of. In your case, sitting at UCLA across with the business school and the medical school gave you some sort of unfair insights to see what we call a $0 billion market. Steve Vassallo, one of the early venture guys at Foundation Capital, kind of articulated this term of $0 billion markets. This idea that you can create your own category where you don't really have competition. You know, what was it about the tailwinds that you saw, particularly around? Was it the explosion of supplements? Was it the explosion of the isle at Whole Foods that now has 200 products in it, that weren't sort of fully verified, that weren't fully buttoned up? Were some of those tailwinds a driving factor in seeing this as a really big market opportunity?
Jeff Chen
That's such a great point and yet to your point, exactly, it was it took the combination of me being trained in medicine, and then go into business school and then specifically trying to generate clinical proof the old fashioned way on herbs, botanicals, unpatentable wellness products. That's kind of three different lenses that we're able to - and incorporating a fourth lens of Pelin coming in with her data and technology background. But the key tailwinds that we saw were Yes. Number one, the interest in wellness products, in organic, in natural and herbs and supplements. Basically anything that's not a pharmaceutical drug clearly is reaching an all time high and has been growing for quite a while now. Number two, the category of proof of service that we've done, which is these automated, standardized, virtual, direct to consumer clinical trials that we've optimized with AI. This was impossible until everyone had a smartphone, you had really good DTC infrastructure. You had good broadband access. I can ship people kits that they can collect little saliva and blood samples. And that's still there's new laboratory analytical technologies that can now analyze that. So none of this was possible. Only in recent years, could you do this. And so I think that's the other opportunity as well. So there was definitely a demand. Consumers were interested in these products, there was an explosion of brands - very competitive, hard to differentiate. So the companies needed this. Consumer interest was an all time high. Trust was not quite there. The brands needed to differentiate, the brands needed data. And then for the first time, there was shifts in business models and technologies that allowed us to deliver clinical proof an order of magnitude cheaper and faster.
Scott Hartley
It's so fascinating, because as you just articulated, there is a gap that you spot in the market. And that gap is sort of between reality and perception. Sort of the trust gap, as you mentioned. Similarly, you know, we're reminded of a story of Qualtrics. Qualtrics was a surveying company that was in competition with Survey Monkey. Survey Monkey and Qualtrics were largely indistinguishable as survey companies. But then Qualtrics did something brilliant, where they said, actually, there's a gap. There's a gap in experience and understanding of what your customer wants and needs. And it's called the customer experience gap. In articulating this kind of new category, they were able to take the company from 2 billion in head to head competition with Survey Monkey to about 27 billion. And you see that inflection point right around the time that they invent this category called CX.
Scott Hartley
And so in many ways, you guys inventing this category of proof as a service, and articulating that, hey, when you walk down that aisle at Whole Foods, and you don't really know which ones work, which melatonin. Which this, which that, is really the one that you want to give your kids or the one that you want to ingest yourself. Those are the trust gaps that you guys are kind of helping fill. I think the biggest question I have is, when you create a category like this, obviously, you're the first mover by definition, right? It's a $0 billion market. You see it loud and clear, right on the horizon. But you have to convince investors that this is where the world is going. And that's one of the hardest things. And how did you guys navigate that? How did you sell the vision? Because you know, at some point, you can sell traction, but in the early days, you really have to figure out how do I tell the story here, that gets people to see the world in the same way that I do. That's obvious to me. But part of the success that you guys have had is this ability to fundraise, this ability to storytell, to raise enough money that then you can build, the company that you sort of see as saving the world, or changing the world at least.
Jeff Chen
Yeah, and I think the ability to convey a vision, I mean, you hear this a lot as the founders that you can have the best vision of the world. But if you can't convey and articulated in an understandable fashion, it's not going to resonate with folks. I think we were very blessed in that this problem that we were articulating, everyone had experienced. You know, doesn't matter what type of investor you are, you would experience this problem. Every time you walk down that aisle. You've experience this problem when you got frustrated with a pharmaceutical drug either wasn't working or had side effects, or super expensive. And you thought, what else is out there? You've experienced this problem every time a founder pitched you on a wellness product, or your friend was trying to give you a supplement or talking about something. You're like, is this is this just placebo? What's going on here?
Jeff Chen
Anyone we talked to had experienced this problem from so many - both direct as well as indirect area. So I think that really helped, it just instantly. They're like I get it, I get what's happening here. I think that the duo that we also brought together between Pelin and myself also really resonated. So this was going back to backing the jockeys. So in this case, myself having explained how I came at it. For Pelin, my co founder, she had come at it from a - you know, she had spent her entire career in technology and big data before it became more data science and now AI. Then she had a stint for several years as a philanthropist trying to fund research into botanicals and became very frustrated with how slow and expensive the universities were. So the fact that we both experienced the pains made us the right people to do this. So it wasn't a theoretical thing. We experienced the downsides in the current model, we knew there was a better way. And this was our vision for how to create a better way.
Scott Hartley
It's really interesting. One of the metaphors that I often think of is the children's book where you have the kind of three different - you have the head, you have the torso, and you have the feet of three different animals, and you're able to flip the book around, and sort of have an elephant head, a giraffe body and ducks. And it sort of creates this crazy animal, this character that you know, wouldn't otherwise exist. And kind of as you have talked about the go to market, and as you guys have crafted the vision for Radicle Science, I kind of think of that metaphor of, you know, taking the interesting vision that you had on this overlap and the missing pieces of proof as a service, the timing, and the tailwinds of this sort of explosion of supplements, explosion of this category. The third piece, I would say, is maybe some of this regulatory piece that's starting to happen as another tailwind and something that you've told me about. You know, I think this is something that people overlook. But as regulation changes, it often really accelerates the timing. Or it really creates a crucible, where the timing that you guys have becomes even more acute. And maybe you could talk a little bit about how you guys spotted that coming change, and how you guys sort of slotted into the right lane at the right time, continue building a great company material.
Jeff Chen
What's really interesting is just candidly, when we first started the company and went down this path, but we knew regulations at some point would change. We didn't realize it would happen as rapidly as it necessarily did. So we just knew that this was the right thing to do. There was going to be a business case for this, even if worst case regulations didn't shift, because the brands that we serve as they become proven, not to satisfy some regulator, but now they get to satisfy public interest, or investors, or have easier conversations with retailers and distributors, because they have real proof. Well, we knew there was value there. But yes, about eight months ago, for the first time in basically 25 years, the federal government issued new regulations on health claims of any consumer product. Doesn't matter if it's a t shirt that makes a health claim, an app, a scented candle, supplements, food, beverage, they rehauled all of that. And it basically to our delight basically says you need a double blind, randomized placebo controlled trial of XYZ rigor run by scientists to be able to make any health claim. And so it's still relatively new regulations. But it certainly is a tail wind in that sense as well.
Jeff Chen
Now, what's also interesting is going back to - for other founders who might be listening out there - regulatory tailwinds are great. They're a forcing function for your business when aligned. But there's other interesting forcing functions too where other businesses that are big giants can be forcing functions for your business too. So another positive development that we're seeing is the retailers. And certain retailers more so than others are now asking for clinical proof for the products on their shelves. And if you don't have the clinical proof, they say okay, then you got to strip all these claims off your product. And now you're just selling a very vanilla product, how you're gonna get someone to pay money to buy it? So the retailers being these choke points in the system. And so as a founder also look for - who are the other nexus and choke points in your industry? How are they shifting? What's happening? And how can you then offer a service that can take advantage of that as well?
Scott Hartley
It's something that I didn't really realize until you'd explained it to me that the question of - does something have a medical claim could be as innocuous as having some Zzz's on the box and running a poll and saying, Hey, what did these Zzzs seem to represent here? And if enough people come back and say, Well, I think it means sleep, sleepiness, you know, then you're effectively making a claim, which then has to be backed up by clinical trials, according to this, this new regulation. So, you know, that's something that certainly has, I think, worked in your guys' favor as far as the timing of what you're building. And then as you look forward, how do you guys think about success? How do you define success? And also, I guess a secondary question to that is, how do you think of success over given periods of time? You know, what are you trying to achieve in the next 12 months versus 24 versus, you know, decade or what you want to build here?
Jeff Chen
And actually, before I jump into that, one thing that I also wanted to add, again, that might be helpful for founders out there, when it comes to category design. And it's a useful tool, not even a tool. It is a incredibly powerful framework for Yes, showing investors that you're different. It's an incredibly powerful framework too from a sales and marketing standpoint. So for us, we came into the dietary supplement industry as nobodies. And that's our beachhead. Eventually, we'll expand more to food and beverage and then there's skincare then there's all wearables, digital apps, all these things. but right now, it's dietary supplements. $60 Billion US market. We came in, and we weren't just saying, Hey, we're here to run clinical trials for you. Every university's saying that, there's tons of private companies also running clinical trials. And someone can say like, yeah, they're slow. They're expensive. Most of us don't even try to do that, it's just not even attainable. We came in saying this is proof as a service. This is different. people were like what? Tell me more. This is interesting. And it was that difference by fundamental leaps, something different, that really helped us take this industry by storm.
Jeff Chen
And within basically a year of stepping into our first dietary supplement conference, we were headlining speakers, at conferences, we were winning awards, we were closing some of the biggest clients in the space. Unheard of, in these industries, where it takes a decade to build a reputation and, and things like that. So that that was a really another powerful feature of category design. And for a book you might want to read for fans out there - Play Bigger, that's the one that we read. And there's also, you know, consultants that can work with you and help you through that process.
Jeff Chen
Now, to go back to your question, Scott. So what our long term definition of success is one day, because of what we do, and because of the work that we enable our clients to do, our clients being brands, consumers are going to have access to proven products that they know are proven, that have so much data in aggregate, that they can know that these products are also personalized. Which product, at what dose, should someone like them use for the condition that they're currently grappling with. So not only are the products individually proven, but we've also been working across all these brands, and we have enough anonymized aggregate data that we can say, Hey, Scott, out of all these proven products for sleep, this is the one that actually seems to be best predicted to work for someone like you. Given your demographics or lifestyle, things like that. Oh, and by the way, best of all, they're all affordable. You don't need to worry about insurance, you don't need a doctor's appointment, and they're at your local grocery store. That's the vision that was really the crux of the TED talk I gave earlier this year was like, This is what democratized medicine looks like. There's no gatekeepers, it's affordable. And best of all, these are personalized, democratize medicines, that's the long term success that we look at. Now. How do we get there?
Jeff Chen
I think in the short term, we just have to get increasingly greater amounts of brands, realizing that for the first time ever, clinical proof is accessible to them. It's not just the wheelhouse of Pharma. And that there are tangible benefits like before, they haven't created a budget for clinical trials. And so they go, we don't have a budget for that, well, think about it, like you've budgets for marketing, your budgets for sales, right? Your budgets for R&D. These fall into those buckets. What happens to your business, it's not just that you acquired a few extra customers, your product is fundamentally transformed in terms of its reputation, its trust, MSRP might go up, you know, unit sold might go up. And not just might, like it will go up once you start saying you are clinically proven product XYZ. So in the short term, it's getting more and more brands that are realizing for the first time ever, that they can actually access trials, realizing the importance of what it can do for their business, realizing that the ROI there is massive. And with that, there will be increasingly amounts of proven products on shelves. And then once there's that, then we can start thinking about the personalization and the matching, and getting consumers to the right product for someone like them at the right time. But first, there needs to be a critical mass of products that are just proven in general to work better than placebo. And so right now, our estimates are the number of brands sitting on shelves that have that clinical proof: less than a percent. And we think we can fundamentally change that in a very short amount of time. And then after that get to that personalization aspect too so that we can really benefit consumers.
Scott Hartley
You know, for skeptics out there that say, Well, you know, that's cute, you change the lingo, you change the words and claim that this is a new category. What goes beyond deeper than say, for Qualtrics, changing the words from survey to customer experience? Or for you guys to change the word from clinical trial to proof as a service? You know, I think sometimes skeptics of category creation will say, Well, you know, it's just a marketing stunt, you just spun the words in a slightly different way. But I think as you've alluded to, there's so much more that happens deeper when you think about because you're really selling into a person that hasn't ever bought this before. Or you need to articulate what budget this comes out of, who the stakeholder is, who the key decision maker might be. Also, on the flip side, on the supply side of the clinical trials, are you articulating this in a different way? Because they're used to doing pharma type proof, right? And you're saying, Well, this is actually a supplement. This is a botanical, this is a, you know, whatever might be in that aisle at Whole Foods. But what goes on deeper than just the changing of the words or as you and Pelin went through that process, maybe walk us through some of the things that popped out at you or how you guys sort of arrived at that real sort of depth of category creation.
Jeff Chen
And I love that you mentioned that because that depth has to be there. So yeah, you're right. You could flip a term, call it something different. Maybe you'll get a couple extra top of funnel leads. But the second they start talking to you and they're like, this is like you just bait and switch me. Like I'm out, it's not going to actually change anything. And so you really have to live the new category. So when we said proof as a service, we're like, Well, what does that mean? It means that the clinical trial is so far in the background. And there's all these things happening that you as the client don't even need to care, think, or worry about. It just works. Just hand us your product. And boom, here's your proof. That's what proof as a service does. The clinical trials, just the tool in between that's getting there, one of the pieces. And so for us, I'll give you an example.
Jeff Chen
The one fundamental way that we transform this is that no longer was there these multi-month discussions of like, well, what do you want your clinical trial to look like? And what type of people do you want to be in the trial? What types of questions should we ask? And what type of statistical analysis do you want us to do? And it's just a product. It's standardized, there's nothing you can really change about it. So therefore, you don't even necessarily need to worry about every single aspect of it. So for instance, we just have in proof as a service, we have our standardized sleep proof program, our standardized mood proof program, and you just go, hey, there you go, Okay, I like to sleep, that's what I need, boom, there's that. And okay, go, we go, we push and we go launch, right. There were other elements of our new category as well, that we want to also show is fundamentally different than the way things are done before. One is the predictability of this.
Jeff Chen
So with clinical trials, the analogy we like to use is the way that clinical trials are created and run. It's the way that cars were produced before Ford came along, bespoke, custom, handbuilt, manual. And when you deliver it, extraordinarily expensive and slow, and of unreliable quality. That design has ever been built before, the tire could fall off, engine catches on fire. Then Ford came along and said, I'm gonna standardize it, automated, scalable assembly line you can have in every color you want, as long as it's black. And that's kind of what we done. We do not study every condition under the sun. Like right now we have 10 standardized health areas we study and it's sleep, anxiety, women's health, pain, gut health, immunity, etc. But because of that, I can churn these out, not just faster, but extraordinarily faster and cheaper. But at much higher predictable quality. These are things that I've done before, I'm just pushing a button, and we're rerunning all the algorithms and the processes we've done before.
Jeff Chen
So like when you get software as a service, it's, you know, it's just gonna work, you don't need IT on hand, you don't need servers, you don't need to worry about manual updates, you don't need to worry about the thing crashing, it just works. So we really wanted to live and breed that with a new category. And the final thing that I'll say in this, you don't necessarily see this part when you just read the term proof as a service, but we really wanted that diversity and inclusiveness in our dataset. Because what's the point of, even if you could get clinical trials cheaper and faster, if I study a bunch of, you know, Caucasian men living outside Houston, is that data generalizable to the US population? It's not. So we needed to study people in all in all geographies, of all lifestyles, of all demographics. So that was another big push, because then that data that these brands are actually getting are most actionable and useful to the people they sell to, which is generally broad folks across the board.
Scott Hartley
I love that you're taking complexity and you're packaging it up as a very simple check the box of: I want to prove sleep, I want to prove this, I want to prove that. It reminds me of a story in the early days of Google when they were trying to sell Google Docs. And Google Docs was largely similar to Microsoft Word, but then it had 20 other bells and whistles. And when the marketing team went out to try to sell Google Docs, people got confused. And this would start to latch on to one of the 19 things that did that was maybe not perfectly in line with their vision. They said, Well, you know, we actually were worried about the cloud because of their security issues. And so ultimately, the way that Google started marketing Google Docs was by saying it's exactly like Microsoft Word, except for you can have multiple people in the document at the same time. So what they did was they packaged up all the complexity, and it's what I call sort of vanilla with a twist. It's exactly like the same thing you're used to, except it does one thing different. I think, in many ways, the art of storytelling, or the art of selling a product like yours that is complex, is sort of packaging it up in this plain vanilla way. But then having this twist where you say, well, it is like a clinical trial, but it's different. It just has this one thing that's different, that makes it that much more accessible, that much easier. And so that's kind of how you walk that line of how do you sell into an organization that's used to buying one thing and sort of create categories that's adjacent or different? I think you guys have done a brilliant job of kind of walking that tightrope. A lot I've seen so far.
Jeff Chen
And that's a great point and obviously, and our salespeople are trained on this, who we're talking to in the organization, the type of organization, also matters as well. To give you an example, our largest client is one of the world's largest CPG companies. You know, multi-hundred billion dollar market cap. They have done clinical trials, even for their supplement product. So when we went in, it was a much more like, you want the complexity, let's go. You want like, let's dive in double blind, randomized placebo controls, linear mixed models like, validate outcome, and you've got all the way down. And then there's other brands coming to us, they don't even have a chief science officer. And that's where we go kinda like what you said, we just go look, it's just trust us, it is a full blown clinical trial, don't worry about the details. But the thing that pops out, if your product is actually better than placebo is proof that it'll help sleep if you go with our sleep study, etc. And then usually we're dealing with like the CEO, the founder, or the head of marketing, they go cool. Like, again, you know, great, like I couldn't, before, it was such a black box, to me anyway, at least you guys have shown me that I don't need to worry about all the details and stress about that. It just works great. Here's my product. Let's get rolling.
Scott Hartley
One of the things I think that drives really big outcomes, you know, ventures are driven by this Power Law of Return, you know, where one company returns sort of the whole portfolio is being both what I say, is contrarian and correct. And so what you guys are doing in some way, shape or form, because you're the first to do this, it is contrarian. So what would the other experts in the field or folks that are out there that are naysayers? What are the ways in which they disagree with you, you know, how are you guys kind of pushing against the grain? Or why hasn't somebody done this before? What do you think it was that enabled you guys to spot this market and be actually a little bit contrarian?
Jeff Chen
Yeah, so maybe I'll start with the question of why hasn't necessarily anyone done this before? I think everyone in the world that had a really good sense of clinical - and clinical trials are incredibly like complex thing to do. Vast majority of those folks, almost all of them, were either running these clinical trials for pharma, where it costs $50 million - $100 million a trial, takes five years, 10 years, whatever. Or they were university professors, and they weren't necessarily thinking about scale, they were just focused like one project at one research study at a time. And their timelines in academia are also like very different, their goals are very different, as well. So I think, fundamentally, you had all the subject matter experts, tackling areas that were totally unrelated to the wellness sector and could never be applied, and translate to the wellness sector. So I think that was probably one key piece of this. And because they were well fed by pharma's dollars, or well fed by grants, there was no incentive to lower the cost 10x, and speeded up by 10x, or make it automated and scalable. Like, who would you be doing that for? There's not 10,000 pharma companies like there are 10,000 wellness companies. And again, when you're a professor in academia, you're not trying to do it, you're just focused one grant one project at a time. So I think that was part of it. For us to come in and be like, Hey, we see this use case, no one else sees it, no one else candidly cares, because they're being fed right now, from grants and pharma, and they're happy. But here's an entire sector that's languishing that needs this and needs the barriers brought down. And also, I think we knew enough to be dangerous. But we haven't been saddled by doing this for like 20 years, the old way, where it's hard to think outside the box, we both had, again, knew enough to be dangerous. So that was nice.
Jeff Chen
To answer the other part of your question, the contrarian aspects. So I would say one key contrarian piece on this, and it still comes up when we're talking to clients where maybe the chief science officer has been doing trials the old way, or has experienced trials, though, for many decades. They'll say, oh, but uh, you don't have so much control over your subjects in a virtual study that's automated. In, for instance, in the clinical trials, I was running at UCLA, you would have people physically come in, you'd give them the study product, you'd record information from them. And then they come back a week later, and you do it all over again. And it's very tightly controlled. And sometimes you call them in between and all this stuff. And the contrarian thinking that we said as well, that's fine, you may be able to better control the study. But then does your data matter then, to someone who's then going to pick up this product off the shelf, take it home, and they don't have a doctor calling them every day, and they're not taking it exactly twice a day at the exact 12 hours apart, and yada yada yada. So we actually think that our approach results in better data not despite but because of the lack of strict control. Because then people in our study are using the products in a more similar way to how these products will actually be used in the real world. Therefore, the data and results from our study are more relevant and predictive of what's going to actually happen when this product is sold at Whole Foods that someone walks home with it.
Jeff Chen
And number two, related to that. In addition to the usage being more reflective, we think that the outcome measures that we're focused on are ones that are more relevant and important. And I'll explain a little more. Our key outcome measures that we're generally collecting are validated, patient reported outcome measures. And so these are how people are experiencing things, how they're feeling and functional effects. So in addition to that, we will collect, for instance, blood and saliva. But I always go back to - if you sell someone a product, especially if you're a wellness brand. And let's say you are changing some aspect of the blood chemistry, but they don't experience a benefit, they don't feel any different. There's no functional difference, you might sell it to them once, but they're not going to keep buying. And so wouldn't you like to know what your product is actually doing for their quality of life, their functional outcomes, or experiential outcomes. So that's why so much of our studies were focused on that. Whereas in the pharma world, it's kind of the opposite, they're focused on moving a blood marker, or something like that. So that was another aspect that was rather contrarian.
Jeff Chen
And when you're looking at experiential and functional outcome measures, the best place in time to collect that, and setting, is when someone is just going about their day, without someone looking over their shoulder, pressuring them to fill out some information. Now contrast that with a clinical trial, a real real, like naturalistic real world outcomes, as opposed to like, Hey, Scott, I dragged you into this clinic, you sat through traffic for an hour, you're late for your next thing. You're tired and I hand you a survey, how's your mood right now? Shit, my mood's not great. Right now I'm pissed. How's your energy right now? It's not great. So versus you and someone in a white coat sitting in front of you. So you might be kind of indirectly unconsciously being like, oh, I want to fill this out in a way that appeases them. Versus when we're just directly working with you and your smartphone in your own home collecting those outcomes. It's much more reflective of what you're actually experiencing.
Scott Hartley
Yeah, I could see that being very contrarian to the kind of ivory tower and traditional ways that things were done and highly controlled. But shifting gears a little bit, kind of in summary to wrap up, you know, other than your Oura ring, and the fact that you don't need to sleep and you do 8000 push ups a day, what is your superpower? What is the thing that you're known for? That I could, I could ask Pelin, and she would confirm?
Jeff Chen
Yeah superpower, I would say probably something around like storytelling. Storytelling, public speaking. And the oral communication, I think I was very blessed that I developed that superpower, largely through - I was I was, by pure chance and luck, I kind of fell into a rock band in college. And so we play a lot of shows. And at that point, you kind of become unflappable in front of a crowd. And in between the sets, you still gotta keep the crowd pumped, and you gotta like, you know... so I think that's where I kind of first developed it. And then it was really honed the three years that I was at UCLA running a research center, because I had to give so many talks, and give so many interviews to reporters. So that's where I really had to hone that storytelling and public speaking superpowers. And there are ways to hone that for other founders out there. You can go to Toastmasters, they have regional chapters all over both physically and virtually. So you can practice the art of storytelling. And it's a very powerful tool that to use in everything, everything from fundraising, to marketing, to sales, to even just leadership with your own team on. When we do our all hands virtually, or in person retreats. It's that storytelling where you're you're getting the troops jazzed, you know, and you're getting them riled and ready to go to war and fight.
Scott Hartley
It's so funny you say that, because that's the opening story in the book that I wrote a few years ago. It's about a young woman who's making her way on Broadway, and then becomes an entrepreneur. And she really equates entrepreneurship to the same process that she experienced auditioning for Broadway shows. You know, where you show up, and you're auditioning to be Kate, you know, in Taming of the Shrew. And everyone gets the same part, everyone gets the same script, the same words on the page. 50 people show up at the audition and 1 person leaves with the part, and 49 go home. And you think about this in the context of entrepreneurship. Everyone says, Well, gosh, you know, I had the same idea at the same time. And my response is, well, 49 other people also showed up at the audition, but one person persevered under the lights, had the ability to sort of storytell to imbue the character with the right emotion, the right passion, the right meaning. And that same characteristic is something as you've talked about, that is really something that leads to your success. Not just spotting the opportunity, not just having the tail winds, not just getting sort of the go ahead from regulatory shifts, but it's really this ability to right place, right time, getting the right words on the page, but then executing under the lights, keeping the momentum of the crowd and having that rockstar concert.
Jeff Chen
Yeah, and I think another for this female actress that was on Broadway, a lot of that is also how truly authentic, passionate, and aligned is this mission with you as an individual. And that's where - it doesn't even become storytelling anymore. It's almost like just a manifestation, an expression of yourself. And that really resonates as well both whether you're a performer or you're an entrepreneur, trying to get a founding team in place, trying to get investors to believe you. So, find that thing that is aligned with you at your core, in essence, and the storytelling will come naturally.
Scott Hartley
Alright, Jeff we'll speed round here. What's a book you're reading right now and really enjoying?
Jeff Chen
It's a super random book. I picked it up and I'm loving it. It's Seabiscuit like it was made famous from that movie, but man, you're reading it. And it's such an awesome underdog story. And the characters are so rich, and the movie doesn't fully do it justice. So I recommend check out the book. It's pretty, pretty fantastic. It's an older book it's written maybe 15 years ago.
Scott Hartley
Yeah, remember that about the horse. If you could live anywhere in the world for a year, where would that be other than Santa Monica?
Jeff Chen
I would live in a camper van. And actually drive around for now, let's say the continental US and eventually maybe some trans stuff like through loop through LATAM and stuff. For now, it would be amazing to spend a year living out of a camper van driving around the US and spending a week or two in a different spot before moving on.
Scott Hartley
What's your favorite productivity hack? And I think I know between wall sets and push up. What else?
Jeff Chen
Good point. Good point. So productivity hack. Yeah, like after you eat a meal, make sure you do a little bit of movement. And you will find that you will have better energy after that, because you're basically helping your body regulate your blood sugar spikes better, and you'll have less of a crash. Another one that I've recently started doing is trying to break up my day with little moments of flow. And whether that's like, I'll hop on my skateboard and go around the block. Or I will put on my favorite tune and just dance. Or like I will sing a song and grab my guitar. And I think what what it actually does is it gets me into a flow state or near a flow state. And then when I returned to my task, I'm actually in that flow state to carry through the task at hand. It only takes a couple minutes to dance to a song, hop on your skateboard for a second. You know, sing a song, whatever.
Scott Hartley
That reminds me of one of our other podcasts where Jenny interviewed Kevin Delaney who's the founder of Quartz media and now Charter. Kevin keeps a keyboard in his office. And I asked him, Kevin, what's the keyboard for? And he said, Well, if I have to change tasks from something that's high, highly management oriented to highly flow state oriented, sometimes I'll just go over and I'll play a song in that helps me sort of transition in those moments. I love that. I'm gonna get on my skateboard from from high school. Try to not break my arm. And finally, where can listeners find you?
Jeff Chen
Oh, LinkedIn is probably the best. All my ad tags are Dr. Jeff Chen, Dr. Jeff Chen, Dr. Jeff Chen, across Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook, and most of my assets. Yeah LinkedIn is probably where I'm posting most of my stuff these days. Unless you want to see like stories of me like surfing or something that's that's on Instagram. But yeah, LinkedIn for all things business related.
Scott Hartley
All things business. Well, Jeff, thank you so much for spending the time with us today. I think this is really a fascinating discussion of category creation and all the other things that radicle science is really pioneering. So congratulations, and thanks for spending the time with us.
Jeff Chen
And you know, thank you for having me, Scott, just again, thank you for all the early support and belief that you and your team have had. It's honestly truly been amazing. And I rave about you guys. And we're just such big fans, and so lucky to have you guys on our cap table.
Scott Hartley
Thanks for joining us and hope you enjoyed today's episode. For those of you listening, you might also be interested to learn about everywhere, we’re a first check preseed fund that does exactly that. We invest everywhere. We're a community of 500 founders and operators and we've invested in over 250 companies around the globe. Find us at our website, everywhere.vc on LinkedIn and through our regular founder spotlights on Substack. Be sure to subscribe and we'll catch you on the next episode.
Read more about Radicle Science in Founders Everywhere.
Pelin Thorogood is featured with Scott Hartley on Episode 39 of the Venture Everywhere podcast. Listen on Apple, Spotify and check out all our episodes here.
