Venture Everywhere Podcast: Pelin Thorogood with Scott Hartley
Scott Hartley, Co-founder and GP of Everywhere VC, catches up with Pelin Wood Thorogood, the co-founder and Executive Chairwoman of Radicle Science.
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Episode 39 of Venture Everywhere is hosted by Scott Harley, Co-founder and GP of Everywhere VC, and he catches up with Pelin Wood Thorogood, the co-founder and Executive Chairwoman of Radicle Science, a leading healthtech B-corp company that offers Proof-as-a-Service for personalized wellness solutions. Pelin discusses Radicle Science's data-driven methods, ensuring affordable and trustworthy clinical trials. Pelin also shares insights on the increasing consumer demand for personalized solutions and their potential impact on wellness.
In this episode, you will hear:
Radicle Science’s role in helping companies optimize their formulations and claims.
Benefits of the Proof-as-a-Service model for companies in the wellness industry.
Continuous adaptation in startups and the principles of dynamic optimization.
How personalized data can aid in customizing wellness solutions to individual needs.
The importance of prioritization and focus for entrepreneurs.
If you liked this episode, please give us a rating wherever you found us. To learn more about our work, visit Everywhere.vc and subscribe to our Founders Everywhere Substack. You can also follow us on YouTube, LinkedIn and Twitter for regular updates and news.
TRANSCRIPT
00:00:00 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.
00:00:20 Scott: I'm Scott Hartley. I'm co-founder of Everywhere Ventures. And I'm here today with our distinguished guests, Pelin Thorogood. Pelin is the co-founder and executive chairwoman of Radicle Science, which is really pioneering Proof-as-a-Service of a personalized wellness, studying 50,000 plus Americans since its inception in 2021.
00:00:40 Scott: It's really been named by a number of different outlets as a world-changing idea by Fast Company, KPMG Tech Innovator. Pelin, welcome to the podcast, Venture Everywhere. We're so excited to have you with us.
00:00:52 Pelin: Thank you so much. It is my pleasure.
00:00:55 Scott: Maybe you could give us a little bit of your personal background. I know that you're from Turkey originally. You came to the US. You've got three degrees from Cornell. You're heavily involved with UC San Diego as a trustee and treasurer to the foundation.
00:01:10 Scott: And then as a main job, you have this co-founder of Radicle Science. You've got such a diverse and fascinating background. Love to hear a little bit about your journey to become an entrepreneur.
00:01:20 Pelin: Sure. So briefly, yes, I'm from Istanbul, Turkey, so Mediterranean girl through and through, and came to the States when I was 18 to go to Cornell to study engineering, or more specifically, information engineering and operations research. So very much been a data girl from day one.
00:01:38 Pelin: I love exploring things, and I love understanding patterns and where things may lead to. I got my bachelor's in engineering, my master's in engineering, and my MBA all from Cornell on this crazy six-year program.
00:01:50 Pelin: And then moved to the West Coast, to the world of data and analytics, which has been, as we all know, a pretty exciting world in terms of how we leverage these ever-increasing datasets to drive better decisions across the board. So that has been my life and very much enjoyed it.
00:02:07 Pelin: It's both very much a thinking job because you think about data, but it's also a feeling job because you also want to understand the patterns and how things actually interact. So it's a left brain, right brain thing.
00:02:18 Scott: Amazing. And when you and Jeff, your co-founder, got together to start Radicle Science, one of the things, maybe you can give us a high level description about what you guys do specifically, but one of the things that really struck me and piqued my interest and really drove our interest in investing in your company was these adjacencies where you see heavy trends of adoption happening in the market, and then you think about the picks and shovels, businesses adjacent to those trends and those tailwinds.
00:02:45 Scott: I think what you guys are doing obviously skates into a real focus around personalized medicine, around wellness, and then also around veracity of what actually works, right? There's so much noise in the ecosystem around different supplements, different wellness hacks, different biohacking, all the different tools and tricks that people are doing these days, and you hear about it, and especially living in a place like New York or Los Angeles, you see it on the streets day in and day out.
00:03:10 Scott: You see it, the whole aisles upon aisles of different supplements at Whole Foods. And who's proving what works and why it works? And maybe you can talk a little bit about the mission behind Radicle Science and really the big pioneering category that you guys have created to really verify some of these supplements that are out there.
00:03:28 Pelin: Absolutely, and I think what's really cool about our partnership with Jeff or Dr. Jeff Chen, is the fact that we have such complimentary backgrounds. He's a doctor. He was running clinical trials on natural products at a lab that he had started at UCLA.
00:03:45 Pelin: We talked about my background has been data, analytics and making sense out of these large data sets. And after my last exit, I had started funding some clinical trials. Again, I'm very focused on wellness. That's a personal passion.
00:03:58 Pelin: And I knew there was not a whole lot of data on them. And I realized that the way we were doing clinical trials, to me, coming from the outside in, there was something missing. Not only that they were expensive and slow, which obviously is a problem, but the datasets were very small and homogeneous.
00:04:15 Pelin: And you can't generalize data from small homogeneous datasets to the population at large. And Jeff, coming from the inside out, being actually living in the system and actually trying to fulfill his mission of delivering wellness, as a doctor, he was also battling these things and seeing all the issues.
00:04:34 Pelin: So Jeff and I had been friends for several years and when COVID hit and when all clinical trials came to a screeching halt for obvious reasons, we already knew there was a better way and we decided it was time for us to actually do something about it.
00:04:47 Pelin: And our complimentary backgrounds was a perfect place for us to start that intersection of data and medicine. And the other part is there's this incredible focus on precision medicine, personalized medicine, which is fantastic. But it's primarily around pharma. And we are really trying to cure diseases, which I am very, very happy about.
00:05:07 Pelin: But what we don't have is the similar focus on well-care. How do we actually keep people healthier longer so that we don't have to necessarily cure diseases? When they get sick, please let's do that. And let's do it with the best information and the most personalized and precise method possible.
00:05:24 Pelin: But how about we actually understand how to keep each of us in our different ways, healthier, longer. And when we have minor ailments, how can we actually take care of them so they don't actually become full-blown diseases? So really, the focus behind what we're doing is not personalized medicine.
00:05:45 Pelin: It's personalized wellness for a reason because our focus is wellness, to promote wellness and do it at the personalized level because between you, me, and Jeff, it's whether a product is good or bad is not the point. It's about what's going to work for us right here, right now for our unique condition.
00:06:01 Scott: So thinking about those products that are out there in the market, you guys are really focused on helping both brands, but also retailers, potentially, that are offering these various modalities to customers to be able to prove that this is what it says it is. It has the amount of ingredients that it states on the box.
00:06:19 Scott: That it has these objective measurements and metrics that you guys are able to measure across different diverse conditions, different diverse populations, and verify these on behalf mostly of brands and also retailers? Or how do companies come to you guys and request Proof-as-a-Service?
00:06:35 Pelin: Interestingly, the thing about the wellness industry is that until very recently, until, in some ways, these approaches that we are pioneering were available, they did not have access to the double-blind placebo control clinical trial model. It was, honestly, invented for the pharmaceutical industry, products that are patentable.
00:06:56 Pelin: So they could afford these costly and lengthy clinical trials, which, again, very valuable for the drug discovery processes. But these products that anybody can go purchase from a Whole Foods or a CVS or wherever, they did not have the opportunity to be tested for efficacy.
00:07:14 Pelin: We test them for cleanliness, which is, of course, very, very important. But the best that the wellness industry could do was look at information out there about individual ingredients that may have been tested or look at animal trials and things like that to be able to create the best products they could create based on the data available.
00:07:31 Pelin: Whereas there are synergies or antagonistic reactions between different ingredients. Dosage obviously matters. So creating a formulation and testing that formulation on a large population and seeing maybe variances between men and women or age groups or even BMI is a very, very important thing. And this is not something that was accessible to them.
00:07:52 Pelin: That's what we came in to do. And the reason we are calling what we do Proof-as-a-Service, really creating a new category, is this was missing out there. What we're not doing is doing something better and cheaper than before. We're actually bringing something to the table that was not doable before, it was not accessible before. Hence the whole point around category creation.
00:08:13 Pelin: And what we're doing is trying to create those better business decisions on creating and offering the best product as well as best health decisions so that you're actually getting something that's going to help with your condition powered by proof. That's the point around creating the proof part.
00:08:28 Pelin: And as a service, very much akin to how software as a service back in the day, 20-some years ago, came along and changed the industry and made something that was very complicated, that you had to have the IT group as the intermediaries to be able to implement anything, turned into something turnkey so anybody could do it.
00:08:48 Pelin: So we're here to actually bring proof, both business proof as well as health-related proof, and turn it into a turnkey offering so anyone can access it. So really bringing it to accessible and affordable for the population for their different needs.
00:09:05 Scott: It's so interesting to talk about category creation. When you guys started this business, I don't imagine you foresaw this ability to create an entirely new category. Looking back through history, some of the key examples of category creation may be pointing to Chrysler was on the ropes as a car company.
00:09:23 Scott: They came up with something that was in between a sedan and a hatchback. They called it a minivan, and then they ended up owning the category of minivans for decades following, right? Creating a whole new category around that. Similar to 5-Hour Energy maybe is another good example of somebody that created a direct-to-consumer energy drink.
00:09:43 Scott: When they went to stores, they said, we don't want to compete with the beverage aisle. We actually want to sell this at point of sale in a very small form factor. Created an entirely new category of energy drinks, which then led the way to a million other copycats, right?
00:09:57 Scott: We talked earlier about Marc Benioff and the creation of Salesforce being one of the very first pioneers of software as a service. Taking software, moving it off-premises into the cloud, and charging on a monthly basis. You were also participatory in some of those early days of web building.
00:10:14 Pelin: Yes, I was. Interesting times.
00:10:16 Scott: Helping turn marketing from an art into a science. Maybe you could walk us through that experience in creating a category, turning marketing into a much more analytical, web analytics type operation, and maybe how you learned from that experience to then spot the opportunity with Radicle Science to create this new category. And then, what is that like? What is it like to create a category? How do you actually go about the mechanics of doing that?
00:10:41 Pelin: No. Category creation is, I don't know that necessarily you start out saying, I'm going to create a category. I think some of those dots connect backwards, a la Steve Jobs, when you realize what you're doing. One of my very first jobs back in the day was chief marketing officer, Website Story, a company that went public in 2004. It was the third SaaS IPO, software as a service IPO.
00:11:02 Pelin: First one, of course, being Salesforce.com. And that basically changed marketing as we know it. Until then, marketing was, and still is, an art. About which one do you like better, blue or red, or this ad or this ad? And you know, everybody had a different opinion, and you'd ask a few people. Maybe you had a focus group.
00:11:21 Pelin: Leveraging analytics, web analytics, we're able to now all of a sudden turn that focus group into millions of people and understand how all these different people reacted and understand how these subgroups reacted differently so we could start targeting. We could actually pick what worked for which group, in which channel, at which time. What an incredible concept.
00:11:41 Pelin: And I was fortunate enough to be actually the person, as an engineer and a data girl, be embodying the new generation of marketers that are going to be thinking differently, bringing art and science together so that you can actually create something that's really cool, but then that prove that it works or proof for a different group. That, I think, is something that we were doing at the time.
00:12:03 Pelin: To me, Radicle Science is very, very similar. We came in, really, to initially ensure that a wellness product, which did not get enough attention for a lot of the reasons we discussed, could actually afford clinical trials, clinical proofs so that they can actually be proven and be trusted by consumers, trusted by healthcare providers, trusted by insurance so that they could actually become a new way of providing wellness to the masses.
00:12:28 Pelin: I mean, we are a B Corp. We're a public benefit corporation. Even in our mission, as stated the Secretary of State of Delaware, when we actually formed the company, is about bringing wellness and making it affordable and accessible to the masses. That's what we're here to do. So that's what we're doing. What we didn't realize is our methodology actually completely changed the game.
00:12:47 Pelin: We were doing something that was completely missing. It was going to enable personalized wellness at a level and was going to change how manufacturers could manufacture the best products, not just products that hopefully work, but best products, and for products that work for different subpopulations, for retailers to be able to offer the right products for their target markets.
00:13:08 Pelin: Whole Foods and CVS likely have different target markets. For insurance companies to offer potential insurance on products that were actually going to promote wellness instead of for them to actually have to cover sick care later on.
00:13:21 Pelin: And for health care providers to be able to trust the information, just like they trust a lot of the pharma drugs, to be able to actually suggest using those to promote wellness versus always dealing with sick care. So we realized we had this massive opportunity.
00:13:35 Pelin: That's when we said, this is the time for us to actually focus on category creation, so people realize we're shifting the game completely.
00:13:42 Scott: It's so interesting because we have this gamut of, call it formal health care, and we have a movement now toward kind of food as medicine, really a movement that's long existed in the East that's kind of now moving West to some degree.
00:13:56 Pelin: Well, you know, Hippocrates, I think it's not that new at all.
00:14:00 Scott: You're right, going all the way back. And thinking about in that Whole Foods aisle or any retailer, the ability to more granularly help people find the wellness products that really suit to your point about web analytics, right audience, right place, right time.
00:14:15 Scott: If I'm on the cusp of getting sick, to better know that a ginseng shot or a tincture of this type, or a supplement of that type could actually help me stave off that coming illness, that's a really useful tool. And to this point, you know, we don't really have the analytics or the measurement. If you can't measure it, you can't manage it, as the group once said.
00:14:34 Pelin: No. Well, and then our motto at the Web Analytics was creativity without conversions equals zero. So you need both parts. You need to actually have the idea around the formulation in this case or the idea around the ads or whatever in the marketing case. But then it actually has to work.
00:14:50 Pelin: It has to convert people for marketing and it needs to heal people in medicine. So you need both sides. And that's the art and science coming together. Analyze with large scale data to understand exactly what is the right thing right here, right now to the person that we're dealing with.
00:15:06 Scott: Shifting gears a little bit to how you guys run these clinical trials on behalf of these companies. Could you talk about maybe a couple of companies or types of companies that you guys work with?
00:15:16 Scott: And then two, how do you select the patient populations? How do you sort of make sure this is emblematic of society writ large or has enough diversity, enough data to really get a viewpoint into the efficacy of that particular supplement?
00:15:28 Pelin: Sure. So we basically work with any company, large or small. Some of our customers are some of the largest CPG companies with multi-hundred-billion-dollar market caps. Others are companies that are literally forming and they are thoughtful enough to actually want to go to market with a product that works.
00:15:46 Pelin: The entire gamut. And that's the beauty of actually creating something that is actually affordable for all from that perspective so we can bring all the creativity out there and for us to actually test the veracity and see if it actually works or not. Across the board, we work with all manufacturers and even ingredient suppliers in terms of what we do.
00:16:06 Pelin: We help them develop the best formulation. So we will start working with them from the R&D stage. So companies can come to us with multiple formulation ideas with different ingredients, perhaps different dosages, against an active, plus non-active placebo such as melatonin. We know it works for sleep.
00:16:21 Pelin: And against a placebo as well, full-blown placebo. So that we understand out of these products which one or which ones beat placebo, how they compare to a known active such as, say, melatonin or caffeine or other things.
00:16:34 Pelin: And also, because of the very, very large scale of our populations, we're able to understand how different subpopulations at a very basic example have men versus women or different age groups may respond differently. Because the world is not about averages. It's really about getting as close to personalized as possible.
00:16:51 Pelin: So we really do a lot of subpopulation analysis to figure out. We may find out that they have actually two products that beat placebo. Well, one is better for men, one is better for women or better for a different age group.
00:17:03 Pelin: And sometimes we tell companies, you know what, out of your four formulations, only one actually beat placebo. That's the one you go to market with. So we enable them to go to market with the best product, the product that actually works.
00:17:14 Scott: So in many ways, the kind of Proof-as-a-Service is almost helping R&D as a service to really optimize formulation at the inception point of a company going to market, which is fascinating.
00:17:26 Pelin: Absolutely. But that's only the beginning. Then we help them with claims so that they can actually enable the right claims so they don't get into trouble with regulators. We help them with marketing so they can actually target the right populations back to our earlier point.
00:17:39 Pelin: Right product in the right channel to the right population, etc. We really work with our brands across the entire lifecycle with R&D, with regulatory and with marketing so that our data is the proof that actually powers each of those activities. So that's why it's so powerful.
00:17:57 Scott: Thanks for clarifying that. Yeah, because you're right. It's only part of the funnel, R&D. And then that second piece, maybe talk a little bit about claims, because I know there has been a shift in the regulatory environment around liability, who is on the hook for false claims or claims that are over exaggerated, kind of beyond the pale of what the supplement may or may not be able to do.
00:18:19 Scott: So you really provide a backstop or a safety net in some ways for companies, whether it's retail or the brands themselves to be able to say, hey, this melatonin makes you go to sleep. It actually works. And therefore, we're able to claim this on the box, on the label and target that population that's seeking that sort of outcome. So maybe you could talk a little bit about the benefits.
00:18:39 Pelin: Great question, Scott. In terms of claims, there are two types of claims, the explicit claims, things that says cures insomnia. Explicit claim, something you shouldn't be doing because it's a disease and supplements, for instance, should not be doing disease claims.
00:18:53 Pelin: There's implied claims. You can actually not say any of these things, but you can put the picture of a doctor or you can put an RX symbol or you can put sleeping person. Those are implied claims. So if a significant population of consumers believes that image to actually imply something, that's considered an implied claim.
00:19:10 Pelin: And FTC, the Federal Trade Commission, is actually responsible for both of them because they're all about truth in advertising. What did the new FTC guidance, which is really an update to their guidance from about 25 years ago, highlights for the new FTC guidance that is really an update to their guidance from 25 years ago, clarifies that for competent and reliable scientific evidence.
00:19:33 Pelin: What supplement companies and really wellness companies, things that are not drugs, things that are not pharmaceuticals, need to have double-blind placebo-controlled clinical trials on humans, so not animal trials, and on a population that is going to be using those products.
00:19:50 Pelin: Basically, if we're going to be selling to Americans, you need to do the study on Americans. You cannot be doing a less expensive trial, say, somewhere in Asia. So these are important parts of the clarification. And if those are not the case, and if you are saying things without the backing of this competent and reliable scientific evidence, you can get into trouble.
00:20:09 Pelin: And FTC has been getting a lot stricter, both on the brands saying it, for retailers who may be carrying these products, as well as influencers who might be able to highlight these products in effectiveness. So really, anybody who promotes any of these things without the right backing to consumers can actually have FTC after them. The reason is FTC is there to protect the consumers.
00:20:30 Scott: So interesting that oftentimes we find in businesses, the solving a heart attack, not a headache, or the pain points around the stick, not the carrot, so to speak, in regulation is a stick. It's a must-have. It's a thing you have to stay compliant on, whether that's the FDA or the FTC, around claims, as you described, both explicit claims or implied claims, which I actually didn't know until speaking to you and Jeff about this concept of implied claims.
00:20:57 Scott: But I said, oh, yeah, if you have the Zs on the box and the sleeping person, the implied claim, majority of people would say, is it probably puts you to sleep. And if you're putting those things on a box, therefore, you now have to verify and show that the efficacy of this product does, in fact, do what the implied claim leads you to believe it does.
00:21:15 Pelin: And Scott, what's really cool is, so that's the stick. And sticks are good because we're here to protect. But really, what's more powerful for the industry is not just running away from the stick, but the fact that consumers now want clinical proof and they're looking for scientific veracity of these products.
00:21:32 Pelin: According to the 2024 McKinsey survey on the future of wellness, that has become the number one driver of consumers selecting wellness products. So now we have the pool. Now we have the carrot that's showing that consumers are wanting products that work and consumers are wanting products that work for them.
00:21:50 Pelin: Personalization is another area that consumers are really focused on. So I love the fact that there is the government saying, this is what thou shall do. But what's always more attractive to businesses, that's what the consumers are willing to pay more money for as well. It's actually a new place.
00:22:06 Pelin: And again, that's where Radicle Science and the concept around category creation works really well. We were at the right place at the right time. It's actually, there's a lot of demand for this. And now we have the technology and the ability to be able to do this. So it's a very, very exciting time for personalized wellness. It's a very exciting time for all of us as consumers.
00:22:24 Scott: Thinking out to the macro vision of where do you see yourself and Dr. Jeff Chen? You know, in five, ten years around the goals of the business? What is the end game or what do you see as your mission in driving this company long run?
00:22:39 Scott: And then kind of the flip side to that question is what keeps you up at night? What are the things that could knock you off that path that you sort of wake up saying, oh, gosh, I need to solve this?
00:22:48 Pelin: So in terms of the future, that really, really excites me is, ability for each one of us to go to the channel that we like to purchase wellness products in. And again, wellness, I mean supplements are not the only kind of wellness, of course. So we're talking about any kind of wellness, functional foods, functional beverages, topicals, anything that actually promotes wellness. Right.
00:23:08 Pelin: My vision is, and this is very aligned with Jeff's vision, of course, is our vision is a consumer can be online, can be at a store and knows exactly what to get for their unique body and unique condition. They trust that product is going to help them.
00:23:24 Pelin: That product can get covered by insurance because insurance knows that product is going to actually promote wellness versus actually have to deal with that consumer and later on in sick care, which is going to cost them more money. And when they talk to their doctor, the doctor says, that's great.
00:23:39 Pelin: Or the doctor sent them there in the first place because they know it's going to work. So that trust among everyone, because the trust is going to be powered by proof that personalized wellness is that's going to be powered by proof.
00:23:50 Pelin: And that's the future I'm looking at, because that means we'll have affordable, accessible wellness products that can really help all of us at that personalized level promoting wellness for all.
00:24:01 Scott: And on that note, is that something that you guys think about as far as reimbursement? That's an interesting angle around whether it's FSA or HSA plans, flexible savings accounts, health savings accounts.
00:24:12 Scott: If you can prove that something has legitimate efficacy for your health or well-being, it seems like that's a major incentive for consumers to do more in that category. If you guys can provide the backstop of proof and veracity that then unlocks a number of different products into reimbursable categories.
00:24:28 Pelin: Absolutely. I mean, it's something that we are absolutely considering in the future. We believe all stakeholders in this massive ecosystem of wellness, they're all looking for proof. Consumers are really there to hopefully promote their own wellness and have something that works for them and something they can afford.
00:24:43 Pelin: But all the other players are, A, hopefully trying to do the right thing, but B, they're also trying to save money. I would think that insurance providers, if they have the data that this is going to actually prevent future doctor visits, hospital stays, they would have every incentive to actually support it. To me, it's about doing the right thing and also following the money so that you know that right thing is also going to help businesses. It's a win-win.
00:25:07 Scott: In the flip side of it, the excitement and the big vision, what keeps you up at night? What are the major challenges or headwinds that you feel on a daily basis just being an entrepreneur?
00:25:16 Pelin: Interesting question because what keeps me up at night oftentimes is not, oh my God, what can happen? The sky is falling. What keeps me up at night is the number of opportunities out there, and the focus is prioritization. How do I make sure I am picking the right things to focus on, something that can actually create the right tailwind for the next thing?
00:25:36 Pelin: It's more of an exciting reason to stay up at night versus a worry or a high anxiety-producing reason to stay up at night because the opportunity is massive. And there are so many ways we can go to market and so many ways we can actually achieve our vision. I really want to make sure we're getting there in the most effective way possible.
00:25:54 Pelin: And of course, it's not a straight line, so really figuring out that circuitous way and seeing the wormholes that we can actually identify, take advantage of so we can get there faster because that's what's going to help the world.
00:26:06 Pelin: That's what keeps me excited, keeps me up at night because I think what we're doing is the most exciting thing I've ever done as an entrepreneur. I love data. I love analytics. But this is the first time I'm actually applying it to something I'm truly passionate about, wellness.
00:26:20 Pelin: So what an incredible place to be able to apply my skills to something I'm truly passionate about and leveraging what I would call my superpower, which is lateral thinking. Really looking at things from multiple angles and solving these very difficult problems in unique and indirect ways, that's the opportunity. I think that's a pretty good reason to stay up at night.
00:26:41 Scott: That's incredible. One thing that I've seen and said many times is, you know, a lot of startups die not for lack of opportunity, but for lack of focus in this truth around prioritization and really being laser focused around three things. I call it accuracy, precision, and economy.
00:26:57 Scott: Accuracy is finding this product market fit. What is it that your consumers really want? And that's a moving target, right, because maybe early adopters are different than early majority or lagging adopters later in the curve. And then how do you build a culture internally?
00:27:10 Scott: How do you hire the right people to precisely hit that target repeatedly as it moves? Then how do you do that efficiently? How do you sort of do this on the least amount of inputs, whether that's human or capital, right?
00:27:21 Scott: And thinking through this rigorous prioritization, like you said, that's the thing that keeps, even for us running a small fund, keeps us up at night is what are the things that we need to focus on? What are the lowest hanging fruit opportunities?
00:27:33 Scott: The world's our ocean, but we've got to laser focus on those priorities. And so it's something that I feel like most entrepreneurs probably feel and it's a very optimistic reason to not go to bed.
00:27:43 Pelin: Absolutely. What's funny is, like I said, I did study operations research back in college and one of the classes I took was called dynamic optimization. I never thought that that would become the motto of my life. Literally, it's all about dynamic optimization because things shift all the time. It's not like one and done.
00:28:00 Pelin: There’s new inputs. Everything changes internally and externally. So how do you constantly looking at, how do I optimize this ever-moving thing with infinite dimensions? And to me, that's the funnest challenge I could possibly have.
00:28:13 Scott: Amazing. We have a tradition on Venture Everywhere podcast where we have a speed round, a lightning round. We get a couple of quick answers from you. We'd love to know what book you're reading or what podcast you're listening to, of course, other than the Everywhere Ventures podcast. What do you sort of have in your podcast radar these days or on your library shelf?
00:28:31 Pelin: Well, in terms of the book I just finished, it's Measure What Matters by John Doerr. It's really about the OKR objectives and key results model, which we are implementing in Radicle Science and really understanding the nuances.
00:28:46 Pelin: Because to reach these massive objectives, and I'd say we have pretty audacious objectives, we need to make sure we understand the individual milestones along the way, have full alignment across the whole company, and not even at a departmental level but individual level.
00:29:01 Pelin: To implement the OKR model, I read that book a few times. It has been very, very exciting and fun to get those nuances to make sure we can power and enable our team to actually achieve the goals.
00:29:13 Scott: Amazing. If you could live anywhere in the world other than San Diego, where would it be?
00:29:18 Pelin: Where I live doesn't suck, so that's a good question. But I'm from the Mediterranean, and to me, that's where everything started as far as I'm concerned. And that's where you don't have to have a life-work balance.
00:29:29 Pelin: It's all about life and living and connection. So it would probably be in the Aegean Sea somewhere on some small Greek island. And you can come hang out with me whenever you want.
00:29:39 Scott: That sounds great. Well, plan for it. I'll be over in that part of the world sometime soon this summer. What's your favorite productivity hack? How do you think about keeping alignment, again, back to this Mediterranean lifestyle, work-life balance. What are your tricks and tips?
00:29:55 Pelin: So to me, it's really about a change of scenery in every way. I go for longer short walks just because that's what clears my mind, clears any clutter and actually provides truly a new perspective, both because I'm walking and moving and also because I am able to get away from all the digital devices. So to me, the biggest key is moving and change of scenery so I can totally shift my mindset. And then all kinds of new thoughts are available and accessible.
00:30:24 Scott: Yeah, that's great. And finally, where can listeners find you online?
00:30:28 Scott: Very active on LinkedIn. My name is Pelin and so I was fortunate enough to actually own that handle. So I'm literally LinkedIn at Pelin. So it's pretty easy to find me there. And also I'm a contributor to Fast Company. So I love writing thought leadership articles about anything from category creation to the future of wellness. You guys can find me there too.
00:30:48 Scott: Incredible. Well, thank you so much for joining us today. We're super proud investors in Radicle Science and everything that you and Jeff are building. Couldn't be happier to have you on the podcast. So thanks.
00:30:57 Pelin: We are so honored to have you guys as investors. You and Jenny have been so supportive and so helpful across the board. Not to mention, honestly, reading you guys' articles, listening to your podcast. I'm not saying this is a plug.
00:31:10 Pelin: You are so, both of you are so thoughtful about how to help entrepreneurs think through the corners and think through the crevices. It's incredible. So we couldn't be more excited to have you guys as partners in crime.
00:31:19 Scott: Likewise. Well, thank you so much.
00:31:23 Scott Harley: Thanks for joining us and hope you enjoyed today's episode. For those of you listening, you might also be interested to learn more about Everywhere. We're a first check pre-seed fund that does exactly that, invests 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.
Check out Jeff Chen with Scott Hartley on Episode 12 of the Venture Everywhere podcast. Listen on Apple and Spotify and check out all our episodes here.