Conrad Slorer

Venture Capital is increasingly directing their dollars towards "Quantified Self" startups like Whoop, Oura Ring, and Eight Sleep. These companies promise a new era of health, fueled by a constant stream of biometrics. But VCs overestimate the average consumer's appetite for granular health data, missing larger opportunities to solve basic challenges. These oversimplified metrics are the TV dinners of health and wellness. You may feel a little fresher by bumping your recovery score from a 93 to a 97, but something else is probably going to get you first (maybe unnecessary stress).

The Quantified Self is an extension of the same sociological phenomena that explain why so many Americans are chronically ill in the first place. Other countries are default-healthy; Americas are default-chronically ill. We lack the centuries-old culture of home-cooked meals, local produce, socializing, and movement that we enjoy on vacations to countries like France, Italy, and Japan but fail to replicate at home. Traditional American ways of eating, like the quantified self, are an extension of American Industry, hyper-industrialized and over-optimized. Our food is mass-produced, mixed with petrochemicals and shockingly shelf-stable. Two-tonne personal vehicles shuttle us from A to B while scientists develop cutting-edge treatments for diseases created by our own modern lifestyles.

I do not see America embracing Japan's home-made school lunch system or Italy's tradition of La Passeggiata in the near term. People always prefer for their problems, including their own health, to be solved for them, rather than doing it themselves. The only way to default-health in America is via even more technological acceleration, but metrics are not the end-game. Products that improve our health in the background will capture long-term value.

I think it's great that the tech-adjacent crowd (myself included) are taking active steps in measuring and improving their health and performance. This new wave of wellness is leading to reduced alcohol consumption, increased intake of whole foods, and an openness to talking about mental health. And for the first time, people with non-scientific backgrounds are trying to read the scientific literature. Bryan Johnson and Andrew Huberman's deep dives into the scientific aspects of health like metabolic aging, hormonal balance, and epigenetics are the best examples of the new popularization of the technical side of health and fitness. But corporate athletes should note how frequently they use metrics and benchmarks in the rest of their lives (EBITDA, LTV, TAM, FLOPS, etc.) before they project how the rest of the world wants to get healthier. For VCs immersed in this culture of relentless self-optimization, the Quantified Self represents peak well-being. This resonates deeply within a region populated by high-achievers, early technology adopters, and individuals deeply invested in these same companies.

This movement misses the vast majority of the population who grapple with inconsistent exercise routines, ingrained poor dietary habits, pervasive chronic stress stemming from demanding work and economic pressures, and a lack of access to readily available and affordable healthy lifestyle options. For these consumers, the phases of deep sleep stage or heart rate variability are irrelevant compared to basic healthy eating or a sustainable exercise routine. Solutions are far more valuable than insights. For example, 6% of Americans are on GLP-1s but less than 1% wear CGMs. Once a problem is resolved, it no longer needs to be measured. The only customers left are the same biohacking adjacent people who love optimizing metrics ad nauseam.

The market has already witnessed wearable user numbers plateau after rapid initial growth. Jawbone, once a prominent player in fitness trackers, ultimately faltered, struggling to maintain user engagement beyond the initial novelty of step counting and basic activity tracking. Fitbit, while achieving broader mainstream adoption, has also faced challenges in sustaining rapid growth. I think Eight Sleep will have real staying power because it improves your sleep rather than just measuring its quality. I believe its key value proposition is that you do not have to change your own behavior to have better sleep. The sleep score is there for those that want it as well, but you do not need to look at it in order to feel better every day.

Another example of a healthy solution that does not require extra work is CloudKitchen. American loves fast-food. CloudKitchen is a great product because it allows a consumer to maintain the same habit of ordering takeout, but with the nutritional value of a home-cooked meal and the additional macronutrient metrics if you care to look at them. The solution takes precedent with the metric in the background if you care. I think that's a great formula.

Another is Z-Biotics. Want to keep drinking? Great! Have this little shot before you have ten shots and you won't have to deal with the normal consequences of drinking. Obviously it would be better if we were all perfectly healthy and never drank, did drugs, or ate fast food. But before we all become perfect, there is a lot of room for products that do the work for us.

Venture capital will find more sustainable and impactful opportunities in businesses that directly address the more pervasive and fundamental health needs of the average consumer. These solutions, while perhaps less technologically interesting than metric-heavy wearables, address the root causes of poor health for the majority, offering a more scalable and ultimately more impactful path to market success. And while I am excited to buy an Eight Sleep when I can scrape the money together, it would be intellectually dishonest of me to assume the rest of the world shares my metric obsession.