Startup Interview with Patrick Samy, Span.health CEO

HackerNoon Reporter: Please tell us briefly about your background.

I've been playing Tennis my whole life, while building online since the early 2000s. I was previously building consumer products for Skype at Microsoft, a product associate at Techstars, researcher at Stanford University, and I'm also part of On Deck.

What's your startup called? And in a sentence or two, what does it do?

I started Span after my own personal health journey.

We deliver 1:1 health & longevity coaching driven by data from next-gen wearables.

Our unique experience provides you with personalized diet, sleep & exercise experiments leveraging Oura, Whoop, Levels, Eight Sleep, Apple Watch, 23andme, Viome, ...and more.

What is the origin story?

After transitioning from being pretty active in college, to working for 8 hours a day at a desk for 3 years, I realized my health wasn’t in the right place.

I had maintained a balanced diet and was exercising 3 hours per week minimum.

Yet, all my blood markers were increasing and it was clear something in my diet, sleep hygiene, or exercise patterns was wrong.

I got as much data as possible from 23andme, an Oura ring, Apple Watch, Continuous glucose monitor. But it was with the help of my friends Dr. Adam Bataineh and Rachel Lett (Health Coach) that I was able to translate this data into experiment to run and validate changes.

I discovered I was eating and exercising as I should, but at the wrong time of the day.

Because of my genetic profile, this had a long-term negative impact on my health, enough to cause my blood glucose levels to go up every 3 months on a blood panel.

What do you love about your team, and why are you the ones to solve this problem?

Well, you’ve heard my story and it’s the same with the entire team at Span. We’re all driving our own experiments to keep optimizing and driving our health & longevity in the right direction – the same way most people do it for their wealth throughout their life.

If you weren’t building your startup, what would you be doing?

Building something else or joining an existing startup to build with them.

At the moment, how do you measure success? What are your core metrics?

Success for us is simple. Each member has a long-term goal and expects to move ~4% per week towards that goal. If our average progress across all members is equal or more than 15%, we’re doing our job well.

What’s most exciting about your traction to date?

We’ve been growing 100% month-on-month in the last 3 months, with over 50 customers today.

What technologies are you currently most excited about, and most worried about? And why?

Health & fitness wearables. We're all going to wear some kind of technology measuring our real-time health & fitness in 10 years. The big question is what are we going to do with this data.

What drew you to get published on HackerNoon? What do you like most about our platform?

Unique content from hackers & builders at the cutting edge and around the world.

What advice would you give to the 21-year-old version of yourself?

Get started. Faster.

What is something surprising you've learned this year that your contemporaries would benefit from knowing?

10 thoughtful customer calls can be the difference between life and death for a startup.