Jason Whitson - Co-Founder & CEO, Wellcore

Jason is a lifelong Austinite, athlete, technology innovator, team builder, and entrepreneur who approaches his career and business as a sport. His latest venture, Wellcore is bringing an ultra-premium health & wellness business that scales through virtual care technologies. 

 

Troy: Good afternoon, Austin, Texas. Hope your day is going well today. Today I am joined by Jason Whitson of Wellcore. How's it going today, Jason?

Jason: I'm good, Troy. How are you?

Troy: I'm doing well. It's been a fast start to the week somehow. It already feels like it's the end of the day. It's, one of those fa fast days.

I don't know. Is it usually slow days, fast years, or something like that? Like it's everything just. Seems fast though the last six, six to 12 months for whatever reason, and I'm sure as a relatively small company, that is the case for you a lot too, just because there's usually a lot on the plate of startup companies.

Jason: Yeah, time is definitely flying.

Troy: Nice. You're with well core based here in Austin. Usually, kind of like to start out a little bit with just like origin story, a little bit about you as one of the founders of the company and kind of just get a little bit of your background maybe a couple minute origin story about yourself and the pre court days.

Jason: Yeah. Origin story can't help but mention that. I was born and raised here in Austin. Been here all my life. Every now and then I run into a fellow unicorn, but it's pretty rare. I would

Troy: feel like, I feel like outta the 80 or so podcasts I've done, I've had maybe five or so people that were either at least, if not native Austins, like Native Central Texans or Texans, but a couple are native Austins.

So it's definitely definitely not the norm. So it's cool to be able to say that is you.

Jason: Yeah, I'm a tour guide for everybody that's riding around in my truck with me. Do you know what used to be there? Do you know what used to be there? Yeah. Origin story. So born and raised in Austin. But as it pertains to Wilco Wilco was this opportunity that came to me about a year and a half ago, a little over a year and a half ago.

We're a Red Bud Brands portfolio company. And they had this idea about human optimization, so healthcare for people who weren't necessarily sick but wanted to be the best possible version of themselves. And I got to talking to a couple of the operating partners and founders there and realized that my experience in IT and technology and app building, community building, Athletic performance, human performance, healthcare, and telemedicine was just this strangely perfect mix.

And I often joke about how they had me in the first, a few minutes of the conversation I wanted to be a part of this. But of course, drag it out for a couple weeks. But yeah, year and a half in the idea was to build something that was extremely high end and premium. That was just the antithesis of any existing healthcare experience today.

Being a poor kid that grew up without insurance I knew how expensive healthcare was how difficult it could be to consume, and we just wanted to build something that was nothing like that. Add in the fact that it has human performance elements addressing extremely important foundational elements of health and wellness.

And you had just a perfect storm for something that I'm really passionate about and wanted to do.

Troy: Nice. Yeah. You mentioned that background that on the, at the surface level maybe have seemed grab bag of all, a bunch of different stuff, but fit well with the well core side of things.

Like what, as your journey here living in Austin, did you end up going away for college or did you do the whole UT component of it as well too and had your whole career here in Austin or has that been a gone other places and kind of Austin pulled you back in?

Jason: Yeah, so I come from a family of entrepreneurs and business owners specifically with.

With my father was an auto mechanic and had his own shop Gibson Bar over on Lamar was the family auto repair shop from the early eighties until the mid two thousands. And before that it is what is now Little Woodrow on sixth Street. He got there in the seventies and my mother was a homemaker and we just had the mentality of, we, we do everything ourselves.

They didn't work for anybody. They always worked for themselves, and college wasn't really a thing for my family either. But my sister was the first to go and then I went and I'm a, I'm an ACC kid, so I was an Austin community college kid. Got my start there, going.

No, my first job, my first step into technology was running IT operations for a small company here in town that ended up going global. And throughout the 15 years that I was there, I started and shuttered probably a half dozen companies. Everything from E-com drop ship stores, blogging platforms.

Things that we now call social networks. Stuff that I just walked away from and got bored with. But never left Austin for any significant amount of time. Right after high school, took a little break and moved to Anchorage, Alaska chasing a what's called a roustabout job up at point Barrows, like the northern tip of Alaska, where you're basically a welder's assistant.

Okay. Came home and. Got to work and haven't looked back. So shorter answer to your question is Austin all my life personally and professionally. Nice.

Troy: Anchorage is a, for being in Austin, I the majority of your life, to have your one little blip be the northern part of Alaska is is a unique thing.

That's not oh yeah, I went up to Dallas for a year or so, or something along those lines. That must have been a pretty interesting experience being up there.

Jason: The funny thing about Anchorage is it's mostly Texans. Yeah. A lot of people from Houston, someone had to go up there and teach 'em how to drill for oil, yeah. So yeah it's an interesting crowd up there in a beautiful landscape. I never thought that I would be running around in shorts in a t-shirt, anywhere in Alaska, but the summers are actually quite nice. Yeah, and you have like daylight

Troy: frat forever and ever. I know. Remember that was one of the big things originally, so I grew up in the Midwest originally coming down here, I was like, oh I'll enjoy the warmer weather a lot more cuz I'd never really cared that much for winter.

But you, I. I'd always equated warm weather with longer days, and so when you got down here, you'd have warm weather in the winter, but you still had the shorter days, which was like, oh, that mean makes sense, like when you really think about it, but you just assume or you had equated when it's nice in seventies and eighties out that you have.

12, 14 hour days of sunshine. Obviously up there is more like 20 hours days of sunshine. And that's not necessarily always the case down here. If you wanna go golfing, you have to take the day off work in the winter. You can still go cause it's nice enough but you just don't have the sunshine to do

Jason: it.

Yeah. Playing basketball until midnight, 1:00 AM in the morning and Anchorage was weird. Never got used to it. And then winter down here in Austin, you're like trying to get the lawn mode before the sun goes down. Yeah. Cause it's gonna be dark. Yeah,

Troy: no, it's, yeah, it's that, like I say, definitely two different worlds in that regard as well too.

So it is interesting, a lot of the people that I end up interviewing on the podcast, because it does focus on a lot of small business owners and founders and stuff. Definitely a super high percentage of them had parents that did some type of entrepreneurial or small business kind of thing as well too.

It seems as if it was a much either, much more accepted or a much easier path to find when that was what you were used to growing up, which shouldn't be that surprising necessarily in that regard. But it's always interesting to hear the stories of Fam, parents and family members that were doing their own thing as well too, and not worried about having the regular nine to five and ma just making things work.

Cuz I think that's probably the biggest scare or worry for a lot of people that want to maybe do their own thing is just the uncertainty of it and how entrepreneurs have to deal with that. Honestly, on a daily basis, let alone on a quarterly or yearly basis. And so how do you think that affected you and your journey to becoming an entrepreneur?

Jason: I feel like there's two routes that an entrepreneur can take. There's the, I'm all in I'm making my living from this startup or second mortgage on the house kind of thing. And the other ones like myself is you have. A job where you are delivering or overdelivering between the hours of eight and five or eight and six and your evenings and your weekends, and any spare time that you have go into building something else.

I feel like now everyone's calling that a side gig. It's almost like entrepreneurs not the word that's being used. It's like everyone needs a side gig because that's how you're gonna make it. So I think it's still pretty common, but I guess it's. A little bit more accepted. And I don't have the data to, to verify this, but I feel like back in the eighties maybe there wasn't as many, gigantic employers like there are today.

We, with the growth in the tech space, I feel like we have a lot more IBMs and GEs, of the old days. You could even talk about the. Automobile industry, some of the biggest employers in the world. So I don't know. It was normal to us and it feels normal now.

It just has different words. Sure. No, and words are an interesting,

Troy: could be a whole podcast on, into themselves over the last few years about words and the meaning of words and stuff. But it's one of those that it's easier than ever to say you're an entrepreneur, cuz all you have to do is put it in your Instagram bio or wherever you want to put it.

And suddenly that makes you want, even though that's not really the case. But,

I would agree that like obviously company there, to some degree companies have gotten bigger and there's been, there's more big

Jason: companies perhaps than there were,

Troy: 20, 40 years ago or so. But at the same time, it's also easier to, because of the internet and because of the different opportunities out there, it's easier to Start and do that side hustle or side business or contract

Jason: work and those kind of things,

Troy: which were ne never felt like they were really an option for a lot of people 30 plus years ago because you didn't have the internet and couldn't, just do something if you're, you are.

Part-time gig was literally a real second job, like type of thing. Like literally go to someplace else and work in an office part-time on top of working at the factory part-time or whatever other type of work you did, where now you can actually build stuff yourself whether it be, Shopify stuff or Instagram, Amazon, those types of things.

So it's, there's definitely been a big difference in. The types of opportunities I feel like people have today versus 30 years ago.

Jason: Yeah. Mu much harder to build a, e-com drop ship business eighties, even in the nineties. A lot easier today. Yeah,

Troy: very much you mentioned for you than starting off being a part of a company but doing a lot of different things for them and then again, some of the stuff on your own, what.

What prompted you to have that desire? Because there's a lot of people as well who, even though when you're in it, it feels like everyone has a side business side hustle kind of stuff. But in reality, there's a lot of people that don't. There's a lot of people that go to their nine to five and then want to go play on the softball team or want to go

Jason: hit the golf course or whatever that may be.

Troy: What. In your mind had you deciding, hey, I want to try all these different kinds of things. E-commerce, drop shipping, social media, all those different things along the way.

Jason: I got really lucky in that my first real job, meaning not working on cars at the shop for my dad, or working at a movie theater over in Westlake way back in the day.

I was working in a space that I actually liked, even in my spare time. So it is data centers building out high performance computing capabilities to solve problems for the Department of Defense. I wanted to do that stuff at home. I did that stuff at home and it was. A tough sell in the beginning with the CEO that I reported to at my old company.

But he quickly came around and was like, okay, I see what you're doing. And what it was that I would do things in my spare time, which an employment agreement might say Hey, anything you do like on company hours is hours. I'm like, okay, then I'm gonna separate church and stay here and do it at home.

I learned things, trying to build businesses that I brought into the full-time job, whether it was building, web-based apps, and I'm, I'll date myself here, building stuff on the lamp stack that turned into a product delivery system for all of our clients at the company that I was working for full-time.

Everything they learned about building, What I would call a personal supercomputer. I never built anything that would take up this entire room, but built some things that would take up a couple racks worth of space. Brought that into the office and was able to help the computer aid engineering team solve problems for the modern war fighter.

So the luck was, my full-time job was something I loved and I could experiment and turn some of those things into businesses. Separately. Sure. Now granted everything that I learned or did on the side didn't translate to the full-time job, but a lot of it did. Yeah. And

Troy: only say a lot of it obviously has been impactful for different other parts of your career as well too.

Absolutely a big part, again, another big part of entrepreneurial life like, Social media likes to glamorize it. As people making millions of dollars when that's not the case for most entrepreneurs. But the fact that you're generally gonna fail way more than you succeed is can be a tough pill to swallow for a lot of people.

And so being able to have, I'm sure some of those micro failures, which really aren't failures, In the big scheme of things, but at the time they feel like it, right? When you're going through whatever project you're trying to do and hope it has success, it can feel that way. If you're not used to, hey, this is not that big a deal, that it failed cause we'll just move on to the next thing or figure out how to change it to be something

Jason: better.

And it's, it is, it's a mindset and short of. Referencing, some of the books that we've all read. Yeah. Failures are Lessons and you'll probably never make those mistakes again. But made plenty of those along the way. Still make 'em on a daily basis. Yeah. And you honestly learn

Troy: It they, while they can hurt, you learn so much more from them than the small successes that you have.

It's obviously we both talked about sports stuff before. It's why coaches like losses more than they like wins in some cases because you learn, your team learns so much more when they lose versus having a win where they maybe didn't execute that much better than the loss.

But it's harder to get those lessons through the win a lot of times than it is through the loss. And so having those setbacks is probably honestly a better word even than failures. But having those setbacks along the way is actually super beneficial for moving you further

Jason: down the road. Agreed.

Troy: So you're at. The previous business you were at or the, because that was mostly like self, or not self-defense, but national defense stuff, contractors, things that you mentioned, the IT stuff, was there any jump between there and then

Jason: getting to Elcor? I wouldn't say that there was a jump from there cause there were a couple stops along the way 15 years at that company led to actually Under Armor a really good friend of mine and I built a company just the two of us with some contract development help built a search engine effectively for upcoming fitness activities and.

We built it for ourselves because at the time we were still competitive athletes with a team and organizing a team of, I think at the time it was 12 men adults. It was like herding cats and to practice our sport, there's a lot of minutia and details in terms of what kind of practice, what are we gonna do, where are we gonna go?

How fast are we gonna go there? And him and I are super a, d about being organized, so we just built a tool. And then we're like, wait a second, we're inadvertently surfacing opportunities for people to join an event or an activity. What if we did this for more sports? So we ended up building it to support 23 different sports and we ended up having people list their activities globally.

Whether it was Austin or Dallas or Los Angeles or London. People started listing their activities on there cuz it was a way for them to get. Like-minded individuals to come in and join that activity. So before you know it, we're listing activities for Susan G. Coleman and Camp Gladiator in Gold's Gym.

Everyone that had a place where they wanted to bring people in. Now as I'm saying this out loud the way that we built that, the way that we architected it, was definitely something that I learned how to do at my previous company to solve a problem for them. And to build, side projects for myself.

From there, we, I wouldn't say we got that to be such a massive company that we had a lot of people courting us, but we definitely got the attention of Under Armor at a few other companies and they came knocking one day and they're like, we like what you have. Come up to Baltimore and show us more of it.

And we went to what's called their future show. It's it was their version of Shark Tank. Just as high pressure if you ask me cuz some of the people that were on the other side of the cameras, Olympians, professional athletes, executives, it was intense. And we got sent home on the first day of three days.

And we were pretty down on ourselves about that. We thought, man, we thought we had a great idea, we could integrate with what they were doing. Like it was gonna be great. Lo and behold, what we found out is they wanted us to go home cause they didn't want anyone else to see it. So that started another several months of conversations and courting and it turned into an acquisition.

And my good friend Tommy and I got to go there and Become, leaders amongst some very large teams and product in big data. You talk about a company that had they still effectively have, one of the largest data sets in the world in terms of activity tracking gps, but also at that point the largest food database.

Interesting ever known to mankind. And it was their acquisition of MyFi Pal, right? So going from, small companies, solving problems, department of defense, little bit of side hustle here and there to the darling of Wall Street at the time, one of the only companies to grow 20% quarter over quarter for 20 plus quarters.

It was insane. I. A little bit of a meat grinder for us. Two small business guys, entrepreneur, guys going to a place like that. But long-winded answer to your question, but yeah, a lot of what I learned in the previous role and what I did on the side fed into that, no doubt. After Under Armour it was telemedicine and healthcare.

Wasn't my first time in healthcare. I actually worked for an orthopedic surgeon a group of orthopedic surgeons in the nineties. Went into healthcare, telemedicine, SaaS platform did some experiential retail, went back to telemedicine, and then after that is, is what got me here to corre, hence the insane mix of experience that just happened to be perfect.

Yeah. And not that necessarily, I

Troy: don't know exactly how big Under Armour was at the time, but how. How was that transition? Because there's a lot of people who enjoy the startup, small business kind of space, and then a lot of those people don't necessarily enjoy, even if they're brought on, enjoy the complexity and red tape and processes of a much larger company, or a Fortune 500 company might.

My guess is maybe at the time there how was that integration just from, for you personally, from a, trying to get stuff done, trying to move your ideas and things forward? Maybe some of the contrast, some of the differences that way.

Jason: It was extremely difficult. It was a gut punch at times.

And I'll. Never speak for my buddy Tommy, but I think he would agree that it was extremely difficult cuz I have an opinion about big companies that buy startups. To me they do it because they see a small, efficient team that is able to build something potentially complex or complicated and extremely successful.

And they say, we can't seem to do that, so we're going to buy you and bring you in. And then once they do that, the integration of that startup into the new org, like you're describing, I've seen a lot of 'em fail. Yeah. Some of them personally, but some of them just from the outside, it's oh yeah, didn't they buy, oh, they shuttered that, or, oh, the entire team left after the acquisition.

Some companies do it really well. If you've ever gone to Wikipedia and looked at the list of acquisitions from companies like Amazon or Google or Facebook, they've made dozens and dozens of acquisitions and it's functionality in systems and Entire pieces of software apps that we use every day.

And we're like, oh man, Facebook made this amazing thing. It's no, they bought that. Yeah, they bought that from somebody and integrated it. It was difficult because when you go from being a very small agile team that is used to doing everything yourself, Not having a single person in the room that is ever willing to say, that's not my job.

To landing in an organization with a bunch of systems and processes, SOPs, politics, FTOs it can be really tough to navigate really tough. Yeah, no, it's

Troy: definitely, like I say, it is surprising to me that a lot of times those larger companies don't give the companies, they buy more anonymity. I think, obviously probably the most famous acquisitions, recent memory, especially the big ones are, Google buying YouTube or ins Facebook buying Instagram and WhatsApp and stuff.

And not that there definitely aren't a lot of integrations, but it felt like at least initially, they let those teams. Do what they were already doing just with the power of a bigger company and more resources and try to really give them some additional hyper growth functionality versus, no, we bought you, so now we wanna fold you into this organization that hasn't been able to do what you've been able to do over the last.

24 months and then suddenly, but we want you to keep having the same growth that you were having before. And it's we can't, if decisions are gonna take the amount of time they take

Jason: at the new company. Yeah. There's, yeah. So politics process that can add a bunch of time, which for an entrepreneur or someone that's used to going fast, it just, it feels like death by a thousand cuts.

I've always, it's effectively what we're doing here at Belcore, but in some of my past lives, I had this desire to effectively build or operate a skunkworks team where it's look, we're gonna be extremely focused on going and solving this consumer problem, or, business challenge and that's all we're gonna do.

Tried it before and strangely enough, The answer at the larger companies is like you're gonna create a riff with other people who want to do what you're doing, but they can't. They need to go work on, their stuff. And we're like, no, like we should be able to compartmentalize and go get this thing done.

But the no that I've heard in the past was basically don't wanna rock the boat. Yeah. That's not how we do it here. Yeah. That's not how it's always been done. Oh, that's

Troy: one of the worst ones. Yeah. So with well core, what kind of, got you. Deciding, Hey, then, my next step or my next project.

It was first off that it was right, the timing, it was right for a new project. But then also, going into healthcare and that side of startup, because I don't, as someone that's on the periphery of the startup culture because of Austin, and how Widespread it is here.

Healthcare doesn't seem like the first place you'd want to go if you're thinking, oh, I wanna be able to make, have things go fast and make big impacts on stuff. Not that there isn't plenty that needs to be done in the healthcare space, but there's obviously a lot more regulations and maybe not monopolies, but big players that kind of dominate the space and stuff that way.

So what was the impetus to. Be ready for that next chapter. And then why was a healthcare startup kind of that

Jason: route? It, yeah, it was a confluence of things. One of them being, again, luck. So timing at the telemedicine startup, the SaaS company that I was at for a couple years when Covid hit.

We had something that everyone needed all of a sudden cuz we were trying to sell into individual clinics, clinicians, small practices. And it was like pulling teeth because doctors didn't want to change the way that they had always done it or the way that they were taught in school. Their days were 15 minute appointment after 15 minute appointment, and they were trying to do as many of them as they can to feed their family.

A lot of people don't realize that, being a physician, now granted there are specialties that pay really well, but being a physician is not gonna make you rich these days. Yeah. Cuz you're subject to whatever the payers are willing to give you insurance companies.

Yeah. So there's a little bit of altruism there where it was like, man, something here really has to change. So we had this SAS. Platform or like we need to make access to care easier and more convenient so that people will consume it like they consume everything else. We have a instant gratification.

Bring it to me society today. The Jordans that are on my feet right now, which is a new thing that I got addicted to a couple years ago. I can have just about any pair I want brought to my house. Same thing with a loaf of bread and a cur of milk. Everything you want can be brought to you. And the idea was we need to do this with healthcare wherever possible in order to get people to consume it.

Otherwise, care avoidance is just gonna continue to spread and people aren't gonna come in and ask for help until they're just really broken. And sometimes by then it's too late. So Covid hits and we had this thing and doctors made the shift. Where all of a sudden competing with Microsoft teams, Google Meet Zoom became a household name and of all things FaceTime for telemedicine was, allowed with the relaxation of HIPAA enforcement.

So we had some competition, but there was enough business to make us feel like, man, we're on fire. This is great, but. Every time we would hear about maybe the country opening back up or, two weeks to flatten the curve, we would see utilization go down and doctors would shift back to, Nope, come on into the office.

And we even had, some cancellation, some churn. So myself and a couple other members of the executive team were like, Hey, we think this is a sign of what's to come. Like when Covid is over We think that our subscription model is gonna be over two. So we started working to pivot the business to a services model.

It was going to work me out of a job and I knew that cuz you wouldn't need a, tech product guy. You wouldn't need marketing. You wouldn't need client success if you were selling your product into self-insured employers. Because they're looking at a clinic model. So we worked to pivot the business, we did pivot the business which led to several of us, exiting by choice.

And back to the luck piece, redbud with this well, core idea called me like a few weeks before I was about to leave. So I got really lucky there. But I was working on something as I was exiting to help. Not just increase access, but to do something a little bit more on the preventative side, because when I talk about human performance or human optimization, which is a term we use at corp, quite frankly, it's preventative.

It's getting out in front of potential issues down the road by making you a more performant and healthy and better feeling, human being. Now, why should you wait until you're in your late forties, fifties, sixties, or seventies to go? Been moving pretty slow for a while. Hurts to get off the couch, can't bend down and pick something up.

Can't be there for my kids, grandkids, or great grandkids. It's a way to get out in front of it. Luck, altruism the weird mix of experience that I had that just happened to be a really good fit. Like all of those things led to well, corre and where we're at today. Yeah,

Troy: you mentioned the preventative side of it.

It's, which fortunately that's becoming more and more of a thing. I feel like more people are diving into that, and again, obviously for a couple of guys who are. Past what would generally be considered our prime. We both try to stay pretty active and stuff, and so that's, the forties, the new 20 or forties, the new 30 kind of stuff that you keep seeing, right?

Like people are staying healthier longer, but that doesn't always mean that they're they're being in, hopefully being as. As specific as far as what they're being healthy with, right? Anyone who's tried to go on a diet knows that it's a pretty challenging thing to try to lose the 10 pounds or 20 pounds once you've put them on.

But it's a lot easier if you can build the lifestyle habits of keeping that off and already be in that rhythm of a day-to-day life. And so the same kind of thing happens on a. On the medicine side of things and whatnot is if, and once you get to a point, there's a lot of times only so much that can be done.

Whereas if you can build that lifestyle that prevents you from or prolongs you being able to stay young and healthy and active for a lot longer, that's gonna be a much better,

Jason: Scenario. Yeah, and I don't have the numbers off the top of my head, but I do know that when, COVID was seemingly here to stay, call it six months in, there was an explosion of offerings and sales of at home tests at home assessment kits.

Some really large companies started doing that. Some in Austin. People were taking or attempting to take control over their health and they were wanting to understand like, Why am I always tired or why do I feel this way? Or, why can't I eat this food? Like, why does it affect me that way?

Is there anything else that's gonna negatively affect me? Sleep tracking, like you name it, everyone wanted information about their health and wellness, and where it fell short was what I called the so what like, Okay, you've got some data that says you're not great here and you're not great here, and you might wanna look at this, but you were just left with a pdf, like a report.

And some of the testing mechanisms, the techniques were not trusted by physicians. So you couldn't walk into your doctor's office with the PDF and go, Hey, need some help here according to this file. They're gonna say, cool story. I need to send you to a lab and get some blood work or a urinalysis.

Like they, they wanted more traditional lab work done, so it fell short. And it was also an opportunity for companies like ours and there's definitely some others in different spaces that are like, we're gonna help you with the tests and, identify potential issues, but then we're also going to bridge the gap and provide you with that path to do something about it.

Yeah, no.

Troy: There's so many, say, obviously technology in know a lot of different ways exploded during the pandemic and stuff, right? You have things from your Apple watch to o Rings to even like sleep number. A lot of times on different beds will have, give you your rating for how well you slept or how many step steps you walked.

And obviously if your Apple Watch is telling you how many steps you walked, okay, great. If you're not moving around a whole lot, that's a. Maybe not easy to find the time during the day, but okay. I just need to move around a little bit more. Or if you are tracking your calories, but Right. Oh, I didn't sleep well last night.

That's okay. You can try to figure out some things about why that might be the case, but. It's not just usually a matter of oh, I just need to go to bed earlier. That's not always the simplest answer that way until you say we, it's not very challenging these days to get data.

Data. We've gotten very good at being able to accumulate data for things, but being able to actually analyze it and create a plan that's gonna be beneficial is the, is where the money's at.

Jason: Yeah, the insights, the so what part? Like I, having been, during my Under Armour time that platform ingested data from just about every wearable that you can think of, whether it was HRMS or risk-based devices, rings, my mattress collects data from me.

But. It's not the kind of thing that you could just get those beautiful reports and go, oh, I know exactly what to do about this. The insights it's something that we actually have on our roadmap because our virtual care platform is capable of ingesting that data too. But we would need to build a team that can work with the clinical side to say, look, Here's all the data that we're getting from this guy, Troy, and this guy Jason.

Their complaints or goals were this, and this. What could we give you from this data that would help inform your plan for them? And that's gonna take a lot of iteration and collaboration for them to get to what those insights are. So defining them and then go into your point, synthesizing that data to go.

This is what Jason needs to do. This is what Troy needs to do. And they might not be the same. They're not going to be the same for everybody. And diet is one too. Don't put me on a diet that looks anything like vegan or vegetarian. My body shuts down. Like I do not do well on those things.

I have different needs. My body processes food in different foods in different ways It goes back to one of our principles here is there is no one size fits all. Personalized medicine is it's where we're going. It's where we have to go. Okay.

Troy: So give us the lowdown about Walco, what you guys specifically do and how you help people achieve their best

Jason: selves.

Yeah. We are building what we call a human optimization platform. That's a collection of words that should not be put on a billboard because not a lot of people will look at that. Go. I know what that is. So our services in the beginning, the first two things that we've built are painless at home hormone optimization for men, and the women's service is gonna be launching here in the next, call it six weeks.

The other term that everybody uses for this is hormone replacement therapy. And they put it in the bucket called anti-aging. We're not huge fans of that term because it's a marketing term and there's no such thing as stopping the aging process yet. What we do is put back things that nature is slowly taking away from us over time.

So for men, the sex hormone that makes us what we are and is responsible for well-functioning systems in our body is testosterone. It's what gives us the bone density. We have the ability to put on and maintain lean muscle mass. It's responsible for things like our facial hair, our deeper voices.

Like it's literally the thing that makes us what we are and your body, and this is for everybody. Your body will stop producing it a little bit at a time. And if you can put that back. And find like your optimized level. Everyone refers to the number measuring your testosterone. If you can put it back to the number that's right for you, you will likely have that feeling of being substantially younger whether it's better sleep.

That drive, that get up and go that you had in your twenties and thirties to maybe go and start half a dozen companies is there the desire to go work out your sleep improves? There's a number of more recent studies that suggest that it could be an extremely powerful weapon to fight heart disease, which is the number one killer of men and women in the United States.

For the men, it's testosterone in controlling the second and third order effects of putting that back in your body testicular function, fertility and estrogen. So we control those things. Our clinical team controls those things so that we look to head off any side effects before you ever encounter them.

On the female side. Again it's launching in about six weeks. The ladies have a more complex body and their chemistry is a little more complex. The guys are a little bit simpler. So with the ladies, you have to concern yourself with testosterone as the least important sex hormone in the female body, but also estrogen and progesterone and even D H E A.

So our clinical team, with the painless blood collection device, and it truly is painless. We've got so many people that tell us like, I was so scared to do this. I figured it would, feel like a finger prick and it was gonna hurt. This device has been used on children and they don't even complain, but collecting whole blood allows us to look at nearly two dozen markers.

Some people use the term analyte biomarker. It's effectively blood tests, but we do almost two dozen of those, and that gives our clinical team the data that they need to assess what is right for you and make a determination on whether or not you should even be on the plan. And if you are, what is that plan gonna look like?

The male service has been live since mid-January of this year. Female service launches in about six weeks. And after that, we are looking at rolling in additional services like nutritional supplementation, nutritional coaching, and things like fitness and sleep tracking, because if our clinical team has that data, they can do more for you.

There's more. There are marginal gains everywhere to be had. Yeah,

Troy: and like I say, if that's the thing that they're focused on, then unlike going to your regular doctor who's yeah, this data is nice, but I need to start from ground zero to really figure out what's going on. They'll have a better idea of how that fits into everything else.

That's that of the data that you've given them.

Jason: What

Troy: you know. So as someone who's into health and fitness, what kind of makes you guys different from Cuz? All right. Knowing that men lose testosterone as they is necessarily phenomenon. And there are unfortunately a lot, a number of companies out there that while they may do some stuff to help, it doesn't seem like it's really maybe the best company to go with for this type of situation, for lack of a better for being nice with the health and wellness industry because unfortunately, a lot of times it it doesn't.

It doesn't deserve it when you go on places like Instagram or Facebook and you can get a lot of stuff that's pretty inaccurate to say the least. What kind of sets core apart from other

Jason: companies that might be out there? Yeah. You can find good quality and poor quality everywhere you go.

And healthcare is not exempt from that. You mentioned health and wellness. Supplementation is a big category in there. Of course, there are some companies out there that make amazing supplements. They're pure. You can request the lab results, the testing, the purity reports from them.

A lot of them won't give that to you. I encourage everyone to ask for those things from any supplementation that they're taking, cuz otherwise you don't really know what you're getting. The same thing applies in healthcare. Like I think we've probably all had an experience with a clinician whether it's an md, a do an MP, or a pa, there's good and bad ones, but more so with healthcare.

There's this proliferation of subspecialists. And when talking about hormone replacement therapy, you might be talking to a doctor whose knowledge on the subject is 20 years old because they haven't looked at it since they were in school, or they haven't had to go and read a clinical study or report for dozens of years.

So they literally have an opinion that is extremely outta date. The joke that I make when I'm talking to doctors or clinicians or folks that are just skeptical, I'm like, look. If you broke your leg, would you go to a cardiologist? And the answer is always no. And I go, of course not. You would go to someone that is current and up to date and currently practices what you need, which if you broke your leg, you should go to an orthopedic surgeon.

They're doing that every day. So the same thing applies for things like hormone optimization, hormone replacement therapy. What sets us apart from. Other companies that are doing at home. Of course this is my baby, so I'm very opinionated about it. Our panels, our blood tests are substantially more comprehensive than many of our competitors.

Our opinion on that is that if you are not looking at enough markers and the correct markers, it's irresponsible to. Put somebody on a long-term program that's going to substantially change their bodies in a good way. But we err on the side of caution and getting an abundance of markers to make sure that we're making the right decision for that person.

The other area that sets us apart is that our at home blood collection device is painless. You don't have to prick your finger. We're not huge fans yet, although we're looking at some of it of saliva based testing for sex hormones. It's come a long way and it's still progressing. We'll keep an eye on it.

But the amount of blood that we can collect in a painless way definitely sets us apart for the men if you end up on a well core protocol. Nothing beats injectable testosterone in terms of bioavailability how fast it can act. Even though we're all a little bit different. Asking people to self-inject at home is asking a lot.

So we've got a device that helps take away some of the fear of the uncertainty, the angst, but also contributes towards making the injection practically painless. Couple that with the fact that we're able to use extremely small needles and we just continue to chip away at the fear and the pain it's an extremely high end product.

Both, in terms of the practicing medicine, but also down to our packaging. We left no stone unturned. You're gonna get the, a really nice high end box that we call the nuclear launch code box because there are some dudes here that watch too many action movies. But it's something you literally open up.

And you've got this die cut foam set up where everything has its place and everything is labeled, and the instruction sets are really easy to understand because we didn't want people opening up this box and it's like syringes and needles and devices. This is, this scares me. Sure. We drew it's jokingly, but seriously we drew inspiration from.

Ikea assembly instructions in terms of making them extremely simple, but we definitely put, some design into them so that they're not, black and white stick figures. Every person that becomes a client has a dedicated team, and that team is a group of people that will be the same group.

They will know their faces. They will know their names, and they will have their contact information. There is no call the front desk. Leave a message. Hope you can get in to talk to your clinical team type of stuff. You will get somebody, cuz you've, you're gonna reach out and you're gonna ask for Brent because you're gonna call him or email him, or you're gonna talk to Valerie.

So you're gonna know your team. And that's something that sets us apart too. We didn't want anyone to feel like they're a number. The way that we plan our staff is that we're not gonna inundate anybody. With having too many clients, we have a set number and it's fixed. And once you have that many clients, you're not responsible for anybody else because we don't want the attention and the reaction times to slow down.

Nice.

Troy: Now, sounds like again, definitely a higher caliber operation than a lot of health and just, blanket health and wellness or blanket supplement places are, because they say unfortunately that side of the space, aside from the healthcare obviously what the healthcare, it has to be a little bit more regulated, but there's so much stuff that's just outside the true healthcare space.

In health and fitness and supplements and stuff, that really doesn't have to be that well regulated that it then can lead to a lot of problems. And so to see you guys going above and beyond is very

Jason: cool. Yeah, we definitely built it for ourselves. Like we built it in a way like, this is something we would want to consume.

This is something that we would pay money for. Yeah. For people that are

Troy: looking to find out more about you guys, what are the best places or best place to kinda make that

Jason: happen? Yeah, most people, their first introduction to us is gonna be the website. So team, core.com is ours. Just got a facelift by the way, and it's gorgeous.

I'm staring at an individual that had a hand in that everything starts there. We try to strike a balance of educating and informing people about what it is that we do, the space hormones, why they're probably one of the most important things that you can tackle for your overall health and wellness.

But we also want everybody to. When interacting with us to not think that they're dealing with some gigantic healthcare conglomerate that, isn't a little bit sexy looking. A nice well-designed website that's inviting and exudes that premium yet approachable.

Look and feel. And anyone that has questions we've got contact information that's gonna go to real human beings that work for Wilco. And I think we'll even have our live chat back up there probably early next week. Nice. Cool. And then

Troy: I did see from a camera, remember if it was you were from Keith, you guys actually have a special offer for people that are looking to maybe get the introductory process started with.

With you guys as well too.

Jason: We did so we created a coupon code that allows listeners to go and order the assessment kit using the code ATX spotlight, and they'll get it for 1999. That assessment kit usually sells for $200. I use the term street value, meaning if you were to go and cash pay for this stuff on your own at a lab in a doctor's office, it's gonna run you six or 700 bucks to do the comprehensive tests, and that's not even taken into the account that it's a painless device that you can use on your own at home.

And it's all inclusive too. It's. The assessment kit itself includes the device to collect blood shipping in every direction. The lab analysis and the consultation with a physician, you're not gonna pay anything else to get to that point. If the clinical team determines that you're a good fit and you say, I want to do this, that's when you'll actually pay for being on the program.

Cool.

Troy: No, we appreciate you guys extending that offer and hope hope some people can take advantage of, like you say, you can't buy lunch for 20 bucks these days. So that

Jason: seems like a pretty good deal. Agreed. I

Troy: appreciate you taking the time to, to jump on and do the podcast.

It's always cool to hear the different stories that people have and seems like you guys are doing some cool things over there at Wilco.

Jason: We're excited about it. We're we're gearing up to tell the world that we exist.

Troy: There you go. Yeah. That's, it's always gotta be an exciting

Jason: point in the journey of we

Troy: Feel like you've got the thing ready to go and now you're just getting ready to hopefully see, lift off and see that success out in the real

Jason: world.

Absolutely. Cool.

Troy: Again, appreciate it a whole lot and to everyone out there, hope you guys have a wonderful day. We'll talk to you soon. See you, Troy.