I am the CEO and co-founder of Ketone-IQ (ketone.com). I’m also a competitive marathoner — my personal best is 5:57/mile for 26.2 miles (2hours 35min).
I grew up in Chicago and went to Lincoln Park High School, a public IB school in the heart of the city. I gained a lot of independence from a young age, riding the CTA train to & from school every day, benefitting from a blend of a competitive magnet program while also navigating my way around a big city from age 13.
Starting from the middle of high school, I always had a side hustle — selling glow-sticks on warm summer nights at the Taste of Chicago, refereeing kids’ soccer games on the weekends, tutoring students a year or two younger at my high school.
Through a mix of hard work and good luck, I made it to Stanford, where I studied Computer Science and Product Design. This brought me to California where I felt immediately at home with the entrepreneurial ethos — as Steve Jobs said, “Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you and you can change it, you can influence it, you can build your own things that other people can use.”
During college, I worked as a TA for public speaking and computer science classes, and interned at Google and a startup.
My first job out of college was as a Product Manager at YouTube. This was the era when Gangnam Style became the first online video ever to hit 1B views. I learned a lot being at the epicenter of internet tech and culture.
After leaving YouTube I became a professor of brand strategy at the Academy of Art in SF, teaching undergrads and masters students a curriculum of how brands express their core value across various mediums — product design, written word, photography, graphic design, architecture, sound, etc.
I started tinkering around with biohacking in 2014.
I ordered blood glucose monitors from the European grey-market before they were widely available in the US.
I started intermittent fasting on a weekly basis, and one time fasted for seven days straight.
After trying out various nootropics discussed on r/nootropics, I launched one of the very first nootropics brands, called Nootrobox.
It was obvious to me at this point that the human body would be one of the next major platforms for product innovation. I read/tried everything I could get my hands on.
While fasting, I would routinely measure my blood ketone levels to see how my metabolism was responding to the lack of caloric input — fasting caused my ketones to elevate. More on ketones later.
My Nootrobox cofounder Geoff Woo and I created an intermittent fasting group called WeFast, which peaked at 100k online members with weekly meetups in SF. It was the first time intermittent fasting broke through to the mainstream.
We raised a couple million dollars from Andreessen Horowitz to continue exploring and developing venture scale ideas within human performance.
Then I ran my first half marathon.
I trained for 8 weeks and ran the SF half marathon in just under 1:30. It was the hardest physical experience I’d ever put myself through. I was hooked, not just on a personal level, but on understanding the science of endurance.