Ari Tulla Podcast Transcript
Ari Tulla joins host Brian Thomas on The Digital Executive Podcast.
Welcome to Coruzant Technologies, Home of The Digital Executive podcast.
Brian Thomas: Welcome to The Digital Executive. Today’s guest is Ari Tulla. Ari Tulla is a San Francisco based entrepreneur, co-founder, and CEO of the smart nutrition service Elo. Elo uses AI personalization engine to turn food from the cause of disease to your best medicine.
Ari is also an active angel investor and advisor with a portfolio of 50 startups including Virta Health, Verge Motorcycles, Levels, and Aura. Previously, Ari was the CEO of Quest Analytics, the market leader in doctor data and network management. Ari led the company through a pivotal growth stage from 15 million to 40 million in revenue.
Before joining Quest Analytics, Ari was the co-founder and CEO of BetterDoctor, a doctor search engine. After years of family health struggles, Ari has dedicated his life to building companies that help people live better. His companies, BetterDoctor, Quest Analytics, and Elo have helped over 100 million people gain better access to healthcare.
Well, good afternoon, Ari. Welcome to the show!
Ari Tulla: Thank you, Brian. Great to be here.
Brian Thomas: Awesome. I appreciate you making the time. Nothing like doing a podcast, getting to learn somebody’s story and sharing it out with the world, which is awesome. So, Ari, we’re gonna jump right into your first question here. Your journey into the health and wellness space is deeply personal, beginning with health challenges within your own family.
Can you share how these experiences led to the founding of Elo and your mission to transform food from the cause of disease to medicine?
Ari Tulla: Yeah, happy to. Happy to dive in. So, 20 years ago, my wife had a thyroid tumor out of the blue. We just realized that, you know, healthy 20 something woman has a lump on her neck about size of a fist.
And that was scary, of course, in the first place. And then the doctors, they got into it, they, they cut it away. They had to take part of the thyroid away as well. And they high fived us. They said that everything is fine. There’s no. no cancer, you’re going to be fine. And over the next year, we realized that the removal of the part of thyroid led into autoimmune diseases, hormonal imbalances, and these unknown unknowns we have in healthcare.
And my wife was medicated with medicine that made it impossible to have a family. So that was the beginning of our, our struggles. And we spent about a decade of our life to try to find a solution. We went deep into Western medicine Eastern medicine, mindfulness, and in the end in California, we, we had a doctor who guided us into anti-inflammatory diet that is today used for many autoimmune diseases.
It was pretty new at the time and that helped. So, we, we got the food that was helping my wife’s body to heal itself. And that helped us to, to get pregnant with IVF. And we were very unlucky that, you know, we, we then had a total unrelated issue that, you know, we, we lost our first son.
But that was basically like a 14, 15-year journey for us that led us to. find few things. First, we believe that food can be medicine. And today we have, we have two healthy, healthy kids who are, who are thriving and outside. And we also learned that the healthcare system is very complicated. So out of that experience, I, I left my, my life in in the video games and tech and have now built three healthcare companies.
The first decade I spent on focusing on helping people find doctors, access to care. So today, a hundred million plus people in the U S are using our tools to access healthcare. So that’s really cool. That’s something that, you know, started from our pain. It’s helping people. And now I’m trying to do the same again in the space of food.
Brian Thomas: Thank you. Incredible story. Everybody has a story, right? And I love the ones, especially entrepreneurs that come on the show and they talk about not just a problem they’re solving, but sometimes they have in your case but kind of a traumatic experience. And you obviously want to make the person feel better or someone get healthy or make the world a better place.
Right? So, love your story and you’ve got such a passion. I can tell. I do appreciate this. And this is just going to be a great podcast. I can tell love this stuff. So, jumping to the next question. Elo stands out by using AI to analyze personal health biomarkers to create precision nutrition plans. What challenges did you face in developing this AI driven approach and how does it redefine personalized nutrition?
Ari Tulla: Yeah. So, we, I took the learning I had over the, over the decade when we were trying to figure it out. My, my wife’s foundation and I learned a lot about food, nutrition, healthcare, and I wanted to build a company already over 10 years ago in this field, but it felt complicated. The science wasn’t there weren’t really systems available to do it.
We didn’t have enough data from our bodies. And a few years ago, I realized that now we are ready, and the market is ready. So, what we do at Elo, we take information from your body, think about in a form of you know, blood test it can be wearable device data. Or home monitoring data by Apple, what’s your ordering or your weight scale.
And of course, we can take assessments. We can ask you questions and learn about you like a doctor will do when you go to a new doctor for the first time. Then we take that information, and we can get up to a hundred different points of assessment from the patient or from the member. And then we turn that with AI into the right nutrition plan.
So, think about, for example, if we realized that you have a high LDL cholesterol, low vitamin D and so forth. So, we can turn that information into the right plan. And then we can deliver you those nutrients in the form of pills or powders or gummies that are custom made for you. So, every product we do at Elo Its custom made for you after we have formulated only for you and we put your name on the, on the packaging.
So that’s something very unique that I don’t think anyone has done before. And really the AI is playing a few roles here. So, the number one, of course, is that we built an algorithm. And that became a learning AI today that is defining what you need. It’s based on all the science today we have about nutrients.
And secondly, we also use AI to make the plan better. So we have feedback loops. It could be a daily feedback loop. If you answer questions, it can be a quarterly feedback loop on a blood test, for example. And then when we get more data about you, we can make the plan better to help you further. So that’s the principal idea and, and it’s been really interesting to, to work on this because it’s something quite new.
And of course, in the last year, we all have been using the, the CHATCPT and other LLM models. And those are now adding a third layer of AI for ELO as well. So sometime, I think this year, we hope to release more like a codes that can help you to get the right nutrition and also ask, answer questions you might have.
Because many people, they, they, they don’t know everything about nutrition and they have questions, but they have nobody to ask them from.
Brian Thomas: Thank you. I really liked that. And of course, we’ve got so much data at our fingertips and with the power of AI, we can quickly pull the right data for the right particular person and their nutrition needs.
Obviously that biomarkers are a big key to this. So, I appreciate the share. And Ari, you’ve mentioned that 95 percent of ELO’s users show biomarker improvement within six months. Can you delve into the science behind this and share a story that encapsulates the impact ELO has had on individuals’ health?
Ari Tulla: It’s interesting because many people go to doctor’s office, and they get a blood test. And often what you learn is your lipid panel. Think about your cholesterol LDL. Maybe they are testing your A1C, the marker for diabetes. But often we don’t test anything beyond that. So today at Elo, we do a panel of 12 biomarkers.
So, we test your, of course, the lipid panel. That’s very important. We do A1C, but we’re also looking at inflammation. That was one of the key culprits for my wife. So I have a good understanding of the power of inflammation. We also test vitamins, minerals like vitamin D, B12, iron, and so forth. And that gives us a pretty good idea of what’s going on.
So, most people who get onto the yellow platform are relatively healthy people. And when we test them, we find that most of them have issues on the vitamin D levels on the cholesterol levels, or. iron or B12. Those are very common. So, when we then give them the right nutrients that are designed by the LOAI, we are usually seeing that over 90 percent of people have an improvement in their blood biomarkers by month six.
And some of the things are very easy, like vitamin D. We can supplement people with the vitamin D supplement and usually you get an improvement. Some things are much more complicated, like for example, your LDL cholesterol. I mean, we can give you some supplementation. It might help. But really the help comes in the form of coaching people to do the right things.
So, it also has, in the Elo app, we have ability to give you guidance, what to do, and together the supplementation or the nutrients, and then the coaching usually has a positive effect. And it’s unbelievable how powerful food can be. It’s just often difficult for people to change behavior or do the right thing.
And one thing that we really surprised ourselves. Is that when you give people nutrients and you notify them in an app to take in a certain time of day, usually in the morning it becomes almost an enforcer of doing the right things throughout the day. So, when people take, let’s say the gummy vitamins in the morning, then they tend to do better things throughout the day because they remind themselves what they should do. So, it becomes almost this sort of a behavior change tool itself.
Brian Thomas: Thank you. And I really appreciate you focusing on the nutrition and the food part. Honestly, be in the medicine, right? That’s if we all could get on the same page. I know that the medical industry focuses on the pharmacology side of things, but the.
The nutrition side, I think, is overlooked quite a bit. And so, I appreciate you highlighting some of that. And our last question of the day, looking ahead, where do you see Elo and the field of personalized nutrition evolving in the next three to five years, especially considering the rapid advancements in AI and health technology?
Ari Tulla: I’m a big believer. Of course, I, I already spent three years of my life on, on building Elo. And I think I’m going to spend the next seven on this mission. So, what’s, what’s happening today? There are a few things that are making something like Elo possible. First, we have a world where We have a lot more data from our bodies, all this biomarker testing, wearable devices, they’re becoming ubiquitous.
Most people already have some type of device. That’s the number one. Number two is that food delivery, it became very common during the COVID. Before COVID, only 20 percent of people had done food delivery. Think about Instacart or. Uber Eats or Door Dash, now it’s more like 80 percent today.
And then thirdly, like you said, the AI is now making everything very different because we can actually have a coach. We can have a system that is designing things for us or even doing work for us, like ordering and handling the backend of these things. So those three things are really enabling this new world.
And the personalization is something that, you know, we have seen already to happen in many different fields of business and our world. And now I think it really is coming fast into, into nutrition, food, supplementation, and so forth. And where this will take us and why do I do this? I’m not trying to make and build products that are cool only and exciting for the worried well.
All the wealthier people optimize their life to become even better and healthier. But it should really be focused on the people who are suffering today. 80 percent of people today are overweight, half of the Americans are obese. We have to do something our life expectancy went down three years in the last five years, not only because of COVID, but because we are just sick as a nation.
So, I don’t think we can fix that by adding another medicine. We have to focus on changing the way we eat, changing the food system, how it applies. So, I hope that in the next five years. ELO will play a role, a small role, in this world where we will be starting to subsidize food and nutrition to people who are sick.
Think about type 2 diabetes, obesity, heart disease, even cancer. And the idea will be that today we spend a trillion dollars on medicine. Maybe we could spend a hundred billion into food and nutrition intervention and focus on people before they are getting too sick to be healed. We have a lot of people.
Who are on the yellow and almost the red on the biomarkers, or they are getting too heavy and so forth. Why don’t we help those people before they get too sick to be healed or they become chronically sick that we need to do interventions like barrier surgeries or medications. So that’s my hope. Food could become this preventative care that we’ve been waiting for a long time.
Brian Thomas: Absolutely. It’s a hundred percent. I would agree with you. The preventative is certainly the way to go. We’ve got to change the mindset and we’ve got to change everybody from the corporations to wall street as well. There’s a fixation on, you know, it’s got to be profitable, or it’s got to meet a particular.
Quota, you know, and at the end of the day, we need to really change a mindset across a whole spectrum of different verticals. So, I appreciate what you’re doing, Ari. And we’re going to be happy to get this podcast published and out to the world for sure. So, Ari, it was such a pleasure having you on today, and I look forward to speaking with you real soon.
Ari Tulla: Thank you.
Brian Thomas: Bye for now.
Ari Tulla Podcast Transcript. Listen to the audio on the guest’s podcast page.
