#15. Jan-Philipp Martini, Founder & CEO of Sapiens

Alright, so we're live. Jan Philipp, welcome to B. Well, it's a pleasure having you today as our guest. As mentioned Jan Philipp Matini, he's founder and CEO of Sapiens, a premium diagnostics brand that helps high performance detect and reverse stress damage before it becomes to a crisis. And with one simple at home test kit Sapiens measures over 250 stress-related markers from hormones and heart rate variability, inflammation and also microbiome balance to calculate a unique readiness to perform index. And then their AI then surfaces individualized root causes and builds a personalized resilience plan supported by coaching and follow up. Jan, it's a pleasure having you today again. And before we start talking about Sapiens, it would be nice to get started and learn a little bit more about your personal background. You worked for a while at BCG. So you really, really know how it is to work in an intense environment where a lot of stress comes up. So maybe share a bit about your background. Yeah, originally an engineer. I wanted to work with people more, went into consulting for five plus years at BCG. Explored a lot of the healthcare space there. And I had this hobby which was since school time, really, I spent lots of time in long term meditation retreat. So it was always curious and fascinated about the mind of the aspect of stress. And that's basically what I brought together after BCG, which is the fascination for the mind and for the human condition together was working in an high intensity job. And yeah, we're from Germany, Düsseldorf and my wife, Son at me, right now, spent time in our summer house in Lithuania while it's warm here. Great. Wow, incredible. You're already alluded to your career previously in consulting at BCG. Could you maybe share a bit more details about the path from being a consultant to what's being a founder now? And also from what I heard we already talked earlier, I mean, oftentimes people in the space experience a personal incident that also maybe triggers their desire to become an entrepreneur. Could you maybe give us some more details about your personal health issues, also the experiences that spark sort of the interest and motivation to also build your own business? Yeah, sure. Lots of what Sapiens is today really came out of my own. I have to say frustration was a type one diabetes diagnosis that I had straight off to BCG. So I already made the choice of not necessarily becoming an entrepreneur, but at least to start my own business as a freelancer initially. And a few weeks in, I had a type one diabetes diagnosis and I got a little bit an insight into the healthcare system, how stress-related issues are not really detected early. Type one diabetes could have potentially a stress-related component. I had lots of gut issues before I felt actually much more fatigue than I had realized at the time. So many of the early markers of a disease were actually overlooked. Actually, I also should take ownership for that myself mostly, but many things I just didn't realize while I was at BCG and that really led me to build a platform that hopefully prevents other people from having a stress-related issue like an auto-means disorder, like a depression, like a mental health issue, like many other diseases that at least accelerated by stress. So that was, I think, the one part of the question, the personal incident that led to building Sapiens' acid is today, which is really a stress diagnostics and preventative health company. And then you also ask about the journey from from BCG to founder. That was a very gradual process for me. I stepped out of BCG, started doing biofeedback training for people in intense jobs, basically helping them to self-regulate their nervous system under pressure. So I would just bring lots of biofeedback devices to people's, we work with big strategy consultancies, law firms, investment banks, all kinds of non-line-to-five jobs, let's say, and we help them how to downregulate their nervous system and really have pressure negotiations or meetings. And through that learning of being one-on-one was basically my future target audience. Over time, I professionalized it, brought people into the team, medical doctors, neuroscientists, and then we basically got deeper and deeper into stress diagnostics and understanding not just stress in the moment measured by a biofeedback device, but also the more chronic aspects of stress exposure. Maybe walk us also a bit more through the, let's say, exact founding moment. I mean, you mentioned earlier, you left BCG and you're already testing out things working with consultants and other, let's say, high performing professionals. And what did you see maybe in the market related to, let's say, executive stress support? Was there also a gap in the market that you experienced? Because, I mean, to a certain extent, that it's a topic that has been addressed already or is being addressed, but what gap did you see related to the stress support sector? Yeah, let me start with what we actually, what makes us unique, right? So we offer us, you are needed to stress diagnostics at home measurement kit. That's probably the most in that picture of your stress that you will ever get. We get to that later a bit more. And I think what makes this difference is A, we are super data driven measuring biometrics. Secondly, as we really understand our target audience very well, we have people, ex-lawyer set works with law firms, we have ex-consultants, ex-mechancy people that work with mechenzie, for example, as in, so we know our target audience very well. And then given that we measure stress before and after our entire organization, the medical people and the team, everybody really got focused on producing outcomes, meaning lower stress higher resilience for people. Because the only way that we are measured is in producing better stress levels after in the second measurement compared to the first measurement. So I think that makes us unique. And you asked me for the founding moment. If there was one moment, it was probably I was two and a half, three years into doing as a freelancer biofeedback training with clients, I did work with around 7,000 people. So super intense one-on-one work group work. And that really helped me to understand their needs. These are very busy people. They don't want isotaryx solutions. They have tried it all to reduce stress, nutrition, exercise, mindfulness apps. But they want something that's ultra specific and where the impact can be measured. And I noticed that when one of our big clients asked me, hey, don't you have a stress diagnostics kit to measure, like to produce complete stress profiles of our executives? And at the time, I said, yes, it's two and a half, three years back. I said, yes, even though our stress diagnostics kit wasn't existing, it wasn't far-fetched idea in my head. So I bought third-party diagnostics tools, put them all into one nicely branded kit, and sent them out for testing purposes. And only after I noticed, wow, the client is loving it. It has a level of insight that they never thought about their own body. And only then we actually started collaborating with university, with scientific advisors to build that actual stress diagnostics that I had sold in the first place. So that really helped us to start with a client need front and center, and then do all the development up from there. Very exciting to also learn a bit about that process, how you actually developed that diagnostic kit. Before we talk, because you mentioned already, it's very important to also do a little bit of a deep dive into your product. And what stresses you actually measure and how that all works, I'll be curious because you mentioned that you are not working alone, you have an entire team of different people actually. So it includes PhDs, neuroscientists, nutritionists, and other partners. Could you maybe elaborate a bit on how you found your team and how you build it throughout the years, and maybe who joined early on, maybe what's their background, what motivates them then actually? Yeah, the first person that joined is Dr. Dominique Sautopashkis, she's medical supervisor. She's an internal medicine doctor, and really we started out with the two of us providing programs with third-party lab tests. And then we wanted to become a little bit more scientific in our, a bit a lot more scientific actually in our approach of measuring stress. So we reached out to all the different authors of the big stress science papers, the stress diagnostics papers out there. One of them was Professor Kliemann Skischbaum, one of the most published stress scientists in Germany out of university in Dresden. And he then was super up for bringing his work into practice and to a product. And that was basically a big first collaboration in terms of scientific advisor. And then we brought a biotechnologist and neuroscientist Julian and Pratchan Board who built this product of integrating many different data streams. saliva samples for cortisol, hair steroid measurements to get like a history book of his stress levels in hair. HIV, diagonal measurement with an ECG monitor, different self-assassments, and now we are starting to get into at home blood testing, microbiome testing at the Thank you. to. And yeah, this is basically the core team. And then we have experts and freelancers that we work with who know our clients very well. Alice Brooks, for example, she was at McKinsey for nine years, a medical doctor by background. She works with the strategy consultants as an example. We have somebody in law, somebody who has the private equity background, so different partners, basically, who know their clients and who work with them today. That's our team. Maybe time to dig deeper into your exact product offering. I mean, you already alluded a lot to how your product actually works. But maybe in very easy words for someone who was entirely new, how would you describe what Zapiens actually does because you've been, you know, on a journey, you started out coaching people individually. Now a couple of years ago, you started with the diagnostics tests. Where are you guys at? What's your current product offering? Maybe give us an overview. Yeah. Um, we are doing bio macro based stress diagnostics and prevention for people and busy jobs. Right. And that entails a few things. The first thing is you get an at home test kit. Send to your home takes an hour to do multiple tests. As I mentioned, saliva, hair samples, blood testing, microbiome testing, self assessments. And out of that, we create a really in depth risk profile for how much is chronic stress impacting your health. And not only do we do a risk profile, we also building a system that detects what maybe the root causes of stress. Right. Sometimes stress is considered a it's just my workplace, for example, but actually there's nutritional root causes might be inflammation going on in your body. It might be that your you have chronic tension somewhere in the body. It might be that your circadian rhythm is disrupted that cortisol is not properly spiking in the morning. It may be that your sleep quality is low. So we are basically getting into the root causes of stress. And then we creating a one on one resilience plan, which is really specified for yourself, where we are trying to identify the most likely intervention that reduces stress and most and impacts resilience best. And this product is basically super simple to use. We know our clients are super busy. It doesn't take us long as a full day helps check up in the clinics. Takes an hour to measure you get a super personalized plan and then we track impact over time and many people come to us again and again. And we are basically their resilience companion while they do something incredible, which is a really intense jobs working 80 hours per week and still trying to stay healthy. You mentioned or it's visible that you guys or the zapian or zapians over the platform is actually based on an other static load model. And what is it and how does your approach actually quantify cumulative stress, maybe better than let's say all those other stress measuring devices, people are wearing their variables all day. And trying to figure out how this stress is, could you maybe explain to us what that model is all about and why your platform is actually capable of measuring that stress a lot better than maybe other competitors that are out there in the market. Yeah. Most people know stress measurement from their HIV metric in their wearable let's say who are right. And that is measuring an element of one of the two stress systems in the body. The body has the nervous system, which is not getting stress like your hard rate goes up when you're getting stress right. Or digestion slows down when you're getting stressed. And then there's a second stress system, which is more the slower response stress system or the chronic stress system you could call it, which is your stress hormones. And it's called the HPA axis and it's basically governed by a molecule that's called cortisol. The wearable first of all is only able to measure one of the two stress systems, which is your nervous system. And it's doing that. Okay. It's a good approximation of the day to day variation in the activation of my nervous system. But what it cannot do is first of all, it cannot tell you where does my stress come from. Right. Is it coming from food intolerance that I have or from my boss that was not very kind to me this afternoon. Secondly, it does not measure chronic stress in terms of how much damage does stress do on my body. It doesn't measure which body the system is first impact by that stress. Is it my microbiome and my gut health, which is suffering? Is it my lower back, which will develop pain? Is it maybe a mental health disorder, which is on the horizon if I continue with that stress level? So while you're getting a rough approximation from a wearable of how is my stress today compared to yesterday, you don't know it in absolute terms. How much damage has been done and you don't know where it comes from. And we basically Focused on no continuous measurement, which wearables are really good at. But we are saying you are coming to us like a pit stop of a formula one car every three to six months. And you are getting the most complete picture of your stress you ever had. And then you focus on one or two root causes that you address in the next three months. Then you come back and then you track the impact. So I wouldn't say we are better. Obviously, there's a much more premium offering that we do here. But while a typical wearable would measure three to five markers, HIV, resting heart rate, movement patterns, etc. We are measuring 250, which includes the self assessments of scientifically validated questionnaires and then these biomeuribase systems that we do. And so I think that's that's one part of how we how we differentiate from wearables. And the alostatic load index is not something we developed. It's has been developed in the 70s by Bruce McEwen, a wonderful researcher. We now work with Robert Paul Euster, which is a professor from Canada. And the essence of the alostatic load model is basically to measure how much Health impact where health damage has been done by stress. And the essence is there's not one marker that will correlate with stress, but rather it is a combination of many different markers of many different body systems that's correlating with stress. And HIV is just one marker. It might be a little window into your stress level, but it's not the full picture and we are trying to get closer to the full picture. And that's what alostatic load is. It's an academic model and we implemented into practice. It has been used in research long for a long time. But as far as we know, nobody has fully implemented into a consumer product yet. That's very interesting. I mean, that's something I hear a lot is the aspect how do you actually make sense of all the data, right? And that seems to be one challenging part. So people have their devices. And now you're telling me it's only minor, minor picture you get actually of your health. And so you guys seem to really do something about it to address that that problem actually that exists. So people maybe get the wrong sense of their health status by only measuring a small amount of biomarkers. It's helpful. It's helpful as long as it is improving your own self awareness. So if you use a wearable symbiotically, meaning you look at the data, you check in how you feel yourself. It's a very helpful tool. I'm not against it at all. At the same time, I'm saying you oftentimes optimize what you measure. Instead of what you're actually after and what you're after is to perform better and to feel better. And I think HIV is one marker for it. And there's a trap here, which is you're just optimizing for HIV instead of for performing and feeling better, which is what we try to do. One aspect we also mentioned slightly, but apparently is very big is your hair steroid analysis, right? I mean, apparently it's also very, very unique. Your approach is something that does not exist likewise in the market. If I understand correctly, could you share a bit about that particular bio biomarker analysis? Yeah. This is not something we develop, but it's developed by many universities and researchers all over the world. One of them is Dr. Professor Clemens Kishbohn that we work with and the lab in Dresden in Germany is also analyzing our samples. The idea is that hair is a little bit like if I go into the details because you were your healthcare, healthcare podcasts in a way. There's a marker for long term blood glucose, which is called hemoglobin A1C. And it's measuring how much was your glucose over three months period? Nobody is measuring a single blood prick test anymore and this then gets any inside about somebody's metabolic health, right? But rather you would look at the long term picture. The same if you just take one cortisol measurement that does not say anything because cortisol is changing over the course of the day, for example. It's very high in the morning and it's very low in the evening, ideally. So just taking one measurement doesn't really make sense and instead looking at the hair allows you to look into the last one to three months of accumulated cortisol. It's a little bit like a history book of your stress hormones. It's not just cortisol. We measure many other hormones in there like testosterone, DHA, which is stress protective molecule, a cortisol and a few others. And by that is we are getting a longer term view of your stress levels. This is experimental data or experimental diagnostics. It has been established in many nature top tier publications. So it's very solid and research. And we are only using it together with saliva cortisol and other stress hormone analysis so that we try and relate basically the data. But as far as we're going to do, we know integrating here and saliva measurements of stress hormones gives us a much deeper perspective of what happened to that person in the last three months. I mean, yeah, as you mentioned, we are the podcast of business, of the business of wellness and health, but I mean, I'm also realizing that I mean, this topic is a whole world for itself, so it seems very, very interesting. If anyone is interested to dig deeper into this topic and to really find out what it's all about, but very exciting. Could you maybe also give us an idea - I mean, you already gave us an idea of who your typical target customer looks like, and what they're doing in their daily lives. Could you maybe also bring us along what maybe the typical customer journey would look like for someone who, you know, on boards or gets becomes a customer of sapiens? How does their journey look like? And how are they maybe also coached afterwards? Because I mentioned that also probably entails is a big and important aspect of your platform to make sure that also maybe lifestyle and habit changes come about after those diagnostics. Yeah, absolutely. We work with people who are willing to perform at their edge. As I said, mostly top executives, we work for example with all the top 200 executives at a big consumer goods company. We work with many strategy consultancies, lawyers, investment bankers. People who feel they're not as sharp as they have felt two years ago, maybe they're a little bit fatigued. They could perform better than they're currently are. That's usually the reason why people would come to us. And if you sign up, IZOR as a team, which is very powerful or is an individual, you get sent home a stress diagnostics kit. It has four tasks as a baseline, which is the ECG monitor for your one week recovery analysis. You see exactly what drives your stress, what enables your recovery. The second thing as you provide a hair sample for all these three months for it for a spectrification of stress, you measure multiple days of cortisol, vacadian, risen profile, multiple measurement, multiple days, and then you do a big battery of self-assessment from cognitive performance to different health symptoms, etc. And then depending on your results, you might also do a microphone biome test, continuous glucose monitor, or a blood test at a laboratory or with our at home blood test kit for things like inflammation levels, all which is stress associated. So that's kind of the first thing. It sounds big, but we have really streamlined the user experience so that you just pick one week, you have one hour of effort, you send all the stuff back to the laboratory or the envelopes get picked up at your home. And then two weeks later, you have a debrief with a medical doctor or an expert in our team. And you essentially get a readiness to perform score, which is what is your accumulated chronic stress and how ready are you today to perform at your best. And then you understand what are your top stress drivers, what are the five to six things which are driving most of your stress, what are the biggest factors that enable your performance, right? What are the protective factors? And then you get three to five areas of recommendation, which is a very specific blueprint for how to work on the biggest stress carriers. Maybe gut health. If we identify that through the microbiome test, maybe my evening cortisol levels are very high. My sleep quality is low. I don't wake up refreshed. Then we work on evening down regulation and re-aligning the circadian rhythm. Maybe some nutritional patterns if we see you have some food intolerances. So whatever is stressed in the broadest sense of the understanding, we build a personal plan for you. And then the third step is after you have identified the stretchers, got your personal plan. We don't leave you alone there, but we help you to integrate that into your basic calendar. We have a little habit change companion, which helps you track impact every day, which reminds you of the habit that you committed to. And then every month we are measuring the biggest challenge area. For example, if you had difficulties with suboptimal sleep and high evening cortisol levels, we would measure those two measures every month and see how you improve over time. Once you improved it, then we get into the next area, which may be gut health. So we help you to do one step at a time, improve one step at a time. And over time, people say they built much bigger awareness of what's actually driving their stress, so that after a few months, they can actually walk alone and feel much better, perform much better than before. Incredible. Maybe let's move on and talk a bit more on a bigger picture about the industry and how zappians can be understood in this context. One question I actually asked every guest basically is the question of how to actually position their company in all these different definitions and terms that are flying around. So I call it the health and wellness podcast, but there's preventative health, there's longevity, there's so many different terms flying around the space. How do you position zappians in that space to really convey to, let's say, your target customer group, what you actually do? How do you position yourself there? The term we would add to the ones that you mentioned as human performance, that's what we do. We notice that our target clients, people in intense jobs in their 30s and 40s, they don't care so much really what, how they feel like when they're 80 or 90, it's too far away for them. They care how do they perform the next week, how much energy do they have, are they getting into the weekend depleted, are they coming home after work and they are not able to be present with a family anymore, that's what they care about. And that's what we call human performance. Obviously, people who do our programs end up being healthier, that's a nice side effect, right? But first of all, their performance feel better and they're more into them with their own body, they get to know their own body better. I think that's a positioning. And then in terms of the big picture, the vision that we have is the other static load model that we take from academia is basically enabling us to detect chronic stress-related issues, which are more than you think, six to 24 months in advance. That's what we're working towards to. We're not there in all aspects yet. But we're getting better and better with every client that goes through our pipeline. We collect so much data that we are able to create personalized profiles and then identify which body the system is breaking first and we take preventative steps to address that. So that you perform better, so that you feel better. And there's a nice side effect also that you stay healthy longer, but that's not our positioning. Human performance, great way to position oneself. A new word that I have to keep in mind and also address in other interviews, definitely. And I've heard of it already, so it's very, it's great that you see yourself in this space. Maybe from your view in the human performance space, what would you say is maybe right now from your view even overhyped, or what is, you know, maybe chronically undervalued from your view in this entire space. I mean, I answered that question with a bias of a stress diagnostic startup founder. I think the biggest area that is underhyped in the longevity area. So the thing that is most overlooked in the longevity space is chronic stress. Chronic stress directly is a big driver of aging, purely from the biological mechanism. For example, cortisol raises blood sugar, which is correlated with a lower health span downstream effect would be type 2 diabetic. So it's directly driving health issues, which we are helping to reduce by reducing chronic stress. And indirectly, of course, it's impacting all the longevity habits, quote unquote, which is usually when you have more chronic stress, you eat worse, you sleep less, you sleep have a less lower sleep quality and you exercise less. So I think chronic stress for the target audience that we work with, which is people that work more than 60 hours per week basically, for them, chronic stress is a one area to look into if you want to live long and healthy. And that's I think what the longevity industry currently overlooks. While it is potentially overhyped with all the little self improvement hacks in the supplement industry, which might not hurt, which are oftentimes not proven to work and have the right efficacy. So I think chronic stress is actually the one area to look into first. If you are an hour target audience, I mean, no quick fixes. I mean, other as as bagel, not element that people oftentimes overseas, for instance, community, right? I mean, having people around you, I mean, it's something, how do you even measure it, right? And stress, okay, we're starting to measure it. You are contributing to it. That's great. But makes a lot of makes a lot of sense. Another article actually read a couple of months ago, maybe even fits to, I mean, fits quite well to what you do. And I assume maybe you have read it as well. And it was actually a McKinsey report and they call it the Hume, I think the what was it? The athletic CEO. So they're comparit, you know, CEOs with athletes actually in what CEOs can learn from athletes. And apparently in the US, the Americans are quite advanced when it comes to that. So a lot of CEOs from Fortune 500 companies seem to be, you know, really taking that seriously. And also, you know, their work and seem to more and more behave or, you know, inspire their daily habits from the ones that athletes have. What would you say is anything, you know, happening in the US? Is anything, would you say, do you have this maybe even? a bit more advanced when it comes to your topic of human performance. Is anything happening there that we in Europe or in other places of the world or are there other places in the world where the topic of human performance seems to be regarded more important as having a lot more attention right now? Yeah, this mindset of the CEO of the athlete or generally speaking, a high performance knowledge worker as an athlete, that's exactly the identity that we work with as well. An athlete has their entire team of nutritionists, of recovery experts that would never just sleep for hours per night in order to perform at the competition. So basically that's how we focus on it as well. And while every athlete would do performance diagnostics via to max testing, etc. Our off-frame is basically performance diagnostics for the for the model CEO absolutely. To a question on the US versus Europe, I have only spent a few months in the US so I cannot fully talk to it. My sense is that the top one top 5% in the US is very much advanced in terms of human performance compared to the top 1 or 5% in Europe. Yet if you look at the overall society, the obesity rates for example are very high, the chronic stress levels depending on which scale you measured was probably higher than in Europe. So it's a paradoxic picture, I guess, that we see in the US, with some people spearheading the human performance movement absolutely. So paradoxically, the society there's kind of in two different directions, some are more advanced than in Europe, some areas of the society probably less than that perspective. Makes a lot of sense. Maybe one more question. I mean, you've coached already now a lot of professionals and worked with them. We talked about that aspect of community that is also maybe something that is oftentimes overlooked as something that sort of enhances your performance and also maybe your longevity, however you want to call it. And does that play a role for you guys at Sapiens? Is that something you guys try to work on to, or maybe even build a community around your topic and connect people all around that topic to sort of bring them together and almost create a movement around the topic of human performance. Is that something you guys are thinking about or doing? Thinking about yes, I think that's something that we can get much better at. In a sense, we work with D2B, so there's big companies, big strategy consultancies, for example, and the area of intervention is usually the team. So we would work with an entire project team at a strategy consultancy or with an entire squad of lawyers, for example, or with the entire top executive team of a company. And by that, we actually implicitly leveraging community and we are changing culture in those companies while we're not working across companies yet. But if, for example, an entire top executive team, DASAW, or Stress Diagnostics, starts an open conversation about what are my stress drivers, what is reducing stress. We have different ways of measuring the impact of team dynamics on stress, which is of course a big one, so that we actually are creating movements and big companies. One company, nearly 100,000 employees, with work with every single top executive in their team. And they are, of course, starting to speak about stress diagnostics, human performance, recovery, so much more, they inspire their people. And our idea is basically to enter these houses of power, started the top in companies, and then inspire a movement within that company. And at the same time, we can get much better and mobilizing people beyond or across companies as well. It's a good idea of yourself. I mean, I assume it's very interesting that sort of, you know, we started the top and they see real life changes, not only professionally, so maybe also personally, and then it just trickles down, right? It's great vision, I would say. Maybe also let's talk a bit more about growth and scaling for you guys at Sapiens. I mean, could you give us, you know, an idea how many people or teams you've coached already, how many have gone through the Sapiens program, and also give us an idea about your distribution. I mean, you told me that you guys are primarily focused or have been primarily focused on B2B up to this moment. But is it maybe an idea to also go directly to the consumer or what sort of distribution channels are you guys considering for yourself to, you know, to continue on that journey? Yeah. The first question since I started the different iterations of Sapiens for now, years back, 7,000 people have gone through the program, not always it full stress diagnostics that we have today. And we are, yes, working mostly with B2B because that's where we have been successful, companies see a clear business case for prevention of stress related issues, for productivity, especially for leadership development, for reduction of attrition, right? All the places where we work with people are leaving the company after two to four years because it's so intense. And if the employer signals that they are helping with stress and that are measurably reducing stress, that of course keeps top talents on board longer. So there's a clear business case in B2B, which is why we work there. And we have started working in B2C as well. We haven't been as public about it in our marketing or website or so. But people can sign up by texting us for our program as well. We work with many topics, X individually as well. We probably gonna focus on that much more, once we have the premium offering fully established that we have now for B2B companies, where you have a personal team basically of an nutritionist, obviously, scientists, of experts around yourself. That's very expensive, as you can imagine. So we are looking into scaling our product, maybe bringing a few aspects of the experts into an AI doctor or AI coach. And once we're ready with that, we have a little bit of a lower pricing offer that we can scale further to B2C as well. For now, we stay a lot in B2B. So if you are listening to this podcast and I curious, you can try it with your team, for example, you can try it with the top executive team that you are in, or you can also try it for yourself. Try to pull. Could you also share with us a bit, is any metrics you could share in terms of go-to market or about the next milestones, anything you could share what's coming up in the next months in terms of go-to market particularly? Yeah. Go-to market where operating in the entire European Union at the moment, we ship our stress diagnostics to all those countries. We are testing the US. The US obviously has a system where the employer pays more for the health insurance of their people, of their employees, which makes a business case even more attractive than it already is in the European Union. So that's a market where we are growing, where we're thinking about going, we just launched some tests so far, same with some selected Asian countries. Middle East is growing a lot, so we started some pilot there. So yeah, there's a geographic expansion that we do, and the second expansion we do is creating less, we believe that human touch and personal support is required in our market to really make a big difference, yet we are streamlining it a bit so that it's becoming a little bit cheaper and that we also can address all teams of a company, not just the top executives, which is starting basically to become a more affordable offering, which for example, selected biomarkers instead of the full offering that we currently offer for everybody. Yeah, I imagine it to be very challenging to reach that scale and simultaneously also wanting to ensure that deeply personalized offering, so that's probably something that you need to manage and what is to come, so very interesting. Could you also give us more? I mean, we talked about community before, but also maybe partnerships, right? I mean, you seem to be working also with research labs, with health tech platforms. Could you maybe elaborate a bit more on who you're working with in terms of partnerships? And also how important partnerships are for you guys at SAPiens? Is it even an idea to eventually collaborate, for instance, with those wearable devices because you seem to be a lot more focused, but you're also saying that those devices maybe have their value to a certain extent. How do you view that topic of partnerships more broadly for you guys at SAPiens? Is it how's the strategy there? Yeah, the partners that we work with today were small teams, so we couldn't do it all. We collaborate with basically Europe's leading stress laboratory, which is mostly working in research today, and we are leveraging the entire stress hormone analysis of that. That's our biggest partner. We also start collaborations on the blood laboratory site, both for in-person blood drawing as well as for at-home blood testing. We are currently testing different microbiome tests for validity. There's some challenges there so that we start bringing more microbiome testing. We, of course, don't own the ECG monitoring hardware, but we have some collaboration there where we use medical grade ECG monitors for measuring of recovery and doing the analytics on it. And then we are essentially the integrator who has. has a model that detects stress risks and root causes based on the aggregation of all these data from our partner. The wearable data is interesting, but it will be more like an app where we are integrating with existing wearables. We are obviously not starting to compete in that space, but we can, in the future, integrate with Garmin, whoop all the traditional wearables and consider those data points as well. On top of our, let's say, more advanced measures of ECG monitoring for stress analytics. So that will be just an additional layer that is integrated in your entire offering. Very interesting. What would you say is maybe even from a business view, what are the most challenging aspects of building this sort of platform, sapiens, what has been sort of most challenging in all those years building that kind of platform? What would you say? Two things. So one is we are self-funded, or rather funded from client revenue. I wanted to build a product which is really honest and which has a brutal test of product-matter fit by seeing if clients are paying immediately for what we have to offer. We have many big deals with companies that do work with us for multiple years in the future that allows us right now to be self-funded, that comes with its own challenges. We are not having investors money partially for the reason that I believe it is a risky business to take a lot of funding and not have a product that actually has proven product-market fit and then cover it up with all the cash that you got from the investors. So that's one of the reasons. I might change my thinking there, but that's the current approach we take. And the other one is building a strong team. I mean, we have limited funding. We have the ambition to be super science-driven. We have multiple PhDs on the team that obviously is expensive to build it and to create that momentum of finding the right people. So far people are coming because they're inspired by our mission. That drives a lot of the top tier people to come to us. At the same time, it's also challenging to build in the space of being a self-funded entrepreneur, but it's very rewarding and it's wonderful to see actually all the teams' effort and investment that touches me so much to see how far they go and how much they invest in making this company great. And more important, helping people to reduce stress and perform better. Maybe before we rip it up, 'cause we're already slowly coming to an end. So you've been now in this journey for four years. What would you say, how does success look like to you now personally and also maybe for SAPians? Is it making sure that the business survives, obviously? Is it the impact? What sort of motivates you to continue on a journey to build SAPians and also to scale it to a big business? Yeah, ultimately, this is not so much about making the company successful as more about serving our clients well. I hope and I see clear data. I can share some soon that we are improving people's lives. We are reducing the risk of stress-related diseases for many people that work in 10 strokes. And we also have the pleasure of working with some of the smartest people on the planet in those companies. And I think reducing chronic stress for them makes them, enables them to make much better decisions to be much more productive and in doing good work. So I think we are kind of enabling other super smart people to be more of themselves or to be a better version of themselves. I just cliche at that sounds. And that's how we met our success, first of all. We've recently, we're starting a scientific study and showcasing or seeing if there's any impact of our programs from a scientific perspective. And we recently completed the first pilot with top executives all leading two to 5,000 people. And we saw six months later. So we measured in the beginning of the program. We did a program with one-on-one support with workshops. And then we measured six months later. We saw an average of 50% reduction in evening cortisol levels. We saw a 26% reduction in our chronic stress score, which is built based on these hair data and other data. And we saw people found 38% more recovery at night. These results were obviously they're not statistically validated, not went through the-- they're not published yet. So we have to do the data cleaning there, et cetera. But these initial results show us that our programs actually work. And people are reporting that, well, sometimes their work demand might go up. They are much better in charge of their stress levels and their nervous system response. And people come to us saying, hey, I had so many leadership challenges. And once my chronic stress is lower, I can deal with them so much better. And that has an impact of how present I come home to my family. And that's really what we are after. That people feel better and can do their best work while also living a good life. And I think the feedback is coming in so much now. Every week we get messages from people who are inspired about the work we did for them and who say, hey, you changed the part of my life. And that's really rewarding for us. That's what we are after. Yeah, very, very interesting when the impact is felt also beyond your workplace. So that must be very exciting for your customers. You alluded to it already. And that would be very, very curious. So you've collected already a lot of data. You are experiencing sort of day to day with your customers. And based on that sort of on the data that you've collected and your experiences with the customers, what structural changes would you like to see in our company's treats, stress, and resilience? We focus a lot on what you can own as an individual. We also start to help people, especially top executives teams, to start a conversation about recovery performance health. And I think the big structural change is that we get away from this hustler culture, from thinking that not sleeping tonight or sleeping five hours per night is actually independent of health. I think it's bad for performance. And I think that shift making that noticeable and putting that into data and publishing the data that we gather over time will probably be contributing to that shift and understanding of what performance means for a company, especially in times of AI, where all the transactional work can be done by machines. What is left for humans is actually creativity, emotional connection, and all the things which are anti-correlated was called stress. So I think our work will become more and more important. The more AI we will use. And the more chronic stress will be getting in the way of doing our best work. So yeah, I think that will be the answer to the question. It's great. And maybe one short anecdote since I'm studying in St. Gallen and they also have this mindset of hustle culture. And then if you're not too excited about this culture, you feel OK, to which group or to which mindset do I belong to. And then the other group in societies, the three days a week and not working. And it's also not a group where you sort of a group that I am I don't define. Exactly. So the sweet spot of seeing yourself like an athlete, and then being able to actually even perform a lot better. That's something which I also personally experienced in the last weeks and months that it's something I'm resonating or I can resonate with a lot better than other cliché mindsets that are out there. So very exciting what you do in congrats to your journey. Maybe finally, is there anything you would like to share to the audience before wrapping it up? Yeah, Toby, I just take your picture that spectrum of over focusing on well-being or over focusing on hustle culture so much. And I think we are really about a third way, which is a performance culture, however, which is not sacrificing your health for your performance. And what I notice is that a lot of the longevity industry is about self-optimization to get there. I think that is a path where we oftentimes get stuck. We're asking a question of what is missing? What do I have to fix? And that will always lead to a feeling of lack. So I think our company is more about, that's what Sapiens is about. We're about synchronizing with your own rhythm, identifying your biological rhythm, and then synchronizing with it instead of working against it. And I think there is a subtle difference between self-optimization and then finding your own rhythm and work with it, which is I think the best recipe for performance and health. And that's what we try to embody and to create. - Jaden, was a pleasure having you. Thank you very much. And all the best on your journey with Sapiens. - Thanks for spreading the word to me and for doing good work.