Miranda Nover is the Co-founder and CEO of Fort Health. Fort builds wearables that automatically track strength training for people who care about longevity.
This is a new format of the podcast that Iâm experimenting with. Itâs the first time Iâve had a Banana portfolio company founder on the show while theyâre still at the pre-seed stage. Miranda is still very much working through the idea maze and iterating on the Fort product.
When I surveyed all of you a few weeks ago, you were most interested in more early stage VC-backed founders. Iâd love your feedback on what you think of this!
We talk about the megatrends in consumer health, why sheâs building a company that helps you get stronger, and everything sheâs learned getting a hardware company off the ground.
Sheâs also in the middle of the current YC batch, and gives an inside look at what YC is like and if sheâd recommend it to other founders.
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Timestamps to jump in:
3:37 Importance of strength training
6:34 Benefits of being strong
10:37 Evolution of Fortâs hardware
15:58 Automating workout tracking
19:29 Two types of strength trainers
25:30 Building the strength company
27:26 How healthcare is consumerizing
40:43 Lessons building batteries at Tesla
44:56 Hardest parts about building a hardware startup
51:01 Adventures in vibe coding
57:54 How to use Twitter as a founder
1:02:09 The launch video industrial complex
1:08:03 What itâs like doing YC
1:10:19 Selling crayons in 3rd grade, Lemonade stands
1:14:41 Mirandaâs best vintage finds
1:16:44 How Turner evolved as a VC
1:22:22 Turnerâs early social media PMF
1:28:53 Inventing shitposting
Referenced:
Try Fort
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Transcript
Find transcripts of all prior episodes here.
Turner Novak:
Miranda, welcome to the show.
Miranda Nover:
Thank you.
Turner Novak:
So Iâm excited. Weâre going to talk a lot about just consumer health topics and hardware stuff, like building a hardware company. And youâre very in the thick of it still trying to figure it out and get it all to work.
Miranda Nover:
Yeah.
Turner Novak:
So can you real quick for people who arenât familiar with Fort, what is it?
Miranda Nover:
Fort is a wearable device. I actually have one on right now and it automatically tracks strength training and itâs for people who care about longevity.
Turner Novak:
So whatâs the importance of that?
Miranda Nover:
Yeah. So we as a society have recently emphasized strength a lot more than we have in the past several decades of wellness. Thereâs been a lot of great research about how important strength is to maintaining our independence, our metabolism as we age. And then also, I think culturally thereâs been a lot of memes and a lot of public interest around people getting jacked, but itâs not in the bodybuilding way that it was in the â80s. I feel like a lot of the people that do get jacked, like Mark Zuckerberg is an interesting example of this.
Heâs not a bodybuilder, but he certainly cares a lot about fitness and cares a lot more about being muscular than a lot of the public figures, I guess, did in the past.
Turner Novak:
Even Bezos.
Miranda Nover:
Bezos too, yeah.
Turner Novak:
Bezos is that one iconic picture of him at, I think, itâs probably like a Sun Valley Conference where heâs got the vest on and he has the sunglasses and heâs just like, he look jacked. Shoulders look like a box because heâs just so big.
Miranda Nover:
Yeah. And obviously influencer culture has played a huge role in this because now thereâs all these people who post crazy gym footage and people learn how to work out online and people share not only their physique, but also their this morning routine, wellness routine. I think thereâs also... COVID played a big role in the rise of wellness culture and also tangentially the rise of strength. Especially for my generation, I feel like it brought to the surface a lot of distrust in the medical system that was already brewing.
And I think that people who experienced some of that distrust, a lot of them took to more like... Homeopathic is not the right word, but more like DIY ways to stay well. I think thereâs also been a lot more of a sharing culture because people are figuring out new ways to keep themselves well and then they talk with others about, âWhatâs your supplement stack? Whatâs your sleep score?â And this is something that other wearable companies have brought into the public discourse.
So I think thereâs this distrust in the medical system and not so much that itâs very expensive to receive different types of healthcare, especially preventative healthcare in America and people are also just more open to sharing and talking about it.
Turner Novak:
What are the benefits of being strong and muscle strength aside from maybe you do or you donât, like look jacked? Whatâs the health benefits of just being stronger?
Miranda Nover:
Yeah. So thereâs a lot of them. I think the most obvious ones pertain to your ability to walk, to pick things up, to go up and down the stairs comfortably, to do the basic things like sitting in a chair and standing up. And we take those things for granted, but as you age, those things become a lot more difficult. And itâs a lot harder to start putting on muscle as you age. I think you lose something like 8% of your muscle mass every year after 30. Iâm not 100% sure of the numbers, but it certainly declines with age.
Turner Novak:
Iâm on the point of no return as an almost 35-year-old. Iâm like 8%, 8%. If you compound that, Iâm like, really losing it.
Miranda Nover:
Well, I mean, thatâs when people might say if you were to hormonally engineer yourselves-
Turner Novak:
Oh, yeah, thatâs true.
Miranda Nover:
... then you could certainly build a lot of muscle. But regardless, you still have plenty of time.
Turner Novak:
I got some runway to figure this out. Iâm glad Fort is here.
Miranda Nover:
Definitely. I think then outside of being able to perform basic movements, thereâs back pain, knee pain, pain reduction in general. Itâs a huge deal for Americans. Musculoskeletal disorders are a huge cost burden on our healthcare system. Thereâs a lot of surgeries and pain medication that are used as treatments for a lot of musculoskeletal disorders that could have been prevented with better posture, stronger muscles that someone could use as a preventative measure. So you never really get to the point where youâre having to deal with severe back and knee pain.
Turner Novak:
Just because your back is stronger, you have less pain?
Miranda Nover:
A lot of times itâs compensatory. So it could be your back being stronger. It could be your core being stronger. It could be that you sit all day and you have weakness in your glutes or your hips in a way that tweaks your back. Everything is so interconnected and physical therapy and rehab is so complicated.
Turner Novak:
And itâs boring.
Miranda Nover:
And itâs boring, yeah. Which is why I think people should strengthen because itâs a lot more fun to do it recreationally and just still think about it in the context of a health practice, like a wellness practice, not like a... I mean, I personally train because itâs fun, and for aesthetics, and for health. And thereâs a great way to balance all those things. But once you get to the point of doing physical therapy, itâs really boring. Itâs really hard to tell if youâre getting any results.
Turner Novak:
Kind of like a chore.
Miranda Nover:
Very complex.
Turner Novak:
Yeah. Well, complex and then... Because youâd think of when somebody says, âIâm trying to get stronger or I care about my muscle health,â your mind would just go to, âOh, that person is just trying to look jacked.â And itâs maybe your hypothesis and thesis behind Fort is itâs actually like a health thing also. Maybe thereâs an aesthetic thing like, âOh, looking strong is an aesthetically more attractive thing, but also itâs actually healthier.â
Miranda Nover:
It is, yeah. And I think itâs like... Also, with the rise of GLPs, I think thereâs a lot of talk about how to preserve muscle while you lose weight and muscle is metabolically active tissue, which means it helps you burn more calories at rest than fat or other tissues. So somebody could weigh the same as somebody else, but if that person had more lean mass relative to body fat, the person with more lean mass would burn more calories even if they didnât do anything different.
Turner Novak:
How does that play out?
Miranda Nover:
Iâm not a biology expert, but I think that itâs... Yeah, if you build more lean tissue, your body is... Because that tissue is firing and is doing a lot of metabolic processes, you burn more calories.
Turner Novak:
Interesting. Okay. And so youâre building some software products, youâre building some hardware products. Thereâs already some healthcare hardware things that are sort of out there. Couldnât somebody just use an Apple Watch to, I donât know, track strength? Maybe itâs an interesting way to help people understand what are you even doing? Whatâs even the opportunity in building a strength measuring hardware product?
Miranda Nover:
Yeah. So a platform like Apple Watch, they can do a lot. If you get apps on top of your Apple Watch, they can automatically count reps and theyâre pretty good at exercise detection. The real limitation of the Apple Watch is that it lives on your wrist. Our device can be used... So it has like a magnet.
Turner Novak:
You have it on your wrist right now.
Miranda Nover:
Yeah, I have it on my wrist right now. So I envision the device being used like an all day health tracker. We measure heart rate and we measure motion on the wrist the same way Whoop or Apple Watch would do. But when itâs time to train and you want to do something that you canât track from the wrist, so think of something like a leg press. My wrist doesnât move when Iâm doing leg press, but if I stuck a magnet onto the leg press carriage with this device on it, I could track the reps via a motion tracker in the device.
Turner Novak:
So youâd stick it on the equipment or youâd stick it on your leg?
Miranda Nover:
You could do either. I think I find it easier personally to use the magnet. I like to wear leggings in the gym. So a lot of times using the body strap is more difficult for me, but we do produce body straps. So if our users want to wear it around their leg, we can give them those. And when we originally started building Fort, we had a hypothesis that the reason Whoop, Apple Watch and others couldnât track strength effectively was because motion tracking is not sufficient to fully understand someoneâs muscle fatigue during strength training.
So the original version of Fort utilized a different type of sensor called surface electromyography. And this is a type of sensor that you do need to wear locally to the muscle. So if you flex your bicep and you want to measure the strength of that contraction, you can use this type of sensor, but you have to wear it on your bicep. You canât detect bicep from wrist or leg from wrist.
So originally we thought that novel sensors were necessary to sufficiently track strength training even in a wellness or recreational context. I think now our working thesis is that motion is sufficient, but motion only at the wrist is not.
Turner Novak:
Okay. So why is that a big deal?
Miranda Nover:
I think that if youâre going to track strength training and you want to do this for a mass market consumer, they donât want to have to. Like I just said, I like to wear leggings at the gym. Most women do and many people, they donât want to be wearing a chest strap, wearing an arm strap and moving the device around during strength workouts. So originally the device that we were designing would have had to been moved around to the muscle group you wanted to measure, which we-
Turner Novak:
It was this big clunky thing.
Miranda Nover:
Yeah. First it was like this adhesive sensor. It was really big.
Turner Novak:
Youâd stick it on and then youâd have to...
Miranda Nover:
Peel it off.
Turner Novak:
... simply rip it off. I mean, it was stuck on my arm when I use it that one time.
Miranda Nover:
Even when I first showed you on Zoom, it was like a raw circuit board with some adhesive stuff on the bottom and you were like, âIs it always going to look like that?â
Turner Novak:
Yeah. I remember thinking, âI donât think that will work.â I mean, you probably knew it wouldnât work specifically like that too, but...
Miranda Nover:
Yeah. So thereâs definitely two paths for tech in our general niche of health tracking. You can either become more of a medical device and thereâs a spectrum of how much FDA clearance, how invasive, how precise, what medical claims you want to make thatâs on that med device side. So itâs generally still like youâre selling into healthcare, the go to-market is very different, the regulatory pathways are very different. And then thereâs the consumer fitness angle, which is what weâre pursuing, which is going and competing with Whoop, Apple Watch, Garmin, or a Ring.
And itâs a very different... You win on clinical accuracy and supporting patients that have a demand for your product in this healthcare segment. And then in consumer health tracking, you really win on how much people love you and how much you can change their behavior with a product. And we didnât feel like going with this, certainly not the sticky thing, and then also not the bands that you wear everywhere was really friendly to a consumer, but we still think the core problem of strength tracking being really inaccurate or impossible with the existing consumer health trackers is worth solving.
Turner Novak:
So why is even strength tracking even that important? Because I can just go to the gym and just bench squat and write things in a piece of paper or donât even have to track it and probably get stronger. Whatâs the importance of actually like, âIâm tracking this stuff in the first placeâ?
Miranda Nover:
Yeah. Thereâs two groups of people that would find value from the device. One group is like, âThey are optimizers. They want to build muscle. They want to get stronger and they want to do so in the most efficient way possible.â So with that, itâs like you really want to be able to tell if you are fatiguing your muscles enough to see growth while maintaining good form. So I feel like for a while before I was as busy, I fell into this camp and I worked with a personal trainer, and I was in the gym all the time, and I was super obsessed with my routine.
I would find myself trying to go up in weight to get stronger in my lifts, but then I would be like, âAm I still hitting the same range of motion that I was before or am I cheating a little bit?â And itâs really hard to figure out how much weight... I know I want to lift more weight, but when should I increase the weight? By how much? Is my form still good? Am I unstable? Which are all things that a sensor can help do. Writing in a piece of paper gives you... Logging the data has an inherent value. Itâs nice to be able to track different, the graph of how the weight went up over time, but you miss a lot of that context of how someone actually moved and how tired they got objectively rather than subjectively.
Turner Novak:
So thatâs a big piece of what youâre measuring is the fatigue level when youâre doing workouts and then layering that with actually tracking what they did and how they went, and then figuring out where to go from there?
Miranda Nover:
Yeah. We use motion. So when we were working with EMG sensors, which were the local ones, we could directly see fatigue due to a frequency shift in the data.
Turner Novak:
So EMG sensor, whatâs that?
Miranda Nover:
That is the one that you have to wear locally and it measures muscle activation as an electrical signal.
Turner Novak:
Whatâs EMG stand for?
Miranda Nover:
Surface electromyography. So EMG is electromyography, but we use... They also have ones with needles. This is for really... If you want to access little muscles in the hand or wrists, or you want to access subsurface muscles anywhere on the body, you put a needle in, and itâs the same type of sensor. Itâs literally just measuring the potential difference between two points in the body and then amplifying that electrical difference in a circuit and reporting out the data. So itâs a very simple non-invasive measurement when used at the surface, and itâs still simple, but invasive when itâs used internally.
Turner Novak:
So there are tools or devices out there that stick little needles in and you work out with them?
Miranda Nover:
Not for working out. Itâs more for neurological rehabilitation. So maybe like a stroke patient or someone who is looking to regain the use of small muscles or fine motor skills after an accident, or someone who is experiencing pain in their joints, they might go in and get EMG testing done in a lab. Theyâre certainly not selling those for consumers.
Turner Novak:
So thereâs the hardcore optimizing a lot of things, tracking things. Thereâs a different type of strength interested person?
Miranda Nover:
Yeah. So the optimizers are people who they want to build strength or build muscle as efficiently as possible, and theyâre willing to do a lot of training and devote a lot of resources to that. And then thereâs this other group thatâs like, they want to do as little strength training as possible to still be considered healthy. And I feel like these are people like busy parents, people like busy founders, people who do-
Turner Novak:
I feel a lot of people graduate. I feel like when I was in college, I was in the optimizer working out. Thereâs this workout that me and my friends in college called the Nebraska Workout.
Miranda Nover:
I remember you telling me about this.
Turner Novak:
I guess itâs the Nebraska championship football team the 1980s did it and we were obsessed with it and itâs like just a program for progressing your bench really fast and works really well. And then now I literally donât track things when I work on it. I just go to the gym and itâs like bench, squat, trying to get back into deadlifting and just like other workouts and maybe play basketball. And itâs like, âNow, Iâm tired feeling I having to workout and thatâs the extent of it.â Because thereâs so much else going on, I just donât have time to track it.
Miranda Nover:
Yeah. We think that itâs really important that what we build works for people like you and other people in this camp where itâs like... The persona here is like they do a lot of different activities. They probably do go to the gym, but they might not go every single week of the year. They play sports on the side. They often are parents or maybe they have some type of manual aspect to their job. And a lot of the times what people would be concerned with here is if youâre missing some type of foundational movement pattern in your training.
So you might be doing just like bench squat deadlift, but you would also want to add some type of pulling movement in general. And this pulling could be good for like, if youâre doing it like this, itâs for your biceps and if youâre doing it like this, itâs for your back and you can do kind of...
Turner Novak:
Yeah.
Miranda Nover:
So thereâs these foundational movement patterns and you want to generally like to maintain your fitness and your health. You generally want to hit most of those on a regular basis, but thereâs such a lower bar for what you need to do to maintain versus to build. And I think for someone like me, I donât really want to think about what I do in the gym now, but I donât want to lose the gains that I made when I was in this optimizer camp.
So itâs like, âOkay, I know I trained legs two days ago and then Pilates... Or I guess legs two days ago, rested yesterday, Pilates this morning. I want to know whatâs left. I donât really want to keep track of this in my head, but I still want to make sure Iâm hitting everything sort of evenly.â I think thereâs different times... We were just talking with Danielle about perimenopause.
Thereâs different transitions in life where we become more aware of our health and we want to do things to prevent decline when things about our bodies change. Either we get an injury or we have pain or weâre going through hormonal changes. And I think those times are also another really good time to keep up with tracking as well.
Turner Novak:
I feel like too, as you get older, thereâs like if youâre... I donât know. Maybe Iâve already hit this. Iâm just like, âI donât even care if Iâm the most jacked. Itâs just I want to be able to be as healthy as possible. Iâll care more about, am I flexible?â I feel like thatâs like a big thing as you get older. Letâs say youâre in your 50s, you might just have accepted like, âIâm not as strong as I was when I was in college,â but thereâs just importance of being able to still... I feel like flexibility and joint stability and... Hip strength is like in your 60s person. You can just fall and like break your hip and die.
Thatâs just a thing thatâs a way that... Not super, super common, but the older you get, the weaker you get in different points of the muscle like grouping and whatever. I donât know how that works. Itâs a big problem.
Miranda Nover:
Huge problems. I think flexibility is more tied to strength than a lot of people think. A lot of times, itâs not that you need looser muscles, itâs that you have an imbalance and you need to strengthen something thatâs weaker than the other thing, and itâs pulling various parts of your body out of alignment.
So my mom is great about going to the gym, and thatâs who got me into the gym. And I think that in turn now, I mean, she doesnât require a lot of motivation, but I certainly encourage her to do more with fitness or we talk about whatâs good form and talk about different ways of training. And I think I noticed this with, this was a really common theme from talking to a lot of our users and potential users is the intergenerational dynamic. Itâs like if your parents arenât strength training, you start seeing them experiencing falls. You start seeing them experiencing limited mobility and needing aids to do everyday activities.
And the impact of that is twofold. Youâre obviously worried about them and their health and want them to maintain their independence. And then at the same time, you also start worrying about, is that happening to me? And so I think the product that we are designing, I definitely want it to be, or some version of it that exists in the future, to be the thing that you get your parents when youâre worried about them not being able to be as mobile or as strong as they used to be.
Turner Novak:
So basically your hypothesis or just thesis behind all the things that youâre trying right now to do is just that strength is something that humanity will care more about?
Miranda Nover:
Yeah.
Turner Novak:
A super way to distill it down to the most simple concept. Itâs like the strength company.
Miranda Nover:
Yeah. Strength is a pillar of health. And I think that nobody really owns the mind share and the market share around being the strength company. I mean, thereâs gyms, thereâs protein shakes and creatine and stuff. But a lot of that is resembling this gym-bro culture that I think is not really like ... Yeah. I really want to reframe the publicâs idea of strength as a tool for health and wellness, which I think people are generally coming around to and sympathetic to.
Turner Novak:
So somebody who might, theyâre like a 45-year-old mom whoâs a teacher. She does not identify with a gym-bro. And Iâm trying to think of whatâs the opposite of a gym-bro. But that person can still identify with being strong.
Miranda Nover:
Yes. Yeah. I think that that person ... I mean, the ideal is that they find fun and pleasure and confidence in strength training, but at minimum, itâs nice to have guidelines for what is enough. And itâs nice to have some type of tool to help take some of the mental load of planning workouts, tracking workouts, thinking about what to do.
Sort of like a personal trainer, like a tech-based personal trainer. But I think thatâs not necessarily what we want to be. I think we just see ourselves as passive tracking and a simple way to check in like, âHave I hit all of the foundational movement patterns with sufficient intensity this week?â I think a teacher, anyone could benefit from something like that.
Turner Novak:
So what ways do you think healthcare is changing? I mean, maybe hit on it a little bit earlier. Maybe we talked about before we started recording, I donât even remember, but I donât know, I maybe think of, this seems like almost too abstract of an idea that maybe wouldnât have ... If we go back in time a little bit, this seems like a hard thing to make people ... So how is healthcare kind of changing to make you think this is going to work?
Miranda Nover:
Thereâs a lot of layers to it. Thereâs the points that we touched on before where consumers are fed up with rising costs, a lack of preventative care that is accessible either by price or by location or availability of providers. And then thereâs some distrust that COVID really made worse. Thereâs not always a positive relationship between providers and patients. And itâs unfortunate because I still firmly believe that evidence-based medicine is king, but thereâs a lot of convoluted incentives in that system that make it really hard for providers to serve patients in a way that it makes both parties happy, basically.
Turner Novak:
So how so? Explain what evidence-based care is and then what the incentives are messed up.
Miranda Nover:
Yeah. So when youâre a physician and when youâre operating in a regulatory environment where youâre FDA controlled, youâre diagnosing and treating actual conditions, you need to perform good science if youâre going to offer a product. And then if youâre somebody whoâs diagnosing and treating diseases, itâs on you to be up-to-date with the literature and making sure that you read the good science that other people produce and you make decisions of clinical care based off of that.
But thereâs also like the insurance landscape plays a big role in what people have access to and where and when they have access to that care. And then thereâs hospital administrators and people who run large networks of clinics and healthcare facilities that are in the loop. Thereâs a lot of regulation in the space that controls where money goes and the players are so entrenched because everything has to be done by such bureaucratic processes.
And tech has really, this is a bit tangential, but tech has really failed to penetrate the healthcare market in the way that it seems like it could. And I think tech bros, we always think weâll just do things more efficiently. Thereâs clearly all these inefficiencies, just pick one, tackle it. And then you try to go down that path and thereâs all these entrenched interests and procedures. And itâs like, at the end of the day, the system, the healthcare system as it is right now, it doesnât seek efficiency, it seeks compliance, which is good, for some people.
Itâs good because youâre always doing things by the book and you donât want to move fast and break things when it comes to peopleâs health, but at the same time, itâs also to the detriment of a lot of people. Yeah. And thereâs like the largest example of this kind of dynamic of tech starting to penetrate healthcare, but failing to really fully materialize, I would say, is the EHR or EMR situation. So electronic medical records were kind of introduced as this thing where you can digitize all of the clinical notes and the lab tests and give providers access to data. And itâs great because it preserves a record of everything, but itâs really created a lot of extra work and burden for clinicians.
Turner Novak:
Oh, really?
Miranda Nover:
Yeah. So the clinicians are struggling to use this system thatâs like ... I donât know if youâve seen those memes. They usually refer to creative tools, but itâll be like, itâs like the cockpit of an airplane. Itâs like, âHow it looks when I open After Effects,â or something.
Turner Novak:
Oh, my God.
Miranda Nover:
I think that that applies with Epic, which is the primary electronic medical records software that many hospitals use. Itâs really full-featured, itâs really intense. You have to manually record everything and thereâs all these startups that are trying to disrupt that, but itâs a system thatâs very resistant to disruption. And all that to say, tech hasnât necessarily helped healthcare find a lot of efficiencies. And I think itâs a very entrenched structural problem. So then thereâs all of these more wellness focused products and-
Turner Novak:
So these are just like wellness focused product is like the consumer makes a decision on it based-
Miranda Nover:
Yes.
Turner Novak:
... on how they just feel or want-
Miranda Nover:
Yeah.
Turner Novak:
... versus going through a healthcare order of procedures, order of operations of how a healthcare system is designed to diagnose or prescribe things.
Miranda Nover:
Yeah. And those two things are inherently distinct, but I think that theyâre increasingly starting to mingle, which I think is a really ... If tech canât or has to date failed to fully penetrate in the actual capital H Healthcare system, and then in the consumer market, you face issues of saturation, lack of trust, because you donât have to adhere to these medical standards, or you donât have to adhere to being an evidence-based product, thereâs data privacy, thereâs so many. And just consumer businesses, like your inventor, Iâm a founder, we all have heard thereâs a lot of the revenue isnât stable, the consumers are very difficult to make happy, itâs very difficult to make them change their behavior. And you canât diagnose or treat diseases with consumer products.
So thereâs a lot of limitations there, both about the economics of it and the capabilities of the products, but thereâs starting to be more of a consumerization of actual healthcare products, which I think is driven both by the consumer demand and by the access to more flexible spending dollars, like an HSA and FSA accounts, I think is a big driver of consumer spending on wellness products.
And then thereâs also bills that theyâre trying to pass most recently, like the Choice Act, which gives people access to flexible spending dollars as part of their employer provided insurance plans. And thereâs all these services kind of like Noom or Headspace, thereâs a lot of mental health, like digital mental health clinics that consumers find and consumers choose, but are still insurance supported. So these insurance supported but consumer, I donât know, driven marketplaces.
Turner Novak:
Yeah. Itâs almost like we had to make up new categories that werenât touched by the entrenched healthcare. So mental health, if you think of 30 years ago, there was no mental health.
Miranda Nover:
Right.
Turner Novak:
You were just crazy. Thatâs how they would describe it.
Miranda Nover:
Yeah. Yeah.
Turner Novak:
And so itâs probably like Calm and Headspace, they created products that just werenât being served by existing kind of entrenched categories and werenât maybe touched by regulations. Honestly, you could possibly make the argument that affecting someoneâs brain should be way more regulated than anything else.
Miranda Nover:
Oh, yeah.
Turner Novak:
But the current healthcare system, thereâs no way to provide mental health support. And so it kind of was able to evolve in more of a decentralized way. Maybe thatâs like the opportunity is like, there needs to be new categories that arenât under the umbrella of existing infrastructure of providing care and support in healthcare.
Miranda Nover:
Yeah. Thereâs a lot of interesting takes on this where people are inventing new markets. I think that concierge medical service is at the highest end. I know a lot of people who are high net worth relative to the average American, but certainly not ultra-high net worth. People in the tech space, theyâll go see ... Solace Health is one example of this. Thereâs been a lot that have kind of popped up and failed.
So that at the high end, and then thereâs these blood testing services, Function Health, one of the fastest growing consumer health tech companies, I believe ever, certainly recently. They offer blood testing, which has always been around, but you used to get it through your doctor and now they just offer it through independent labs and they offer feedback and follow-ups based on that. Wearables.
Turner Novak:
Yeah, because I feel like blood testing was always a background of youâre just at the doctor, âOh, by the way, weâll just test your blood and do something.â But it was never like a ... Because Quest is the big player, like an infrastructure company in healthcare. And Function Health made it a product that the consumer could interface with maybe, but there was no ... You didnât just go to get your blood tested just to see what it said.
Miranda Nover:
Yeah.
Turner Novak:
Thatâs not something most people did.
Miranda Nover:
Yeah. And even though you could theoretically have Googled the results before or ChatGPTâd the results more recently, which is a whole other thing. We should definitely talk about ChatGPT Health, like Anthropicâs new health product, being able to have ... You know whatâs crazy? I was at a healthcare founder dinner recently, and I donât know the exact mechanics of how this works, but Iâll paraphrase, and apologies if I get anything wrong. But basically, I am legally ... If I want to access my medical records as a consumer, Iâm legally entitled to do so, but nobody has to make it easy for me. So you a lot of times have to go chase down different files, like if youâve got imaging done or blood work done at a different lab, maybe those files are really hard to access. You have to go in person, file some, fax them something, very archaic.
But if I was to make a company, thereâs certain hoops you have to jump through. You have to employ a physician and thereâs fees involved. But if I was to be a company who wanted to get access to my medical records or your medical records, I could just set up my company in such a way and it exists in a centralized database online. So now I have access to all those things without having to go through the archaic access procedure that a consumer would have to do to access their own medical records.
And itâs just up to the hospital system or the doctorâs office if they want to make it easy for you or make it hard for you. And you certainly donât get them all in one place unless you go to one of those companies who has the access that you canât get as an individual. So it seems like that ChatGPT Health and others will probably integrate with some providers like that who go and get peopleâs medical records and then deliver them to the individual.
Turner Novak:
Yeah. It seems like a lot of stuff thatâs happening in consumer health. Weâre not like inventing new things, itâs just weâre just doing things that no oneâs done before, if that makes sense.
Miranda Nover:
Yeah. Yeah. Combining services with a consumer-friendly interface or just making things available at different times in someoneâs life when the medical system hasnât deemed them necessary, but the person wants to know more.
Turner Novak:
Yeah.
Miranda Nover:
Yeah. Itâs very interesting. I think that itâs a huge market, but I think the products, in order to be durable ... Itâs very difficult to build a durable brand in that space, I would say. Thereâs a lot of competition. And a lot of times people will use one of these products once, discover behaviors that they need to change and have a magical moment with the product and really like it. And then once they change the behaviors, it goes out of fashion.
Or with the blood testing companies, you only look at the results of the blood test, realistically, at most, youâre getting your blood tested once a month if youâre maybe on some type of medicine that requires that you get your blood testing once a month. But most people, itâs going to be once or twice a year. So how does that company interact with their users in the meantime? Which is one thing weâre excited about with wearables. Whoop and Aura have started doing labs, blood work through their platforms. I would assume weâll see more access to medical records in those platforms, integrations with glucose monitors.
But the wearable is something that the user can wear every day and ideally theyâre looking at the app every day, but even if itâs once a week, itâs still a product thatâs rare in the space because itâs part of the daily ritual of sleep tracking or fitness or calories or steps. Whatever it is, itâs things that we do on a daily basis or we might think about on a daily basis.
Turner Novak:
So youâre actually like, youâre building different devices and testing different things. I donât know where the appropriate time to start this story or journey of building for, but what made you feel like, âI could make a hardware company,â like you could make something? Because I feel like maybe now weâre at a point where itâs maybe slightly more acceptable or slightly more of a non-insane thing to say like, âIâm building a hardware company.â So whatâs gotten you comfortable with saying like, âOh, weâre going to try building a health hardware productâ?
Miranda Nover:
I know. Consumer health hardware, all of those things together, like VCs are running for the hills, I can already tell. No, I think it was a combination of things. I think, so my background is in mechanical engineering. Thatâs what I studied in college. And then after school, I worked at Tesla doing mechanical design for lithium-ion battery cells. And we were designing ... It was the first time Tesla had ever fully designed a cell in house. Previously they were joint ventures, like the big Panasonic factory that Tesla stood up. A lot of the IP didnât belong to Tesla.
So it was like they were trying to bring all the IP in house and make a bunch of design changes, both on the mechanical side of the cell, so how everything is shaped and the materials that were used, and then also on the chemical side. So it was a really risky, ambitious project. And I interned when things were really early and I came back when we were just prototyping a cell that later went into the Cybertruck and I stayed through the launch of the Cybertruck cell. Even though I wasnât there for very long, it did give me exposure to this safety, critical, really risky product that had to be manufactured at high volumes without failing.
And I think that that made the prospect of developing my own hardware device thatâs like, it still matters immensely to me that this device is extremely accurate and is way more helpful than it is hurtful, but ultimately itâs not going to light a vehicle on fire if ... The worst this does is tell you you did 10 reps and you actually did 12. But at Tesla, the cell, it has a lot of safety risks. So I think that was one thing.
But I also think that thereâs a real structural advantage now in the market of doing things that have even just a little bit more moat that AI canât immediately do all of the hardware design and development tasks that we need to do. Whereas with software engineering, I feel like a lot of software products, thereâs still relationships, distribution, thereâs still a lot of ways to build a moat, but I think some of these less approachable categories are becoming more approachable.
Turner Novak:
AI feel like the thesis on any kind of AI company is figuring out how to capture a workflow, capture data, unique data, and you can argue this is a way to do it in consumer health. I feel like itâs still ... You havenât launched yet, right? I think this will maybe actually come out-
Miranda Nover:
Right after we launch.
Turner Novak:
... right after you launch. So youâre still very earlier in iterating on building all this stuff.
Miranda Nover:
Yeah. So weâve been operational for almost exactly a year to date, and it was a lot of figuring out, building different prototypes, like the ones that weâre attaching to the muscle and it was pursuing a more med device route for the product. And then it was like, okay, weâre pursuing consumer, but the thing that we have is very dorky and the iteration speed in hardware, itâs getting a lot faster and it is faster because weâre building a small consumer device. If not like we have to build a big crazy machine, but itâs amazing.
Iâm now writing a lot of our companyâs code. My primary role, I would say at Ford is software and product, and I can just change things. I can just tear the app down and rebuild it if I want to. And thereâs obviously some time sunk and hassle in doing that, but if I want to tear down the hardware architecture and rebuild it, thereâs lead time, thereâs supply chain issues, thereâs physics that often gets in the way. And itâs just like the process is way more friction filled than it is to design software.
Turner Novak:
So what are the hardest parts about iterating on and shipping and building a hardware product?
Miranda Nover:
I think thereâs just a lot of technical surface area is the first thing. So thereâs mechanical hardware, right? The case is a hard good that we make out of plastic. These interfaces between the hard good and the fabric strap are made out of metal because they need a tighter tolerance. Then thereâs the electronics and the sensors that go inside here, the boards, theyâre very difficult to design and manufacture. And then thereâs the firmware that runs on the chip in here. And the firmware has to do a lot of heavy lifting because we need to store and process data on the device to avoid sending too much over to the phone.
And then thereâs the phone app, and then thereâs the backend data processing server and stuff. So thereâs all these different things to maintain. Whereas if youâre in a software company, you just donât have half of those things. And then I think the way you can get around that if you donât have the skills in house is outsourcing, but then youâre working with people who donât care as much as you and who donât ... You have to work really hard on communicating your vision effectively to say a Chinese supplier. You have to figure out what parts of the process and product design you want to own versus what they should own. You want to make sure youâre building the right thing before you invest in a manufacturing line.
I think thatâs been a big thing for us is it would be so much easier if we could work with a manufacturing partner on a lot of things because they have tons of engineers and tons of expertise, but then itâs like, if we tell them to build something, theyâll do it. If we tell them the wrong thing, theyâll build the wrong thing. So itâs really helpful that our team is like, Iâm a mechanical engineer, my co-founder Paulâs an electrical engineer. He worked at Tesla much longer than I did. And then we have another engineer, Zach, and heâs a mechanical engineer. So now I write code and he does most of our hardware design, but weâre capable of, as rapidly as one could, rapidly prototyping stuff and making changes based on feedback that we get from testing and from users.
Turner Novak:
And then so with Paul, what was he working on at Tesla?
Miranda Nover:
He did sensing systems for the Tesla semi and some other programs. So one of the cool ones was cabin radar, which are these radar sensors in the vehicle that they can detect if someoneâs having a heart attack.
Turner Novak:
Why is that important for the Tesla vehicle?
Miranda Nover:
I mean, Tesla is just a very safe vehicle, and I think they might have other uses. Iâm actually not familiar with the cabin radar system at all. So it mightâve just been a health feature that is interesting to the Tesla consumers, or it might have some other use in autonomy, but yeah, Iâm not familiar with how they actually deploy the sensors and use them in the Tesla vehicles.
Turner Novak:
And then I know Zach, are you allowed to say what Zach worked on? Is it a public thing thatâs already said?
Miranda Nover:
Zach worked on Cybercab.
Turner Novak:
Okay.
Miranda Nover:
Yeah.
Turner Novak:
Thereâs a lot of different, probably more mission-critical life or death safety types of features and products versus tracking some muscle movement.
Miranda Nover:
Yeah. Yeah. Itâs definitely less intimidating from a safety perspective, but there is a... The thing with wearables is Iâm someone who cares a lot about design, brand and aesthetics. And I think that at various points in this journey, Iâve thought maybe we should just build a better looking WHOOP. But people will use a wearable that looks bad, but is very accurate. People will not use a wearable. They might buy it, but theyâre not going to actually keep using a wearable that looks good, but isnât accurate. I think accuracy and having some type of differentiated metrics that actually work reliably is more important than having something thatâs really aesthetically pleasing in the beginning. I fully imagine that our device will be half the size made of metal, a lot more elegant in its future iterations, but we donât want to devote so many resources to that.
We want to devote resources to making sure the rep counting exercise identification, form analysis, and the software interface is really accurate and robust first.
Turner Novak:
Howâs it evolved over time? I think you mentioned, it sounds like it just has gotten smaller over time.
Miranda Nover:
Yeah, itâs gotten smaller and weâve reduced the amount of sensors that we use. Well, so this device actually does have the EMG sensors that we talked about that can do local sensing that weâre investigating as a primary sensing methodology. So we havenât actually fully removed them yet despite we generally think we want to focus more on motion tracking as a proxy for exercise fatigue and exercise form versus the local stuff. This also has near infrared spectroscopy, which is a optical sensor. So itâs a light-based sensor similar to the heart rate sensors. Itâs again though, you have to wear it locally. So this actually is still pretty beefy in terms of what it has on board. It has a lot more sensors than WHOOP and Oura and Apple Watch do. If we get demand from our beta testers to use those sensors more, they really want to wear it locally and get more data, more accurate data, more localized data.
We can still do it with this hardware. But if not, our hypothesis is that motion is generally sufficient as long as youâre not bound to the wrist. And so we should just make the device smaller and cut some of this extra sensors.
Turner Novak:
Yeah, thatâs fair. One thing you mentioned was youâre doing a lot of the software and product stuff yourself. I remember, I feel like youâve been a ground zero case study of what vibe coding can do or whatever. I remember thereâs one night in the four office where it was one of the earlier versions of Cursor where youâre learning to use Cursor to make a product. What has that been like? I feel like youâve been at grounds, youâre capitalizing on what you can do with vibe coding.
Miranda Nover:
I actually feel like I am somewhat... So non-technical people I feel like now could get a lot out of vibe coding and will be able to get a lot more out of vibe coding in the future. Highly technical people obviously can get a lot out of vibe coding and they can do more complex agent orchestration and have these interesting development workflows. I, as someone whoâs semi-technical, I would say, I did some AI research in college, but thatâs mostly Python in notebooks and Python deployed on servers. Itâs not the same as full stack. Itâs certainly not writing a mobile app. And I did some data analysis work at Tesla. Again, itâs Python based. Itâs not software engineering in the way that I do now. I feel like Iâm an absolute weapon because I had some context for how computers work, how programming languages work. Iâve been in VS Code.
Iâd made a Twitter bot before. Iâd made my personal website before. What I can do, I feel like itâs just insane. I feel like Iâm at the perfect... I didnât really have to actually learn to be a software engineer, but I still get so much more out of it than if I was fully non-technical. And yeah, itâs evolved a lot. I remember first using ChatGPT when I was at Tesla, I would ask it little Python questions and I could do that. And then we got Cursor. And Cursor was good at first, but I remember it would just lead me down paths that werenât actually going to work. I think when you came to the Afore office, I was trying to set up some streaming service for our data to get from the device through Bluetooth into cloud storage.
And the architecture was awful. It was so horrible. It was never going to work. And I kept being like, âOh, weâre 95% of the way there. Just one more bug fix, just one more prompt.â And neither I nor the coding agent was smart enough to figure it out. But now I feel like Iâm certainly, especially with Opus 4.5 and with Claude Codeâs recent updates, I feel like at least my community of founders has generally converged on Claude Code as a primary tool. And itâs interesting to see how as the models evolve, different clusters of people go to different things. They use different models for different things. Thereâs all this sharing of different workflows. But yeah, vibe coding is incredible. Itâs amazing. Have you been vibe coding at all?
Turner Novak:
Not enough. Maybe a little bit, but I just donât have anything I need to build.
Miranda Nover:
You know what you could do.
Turner Novak:
What could I do?
Miranda Nover:
You should do some Valentineâs Day thing. I feel like holiday or a podcast thing, Shweta, one of my friends, she did a tarot deck that was a vibe coded project that was which tech bro tarot readings. But Iâm curious because Iâm certain someoneâs going to do a Valentineâs Day themed one that will be really viral. And I havenât come up with any ideas that I feel like are viral enough to actually go do it myself, but maybe you could.
Turner Novak:
Thatâs a good idea.
Miranda Nover:
Or you could do something with your kids. Your kids are into music production. We were just talking about that. Maybe you could make them an interesting synth interface or something.
Turner Novak:
Yeah. My daughter does love coding. So thereâs this program that the school does, itâs called PLTW, Project Lead The Way. And for whatever reason, they do a lot of coding and learning to code. And itâs a lot of, itâs some kids program. I forget what the programâs called, but itâs not like cursor or anything anyoneâs probably heard of, but itâs some kind of like you learn to make the computer do actions and stuff like that. And she calls it coding. I donât think anyone listening to this would call it coding, but thatâs how they describe to the kids where you make things. So Iâve been thinking about one of these weekends we should spend a couple hours of make a game together in Claude or something like that, which would probably work.
Miranda Nover:
Yeah, I think it would be super feasible. I think it helps the more... Well, this is the great thing about doing it with your kids too, is itâs like the more strong of an idea of the creative vision you have for the project, the easier it is for Claude to just handle the boring stuff. So she can really let her imagination run wild. And I feel like then you can maybe translate that into more executive instructions, in what order to do things and what are the success criteria, because I feel like thatâs really important as well. I think weâre quickly approaching the time when prompt engineering doesnât really matter. You can give some abstract idea to some of the models and the inference will be able to tell what you really mean. But I still feel like now I get a lot more out of it if Iâm specific about order success criteria, how itâs supposed to evaluate the success criteria. But yeah, the creative stuff, itâs so cool to be able to see peopleâs visions come to life.
Turner Novak:
Yeah. One thing you mentioned, you said you made a Twitter bot. What was the Twitter bot?
Miranda Nover:
Okay. So this was pre me having any type of Twitter. I didnât tweet or anything. I guess it was right after college, but it was when crypto was really popular and I felt like I, as a mechanical engineering student and just freshly moving to San Francisco right in the heyday of crypto, I didnât know a lot of the words that people would say on crypto Twitter. I didnât understand what they meant. So I made a bot that I could tag into comments and it would parse the tweet for any finance or crypto related words and define them for me. I didnât know what a DCF was either. So it was like finance, like a cashflow model. I didnât know any of the finance words and I didnât know any of the crypto words. So if it was a ticker symbol, it would tell me what company it was.
If it was an acronym that they use in finance, it would tell me what that was. And if it was a coin or a crypto term, it would tell me what that was.
Turner Novak:
Okay.
Miranda Nover:
Yeah.
Turner Novak:
Nice. So you would reply to the tweet, you were one of those people?
Miranda Nover:
I would go on the bots account and I would just have it tag itself. And it was like, this is very an overstatement of its capabilities, but you know how people now are at Grok explain this. It was like an early primitive version of that. Yeah, basically invented Grok.
Turner Novak:
Yeah, no big deal. And so we actually met on Twitter. You use Twitter a decent amount in how you think about Fort and being a founder, I guess.
Miranda Nover:
Yeah.
Turner Novak:
So whatâs your relationship with it?
Miranda Nover:
Yeah, I think itâs evolved somewhat. I mean, maybe externally, it probably doesnât look like itâs evolved a lot, but I feel like now Iâm worse at Tweeting, unfortunately.
Turner Novak:
So how do you approach Twitter as a founder?
Miranda Nover:
I think itâs really important to be authentic. This is cliche. Iâll explain what I mean. I think that the mistake I see a lot of people who want to engage with social media and use it to grow their platform. The mistake that they make is they try to tweet LinkedIn slop on Twitter and it doesnât work.
Turner Novak:
Why not? Itâs just all social media, isnât it the same?
Miranda Nover:
Twitter is similar to founding a company where if youâre in a bad market, even if your product is good, itâs going to flop. And what I mean by that is the topic that youâre discussing has to be either the current thing or one of these evergreen topics. And even then, if your take is kind of lukewarm, but itâs worded well, I feel like your tweet does well. But if you talk about something that nobody cares about, itâs never going to do well, even if itâs funny or interesting. So I think you have to figure out what the intersection of things that you authentically care about because what I meant when I said people tweet a lot of LinkedIn slop is itâs very generic. Itâll be like, oh... Yeah, I donât know. Theyâll be like, âIâm working so hard trying to meet customers or something.â I donât know, itâs kind of boring.
Itâs kind of vague. And maybe the hot topic would be 996. So even if youâre thinking about that, you have to figure out a way to slot it into the current discourse. Or my co-founder, he was trying to get into Twitter at one point and he tweeted something about red pandas. And I was like, first of all, you donât really care about red pandas. And second of all, nobody else is really talking about red pandas right now.
It probably doesnât have a good chance of success. But yeah, so something that you know about and then also something that you notice other people talking about a lot on there is generally whatâs going to do well.
Turner Novak:
Is that annoying though that you have to talk about the current thing?
Miranda Nover:
I think you hit escape velocity at a certain point, as in if you have a following and people generally start to know who you are from talking about the current thing, you can start talking about other things and itâll still get traction because you have a core group of people that are now interested in you. So for me, the way that I first had a few viral tweets was talking about San Francisco culture, specifically dating culture at first, because I was single at the time and I was dating and Iâd observed all of these interesting things that happened.
Turner Novak:
Backpack at a bar.
Miranda Nover:
Yeah.
Turner Novak:
I think that was the first big tweet you had. Something about... What was the-
Miranda Nover:
It was like guys in San Francisco will say itâs hard to find a girlfriend and then wear a backpack to the bar. And I had another one that was like, guys in SF say itâs harder to find a girlfriend than it is to raise $10 million or something like that. And this was something that people had actually... I didnât know that it was discourse on Twitter around dating, to be honest. I didnât see other people talking about it and then start talking about it because other people were talking about it. But in hindsight, people were definitely talking about it. And I had a novel take, I guess, because Iâm a woman and because I phrased it in a way that was engaging. And I feel like that format worked really well for me in the beginning. But now a lot of the stuff that goes viral, just random wholesome posts. My mom sent me a cute picture and I posted it and it went super viral and I replied a bunch of times to my own tweet.
Turner Novak:
Yeah. You have a series of your momâs pictures that she-
Miranda Nover:
Yeah. Yeah. My mom, she knows what sheâs doing. Thereâs actually another one that I didnât tweet, but I probably should. She sent me a really funny picture.
Turner Novak:
So then what about if youâre a founder and youâre thinking about doing a launch video? You didnât do a launch, but you just an announcement video.
Miranda Nover:
Yeah, announcement.
Turner Novak:
Youâre just sitting in your webcam talking. And I think that was pretty successful. I mean, it wasnât like the most viral video ever on Twitter, but I feel like it went pretty well. Whatâs the keys to doing a good announcement or launch on Twitter?
Miranda Nover:
I think last year there was all this cluely stuff. And before that, even Avi Schiffmannâs Friend video was super viral, but I think there wasnât this launch video industry until last year with the Cluely stuff.
Turner Novak:
It was industry. It was industrial complex.
Miranda Nover:
Itâs still an industrial complex.
Turner Novak:
It was still like, âHey, weâre doing our series A launch video.â
Miranda Nover:
Yeah. And I think that thatâs fine. You can think about it as an expression of your creative vision for the company or whatever, but I personally think thereâs a lot of ways you can express your creative vision for the company more simplistically. So when I did my simple sitting at a table launch videos, I wore a particular shirt, I sat in front of a particular background, the lighting was a particular way. I thought about those things. And maybe you could intentionally not think about those things. Maybe you want to signal we are just cracked degenerate engineers and we do not care about any type of aesthetics and we are just grinding all the time and we want the video to look like that. But I think thereâs a lot of ways you can do that without spending 10, 20, 50, 100 grand on a high production video.
I think that the production, growth in your business should fuel spending on these types of stunts, not the other way around, in my opinion. I think you should really challenge yourself to have some type of customers or traction before you go and splurge on this stuff. I think a lot of people see it as a ticket to getting a lot of inbound, which it is, but I think you can keep it simple, still get the same level of inbound or approximately the same level of inbound and not spend 20 grand on a launch video.
Turner Novak:
Yeah. I remember one interesting one would be Paul Klein at Browserbase. His first video he did was just in front of his computer, recording the video, he had a whiteboard behind him. His particular thing was like, I made sure I had an American flag because he knew that the Gundo community would support the flag. So he was like, âThatâs an extra thing I could do to just get a little bit more of attention to my experience having an American flag in the background,â which is kind of smart thing.
Miranda Nover:
Itâs smart. Yeah. Those tricks are so good. One of my friends and batch mates just went pretty viral on Twitter and it was like his co-founder posted, they were trying to sell hospitality software and the co-founder was like, âI dressed up in a suit and tie to go talk to the general manager at local hotels to try to sell them software.â He was wearing jeans and a backpack and it was not a suit and tie, but he was wearing a jacket. So it was like a SF take on a suit and tie. Everyone at the company was like, âThatâs not a suit and tie.â But thereâs so many little visual tricks you could do either to rage bait or to just engagement bait more subtly.
Turner Novak:
Do you want to rage bait an engagement bait though because somebody might say like, âOh, these guys are clowns.â Would I really trust the product if theyâre rage baiting? I feel like weâve seen the upsides and the downsides of those over the past year if youâve been kind of observing. Should you do that or?
Miranda Nover:
I donât think I should do that, no. I think thereâs a certain amount of... Well, thereâs a little bit of engagement baiting that I think is fair. I think for us, itâs really important that we demonstrate commitment and people who maybe we donât have 10 years of engineering expertise at this company and millions of dollars under our belts, but we want to seem like we could get there.
We want to seem like we are working tirelessly for our customers, which is what we are doing. And I think we donât want to... Selling this as a tool to get jacked is absolutely not how I want to market it. I think naturally people that want to get jacked will use Fort. I like those people. I am one of those people, but I think we need to build a lot of trust in our ability to accurately measure strength and then deliver the information in a way that helps people change their behaviors. And I donât think any of that really revolves around a crazy viral moment. Plus itâs just the purchase price of one of these apps. If youâre trying to sell Cluely, you need someone to pay you whatever, like 10, 20 bucks a month. I donât know what exactly it costs, but itâs relatively low fee and they can cancel whenever and theyâre not buying a hardware product and it doesnât measure any of their sensitive health metrics.
So maybe itâs better to just get a lot of top of funnel. Whereas for something like what Iâm doing, I need someone to spend, call it $300 on my device plus software subscription for a year. I need them to trust me to take their heart rate and to know certain things about their health before maybe even they do. And if I want somebody to do that, we need to establish a different kind of relationship than just selling it a viral app.
Turner Novak:
Yeah. And you mentioned something that your friend who had the post of the backpack, suit and tie, was a batch made. So youâre in YC right now.
Miranda Nover:
Yeah.
Turner Novak:
When did it start?
Miranda Nover:
It started, I think weâre in the third week now.
Turner Novak:
Okay. So youâre pretty early.
Miranda Nover:
Yeah.
Turner Novak:
Whatâs it been like doing YC?
Miranda Nover:
I mean, I honestly love it. I think that I donât know what the sentiment about YC is in the actual general population, but in San Francisco, certainly thereâs mixed feelings from people. Thereâs generally, I would say itâs generally a positive thing, but then thereâs also some founders are like, oh, because of all the launch videos and because theyâre funding a lot of kooky ideas, what was it? Fusion reactors on ships or something or thereâs a-
Turner Novak:
CHAD IDE.
Miranda Nover:
CHAD IDE, there was Pair IDE, which was a fork of Cursor before and thereâs a Moon hotel in our current batch. Because they fund companies like this and people have these crazy viral moments, I think a lot of people...
Turner Novak:
They assume every single thing in the YC batch is just some ridiculous Moon hotel thing.
Miranda Nover:
I think what I really like about YC is it kills a lot of the fear and hesitation that people have around launching and talking to users. And I think itâs like, I wish I could say that I never had... Iâm not really afraid of putting myself out there, but itâs different putting something that you make out there and also being an engineer and knowing all of how the sauce is just made and all the things I want to fix and all the features I want to add. But they really encourage you to sell while youâre still uncomfortable, which I think you have to do to have a successful business. I think thereâs always going to be a point in everyoneâs business when they want to add more features or polish something or change the way something works, but you need to make money and you need to... Also, a lot of the times you donât know what the right thing to build is your customers do.
Theyâre the one who is going to pay for it and use the product. So a lot of the times, I mean, if you know your customers well, you can make an educated guess, but a lot of the times theyâre going to tell you something thatâs unexpected or valuable. So YC, I think itâs also just so much fun for me to go be around other founders all the time because itâs something that Iâve always wanted to be an entrepreneur. I didnât know that thatâs what I wanted, but now I can identify a lot of patterns of thinking and behavior in myself growing up that I can identify as wanting to be an entrepreneur now.
Turner Novak:
Like what?
Miranda Nover:
I was like, well, I mean, this is pretty straightforward, but when I was even in elementary school, I had various entrepreneurial ventures of questionable morality, the less questionable... Well, I guess they were all kind of questionable, but at that age, nothing is really regulated. So what I mean is I would make paper cranes and I would sell them to other kids on the playground, but the money that the kids were giving me, we were in third grade. So the money that they were giving me was maybe lunch money or money that their parents had given them and I got in a lot of trouble for doing that and then...
Turner Novak:
Because kids couldnât buy lunch?
Miranda Nover:
I donât think it was that they... I hope that they werenât giving me their actual lunch money. I donât know. I was really way too young to realize that that might have been a consequence of the action, but certainly they just didnât want commerce being done on the playground. So they sat our whole class down and they were like-
Turner Novak:
Regulated market.
Miranda Nover:
-no more playground commerce. So at that point I was sore out of luck with the selling paper cranes and I changed my business model because in our class there was this be called a lottery, itâs like a drawing that you would get tickets for doing good things in class. And then at the end, the teacher would draw one of the tickets out of the bowl and that person would get a prize. And so I would take toys that me and my sister didnât want anymore, and I would bring them to school and I would sell them for tickets because I couldnât sell things for real money anymore. So I decided the next best currency was tickets. And so by the end of it, I had so many more tickets, probably 10, 20X, the tickets of anyone else in my class. So I feel like that was... Yeah, there was a million other examples of things I did when I was a kid that I feel like were what I would now consider entrepreneurial.
Turner Novak:
Yeah. I feel like maybe one interesting one I had was I had a lemonade stand in third grade and my brother helped me. And so I think I made, my mom also helped me and made all the products.
Miranda Nover:
Yeah.
Turner Novak:
I didnât pay my mom for any of the materials. She made it all for free.
Miranda Nover:
Nice.
Turner Novak:
I made $47 and I paid my brother a dollar for helping and he did-
Miranda Nover:
Thatâs so funny.
Turner Novak:
... the same amount of work as me.
Miranda Nover:
Thatâs so funny.
Turner Novak:
I think I bought Pokemon Yellow Version with the money-
Miranda Nover:
Oh, nice.
Turner Novak:
... that I got from the lemonade stand-
Miranda Nover:
Yeah, you were rich.
Turner Novak:
... that we had. Yeah. And it was pretty high margins when you donât have to pay anyone.
Miranda Nover:
Yeah.
Turner Novak:
But as a kid, itâs like, I donât know. I was like, âHey, Peyton, Iâll give you a dollar if you help me.â Heâs like, âYeah, okay.â And then my mom, she was a willing participant in just making cookies.
Miranda Nover:
Yeah.
Turner Novak:
And then I think they probably bought all the materials too. And I just kept all the money.
Miranda Nover:
Nice.
Turner Novak:
Pretty good margins as a kid. We did the same thing with my daughter. We had a garage sale and she sold hand squeezed orange juice, cookies that we made from scratch, lemonade. We had coffee. And again, it was like we just did all the work for her and then she had to keep all the money.
Miranda Nover:
So fun. Itâs so rewarding as a kid. I did one where we donated all the money to charity and we made way more money than we would have otherwise.
Turner Novak:
Just by saying youâre donating it to charity.
Miranda Nover:
No, we did. We werenât lying, but we did donate it to charity. But yeah, we said... It was actually the premise was, free lemonade, all tips go to charity. So sure, some people would get it for free, but most people, they would come and just give us a 20.
Turner Novak:
Yeah, $20.
Miranda Nover:
Yeah. And we donated it to, I think it was called St. Francis, some charity in Portland, Oregon where I lived at the time. And they were really impressed because I think we raised, I donât know, close to 500 bucks, something like that. Something pretty significant for a dayâs lemonade stand.
Turner Novak:
This was in school, at the side of the road at your house?
Miranda Nover:
I think was, it may have just been on the... So it was at my friendâs house. It may have been on a day when a lot of people in the neighborhood did garage sales all at once. That mightâve been how we were able to get so much money. I donât remember if it was just a normal day or if it was that specific day.
Turner Novak:
Interesting. Okay. Whatâs your best garage sale find or vintage searching find?
Miranda Nover:
Oh, I have so many. Yeah. Well, the most recent one that was exciting, which youâll see later, itâs this crazy mirror thatâs wider than this table is, I guess. We got it for 25 bucks, but itâs shaped like a flower on the outside and then the mirror is a circular part inside the flower. Itâs just a really good deal for 20 bucks for a giant crazy thing.
Turner Novak:
And itâs this furniture vintage store down the street from the office or?
Miranda Nover:
Yeah.
Turner Novak:
Okay.
Miranda Nover:
Yeah, itâs almost like a warehouse because where weâre at in the Mission, which is a common neighborhood for robotics startups or they have a lot of things that are zoned where you can manufacture things in the units and you might also live in the units, is an interest. Paul stayed in our office for a couple months.
Turner Novak:
Does he still live there?
Miranda Nover:
No, he doesnât live there anymore.
Turner Novak:
So do you have to whole the upstairs areas?
Miranda Nover:
The upstairs is manufacturing now. Youâll see. We have two 3D printers. We have a workbench up there. Weâre trying to turn it into the shop because I got really tired of having so much mess downstairs in the office area and-
Turner Novak:
Yeah, because you walk in, thereâs just a squat rack to the left.
Miranda Nover:
Yeah.
Turner Novak:
And thereâs a lot of tools and stuff-
Miranda Nover:
Yeah, yeah.
Turner Novak:
... just sitting out there.
Miranda Nover:
We still want it... So the squat rack is still there. Also, we got the squat rack for free because Zachâs family already owned it, but they werenât using it. So we were able to just get that for free. A lot of our office stuff we got for really cheap, but our office is pretty nice. But yeah, so weâll keep the squat rack there. And then we have a desk set up to do sensor testing basically there and then hardware in the loop testing. We donât have all the infrastructure set up, but we ideally want to be able to push code and then have it tested on real hardware automatically. So weâll do that, lab stuff downstairs, but all the actual tools, like soldering, mechanical work will get done upstairs.
Turner Novak:
I know weâre doing a board game night in 52 minutes from now, so weâre going to start winding down. But I was wondering if you have any questions for me at all and anything.
Miranda Nover:
Yeah. So Turner is so different than other VCs. I think I want you to share... I know a lot about your investing thesis and how you run your business, but I think that the people, it would be really interesting for other people who might be thinking about starting companies, to hear about how you run your fund.
Turner Novak:
Yeah. I mean, Iâm still figuring it out, honestly. I think the most interesting thing is I kind of accidentally also am a media company and I accidentally became an influencer. I was just trying to get a job in VC eight, nine years ago, and I kind of just became an influencer. And with people following you on the internet, it makes it a little bit easier to do something sometimes. And then itâs kind of reached a point where I just realized, âOkay, thatâs my advantage.â I guess I have people that follow me on the internet and a lot of investors donât.
And then you can think about it as like, âWell, how can I lend my distribution to portfolio companies?â And then it got to the point where, especially after starting the podcast, I had friends who were heads of growth at Numeral who was sponsoring this episode and Nate was like, âIâve listened to every episode of the podcast. Itâs so good. Can I sponsor the podcast?â And I was like, âI donât know. Yeah, it might be kind of cool, but it seems like a hassle. It canât be that much money. I donât know if itâs even worth it.â And then it was kind of evolved to the point where itâs like, âOh, I kind of accidentally... I also have a media business also.â
Miranda Nover:
Yeah.
Turner Novak:
So itâs kind of like this two-pronged and a lot of things that I am investing and I think itâs not the only part of the thesis, but I think about, if I invest, how can I help out? Can I lend my distribution? So I guess with Fort, itâs like, I donât know, youâre maybe selling to my audience, but itâs like, can I help? Or also, do you understand the psyche of the customer, maybe that drives the decision making of would you invest or not? I mean, I used to work out four or five times a week in college and get married, have kids, just once a week now to consistently actually do a good workout.
And itâs just you play floor hockey also instead of even doing a gym workout. But you identify with the product and you realize, âOh, man. That is some...â You realize what the customer might want. So I donât know. Itâs kind of, a lot of investing is stuff that you feel like you could help or you understand would people actually use this and pay for it. And I donât know, do you think youâll be able to make money? I feel like thatâs a big thing that people donât think about, is you have to make money.
Miranda Nover:
They donât think about making money in a business. Itâs crazy.
Turner Novak:
Well, and itâs not even just, can you charge customers for it, but is this a valuable company?
Miranda Nover:
Yeah.
Turner Novak:
Because thereâs a lot of things where you can sell a dollar for 80 cents and you can generate infinite revenue losing money, but you need to be able to think of like, âOkay, if I put a dollar into this company, will I get a billion dollars back in a week? Thatâs probably the ultimate is invest a super small amount and you just make a shit ton of money really quickly and then thereâs a spectrum of it might take a lot longer, you need to put in more money, et cetera. But ultimately, I think it was just, can you make money?
Miranda Nover:
Yeah.
Turner Novak:
I feel like as a founder, you maybe donât think about that as much. Itâs all about the TAM or the product, like me as the team and people are looking at it and thinking about a lot of that stuff, but also itâs just, can I make money?
Miranda Nover:
Yeah.
Turner Novak:
Thatâs what the investors are thinking about. I think thereâs also a dynamic of, depending on who you talk to of, will I get promoted if I invest in this company? Because a lot of the tenureâs pretty short. So the way that might play out in practice is, okay, I invest in Miranda and her seed round. And then in three years later or maybe honestly three months later, you raise a Series A, two months later you raise a Series B. It looks like really quick progress on the surface. And me as the investor who did that, my career prospects look good. And I can go from being an associate at a fund to a principal or maybe I can leave and start my own firm.
Miranda Nover:
Yeah.
Turner Novak:
And it might not actually matter, like was Fort successful. Maybe you are and it becomes a public company or maybe things like crash and burn, but it doesnât matter because I got my promotion. So I feel like those are some of the different angles that investors might be thinking about thatâs, itâs not the same framing as, how good is the product, whatâs the market like, whatâs the TAM?
Miranda Nover:
Sure.
Turner Novak:
The way I think maybe is the most helpful for founders is just, you come to the investors and youâre like, âHereâs how weâre going to make a bunch of money.â Because thatâs also what people are kind of trying to answer.
Miranda Nover:
Yeah.
Turner Novak:
Itâs like the investors are going to make a bunch of money and itâs going to help their career because thatâs ultimately when youâre selling a product to someone. Youâre selling like B2B SaaS. Itâs like youâre saving them time, youâre saving them money, or itâs like they brought this new AI product into the organization and that person gets promoted and becomes like a VP because they brought in this great software that helped the company. So I feel itâs an angle to maybe think about fundraising thatâs a little bit different.
Miranda Nover:
Yeah. They talk a lot about inflection points. And I think obviously, the reason for that is the slope is steeper. So the time delta between now and when weâre either in theory or in practice going to make some unfathomable sum of money is just so little. Itâs like the classic power law dynamics. I also want to know, what were the first things that sort of did well on social media for you? When did you find social media PMF and how did you think about that?
Turner Novak:
So probably the first things I started tweeting about... Did you use Snapchat or do you use it?
Miranda Nover:
I donât anymore, although I have noticed itâs coming back.
Turner Novak:
Oh, is it? Okay.
Miranda Nover:
Yeah.
Turner Novak:
So this is probably the very early days of it was, I started, I kind of wanted to get a job in venture. I was like, âOh, I feel like this would be kind of fun. Theyâre on Twitter. Iâll just tweet about things I feel like Iâm smart about and people will follow me and Iâll use it to build a public track record of saying things and Iâll get a job.â
This was probably 2017, 2018. So the first things I started tweeting about was Snapchat did this big redesign. I donât know if you remember when they added stories to the left side of the app, and they basically turned to the Discover section into a endless feed and Kylie Jenner, Kendall Jenner, I donât even remember who, one of the Kardashians tweeted that... She said something like, âDoes anyone use Snapchat anymore?â
And the stock dropped 20% in a day. And it was pretty interesting where Snapchat is a product that pretty much every kid in the developed world, like US, Europe, et cetera, they use it all day, every day, had about two thirds the size user base is Instagram and Instagram was... There wasnât a ton of public data around how big Instagram was inside Facebook, but it was probably worth hundreds of billions of dollars.
Miranda Nover:
Sure.
Turner Novak:
And Snapchat at one point traded at about $5 billion and it was basically, people were like, âThis companyâs going bankrupt. No one uses it anymore.â And itâs just because a lot of public negative consensus around it. Now itâs, thatâs so not even a fair assumption to have. Literally, every kid in the country uses it all day, every day. Facebook is the best business model of all time and Snapchat is just a worse version of it, but itâs still a pretty good business.
Miranda Nover:
Yeah, yeah.
Turner Novak:
And I think today, Snapchat does six billion in revenue, but at the time back in 2018, it was worth $5 billion-
Miranda Nover:
Wow.
Turner Novak:
Because I was going bankrupt. So I started tweeting a lot of why I thought this was, based on all the data, I was kind of listening to the earnings calls, finding different charts, reports and tweeting things. Itâs kind of like having an opinion on something that you feel is a unique view and youâre just kind of putting it out there. And a lot of people are like, âOh, this is pretty good take. Maybe this guyâs actually right.â Itâs probably similar to today when you come across someone and youâre like, âOh, this is a smart thing this person said.â
Miranda Nover:
Sure.
Turner Novak:
And so, I started tweeting about that specifically. And then also, probably another big thing that worked for me was when Musical.ly rebranded as TikTok, I really had never even really heard of Musical.ly because I was in my 20s and there was a Wall Street Journal article about this TikTok app. And I was like, âWhy is there a Wall Street Journal article about some social media app?â I tried and I was like, âHoly shit. This is the best product Iâve ever used. It feels like Vine 2.0.â TikTok, when it first came out, it felt like Vine. And I was like, âWow.â And the product was really, really good. And so, the thesis with when I was posting a lot about Snap, it was that, âOh wow, theyâre adding a ton of more ad inventory.â Theyâre basically bringing stories into the messaging section so they can monetize the messaging. So it was always a big issue with Snapchat was all people use it for is messaging and they canât make any money.
They added stories to that part of the app and then they also made this endless feed that you scroll and they started showing ads in the feed. And itâs like thatâs why itâs just such a good business is because itâs just you get people addicted to their phone and the more they scroll, you just keep making money. And the interesting thing with TikTok was back in 2019, when you opened the Instagram app or even still you opened Facebook and you think of your phone as this rectangle and maybe one third of the screen is actually the video and then thereâs a white bar and itâs Miranda and your little circle of your profile picture and the name. And thereâs like a big section is just the like button and then the comments, but the apps in the screen space wasnât really optimized. And TikTok was just you open the app and itâs all the video.
Miranda Nover:
Yeah.
Turner Novak:
And the other interesting thing was when you looked at what they were doing in China, you could shop right from the app and buy things from the app. And everyone had kind of always said, âMaybe Instagram could do this.â You can shop on Instagram, but TikTok was much more positioned to basically be a video first Amazon or be a more visually optimized version of, when you think of, because I think that the thing that Instagram maybe struggled with at first was when you think of Snapchat maybe started the stories concept and it was youâre sending people video messages or picture messages.
And then the way it evolved was, you have that screen where you can pick who you send the thing to and you can just at the top, click my story and bolt it onto the story. And itâs this kind of thing that accumulated over time that you layered in these different videos or different pieces of media, and it kind of told a story per se. And then when Instagram literally copied it, they literally copied everything about it. And so they just added these circles at the top of the screen and thatâs how Instagram added full screen video to the app.
Miranda Nover:
Yeah.
Turner Novak:
It was literally a carbon copy of, Snaps had evolved from this messaging feature and Instagram, they almost didnât think from first principles. Theyâre just like, âLetâs exactly clone it and do exactly the same thing.â And youâre like, âWhy is there this weird circle stream at the top of the app?â And itâs still there. And then thereâs kind of reels now, but itâs kind of this Frankenstein thing. And it was just, I always thought it was kind of fascinating that TikTok was like, âIf you were to redesign a social media product native to mobile and video, then it would be TikTok.â
So anyways, I started tweeting about this kind of stuff back in 2018, â19, â20, and it was a lot of serious things and people followed me for that. And then there was one point I had a friend who ran an account. Itâs not that active, I wonât say the name, but it was a meme account about VC and tech. And I started, Iâd probably come up with 10% of the tweets and they would slap. Theyâd get a thousand likes, which was pretty good back in six years ago-
Miranda Nover:
Iâd still take it though, the likes.
Turner Novak:
... seven years ago. Yeah.
Miranda Nover:
Yeah.
Turner Novak:
But even then, it was like inflation adjusted. It was maybe 5,000 likes equivalent today-
Miranda Nover:
Which is great. Yeah.
Turner Novak:
Yeah. And Iâd be like, âMan, I spent all this time, like eight hours on a weekend putting out this kind of insightful thing and no one cared.â Relatively, people just didnât care as much versus, huh? I made this dumb meme making fun of VCs and the founder of a public company retweeted-
Miranda Nover:
Sure.
Turner Novak:
... raised venture funding and probably hated as VCs. So I was like, âHuh.â There was this weird dynamic thatâs kind of emerging where you can use humor for marketing and smart founders would identify with it. So I started, instead of helping my friend with memes, I would make them from my own account and Iâd start posting memes and itâs called shitposting now, but it almost wasnât... There wasnât a word for it and it worked really well because it wasnât really a thing that people were doing. And back at the time it was a lot of tech Twitter and VC Twitter was earnest cringe posting, like you would get on LinkedIn, is much more prevalent on the feeds. So youâd see, weâve all kind of seen those really weird congratulatory tweets of VCs bragging. It was so much more prominent. And so, all of a sudden I was like an investor that was just making fun of myself and other VCs.
Miranda Nover:
Yeah.
Turner Novak:
And founders just identified with it and liked it and it just worked. I had a hypothesis that if I just kind of lean into this, I bet it will work and it was 10 times more effective than I thought.
Miranda Nover:
You invented shitposting.
Turner Novak:
Yeah. I would not say I invented it, but I probably made it more acceptable because I raised a fund off of it and people are like, âOh, this is a business strategy.â You can use memes for-
Miranda Nover:
Actual business.
Turner Novak:
... B2B marketing, really. Yeah.
Miranda Nover:
Yeah. I think thereâs an interesting... I tweeted 5K followers on Instagram gets you a discount code with a drop shipping company, but 5K followers on Twitter gets you a $5 million precede. And itâs crazy because I think that this is inherently this is an interesting concept of having different amounts of leverage for different niches and different platforms. But then I also think thereâs just so many... I was actually thinking about writing a Substack post. Iâm too focused on business to do this, but as a side project, Iâd love to interview a bunch of my friends who are micro influencers in different niches and see how different the lifestyle is because so many people are influencing on the side.
Turner Novak:
And also whatâs the business model.
Miranda Nover:
Yeah. And whatâs the business model?
Turner Novak:
What is the business model?
Miranda Nover:
How durable is it?
Turner Novak:
Yeah. Because in some categories, if youâre selling... Itâs basically how big is the ACV of the product?
Miranda Nover:
Yeah.
Turner Novak:
So if youâre selling enterprise SaaS that is infrastructure level, except average customer pays you a million dollars, the content can be extremely effective versus it might be more challenging with a super small ACV like if Apoorva, the founder of Instacart was making TikToks to try to acquire Instacart users, the economics on that kind of just changes and looks different.
Miranda Nover:
Yeah. UGC and all these crazy things. Iâm actually very excited to try to run the marketing engine for Fort at scale. I think itâs not time to pull the trigger on that until again, weâre really sure what weâre building and we make our beta users very happy. But I feel like that is something that Iâm tremendously excited to do is leverage social media at scale to actually efficiently market a product, which has more challenging economics in terms of just consumer products. And you canât really have lower ACV and you have to get more customers and the customers are more fickle. So thereâs a lot of... Yeah, thatâs a very exciting thing. And Iâm also really excited to see what happens with AI, both AI consumer products, AI devices, like sharing generative AI, like text-based content or images or whatever. It will be really interesting to see how marketing evolves with that too.
Turner Novak:
Yeah. I feel like itâs going to be crazy.
Miranda Nover:
Yeah.
Turner Novak:
But anyways, this was a lot of fun. Thanks for doing it.
Miranda Nover:
Thanks for having me.
Find transcripts of all other episodes here.
This was very well articulated. I appreciate the depth of thought here.