The journey to Y-Combinator
It was 15 years ago, I started using my first health sensor — a Polar HRM. So uncomfortable, yet it had such great insights. By seeing the cardiac output and calorie expenditure, I could optimize and maximize the weight I could lift since I was a powerlifter.
A couple of years later, I had to become more of a marathon runner since I joined the special forces and thus I needed to train in different cardiac zones. In my first 60km long march, I used a Polar FT80, and I still remember that after 10 hours of grueling training, it was showing ‘6328 calories burned’. It didn’t even measure the whole thing because its battery drained.
That’s when I became a fitness addict. I read everything I could get my hands on, from nutrition to biochemistry, to physical training and thus I could easily see the strong correlation between hormonal function, muscular growth, and nutrition, so I started optimizing everything, gram by gram. Plus, I used every single sensor that was coming to the market.
By using all of those sensors, I could see a strong inconsistency between the data extracted and what was taught in biochemistry books. Whenever I was doing ‘anaerobic training’, it wasn’t really anaerobic, according to my HRM. And since HRMs are based on ECG, the error rate is meager.
A few years later I went to study engineering. I started learning how to think with first principles and how to think using feedback loops. A system that learns from its mistakes.
At that point, I had strong evidence that the sensors I was using were right, because physics.
So it must be that what we know about biochemistry is wrong?
If you think about it, information is created in the black box after every airplane failure. The signal is distributed to all planes, and hence the system improves — thus the error rate of planes is lower over time. Hence you have exceptionally low aviation disasters.
What happens when you do surgery and something goes wrong? Does a medic come out of the surgery room to proudly declare, ‘I made a mistake?’
So how does a medic improve? Are medicine and biochemistry flawed?
That’s exactly where I made the correlation. Fitness and health sensors and wearables provide accurate real-time information. And they can be used with machine learning to radically improve what we know today.
Think using Levels, Vena Vitals, WHOOP, and Garmin. Real-time glucose, blood pressure, respiration, and heart rate. So many data points.
The people that really understand sensors and machine learning are not medics though; they are developers and engineers.
So what if we build an API that makes it easy for developers to access fitness and health data from wearables and sensors?
That was the start for Terra.
Since I spent years in Europe pitching different projects to investors, I knew there was only one path.
Travel to San Francisco and raise funding from Y Combinator.
The most important investor of our generation. They were the first investors in companies such as Airbnb, Dropbox, Stripe, Coinbase, and so many billion-dollar companies.
Statistically, the admission rates are close to 0%. Last year 8 people from Europe got admitted. From the whole of Europe.
And 0 Greek Cypriots— in history.
Fuck it — let’s figure out a way to become the first ones.
For the next month, we spoke with 20 people amongst the best early-stage entrepreneurs in the world to help us figure out what needs to be done. We crafted the application to perfection and sent it to them before the deadline.
After a while, we got accepted to the interviews. And the interviews are usually 10 minutes, with 40 to 80 questions.
So you have 7.5 to 15 seconds to really answer them with the judges being the most successful entrepreneurs in the world.
So you need to rethink how you think.
The prep was long, and instead of the usual 1 interview, we had to do 3.
Long story short, it was two months with 0 sleep, lots of coffee, and only work.
I still remember the last words from the last interview :
‘That was a pretty good demo guys” — from Jared Friedman
A couple of days later, we got our admission offer from Y-Combinator.
I was in total shock for 3 days.
All of the investors in Europe never funded us, but the best in the world did.
But more importantly, Y Combinator is allowing us to enable every developer to access health data and change what we know about health.
The motto in my special forces days ten years ago echoes in my ears stronger than ever.
Who dares wins.
