28 May Episode #334: Rachel Raymond, Founder & CEO, Purpose
Pete Moore: This is Pete Moore wanted to officially announce the release of Time To Win Again: 52 Takeaways From Team Sports To Ensure Your Business Success. I wrote this book over the last year. I think you’re going to love it. Good to great meets wears Waldo pick ’em up for your team. Time to win in 2022. Happy to come to your club, your studio, your company, and talk about ways we can optimize business and win going forward. Go halo.
Pete Moore: Pete Moore on halo talks. NYC, I have the pleasure of bringing a futurist. It’s going to tell us all about how our moods are going to be changing through the fuel. We put in our bodies, Rachel Raymond coming from Arlington Virginia with her startup. Welcome to the show.
Rachel Raymond: Thank you for having me.
Pete Moore: So we use health active lifestyle outdoors at the end of we might call it health, agriculture, lifestyle and outdoors. So you come from a unicorn ag tech company. So why don’t you give us your background and then we can understand the lens that you look through in starting purpose.
Rachel Raymond: Absolutely. So, yeah, I spent the past five year a company called indigo agriculture, which is one of the fastest growing ag tech startups in the space. I was the chief operating officer for their north American business. And when COVID hit last year, I was spending a lot of my time talking to my team about, and one of the key hypotheses that indigo was founded on was that the microbes that are inside of plants can help plants perform under different areas of stress. So, you know, a hot field, you don’t want all the plants to die. The micro inside of them actually helped them thrive. And as I was seeing this happen before my own eyes with my own team, well, actually not before my own eyes, but on zoom, I came up with a similar hypothesis around the interaction between the microbes inside of our body and the impact that can have on our performance under stress. And so decided to investigate that. And we pulled together purpose, which is a mental wellness company that leverages the science of the microbiome to help us improve our mood.
Pete Moore: Got it. So we’ll do a quick shout out to Casey least. It’s one of the hardest working men in finance, who you worked with at this startup for connecting us and giving us a, a lens into the future. So, you know, as you think about commercializing a product like this obviously there’s a big educational component to it. You know, we’re using you know, big words and, and scientific research with people that just want to get a, a, a workout feel healthier and probably look better in the mirror. So how do you think about educating people about what purpose is going to be of tools that you’re going to create and how does that kind of dovetail maybe with AgTech and, and, you know, the client base there, which, you know, some of them are professional, you know, farmers and large companies, and some of them are, you know, independent operators similar to what we have, you know, in our industry, in the fitness industry.
Rachel Raymond: Yeah. So if we think about purposes, it can zoom facing company and go the general population, I think, will benefit from having these tools that we’ll provide. What we, what we plan to do in terms of education is let people take it at their own speed. So we will provide the information around the science, as deep as people are interested in, but what they need to know with the headline is what you eat impacts how you feel. That’s intuitive to you and, and probably to many of your listeners. But one of the reasons for that, that may not be intuitive is the microbes that are in what you eat, interact with all the systems that you, your body. So really this is just a, at the highest level saying you are what you eat, and if your systems are messed up, because of the food that you’ve been eating, processed, food, high sugar, you name it, all the things we love, or at least I do mm-hmm <affirmative> Then you might be out of balance and adding these products back in can help rebalance that. And what you’ll notice is when you get rebalanced, you feel better, you feel less anxiety and less depression.
Pete Moore: You know, it’s interesting, cuz I, I was thinking about this the other day with all these different processed foods. And when you read some of the ingredient labels on, even things that you’ve think are healthy you know, and, and obviously your, your digestive system is the most advanced out of the entire body. If you believe in, you know, the evolution of a human, you know, it must be so confusing being inside of, of a stomach being like, all right, I can’t even diagnose what this food is, what these chemicals are, you know, almost like having to have your stomach like intelligently unpackaged. What you’ve just put in is fuel versus, you know, living a much cleaner, you know, eating fruits and vegetables, you know, things of that nature. So, you know, tell us about how the bio indicators work and you know, the ease of the saliva test to kind of track what what’s going on.
Rachel Raymond: Yeah. So what happens when your body is under stress and that can be stress from work or your relationship or whatever you’ve got going on in your life is it releases hormones like cortisol and adrenaline. And that is a natural evolutionary response. You know, if you used to be out in the Tundra and you came across a lion, you need to high tail it out of there <laugh> and have as much adrenaline available to you as possible. Mm-Hmm <affirmative>, but soon afterwards, this stress goes away and you’re able to go back to baseline levels. What people today are doing is living under sustained stress for a long period of time. And so that cortisol and adrenaline and suppression of the immune system and suppression of things that counteract inflammation is going on for a long time. That’s what the point of care saliva assay can measure. So it will measure different bio indicators that are measurements of stress and the performance of your immune system. And you can do that at the same time that you’re reporting how you’re feeling. So you’ll be able to try angulate okay. I’m saying that I feel stressed out, but then you also will have the quantifiable measurements of yeah. My body is really manifesting that stress as well.
Pete Moore: Mm-Hmm <affirmative> so you take a look at I, I don’t, I don’t use the whoop yet. Mm-Hmm <affirmative> but that, you know, we’ll tell you, okay, today’s a good time for you to exercise. You’ve got very high energy levels. You slept really well. Do you view purpose as almost like a, you know, a roadmap in the future of, if you feel this way, do this, here’s what your test is? And now like here’s almost, you know, a I don’t know. I like to, I like to play a game candy land back in the day, but here’s like a nice path you to go down, you know, in order to remedy some of your issues or, you know, to get yourself back on track. How, how does that work? Because I, and, and before you answer that, I feel like there’s a lot going on in workout recovery. There’s a lot going on in data tracking. And it’s almost like too much of a, like a self-use. And not like, if you feel this way, you know, if you, the green path, if you feel, you know, this way, take the yellow, take the red. I feel like it needs to be dumbed down to the point where I could actually, I know what to do. And you and you’re, and you’re, you’re taking me step by step. So how do you think that evolves?
Rachel Raymond: Yeah, couldn’t agree with you more. That’s why we think about purpose as a whole ecosystem, not just tracking how you feel and giving you those measurements, but here’s what you should do about it. So we we’re leveraging the science around understanding stress to provide people with increasingly individualized recommendations about food and about these probiotic, enhanced snack and other things which may include talking about the amount of sleep they’re getting or taking breaks throughout the day, or many things that are being uncovered to create a roadmap. As you say, or you could think about it more of a menu, like you’ve got to work on these three things and that will help boost and get you to where you try to go.
Pete Moore: Yeah. So, so 25 short years ago, I used to work at chase Manhattan bank. And I was in the group that covered Monsanto mm-hmm <affirmative>. And, you know, when they were genetically engineering all of the seeds to make sure that, you know, they were you know, insect repellent and they were you know, going to grow the largest tomatoes and, you know, and we were trying to put a what’s that worth, you know, to a farmer you know, to basically have almost like zero waste in and predictable yield and so on and so forth. How do you think about pricing a service like this when it’s basically your entire being, you know, I’m going to regulate and optimize.
Rachel Raymond: Yeah. So you can think about multiple contributing factors to the price, essentially. It is the convenience of having the tools to gain this visibility in your own home. If you think about the amount of money that people spend on, you know, nutrition and exercise, et cetera, mental wellness is as important to manage as your physical health as you guys know. And so we want to have price points that are acceptable, but, and thinking about what the market will bear and what it’s worth to people, we want to charge something that will, that will leave much of the value with the consumer.