1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Michael Smerklo of Next Coast Ventures (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Talk about some examples of what you have really invested in and more about the ones that are conviction investment.

Michael Smerklo: I’ll give you one example. I’m on the Board of a company called EverlyWell in Austin, Texas. This was an idea that we were looking at. This is disrupting the lab testing business.

If you’re a consumer, you want to get a lab test. You drive to a clinic. You submit the test. Your doctor gets the result and hopefully, you get some form of information from that. Today’s consumers, especially millennials, want more control over their health. They want to understand things at a deeper level.

There’s a great entrepreneur called Julia Cheek. She looked at this market and said, “Can I disrupt this? Can I go direct to consumer?” We believed that biohacking was a big trend. That was the market. We came across Julia. We cold-called her. We knew the market, and we saw what she was doing.

We did something unusual. We called her up and said, “We’d like to meet you.” We spent about a year getting to know her and her business. When it came to their Series A, we were the only new investor in. This is a great example of an entrepreneur who took a big-market opportunity with a disruptive solution.

If there was ever an example of a glass eater, Julia defines it. She is focused. She has built an amazing team. Her commitment and passion around the customer experience is omnipresent in everything they do. When you see that, the conviction rate gets incredibly high.

Sramana Mitra: What is the disruptive solution? What are they doing that’s different from the general lab market?

Michael Smerklo: You can go to EverlyWell.com and you can choose from about 25 different modalities. If you’re sitting and trying to figure out you have a food sensitivity or you’re concerned about testosterone level, you can narrow it down and say, “I’m interested to learn more about it.”

You can pick out a kit. They’ll send out the kit directly to your home. You can self-administer a sample using blood or saliva. You send it back to them. They’ll process it in a very short time. Then literally in a two to three-day timeframe, you’ll get a robust and rich dataset and information helping you understand where your health needs may be.

Then they can help guide you. They’re not a physician. They can help you understand, in the health journey, where you might want to take that. If you compare that to where you go to a doctor and he gives you a form. You go get a test. It’s just a radically different consumer-oriented solution. The company has done just incredibly well and has been on a tear in terms of growth.

This segment is part 3 in the series : 1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Michael Smerklo of Next Coast Ventures
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