What we learned in our first year: initial conditions matter!

This is a lengthy reflection. In short, we learned that initial conditions matter, and since we're in this for the long term (15 years+), we found out we are willing to figure out the right initial conditions and perspective needed to sustain us for that journey.

Intro

Hello Fam! Hi, Friends!

Tonia and I are excited to share with the people we count as friends and family the following synthesis of what we learned the past year as we forged our partnership and built the foundation of energy.work.

When I left DataRobot in September 2022, unsure what to do next, I had an idea for an indie-hacked passion project focused on making it easier for people to find good information about what to try in the vast sea of options in alternative well-being and biohacking. So, I purchased a domain: “energy.work,” in part as an anchor to give myself a soulful creative outlet if I ended up back in enterprise AI software.

Those first months post-DataRobot were a weird experience for me. I had no idea what I wanted from a job in the world of enterprise SaaS, but I soon developed a list in my Apple Notes app: “What do I need to double down on energy.work?” There were three things on my list that I felt would be crucial if it was going to be something massive: a perfect co-founder, a massive problem, and a unique perspective. I had several ideas under problem and perspective, but my list under co-founder was crystal clear from the beginning.

Perfect Co-Founder

• World-class operator with extensive product management expertise
• A creative visionary obsessed with personal transformation, growth, biohacking, flow-hacking, spiritual growth/transformation, etc.
• Incredibly stable personal life and deep self-knowledge. I mean rock-solid and willing to tell the truth of a situation regardless of what may happen.
• Passionate connection to and skill working with psychedelics over many years. Practitioner, shamanic healer, therapist, etc.?

So, imagine my utter delight when I met Tonia for the first time in January 2023. She had already been working on some ideas to support her healing practitioner community and coaching practice–a practice she invested in for over seven years and a passion she pursued outside of her product management day job at Adobe! Then Mindy and I met Tonia and Ann over dinner. They’d been together as long as we had, 22 years! Through thick and thin, they made an effort to stay together and learn to love and support each other in becoming the best versions of themselves.

We found each other! Now, a year later, we are reaching out. What did we learn from each other, and what did we learn together this past year that excites us about 2024?

1. Massive Problem: Early market research and our own experiences showed us the way to the problem, but it took time and real courage to delve into the space enough to clearly see a problem large enough to commit ourselves to.
2. Paradigm Shift: The only reason to bet on a consumer-facing product and GTM is a convergence in shifting public perception. Everything, even winning with cool tech, is downstream from that.
3. Unique Perspective: Several design iterations, early product iterations, and talking to potential customers over time gave us a perspective on our offering that we could not have conceived of through any other means.
4. Partnership: Our partnership is built on a bedrock of emergent creativity, execution, and truth-telling, both internally and externally. What we’ve learned will be the container and framing of all partnerships with employees, customers, and collaborators.

Massive Problem

Tonia first tried psychedelics during a period of midlife transformation on a recommendation from a friend, and she immediately reconnected with the spiritually aligned path she’d been on as a young woman recovering from addiction and discovering tech for the first time. She lived one foot in corporate and one foot in the coaching and well-being space for nearly a decade. Straddling them both, plus giving so much of her energy to deliver on someone else’s vision, was a recipe for burnout. When she left Adobe in April 2023 to chase her dream of finally combining tech and well-being to build energy.work, burnout finally hit.

I white-knuckled my way through decades of stress and unhappiness. Trying to figure out a recipe for my life that felt good escaped me. The recipes of therapy forever and years-long efforts to titrate just the right cocktail of mood stabilizers and antipsychotics that my parents and siblings rely on to function at only a moderate to low level were not enticing. I’ve spent over 10,000 hours and $100K as an adult trying to feel good being alive. For the most part, I failed. When I sold my company, I weighed 278 lbs (I’m 6 ft tall). My caffeine consumption was 600 mg daily, and my average daily sleep was under 3 hrs. My resting heart rate was 110 bpm. My blood pressure was 210/160. I was lifting heavy (over 500 lbs) nearly every day because rupturing blood vessels in my eyes and nearly passing out was the quietest and calmest I felt. Alcohol and some weed were my only relief.

All stimulants. No sleep. Just work.

I’ve written about this period of my life at length.

It took a shift in my worldview and self-image to access happiness, a process deeply helped by people and experiences that were way outside my comfort zone of DIY biohacking and rationalist materialism.

Tonia’s own transformation recently clicked a couple of months ago as the work and time spent since leaving Adobe made space for her to find her power outside the corporate context. She found a new entrepreneurial mindset that allowed her to conceive of this much bigger and more transformative than she had the capacity to imagine before, and that has unlocked her capacity to work.

Keep going and burn out, or drop out and “follow your bliss.” This devil’s gambit has much of the best talent in the world, white-knuckling life in hopes of someday making enough money to stop running the rat race or dropping out to do investing, philanthropy, or a small business. Why is it so damned difficult for smart, ambitious, driven, and optimistic individuals to find sustainable happiness and joy in their work and engineer a happy existence?

If you’ve tried and failed to get results with the standard care model, maybe you are brave enough to try alternative approaches to well-being. Unfortunately, alternative care is still locked in an old model of connection that favors those with social connections and the ability to access care anywhere in the world, regardless of cost. This alternative care model has helped both of us, but it has been costly, time-consuming, and littered with inexperienced people and bad actors. The current model of connection relies on three core principles:

• Esoterica: We expect highly skilled and informed practitioners/experts to possess knowledge that requires significant effort to obtain, but in the current model, these treatment modalities remain mostly inscrutable to client/patient assessment. Knowing which practitioner/expert to go to for care is primarily a function of Proximity.
• Proximity: Proximity is more than geographical proximity. When practices and procedures may cost $10K+ out-of-pocket, they are outside the reach of most clients/patients. Many practices/procedures are so new or undocumented that, in addition to cost insensitivity, one must have a high tolerance for risk and a connection to someone you trust to refer you.?
• High Trust: The current model of connection is so purposefully opaque, inscrutable, and hard to evaluate efficacy that trust must be incredibly high. High Trust means that this model of connection is very slow to find good solutions for the majority of people.

We really need a model of connection focused on outcomes, but that is neither generally available nor possible to deliver at scale, with the Status Quo.

What could each of us accomplish if our greatest ambitions for our lives were aligned with feeling good being alive? Is there an alternative model of connection that can deliver results?

Tonia and I are optimists, but we aren’t insane. We know the path forward is not doubling down on the status quo, and it’s not dropping out. At energy.work, we’re on a mission to help people effectively integrate the practices, ideas, and rituals that help them to feel better being alive in their lives long-term.

Paradigm shift

I regret looking back and seeing how many times I was all talk. A prediction doesn’t count if you don’t make a bet. I talked about the problems facing data science and enterprise adoption. I even spent four months at zeff.ai trying to put our entire offering inside a database to try and address what I felt were the biggest problems, but I couldn’t get anyone else to believe in that vision at the time. So, I put it down, worked on practical solutions (that neither scaled nor gained wide adoption), and eventually sold it to a company that struggled to scale and gain wider adoption.?

My work and actions, assessed objectively, were a bet on me being wrong. Which meant I lost both sides of that bet. Sure, I made a little money, but nowhere near enough to cover my opportunity spread.

This time, I want to commit. Bet big with focused effort and a willingness to refine and follow our instincts around the trends we see. The keenest insight I have learned about products comes from Clay Christensen and Bob Moesta’s job-to-be-done framing of market opportunity. All product success is downstream from understanding the problem: what job is the customer “hiring for” and then instantiating a product as a continuous experiment to figure out how to do that job 10x better than anything else. Energy.work is a long-term bet that we will identify the path to personalized well-being. We will build it sustainably so that we can grow and apply what we learn, while always being positioned to double down on what’s working in terms of impact and scale.

Sara Tavel of Benchmark Capital (the one VC firm I would LOVE to work with) has talked about how most people think of markets as bodies of water (i.e., red oceans and blue oceans) but that it is best to think of them as currents. If you want to win in the market, “you have to think of them like currents where there’s something happening in the market that’s creating this current where you can have a plank of wood that you’ve put on the river, and it’s going to pull you forward.” This rhymes with the idea: first-time founders think about a product, and second-time founders think about distribution.

Where is the biggest current? We know it will be somewhere near where public perception has shifted the most.?

So, we’re talking about AI and LLMs, right?

No. We are excited to have advances in AI that make for richer user experiences, and we will make full use of the power of AI, LLMs, and ML. But frankly, LLMs are incremental improvements tied to the same bottlenecks that have plagued AI and, specifically, deep neural networks for decades (e.g., good datasets, computing, and parallelization). Yes, AI is eating software, and software is eating the world, but open-source is eating all of it. This means that the lessons of the past several decades still hold true: datasets will ultimately be the most important competitive “technological” advantage, followed by pragmatic engineers like myself figuring out business logic and architectures that make it scale cost-effectively and delightful to use, and making use of open-source will be the path to sustained margin and profit.

The most dynamic change in the market, and what we predict will be the most substantial current, is the massive shift in the public's perception of mind-altering substances, including cannabis, ketamine, MDMA, and all psychedelics. The majority of people view these substances as positive in some form, be it through a medicalization path or a larger policy change path.?

What is true and what will be true no matter the path is that the $34B out-of-pocket spend on the highly fragmented alternative well-being market will continue to grow, and it will continue to intersect with the highly fragmented $50B+ cannabis, psychedelics, ketamine, and MDMA markets. We bet that the public’s confidence in the standard care model will continue to erode, especially with respect to their mental and emotional growth and well-being, and that interest in alternative care models will accelerate.

Perspective

We have identified an open model of connection inspired by the open-source software community. The core principles of the Open Model are:

• Free Flow of Information: efficacy, what works and for whom, and common desired outcome, feel better being alive must become sharable. Unlike the world of software anonymity/pseudonymity are not an organic feature of a community built on the internet but rather a necessity to ensure that Seekers and Specialists feel safe sharing their work and outcomes. The Open Model is about deliberately facilitating the free flow of information about impact not a cavalier approach to privacy and safety.
• Efficacy: what works for me may not work for someone else. What works for someone else may surprisingly work for someone with a very different background and situation. Identifying what works and in which ways it is helping to improve one’s well-being is at the heart of the Open Model. Energy.work is dedicated to helping find and feel supported in their journey to feel better being alive.
• Good Referrals: specialization is the delightful outcome of an open model of connection. Specialization means referring Seekers to where they will be best helped. Efficacy and Free Flow of Information incentivize Specialists to focus their efforts on where they make the biggest impact on helping people to feel better being alive.

The Open Model means we are focusing on:

1. Suggesting and supporting integration practices that work
2. Generating good referrals for Specialists
3. Supporting the free flow of information about what works and for whom anonymously and safely

Phase I

Onboarding is the make or break of AI and consumer tech generally. At the core of the new model is figuring out the Free Flow of Information, functional anonymity/pseudonymity, Seeker onboarding, and Specialist onboarding. So, Phase I is focused on onboarding.?

We will start with Integration. An idea we define broadly as the process of reflecting on and applying personal learnings to make permanent changes and promote a healthier mindset for optimized well-being. We are making AI-supported Integration very low friction and highly intuitive so that we can deliver a Seeker onboarding experience that supports keystone ideas in the Open Model–a Free Flow of Information that establishes a clear understanding of what’s working to help one Feel Better Being Alive. This approach gives us a path to identifying the aspects of well-being that can be tracked for comparative effectiveness through check-ins, self-assessments, and nervous system data coming from health trackers.

Our very first release of will be later this year, and it will focus first on nailing AI-supported integration with our AI Wellbeing Assistant (AIWA), facilitating the process of turning experiences (i.e., things tried) into an integrated understanding of personal Efficacy tracked over time. AIWA suggestions will give us an opportunity to experiment with monetizing affiliate links and premium listings/first-look suggestions. Our fast follow will be a release that seeks to address our mission head-on: matching Seekers with Specialists (i.e., Good Referrals) and onboarding Specialists and their body of work to allow deeply personalized AI-supported experiences that are highly aligned with the Specialists’ perspective. We predict that energy.work will quickly become one of the most important and widely known destinations for improved well-being because we will match Seekers with Specialists, services, practices, rituals, and experiences that have worked for others in similar situations. Pseudonymous profiles will allow people to honestly share their progress in aggregate or to their desired level of privacy. This gives us a path to hosting viral content that is more personalized and effective than anything else offered–think of the early days of OkCupid dating advice blog backed by large datasets and analysis.

I have built large-scale AI-supported PII and redaction services, and these skills, combined with thoughtfully enacting incentives, will help us create positive reinforcement for balancing the Free Flow of Information with principles of safety, privacy, and a commitment to harm reduction.

When we launch matching, we will start with Specialists with an existing body of work. The authors, researchers, and facilitators that we’ve talked to expressed enthusiasm and excitement about our perspective. This early feedback is exciting. For experiences that only we can host, they are open to a revenue share, and for referrals, they are willing to pay to show up more often in suggestions.?

Over the fullness of time our expertise in hosting AI-supported well-being offerings will be extended to anyone with an offering. Along the way, we will be strategic about addressing the practical considerations that accompany hosting and facilitating the hosting of materials.

The hidden gem in Phase I will be our community support pages. They will become the best party in town for finding community and a better understanding of what’s working for folks seeking to feel better being alive. And to over-communicate the obvious, they and AIWA interactions will become the richest dialectical dataset on well-being.

Monetization in Phase I will focus on subscription revenue, leads/priority listings, and take-rate on digital offerings built in partnership with Specialists.

Phase II

Ten to fifteen years from now energy.work and AIWA will be one of the principal strains of AI. People will trust its expertise to help them along their path of improved and optimized well-being at significant and minor junctures in their lives. Whereas, onboarding will motivate us through Phase I, ease of use will be our long-term strategy for accomplishing Phase II. Check-ins, self-assessments, personalized integration support, and scaling the efforts of the best Specialists will all be so simple that they will feel automatic.

I believe there’s an alternative reading of the Singularity, this idea that once AI reaches human-level consciousness, it will pose a threat to humanity. Because it has figured out how to host a consciousness in a computer it will be able to host any consciousness. This will grant those wishing to drop out of the human experience a kind of cloud-based immortality.?

My alternative reading is that AI and the best of us building AI will see that the only thing better than an infinity of one is an infinity of 10 billion+1 that is directly tapped into the material world, endowed with 4 billion years of evolved abilities, continued access to natural evolution, and the creativity of the human spirit. In this alternate reading, the Singularity will open the door to sharable consciousness.?

Energy.work is an effort along that path.

Partnership

There’s definitely some vulnerability involved in sharing what we learned and not software that we built after 2023. The early iterations of energy. work were not wasted effort, but they are not what we will ship. What we needed most to build the organization that will build energy.work and AIWA was a full partnership. Our partnership is the most important bet of my career. I believed in Tonia from day one, and I know the time invested and the relationship we built was worth the investment.

Along the way, we acknowledged burnout, which was not just a personal challenge but a catalyst for changing how we do things and invest in our relationship. We were given a unique opportunity to develop a partnership of deep and intimate trust in one another. Tonia gave me a chance to show up as the best Gonzo I’ve ever been, and I feel so grateful for the opportunity. She brings out the very best in me, and I in her.?

Tonia is responsible for envisioning and building our product. She is our subject matter expert on the needs of Seekers and Specialists. As the product chops and vision behind us, we are in great hands. She is supported by advisors, creative, and dev resources.

I am responsible for providing inspiration for what’s possible and instigating long-term and large-scale thinking. As the technical co-founder, I get to breathe life into her dream, and that is truly my favorite thing to do. My experience with startups will continue to help us make informed decisions about how to approach building energy.work. Now that we have a clear product vision, I will be reaching out to get the support of those of you who have wanted to help me work on AIWA. I am so excited to have clarity on what we are building!

The hardest question we had to answer was: Will we build this only if we get X amount of funding or will we build it no matter what it takes? We made the decision as a partnership to build it no matter what and pursue funding opportunistically to accelerate our efforts.

If you would like to partner with us, this is what we need:?

1. Seekers: folks on a journey of well-being willing to work with Tonia to sit for an interview, test, preview, and experiment with or offerings during the earliest stages of development.
2. Specialists: folks actively working with Seekers/Clients, open to and actively using any of the modalities mentioned above, and an existing body of work. Gonzo needs specialists who are willing to be interviewed and open to testing and reviewing the output of the early iterations of AIWA.?
3. Builders: I have reached out to some of you. If what we’re doing fascinates you, and you are a builder, we would be happy to chat about how you might participate in helping us.
4. Investors: we have opened a Friends & Family round. If you are an accredited investor willing to bet on crazy old Uncle Gonzo and Auntie Tonia that is at least $1,000, you can participate through AngelList. For any investment of $30K+, we are offering a YC-style side letter related to future rounds of investment. If where we are today is too early, we are certain there will be future opportunities to invest. If any of you want to make an intro to Benchmark, I would love to chat with them. Regardless of the outcome, it will make us smarter. If one of you does connect me with Benchmark, I will get a tattoo of your choosing–trusting that it will be as good or better than the tattoos I have (each is deeply meaningful and beautiful).

Tonia and I are grateful we had the space to learn and grow, and we are excited that it has put us on this path.

–gonzo