First-time CEO after 50?

Today Zero Longevity Science — the creators of Zero, the most popular tool for intermittent fasting and metabolic health — announced that I’m becoming their new chief executive. I thought I’d share a bit of personal context here as to how and why I’ve decided to become a first-time CEO. (Hi Mom!)

Coming into my 50s, and coming off a pandemic, I’ve found myself feeling a stronger and stronger desire to not just engage in fun and creatively challenging work, but to find projects that feel meaningful to me. I want to be confident that I’m contributing to something that has a lasting and positive impact on the world.

For most of my career I’ve been driven by a desire to create products that delight people through entertainment or by unlocking their creativity: early graphical user interfaces, games, tools for exploring music and social camera experiences to name a few. If I could find projects that had these ambitions at a huge scale, it was enough for me. Along the way I’ve been lucky and fortunate enough to work with and learn from many kind, brilliant and creative people.

But over the last 10 years, two things have become clearer and clearer. The first is that bringing fun technological distractions into the world is feeling more and more fraught. These tools too often (and sometimes by design) are embedded in patterns that can take us away from real experience and interaction and maybe even down a rabbit hole of digital addiction.

And then on top of all of that, there are unintended consequences everywhere — from record stores shuttering to an epidemic of online bullying to the manipulation of our democracy itself. It’s become harder and harder for me to show up each day under the Pollyanna banner that “the world will be more fun with [this product] in it.”

I’m reminded that in the early ’80s when Steve Jobs was recruiting Pepsi executive John Sculley to Apple, he famously asked: “Do you want to sell sugar water for the rest of your life or do you want to come and change the world?” I confess that the sorts of things I’ve spent my life on have increasingly come to feel like a sort of technological sugar water, and I’ve become hungry to do something positive and world-changing again. But what would that be?

Even as I struggled with that question, there was something else I was wrestling with: not only was I looking for a meaningful product to make, but more and more I felt a responsibility to ensure that the companies I contributed to were meaningful places to work. I wanted to help create environments:

• Where everyone could do their best work
• Where diverse perspectives were embraced, heard and elevated
• Where everyone was respected, supported and understood
• Where the team could find a balance between the personal and the professional
• Where the builders meet their audience with a sense of humility and a desire to learn and serve
• Where open-minded experimentation was celebrated alongside bold and visionary leaps

I was fortunate at Pandora to have a role and a place in the company’s history that afforded influence over the values of the company we were building, but I can’t say the same of every subsequent chapter in my career. So this year, I found myself contemplating that what came next needed to combine a meaningful product with a meaningful company — where the former meant doing undeniable good in the world and the latter meant contributing my talents to the leadership of a company that was a source of professional inspiration, delight and growth for everyone involved.

For the first time in my career, at the ripe old age of 51, I started to think this also meant I needed to be a CEO, perhaps of a company I founded myself. My intention was to start down that path once I’d spent most of 2021 reinvesting in family, friends and projects that I’d neglected during the most recent chapters of my career.

And then three serendipitous things happened one after another.

First, in November of 2020, I called Mike Maser, Zero’s founder. We were acquaintances but had fallen out of touch when I moved to LA to work for Snap. I called because, just watching his company’s progress from afar, it felt like there was something he was doing that was in tune with my entrepreneurial instincts. In truth, the way Quibi had fundraised and gone to market — raising and spending nearly a billion before the first user watched a show — had always felt at odds with much of what I hold dear in the entrepreneurial process, and it’s the part of the Quibi chapter that I most struggle to defend. By comparison, the way Mike had been tackling the Zero opportunity seemed much more aligned with what felt like the best expression of entrepreneurship: an approach that eschews fundraising shortcuts and earns each milestone one at a time.

Also his company was fully remote long before COVID-19, and I was interested in what he was learning about distributed work. I’d already decided that, whatever I did next, I was going to put some of my personal priorities ahead of my professional ambitions, particularly as it related to where I lived in the world. I wanted a life that afforded me a chance to spend some of the year on the east coast closer to family and some of the year on the west coast closer to friends. This seemed to suggest that whatever company I built or joined, we’d have to be excellent at accommodating team members who had priorities that didn’t include living five miles from a central hub.

All of which is to say, when I called Mike, one thing the call was not about was joining the Zero team; back then that idea never crossed my mind. Instead I was just trying to glean the lessons Mike had learned so I could apply them to whatever company I started next.

Second, about a month later, I decided to face the grim reality of what I’d let happen to my health during the pandemic. For all of my adult life I’ve been about 25 pounds too heavy to be considered “normal weight” in terms of BMI. While I carried the weight reasonably well, those extra pounds hurt my self-esteem every day. I hated pictures of myself. I was embarrassed about the way clothes fit me. I even felt insecure in my romantic relationships. But carrying around all of that burden — both weight and emotion — wasn’t enough to get me consistently making better choices. I’ll say it: I ate a lot of doughnuts. The pandemic didn’t help matters, and when I got on the scale on the day after Thanksgiving 2020, I was 45 pounds above a normal BMI and just one pound shy of a score that would have earned me the obese label. Those additional 20 pounds not only brought more shame, but also, for the first time in my life, I felt physically sick. I got out of breath climbing stairs. Tired. Irritable. I was a mess.

So on November 30th, I assembled some technology tools that I thought might help me get to a healthier place: Zero, Peloton, Oura and an Apple Watch. In the first 30 days, I lost 20 pounds. In six months I’d lost nearly 60 pounds, and today I feel healthier than I have in 30 years. And these digital health tools, particularly Zero, were a key part of getting me to this place. The product literally changed my health, my happiness and my life.

Still, I wasn’t thinking about joining the company. From my conversations with Mike I could see glimpses of values I held dear, and I knew how big a difference the product had made in my own life, but honestly I was looking down the road to starting something of my own and hadn’t stopped to consider that perhaps Zero might benefit from my help.

Then, in May, the third serendipitous thing happened: I got an email from the executive search team at Daversa Partners. These kinds of emails usually say enough to get you interested but leave most of the concrete details — including the actual identity of the company — shrouded in mystery. This email said something to the effect of “we’re doing a CEO search for a fully distributed digital health company funded by the same investors that backed Blue Bottle and Peloton.” In this case, two lightbulbs went off simultaneously. First, this was obviously Zero, and second — and more importantly — here perhaps was an opportunity that fit all my criteria for the next chapter of my career.

A quick call to Mike confirmed that he’d decided to step up into the Executive Chairman role and was looking for a partner to take over the CEO responsibilities to help shape and scale the future of the company. Having spent the subsequent months getting to know the company better, I’ve come to understand that this is an organization with a huge ambition that stretches well beyond its current aperture. Their mission is nothing short of helping people unlock their metabolic health so they live longer and healthier lives. During a time when 73% of American adults are either overweight or obese and 88% are metabolically unwell, I can’t imagine finding a more meaningful product to commit my professional life to. What’s more, having come to better know Mike, his leadership team and the values they share and live by each day, I can’t imagine finding a more meaningful company to lend my efforts to.

This is the beginning of a grand adventure, and I couldn’t be more excited about where we’ll go together. At the start my ambitions are simple and high level: I want to help Zero create products and experiences that have a huge and positive impact on the world, and I want to make sure we create a company where people do their best and most fulfilling work. Easy, right? Want to join us? Let’s get started.