Hims & Hers 如何凭借23亿美元营收达到43亿美元市值 | Andrew Dudum

One of the things I learned earliest in my career is that if you can’t hire people who are smarter than you, you will fail. What you gain confidence in with brand marketing over time is that consistency is required.

1. Why Hims Gets Dunked on More Than Competitors

When you’re disrupting an industry, you have to have a team that is used to being uncomfortable, used to getting through it, used to staying calm, and having that resilience. I might be the only person who believes this, but I think running the company in the public markets is more fun than being private.

Ready to go? Andrew, it’s been 6 or 7 years. I was young and fresh when we last spoke.

Was I? Yeah, I was a lot younger. We looked a lot better back then, but I’d say we’re pretty good right now.

2. Why Running a Public Company Is More Fun Than Being Private

Listen, I think life’s been pretty kind to both of us. Can I start with a super weird one? You might be like, “Dude, I thought we were buddies.” I speak to so many public company CEOs today, and I can’t find a happy one. Are you talking serious?

Yeah.

Are you happy?

I think I might be the only person who believes this, but I think running the company in the public markets is more fun than being private.

Why? You get shit on every day, dude. I see it, and I’m like, “Oh, poor Andrew.” I still remember our dinner with your lovely wife, and I’m like, “Oh, he’s so nice.” And I see shit on Twitter.

You do?

I love it for a few reasons. One, if you’re a highly competitive person, you get to put out high benchmarks every 90 days and see if you can actually deliver on them. You can build a high-performance team and say, “Hey, we put this out, and it’s a big stretch. Let’s go kick ass and figure it out.”

When you’re private, it’s so easy to get cozy. The worst-case scenario is that you’ve got some VCs who call you and are stressed out about something. But the public markets are like boot camp. You have to deliver. I love that from a competitive standpoint.

I also love the ability to hire talent in the public markets because they can see the vision, and you’re forced not only to talk about where you’re going to go 10 years from now, but to actually make steps quarter to quarter to prove it. As a competitive person, I think it’s a lot of fun.

Also, when you step back, we went public really early. We went public after, I think, 36 months of launching, which was a little bit crazy. When you look at the biggest companies in the world, they went public within the first few years of launching: Google, Facebook, Apple, Amazon—all of them. They didn’t stay private for 10 or 20 years.

They forced the founder to figure it out in the public markets: how we’re going to grow, how we’re going to get efficient, and how we’re going to tell a big vision. I think that’s a lot of fun.

I love that. Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, Hims.

Right.

Nice. That’s actually one of the oldest marketing tricks ever: marketing by association. You know this. It’s called Six Flags. Do you remember Six Flags, the really fucking great theme parks?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I don’t know them because I’m British, but they wanted to be better than everyone else, so they just did massive billboards that said, “Not as good as Disney.”

Smart.

Very smart.

Yeah, I know. I like good marketing. I’m fascinated that you said that about going public so early. If you were sitting down with the Collisons today, would you tell them to go public?

I think if your business is ready from a predictability standpoint and you have a long-term orientation, then I would encourage you to go public. I think those 2 things have to be true.

You have to actually be able to predict your business with consistency because you can’t enter the markets without that confidence. You also have to be ready to sign up for a decade or 2 in the markets, right? This is not a quick exit. It’s not a liquidity event. It’s the beginning.

I would encourage any founder who has those 2 dynamics to consider it.

Do you think you can do what you want to do from a long-term strategic objective standpoint and have the—as you said, I love it—the 90-day ticker of, “Hey, we’ve got to go hard for the 90 days”?

I think you do. It takes discipline, and I think it takes hiring the right people.

I focus on hiring a certain type of person. They’re not particularly fancy in background. They’re not credentialed with all of the really great tech companies. That’s not what I look for. I mostly look for people who have been builders and have gone through some shit. That’s the honest reality.

3. How to Hire for Grit: People Who Have Been Through Shit

If you look at our team, Yemi, our CFO, was the divisional CFO of Uber during COVID. The whole business disappeared overnight, and he had to figure it out. Or Dearja, our chief product officer, was at Robinhood during GameStop and had to figure out that chaos.

Do you seek out crisis in their lives? I know it sounds stupid. You mentioned 2 very iconic—

Yeah, I seek out grit. I seek out a lot of grit because I think when you’re disrupting an industry, which we are—and even in the last year, our category has exploded, changed, and been fraught with all types of chaos—you have to have a team that is used to being uncomfortable, used to getting through it, used to staying calm, and having that resilience.

I absolutely search for people who have seen those types of ups and downs and thrived in them because I think when you’re disrupting, it’s inevitable that it’s going to happen.

I spoke to so many people around you. I really grilled the shit out of you again, which was nice because I know you, but it was great to hear stories about owning donut shops.

The talent element was one thing, and Jules Maltz from IVP said that you’re incredible when it comes to acquisition and retention. What do people get most wrong, do you think, about acquiring great talent today?

I think often people, as they scale—maybe founders as they scale—fall into the trap of trying to hire people who have seen bigger scale than them and are more strategic. They feel like they’ve gotten to the point of success where now it’s time to up-level the talent to non-startup-y folks, to real professional people.

I think that is a huge, huge mistake. Huge mistake.

Chris Payne is on our board. He’s one of my mentors.

Shout-out to Chris.

Yeah, great guy. I think he’s one of the best operators I’ve ever met.

When I look at the team that Tony’s built at DoorDash, that team is an operating machine. It’s a huge company—it’s an $80 or $100 billion company—yet they’re still operating with speed and focus like a startup. I think so much of that is because the team Tony’s assembled around him is a team of operators who love to build.

As you scale, there’s a pressure to go hire that big strategy person who has more credentials than you. It almost feels confidence-inducing as a founder to get to that level, and I think you have to fight that at all costs.

I’ve made mistakes. I’ve hired people like that because I thought it was the right move, and I’ve always come back to finding people who love the mission, who love to build, who are tactically excellent at what the function actually requires, and, again, who are greedy as hell.

What are you not excellent at in the role of CEO but persist relentlessly at despite your lack of skill?

So many things. There are so many things.

4. Founder Mode vs Trusting Your Team

I’m constantly trying to find the balance between being in the weeds and building a team that can scale independently of me. You’re constantly trying to find that line of how hands-on you should be, how strategically involved you should be, and how tactically involved you should be.

Where do you come down on that? We have founder mode, and I love Ryan at Flexport, but he’s so in the weeds, and I love him for it.

Yeah, I think you have to be intentional about where you get into the weeds. I don’t believe in this concept that every design review comes through me, everything that ships comes through me, and every decision comes through me.

One of the things I learned earliest in my career is that if you can’t hire people who are smarter than you, you will fail. Young managers struggle with this all the time. They’re scared to hire people who are better than them because they feel like, “If I hire somebody better than me, what the fuck am I even doing here? Why am I here if I just hired somebody who’s better than me?”

In fact, it’s completely the opposite. If you want to continue to scale in our organization, or any organization that’s growing, you have to realize that your job is changing every 12 months. You have to level yourself up to the next highest-leverage focus area.

In order to do that, you have to replace yourself every 12 months with talent equal to or better than you, always. And so, to me, that's a really important realization as a CEO and founder: I want to hire people better than me, and so I trust them. Yet at the same time, if there are specific areas of the business that are critical, either strategic decisions or tactical implementations being worked on, you have to know when to go deep.

You need to acknowledge to the team, “Hey, this is something that's really important. I'm going to go deep on it. I'm not going to go deep on everything, but this is important. I'm going to be in the weeds here.”

Dude, I sit in these boards nowadays, and honestly, that is mostly useless and so exhausting. AI is at the top of every big company board discussion topic, okay? No shit. How does your business change with AI? How many people do you have today?

About 2,000 employees.

Okay, you have 2,000 employees. How many do you think you'll have in 2030?

That's a great question. Probably not many more than 2,000 or 3,000.

That's a big range.

Yeah, we operate about 1 million square feet of pharmacy fulfillment throughout the US. And so we have a large chunk of labor force, which is actually just variable labor responsible for pharmacy oversight, pharmacy review, and the shipment of medication.

5. How Many Employees Will Hims Have in 2030?

AI can do a lot in regard to efficiency for core product, engineering, accounting, finance, marketing, et cetera. But when you're actually running physical facilities, and a lot of this is actually required doctor and pharmacy oversight, you can't get as much leverage on those areas.

Are you pushing AI down into every function of the org?

Yes.

6. Where AI Is Having the Biggest Impact at Hims

Are you seeing it have dramatic implications? We have engineering and customer support. I think we overexaggerate elsewhere where it has an impact.

I think those two areas are critical. We're also seeing it have massive leverage in design. We deploy about $1 billion in marketing spend every year across the Hims & Hers brands. The cost to do a live photo shoot, the speed of a food photo shoot for every single product launch—we probably have thousands of variations of TV commercials, Facebook ads, Google ads, et cetera.

The speed of iteration with AI in that function is actually one of the most tangible impacts that I've seen across our organization.

In terms of cost reduction and in terms of supply expansion?

It's mostly with regard to output. You have the same team, but you're probably delivering 3 to 4 times the amount.

The other area where we see a big degree of improvement is actually on the clinical side. We treat 10,000-plus patients a day. We're probably the largest health care system in the US if you actually look at the volume of patients treated, and now, with recent metrics, definitely the largest globally from a digital health standpoint.

If you can apply AI to the medical side, the EMR, where doctors are actually making clinical decisions, and it can help give guidance with regard to certain protocols and speed up that process, that is a huge amount of leverage for the clinical end from an efficiency standpoint.

But it's also a meaningful improvement in quality because you have essentially an intelligent brain helping standardize care across thousands of doctors who are making decisions every single minute.

When you speak about the explosion of the business, that explosion is driven largely by GLP-1s and weight loss. How much of that is the core business today? Is it 80% weight loss, 20% everything else? What does that look like?

No, no. I think that's one of the funny things about our business: We are constantly in the headlines as a single-category business. When we first launched—when you and I first met—we were the erectile dysfunction business, right? It was on the front page of The New York Times, and it was fun and silly and provocative. From everyone's perspective, all we did was ED.

Then we launched hair, and all of a sudden it was like, “We're a hair-loss business.” Then we launched the Hers business, and everyone said, “Oh, Hers is never going to work. You're just an ED and hair-loss business.”

Eventually, we launched GLP-1s, and everyone said, “Oh, now you're just a weight-loss business.” A year from now, people will say, “Oh, you're just a peptides business,” probably, if I were to take a guess.

7. Hims Is Not a Weight Loss Business

The reality under the hood is that you have a dozen completely different clinical categories and completely different businesses, each scaling with very solid, robust growth, which is why this business is interesting. That's why I run this business: The durability of it is quite strong because you have 10 different businesses with completely different customer segments.

Weight loss is actually nowhere near the majority of this business, and I don't think it ever will be, just because you're continuing to expand core categories and a lot of new categories.

8. Running Hims Like a Venture Portfolio of Bets

Do you run those as separate businesses? When I had Nik Storonsky from Revolut on the show, he said something fascinating. He said, “We run 26 different product experiments at the same time. I treat them much like a venture incubator, and I give them more or less money depending on how well they perform.” Do you run them as a venture incubation unit?

Yeah, absolutely. When we first met, I was working with Jack Abraham, running Atomic Ventures for a long time. That training of zero-to-one exploration is what Hims & Hers is, right? I think of it as a public shell for innovation and bringing great health care to consumers.

That means every year we're testing completely new go-to-market strategies and completely new categories. The way we think about it internally is just different bets. Some bets you starve, some bets you fund, and some bets you ring-fence to allow exploration for a year or two.

They're run increasingly independently, and I think the DNA of management is to look at it as a portfolio that continues to scale. Ultimately, in our business—health and wellness—what makes up great health and wellness is constantly changing. There are new diagnostics, new devices, new drugs, and new learnings about the sauna and cold plunges, or whatever it might be, whatever's trendy.

All of this is changing, and it's going to continue to accelerate. Our job is to curate the best and bring it to people at scale at an affordable cost. We have to think about this, frankly, as a portfolio that's constantly evolving.

I can't get my head around the sauna, Andrew.

You have to do the sauna 4 times a week: 170 degrees for 20 minutes.

No, I don't.

What it does to the motility of your sperm?

Yeah. You just put it in—

Kids, buddy. Some of us have got none, okay?

He's got to bring an ice pack in there.

I'm not going to bring an ice pack for my balls. I'm sorry. This was genuinely the most unattractive thing ever. And it's like, you know, Huberman's like, “Oh, it extends life by 3 decades.” I'm like, “He's right. I'm not doing ice packs.”

We'll sauna together next time I'm in London.

I'd love to. I'd do it with you.

Yeah, all right.

9. First to Market vs. Best in Market

There you go. You said there about these bets. What did you do that, with the benefit of hindsight, you wish you hadn't done?

For us as a business, I think it's important to constantly be in a customer's mind, to have mindshare of the new, evolving health and wellness categories. And so I think in many categories we've been quick to market, and in many categories we've been patient to market.

In retrospect, I am constantly evolving my perspective on how fast we should be there. My net-net takeaway is I don't think we actually need to be first ever in market. I want to be best in market.

When I think of new categories—peptides, for example—there's a lot of conversation about 10 or 15 peptides going from Category 2 to Category 1 compounding so that people can actually get access to things like BPC-157 and TB-500. This is an incredibly interesting category. You won't see us be first to market in this category.

When we launch it, you'll see us feel extremely confident in the clinical protocols and the guardrails. We'll make sure that the supply chain and the quality are done to a level we feel is bulletproof from a pharmaceutical standpoint.

There's a lot of introspection in my brain around speed and prioritization of which categories to enter, but what I always come back to is not being first, but being best. From a brand standpoint, people know Hims and Hers to be high-quality and trusted. When we actually bring something to market, you know it's safe, you know it's done right, and you know it could be something powerful and important for your health.

I always remember Hugo Barra, who was the product guy from Xiaomi, and he said on the show, “When you're doing anything in physical products, you need to choose one. You need to be feature king, or you need to be price king.”

Yeah.

What are you?

I think you have to be both. For us, I think you have to have the best at the most affordable price eventually.

10. Why Hims Wants to Be Both Price King and Feature King

And how come it was $1,800 to $2,000 for Wegovy and Ozempic then, which wasn't wholesale?

Well, what is it now?

Well, the self-pay price at the time was $300 to $400.

Yeah, it's down to about $149 in 18 months.

On Hims?

We just announced the Wegovy pill at $149.

Not post-Novo deal, though?

Oh, yeah. Yeah, it's through a partnership, absolutely.

Got it. Totally get you. So we want to be price king and feature king.

I think for us, we want to curate the absolute best at prices the masses can afford. I think the way you do that is you work with ecosystem partners and leverage the scale of the platform, right? We're probably the largest global distributor of medicines at this point. By working with the best diagnostic companies, including the cancer detection company Grail, we can bring those products to consumers.

This is a test that I've been taking for 5 years. I've had everyone in my family take it because there's cancer in my family. It's called the Galleri test by Grail. It's a blood test, and it can detect 50 to 100 cancers, and it focuses specifically—it's best, from a clinical standpoint, at some of the harder-to-find cancers: prostate, pancreatic, and ovarian cancer. It's a simple blood test.

This blood test was thousands of dollars for the last few years. We were able to work directly with Grail to bring that test to Hims & Hers at, I think, around $600. My hope is that over the coming years, it'll continue to come down to a few hundred bucks where everybody could do this on an annual basis, like going to the dentist, right? It's just a check to see if there are any early signs, any early protein indicators of stage 1 cancer tumors.

11. How Hims Helped Cut GLP-1 Prices by 80% in 18 Months

So there's an arc, right? When the GLP-1s first came out, it was a $2,000 list price. We applied incredible pressure to the drug companies. I think the current administration in the US did an amazing job. And thanks to the drug companies, they actually agreed to bring them down from thousands of dollars to $150 to $200 cash-pay prices.

That is completely transformative. It's not something that's really happened in pharmaceutical history: that the blockbuster drug of the century gets cut by 80% in 18 months, right? And the reason for that, I think, is in part because companies like us and consumers applied massive pressure to change the distribution model. In 18 months, the distribution model has completely changed in pharmaceuticals in the US.

Instead of going through PBMs and insurance, they're going straight to customers through platforms like ours at prices everyday people can afford. So there's an arc to that price reduction, but I think for us, we want to have the absolute best and also be able to apply pressure to bring that cost down as much as we can.

Do you think PillPack sold too soon when you think about the erosion of PBMs' power that you mentioned there and how challenging it was for a business like PillPack?

I don't know too much about PillPack, to be totally honest. What I don't believe is that the pharmacy fulfillment part of our business independently is a particularly valuable business.

How should I think about the preventative healthcare companies that I'm pitched every day, whether it's your Prenuvo or the likely "Nacos" in the UK, which is expanding too? Is that the future? Some are much deeper, some are much shallower, and some are much more expensive. How do you understand and analyze that space? Is that something that Hims would do?

Yeah.

Is that the future?

We spend a ton of time looking at that space and actually did a partnership with Prenuvo that was announced just a couple of weeks ago. I think where there's a lot of interesting companies right now is in highly specialized levels of testing for clinical areas that are meaningfully unmet, right?

You look at things like cardiovascular disease. It's still one of the number-one killers. Most dads die of a heart attack, yet a statin is 2 cents for me to manufacture, and if you take a statin every day, then you won't die of a heart attack, or you're meaningfully less likely to die of a heart attack. Yet nobody does it.

There are biotech companies right now working on therapies where a single injection quarterly or a single injection annually can absolutely obliterate your cardiovascular risk. If you can do something like that, you meaningfully curb that rate of death and get ahead on prevention for cardiovascular disease.

Prenuvo, I think, is another interesting one. It's how we get ahead of detection for things like cancer and early tumor detection. My dad had stage 4 colon cancer when he was 39. It then cost the health care system hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars and millions of dollars to have surgery and then treat him for many years with chemotherapy, right? Afterwards, there was the care involved to get him back to a steady state.

The idea of an annual exam that can scan your body for early signs, early proteins through blood testing, or early imaging signs that can detect a millimeter-sized tumor is incredibly fascinating. Now, I think a lot of clinical people—and they're smart—believe something like that is not yet ready for mainstream, and it might not be, right? I choose to be opportunistic in giving people the ability to make those trade-offs for themselves. I take Prenuvo annually, so I recommend it to my family. Is it perfect? Absolutely not.

How much is Prenuvo?

I think now it's maybe about $1,000 or $1,500 a year.

Okay, that's better than I thought.

Yeah, and again, these are machines that cost $500,000 as a one-time purchase. But then you're charging $1,000 or $2,000 a year, and so the idea that this cost could come down dramatically is very real, right? A $500,000 machine capitalized over a decade means that the cost could come down to something like $300 a year to do this test eventually.

12. Is ChatGPT the Biggest Threat or the Biggest Opportunity?

That's where my brain goes when I'm thinking about the future: what are the Swiss cheese layers we can give people that together make up really great prevention, working backwards from what we know causes shortening of life and healthspan?

Is the biggest threat to your business not actually OpenAI? If ChatGPT is the kind of consumer interface for a lot of health care questions that people have today—which, you know, it is in most cases, actually, and that's why health is a big focus for them—isn't it the most natural extension ever that they extend that into delivery and supply, being your on-demand doctor?

Something that people have been talking about a lot—actually, Dario was mentioning this recently—is that some of the most defensible businesses in the age of Anthropic and OpenAI are businesses that actually do something physical. I think they require actual specialization and infrastructure.

A huge part of what we do every single day is treat tens of thousands of patients with thousands of doctors who are specialized and licensed in every state or country in the world. Then we actually help make people's medicine. This is a million square feet of pharmacy fulfillment. This is hundreds of pharmacists and robotic machines that are actually compounding treatments or fulfilling branded pharmaceuticals.

So when I think about the most defensible businesses, the businesses that can thrive in the age of AI and actually be enabled by them are ones where the conversation around something like ChatGPT massively expands the funnel of people engaging in health and wellness, but then can be driven to a platform that actually connects them with the specialist, connects them with the products, and actually can get that delivered to their door.

Ultimately, I think we're a combination of all of those businesses together. So I think there's a lot of opportunity with that funnel that opens up with things like ChatGPT.

Yeah, I agree with you in terms of physical infrastructure and real-world requirements, meaning there's just inherently more value that exists, and it's harder to do. So does that look like a partnership, then? Say I come in and I say, “Hey, I've got a rash here, and I'm worried about it,” and then they siphon it off to Hims. So what does that relationship look like?

Yeah, I mean, I think it's similar to what you see on Google. I don't think it's going to be all that much different, right? You'll be able to partner directly with Anthropic and ChatGPT, find patients who are looking for certain services, and then have handoffs to specialized implementations, right? I think there's great opportunity to partner with all of these players.

13. How AI Overviews Are Changing Patient Acquisition

We mentioned the transition in how people consume health care. In terms of how people find you, I actually had Aaron from Monday on the show, which was a fascinating show, and he said that with AI Overviews on Google, they've lost 18%—or maybe between 15% and 18%—of their AdWords in terms of acquisition. How are you seeing the way that people find Hims change?

It hasn't had particularly dramatic changes since some of these new AI companies have grown. I think for us, a huge number of people who come to us are first-time patients interested in some of these care categories.

And so, they’re hearing about it through watching Fox News. They’re hearing about it through watching the NFL on Thursday nights. They’re hearing about it from their friend who all of a sudden is feeling great and talking about the treatments they’re on, or the fact that they’re getting care from Hims & Hers.

I think more and more for us, the brand and the spend are moving toward channels where you’re talking about the opportunity to feel great. You’re not relying on the AdWords Google funnel that you mentioned. I do think those businesses will inevitably struggle in transitioning to some of these chat-based interfaces, but there will be ad networks built through those chat-based interfaces that eventually just replace them.

Ultimately, I’m not sure it will matter. But for us, I think an increasing amount of spend is going toward telling people about all of the new things Hims & Hers is doing—the fact that you can feel great, the fact that it’s affordable, and that you can come check it out. It’s a lot of market creation, both in the US and globally, versus latent demand that you’re capturing through some of these more streamlined channels.

14. The Eucalyptus Acquisition & Going Global

If I gave you an unlimited checkbook, what would you spend on today that you’re not currently spending on?

I would definitely sponsor Ferrari F1 because I’ve told my wife that if I were to have one job that wasn’t my current job, it would be a Ferrari driver. But she did not really like that answer.

Do you think that would be a net positive for Hims as a business? Don’t laugh.

The Ferrari sponsorship?

Yeah.

At this point, probably not, because I’m not sure we’re live in every market with the penetration we would want, where that global footprint matters. I think eventually it would. I think eventually, in the coming years, the World Cup and global sponsorship opportunities actually do matter, because this year was a huge level of commitment to win internationally.

We did not dip our toe in. We acquired 3 or 4 very large companies—

Eucalyptus for, like, $1.5 billion in cash?

Somewhere around there.

How does that come to be, dude?

15. What Andrew Got Wrong About Brand Marketing

You know what? It comes to be because you get to know the people really well. I’ve known Tim for probably 4 or 5 years. I think he was the best operator overseas, no question. His understanding of the customer and his ability to build a team that just moves fast, experiments, is willing to take risks, and fail—I mean, when I first met Tim, he was live in 6 or 7 markets, and it was all failing.

He was telling me how chaotic it was, and I was like, “I don’t know, man. This sounds crazy. You’re in Indonesia, you’re in Japan, you’re in all these different places. Is it going to work?” He was like, “I’m not sure, but we’re going to try it.” Then a year later, he was like, “Okay, it didn’t work. We’re toning it back. We’re going to focus here.”

His humility and his willingness to experiment, test, and learn are incredible. Because of that, they’ve just moved so much faster than everybody else. They’re the dominant player in Australia, the dominant player in the UK, the dominant player in Germany, and quickly growing in Japan. It’s just a phenomenal business.

I think the power of what we built in the US from a cash-flow standpoint has enabled us, in the last 4 or 5 years, to buy that business with pretty moderate dilution. You can actually just fund the purchase of it off the balance sheet over the next couple of years, which is incredible. We have committed a huge amount of dollars and focus internationally because I just think the opportunity for the brand is pretty consistent, whether there’s a national system in the UK or not.

Does it give you cold sweats at night, being as aggressive as you have been, as quickly as you have been? I remember interviewing Dax Dasilva from Lightspeed, the POS system in a lot of restaurants, and he mentioned the challenge of acquiring so much so quickly. I think they made 18 acquisitions in a 2-year period. Are you worried, like, “Oh, shit, I now have to integrate Eucalyptus and these 3 other businesses?”

16. The Fine Line Between Aggressive Growth and Losing Control

Definitely. There is a very fine line between driving so fast that you’re losing control. There’s no question about that. What I’ve found, at least in running this business, is that if you don’t feel like you’re getting close to that line, you’re probably not pushing hard enough.

I do think that uncomfortable gut feeling—where you’re constantly questioning, constantly evaluating, constantly tweaking the strategy or the tactics—that feeling is what success feels like. I’ve taught my team that we’re going to get really comfortable with that feeling. We’re going to get really comfortable sitting in that feeling, questioning and reevaluating and pushing, because I think that’s how you win.

I was a rower in high school, and I remember my coach saying, “The group of guys out there that is willing to be the most uncomfortable and in the most pain are going to win this race.” That’s actually true in that sport, and that’s true in most sports. I don’t think that’s true in business.

If you can put yourself in environments where you’re being aggressive but smart, taking the right bets, and having a team that is bought into the mission and comfortable with that level of aggressive risk, I think it’s the right formula. To me, that’s what makes this fun.

When, with the benefit of hindsight, did you push too hard and have to pull back?

In the early years—and I think we still try to moderate this—with our business, we could launch so many things within a month. You could launch a skincare routine, a makeup brand, sleep vitamins, or a wearable device. Anything people are doing in health and wellness could live in the Hims & Hers brand, which is pretty powerful and also extremely risky.

If you do too much and move into the wrong areas, you waste a ton of resources. In the early years, I thought just having everything on the platform was how you win. We invested in skincare regimens, vitamin supplements, and so many things that, in retrospect, were fairly commodity products.

For pretty much the same price, or even less, you could walk across the street to Walgreens and get something that was pretty much the same thing. I think that was a massive mistake. It was a belief that just assortment won, and I think there’s a more nuanced perspective: the right assortment wins.

We’re really careful about the categories we enter and the products we launch to make sure that they’re products and offerings that are actually differentiated for people, that are hard for other people to receive and get access to. Maybe that means it’s pharmaceutical-grade, manufactured in a way that’s very, very challenging to get quality. Or there’s a level of personalization that’s required in this care or treatment that makes it unique to you.

When I think about some of the early D2C brands that launched, they were selling commodity products. Those products capped out at $1 billion in revenue or a couple hundred million in Facebook spend, and the curves were like this. That’s my nightmare.

In the early years, we made a lot of those mistakes, and we try to make sure we don’t do that again.

I do want to get back to the brand-marketing element because you mentioned, obviously, brand being a core component of defensibility. When I interviewed Nik Storonsky at Revolut, he said brand marketing was the single biggest thing he’d changed his mind on in the journey of Revolut, which I thought was an interesting statement.

What do you know now about brand marketing and spend on things that seem facile? What do you know now that you wish you’d known?

I think what you gain confidence in with brand marketing over time is that consistency is required. In the early years, as companies grow, they throw some dollars at it: “Let’s do an out-of-home campaign in New York because it’s really cool. Let’s take over subways,” right? We did a ton of that.

Then they do it once, and everyone on the team is so fucking excited because it’s so cool. You can see it and take pictures of it. But you do it once. Months go by, it gets taken off, and then that’s it, right? You did it, and it was fun and cool.

You look at the numbers and think, “Maybe there was a little spike in New York City on this day.” You can’t really tell—probably not—but you’re hopeful. Then the next year, it’s, “Okay, what are we going to do this year?” That’s just a guaranteed way to lose money.

It’s a great way to feel good, and it’s super fun. We’ve done a ton of it, and it’s really fun. But that’s not a business strategy. I think in order to have brand marketing work, it has to be consistent.

It has to be consistently random. If that makes sense, you have to appear in different places for people in a randomized way, but with consistency. Because it’s the multiple hits. You have to be hit 10 different times in 10 different ways for all of a sudden people to say, “Hey, there’s a cultural zeitgeist association with Hims right now that I need to pay attention to. What are they doing that is showing up in so many ways in my life?” That’s where your brand trust elevates and your cultural relevancy elevates.

17. Why Great Brands Say the Same Thing in 20 Different Ways

So it isn’t a one-off thing. I think in the early years, you hope it is and you try to track it, but it does require a level of dollars and a level of consistency. Kathy, our chief communications officer, told me this when we were interviewing, which I completely believe. She said, “The thing early companies struggle with when it comes to communications and their brand is they get bored of saying the same thing, and then they move on to the next thing.”

Early companies are excited: “We’re young, we’re changing. So, here’s our vision and here’s what we stand for.” Three months later, it’s changed up a little bit: “I want to say something different because I already said that thing in that last podcast. Let me say something new in this new one.” In fact, what makes great brands great is the fact that everybody knows why they exist, why they fight, who their customer is, and what value they deliver.

It’s because they say the same damn thing in 20 different ways every single week. I think that’s one of the key parts about brand marketing, or communications in general: consistency, making sure that the message and the narrative aren’t changing. That requires an immense amount of discipline and, in many ways, it’s a lot less fun. It’s much more of an engine, but over many, many years, I do think it builds.

I agree with you. I also think everyone, when you’re bored of saying it, has to remember that there’s a new team member who’s never, ever heard it before.

That’s right.

I also think it’s not opinionated enough. If you look at the Hims & Hers brands today, where would you say you are not opinionated enough?

I think Hims & Hers will increasingly have a stronger perspective on what great health care looks like. As we grow, we’re building an understanding of patients at a scale that I don’t think most have. When you think about the fact that we’re treating 10,000 to 20,000 patients a day, the largest health systems in the world are not treating 10,000 to 15,000 patients per day.

There’s an immense amount of knowledge being built around different types of patients, their demographics, their risk factors, their biomarkers, what medicines and treatments work and why, what side effects they have, how much better they feel, and combination therapies that are beneficial. There’s just an immense knowledge base growing, and I think we’re going to be able to start having stronger perspectives on what excellence looks like in health care.

What do we believe the gold standard in preventative care is? If you, Harry, want to be the absolute healthiest 29-year-old and be ahead of the curve, what are the 10 things you should be doing? What are the tests you should be doing specifically for you? What are the treatments—whether they’re holistic, supplements, or maybe a sauna—that you should be doing? What’s that exact regimen? Get ahead of it, and there you go: you’re going to be the gold standard.

You’re so far off the gold standard, dude.

You’re doing great. You’re doing great. And I think that’s the point. To me, that’s such a key part of the Hims & Hers brand: everybody feels that way. Everyone feels so far away from optimal, and it’s really fucking hard to take the first step and have the confidence to make a change.

Most people who come to Hims & Hers are first-time customers because I think we, as a brand, try really hard to empower you and say, “Hey, that first step is going to be easy. We’re going to make it easy.” It’s kind of like that old Marine or SEAL story: you make your bed in the morning, right? Because when you make your bed in the morning, you’ve completed something—a very tactical action. You’ve had success, there’s positive adrenaline, and then from there, you’re going to do other great things throughout the day.

With Hims & Hers, I want to make it so easy for everyone to take that first step toward feeling great that it empowers a lot of people to do so. From your question, we’re going to have a stronger opinion about what great actually looks like.

So, for anyone wondering, that is Admiral McRaven’s commencement speech, one of the greatest speeches, I think, recorded on the internet. I’ve listened to it probably 1,000 times. It used to be the start of every single run because it’s 16 minutes, which is always the most painful part of any run: the first 16. So, amazing alignment.

18. The Vision: Free Preventative Health as a Loss Leader

I’ve got an out-there idea for you. You said that you want to make it easier. Why do you not have Hims preventative assessments in every city and say, “Hey, we’ll tell you what’s wrong with you,” like Prenuvo does, or like any of the preventative-care companies? You can choose to buy with us or not, but by doing that, you’re building up the world’s largest set of health care data for free, and you give it for free; the treatment is what they pay for. It’s like your loss leader.

Also, what a goodwill engine. I would go to the dinner party—even if I didn’t talk about it, even if I didn’t buy products—and go to all my friends and be like, “You’ll never guess. I found this out about myself when I went to Hims.” “Oh, what’s Hims?”

I think we are very close to that being a reality.

Do you have the elasticity and budget to do that? I don’t mean that rudely, but it requires localization.

It requires two tangible things. Last year, we acquired YourBio Health, which is one of the few at-home blood-collection devices. I have it right here on my desk. This device costs just a couple bucks to manufacture, and you can click it on your arm. It has 30 microneedles inside of it, each of the microneedles smaller than an eyelash, so you feel nothing.

19. The At-Home Blood Testing Device That Could Change Everything

You click a button, and then a small tube of blood gets extracted from your arm in about 1 or 2 minutes. You can then peel that off and mail it to New Jersey, which is where we have a lab-processing facility. We’ll have a couple others in the next 1 or 2 years. We can run a full panel of 50 biomarkers, and it will cost us almost nothing.

Today, if you go to Quest or LabCorp and try to get that panel, cash pay might cost you $1,000 or $2,000. If you go online and go to different competitors, maybe it costs $300 or $500 for that panel. My goal, my vision, is that very quickly I want to give that away as part of the Hims & Hers membership for free.

If you can get a sense of those metrics—and I’m not talking about just baseline metrics like your cholesterol and things, I’m talking about things that are even more sophisticated, like genetic predisposition risks, which very few people get access to, or cancer risks, or polygenic risk scores—then you can act on them. If you have a really accelerated risk of colon cancer, there are things you should be doing that are different.

To me, that is the vision: a preventative front door that is at near cost or free. That requires us to spend hundreds of millions of dollars, which we’re doing right now, to totally verticalize this stuff and actually own the devices, the lab processing, and that fulfillment. Then you have a platform that says, “Here’s everything we know. Here’s what we can help you with,” and gives guidance and again makes that next step really, really easy.

Yeah, I thought it was really interesting. Gokul Rajaram is amazing. I don’t know if he has said this, but he basically said his biggest lesson from Square, where he was for many years, was that when you’re running a multiproduct company, not every product line has to be profitable. Huh.

That’s so right. I think for us, that entry point and that data collection serve 2 purposes. One, most people just don’t even have access to this stuff, so they don’t even know if they’re doing well.

I’ll give you an example. One of my best friends is in his mid-30s. He’s trying to live healthy, and he was telling me the other day how he’s running a lot. He looked at his cholesterol numbers, and they were kind of out of whack, so he said, “Now I’ll start eating more salmon and going for a run.” I’m like, “Oh, that’s great. Awesome.”

Then I told him, “Hey, have you done testing for this specific genetic risk factor for heart disease? It’s called lipoprotein(a).” He said, “No, I’ve never done that test.” So, he went and did that test, and he came back and said, “My number is like 450.” I was like, “Well, that’s a problem because that number should be under 70. If it’s 450, it means there’s a pretty good chance you’re going to have a heart attack at 50 or 60.”

20. Why Not Every Product Line Has to Be Profitable

I looked at him and said, “Has anyone ever had a heart attack in your family?” He said, “Well, my dad died when he was 60, and my grandfather died at 55. Both of them had heart attacks.” To me, that moment was why all of this matters, because he went to his doctor and he went to a cardiologist because he was trying to do well.

They gave him a set of panels and blood tests, and his numbers were a little bit off. So he started to go for runs. Great first step. What they didn't test was a genetic predisposition marker that we now know is so much more important. If you have that high genetic predisposition number, your cholesterol numbers need to be amazing, not good. They have to be incredible, or you're going to have a heart attack.

There are so many therapies he should be starting now because he has access to that number. That's the kind of stuff I want to give away for free. That level of information helps people actually get preventative, not reactive, and puts them on a care spectrum where, if somebody wants to be aggressive, they can, and if somebody wants to be conservative, they can. But I want to give people information, and then I want to give them choice and assortment and a doctor to help navigate that for a cost that isn't overwhelming.

I'm sorry to be like—and this may be a total tangent—but isn't it totally fucked that doctors get incentivized by drug companies?

21. Why the US Healthcare System's Incentives Are Totally Broken

Yeah, the whole thing is totally fucked, right? If you look at the existing system in the US, almost nothing has to do with patient outcomes or patient happiness, right? So many people make money. Everybody makes money, but none of them make money in any way that's actually reflective of the success of the customer or patient.

I think that's where our model is most powerful. We only make money at Hims & Hers if you are happier and healthier, period. Because you pay us. You pay us to be healthier. If you don't feel healthier, if you don't feel happier, you stop paying us. And so our incentive is only aligned with you.

We then fight behind the scenes: the drug companies, the diagnostic companies—we fight everybody, and we work with them, but we apply pressure to them to get the best stuff at the best price to bring it to you. But ultimately, we only succeed if you succeed.

In a way, though, your business is like my business, yeah? We don't want you to be too successful, where you don't need us. A world where businesses don't need venture capital is a problem for me. That's not a good thing. A world where humans don't need any medication—and I hate to say it—is not a good business for you.

Well, for us, it's not necessarily about medication, right? You will always need somebody to help quarterback your wealth and your health, right? As you grow, as you age, you're always going to want to have somebody who's an expert partner, who's available to you 24/7, that you trust, that can help you navigate how you feel in life. And this changes, right, at different milestones.

You might not be there yet, but 10 years from now, things will be popping up all the time, and that trusted partner becomes so valuable. It could be super acute. It could be something small, but I don't think that changes. And so that relationship that can last decades with Hims & Hers is what matters, right?

Me just getting you a specific treatment today and making the most money I can from you today—that actually isn't what matters to me long term, right? I'm 37. I've got a multi-decade perspective on how big this business can be. In order for it to reach that maximum value, you have to build a brand that people trust to have with you for a very long time.

That means often saying, "Hey, right now this treatment might not be for you." But we're here for you when something else pops up. And here's more information, and here's more diagnostics, and here's maybe a wearable device, and here's some other habits and food and nutritional support to help you along the way.

What is your least profitable product that is most important?

Yeah. Right now, it's the lab testing offering. We offer it essentially at cost. We haven't verticalized any of this infrastructure, so it costs us pretty much just as much money as we sell it for. And again, it's because I believe the lost leader value to the patient is incredibly important.

That margin will continue to be terrible because what we're going to do is continue to reduce the cost as we verticalize it and then actually reduce the cost to the consumer. So that will always be, I think, a platform benefit from my standpoint, where we try to make nothing on it, but give patients information and access. And that ultimately can be really transformative for them.

What do you think not enough people know about Hims that they should know?

I think a lot of people are still trying to understand why we are fighting so hard, right? People see us in the headlines all the time, recently seeing us in the headlines for GLP-1s and with drug-company conversations.

Can I ask you this? Why do we see the negative connotations with you and not Ro? It seems like the world likes to dunk on you more than Ro.

Yeah, I think when it comes to Hims as a disruptor, we are actually disrupting. I think we are pushing boundaries that structurally change how people get access to care in this country. If you look at the last 18 months, the most important medicines of the century got cut by 80%.

Not only did their cost get cut, but now they're available through consumer channels at prices everyone can afford. I think we played a part in that, intentionally, right? We applied massive pressure—regulatory pressure, consumer pressure. We leveraged hundreds of thousands of patients to raise their voices to say, "Hey, these medicines can save our lives. Let's actually get them to us in ways we can afford."

Coverage is now expanding dramatically, and the prices are tanking. And so I think our willingness to be at the forefront of disruption and push on behalf of consumers causes friction. I think we're comfortable with that friction.

I think people understanding why we're doing it is super important because we like to push where it's important to customers, and I think ultimately that is going to benefit how the ecosystem works.

And Ro isn't innovating in that way, hence they don't get the criticism.

I don't know. I won't talk specifically about any other brand because I'm not sure of their strategy, but I would say, in order to actually disrupt the system, you have to break part of the system. And I think our strategy is doing that.

What part of the system would you most like to break that you haven't broken yet?

22. The Part of the Healthcare System Hims Most Wants to Break

I think we're in the middle right now of breaking how healthcare is distributed entirely. Instead of going through the PBMs and then through insurance and then through reimbursements—all of that complexity that nobody understands in the US—I don't think any of it makes sense.

I think all of it, or as much of it as possible, will go through consumer channels like Hims & Hers, where you can pick up your phone, have on-demand access, have total price transparency, have complete choice of which doctor, which specialist, which treatment, complete information access, and then control.

The system in the US is entirely paternalistic, right? You get treated with whatever they want to give you, and the incentives, reimbursements, and costs are so convoluted that it's wildly overwhelming. When I think of every other industry we love—food delivery, financial services, banking, retail—everything is simple. It's on demand from your mobile device, price transparency, customer choice.

Yet the one thing that is the most important part of our life doesn't have any of those elements. And it's the biggest industry in the US. It's where we spend the most money, too. And so I think that's entirely going to change.

I don't think Hims is a D2C company. I think Hims is disrupting how healthcare is delivered in a consumer-focused fashion. And I think we're in the midst of that change. I think people are just coming around to it, and you're starting to see it with the GLP-1s as a prime example, but I think in the next 5 years it's going to accelerate dramatically.

The lock-in and power of Epic is just mind-boggling. Does that progress or prevent innovation in the healthcare industry?

I don't think it's relevant, actually. When you look at the patients coming to Hims & Hers today—the patients starting their healthcare journey—the majority of them do not have legacy data and systems within all the EMR platforms.

They moved to a new city, they moved to New York, and they're 22, and they're like, "I don't have a doctor, yet I'm feeling a little sad. What do I do?" Their first-time entry into the healthcare system is Hims & Hers.

The wave of healthcare for the future, for the next 20 years, for the 50 years after that, is going to be a patient population that's starting today. And that's why I think you have to build a relationship early.

You have to have an assortment of care that starts young for people so that you can give them an example of what great looks like, and then build with them over many, many years.

Final one, and then I promise we'll do a quick fire. I know I've jumped around the whole thing, but that's why I love what I do these days. I think your food industry is at the root of all your healthcare problems. What you guys do to your food is not fucking natural. Apples are not meant to be that large. Salmon is not meant to be that pink.

Do you agree that food is at the root of a lot of your healthcare problems?

100%, 100%.

But genuinely, dude, how do you eat healthily and sustainably in New York today when it's all completely artificial?

Yeah, it's really challenging. I think the current administration is doing an amazing job on that issue. I really do. The push to eat real food, the push to normalize the fact that all of the ingredients on these labels are garbage—they're chemicals—the push to educate people to actually see what is good for you, look at those labels, require food companies to disclose it, and force changes on highly processed foods or corn syrup use, like it's poison.

My wife is French, so when we're visiting our family overseas, I look at the labels and it's crazy. When you look at a bag of French fries in a French grocery store, it's potatoes and olive oil. And that's it. You go to Safeway here in the US and look at it, and it's 40 different things.

I think there's a huge problem with the food industry. I think the government applying pressure and regulation there is a wonderful idea for people because undoubtedly, that's a massive part of the obesity epidemic in the country and also probably the mental health epidemic and many, many other things.

Yeah, I'm totally with you. I feel—and actually on this one, I feel really sorry for—I don't know how to say this without being classist, wealthist, whatever, but I feel really sorry for you if you don't have money because I think it's really hard then.

Oh, yeah, it's so difficult. We've got 3 little boys, and we try to feed them well, so we'll buy a carton of organic blueberries, right? That carton is expensive. Organic blueberries in San Francisco might be like $7. I'll open it and put it in front of the boys for breakfast, and they'll grab handfuls and it'll be done in 15 seconds.

The idea that healthy food costs this much and is consumed that easily is a real challenge right now. Anything people can be doing to eat locally, to have local farms, to make sustainability in their communities easier and better, I think is all positive.

23. Quick-Fire Round

Dude, I want to do a quick-fire round with you, okay? I'm going to say a short statement, and you give me your immediate thoughts. Does that sound okay?

Sounds good.

What decision have you made in the last 2 years that you would reverse today?

I think I was too slow to force the company to invest in completely disrupting their team processes with AI.

Which process was disrupted most?

I think customer care, provider quality, and all patient interactions. I think we were 2 years too slow on totally changing the model of how patients interact with the platform.

CAC goes up or retention goes down—which scares you more?

Retention going down. There are always ways to optimize efficiency on acquisition. There are always new channels, new brand campaigns, and new growth avenues. But if you don't have a sticky customer, and for some reason they're becoming less sticky, your product-market fit, your patient happiness, and your customer happiness are going in the wrong direction.

CAC only ever goes one way. Agree or disagree?

Disagree.

Why?

At scale, with assortment and brand value, new channels become unlocked, new efficiency grows, and leverage accelerates with assortment. I think it often only goes one way, but I don't think always.

Other than Ferrari, what do you not sponsor that you would most like to?

The event itself?

Mm-hmm.

Or, like, the FIFA World Cup brought to you by Hims?

Well, you've got the US one coming, dude. It's not too late to spend some dollars. Dude, I love that.

What advice would you give to yourself starting Hims again? You mentioned Jack and Atomic and started as part of Atomic. What do you tell yourself going back to the very start?

I would tell myself to trust my instincts as we continue to build and get bigger and bigger. Continue to trust my instincts. Also, remember that it's going to be a long journey, and the ups and downs are going to come and go, but that persistence is going to be most important.

I think we do meaningful jobs, and you do a hugely meaningful job. But I think the most meaningful job that you probably do, which you'll agree with, is being a father. What's your final one? What's your biggest advice on being a great father now that you have 3 boys?

There's something I watched once where they asked a whole bunch of little kids what their absolute perfect afternoon was. These are 2-, 3-, 4-, and 5-year-olds. The perfect afternoon was—they all answered the same way—just playing with their mom and dad. Just sitting with blocks and playing with their mom and dad, or drawing with their mom and dad, or something with their mom and dad.

When you're exhausted and you're a parent and you're trying to do everything, pulled in so many different ways, you realize that all the kids want to do is just have you present. And truly present.

My greatest advice would be to try really, really hard to just play with them. Actually play. Get down on your knees, on your butt, in whatever they're doing, and just ask what they're doing and ask if you can do it with them. They light up, because in parenting, it's hard to actually make time for that. But I found that that's really the most important and valuable stuff.

Dude, I so appreciate you. I so appreciate the friendship. I so appreciate you putting up with my incredibly wayward comment. I mean, real breadth to the conversation—you've got to give me credit. But you've been fantastic.

Appreciate you having me, buddy. Good to see you again.