Sam Kothari, Co-founder and COO of Everlab, an entrepreneur who built hospitality brands before launching a preventative primary care startup. He talks about building world-class teams, co-founder alignment frameworks, radical candour in leadership, reinventing personalized primary care, and practical approaches to fundraising and talent retention.
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volunteer_activism ADVICE
Set Honesty As Your Team's Operating Norm
Make honesty the cultural baseline: set an expectation to call out missed commitments and have hard conversations without territories.
Sam says this creates high trust and rapid learning across the company.
insights INSIGHT
Primary Care Needs A Preventative Lifestyle Operating System
Primary care should combine medical and lifestyle data to be preventative, personalized, and inclusive.
Everlab aims to give clinicians 'superpowers' by integrating gender, ethnicity, wearables, and lifestyle into care plans.
volunteer_activism ADVICE
Treat Your Health As High-ROI Founder Work
Prioritize your health as a founder because physical and mental fitness directly improves leadership, recruitment, and problem solving.
Sam says time invested in gym or clinicians is business ROI not time away.
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My guest for Episode 177 of The Startup Playbook Podcast was Sam Kothari, the Co-founder & COO of Everlab.
Sam is an entrepreneur in the truest sense of the word having previously run everything from tuition businesses and ice cream shops to starting a popular Poke bowl chain across Sydney and Mebourne called, Poked.
He is now the Co-founder & COO of Everlab, a first of its kind preventative health protocol that gives you access to cutting-edge diagnostics, a personal doctor and tailored programs – designed to improve wellbeing and longevity.
Everlab recently raised a $3M pre-seed funding round led by European VC fund, B2Ventures. My investment syndicate, Playbook Ventures, also participated in this round and I am personally very excited and bullish on what Sam and the team are building!
In this episode Sam and I discuss a lot of his journey to date and the early days of Everlab including:
Early lessons from founding and operating hospitality businesses
Sam’s approach to attracting world class talent and building high performing teams
Frameworks and tests to ensure Co-Founders are aligned
Why prioritising your health makes you a better founder
How to systematically approach fundraising
and much more!
Timestamps:
03:42 Sam’s background
05:30 Learnings from Warren Buffet and Charlie Munger
07:33 Going into business, challenging cultural norms
11:55 First attempts at business in hospitality
20:41 Importance of radical candour
24:27 Frameworks for personal relationships
29:21 How the founding team for Everlab came together
34:38 Frameworks for assessing co-founder dynamics
40:40 How Everlab is reinventing the primary care experience
42:30 Why health is so important for founders
46:56 Sam’s health routines
51:32 The Everlab protocol
59:52 How Everlab approached their fundraise
01:04:59 Fundraising advice to founders
01:06:21 How to identify and attract talent
01:15:52 Finding the balance between being kind and direct
Our partners
A big thank you to Marc Hermann, Dr. Steven Lu, Fab Makojc and Justin Huang for their help with research for this interview!
Also a big thank you to our partners for the show:
Scendar
Scendar is the OG startup accounting firm in Australia catering to all stages of your business’ life. If you’re busy running your startup, you don’t have time to do your own books and forecast. Instead, fully outsource your finance function, giving you time and resources back to focus on what you do best in growing your business.. Find out more at Scendar.com
Vanta
Vanta helps businesses get — and stay — compliant by automating up to 90% of the work for the most in-demand compliance frameworks. And with over 300 integrations, you can easily monitor and secure the tools your business relies on. Join over six thousand fast-growing companies that use Vanta to manage risk and prove security in real time. Get started with a Sydney-based Vanta team member today, or watch a 3-minute demo to learn more, at vanta.com/playbook.
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