These last 9 years with Empyr have been some of the best years of my life. Today it’s with mixed emotions that I announce I’m transitioning into a board member role at Empyr and taking on the CEO role at Bloom, an in-home health tracker. It’s bittersweet because I’m going to miss working every day along such a talented team at Empyr while at the same time I’m excited about the potential of Bloom.
Our brilliant COO at Empyr, Bryon Cook, is being promoted to President to take over all operations there. Bryon has been on the team for a year and a half and has earned the top spot. Bryon worked at Lytx before Empyr and helped take that company from a valuation of less than $50M to a valuation of $1.5B when he left. He brings with him a ton of experience that will benefit Empyr. I’m excited to see what he and the entire team can do together.
Empyr was the toughest challenge I’ve faced and my greatest teacher. What a wild ride. From the rocket ship growth at launch to all the near-death experiences as we worked to find a business model that would scale. Here we are today with over 7,000,000 consumers and 10’s of thousands of businesses on our platform. We have the pleasure of working with some of the best tech companies like Yelp and some of the biggest retailers like Starbucks. We had our best Q4 in company history and are working towards profitability in 2019. It’s an exciting time at Empyr and the best is yet to come. We wouldn’t be where we are today without the incredible effort from all the Empyr team members and the support of our investor base. I am forever grateful to all of you for allowing me to lead this great company for 9 years. It has truly been a great experience.
I will remain an active board member to help Empyr reach its full potential while also taking on a full-time role as CEO of Bloom. The idea for Bloom came up about one and a half years ago. I met a brilliant engineer Matt McCord at a friend’s house and we both geeked out to the wee hours of the morning talking about some of the technological changes coming that will impact our life span in a positive way. Matt and I decided to meet weekly and see what we could build together to increase human longevity. After a few months, we landed on building a way for people to test their health in their home, also known as “lab on a device” or “lab on a chip.” The idea was to use urine because it’s easy to collect and can track over 100 health markers. I let the board at Empyr know about this side project. The most likely outcome of this endeavor was that we would fail to build a working product around this vision.
Fast forward to a few months ago when we completed a full working prototype. I say “we” loosely as this was thanks to Matt, Jesus, our Chief Science Officer, and a solid product development team. Our device attaches to your toilet and automatically captures some urine while you use the restroom. It then analyses it and 5 minutes later you have a full health report on your app including personalized recommendations to fix any deficiencies your body has.
The Bloom test strips will only cost around $5 each. One strip will track magnesium, potassium, calcium, iron, zinc, vitamin C, B7, B9, B12, hydration, PH, ketones, and cortisol. The recommendation engine we’re building tells you exactly what food, supplements, and lifestyle changes to make to get your levels into optimal ranges. You can order custom supplements and food with just a click, which makes achieving optimal performance and increasing your healthy life span easy. If you’re interested in becoming one of our first beta user’s head over to Blo.om to sign up. I’m saving spots for all my friends and family.
I couldn’t be more excited about what the future holds for Empyr and Bloom. Let’s do this! 🙌
Here’s jsut a handful of the many memories I’ll never forget
