Two logos. That was all it took for his hands to start sweating.
It was a random morning in September, and the room was full, everyone waiting for the news to be announced.
On the screen, his company's logo sat next to the name of a 25-year-old company that advises more than 2,500 investor-backed businesses on pay and benefits.
The room went quiet. He read the two logos again, just to be sure they were really side by side.
He couldn't believe his eyes.
People at those companies could soon have access to something that, a few years earlier, was just a crazy idea.
He had once said, "Be a small fish in a big pond. Avoid being a big fish in a small pond."
He had chosen one of the biggest ponds in the world.
And he had waited a long time for a moment like this.
He just didn't know yet how many more were coming.
Welcome back to Zero to Unicorn, Unicorner’s bi-weekly deep dive into life stories and lessons of the founders behind exceptional companies.
We’re busy in SF this week. One VC omakase down, three firesides and two afterparties to go, including the official a16z x Unicorner closeout on Friday. Exciting times!
Ethan and Arek with our partners at Mercury and Carta.
This week, we’re continuing our coverage of Superpower. We had just gotten to its inception and early success in the story of co-founder Max Marchione, along with the introduction of two others who were just as frustrated with the world of healthcare.
Missed Part I? Read the full Part I deep dive here.
Missed Part II? Read the full Part II deep dive here.
150,000. That was the number of people waiting to join Superpower, the preventive health membership platform created by Max Marchione, Jacob Peters, and Kevin Unkrich, when 2025 began.
Getting there had been a long road. Each of the three carried a story of a healthcare system that failed them. Max had moved to the U.S. from Australia to chase the ambitious dream of building a new healthcare system, and teamed up with two people who had suffered like he had.
After a year of building in silence, they’d come out of stealth in 2024 and made noise on social media, a winning strategy.
The goal was to make high-end concierge medicine, until then available only to people who could spend thousands of dollars, accessible to many more.
The need was clear, because, according to the CDC, three in four American adults live with at least one chronic condition, and more than half live with two or more. Many of those conditions are preventable.
The waitlist let them accept people little by little, so they could onboard new members and see how the product performed.
And now, that brings us to the product. For a few hundred dollars a year, members get annual lab testing covering more than 100 biomarkers across 17 health categories, which the company says is 10x more comprehensive than a traditional physical examination.
To achieve such an experience, Superpower used one more strategy during the first half of 2025: acquiring companies specialized in specific analyses of the body.
Like assembling a puzzle one piece at a time.
The first piece arrived in January 2025 when Superpower acquired Feminade, a company focused on women's hormone and reproductive health.
Feminade also started from a dissatisfaction with the health system. In this case, women were dismissed by conventional doctors when they described symptoms like irregular cycles or were forced to pay thousands for functional medicine alternatives. Feminade's solution aimed to make functional medicine testing more accessible and affordable for women.
Plus, its founder shared that Superpower is what she wanted Feminade to become eventually, and that’s why this acquisition made so much sense.
Looking at the big picture, with the global femtech market expected to more than double, from $39 billion in 2024 to $97 billion by 2030, it's no surprise that special care with female body data would be included in the membership platform.
"Healthcare today is fundamentally broken, especially for women. Feminade's remarkable growth and deep expertise in women's health make them the perfect partner to help us close this gap. With this acquisition, we are taking a significant step toward helping people, particularly women, achieve their peak potential through better, proactive healthcare."
Some months later, in April 2025, Superpower announced a $30 million Series A round led by Forerunner Ventures. It included remarkable angels like Evan Moore (co-founder of DoorDash), Vanessa Hudgens, and NBA star Giannis Antetokounmpo.
The Superpower team sharing their Series A announcement in 2025.
"We're building the healthcare system we want for ourselves and our loved ones. One that is holistic, data-driven, and can support the problems that have classically been neglected by healthcare: nutrition, sleep, inflammation, gut health, hormones, toxins, and longevity, amongst others. Preventative medicine is just getting started."
The waitlist was now at 200,000.
The second piece of the puzzle came in May 2025. Superpower acquired Base, an at-home lab testing company founded in 2019.
Base used finger-prick blood tests and saliva kits to score the root causes of sleep, stress, energy, and dietary issues and gave users personalized lifestyle recommendations focused on diet and sleep.
For Superpower, Base brought data on nutrition and hormones, the raw material for personalized meal and supplement recommendations.
Clearly, it was a first semester full of big steps, and all signals show everything was working. In other words, it meant that rebuilding the healthcare system and AI doctors was closer than anyone thought.
But a waitlist can only grow so long before it becomes a wall.
And Superpower was about to tear it down.
In July 2025, Superpower became available nationwide and removed its waitlist.
This was the inevitable critical path.
Now, the puzzle was complete.
The company had expanded across the U.S., which made sense for a product built around lab tests, with 100+ lab tests and expert analysis available nationwide.
Members take a blood test to set a baseline, follow a personalized plan, and test again to see what changed. In between, 70% improved their biological age, a measure of how old your body is acting compared with the number on your birth certificate.
On top, a medical team led by Chief Longevity Officer Dr. Anant Vinjamoori stood behind it.
“Two years ago, it was a dream to scale Superpower to millions. Now we are on track to do just that. As always, this is day zero for Superpower but one more step towards bringing the best of health to many.”
Later in 2025, Superpower took another big step. The team dropped the price from $499 to $199.
A membership meant an annual comprehensive blood test, all your results in one place, and a care team to ask.
Think about where this story began. Jacob Peters had spent about $200,000 on concierge doctors to get this kind of care. Now it costs $199 a year, about $17 a month, roughly one streaming subscription.
Talk about making the platform more accessible.
And… the demand just took off.
Soon, in late 2025, Superpower launched its first brand partnership with SoulCycle, turning spin classes into a chance to look inside your own body.
It echoed an experience Max had previously. He discovered he was pre-diabetic despite looking healthy and exercising often. It's the kind of risk that exactly something like Superpower should be able to catch.
The numbers were moving. Revenue multiplied by 10.
Max kicking off 2026 with a look back at what Superpower built in 2025.
But the line that says the most is the team.
For Max, talent is exponentially distributed, and the best is worth paying for.
"The real question to ask: will this person change the trajectory of the company? If yes, then 'overpaying' is just linear thinkers misunderstanding exponentials. (...) At Superpower, we'd rather be accused of paying too much than miss the one person who could bend the curve of the business."
He has said that if they found someone they believed would completely change the trajectory of the company, they would have been happy to give that person five percent of it.
"Who cares about the size of our slice? We care about the size of the pie, right? How do we make that as big as possible? So we're not greedy with equity."
The pie was already big. In 2026, Superpower would try to make it much bigger.
In 2025, Superpower worked on opening the door: the waitlist came down, the price came down, and the membership reached spin classes.
In 2026, the question changed. What do you do when everyone can get in? You make the view worth it.
By March 2026, Superpower had grown to a team of 80 people, and the numbers from its members were hard to ignore. 46% had elevated heart risk markers, and 86% said their action plan was better than their doctor's. And the company showed no signs of slowing down.
What does Max attribute that to? Great execution.
In our Zero to Unicorn fireside chat in 2025, he explained that big ideas exist everywhere. Anyone can list amazing ideas. What separates a big idea from a million dollar one is making it work properly.
"And the thing I think about often is that great ideas are far more common than great execution. Or it's far easier to copy someone's idea than to copy someone's execution."
Here’s what execution looked like in 2026.
In May, Superpower announced a partnership with GRAIL, a company that develops blood tests for early cancer detection. Superpower members could now test for more than 50 types of cancer from a single blood draw.
It was the same idea that had brought the founders together, catching disease at the earliest possible stage when it's most treatable.
The membership around it kept growing, too.
A year earlier, it covered 100+ biomarkers. Now, it covers 150+, tested across two blood draws a year, a baseline and a retest, at 2,000+ labs nationwide or at home for an additional cost. Results come with a biological age and 17 health scores, a personalized plan that turns them into action, Superpower AI, and an on-demand care team.
And very recently, in September 2026, Superpower entered a new market.
It announced a partnership with Sequoia, a compensation and benefits partner for investor-backed companies that works with more than 2,500 companies and reaches more than 600,000 people.
The Superpower and Sequoia partnership, announced on stage, September 2026. (Max Marchione’s LinkedIn)
Sequoia launched Superpower to its own 800+ employees, and the offering will become available to eligible employers across its ecosystem.
The enterprise market is a massive move.
What next?
Superpower already gathers crucial data in one place and creates a personal AI experience. The goal is to go deeper, so more people can get what one member recently told Max, "literally better advice than I've had from anyone."
A general AI knows the entire internet. Superpower's knows you.
We can say we’ve come a long way from the boy in Sydney who left everything behind in Australia and landed in San Francisco knowing no one.
The people behind Superpower in a photo shared by the company.
Today, Max still goes looking for what sounds impossible.
“There are things today that sound like magic that at some point in the future we will call science (...) so I think some of the most interesting ideas are the ones that the average person calls pseudoscience. (...) I'm not saying they're true but I'm saying they're interesting to explore."
Magic, in Max's world, is just science that hasn't happened yet. And someone has to be willing to sound crazy to pursue it.
It's what a boy no doctor could diagnose did when he decided to build the doctor he never had.
Magic exists. And believing in it first has always been Max's superpower.
1. Obsess over short-term revenue a little bit more
The waitlist reached 150,000 people, but attention is not revenue. Looking back, if he could do it again, he would obsess a little more over short-term revenue and how to reach it in the most direct way possible.
2. Stay true to your ambition
When Max talked about an AI doctor in 2022, people called the idea unrealistic. He kept going anyway. Looking back, he says he "stayed true to the ambition that was true to me that the world tried to kind of cut down." The lesson is not to ignore doubters, but to know which ambition is really yours, so it survives the ones who tell you it's too big.
3. It's all on us
In healthcare, there is plenty to blame. Regulation, insurers, etc. Max's answer is to turn every obstacle into a reason to be better.
4. Work with the best
By the end of 2025, Superpower's team included 15 former founders, 3 ex-Y Combinator founders, and a Thiel Fellow. Max believes talent is exponentially distributed, so the right choice is worth far more than the going rate.
5. Pitch everyone
"I've never practiced a pitch in my entire life. The way you get good at pitching is just like pitching. (...). Every investor pitch I do, I'm a little bit better than the previous one. So just take action."
It’s all just repetition and a tolerance for hearing no.
