It's 3 a.m. His eyes are wide open.

The young bloke from Australia had been trying to sleep since 11 p.m. 

Soccer training is tomorrow morning, and given the situation, he knows exactly what that means.

He's going to feel wrecked.

He falls asleep without even realizing it, waking up to the sound of the alarm.

His head feels swollen, pressure building behind his eyes like something trying to force its way out. His nose is blocked. 

Just another Tuesday.

He drags himself out of bed, showers, and swallows a couple of pills that kind of help enough to get him through the day.

It's a ritual he knows by heart. This has been his life since he was a kid.

Different specialist appointments and trying new treatments became a routine, but nobody knew exactly what was wrong with him.

It made him angry. Angry and frustrated. 

One day, he would end up taking the matter into his own hands.

The result? A $400 million company rewriting the healthcare system.  

One that, on top of preventing disease, enhances what a human body can do. In a cheaper, more accessible, and efficient way.

He was never afraid to be highly ambitious, even when the people around him weren’t convinced.

And that precisely is his superpower. 

This is the story of Max Marchione and Superpower.

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 here this week with someone who isn’t a stranger to Unicorner.

Max Marchione is the co-founder of Superpower, the all-in-one health tracking platform. We previously invited him twice to join us for Unicorner content. Once for a written deep dive, and another for an in-person Zero to Unicorn fireside chat at Intercom’s SF HQ.

Now, we’re excited to revisit his (and Superpower’s) story for Zero to Unicorn.

Enjoy!

Ethan and Arek 🦄

Max Marchione had a great childhood growing up in sunny and warm Sydney, Australia. His parents let him explore most of the things he wanted, as long as it wasn't unsafe.

Near his house, there was a big bush and rocky area, and he'd spend hours there exploring and running around, playing soccer with whoever was available. His backyard was a mini soccer field.

But around 2008, when he was eight years old, his health started to take a turn.

He started suffering from chronic migraines, sinusitis, and other health problems. On top of all that, he had a hard time sleeping every night.

Yeah, the thing you're supposed to do at least eight hours a night, and even more when you're a developing child. 

What do you do when you feel unwell, have symptoms that don't pass, and they end up keeping you from doing the one thing you should do every night?

Well, you do what people say you should do. You go to the doctor. 

Max did that. Over and over and over again. With around 20 different doctors throughout his young life. 

He had tons of exams, specialist appointments, tried different medications, and even had a surgery. Nobody knew what was wrong with him.

They all looked at the results of the exams and thought Max’s problem was related to their own specialty. 

In other words, to the ear, nose, and throat doctor, he had a structural issue in his nose. The sleep specialist saw a behavioral sleep problem. The allergist saw an allergy.

But a definitive solution that's actually good for him? There wasn’t one.

He became angry and frustrated with the way the healthcare system worked, or rather, didn't work. 

So, he started taking health into his own hands.

He wanted to understand every acronym, every biomarker, and every strange-sounding medical name he came across. He wanted to know how they related to his body and how he could improve them. 

To sum it up, he was willing to do anything to check if there was something he could do to escape this nightmare.

He started wearing an Oura ring around 2015 to track his sleep. Sleep tracking was not common at the time. Friends and classmates mocked him for it.

He also began using a continuous glucose monitor. People around him reacted the same way.

He was just tired of constant headaches and lack of proper sleep, and he needed to understand what was happening to him.

As a result, he ended up becoming obsessed with health technology and healthcare. 

And it's not just his own words. His mother says the same thing.

The struggle kept up for years.

Then, one day when he was 18 years old, Max stumbled upon what he calls a genius doctor. This was someone who was finally able to solve what he had.

As Max reflected, he thought: What would it look like if no one else had to go through what he'd gone through? What if everybody had access to the same kind of genius doctor?

But for now, those thoughts stayed in the background of his mind.

Turns out, even though he slept through a third of his high school classes, he still ended up among the top 0.15% of students in his state.

And what happens when you're a high-achieving high school graduate? You go to study at the top university in your country, choosing one of the most prestigious careers.

So, that’s what young Max did.

It didn’t last long.

When you're among the best students in high school, you may feel pressure to follow a traditional and highly competitive career path, like law.

That's what Max chose first, enrolling in law school at the University of Sydney around 2019.

It only lasted one year. Soon, he’d drop out.  

He would write about this decision on his personal blog, one of the projects he started right after what would become a turning-point decision.

Curiously enough, if you ask him whether you should drop out of law school, he'll probably be against it.

See, he really enjoyed studying law. According to Max, you learn how to write clearly, which in turn also teaches you to better articulate how you speak. Here at Unicorner, we witnessed this firsthand during our Zero to Unicorn fireside with Max in September 2025.

It also taught him how to read complex, lengthy texts more efficiently, a skill he'd use for the rest of his life. 

And since only the top 0.5% in the state get into law school, it meant he was surrounded by smart people with similar interests, which made for a great networking opportunity.

The thing is, he was not fully convinced he had chosen the right career. 

A trigger was when a friend of his asked, "What's your number one fear?"

His response?

Max realized that continuing to study law was, perhaps, exactly the kind of decision that closed him off from better decisions. 

So, he started to revisit his choice. He discussed it with senior students, friends, and family. He reflected on his own motivations. 

To drop or not to drop, that’s the question.

And he realized… he didn’t want to become a lawyer. And studying law without that goal felt like losing time, even if you developed a good set of skills along the way. 

He arrived at the conclusion that these skills could be developed in other ways.

Besides, it also meant he wouldn't have time to study other things he was interested in, and he'd need to spend time on the unproductive parts of law.

Things that were, of course, really important if he wanted to become a lawyer. Which he didn't.

If you're in a similar situation, his tip is quite simple:

So, he let go of law in 2020 to those for whom it was better suited.

And thanks to this decision, things were about to radically change for him and more than 150,000 people.

First, he would need to experience a really, really absurd year.

Second, he would need to get on a plane. Perhaps the most important plane ride anyone can take.

After dropping out of law school, Max studied mathematics and statistics on his own, started a personal blog to keep practicing his writing, and worked 10 jobs on the side, including internships as an equity analyst and at a startup accelerator. He also learned about blockchain and machine learning.

All in six months.

What does he have to share about all these so-very-different experiences?

He also made five thoughtful angel investments, and in 2021 he founded Next Chapter, which he still runs today.

It's a member-only club and Slack community for founders, investors, engineers, and other builders, aiming to create a safe space for them to meet, chat, learn, and exchange ideas about the crazy road of building something. It’s described as the default community for the top 1% of ambitious young people across the globe.

There, members can get fundraising advice and introductions to VCs through its affiliated fund, Ultraviolet Ventures. 

Still in 2021, Max created Fractal Capital, a pre-seed venture capital fund investing in founders before anyone else does.

Last but definitely not least, he started working in investment banking at Goldman Sachs, helping startups raise money and working on project finance.

So we can say it was a wild, cool, full-of-new-things year.

But sometimes, among all the excitement, when things are moving fast and nicely, when you feel busy, creative, at full speed… 

Something feels off. Not wrong, just off.

It's a tiny little feeling that starts to nag at you from the inside out.

So Max listened. It first resulted in him leaving Goldman Sachs in 2022. At this point, he was also running two small companies in Sydney, Australia.

Still, something nagged at him. Just like when he dropped out of law school, he thought about his life. The feeling grew and grew until he had to do something else about it. 

It came to a boiling point when, on a regular day, while drinking his coffee, Max asked himself a simple question: “What do I want to be doing for the next 20, 30, 50 years of my life?”

After careful consideration, he set three variables to solve his equation:

When reflecting on how to satisfy this equation, things took shape quickly. He saw the troubles of his youth in his mind’s eye.

What had he been most obsessed with since a young age? Health.

What did he deeply wish was different for him and other people? Health. 

And exactly from his personal experience, he knew healthcare and the health market had big problems to solve. The combination of a "typically deep-seated dissatisfaction with the way the world is, and a strong desire to create things that shape how the world looks in the future," as he puts it, drove him to build something.

That hit his first two criteria. As for the third?

Health is a massive market worldwide. If you build something that helps improve health at scale, you're talking about millions upon millions of people.

So, that's it. All three criteria satisfied.

He would build a new healthcare system. Better, cheaper, faster, and just more efficient, so no one would have to go through what he went through.

But, if he was going to build a new healthcare system, he needed to deeply understand where it was full of problems and not working the way it should.

And, according to Max, where was it bigger and more broken than anywhere else?

Soon, he was on board a plane, Australia behind him, the U.S. ahead.

And to be more precise, his destination was the city where he heard all the dreamers went to change the world. 

Unsurprisingly, Max would come to know two other people who'd also had difficult times dealing with the healthcare system.

And in 2022, something else was happening. Something that would turn businesses and people's lives alike upside down.

What happens when three people frustrated with the healthcare market meet a technology smart enough to fix it?

Stay tuned.