He hurt in places he didn't know existed. 13 hours of flying economy will do that.
He woke up when the lights came on. He tried to stretch, slowly, checking if everything was still in its place.
Apart from a couple of trips to the bathroom during the night, he'd barely moved.
Not that he'd slept, either. He'd always struggled to sleep on long flights, drifting only as far as that half-state between awake and asleep, not quite either.
The smell of coffee filled the cabin, and he smiled, satisfied.
He looked out the window. Blue, everywhere.
They were close to landing now. Close enough that breakfast was already being served, which could only mean one thing: the Bay would be visible soon.
People had told him to watch for it, that it was stunning from above. So he kept his eyes on the window, waiting for it to appear.
He'd left Sydney at 3 p.m. He would land in San Francisco at 11 a.m. The same day.
He liked the thought of it. Somewhere over the Pacific, the date had folded back on itself, and he'd arrive before he'd left. Like the trip itself was giving him a head start.
Fitting, for a man about to start over.
And the country welcomed him with open arms.
Welcome back to Zero to Unicorn, Unicorner’s bi-weekly deep dive into life stories and lessons of the founders behind exceptional companies.
This week, we’re continuing our coverage of Superpower. We had just gotten to its inception 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 our last cover? Read the full Part I deep dive on our website.
P.S. In case you missed it, we announced our 2026 SF Tech Week lineup. Join us for six firesides, dinners, and afterparties, all happening the week of October 5-9. Full announcement with registration links here!
Last time we left off, after spending all his young years suffering from headaches and sinusitis, jumping from one doctor to another, a young Max Marchione had finally found a genius doctor who solved his health problems.
These complicated years left him with two feelings.
First, he was frustrated with how the health system worked in his hometown op Sydney, Australia. He wanted to make sure that no one else had to go through what he had gone through.
Second, he became obsessed with health, wanting to know everything about his own health and how he could improve it.
Frustration can make us do crazy things. Like wanting to build something on our own to fix it. In Max’s case, it made him abandon law studies after entering one of the most competitive law schools in Australia and leave his warm and sunny hometown behind to board a plane to San Francisco in order to build this solution.
Max Marchione watching the sun rise over the Golden Gate Bridge in SF. (Max’s personal website)
Max explains that the U.S. is one of the places with the most broken healthcare systems in the world. On the other hand, it's one of the few places where you'd also have the space and encouragement to build something big enough to solve a problem this size.
"If you're ambitious and want to do great things, you need to be in the US."
He knew no one back then, spending most of the company's first two years stuck in his office. It's no surprise that building a company from scratch is difficult. It’s “brutal,” in Max's own words, because he knew not only no one, but also nothing about hiring or any other activity involved in building a company.
We should highlight, though, that he wasn't entirely alone, because the Australian community in the Bay Area was (and still is) growing bigger over time due to larger quantities of funding rounds and proximity to AI frontier labs.
"People joke about the Australian mafia (...) but I think there's actually far less of an actual mafia, or allegiance among Australians in the Bay than I would like (...) The idea would be if I hear someone's Australian, I will go increasingly out of my way to help and support them."
It was only a matter of time before he made himself known in the area.
Max was determined to make it work in the one country with all the right conditions to let him try. This fertile ground allowed him to immerse himself into the healthcare issue that had made him so angry, he'd left it all behind to take matters into his own hands.
Around August 2022, he started learning more about AI. This was a couple of months before it was released to the general public. At the time, GPT-3 and GPT-3.5 were just available to specific groups, like researchers and developers. However, Max saw this technology taking shape early on and became obsessed with the idea that AI could eventually perform better than humans at medical diagnosis and that everyone could have access to an AI doctor.
“I was really, really obsessed with this idea that AI would perform cognition or computation far more effectively than humans. In other words, every single person on Earth would have an AI doctor.”
An AI doctor, someone with access to a huge amount of centralized information and the ability to quickly connect all of it, could have made his life much easier when he was young, something no human doctor could do.
Then, on Nov. 30, 2022, ChatGPT hit. OpenAI officially released it to the public as a free research preview. At this point, it wasn't capable enough to support his idea.
Yet.
People called him crazy. For them, there was no way this AI chatbot thing would be good enough to become an AI doctor capable of being the backbone of the new healthcare system he was so desperate to build. But deep down, he knew it was only a matter of time. He spoke with conviction that it just needed a little more time. Soon, it would be the right time for the technology to attain the level required for his undertaking. And he wanted to be ready once it was.
“And I remember when I said that to people in August of 2022, they laughed at me. They’re like, well, is this not possible? Come on. What about the art of medicine or the humans of medicine? A couple of months later, in November 2022, ChatGPT comes out. I’m like, see you guys. They’re like, no, no. What are you talking about? This thing can hardly even write. This thing can’t do anything. And then around a year later, I’m like, okay, now this thing’s getting really good. And it was around that time when Superpower started.”
All he needed now was the right people. He would need backup, and surprisingly, two North Americans would end up believing in his crazy idea too.
Superpower was founded by Max Marchione, Jacob Peters, and Kevin Unkrich in 2023. It was the (first) year AI moved as fast as lightning. Day after day, its usage and capabilities evolved. If things kept up at this rhythm, Max realized, he'd be closer than ever to the AI doctor he'd been chasing.
But he couldn't build it alone. He needed people who really understood why it mattered. And what brings a group of people together more than shared frustration?
Max found his co-founders precisely because they, like him, had suffered under the current state of the healthcare system.
He'd met Jacob Peters a couple of years earlier, at a founder event in London, through a mutual friend. Both were running small venture funds at the time, and both were separately building similar health startups.
His reason to join forces with Max also involves suffering from an inefficient healthcare system.
In his 20s, while building his first company, a multi-million-dollar software business, Jacob gave everything to make it work. As is unfortunately common, his own health slipped through the cracks. He wasn't sleeping well nor eating well.
Around that time, something started to feel wrong. He had early symptoms of an autoimmune condition, but was denied preventative testing by his insurance. By the time he was finally diagnosed with Crohn's disease, an autoimmune disorder that attacks the digestive tract, the damage had already been done.
Then, things got worse.
He nearly lost his life after four months in the hospital. Doctors told him there was no cure, only a choice: medicate for life, or undergo surgery.
“…which is indicative of some of the challenges in healthcare, where 85% of health system revenue comes from those two sources. So there's like this economic incentive to basically ignore the underlying root cause of disease in a lot of cases and focus on the interventions that are going to make the health system the most money and the biggest monetization.”
By the time he was discharged, he had a $2 million bill and had lost 3 major organs.
But there was light at the end of the tunnel.
After he left the hospital, his founder network connected him to a handful of high-end concierge physicians, the kind who work with the tech billionaire class. For the first time, he met doctors who saw health differently.
“(These) doctors charge hundreds of thousands of dollars for their care, test everything in your body, pair you with a full-time team, and leave no stone unturned to help you become the healthiest, longest-living version of yourselves.”
He spent roughly $200 thousand with these "10x doctors," as he calls them, and his health transformed. He saw, firsthand, what healthcare could look like when money was no object.
“I spent over two years on an extensive healing journey that led me to the frontier of modern medicine, where I worked with a half dozen high-end, concierge medicine doctors to fully heal myself. The difference between the reactive, one-size-fits-all primary care I had received – versus the integrative, proactive model you can access privately if you have money and are in the know – was staggering.”
That stayed with him. If this level of care could heal him, why should it only exist for people who could afford six figures out of pocket? That question turned into a mission to use technology to make this kind of care accessible to everyone.
When he met Max, the two realized they were chasing the same thing and decided to build it together instead of competing. The goal was to rebuild the healthcare system from the ground up, focused on longevity and prevention.
“We realized there was an opportunity to build a new type of technology company to democratize this superior model of medicine for everyone, making it easier for us all to feel healthier, live longer and be disease-free.”
Then came Kevin Unkrich, the final piece.
Kevin was the best engineer Jacob had worked with. And he had his own reason to believe in this mission.
As a teenager, he lost his best friend to a brain tumor, just two days before his friend was scheduled for an MRI that might have caught it in time.
In all three cases, one thing was common. If any of them had had access to preventive care sooner, things might have gone very differently.
Superpower founders, from left to right: Kevin Unkrich, Jacob Peters, and Max Marchione. (Forbes)
That truth is what pulled them together to build something that didn't require wealth to access real care and that caught problems before they became crises. With this in mind, Superpower was born.
“We've built the high-end clinic as a software product and made it as easy as possible to see everything that's happening in your body, take control of your health, and then get access to all the tools you need to feel like your best self. So, it's basically high-end concierge medicine at a super accessible price.”
They spent 2023 building the company privately, before any public launch. But when Superpower finally arrived, it didn't arrive quietly. They wanted to make some noise when they showed up. And noise is exactly what they made.
A lot of it.
After more than a year of hard work, Superpower finally saw the light of day in May 2024.
Jacob announcing Superpower’s launch on his X account. (Jacob’s account)
Superpower announced a $4 million pre-seed round and opened to the public with a waitlist. The idea was to onboard people little by little throughout the year, essentially testing the waters before diving in. This way, the team could welcome each new member properly and control the company's growth.
“By combining whole-body testing, concierge clinicians paired with AI, and an ecosystem of the best treatments, they seek to become a person’s health partner for life.”
The waitlist hit 135,000 in October 2024. By the end of 2024, it achieved 150,000. All that with virtually zero marketing spend.
How did this impressive number come together? Well, you need to create a reason for people to reach out to you. And it comes down to the good old strategy of organic content on social media.
From small teasers to grab people's attention, to referral incentives encouraging people to share the waitlist with friends and family, to pairing up with friends and influencers with large audiences, all of it fed the public conversation around the waitlist. Add to that the word of mouth from happy customers from the lucky few who got access to Superpower's beta version. They were so satisfied that they wanted to share it with their own social circles.
And two special things.
First, the build-in-public strategy. If the name rings a bell for you, it’s probably because it’s something Tyler Denk from beehiiv, the email newsletter platform, had done with his own audience, as previously shared on Zero to Unicorn.
For example, Superpower's lead designer back then would go viral nearly every week for sharing her design concepts, and people naturally wanted to understand what it was about. It drove curiosity the way small, unexplained drops on social media do.
Second, they asked directly for help promoting the company. Jacob explained that they built an Airtable CRM with hundreds of their closest connections, and they’d message them directly to help spread the word whenever they had a big announcement.
And it worked.
When Max used that list to help push his LinkedIn post announcing the company, it got more than 800,000 impressions, and the company's website saw over 3 million hits.
Build a community that supports you, because people generally want to help. You just have to ask. It was all part of the same strategy. Attract customers and top talent. Then, use that momentum to attract capital so you can invest further to bping in even more customers and talented people to build with. All that noise pulled in curious investors, drawn in by the hype and unwilling to be left out.
"A lot of the marketing in the early days was to attract a team, most importantly talent, and then secondarily capital, right? If we have 50 million (dollars) in the bank, we can do more than if we have two million (dollars) in the bank, and we can hire more people and build into our long-term vision. So we tried, as much as possible, to build in public, talk on social media, create hype, write a blog, etc., which resulted in investors reaching out to us."
But this win came with a lesson. Looking back, Max admits they leaned too hard into growth and attention, and not hard enough into revenue.
“We should have had a clearer hypothesis around how to get to revenue in the simplest way possible (...) I think we should have been slightly more obsessed with the ground truth proven by data of how we're going to get that first 10 million in revenue.”
It's a reminder that even 150,000 people wanting something isn't the same as 150,000 people paying for it.
It was a lesson they'd need to apply fast.
Because 2025 wasn't going to be about growing the waitlist anymore.
What do you do once the hype has done its job?
You have to turn momentum into concrete growth and revenue. Some would call what came next lucky. Others would call it inevitable.
Stay tuned for the last part of Superpower’s journey.
