Yash Yadav

Building the future of personal health

[dar @radbackwards]

Obsession is the only path to greatness

[Yash Yadav @yashxtwt]

@YesKhush_5 @Kritikaaaa_10

[Jalen Brunson @jalenbrunson1]

I just want to be successful thats all..

[Yash Yadav @yashxtwt]

@LifeOfShandi @saaarrth ny knicks are in the NBA finals, and won the first game of the series against spurs

[Yash Yadav @yashxtwt]

@atletiuniverse The Telegraph probably has never heard about having a preventive lifestyle.

[Yash Yadav @yashxtwt]

@eleelenawa @TechCrunch deserved! so excited for upcoming stuff

[Yash Yadav @yashxtwt]

@arushi_ressl from unclogging toilets in the yc launch video to shopping for faucets and showers, you've come a long way!

[Yash Yadav @yashxtwt]

I recently had a conversation with a prominent longevity physician whose clientele is genuinely extraordinary—Hollywood artists, global influencers, and Ultra HNIs.

He mentioned something that caught my attention:
A fifth-generation Indian family business owner flies to him every three months from Mumbai along with their loved ones for preventive health assessments. Not because they're sick or have pressing health concerns, but simply because they've accepted that aging can be optimized.

And I think what's fascinating is how normalized this has become.

The elite are shifting from displaying material wealth to displaying their biological youth. Accessing these niche celebrity doctors has become a status symbol in itself.

But here's where it gets interesting: this isn't staying exclusive.

Millennials and Gen-Z in India are getting obsessed with longevity and reverse-aging practices, and they're pulling their parents into it too.
What we're really seeing is healthcare shifting from reactive crisis management to proactive prevention.

At Kurma Health, we're focused on democratizing this transition—building the infrastructure that makes preventive health accessible and understandable for everyone, without the premium price tag.

[Max Marchione @maxmarchione]

The new American food pyramid shockingly puts cheese above salmon and berries.

Why?

Conflicts of interest on the review board:
- American Dairy Association
- Novo Nordisk
- Global Dairy Platform
- National Beef Association
- Many more

This sums up the US health system.

[Yash Yadav @yashxtwt]

Indian startups have a "taste" problem.

We talk about why Indian startups struggle to feel truly compelling, something that resonates beyond functional utility. And most of the time, the conversation defaults to myths: "Indian consumers don't care about experience or design." But we're missing the deeper issue entirely.

The real problem is reference points.
When building a product, you're drawing from a library of examples you've internalized—products you've used, brands you've observed, and experiences that felt intentional. Most founders building in India today grew up with a different set of reference points than their Western counterparts who had earlier and deeper exposure to global product culture.

This isn't a reflection on their intelligence or capability.
It's simply the geographic and temporal access to design thinking at scale. They copy successful patterns but miss the underlying taste that made the original feel inevitable rather than assembled.

We assume that Indian users don't care about taste.
This is demonstrably false.
Any user with exposure to well-designed products immediately recognizes the difference between something intentional and something designed by committee. They choose accordingly. They feel it. That feeling drives adoption and loyalty in ways feature parity never will.

CRED didn't succeed because fintech was underserved.
It succeeded because someone refused the assumption that financial products in India had to be utilitarian and forgettable. They built with conviction about what users deserved, not what spreadsheets suggested. That taste became the competitive advantage.

Founders building today, who grew up native to YouTube, Instagram, and global design culture, have access to something previous generations didn't: a continuous stream of reference points about what taste actually looks like.

The ecosystem isn't broken. It's in transition.
The founders coming up now are going to build differently, not because they're smarter, but because they have richer libraries to draw from. And that changes everything about what becomes possible.

[Harnidh Kaur @harnidhish]

The Indian startup ecosystem’s real problem isn’t funding. It’s taste.

(And I promise I'm making a different point than the 283847 'taste' critiques you've read.)

It's super easy to make funding the story, you know? It has villains and heroes and numbers you can screenshot. “Capital winter.” “Risk appetite.” “Dry powder.” You can sound serious without saying anything personally incriminating. But if you’ve sat through enough pitch decks, brand presentations, product walkthroughs, and founder demos, you eventually notice the same pattern: most of what gets built here is just… mid. Not because founders are dumb. They aren’t. Not because people are lazy. They’re not. It’s mid because the room is full of optimisation and short on insistence. Everyone is trying to win. Almost nobody is trying to be good.

Taste isn’t “design.” Taste isn’t a colour palette or a clever font or hiring a studio two weeks before launch and asking them to “make it premium.” Taste is judgment, restraint, and coherence. It’s the muscle that lets you kill a feature that technically works because it feels wrong. It’s the ability to say no to the version that tested well because the version that tested well is ugly, cluttered, dead-eyed, and built like a compromise. Taste is the difference between a product that feels like it was made by a person and a product that feels like it was assembled by a team that’s been trained to confuse motion with meaning.

A lot of Indian startups and products feel 'assembled'. They’re functional. They load. They deliver the thing. They have the features. They have the app. They don’t feel desired. They don’t feel inevitable. They feel like they exist because a spreadsheet somewhere said they should.

And every time someone says, “Indian consumers don’t care about design,” my eyes roll back into my head. People care. People care so much it’s embarrassing. They pick one food delivery app over another. They choose the electronics brand that looks like it belongs on their desk. They check into the hotel that promises aspiration and check out furious when the reality is grimy sheets and fluorescent lighting. They can’t always articulate it in a survey, sure. They can’t describe it in the language of a PRD. But they feel it! In Seconds! And because it’s hard to quantify, product teams pretend it doesn’t exist. This is how you get an ecosystem full of companies that work and still feel dead.

The founders who do have taste are obvious, even early. Not because they’re “design founders,” but because they’re willing to make choices other people wouldn’t make. Their product has a spine. Their brand has a voice. Their hiring has an opinion. Their “no” is clear. They aren’t building for an abstract user they’ve never inhabited; they’re building for a real human experience they actually understand. They aren’t optimising for the market. They have a point of view about what should exist in it.

Most founders, though, have a spreadsheet. TAM/SAM/SOM. Competitor grids. Feature parity. “We’ll do what they do but cheaper.” They can explain why the market is big and still can’t answer the only question that matters: why should your version exist? You’d be shocked how many decks are essentially what I think of as product cosplay- copying the moves without understanding the taste that made the original good.

And yes, founders are responsible for a PART that. But this is not just a founder problem. The ecosystem trains people out of taste, and then acts confused when nothing that emerges from it feels world-class.

Because VCs say we want conviction, but often don’t behave as if they can tolerate it. Taste is messy and hard to benchmark. Taste doesn’t come with clean comps. Taste doesn’t always sound “sellable” in an IC memo. So founders learn the actual rule very quickly: shave the edges, make it 'legible' to the lowest common denominator, add the obvious features, look like what got funded last quarter.

We didn’t accidentally build a culture of mediocrity. We incentivised it professionally, one “can you make it more massy” and one “this is interesting but…” at a time.

And then we add a second, very Indian layer of damage: the mai-baap framing.

(Most) founders walk into investor meetings like they’re entering a temple. Grateful. Small. Apologetic. Negotiating against themselves. Asking for permission. It comes from a real place. We are a capital-constrained society, generationally. Money used to be the bottleneck. The person with the cheque had the power. So we built a culture where the founder is a supplicant and the investor is a patron.

But that’s not what Indian VC looks like right now AT ALL! On the inside, a lot of funds are not spoiled for choice. There is dry powder that needs deploying. There are partners taking thirty meetings a week hoping someone walks in with something that isn’t a clone of a clone. There are more decks than there are genuinely opinionated companies. The power dynamic has shifted. Which means when a founder shows up acting like the investor is doing them a favour, it isn’t humility. It’s a tell. It says: I don’t believe I’m scarce. I don’t believe my judgment is special. I’m here to be picked.

And if you don’t believe you’re the rare thing in the room, why would anyone else?

The VCs who actually know what they’re doing are hunting for founders with a point of view. The rest are pattern-matching and praying. They fund what looks fundable. They reward what I've come to think of as 'legibility theatre'. They confuse resemblance with quality. They end up building a graveyard of perfectly functional, aesthetically dead companies, and then everyone writes the same post about how India needs more “product innovation."

I’ve watched investors get actively uncomfortable around founders with strong opinions. Conviction gets misread as stubbornness. Attention to detail becomes “slow.” Saying no to a feature gets framed as lack of ambition. Meanwhile, the generalist operator who’ll build whatever the market demands will often raise faster and ship something forgettable at scale. That’s the incentive structure. That’s the selection pressure.

Why are we always so surprised when the ecosystem builds exactly what it's been incentivizing from day 0?

This is also why “X for India” is such a curse. We love it because it lets us outsource taste. Someone else already decided what good looks like. You just port the category, localise pricing, add WhatsApp, and call it building. But it isn’t building. It’s transcription. The rarer, harder thing is building something that actually emerges from how people here live, how they do family, status, safety, aspiration, convenience, without turning “Indian” into a motif. Not a temple graphic. Not a heritage print. Not a cringe Bharat-first landing page. A real interpretation. A real take. That requires taste.

Taste, by the way, isn’t premium. It isn’t expensive. It isn’t even aesthetic. Some of the best taste is knowing what to leave out. Knowing the difference between cheap and affordable. Knowing when simplicity is the point and when it’s just laziness. Taste is restraint, and restraint is hard when you’re insecure. Taste is giving a shit in a way that can’t be faked.

Most founders don’t avoid taste because they can’t do it. They avoid it because taste is a reputational risk.

Optimisation is basically insurance at this point. If you build the spreadsheet company and it fails, you can blame the market, timing, unit economics, whatever. If you build something specific and it fails, it’s your judgment on trial. Your point of view. Your taste. Being generic lets you fail without being exposed. So people pick plausible mediocrity because it comes with cover.

The ecosystem won’t change until founders realise they have more power than they think and start acting like it. Walk into the room like you’re choosing, too. Have opinions that cost you something. Be willing to get a no that’s actually about the product, not a soft maybe because you sound like everyone else. Build something so particular that the wrong investor doesn’t get it. If everyone understands you immediately, you probably built something replaceable.

The real nightmare for the Indian startup ecosystem isn’t that most startups will fail. Most won’t. They’ll raise. They’ll hire. They’ll ship. They’ll even grow. And ten years later, nobody will remember them, because nothing about them was inevitable. They’ll succeed just enough to prove nothing.

The only Indian companies that will matter in ten years will be the ones where someone insisted, where taste survived the meeting, and where a founder didn’t trade their point of view for fundability.

[Yash Yadav @yashxtwt]

i think there's also a disconnect between the data and the actual interpretation of the user's wellbeing.

connection > collection
there's more data with less clarity about what the user should be doing. that's more than just "bad analytics"

[Ayesha @ayesha_bedi]

So, wearable sales have been declining.

I'm still bullish on wearables in the long run though.

The change will come when wearables get better at predictive analytics + provide more personalized intelligent insights.

People want actionable value + high quality/ accuracy.

Till then, I don't see much changing.

[Yash Yadav @yashxtwt]

watching nba games made me realize how fun commercials in the US are.

lately, indian ads have lacked that initial "hook." most of them feel repetitive.
cred & a few others are exceptions.

[kache @yacineMTB]

Competition is for losers

[Yash Yadav @yashxtwt]

The best kept secret to longevity: Love.

[Bryan Johnson @bryan_johnson]

Guys…I have a girlfriend.

Now I know what you’re thinking…how is it possible that anyone would want to be with me? I understand where you’re coming from. I think the answer is: her puzzle piece fits mine.

In my early twenties, I read the biography of the American founding father John Adams. He and his wife Abigail had one of the great partnerships in American history; intellectually matched, emotionally intertwined, and co-architects of something bigger than themselves. I wanted what they had.

But it wasn’t within reach. Years before, I’d married in a sort of arranged Mormon marriage. Unsure how else to explain it. We were functional, but we weren’t John and Abigail. We split after thirteen years.

At age 34, after selling Braintree Venmo, and emerging from a mismatched marriage and the repression of Mormonism, I set out to rebuild myself and find partnership.  I met a woman in LA who became my first-ever girlfriend. Coming from a sheltered background, I was blind to the obvious warnings. I was dangerously naive. That relationship unraveled and was followed by litigation. The experience was unnerving and left me wondering if I could ever trust again.

By the time I was 44, I started reconciling with the possibility of a life without partnership.

@_katetolo and I met at my brain interface company Kernel. She’d discovered my work using neurotechnology to improve human well-being and merge human and AI. Even though she’d been dreaming of a career in fashion, she was drawn to what she foresaw as the defining question of our time: how will humans successfully co-evolve with AI. We shared the same obsession.

The puzzle piece fit was immediate, as immediate as either of us had ever experienced.

Yet we maintained our professional boundaries. When we worked on our first project together, the back and forth was effortless. She could conceptualize and feel what I couldn’t and vice versa. It helped that both Kate and I had a natural disposition towards hard work. Our joy came from creation.

Kate was luminescent. When I saw her about the office, butterflies fluttered in my stomach.  Each day she’d show up wearing some unexpected combination of colors, textures, styles and accessories. Always tasteful, playful and interesting. She didn’t chase fancy brands. Most of her clothing was from the thrift store. It wasn’t how she looked but how her mind worked: original, eccentric, entirely her own. She was art.

We both worked very hard and valued every second of the day.  One evening around 6:30 pm she dropped by my office and we talked for hours. It had been all business before.  This was the first time we stepped into each other’s personal lives. My heart strings pulled but my brain pushed back. ‘We know we can’t trust again’, my mind firmly stated.

Our after-hours meet-ups in my office became a daily ritual. The favorite part of my day. We’d reminisce about work and tiptoe a bit deeper each time into each other’s personal lives.

I’d recently started my new anti-aging project and one night Kate suggested to me that I should put the entire thing online to allow others to follow on. We worked together to put up a website and got a v1 out. We pondered what to call it, and decided on ‘Project Blueprint’.

We were oddly from entirely different worlds but somehow the same person. Yet neither of us dared take the next step. We didn’t want to imperil our work relationship and we remained deeply skeptical of each other.  The combination of Kate being raised to distrust all things and me still feeling the sting of the previous relationship left us stirring in a pot of anticipatory disaster.

Before long, whether we liked it or not, we’d become each other's favorite person. We’d spend every moment we could together. Social events and the weekends were still off-limits as our relationship was professional. We were both secretly wondering, ‘does the other person feel what I’m feeling?’

Unable to withstand any longer, after a year and a half of unspoken affection, one night I softly floated the balloon of inquiry. She confirmed it was reciprocal.

Still, with things being so new, neither of us wanted to make our relationship public. We needed time to stabilize, mature and assess whether this was short or long term. I’m a 48 year old American, raised Mormon, with three children. She’s a 30 year old Bosnian-Australian-American. It took time to bridge our worlds. In our years of knowing each other, three of them have been navigating a relationship. All while building a business and movement. There have been many times where we didn’t know if we’d make it.

In the last year, we’ve found our flow.  I trust Kate as much as my mother. She knows how to scaffold trust. She anticipates your anticipation and knows your reaction before you react. She’s meticulous in the integrity of our relationship. She’s even been pivotal in helping my father and me reconcile and navigate the contours of our relationship.

In the past few years, Blueprint and Don’t Die have become global phenomena. Kate is the unsung hero.  She and I have been stride on stride since inception. She’s proven an exceptional executor and despite her unconventional background, intuitively knows things. Her creativity keeps me forever guessing what she’ll say or come up with next. Our minds have become so intertwined that life feels naked without her.

Her story warrants being told as others will be better off emulating her practices and abilities.

What I find most impressive about Kate is her prescience and thoughtfulness. She sees forwards, backwards, and side to side. Relative to her, I feel myopic in my awareness of the world. She can see through others, as an x-ray would. She then structures all that information and can package it in simple, understandable terms. In ways that allow for everyone to win.

Kate is soft spoken, self-deprecating and understated. These attributes cloak her ferocious ambition, piercing intellect, and delightful creativity. Give her five minutes and she will reframe your world. But most people don’t know to look. They assume she’s my assistant. It’s such a loss because people are looking for what she has to offer.

My son Talmage, Kate, and I are family. Nothing makes us happier than being together. Our conversations are fast, dark, and rowdy. Family feeds the soul, and we are nourished. As my son considers possible partners, he wisely models them off of Kate.

Deep companionship is a universal human want.  And while there are eight billion of us on this planet, most struggle to achieve it, including those in relationships. It’s the most fulfilling of human experiences and also the most elusive. The joy of being seen, appreciated and loved, and offering the same to another.

I wrote dozens of different sentences trying to capture what the want and struggle for deep companionship feels like. I deleted them all as none could holistically capture the emotional architecture of it.

Then one day while exercising, I realized what it feels like: what the explorer Ernest Shackleton and his crew must have felt returning to land after being shipwrecked and surviving 497 days adrift in brutal Antarctic.

It’s a bit of a dramatic comparison, however, I suspect many of you can relate. Kate feels like land to me after being adrift and searching for 25 years.

Life sinks or sails based upon the quality of our most intimate relationships. No amount of professional success can plug the sinking hole of an acrimonious personal relationship.

At this point, Kate and I have nearly become one person. We have entire conversations with a single look, sound, gesture or image. We independently come up with the same ideas and insights, suggesting to me that maybe it’s our tandem effort generating them. Our relationship is stable, positive, and calm.

I’ve wanted this my entire life and impatiently waited 25 years for it to arrive. It’s better than anything I imagined.

Lucky me, I found my Abigail Adams.

[Yash Yadav @yashxtwt]

can someone find me better therapists coz my brain is telling me to sign up for hyrox, so there must be something wrong with me

[Yash Yadav @yashxtwt]

The data doesn't align with your logic.

Dal is not a good primary source of protein.

100g raw dal = 24g of protein.
But when cooked, it absorbs water and triples in weight. So 100g cooked dal = 8g of protein.
As a primary source, it's impractical.

Most dals (moong, masoor, urad) are low in methionine. Pairing with rice improves bioavailability, but increases calorie intake significantly. Eggs consist of all 9 essential amino acids.

Based on recent studies, 70% of Indian whey brands exceeded safe heavy metal limits. Plant proteins showed 9x higher lead contamination than dairy whey.

Personal absence of symptoms ≠ biological adequacy.
Protein deficiency manifests silently over the years—progressive muscle loss, metabolic decline, immune suppression.

You might feel fine today, but aging follows exponential patterns. Mortality risk doubles every 8 years after age 30 (Gompertz Law). Prevention built now compounds into healthspan decades later.

Vegetarianism works. But optimization within that framework requires precision—or pragmatism.

Eggs, chicken, tofu, tempeh or soya chunks are better sources of primary protein.

[Sunil Kumar @SunilKumarAus]

Rice + dal, Roti + chole/rajma, Idli/dosa + sambar plus whey protein- I am a vegetarian- never had any problems. There are many excuses to go non-veg, it is not one of them.

[Yash Yadav @yashxtwt]

i can finally go back to using em-dashes

[Sam Altman @sama]

Small-but-happy win:

If you tell ChatGPT not to use em-dashes in your custom instructions, it finally does what it's supposed to do!

[Yash Yadav @yashxtwt]

we definitely need more founders who really really wish to make this world a better place. not the ones who just want to make a bank.

[Yash Yadav @yashxtwt]

ai cannot replace magnesium + vitamin D