Jared Hecht

In 2023 I took a 12-month hiatus to recharge after building startups nonstop since graduating college. During that period of time, I had a rule that I would only commit to something if its gravitational force was completely inescapable. The opportunity to join USV was that thing for me, but along the way I explored a variety of different startup ideas. One of those ideas was around helping people not die of heart disease. I published some of my early learnings on this blog last October, and it was one of the most-read articles I've written. I had an idea to create a service that would help people understand their risk factors and get screened for heart disease, and then generate personalized plans for them so they wouldn't succumb to the world's leading cause of death. Every time I told someone about the idea and what I had learned, they soaked it all up. But when I asked if they ever got the tests I recommended, they usually didn't. So I wrote up a very long treatise on how to avoid dying of heart disease, and I was going to post it on a domain I bought, myticker.com, but I never got around to it because I had moved on from pursuing the idea. But I put a lot of work into the document that synthesized a lot of my learnings and experience. Over the past year, it has made its way around my circle of friends, and I finally decided I'd try to make it legible and publish it for anyone interested. I still think this is a problem that needs to be solved and that someone should build a company that is consumer-first and exclusively focused on helping people not die of heart disease. If you're interested in doing this, please reach out to me because I'd love to help you and share all the work I did. Someone needs to put the myticker.com domain name to work. I also want to thank some people who helped me along my heart health journey: Harvey Hecht, James Min, @Drlipid, Arthur Agatstan, Andrea Klemes, Louis Malinow, @jwessler, @neilparikh, @smart, Alan Tisch, David Kopp and Carrie Weprin. If you have a heart, I hope you find this helpful. And if you care about someone else's heart, I hope you share it with them this Holiday season. Happy Thanksgiving, and don't die of heart disease!

@ShaneMac @pitdesi k we can still be friends then

@jaredhecht @pitdesi Oh I mostly play singles. Actual workout and intense. Doubles is cute. Tape is ugly

it should be illegal to turn a tennis court into a pickle ball court vote for me for mayor

@ShaneMac @pitdesi i love playing pickleball it's like ping pong but you occasionally move around and you can have a conversation with your friends during a point but there are few things uglier than a beautiful tennis court covered in tape

@jaredhecht @pitdesi Growth rate or incumbent?

@pitdesi wrong

@jaredhecht the free market has chosen pickleball, commie

@ShaneMac lol

@jaredhecht Don’t hold back progress and regulate the markets

@alxcnwy go hard at hobbies, maximize time spent with friends and family, travel, get super fit, read, and write.

@jaredhecht I’m in the middle of a 12 month hiatus - any tips for hiatusmaxxing? 😄

In 2023 I took a 12-month hiatus to recharge after building startups nonstop since graduating college. During that period of time, I had a rule that I would only commit to something if its gravitational force was completely inescapable. The opportunity to join USV was that thing for me, but along the way I explored a variety of different startup ideas. One of those ideas was around helping people not die of heart disease. I published some of my early learnings on this blog last October, and it was one of the most-read articles I've written. I had an idea to create a service that would help people understand their risk factors and get screened for heart disease, and then generate personalized plans for them so they wouldn't succumb to the world's leading cause of death. Every time I told someone about the idea and what I had learned, they soaked it all up. But when I asked if they ever got the tests I recommended, they usually didn't. So I wrote up a very long treatise on how to avoid dying of heart disease, and I was going to post it on a domain I bought, myticker.com, but I never got around to it because I had moved on from pursuing the idea. But I put a lot of work into the document that synthesized a lot of my learnings and experience. Over the past year, it has made its way around my circle of friends, and I finally decided I'd try to make it legible and publish it for anyone interested. I still think this is a problem that needs to be solved and that someone should build a company that is consumer-first and exclusively focused on helping people not die of heart disease. If you're interested in doing this, please reach out to me because I'd love to help you and share all the work I did. Someone needs to put the myticker.com domain name to work. I also want to thank some people who helped me along my heart health journey: Harvey Hecht, James Min, @Drlipid, Arthur Agatstan, Andrea Klemes, Louis Malinow, @jwessler, @neilparikh, @smart, Alan Tisch, David Kopp and Carrie Weprin. If you have a heart, I hope you find this helpful. And if you care about someone else's heart, I hope you share it with them this Holiday season. Happy Thanksgiving, and don't die of heart disease!

@gracekcarney thank you grace!

@jaredhecht Love these photographs and love to hear you're working on this again!

@therealwardo yes we will interview others in your life over time to get a 360

@jaredhecht this is awesome but I wish it wouldn't just interview me and could instead interview my family about me (probably after accumulating a good bit of information about me). it feels more like an auto-biographer right now than a biographer. 😉

@therealwardo thanks matt i really appreciate it and i am sorry about your mom losing a parent truly blows

@jaredhecht also, I would've paid to have recordings of the stories my Dad was telling all of us around the dinner table during our last few weeks together with Mom. sorry to hear about your loss too. all my best to you and Asher

@kankanivishal thanks man hope it's less than 20 years or else we're a decade or so too early 😂

This is a no-brainer product. I actually reached out to professional biographers a couple of years ago to capture my grandmother’s life story. I recently had a similar app idea. The design space here is incredibly rich. In 20 years, I think having your autobiography update itself in real time will be as normal as having photos in your camera roll.

@JasonLBaptiste ah man i’m sorry to learn about your mom 😔

@jaredhecht This is a fantastic idea. My mom passed suddenly away when we thought we had a lot more time left. I had planned on doing something like this with her as she had always said “one day I’ll write a book about my life”.

yesterday someone signed up for biographer at 1:13pm et they discovered us through a google ad campaign within 24 hours they spoke with the biographer across 32 interviews about different life topics they now have a beautiful memoir - over 100 pages, single-spaced holy shit.

@albertwenger if it works well for people in english and we think we have the right product, then we will localize it. hopefully next two months.

@jaredhecht Wow. The power of technology! When will you have this in German?

@ShaneMac @mignano hell yeah but i am hearing padel is where its at

@mignano @jaredhecht you guys wanna play some pickleball soon out there on that island?

When we talk about new consumer products that couldn’t exist without AI, this is what we mean. Before AI, it was simply not feasible from a cost or time perspective for most people to have their lives written about. But AI doesn’t care about how much demand there will be for your parents’ book. And it’s now cheap enough that you can fund it yourself. Hence Biographer. Jared and his team are building a new product experience that makes it fun for people to talk about their lives, and walk away with artifacts they can enjoy forever. And that gets to something else we look for in consumer products: net joy delivered. There are so many ways to make consumer products addictive. But addiction does not equal joy, and usually it equals the opposite of joy. But if Biographer works, it’s hard to not imagine a truly positive impact on the lives of people who use it. There are few other products that accomplish this (per my post from a few weeks ago, Spotify and YouTube are other good examples). I’m excited for Biographer. Most of all I’m excited by what it will help my family create.

Was lucky to see a preview of Biographer last year and it's very cool to see it go wide now. It's a strange state of affairs today that you can look up anything you want about the history of any place in the world, read long Wikipedia profiles about the most random lives, but most people still have very obscure views into their own immediate past. You get some of your parents' lives, less of your grandparents', and then beyond that you have to do some serious digging to get anything more than fragments that were passed down. The last time I went to Korea, four years ago, I recorded interviews with my three living grandparents, one of whom has dementia, with the idea that I might be able to play them for my grandchildren one day and have them listen to a story playing across five generations, with twists and turns, recurring characters and personalities, and maybe even an arc that only becomes apparent over several lifetimes. That's a big project, but for now, I'm really excited to see how tools like this can help us know the full stories of the people we love most.

@Teddy__Kim thank you teddy!

@heif 🙏

@jaredhecht love it

@micahjay1 where / how are you doing this?

@jaredhecht One of the best use cases I've found personally of AI is searching old databases for genealogy - particulary now because you can do it at scale, in multiple languages, etc. Have learned a lot of interesting things about my family's history.

@z4v3n we will likely build a native app in the upcoming months that will primarily be about having a verbal 2way conversation with biographer

@jaredhecht BTW my parents will immediately be flummoxed when Safari asks them for microphone permissions ;-)

@z4v3n all built in the original version we had last year, and will be reintroduced soon!

@jaredhecht This is killer. Some features I would love (as child to older parents who would be using this) is a way for me to seamless link into their account, nudge them on progress, and/or help manage the account settings.

@illscience 🎯