Junction

Blood testing is a lousy business. Attractive story, lots of hype, but poor economics. Most companies in the space will fail. But there is a way to succeed if you chart the right path. Here's why: 1) Low barriers to entry. You can now stand up lab testing via APIs in weeks. Most consumer blood testing companies are simply pretty wrappers on Labcorp and Quest. They do not own IP. They compete on sales, branding, and UI while renting the core capability from someone else. That alone is not a durable business. 2. Diagnostics margins are thin and compressing. Commoditization plus lack of proprietary IP drives economics down to the labs. Labcorp and Quest capture the value. Many founders copy the blood-testing piece of Superpower, ignoring the fact that our operating assumption is that there is little long-term margin in blood testing for anyone other than the labs. 3. Even the incumbents are not safe. Machine learning is changing how we measure biology. Once we have large datasets and good models, you don’t need to run every test through a traditional lab. You can infer biomarkers from a face photo, a cheap at-home sensor, or small sample of blood. Theranos was wrong on many things, not the direction of travel. There are already companies running 1,000+ biomarkers off a single drop. Over time, this could threaten Labcorp and Quest as well. So what actually works if you want to build a valuable company in this space? 1. Assume blood tests are a commodity. Begin with the premise that a blood test is no different than an AWS compute unit. Necessary, but not where you make your money. Design your strategy, product, and unit economics with that as the baseline assumption. 2. Don't rely on blood tests alone to acquire customers Selling someone a blood test is harder than it looks. For most people, it is a “nice to have,” not an urgent need. Blood tests are vitamins not painkillers. 3. Build the business downstream of the test. The value is in what happens after the lab result arrives. The longitudinal relationship. The decisions, behaviors, and outcomes you drive for the member. The protocols, interventions, logistics, and software. The winners won’t be “the next Labcorp.” They’ll be the companies that actually change human health. That use labs as a launchpad for a far great mission – preventing disease and enhancing human capability. That's what matters.

Amazon’s CEO makes at least $40.1 MILLION a year while the average Amazon worker makes less than $38k a year How is that pro-worker or pro-American? It’s time to put American workers FIRST