Interview with Yusufa Sey, CEO of AthGene — A nomad which is reshaping genetics and lifestyle
Fake news, fake news, fake news everywhere.
Facebook is thriving to get rid of them. Fact-checkers are being used, but the struggle looks real. AI could be the next tool to fight them. But what if AI is used to generate them? That one would be pretty interesting.
Don’t let fake stories worry you, here we bring you only real stories, from real founders working with AI in the Nordics. This time we had the pleasure to talk with Yusufa Sey, CEO of AthGene, a Copenhagen-based startup that gives actionable insights on fitness, nutrition, and lifestyle on the basis of a DNA test that costs only 350 USD.
Genetics, starting your company in Denmark, AI, VC, and High-Frequency Trading are just a few of the topics of this interview.
As always, don’t be shy and ping me at sp@journeyxp.com for any feedback and come to join us for our 4th AI Garage on May 11th if you happen to be in Copenhagen!
Could you give a small description of your story as a founder and about your product?
Originally from the Gambia, where I was born and raised, I moved to Washington DC when I was 14 and lived there for 4 years and did my high school.
Then, I moved to London for 5 years and studied business management. There I met a lady who became my girlfriend, and now is my wife, which happens to be Danish. That’s why I ended up here in Copenhagen.
However, in between London and Denmark, I moved back home to the Gambia for almost three years and started two companies simultaneously. One was a commodity export business, exporting different commodities to China. I was also running a management consultancy helping companies to enter the country.
Then we come to AthGene. I moved to Denmark in 2013 and in late 2014 I met a geneticist who was telling me about this industry, which is genetics, where what used to cost 4 billions USD, now costs 1 thousand USD. This really caught my attention and I started wrapping my head around what could be done with this technology. We found two other co-founders and we just started working.
Basically what we are trying to solve is based on the assumption that everyone wants to be the best version of themselves.
Look as good as they can, feel as good as they can, have the highest possible level of energy.
Typically people have little idea if they are eating the right food or exercising in the right way, for them as unique individuals.
What we do for our customers is giving them access to interpretation and information about their DNA, in which we tell them how their body breaks down certain types of food and how it reacts to a certain type of stimuli and exercises. This empowers them to take better and smarter decisions about their daily life and feel better.
Basically, the future according to our team is where every individual optimizes his lifestyle, fitness, and nutrition in accordance to his DNA, which is the core of what you happen to be as an individual.
That is what we do at AthGene.
What made all of this possible? What caused this technological disruption?
The main things that happened were a great improvement in terms of technology and a strong cost reduction.
Doing a genetic test on a single person used to cost hundreds of millions of dollars, this meant that not a lot of people got tested and research on the topic was limited. When the cost started dropping, you had researchers and scientists starting analyzing the genes of thousands of people. Hence, they started discovering and learning stuff about how the body actually works. This was the main driver of this new wave of services and products that rely on those findings and information.
It would not have been possible without the cost being low enough.
On the other side, since there are services and companies being developed based on this information, we are accelerating back-growth and contributing with new data to the industry, allowing continuous discovery and possibility of bringing new services to people.
Which role does AI play in the recommendation system of your product? How do you extract insights from human genome and give actionable insights to people?
AI is part of the near-term future of the genetics industry. It is not there yet.
What I mean is that currently the algorithms are relatively static. This means that we have a manuscript of all the potential outcomes that exist, and that manuscript is empowered by an algorithm that defines the outcomes that are relevant for the single individual.
However, right now our CPO, soon-to-be CDO, is starting to study the role of AI and ML in the space.
The future is going to look like this: anybody who has a smartphone in his pocket has a wearable device; we are developing a technology that, by simply having your mobile phone in your pocket, can give you advice not just on your activity level, but also on your goals and your DNA. And you can imagine that when this technology starts gaining traction, the advice gets more and more precise and tailored.
In this scenario, we can get inputs straight from users about what is working for them and what is not, did you lose weight or not, are you gaining muscles or not, are you getting the six pack or not. With that input, our algorithm can learn and make an always better recommendation.
Within 3–5 years we will see very precise recommendations based on genes and right now we are only at the very beginning of a great journey.
You surely are working in a very interesting, but at the same time obscure space. How can you transfer to your clients the value of what you do and how do you convince them of the effective results of your product?
What is going on is that hundreds of institutions are doing research based on DNA, but each of them is relatively focused on a single topic. Out in the stratosphere, there is all this fragmented information and research about what the DNA is actually coding for, but there is not a real and unique application that gives you a know-how.
We are gathering all this research and we try to define what we know today in terms of DNA. We are, then, bringing it in-house and with our proprietary algorithm we define which part of the research and which genes have the greatest impact on the effective outcome of the DNA.
Given all the genes combinations and their impact, we have developed a manuscript of all the possible outcomes that could exist and added weight score to each gene to define its impact on each outcome.
So let’s say you provide us with your saliva sample, we send it to our third party lab which provides us with a transcript of raw data. This represents the input of our algorithm and the latter defines which outcome of the manuscript is the best suited for each single individual.
What is the roadmap right now for AthGene after the recent funding round of 4M Krone (≈ 600K USD)? What do you see in the near future? Keep on working on the product or look for market expansion?
Both. We have just opened a second office in Barcelona, which is going to house our expanding engineering team, so we are hiring engineers in Barcelona.
We are also aligning partnerships in Denmark and also outside, for example in SEA, with players which are market leaders in SEA in what they do. These partnerships would allow us to speed up the international expansion, but the main objective is partnering with companies which already have an infrastructure in place, where we bring know-how and technology. Together, we can establish a footprint and technical integration.
In terms of the impact of AI in the world of healthcare, from genetics to image recognition, to robotics precision arms, and diagnosis support, where do you see the greatest disruptions?
I can only answer that in the genetics perspective.
So starting from the healthcare perspective, we have had a meeting with the biggest private hospital in all of Scandinavia, they have roughly 100 private hospitals.
What they were saying was that if they could somehow partner with someone like us that would mean they could offer a DNA test to all the people who entered their hospitals. Imagine the level of personification we could offer these people. Not only we have their medical history and their medical records, but we would have also their DNA and customize the service we are giving even further.
Take psoriasis as an example of disease linked to your DNA. Some forms of psoriasis limit you to do certain things. You can’t drink alcohol, you cannot consumer flour-based products. There are other forms where these things do not impact your disease. But if you don’t know what kind of psoriasis you have, you are going to avoid all of these things. You don’t eat bread, you don’t drink wine, you avoid cake, you don’t do a lot of stuff because you are afraid to have inflammation and you are afraid that your skin is going to break up.
What if you could find out with precision and genetically-speaking the kind of psoriasis that affects your skin and all of a sudden you have improved the standards of living of these people. And this is just a use case. There are several use cases in the healthcare sector.
Which are those sectors that are usually overlooked in the space of AI applications?
If we consider the things that right now are being overlooked, I would think about something that happened to me this morning.
I was taking my daughter to school and I was waiting at a traffic light for slightly longer I thought was necessary, given the level of traffic and the time of the day.
I mean traffic lights are dumb! They are just there!
Someone made some decisions about the algorithm that defined the functioning of traffic lights. It slows down entire cities and generates inefficiencies.
What if you introduce AI? If you could make smart traffic lights able to take everything into consideration, we would save time, money and we would create wealth. Simple things like making traffic lights from dumb to smart could have a huge impact on society and save thousands of millions of dollars. This is just an example but I am sure there are other thousands of examples where applying AI could have a huge impact.
You are also an advisory board member at Quantum Edge Capital. There are a lot of controversies about how AI and High-Frequency Trading can really outperform portfolio managers and hedge fund in the long-run.s. What is your view on this topic?
To be perfectly honest with you, I am not involved in the day-to-day activities of Quantum Edge. I can only speak on a superficial level.
Personally, I don’t think humans can beat computers in certain kind of tasks. Simply because humans are influenced by biases. When a human wants to execute a trade over another one, there are thousands of biases that come into play. In this case, algorithms have an advantage because they can eliminate biases. They make decisions purely on what they see, rather than doing it on the basis of what they feel. Computers are not affected by fear or greed.
This is from a pure observer perspective.
I got really interested also by this podcast from James Altucher, which claims that out of an average decade there are from 2 to 3 trading days where a great part of the returns is done. These are the days where you should be in the market.
Usually, these days are followed or follow days where everything crashes. Because people, in this case, are not acting rationally. However, no human can be that smart to define those 2–3 days out of a decade in which you should be all in on the market. So if you want to win in the stock market, the way to win is just being in the market. What you should be focused on is how much money you should have in the market. By simply staying in the market, you can make a return.
This thing could be seen also in the VC world.
Right now, I don’t have the numbers on me, but I could bet that many VCs are not making a return.
Why is that? They try to pick and choose.
If you look at a company like 500 startups, they have such a diversified portfolio that brings them to have a consistent return. Can you really pick the winners?
I am willing to bet that if you asked Zuckerberg to do it again, in terms of creating another Facebook with the same impact, he would struggle.
Making the picks is difficult, I think is much wiser for investors not to think just about winners but also about the companies they think they can make it to the market, as opposed to thinking that you can pick the winners.
You moved to Denmark and you started working for an AI sales company. What pushed you to start your company in Copenhagen and not in the UK where you already had experience and connections?
I am gonna give you the honest answer. I could give you a contorted reasons about how we looked at the numbers, the charts etc. ; but the truth is lifestyle.
First the marriage, then the family, and we were building our home here, same also for the other founders. I hired more team members, and they all lived here, so it became always more entrenched, so you cannot simply uproot them.
What typically happens in the startup journey is that you get to a point that you cannot be in this other place. So you open a second office. Could be Silicon Valley, NY or London. Keeping your roots firm.
The second office is usually more purposeful because it is an executive decision.
If you want to open a new office, you have looked at the numbers, you have looked at the spreadsheets, you have looked at the calculations. That’s why we have made the decision to open an office in Barcelona.
We had to grow, looked around, got some advice from the CTO of Blackwood Seven, which also has a 50-person office in Barcelona. We did our due diligence and found out that you can pay an engineer a third of what you are paying a Dane and Barcelona is also a great location because it would be hard to convince and engineer to move to Denmark. However, it is not that hard to convince anyone to move to sunny Barcelona. That’s why we thought that could be a great place for opening our second office
In the future, we may come to a stage to open another office, which would have another streamline purpose. If things go well in SEA, given time difference and physical distance, we could open an office in Malaysia or Singapore for Marketing and Operations.
Sometimes, I have heard companies sending their CEO for a suicide mission to a new country, all by himself to raise funding. This is another journey you can see.
If you have to decide if you want to start your company in Denmark, you need to determine what you want. If you want strong, winner-take-all, exponential growth, Denmark is not the place.
The infrastructure is not here, investment network is not that set up, the secondary network of entrepreneurs turned advisory is limited. It is coming but it is not yet here.
In your being a nomad, you have been able to gather a diversified and fantastic team and be backed by a great board, from Brian Petersen, Raymond McCauley, to Morten Lund. What is the secret sauce in finding the greatest people to work with and to be mentored from?
I can give you specific examples. In the case of Morten Lund, I moved to Denmark and I was looking for the craziest person who did the craziest things and I found him.
I started attending events where he was a speaker I basically started stalking him. Then what happened, I met someone who knows someone who knows someone who might know Morten, hence I took action and put together a pitch deck. I got on his desk and when I got his attention, I started following up.
I explicitly told him that he would have advised us and join us. Since that was going to happen, we just had to sit down to define how.
That perseverance paid off. He then joined us and right now he is the chairman of our advisory board. He introduced us to a lot of people and opened many doors. He introduced us also to Brian Petersen.
Similarly happened with Raymond McCauley.
If you keep on telling people that they would work with you, chances are they will work with you.
What do you think about diversity in the world of startups? Do you think that Denmark and the Nordic regions are in general much more open to diversity than places like Silicon Valley?
I was a bit concerned at first, but it was just a misconception. In my personal experience, I have never felt that being an outsider hindered me in anyways. I could say it has even helped me. You usually remember that guy if you are the only non-Dane talking loudly about how specific people are going to work with you. Chances are they will remember you.
What I found is that in Scandinavia people assume diversity exists, which is not something happening in other countries like the US. Here people just expect this. People judge you just on the basis of results and what you can do.
In our case, 2 out of 3 of our VPs in the management team are women and they are adding a lot of value.
What is your favourite podcast?
I am heavily influenced by the things I have listened and read recently.
James Altucher, most of the stuff I don’t like so much, but the good ones are fantastic. He did one with Tony Robbins and it was really intense.
What is your favourite book?
Rich Dad Poor Dad by Robert Kiyosaki. There are lessons in that book that I carry forward. For example, your house is not necessarily an asset but could be a liability. There are some fundamental lessons that I read when I was 20 that still influences me.
However, recently I have read The Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz and that was an amazing book.
One thing you would like to tell to upcoming entrepreneurs that want to use AI to disrupt new industries?
Upcoming entrepreneurs go for it, always go for it. Don’t even wait. I hope you are writing the code while you are reading this.
Regarding AI, right now everyone has either AI or ML on their Linkedin and I did the same mistake only one year ago. The baker has AI!
Actually, I think that we should be aware that the word AI is getting thrown around too much. As an upcoming entrepreneur, you should push investors and users to tell that what you are doing is AI and not the other way around. The moment you use AI and ML to describe your product, you might get bundled with one thousand other startups. It is a bit counter-intuitive but I think it makes sense. If you can follow this advice, it could take you far.
