Belinda Tan and Noah Craft, People Science, on enabling human-centric, clinically rigorous testing for alternative medicines

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Belinda Tan and Noah Craft, Co-Founders and Co-CEOs of People Science

In this episode, I sat down with Belinda Tan and Noah Craft, Co-Founders and Co-CEOs at People Science. Founded in 2019, People Science is a human-centered clinical research platform addressing the need for rigorous clinical science to back alternative medicines and wellness solutions that do not typically fall under traditional Western medicine. The company’s platform studies a range of solutions spanning microbiome and food-as-medicine interventions, natural and synthetic psychedelic medicines, cannabis and cannabinoids, functional medicines, and digital therapeutics. Its user-facing app called Chloe (Consumer Health Learning and Organizing Ecosystem) supports users to test these alternative treatments on themselves, and enables users to view personal results in real time while comparing themselves to others. People Science secured its $8.5 million seed funding through two rounds, most recently in December 2022.

Belinda, Noah and I discussed:

• Their founding story, and their unique co-CEO leadership model
• The philosophy behind the People Science platform, including the nuances of alternative medicines compared to traditional Western medicine, and the need for a more rigorous process to testing these alternatives
• The business model behind the platform, including both how studies are launched with B2B partners and the consumer-facing app (Chloe)
• Insights and advice from having co-founded not one, but two, companies together

Beginning – 7:10: Noah and Belinda’s backgrounds and path to entrepreneurship

Noah and Belinda each bring very robust backgrounds to the table, with experience across medicine, scientific research and clinical trials. The couple met in the mid-90s in the MD PhD program at UCLA, the start of a “long journey of exploration, learning and education.” 15 years ago, they first joined forces as business partners and scientists, and then entered a romantic relationship.

• Noah Craft, MD, PhD, is a physician-scientist turned entrepreneur who began his career studying at UCLA where he was formally trained in Western medicine, and ran a translational research lab. Specifically, he studied molecular biology, and became a dermatologist focused on microbiology and immunology. In the middle of graduate school, however, despite his clinical training in Western Medicine, Noah began to take personal interest in alternative medicines, specifically psychedelics, for which he brought passion to People Science.
• Belinda Tan, MD, PhD, was born in Malaysia — she identifies ethnically as Malaysian Chinese, and her first language was a dialect of Chinese called Hokkien. Belinda moved to the United States when she was four, and grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area where her parents still retained a lot of their traditional culture from Malaysia; like many first-generation individuals from Asia, she grew up with traditional Chinese medicine (TCM). She excelled in math and science, and ended up going to MIT for her undergraduate degree, after which she pursued her graduate degree at UCLA and met Noah.

In 2014, the duo started their first company, Science 37, through which they aimed to decentralize and virtualize the process of traditional randomized controlled trials for FDA drug development. They were successful at demonstrating that technology could be used to run clinical trials in people’s homes instead of in a clinic, meaning that a diverse spectrum of individuals spanning many demographics could be recruited to take part in research. Noah and Belinda built the company over about five years, after which the company became public through a SPAC-IPO valued at $1.3B. In 2019, they left the company and created People Science.

On becoming an entrepreneur, Belinda remarked: “If one looks at my CV, it looks very intentional… The 2023 rearview mirror [reflects a] nice narrative. But it was by no means that smooth and intentional — I bumped up against a lot of moments over the course of my 14-year postgraduate training where I didn’t quite find exactly the type of roles that I wanted to be, [whether] becoming an academic clinician or researcher, going into industry…I landed on becoming an entrepreneur because it was the space where I had the most freedom to explore, build, and be creative, which is at the core of who I am. I feel like I found my path, which is to create on my own, and put together all of these pieces from my past, whereas previously I felt I was a ‘jack of all trades, and master of none.’ Ultimately, building companies became the place to plug in all of these interests.”

7:10–11:42: Philosophy Behind Starting People Science

I asked Noah and Belinda about the philosophy behind the People Science platform itself, after which they highlighted several pain points that led to the idea:

• Bringing Clinical Rigor to Alternative Medicine: Prior to People Science, there was no way to accommodate alternatives like traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) within the rigorous clinical trial approach of Western medicine. After pursuing training as physicians and scientists, and reflecting on how well TCM worked for Belinda’s family, while also recognizing the “powerful language” behind studying Western medicine that can “solve all kinds of questions and mysteries of nature,” Belinda and Noah knew they had to fill this gap. They knew from prior experience how to build a rigorous technology platform that could support generating the evidence required to understand medicines, and applied this approach to understanding alternative medicines across a broad population.

“At our core, Belinda, and I consider ourselves explorers, scientists and tinkerers. We happen to be trained in Western medicine as physicians — but the notion of being a scientist, and the definition of science to us, is the way that humans organize knowledge to uncover the hidden potential in nature. But what it doesn’t [define] is: what is the frame of the questions to uncover that knowledge? Starting People Science [resulted from] this convergence of our personal passions for complex alternative and complementary medicines that have been around for millennia, with our expertise in scientific discovery and clinical research. This notion of using the lens of science to generate evidence for medicines that are more sustainable and accessible and affordable is part of our long term mission.” — Noah Craft

• Empowering the People: Among the lessons taken away from their first company, Science 37, was the importance of “putting the people first.” In building People Science, Belinda and Noah set out to solve the question: “how do we build a platform and a methodology where all people truly are engaged and feel empowered to participate in research?” It is no coincidence that the platform is named People Science — the couple felt the word “people” had to remain core to the platform.
• Celebrating Diversity: Among existing approaches to clinical research and drug development, there is not enough diversity of participation, stemming from difficulties recruiting individuals across demographics. Moreover, consumers are already making their own informed decisions and tinkering with a wide range of alternative treatments from supplements and foods to psychedelics. This mainly anecdotal evidence needs to be codified to allow a Western understanding. Among the tenets core to People Science is reaching a broad audience of consumers across the alternative medicine marketplace, and uncovering insights unique to individuals as part of the bigger picture.
• Establishing a Public Benefit Corporation: After being first-time entrepreneurs with Science 37, Noah and Belinda observed that Public Benefit Corporations were more frequently being established among founders who strove to be both actionable and socially conscious, and desired to do the same. The public benefit behind People Science is to serve the public with education about health, science and medicine, to “truly, authentically serve the people” and meet them where they are.

Challenges of Studying Alternative Medicines: Belinda and Noah elaborated on how their study of alternative medicines is equally rigorous yet quite different from their approach to studying traditional medicines, as these medicines are often challenging to research. Alternative medicines often take the form of whole living organisms, such as an entire bacterium, an entire fungus or plant, or sometimes mixtures of plants that then interact with the whole human being. If the medicine itself is alive and changing all the time, or lives on or in the human body, it will be challenging to study over time through a randomized controlled trial (RCT) like in the case of a traditional drug or treatment. RCT is designed to study single molecules in a highly controlled experimental setting, which does not represent how most people interact with alternative medicines.

11:43-17:26; 22:36–33:20: The People Science Platform & Business Model

People Science’s main study focus areas include several wellness-oriented markets that are currently booming across the globe. Many of these alternative treatments require a more naturalistic and ecologically relevant scientific design that captures data within the context of people’s day-to-day lives:

• Probiotics and prebiotics: Defined as foods and supplements containing “good” bacteria that affect the organisms that live within our guts and on our skin
• Plant based medicine: Includes herbs, herbal formulations, as well as cannabis. Cannabis has been a medicinal treatment for humans (and likely other species) for thousands of years, and is a very complex plant with hundreds of active molecules. We’re only just starting to scratch the surface of how we understand cannabis, and how it can be applied as a medicine both for illness and for wellness.
• Psychedelics: Both natural and synthetic psychedelics are complex, sometimes take the form of whole plants or whole fungus, and require their own innate understanding in terms of how they impact wellness and illness. Moreover, the study of psychedelics is made more complex because it involves the personalization of an individual’s experience, especially since psychedelic treatments impact mental health conditions such as major depressive disorder that are intertwined with individual traumas, distinct cultural backgrounds, spiritual wellness, and other unique variables.
• Food as Medicine: While the concept of “Food as Medicine” has recently gained tremendous traction in our government and beyond, it is often unclear what clinical endpoints support various types of individualized and population-wide treatment, especially given the diversity of conditions and individual diets. The People Science platform can help uncover some of these endpoints and provide clinical rigor to this pivotal movement.

Study Launch Process: People Science partners with a variety of clients who are pursuing complex scientific questions in the alternative medicine market. No energy or money has beenspent on outbound marketing yet; rather, clients and partners have reached out to People Science based on knowledge of what the platform is doing, leaving the team to manage quite a bit of inbound as the platform gains traction. The ideal client has 1) existing funding to conduct the research (or can work with People Science to raise philanthropic money), 2) knowledge about the process of conducting a clinical research study, and 3) mission-alignment in terms of pursuing science with clinical rigor and quality but in a novel way. However, just as any startup founders must make tradeoffs, the team is conscious that it cannot take on all partners or expend all resources at once despite the number of interest areas, and must strike the balance of finding the right early partners who want to build towards a sustainable business model over time.

The Chloe platform (Consumer Health, Learning and Organizing Ecosystem) is built around the journey of the individual person. Typically, clinical science draws upon two forms of evidence generation: experimental science and real-world evidence. Typically, on the experimental side, one designs a sponsored study and receives the data back, whereas on the real-world side, data is collected retrospectively through electronic health records (EHR), physician documentation, and the like. Chloe is built to capture real world evidence through a very different lens from a doctor’s lens, as EHR data does not “capture the lived life at home of an individual.”

Business Model: People Science is primarily a B2B enterprise platform enabling institutional partners (e.g., academic researchers, CPG brands in the health and wellness industry) to conduct large-scale research. Currently, the platform has 2 different types of customers: 1) customers unaccustomed to study development who are looking for an end-to-end service, from study design, regulatory, and ethics board approval through conducting the study itself, and 2) customers familiar with the process of conducting a study who are looking to leverage a robust, scalable and affordable tool for participant engagement. As the team takes on more and more clients, they continue to learn what future enterprise clients will demand from the platform. Belinda and Noah believe clients will increasingly seek to establish regulatory rigor behind their products as they desire data to inform later-stage studies by the FDA. Additionally, large CPG brands who may already have rigorous research and development processes or clinical operations teams may be looking to leverage the platform to unlock data that will serve as a competitive edge when they go on to market their products and attempt to differentiate in a crowded market. Ultimately, the team hopes to “lower barriers to entry” and “democratize research” in this market.

User-Facing Side: Nearly any consumer can benefit from Chloe — anyone who seeks to consume wellness products or solutions on the market, from food and supplements to microbiome interventions to psychedelics and cannabinoids, and engage with personal data while contributing to the broader scientific community. Consumers can access the free iOS and Android mobile Chloe app, which is integrated with tools and wearables like Apple Health and Fitbit, and are empowered with a user experience different from that of a health tracker (many can already be found on the market), in that users are testing on themselves and shown results in real-time.

Noah remarked: “The data or knowledge generated by individual consumers… you can think of this similarly to electricity. It’s contributed like a solar panel would contribute back to the grid, so it fuels both your own understanding of your own wellness, and can contribute back to the knowledge and societal benefit that People Science seeks to deliver on.”

In another useful analogy, Noah went on to explain: “We think about Chloe and [the platform] we’re building as infrastructure — think of it like railroad tracks — our hope is that we build a global and easy-to-use set of railroad tracks, and that other scientists or communities will be able to put their own railroad cars on the tracks, [and] fill it up with different types of questions. Currently, we also offer the option to ‘put the train on the track’ ourselves if you don’t have [the materials] to run a study. But our long-term goal is really for this to be an easy-to-use infrastructure that attaches people who are interested in contributing to science (the people, or consumers), to scientists that are interested in asking questions.”

Platform Expansion: People Science is currently in its MVP, and the mission with its business model is to become an enterprise platform solution for research. The team plans to focus on building the back-end UI/UX as a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model, while identifying critical workflow solutions needed to support end users in full-service studies, all the while keeping the participant experience in mind. The team includes individuals with backgrounds in public health and community participatory research who conduct one-on-one conversations with these users, and incorporate key learnings into iteratively improving the platform.

17:27–22:35: Challenges in the Health and Wellness Industry

Next, I pointed out that consumers hear all over the news daily about the health and wellness industry, and how it’s being disrupted rapidly by many new products and technologies. Yet, the number of products on the market can be overwhelming, and the claims made about products are very unclear, especially given lack of credibility around many studies. I asked Noah and Belinda about some of the biggest challenges to reforming the health and wellness industry based on the lack of clinical rigor, and how People Science is helping to address these challenges. Ultimately, while the team thinks it goes back to their fundamental platform approach and to the science itself, Noah took an interesting philosophical angle to tackle this big question:

“If you think about data, data is just numbers and ideas that are uncontextualized. If you contextualize data to an individual person in their experience — take you for instance, you Rachel, [and suppose] you’re having problems sleeping, and want to know which medicines will affect you and improve your sleep — that data contextualized to you specifically becomes knowledge. That knowledge, if we collect it from 200 people like Rachel, becomes knowledge at scale, which can be distributed to society and becomes wisdom. You can think of your data as your voice — and use your voice as a form of influence. There are two different ways you can do this. First, you can tell your story to a friend (like in the case of classic marketing — ‘I used this, it worked’) which is one way to influence people to buy a product. The second is data at scale — put your voice in the context of 200 other voices like yours, and it becomes a choir, and its song can be told through a different megaphone.” — Noah Craft

According to Noah, this is the beauty of democratizing clinical research: it enables aggregating individual data points (e.g., clinical endpoints, emotional anecdotes about a product working) to illuminate scientific discovery in an industry that would otherwise be too complex to study. The People Science platform can successfully capture individual data and knowledge, aggregate it, and then bring learnings back to society which will underscore the credibility and believability of these medicines, much like the current FDA process, but in such a way that can really transform the vast industry of wellness and supplements.

Take one example, Food as Medicine, where one of the hardest aspects is convincing health plans (who typically care about bottom-line impact and cost savings) why they should invest in population-wide solutions when they can’t directly point to patient outcomes or long-term health benefits for members. One might ask the question: if we could prevent diabetes with a diet, or reverse obesity with food choices, how much money, wellness and long-term longevity would that generate? We can begin to tackle this question by looking within the People Science platform, which enables studying these questions on a much broader scale across more patients and settings (e.g., in the home, throughout their normal day-to-day lives), over a longer duration of time, to track outcomes like weight, BMI, or disease onset, all without compromising scientific rigor. It will be exciting to see this data turn into results that could amount to billions of dollars of savings for health plans and their members.

The main challenge the co-founders must overcome with their model currently is educating the market on the need for such a platform. Current inbound requests from clients indicate strong tailwinds for the company moving forward. Having sales interactions with customers gives feedback on how users are thinking about this space, as well as what questions they have and what gaps are needed to build out, but the entrepreneurially-savvy couple is “not shy when it comes to addressing these challenges.”

33:21–36:05: Venture Capital Fundraising

I asked Belinda and Noah what success factors they thought contributed to their $5.3M seed II fundraise earlier this year, led by Acre Venture Partners, as well as what ultimately resonated with their 8 institutional investors.

• Topical Alignment: People Science’s investors are focused across an array of related topics, each of which reflect a realm in which the company operates, including consumer goods, health technology, Food as Medicine and psychedelics. Taking a targeted approach to finding the right investors in this niche was important.
• Filling a Market Need: Investors had a market need within their own portfolio companies for more rigorous and fast evidence generation, which People Science could directly fill, making a People Science investment synergistic to other investments in their portfolios while also providing a compelling case for return on investment.
• Welcoming Investors to Shape the Company’s Trajectory: In turn, investors shaped the path of the company — take Acre Venture Partners, which led the Seed II round, and which invests in companies that can make an impact across the food and agriculture value chain. When Noah and Belinda first sat down with the Acre team and learned about their needs, they learned Acre could find no concrete way to test ideas related to Food as Medicine scientifically, making it difficult to invest in solutions in this area. In this way, Acre helped to shape and define the market need in their own space of interest, and Noah and Belinda became more aware of Food as Medicine through that interaction.
• Mission Alignment: Investors who ultimately led and contributed to the round were mission-aligned with People Science and the team, which was critical. “All of our investors get behind us, and they’re proud to say they’re invested in People Science, generating evidence for the public and for common good. It’s this combination of people who want a great investment and [also] want to do something great for the world, whether it’s in climate, or food, or agriculture, or psychedelics, [that makes] a really wonderful combination in our investor base.”
• Repeat Founders: The fact that this was “not [their] first rodeo” in the entrepreneurial ecosystem made Noah and Belinda compelling to investors as well, as it gave them an edge in terms of how they could speak to what they were building.

36:06–40:36: Embracing a Unique Co-CEO Model

Belinda and Noah are challenging industry norms, not just with respect to what they are studying through the platform, but also in terms of how they are running the organization. While we often see Co-Founders in the world of startups, it’s not often we see a co-leadership model at the CEO level, especially one from a married couple, which Belinda and Noah have embraced. I asked them what drove this decision early-on in the company’s founding journey:

• Embracing a Partnership: According to Belinda, “In our prior company, it was more traditional, and Noah was the CEO. I feel like there’s still a lot more work we can all do to model how partnerships and co-leadership can actually work very well.”

“I know a lot of people out there in the business world, including investors, shy away from partnerships like ours, because it [comes with] the expected baggage that one might anticipate. And it’s important to show that we can model leadership holistically.” — Belinda Tan

• Mirroring the Home: Belinda continued on to explain:“For those of us who have partnerships in the home, we are living that model and have to work through it to make it work out for us. The same principles that govern our partnership in the home also governs building a company [as Co-CEOs]. We often try to separate our work and our home — and while yes, that can sometimes be necessary so that you can actually carve out true personal time, I feel like the values don’t change, and the values are interchangeable between those spheres of our life.”
• Improved Decision Making: Belinda and Noah believe they benefit from embracing their unique partnership when any major decision point arises, and they need to have a direct conversation, give feedback, and pinpoint who will be the primary decision maker, as this same decision making approach often arises within the household as well. “Trust is such a critical part of the ‘people’ part of the equation…how do you work together especially as a startup, where there are so many unknowns, and people need to have flexibility, adaptability, and trust one another when making a decision?”
• Re-negotiating Agreements: “Things happen, and things change, and that’s okay.” Both parties’ outcomes are improved if “we can talk about it and renegotiate it [with] open communication.”
• Having Difficult Conversations: Belinda highlighted the importance of having these conversations as often as needed, and as soon as possible. “This applies to us in all aspects of our life: the more you avoid it, the more the narratives spin out and create a really uncomfortable relationship. As co-founders, I look forward to continuing to have the courage together with Noah to model that we can get this done.”

40:37-End: Closing Entrepreneurial Advice

Noah’s advice:

• Embrace an “N of 1” Journey: “I always say my own journey is an ‘n of one’— I’ve only been through this life once as far as I can tell in my consciousness today, [but I am a] delusional optimist, and someone who lives towards what’s possible.”
• Set a North-Star Vision: “A core belief that I have is painting out the future of what’s possible and not focusing on the past or the status quo, or even the competition. I can’t overemphasize how important that is for me. I live for that future vision, and in combination with Belinda, we live with an ‘FIO culture,’ which means we see where we’re going, and then we ‘Figure It Out.’ Along the way, if you lose sight of that North-Star vision, take some time to do the work to learn about yourself and get back to that vision.”

Belinda’s advice:

• Follow your Heart: “As a two-time entrepreneur and innovator in the healthcare industry, getting to know myself and having the courage to listen more to myself and to my heart… that’s been the most challenging. It really goes a long way toward contributing to how you show up for others, and the types of people with whom you magnetize.”
• Surround Yourself with Trusted Support: “As we described before, ‘people, people, people’ was such a huge lesson for us — even right now building our initial team, which we’re proud to say [includes] many [with whom] we’ve worked in the past, [it’s important to make sure it’s] built on trust, and to really find people who resonate with you.”
• Share the Personal: “Another thing that Noah and I do is share our personal stories more with our business world, and even our team. I think many people feel like that’s super private…but [things that] happen in everyone’s life [should be] okay to share. Noah and I sent out an update to our investors recently that shared some really personal stuff that happened to us this summer, and some people have responded thanking us for having the courage to share. My advice is [to have] the courage to listen to yourself, even though it feels like the market isn’t really doing that type of thing.”
• Show Up Authentically: “Regarding being an innovator in the healthcare industry, listening to our hearts and showing up as we are authentically is so critical. It’s what healthcare continues to need — it’s a big business engine that’s taken care of so many people, it’s so complex, and it needs to be operationally minded. And at the same time, we have to continue to ask ourselves, ‘where are the human beings in all of this?’ If we start with ourselves, and ask ourselves, ‘How can I be more authentically human?’ that goes a long way in terms of impact.”

We are very appreciative to Belinda and Noah for joining us on this episode of The Pulse Podcast! Subscribe for our new releases on Twitter, Spotify or Apple podcasts.