Who is actually behind Phoenix

Hi Phoenix friend,

There is no Phoenix 1-800 number. But there is me :)

I received many emails and comments the past month that asked some version of the same question:

Is there a support line I can call?
Can I speak to someone on the tech team?
Who actually handles this?

Fair questions. Phoenix looks like a company. An app on Android and Apple store, a private community, an web app with bloodwork analysis, a clinical trials engine, partner studies, a weekly newsletter...

Something that looks like that usually has a floor of people behind it.
Except…It doesn't. It has me.

A lot of you joined in the last few months and we have never properly talked. So let me introduce myself, and tell you exactly what you have joined.

Who is not behind Phoenix

No venture capital.
No private equity.
No pharmaceutical company.
No supplement brand.

Nobody owns a piece of Phoenix except me and 2 other Phoenix members who became early business angels.
There is no board asking me for a growth curve.
There is no sponsor whose product needs to come out looking good in the data. When Phoenix reports that something did not move the numbers, there is nobody upstairs who minds.

That independence is structurally designed that way, and it is the reason you can trust what you read in the app.

Who is behind Phoenix

Me.
Kevin.
Doctor of Pharmacy, and I carry APOE4/4.

I have help in exactly one place: an agency who handle the Youtube videos edition and run the social accounts (I never got the hang of Tiktok). That is the entire team.

I build everything else alone, with some help from Jason, another Phoenix member.

What a week actually looks like

Here is the honest split. In any given week I am:

• building the next feature in the app

• fixing the bugs you report, and the ones you don't

• keeping the community alive: posts, questions, the monthly pod cycle

• reading the new APOE4 papers so you don't have to

• making the content that brings more carriers in

• telling anyone who will listen that APOE4 is not a sentence you sit and wait out

That is six jobs. I am one person. Which brings me to the apology.

I'm sorry I have been slow

If you emailed me and waited, or posted in the community and heard nothing for days, that was not indifference. Every message reaches me. I read all of them. Some weeks I cannot answer all of them quickly, and I hate that, because the entire point of Phoenix is that you are not shouting into a void.

Same with the bugs. I ship fast, and shipping fast means I sometimes ship something broken.
Tell me and I fix it, usually within days.
Please bear with me while I do.

Why there is a membership fee

Now the part nobody enjoys writing.

Phoenix is not free because there is nobody else paying for it. That is the whole explanation. Your membership keeps the lights on, keeps the app being built, and keeps me able to say “no” to money that would want something in return.

I would rather answer to you than to a supplement company.

Where Phoenix goes from here

Phoenix sustains itself today.
Your memberships cover what it costs to run, and I have kept it lean on purpose.

But the needs keep growing.
More carriers every month.
More features you are asking for (and that I want for myself too!).
More studies worth running.
I want to hire, so the email you send gets answered in an hour instead of three days, so features ship faster, and so I am not the single point of failure in something you count on.
And I want to fund the studies that move us to the front of the line for the therapies actually being developed for APOE4.

That is more than one person can do properly. No matter how passionate I am about it and no matter if I spend 80 hours a week on it (the average work hours for the past year).

So I am going to look at funding options, to grow Phoenix faster than I could alone.

There is also a second way to pay for this that I am building in the open: partnering with the companies developing APOE4 treatments, on our terms. For example helping them recruit APOE4 carriers into their clinical trials.

And why I want more of us, not fewer

Here is the part I think about most.

The largest APOE4 study in the world isn't run in a lab. It's run by us.

Every biomarker you upload, every supplement you log, every check-in you fill in on a bad morning: that is the dataset.
No university has it.
No pharma company has it, because carriers like us are needles in their haystack, and they never get years of our ordinary life sitting next to our labs.

Which makes Phoenix strange in a good way.
A hundred more carriers tracking their ApoB is not a hundred more customers.
It is a hundred more answers about what actually works for people with our genotype.
Your data pays you back through everyone else's, and theirs pays you back through yours.
By finding what actually works for you. What works for us.

There are more than 600 of us now. That is why I push growth so hard.
Not because I want a “bigger company”.
Because a bigger sample gives every one of us a better answer.

September, San Francisco, and a promise

In September I will be in San Francisco, and I will talking to business angels about funding, so I can hire a team and build faster for you.

Before a single one of those conversations happens, here is the promise, in writing.

Phoenix stays independent, and the goal never changes: help APOE4 carriers beat the odds.
Everyone I bring in as an investor will be an APOE4 carrier and part of this community. I believe that is the only way to stay 100% focused on that mission.
I will never put something in front of you because someone on a cap table wants it there.
I can promise that with total confidence, for a selfish reason: I carry APOE4/4.
If Phoenix ever diverts from our mission, the first person it fails is me.
If we don’t solve APOE4, I get Alzheimer’s too.
This was never “just” a startup to me. It is a survival mission.
It is also, I have come to realize, my life vocation.

How you can actually help

A few things, and not one of them costs you money.

Patience, when I am slow or when something breaks (please report it in the bug report feature!).

Your opinion. If there is something Phoenix should be doing and isn't, or something it does badly, hit reply and tell me. A surprising number of things in the app exist because a member wrote to me about them.

An introduction. Heading into September, I am looking for three kinds of person: an investor who genuinely gets why this matters (the best ones tend to be carriers themselves), someone inside a company developing APOE4 or Alzheimer's therapies, and sharp people who might want to help build this.

If one of them is already in your phone, a warm word from you is worth more than anything I can do cold. Email me at kevin@thephoenix.community and I will take it from there.

And one more carrier. If Phoenix has helped you, the most valuable thing you can do is send it to another APOE4 carrier who is still out there waiting and watching. That is one more of us. One more answer. It is how this whole thing grows.

I will not pretend the last few months have been easy. Wearing six hats has cost me sleep and it has cost me some calm, and I track both in the Phoenix app, so it is quite visible.
I have got this. I’d rather burn the candle from both ends than not succeed because we move too slowly.
But you deserve to know what is behind the curtain, because you are trusting me with something that matters.

Thank you for being here. Genuinely.
I built Phoenix because I needed it.
It turned out I was not the only one, and that has made the whole thing worth it.

Let’s continue building Phoenix together!

Cheers,
Kevin

PS. If you ever wondered whether your feedback lands in a support ticket queue somewhere: it doesn't. It lands in my email inbox. So use this as much as possible :)