“We’re basically building WHOOP for your poop.” When my cofounders, Scott Hickle and Tim Blumberg, got to this part in their pitch, I had no choice but to be a part of it. It felt as if my whole life had led up to the moment of meeting them and helping bring Throne to life.
Back in 2012, I dropped out of Harvard after my sophomore year to cofound Whoop where I served as the CTO for 10 years. WHOOP was one of the first companies to pioneer continuous physiological monitoring. At the time, “wearable” wasn’t even a common word, and outside of elite athletes, no one was regularly tracking heart rate or sleep. In just a decade, wearables have become ubiquitous, helping millions better understand their own bodies. With Whoop, we showed that if you continuously capture enough high-quality data, you can unlock entirely new ways to understand health and physiology. The company continues today to advance our understanding of human physiology with datasets that would be impossible to replicate in traditional labs.
In 2016, my life took an unexpected turn when I was diagnosed with ulcerative colitis, a form of Inflammatory Bowel Disease (IBD). Suddenly, health wasn’t just an abstract concept, it became personal. I experienced severe disease, multiple hospitalizations, dramatic weight and blood loss, a carousel of medications, and even a fecal transplant for recurrent C. Diff infection. That journey opened my eyes to the realities of digestive disease: how little visibility patients have into their daily health, how symptoms are often misunderstood, how hard it is to get reliable data (let’s face it, no one wants to take stool samples), and how much uncertainty patients live with day to day. As I worked through the medical system and learned more about the disease and gut health as a whole, I joined the National Board of Trustees of the Crohn’s & Colitis Foundation where I continued to see the scale of the challenge, and also the opportunity, for advancing both patient care and scientific research.
The potential parallels between Throne and WHOOP became impossible to ignore. Continuous monitoring had transformed the way athletes, consumers, and researchers approached physiology. Why couldn’t we apply the same principles to gut health, a domain that touches everyone but remains among the least measured and least understood? And this isn’t just about IBD. Gut health is foundational to nearly every aspect of life, from wellness to weight management to mental health.
After years of searching, I knew when I met Scott and Tim that Throne was the answer. I jumped at the opportunity to join them and the incredible team. Our mission is simple but ambitious: to make digestive and urinary health and wellness measurable, understandable, and actionable for everyone. Throne turns a daily routine into an effortless source of insight, enabling people to passively monitor stool and urine, identify patterns, and receive feedback grounded in science. At scale, these datasets can open the door to entirely new avenues of research, wellness applications, and medical breakthroughs. By building the world’s largest longitudinal dataset on digestion, we aim to empower individuals and accelerate discovery in one of the most consequential areas of human health.
For me, this is more than just another startup. It’s personal. It’s a chance to bring together my background in health technology, my lived experience with ulcerative colitis, and my passion for advancing science into one mission. I’m incredibly excited for the journey ahead and grateful to have you here at the start, as part of the community shaping the future of gut health with us.
