Optimizing our Finances and our Lives | Patrick Wetherille

Tyler Gardner (0:00)

Hello, friends. This is Tyler Gardner welcoming you to another episode of Your Money Guide on the Side, where it is my job to simplify what seems complex, add nuance to what seems simple, and learn from and alongside some of the brightest minds in money, finance, and investing. So let's get started and get you one step closer to where you need to be. My guest this week is a good friend of mine who I respect dearly. His name is Patrick Wetherille and he and I met almost 20 years ago at London School of Economics. I asked him to be one of my first guests not only because I knew he had to say yes as a good friend, but because he has always had incredible instincts for how best to create work and social environments that focused on open, honest, and engaging culture. Additionally, I wanted to bring Pat on early in this podcast because he's one of the few people I know who has simply never bought into the idea that deferring life and experience is somehow a good idea. Patrick is currently the COO of Ada Health, leading daily operations while shaping the organization's strategic vision to empower individuals in their health care journey. And prior to joining Ada, Patrick served as CEO of Lose It, one of the most successful apps ever, with over 50 million users. He drove the company to growth, profitability, and its acquisition by Everyday Health Group, a Ziff Davis company, in 2022, where he served as managing director. He holds an MBA from Harvard Business School, an MPP from Georgetown University, and a BA in economics and political science from Haverford College. Throughout this conversation, Patrick and I touch on startup cultures, the difficulty of being in executive positions, remote work philosophies, and some books that have truly impacted both of us. My only Mia culpa addendum is that the audio is not ideal for a first guest, and that's my fault for not getting the equipment out to my guests as quickly as I needed to. But trust me, this one is worth sticking around for, especially if you would like some creative ideas as to how we can balance work and life more effectively moving forward. And Pat and I touch more heavily on money and spending philosophy as the conversation progresses. So without further introduction, I give you my first official guest conversation with Patrick Wetherille. Patrick, thanks for being on the show. I really appreciate it.

Patrick Wetherille (2:13)

Thanks for having me. I'm excited to be.

Tyler Gardner (2:14)

So can you tell me a little bit about what Lose It is as a product?

Patrick Wetherille (2:19)

Lose It is a weight loss app. One of the first apps ever in the Apple App Store. It launched in 2009 It's basically a food lobbying purse to weight loss where people go in, they enter in what foods they're eating, the counts of calories, and it shows it against the calorie budget. So if someone wants to lose weight, we give the user a budget, they stick to that calorie budget. It's a calorie deficit that drives weight loss. So it's a very old school approach to weight loss. It's the same approach to weight watchers. This product was designed when the iPhone came out to make it really easy.

Tyler Gardner (2:48)

What was the impetus behind the need for this type of product at that time?

Patrick Wetherille (2:54)

So there were three co-founders, one of the original founders, who he had worked with the other co-founders before. He was tracking his food. He was tracking his calories, tracking his food intake, and he had built some kind of software for himself to do it. But then all of a sudden, the iPhone comes out, and the idea of these apps comes out. And he was a software engineer. So he's like, you know what, just for fun, I'm going to make a thing I could use on the iPhone so I could track my food. I track my intake to lose weight. And the other co-founders started to interact with him about it. And we're like, this is pretty great. This is actually going to be pretty compelling. We would love to work on this with you. He had already had a few good exits. He funded the team. They put it in the app store. One of the co-founders is a designer. So if you look at a core of Luzit's design paradigm, it was this guy, Paul D. Cristina, who was a really talented designer, made Fulong really fun. But it was one of the first apps ever in the app store. People were scrambling to catch up to the new paradigm. Luzit gets out there, the number one health and fitness app, and it stayed in there for two and a half or three years. Back then, Apple's Discovery was just the most popular apps list. If you had a good position in the top apps for your category, it just perpetuated itself. That was the starting point. Charles Teague, who was one of the co-founders, ended up becoming the CEO. At that point before then, it was one of the people who had been working with them, but they wanted to actually give a proper team, really, to build the engineering team out. And so I joined April 2012, and in that two or three-month period, the team went from three or four to eight. We had proper engineers, some of them focused on the Android, a couple of people focused on iOS, we had some of them was doing the platform. I was the only non-engineer that was hired.