Jacob Peters, Co-founder of Superpower
Building the AI Doctor: lessons from Superpower’s founder
Jacob Peters didn’t choose healthcare. Healthcare chose him. After watching his family members being misdiagnosed by specialists, and later nearly losing his life despite being under the care of top hospital systems, Peters became convinced that American healthcare needed a complete reimagining. Now as co-founder of Superpower, he’s building what he calls “the world’s first AI doctor and healthcare super app”: a consumer platform that combines comprehensive lab testing, AI-powered health guidance, and a concierge ecosystem for taking action. In a candid conversation with Stanford students, Peters shared his vision for making frontier medicine accessible to all Americans, and the hard lessons learned from building his third venture-backed company.
Healthcare as enhancement, not just treatment
Peters challenges the fundamental definition of what healthcare should be. In the traditional paradigm, healthcare is a tool to get you from “sick to non-sick, or negative one to zero.” But Peters believes healthcare should be a tool to get you from “zero to 10”—to help you achieve enhanced vitality beyond your baseline. His insight is that the human brain is remarkably good at acclimating to its baseline state. Most people think they feel fine until they make meaningful changes to their mitochondrial capacity, gut health, or nutrient balance and suddenly realize how much better they can feel. It’s like being in a toxic relationship or a job you hate—you don’t realize how much it’s affecting you until you’re out of it. This reframing positions health optimization not as vanity, but as unlocking human potential that most people don’t even know they’re missing.
Disintermediate the system to get to physics-based pricing
Peters identifies a fundamental problem in healthcare economics: services are priced at “the laws of incentives” rather than “the laws of physics.” A vitamin D test might cost $300 through a hospital system, while Superpower charges $10 for the same test. The difference isn’t the actual cost—it’s the layers of complexity, bureaucracy, and middlemen embedded in insurance contracts. Peters draws a parallel to Mark Cuban’s Cost Plus Drugs, which revealed that a drug costing $1,000 through insurance only costs $7 to manufacture. By building a direct-to-consumer model outside traditional healthcare systems, Superpower can price at manufacturing cost plus a small markup. It’s the same strategy Coinbase used in financial services—rebuild the entire system from the ground up to eliminate rent-seeking intermediaries.
The clinical model is the IP, not the technology
When asked about competition from wearables companies like Oura and Whoop, or tech giants like OpenAI, Peters made a critical distinction: the intellectual property in healthcare isn’t the technology—it’s the clinical model. Why would someone go to a renowned clinic over their local hospital for a serious diagnosis? It’s not just brand recognition. It’s the accumulated protocols, best practices, and decision-making frameworks embedded in how Mayo Clinic doctors approach patient care. Peters argues that ChatGPT and other general AI models lack this clinical expertise. Wearable companies have proprietary data streams but no care delivery model. Superpower’s bet is that having an opinionated clinical model from day one—actually delivering healthcare, not just data—will be the sustainable competitive advantage as the market consolidates toward one or two dominant players.
The market will consolidate to two major players
Peters predicts the AI doctor market will follow the pattern of most venture-funded categories: it will consolidate to two major players who capture the lion’s share. Think Uber and Lyft, Ancestry.com and 23andMe, Apple Music and Spotify. While there may be room for a winning super app that does many things moderately well like chatGPT, there will also always be room for vertical players like Superpower where one thing is all they do and they do it better. Peters isn’t worried about OpenAI entering the space because Superpower’s entire brand identity is frontier medicine—that’s all they’ve stood for since day one. The name itself communicates the value proposition: you should feel super-powered, like Iron Man, with the energy and vitality that comes from optimized health. This singular focus, combined with their clinical model and early market position, positions them to be one of the few winners when the market matures.
Build culture around the mission
Their foremost cultural principle is “super-prioritize health”—put your health first as the foundation for everything. Their second principle is “mission obsession,” which they screen for aggressively in hiring. Three teammates have Superpower tattoos. Peters reflects on his own evolution across three companies, distinguishing between “clean fuel versus dirty fuel” or “motorboat versus sailboat.” Superpower runs on passion and love for the mission. When people genuinely care about the problem they’re solving, putting in long hours doesn’t feel like work—it feels like contributing to something greater than yourself and sailing effortlessly.
Every decision is a health decision, including your career
Peters offers a provocative framework for thinking about health: treat every decision as a health decision, because everything you do is either positively or negatively impacting your epigenome. Even being in a room with certain people for 15 minutes can change your nervous system and epigenetic expression. A team and culture can create epigenetic convergence and nervous system coherence. The thought exercise: if we had a quantum computer that could model every particle in the universe, we could perfectly predict everyone’s health trajectory. If that’s true, then every decision—what you eat, where you work, who you spend time with—is genuinely a health decision. Peters takes this further with a generational perspective: the epigenetic damage you accumulate will directly affect your future offspring, and their offspring, and their offspring. The health decisions we make today have repercussions for an infinite number of generations. This isn’t guilt—it’s recognizing the profound responsibility and agency we have over not just our own wellbeing, but the biological inheritance of all humans who will ever live from our lineage.
Conclusion
Peters’ journey from nearly losing his life to building Superpower illustrates a founder archetype increasingly common in healthcare: the patient-turned-entrepreneur who experienced the system’s failures firsthand and decided to fix it. His approach combines Silicon Valley’s playbook for category creation with a genuine mission to democratize access to frontier medicine. Whether measuring success by the number of Americans subscribed to Superpower or by clinical outcomes like his parents discovering early-stage conditions that would have become cancer, Peters has built something that transcends typical startup metrics.
The most striking aspect of Peters’ vision isn’t the technology or business model—it’s the philosophical reframing of what healthcare should be. By positioning health as a tool for human enhancement rather than just disease treatment, and by arguing that every decision we make carries both personal and generational health consequences, he’s not just building a company. He’s advocating for a fundamental shift in how we think about our bodies, our choices, and our responsibility to future generations.
A note of thanks
We’re grateful to Jacob Peters for sharing his time, insights, and personal health journey with Stanford students and alumni. His willingness to discuss both the strategic vision and intimate details of his own health challenges provides invaluable perspective for the next generation of healthcare entrepreneurs. Thank you, Jacob, for your candor and for the important work you’re doing to reimagine healthcare for all Americans.
These insights emerged from a dinner conversation between Jacob Peters and Stanford students & alumni in December 2025.
Great content Elsa, thanks for sharing