WellBuilt

I sat down with Nick Green, co-founder and CEO of Thrive Market, the membership based online grocer that curates more than 7,000 natural and organic products across food, home, and personal care. Thrive is approaching a billion dollars in revenue, is profitable, and serves over 1.7 million paid members, built on a model Nick describes as Whole Foods meets Costco online.

We got into how Thrive got funded after more than 100 venture capital firms passed, why the company has never raised its membership fee since launching in 2014, and how Thrive thinks about trust and curation in a category where testing has repeatedly caught brands mislabeling their products.

🧃 How Thrive raised its early capital from wellness influencers like Mark Sisson and Mark Hyman instead of VCs, giving them equity rather than just a cash commission

🔍 Why only 20 percent of Thrive's sales are its own private label brand, and why Nick wants to keep that number low rather than grow it

🧪 What happened when UC Davis tested 54 products labeled avocado oil and found 48 were adulterated, and how Thrive's curation model is meant to catch issues like that

💰 Why Thrive's $60 annual membership fee hasn't moved in 11 years, and the philosophy behind holding it there

🧠 Nick's take on what AI is doing to the value of good judgment at work, and why he thinks it makes exceptional people more valuable, not less

🏃 Why Nick stepped back from tracking his sleep and heart rate data and went back to running outside with no watch at all

On this episode of WellBuilt, I sat down with Rachel Hirsch, founder of Wellness Growth Ventures, an early-stage fund investing across better-for-you CPG, four-wall fitness, and consumer health tech.

Rachel came up through UBS and Tiger Global before starting her own fund with a thesis that wellness would go mainstream. Her portfolio includes Fishwife, BellyWelli, Monarch Athletic Club, GoNaNas, and more. She also writes one of the sharper newsletters in the space on Substack.

We covered a lot of ground:

💊 Why 40% of Americans could be on GLP-1s by 2030, including microdosers and HRT alternatives that aren't showing up in official numbers

🦷 The downstream markets most brands are still undervaluing: oral care, bone density, skin sagging, and fertility

🏋️ Why bone density is the most overlooked category in wellness right now and why the next winner here probably looks more like BellyWelli than a pharmaceutical

👟 Her hot take on wearables: she won't wear one until the data connects to behavior, not just more anxiety

🥤 Why she's bullish on energy drinks despite the crowded field and why brand strength is the only real moat in CPG

Rachel Hirsch is the founder of Wellness Growth Ventures, an early-stage fund investing across better-for-you CPG, four-wall fitness, and consumer health tech. She came up through UBS and Tiger Global before going to business school and starting her first SPVs, with a thesis that wellness would eventually go mainstream. Her portfolio includes Fishwife, BellyWelli, Monarch Athletic Club, GoNaNas, and more. She also writes a sharp newsletter in the space on Substack.

This conversation covers how Rachel thinks about the GLP-1 wave not as a weight loss story but as a supply chain disruption, how she evaluates founders in a few calls, why she's bearish on wearables until the data actually connects to behavior, and where she thinks the next category-defining brand in bone density, oral care, and energy is going to come from.

💊 Why 40% of Americans could be on GLP-1s by 2030, including a whole subset of microdosers and HRT alternatives that aren't being counted in any official numbers.

🦷 The downstream GLP-1 markets most brands are still undervaluing: oral care, bone density, skin sagging, and fertility, and why Rachel is actively looking to invest in all of them.

🏋️ Why bone density is the most overlooked category in wellness right now, what calcium gets wrong, and why the next big winner here probably looks more like BellyWelli than a pharmaceutical.

👟 Her hot take on wearables: she doesn't wear one, and won't until the data connects directly to behavior, not just more anxiety.

🥤 Why she's bullish on energy drinks despite the crowded field, what she thinks is missing for the female consumer specifically, and why brand strength is the only real moat in CPG.

Brian Keller is the Co-Founder and CEO of Rorra, a water filtration company he launched in November 2024 after three years of engineering, design, and testing. Brian started the company after his daughter's eczema cleared up within days of bathing in filtered water, leading him to dig into what was actually coming out of American taps.

Built entirely from stainless steel with a proprietary electrokinetic nanofiber filtration media, Rorra was designed to filter a wide spectrum of contaminants without shedding microplastics back into the water. Brian and his co-founder Charlie reverse engineered the top five whole home filter systems on the market before landing on a countertop unit and shower head that could work for anyone, from a family in Tennessee to an apartment in New York City.

We covered:

🦠 Why over 200 million Americans have forever chemicals in their tap water, and why the infrastructure problem is only getting worse.

🧪 Why most water filters on the market are actually adding microplastics back into your water, including carbon block filters fused with melted plastic, and how Rorra engineered around it/

🧠 Why microplastic and nanoplastic buildup in the brain is 20 times higher than any other organ, and what that means for the choices you're making every day.

📊 How to actually evaluate a water filter: what NSF ANSI accreditation means, why "up to X% filtration" is a red flag, and what Brian recommends for testing your own tap water at home/

💡 The oil change light analogy: how Rorra built a patent-pending performance indicator into a device with no plug, just four triple-A batteries, to help people know when to actually change their filter.

James Oliver is the founder of Atlas Bar, one of the highest-rated protein bars on Amazon, and Anti Chocolate, a four-ingredient sugar-free chocolate he launched less than six months ago that's already growing faster than he expected with almost no marketing behind it.

Built straight out of college, Atlas has grown through major nutrition trends without being tied to any of them. James is convinced getting sufficient protein while minimizing sugars will never go out of style.

We covered:

🧱 Why brands that chase trends get buried when those trends fade.

🔍 How he cold-surveyed 40-50 gym owners before the product existed and got 100% saying they'd buy it. He then spent a year driving around to gyms to prove product market fit before thinking about scale.

📦 His framework on retail: why it's not where you build demand but where you harvest it, and the mistake most CPG brands make going in too early.

📞 How he called 50-60 customers to ask why they kept buying Atlas, and why not a single one mentioned ashwagandha, which is why he cut the ingredient out of an early version of the bar.

⚠️ The risks around building a brand around a single functional ingredient.

🍫 The origin of Anti Chocolate, the first chocolate designed to eat every single day, four ingredients, fifty calories a serving, and what it taught him about applying his learnings in a brand new category.

James Oliver is the founder of Atlas Bar, one of the highest-rated protein bars on Amazon, and Anti Chocolate, a four-ingredient sugar-free chocolate he launched less than six months ago that's already growing faster than he expected with almost no marketing behind it.

Built straight out of college on three principles James was convinced would never go out of style: high protein, low sugar, and clean ingredients. Atlas has grown through every major nutrition trend of the last decade without being tied to any of them.

🧱 Why James built Atlas around durable nutrition principles instead of trends, and why brands that chase trends get buried when those trends fade.

🔍 How he cold-surveyed 40-50 gym owners before the product existed and got 100% saying they'd buy it, then spent a year driving around to gyms to prove product market fit before thinking about scale.

📦 His framework on retail: why it's not where you build demand but where you harvest it, and the mistake most CPG brands make going in too early.

📞 How he called 50-60 customers to ask why they kept buying Atlas, and why not a single one mentioned ashwagandha, which is why he cut it.

⚠️ Why building a brand around a single functional ingredient is one of the biggest risks in CPG today.

🍫 The origin of Anti Chocolate, the first chocolate designed to eat every single day, four ingredients, fifty calories a serving, and what it taught him about doing it again in a new category

In this episode of WellBuilt, Jon sat down with Bill Shufelt, Co-Founder and CEO of Athletic Brewing Company, the largest dedicated non-alcoholic brand in the United States.

Bill's path to Athletic started with a personal decision. He was 30, training for an ultra marathon, thinking about becoming a parent, and realizing alcohol was a ceiling on everything he cared about.

What followed was two years of nights and weekends research, hundreds of conversations to find the right co-founder, and the first brewery and taproom in the country built exclusively for non-alcoholic beer. He talks about how Athletic went from being dismissed by nearly everyone in the industry to becoming the 8th largest craft brewer in the US, why the non-alcoholic category is still barely getting started, and what it actually took to build a brand in a space most people said had no market.

They covered:

🍺 Why Bill believes the TAM for non-alcoholic beer is almost infinite, and why the traditional industry had the math completely backwards on how often people actually want to drink alcohol.

🏃 How Athletic broke out of the penalty box: building a brand people would hold with the label out in a bar, and why that required radical product quality before any marketing could work.

🎽 The grassroots go-to-market strategy: Bill personally showing up to 75 races in year one, bringing a cooler of non-alcoholic beer to events that had never had a sponsor, and building relationships with race directors who put on 50 to 100 events a year.

🏗️ What exponential growth actually costs: building manufacturing ahead of a company growing 20 to 30 percent a month, and why that capital intensity was one of the hardest problems Athletic had to solve.

👥 Bill's leadership lesson on where to spend your time, and why he spent too long on the bottom 20 percent of his team instead of doubling down on the top 20 percent.

📚 The books and brands he's paying closest attention to right now; including Natty Ice Cream, a clean label protein ice cream brand out of Arizona he's been closely tracking, and why early stage brand discovery/mentorship has become a passion of his since building Athletic.

In this episode of WellBuilt, Jon sat down with Robby Sansom, Co-Founder and CEO of Force of Nature Meats, to talk about what it takes to fix the meat industry from the inside out.

Robby traces his path from building Epic Provisions, one of the first brands to bring grass-fed and organ meat products into mainstream grocery, to launching Force of Nature on a simple but challenging premise: the best meat for you is also the best meat for the land, the animal, and the people who raise it.

He gets into why certifications like "organic" and "grass-fed" often fall short of what consumers think they're buying, why Force of Nature chose not to vertically integrate, and how a network of 900 farms and 24 processors across 3.8 million acres is how they're building the food system they want to see.

They covered: 🥩 Why the best place to get your meat is, in order: hunting it yourself, growing it yourself, or buying from a brand like Force of Nature. 🏷️ How food labels have been captured by the big four meat companies and what to actually look for when you're shopping. 💸 How meat is actually less expensive per ounce than a Hershey bar or Ruffles potato chips, and what that says about how we've been conditioned to think about food costs. 🌾 Why Force of Nature intentionally chose a network of independent farms and processors over owning the supply chain, and why that model better serves the mission. 🧠 Robby's personal health adn wellness routine with a two-year-old and a four-year-old at home: resistance training, creatine, five dozen eggs a week, and a nightly family walk after dinner. Enjoy!

In this episode of WellBuilt, Jon sat down with Ian and Margaret Wishingrad, the husband-and-wife co-founders of Three Wishes: the grain-free, low-sugar cereal that's become one of the most interesting better-for-you brands in the grocery aisle.

Ian spent years in advertising before starting his own agency. Margaret came from real estate. When their first son was born, they stood in the cereal aisle of Whole Foods and realized nothing there was actually healthy. Two years of R&D, a food scientist, and dozens of cold calls later, Three Wishes launched in late 2019.

They covered:

🥣 Why cereal was broken and why grain-free, minimal-ingredient, high-protein was the obvious answer that nobody had actually built yet.

📞 The shameless, old-school grind behind retail distribution: tracking down the Northeast Whole Foods buyer at Fancy Food with a Ziploc bag of samples, calling Wegmans for nearly a year straight before landing the account.

💸 The early fundraising reality: why investor rejections were less about the product and more about two first-time product founders who hadn't yet earned the credibility to match their conviction.

🧠 What it's actually like to run a company together as a married couple.

🌍 Margaret's origin story: growing up as an immigrant, being sent solo to China at 19 by her father to source product, and how that forged the "figure it out" mentality she brings to every operational crisis.

🌱 How Three Wishes thinks about the next chapter: evolving the brand from homemade to "big boy," new packaging, and threading the needle between fun and functional without looking like a kids' only product or a diet food.

In this episode of WellBuilt, Jon sat down with Emily McCarthy, Co-Founder and Chief Community Officer of GORUCK.

Emily traces the origins of GORUCK from her time as a CIA case officer operating solo across West Africa, to building an event and community empire around a simple idea: walking with weight. She unpacks how a military-issue bag Jason built her in a rebel-held region of Côte d'Ivoire became the blueprint for the GR1, how GORUCK went from lending out bricks at 1am in New York City to 700+ Ruck Clubs worldwide, and why she believes rucking is on its way to becoming bigger than running.

They covered:

🎒 How rucking was born not in a gym or a startup office, but in the field — Jason training as a Green Beret, Emily rucking through West Africa on Intel operations, both unknowingly building the foundation for a brand.

🧱 The scrappy, absurd early days: Jason showing up to events with Home Depot bricks in a rental car, loaning out bags to prove they wouldn't fail, going from $100K to $12M in just a few years.

🌍 How Emily's CIA tradecraft — spotting, assessing, building community in austere environments — became the direct blueprint for GORUCK's event and Ruck Club model.

💪 Why rucking hits the sweet spot of cardio + strength + community, and how Emily is now focused on making it more accessible to women through initiatives like the Mother Rucker 5K series.

🧫 The pandemic pivot: how Emily opened a Google Drive folder of 100+ city scavenger hunts to the world, and how that moment became one of GORUCK's most powerful community moves.

🏃‍♀️ Where GORUCK is headed — from a Costa Rica Ruck & Flow retreat for women to D-Day events in France, and a bold goal: making rucking bigger than running.