Why I Am So Excited About Noom
Noom is an extraordinary brand with a laudable vision – to intentionally design technology to foster human flourishing and longevity. The passion and hard work of Saeju Jeong and Artem Petakov, Noom’s visionary and talented co-Founders, along with that of so many of Noom’s talented team, built a powerful brand for human behavior change. I’m humbled to accept the immense responsibility of stewarding such an important brand.
At Noom we serve a higher purpose. Our co-Founder Saeju put it best: “many companies talk about their products in high-minded terms, but ours really does save lives by changing behavior to form healthy habits.” I look forward to furthering the company’s important mission by empowering our global team to drive disruptive innovation and accelerated growth.
From Connections & Dating to Health & Wellness
For the last 18 years I built up a company that I founded and took public on NASDAQ called The Meet Group. You may wonder what that has to do with health and wellness. The opportunities and challenges I faced and the experiences gained I think can prove relevant to Noom.
What I believe in most is the transformative power of innovation. I believe that unleashing the creativity of our team is central to how we will continue to grow and evolve. At my previous company, we were early to social networking, mobile apps, and live streaming video. Along the way, we built a thriving app portfolio by acquiring and integrating four other companies, delivering significant revenue and synergies.
One of the more relevant experiences that I want to highlight is building a sizable enterprise business. I believe the enterprise opportunity for Noom is large. I’d like to see us take our powerful consumer brand and continue to push into B2B and enterprise opportunities. I believe Noom for Work can make all of Noom’s programs available commercially for employers and health plans, representing a significant growth opportunity for the company.
What’s more, I believe in the power of community. A few months ago, the Surgeon General of the US issued an 80-page report showing loneliness and a lack of social support are major health risks, associated with issues like cardiovascular disease, dementia, depression and anxiety, writing:
“A world where we recognize that relationships are just as essential to our well-being as the air we breathe and the food we eat, is a world where everyone is healthier, physically and mentally.”
Vivek Murthy, Surgeon General of the United States
General Murthy made clear that community & social support is every bit a dimension of wellness as nutrition, sleep, mindfulness, and fitness. I’m excited to bring a passion for community to a leading healthcare company at a time when the medical importance of social relationships is now beginning to be understood.
What personally interested me most about Noom is its potential to put to work every aspect of my background – driving product innovation, extending a consumer product to the enterprise, building community, and designing a portfolio of brands through organic growth and M&A – to work in pursuit of a noble mission: “to help people everywhere lead healthier lives through behavior change.”
I’m thrilled now to put that same spirit of innovation and strategic dealmaking that drove so many tens of millions of social connections to work to driving an even greater number of positive health and wellness outcomes.
The Promise of Noom
As a brand, Noom stands alone in its potential to transform countless lives through human behavior change, promoting healthy habits and optimized living. Noom is about helping everyone everywhere lead healthier lives through behavior change, focused today on Noom Weight, Noom Med, Noom Mood, and Noom’s Diabetes Prevention Program (DPP), as well as Noom for Work which can make all of these programs available commercially for employers and health plans.
Real results with a personalized weight loss program
Take the quiz!
Noom Weight and DPP today are best-in-class and we believe our other programs can get there, too – but on all of these fronts, after people achieve their “scale victories,” we must explore ways to provide the cutting-edge technology and tools that provide utility and community as well, building further on what Noom has already done – not just to deepen engagement, but because community is itself a form of wellness. After all, when Noom extends the lifetime of its customers, it can extend their lifetimes.
Similarly, the opportunities to expand Noom Med and Noom for Work are massive: The US continues to struggle with population-wide metabolic health issues. Meanwhile, health systems, healthcare providers, employers, and payers are in dire need of programs and tools that can better our health and productivity. Because the Noom brand is science-backed, we are well positioned to partner with payers, health systems and physicians to help them provide continuity of care for patients and support their behavioral health journeys in ways that they are currently unequipped to manage. Likewise, as employers face issues like productivity shortages, burnout, talent turnover and absenteeism, they are more focused than ever on providing their people with programs to keep them healthy and engaged. The guidance of a trusted brand like Noom and our personalized programs can help them meet these challenges head on.
I firmly believe and have experienced that the most compelling pathway to outsized growth in the dynamic, ever-evolving wellness market is to operate at the leading edge, whether that means embracing novel technology with focus and discipline, launching innovative new products, or embracing business model innovation. The market for health & wellness is vast, Noom’s brand is powerful, and we need only build, buy, or partner for the right solutions to continue to deliver positive health outcomes to growing numbers of people.
WHY I’M OPTIMISTIC
Success in such a dynamic market requires building on our strong foundation with disruptive innovation and breakthrough creativity. All innovation begins the same mysterious way: as a stroke of insight inside a human mind. To transform insight into world-changing product, I believe we must do as music producer Rick Rubin has recently urged: “to follow the excitement.”
Great ideas command attention, and only with our attention can they thrive, such is the harmonic nature of innovation. My hope for Noom is to work together with a talented team to catalyze our natural creativity and continue to create products and technologies that can save lives.
While I have a great deal of conviction in these principles and ambitions, over the coming days, weeks, and months, I have a lot of listening and learning to do to understand how they can work best for Noom and the people we serve. The Noom team is extraordinary, having built a defining brand and improving millions of lives. Together, I look forward to solving challenging problems with innovative solutions to create the next chapter of Noom’s growth.
Let our natural wondering lead to conjectures that address problems that have solutions. Such is the prayer of the product optimist. Such is the way companies grow 100 times.
Let us together prove Noom, as big and as successful as it is, is still in its infancy.
