This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Tyler Smith, founder of Hundred Health. It has been edited for length and clarity.
I used to brag about how little sleep I got. It felt like a superpower: I could sleep just three or four hours a night, and still operate at a very high level.
That helped me get ahead early on. As a teen, I bused tables and sold firewood. By the time I was 19, I bought a house (which was possible because it was the subprime mortgage days). Having a mortgage gave me real responsibility at a young age.
It also got me thinking about a career. I couldn’t believe how much my real estate agent made on the sale. Her commission was about $13,000 — which seemed like $1 million to me at the time — and I thought she didn’t do a very good job. I realized that if I did good work in real estate, I could make even more.
I did well in real estate and developed software that took off
I dropped out of college to get into real estate. During the financial crisis, I found a niche helping banks sell foreclosures. In 2006 and 2007, I oversaw about 1,000 home sales a year and managed triple that number of properties.
I was working 14-hour days, seven days a week. It wasn’t a good life, but I was young enough that it didn’t matter. I fueled myself on energy drinks and embraced the fact that work was my life.
To help scale, I developed software to track my business’s transactions. Other brokerages inquired about what I was using, and soon I had clients paying $2,000 or $5,000 a month to use the software.
I was in the right place at the right time with the right product as real estate transactions went digital. By 2012, that software, SkySlope, was doing $12 million in annual revenue. In 2017, Fidelity bought a majority stake, valuing the company at more than $80 million.
I wanted to focus on my passion: health
That deal meant that I had enough money to never work again. I’m wired to build, though, so I planned to use my financial freedom to focus on something with purpose: a mission-driven business.
When I was 39, my wife and I were trying to have a child. I took a biological age test, which said my biological age was 47. That stopped me in my tracks, because my own father had died suddenly of a heart attack at 47.
The test showed me that what I was telling myself wasn’t true. I was working out and eating relatively healthy. I looked fit, but the data showed that what was happening inside my body didn’t match what was on the outside.
I spent over $1 million building a home wellness center
Once I saw that data, I couldn’t ignore it. I spent well over six figures hiring a top-notch healthcare team. My wife and I rented a 2,000 square-foot unit in Sacramento, which we transformed into our own personal wellness center. It had IV infusions, a hyperbaric chamber, a red light bed, cold plunges, massagers — basically anything you can name in the health and fitness world.
We were building a home in Napa and wanted to know which equipment we would actually use. We spent about $700,000 fitting out the Sacramento space, and eventually over $1 million building the wellness center in our home.
Today, I use the red light bed, oxygen therapy, and cold plunge almost daily. Other therapies — like massagers and bikes — didn’t make the final cut. I love the results of the hyperbaric chamber, but don’t like lying in it for an hour, so for now, that’s out of rotation.
I want to help others have more access to health information
I changed everything about my health and fitness, and because of that, everything in my life changed: my muscle mass and energy levels went through the roof, and my mood improved. I felt better than ever, and friends began to notice.
I know not everyone has the money and access I do. Most people have more data about their health than ever due to smart watches and wearable monitors, but they don’t have a team of doctors helping them use that information.
I started Hundred Health not only to provide data, but also to offer a personalized plan for what to do with it. I used to think that wealth was freedom, but now I know that health is — and I would like to help more people access that.
