Why we are building Halor

You've Been Reading the Wrong Dashboard

Fifteen years stress-testing technology bets taught me how to separate durable signal from narrative-driven hype. Then I tried to apply that same filter to my own health.

I spent more than a decade at Temasek learning how to tell the difference between a real future and a well-told story. As an investor my job was to take a technology bet — fintech, AI, dual-use, often before any of it was obvious — and stress-test it until either the thesis broke or it didn't. You develop a framework for that work. You have to. Early-stage venture is almost pure noise, and the entire job is building a signal detector you can trust under pressure.

Here is what took me a decade to notice: I had a rigorous, battle-tested framework for every major decision in my professional life, and almost none of it for the single asset that determines whether I'm alive and functional at 65+. It led me to work with founding teams of concierge clinics and health-tech startups. I became, by any reasonable definition, a health solutions power user. Eventually I co-founded Halor — building the healthspan co-pilot for people who don't want to drop $20,000+ a year on a concierge clinic membership.

That's the flag I want to plant. Not my supplement stack. Something more uncomfortable: the information environment around health is as polluted as early-stage venture investing, and most high performers don't have a filter for it.

The Filter

The filter is really just two questions. Is this a real signal, or narrative dressed up as data? And does it map to a decision you can actually act on? Run a technology bet through those and most fall apart. The interesting thing is what happens when you point the same two questions at your own body.

Take the standard cholesterol panel — the one your annual physical runs, the one most people treat as a clean bill of health. Run it through the filter and it wobbles. It weighs the cholesterol your blood is carrying; it doesn't count the particles that actually drive the risk — and the two can point in opposite directions. A "normal" result can sit right on top of real, accumulating danger.

Now point the filter at your body weight and BMI. You can hold a "healthy" BMI while carrying the visceral fat that quietly drives metabolic risk. The better instrument already exists: a DEXA scan separates visceral fat from muscle from bone and isolates the dangerous fat from the harmless kind. Same shape as the standard cholesterol panel — the crude number everyone trusts, and the precise one almost no one uses.

The filter isn't just a tool. It's a way of asking whether something is significant. And in this space — more noise than almost anywhere — that question is worth asking slowly.

Then it got personal

The moment wasn't dramatic. That was the problem.

I was doing everything right. Or thought I was. The ring. The tracking. Clean eating. Training. A small library of longevity podcasts on autoplay. I had the data, the habits, the story I told myself.

Then the story broke.

My lipids. I'd had the numbers for years and never had anyone really making sense of them for me. Not total cholesterol. Not LDL. I found out about ApoB, Lp(a) and CCTAs by coincidence. The real cardiovascular picture. When I finally had that conversation, I realized I'd been reading the wrong dashboard for ten years.

Then a retinal detachment. No warning. The body keeps its own timeline and it does not negotiate.

And then I started having the same conversation with friends. Not patients. Peers.

One survived a heart attack and couldn't find anyone to tell him what an effective secondary-prevention protocol looks like. Others on atherosclerosis imaging, cancer diagnostics, metabolic and hormonal treatment decisions. Real questions. Serious stakes. Not one of them answered by closing a ring.

Every conversation, the same shape. Someone who thought they were on top of it, finding out they weren't. Not careless. Just lacking an effective system to take control of their health in the same way they run their business.

The most expensive mistake here isn't buying the wrong app, program and membership. It's buying the presumably right one and deciding you've got it covered.

I know. I made it.

The thing I've started being candid about

Most smart, high-performing people in my circle are not being rigorous about their health. They have the ring, they track the sleep, they've heard enough Huberman to speak the language, they got a physical last year and the numbers were "fine". And almost none of them know whether they have plaque quietly accumulating in their arteries right now, or whether the population-level screening schedule is actually catching what they specifically need it to catch.

They've mistaken being interested in the topic for being rigorous about the thing that matters.

Here's the belief I think is flat wrong: "I eat well, I supplement, I track my data — I'm on top of this." It's not that those things don't matter; they do. But they're the visible 20%. The streetlight. A health aesthetic, not a health strategy.

And the hotter take: high performers who won't engage with personalized screening and clinical protocols are making an emotional decision and calling it a rational one. I've watched smart people spend thousands on supplements with thin evidence and refuse — with real heat — to have an honest conversation about the preventive medications their physician might actually recommend. Not because the evidence isn't there. Because "I'll do it through lifestyle" feels virtuous and a prescription doesn't.

That's not rigor. That's identity. The same person who would never let ideology beat evidence in a boardroom lets it win in a doctor's office. I was that person. The system most of us use to evaluate our own health is built for reassurance, not accuracy — and we're all too smart to keep settling for reassurance.

Two ways tracking betrays you

One everyone admits: data overload. Every morning becomes a verdict — did I earn my readiness score, why is my HRV down — and what was supposed to be empowering turns into low-grade dread you manage by gaming the metric instead of chasing the goal.

The other almost nobody admits, and it took me too long to see in myself: the aperture problem. When you're deep in the tracking world, you start believing the things you track are the things that matter. Sleep, steps, morning sunlight. Meanwhile you haven't had a colonoscopy or a skin check, you don't know your ApoB, fasting insulin, visceral fat or appendicular lean mass, you've never had an advanced imaging conversation, and you haven't thought about your family cancer history in a decade. Your watch says you're crushing it. The diagnostic you never ran says something else. You covered the visible 20%. The 80% that decides whether you make it to 65+ intact is sitting in a blind spot.

CEO of your own health

So when a friend asks me "which longevity hacks should I use?" I no longer answer the question. I ask four questions first. Awareness: do you actually know what's likely to kill or disable you — cardiovascular, cancer, neurodegenerative, sarcopenia and osteoporosis? Education: have you built a basic mental model and healthspan framework? Lifestyle: do you have a sustainable approach to sleep, exercise, nutrition, and stress? Medical: do you have a physician who'll act as your healthspan advocate, proactively address cardiometabolic risks, take cancer screening cadence seriously, and engage with pharmacotherapy on the evidence — or is your "doctor relationship" a twelve-minute annual physical?

And here's my spicy take: everyone is experimenting with AI chatbots, and I think that's largely premature. AI chatbots work brilliantly for people who already have the map — but the people who most need help are precisely the ones who don't know what to ask. Drop a chatbot in front of them and it just reflects their own biases back in more articulate language. That's not a health tool. That's a confidence machine.

The real unlock — what we are building Halor around — is making you the CEO of your own health. The tools are the copilot. You're the CEO. Your physician is the senior advisor — chosen carefully, briefed properly, not the autopilot and not the oracle. Anything that pretends to replace the CEO role is selling you something that won't work.

I'll own the obvious objection. I've spent tens of thousands of dollars over five-plus years — trackers, CGMs, coaching apps, concierge clinics — and most of it ended up in a drawer. But the cost-effective path exists. It starts with a thorough understanding of healthspan, then enabling you to navigate the existing healthcare system to drive real results. Not free — out-of-pocket spend is part of it — but a fraction of concierge prices.

What I'm still genuinely unsure about: the science, the technology, the capability all exist. The open question is whether medicine itself is ready to flip — from sick-care-focused Medicine 2.0 to prevention-focused Medicine 3.0. That switch is underway. It isn't finished.

The move

Stop reading. Stop listening.

I'm serious. Stop buying another book. Stop adding another podcast to the queue. Stop bookmarking another Substack. I love a good longevity essay as much as anyone — but for most people reading this, more content is just the comfortable plateau where good intentions go to die. It feels productive. It isn't.

Operationalize. Two things, in order.

One. Adopt a concrete framework and run real lifestyle protocols. Not vibes. Targets. Protein grams. Zone 2 minutes a week. Strength sessions. Sleep windows. Screen-off times. Write them down. Track 90 days. Adjust.

Two. Find a physician who'll actually partner with you — runs your critical biomarkers, takes your family history and screening cadence seriously, engages with pharmacotherapy on the evidence, not on reflex.

That's it. That's the move.

Everything else — including most of what's in your app store — is decoration on a foundation you haven't poured yet.

The tools support the work. They never replace it.

— Ben, Co-founder, Halor