I never planned to build a health company.

I was five years old when my parents packed everything we owned into two suitcases and flew from Guangdong to San Francisco. This was 1984. China wasn't the China of today. My parents wanted one thing: a better life for their kid.

I don't remember much about the flight. I remember the apartment. Small. Cold in winter. My parents working shifts that started before I woke up and ended after I fell asleep. My mother would leave food on the counter with a note I couldn't read yet because I didn't know English. My father would come home smelling like kitchen grease and still ask me about school.

They never complained. Not once. They carried the weight of two lives — the one they left behind and the one they were trying to build — and they never let me see them buckle.

By twelve, I was selling baseball cards outside our building. Not because anyone told me to. Because I watched my parents work eighteen-hour days and something in me said: figure it out yourself. I got paid in cards. I learned what people wanted. I learned how to read a face. I learned that the kid who shows up every day eventually outsells the kid with better cards.

At fifteen, I got a job as a telemarketer. I was calling grown adults, reading scripts I barely believed in, getting hung up on forty times a day. Within six months I was managing people in their thirties. Most kids my age were worrying about prom. I was learning the only lesson that ever mattered in business: rejection is information. Every "no" teaches you what "yes" sounds like.

I dropped out of high school that same year. I know how that sounds. But I wasn't dropping out of learning — I was dropping into it. The classroom couldn't teach me what the phone could.

Here's the part of the story most people don't know.

At thirty-seven, I took one of our own genetic tests. Routine. I ran a genomics company — of course I was going to test myself. I expected clean results. A pat on the back from the data.

Instead, I found out I carry a gene mutation that significantly increases my risk of colon cancer.

I sat in my office for a long time after reading that. The building was quiet. Everyone had gone home. And I just sat there thinking about my kids' ages — how old they'd be in ten years, in twenty. About my father, who smelled like kitchen grease when he came home, who never got to slow down and take care of himself, who gave everything so I could have something.

I didn't cry. I got very still.

I thought about every company I'd ever built — the exits, the listing, the things people called success — and I remember thinking: none of it is a wall between me and that result. Money doesn't protect you from your own DNA.

That night I went home and sat with it. Not the science of it — I understood the science. The weight of it. The way a single piece of information can rearrange everything you thought you knew about your own future.

The weeks after were different. I started paying attention to things I'd always ignored — what I ate, how I slept, what I was actually putting into my body every morning. Not as a trend. As someone who suddenly understood that the margin between being here and not being here might be thinner than I'd assumed.

I read studies at midnight. I called doctors. I flew to meet researchers who'd spent decades studying preventive health. Not for a business plan. For myself. I was the patient. My own family was the reason.

And the more I learned, the more I realized how little I'd actually known — about nutrition, about what daily health really requires, about the gap between what most people take and what the science says actually matters.

We launched IM8 in December 2024. Within eleven months, we became the fastest growing supplements brand ever recorded, reaching $100 million in annual recurring revenue.

But the number I care about isn't the revenue. It's the messages. Thousands of them. People telling us their energy came back. That they're sleeping through the night for the first time in years. That their doctor noticed the difference. That's the number that matters.

In June 2025, Aryna Sabalenka — the world's number one tennis player — joined us. Not as a face on a billboard. As a partner and shareholder. Then in February 2026, Ollie Bearman, the youngest British F1 driver in history, came on board. Same deal. Partner. Shareholder. Friend.

These high-performance athletes aren't just ambassadors. They're partners, shareholders, and friends. They chose IM8 because they tested it, trusted it, and felt the difference.

None of us needs to do this. David doesn't need another business. Aryna doesn't need another endorsement. I don't need another company to run. We've all had success in our careers.

We choose to do this because we want IM8 to have a global impact on millions of lives. Because I think about my parents — who gave everything so I could have something — and I want to build something that gives back. Because I think about my kids, and I want them to see their father building something that actually matters.

IM8 is 90+ clinically dosed ingredients in one drink. It's NSF Certified for Sport. It was developed with scientists from Mayo Clinic, NASA, and Cedars-Sinai. It replaces the sixteen bottles I used to juggle every morning with one thing I actually trust.

I'm not going to tell you it'll change your life. I'm going to tell you it changed mine. And if you've ever sat with the feeling that you should be doing more for your health but you're not sure where to start — I built this for you. The same way I built it for myself, for my family, and for my kids.