“Because of the Coya program, I know I will now live longer.” — a portfolio founder, relayed by Jeff Baxter, Partner and Head of Platform at 11 Tribes Ventures.
Most venture firms will tell you they invest in the founder as much as the business. Very few actually put a number on that investment the way 11 Tribes does.
The Chicago-based VC allocates 2% of every fund back into the personal health and performance of the founders it backs. Said another way: they are betting on the idea that a whole, well-rested human builds a better company than a depleted one. So, when Jeff Baxter and his team went looking for a way to make good on that thesis, they weren’t short on options, but they needed a program that would actually get founders to pay attention and commit.
Pre-Coya Reality
Before Coya, 11 Tribes had been piecing together a patchwork of wellness and performance programs for their founders. Some good, but none were particularly sticky. To be fair, getting a founder’s attention is hard enough on a normal day. Getting them to actually engage with a fragmented set of health resources, on top of everything else competing for their attention, can seem nearly impossible.
So, it’s safe to say that the firm wasn’t interested in another benefit sitting unused in a Slack channel. They wanted a singular offering that was comprehensive enough to matter and simultaneously simple enough that even someone who was mid-raise or mid-crisis would feel compelled to open the app.
As many leaders do, Jeff piloted the Coya program himself first. Then he brought in a portfolio founder the team knew was, in Jeff’s words, “burning it at both ends”. Rest was almost always the first thing to get cut from his list of priorities.
That founder came out the other side of the Coya program and told Jeff plainly that the program had changed his odds of a long life. After that, the good word spread quickly, and twenty-six members affiliated with 11 Tribes (founders and firm alike) have now gone through Coya.
The Experience
When the invitation went out to a cohort of founders, reactions ranged from immediate yes to open suspicion. “I think my initial reaction is like, this is too good to be true,” said Erik Severinghaus, co-founder and co-CEO of Bloomfilter. “Many VCs talk a big game about trying to support entrepreneurs. Very few actually invest in doing it.” Others got there faster. “First impressions of the program and getting that email were almost an immediate yes,” said Morgan Friedman, co-founder of GoNanas, “from both my business partner and I.”
Truth be told, what moved people wasn’t the wearable itself. Founders tend to be a decidedly tech-savvy bunch, and many of them already had a wearable, or had at least worn one in the past. What they wanted from their wearable went beyond the dashboard: it was a clear path to decision.
Anthony Sterns, founder and CEO of iRxReminder, described the moment it clicked: “Just getting the wearable and seeing some of the data insight in the beginning, I began to realize very quickly that I still had a lot of work to do. I now sleep an extra hour a night, which is a crazy amount.”
Erik described the impact of the program as learning when to stay in an activated, executing state, and when to deliberately down-cycle into rest so he could come back sharper.
Dr. Christine Izuakor, founder and CEO of Cyber Pop-up, named the risk that makes founders need this kind of structure in the first place: “As entrepreneurs, it’s very easy to become obsessed and have tunnel vision, and all of those things are helpful to the business in some ways. But without controls and without guardrails, it can be detrimental.”
The Ripple Effect
For most companies, the ripple effect of a Coya cohort is a byproduct. For 11 Tribes, it was the entire investment thesis. The firm whole-heartedly believes that health improvements trickle outward into better leadership and better companies. And the growth from one pilot founder to 26 affiliated members over a matter of months suggests that bet is paying off.
“The biggest impact of the program on me was definitely tying in the data with my stress. That was probably my biggest focus going into it,” shared Robert Beadle, co-founder and COO of Attend. Consistency, not intensity, is what allowed Robert to finally build routines durable enough to survive a founder’s schedule rather than collapsing under it.
The Results
While the founders worked through the program as a cohort, Jeff Baxter went through his own individual coaching engagement with Coach Kaelene Curry. This included a five-session arc that moved sequentially through sleep and self-care, nutrition and hydration, movement and immune function, and environment and mindset.
The biggest win on Jeff’s report card: 77 additional minutes of sleep per night, enough to earn him the title of Coya’s all-time sleep leader. His time-asleep trendline also held positive straight through the holiday stretch, which is historically the hardest window of the year to protect a routine for obvious reasons.
It’s also worth noting that not every metric on Jeff’s report moved in a straight line upward. His sleep quality percentage and HRV growth both dipped slightly over the same window – a reminder that a body under real-world stress doesn’t improve on command just because the sleep numbers do. Coya’s coaching model treats that kind of mixed data as information, not failure. The recommendations given in response to that information were specific rather than aspirational:
– Sustaining a 1:1 sit-to-stand ratio through the workday
– A 30-60-90 movement rule
– Continued intentionality in Jeff’s morning and evening routines
Control the controllables, and you will bend – not break – under the pressure life will inevitably apply during certain seasons.
Post-Cohort Takeaway
A founder who is well built performs better, longer, and leads better teams because of it. 11 Tribes now has ample evidence of this, a founder who now believes he’ll live a longer life because of the program, and a case study the firm is eager to put in front of every founder they haven’t reached yet.
As Christine put it, thinking about the founders outside her cohort who haven’t had this kind of insight yet: “It almost makes me sad to know that every founder might not get to go through this kind of program, because you just don’t know what you don’t know.”
