Jason Karp – From Hedge Funds to Health and Wellness at HumanCo (First Meeting, EP.12)

Ted Seides – Allocator and Asset Management Expert

Jason Karp is the Founder and CEO of HumanCo, a mission-driven, disruptive holding company focused on investing in healthier living. Before diving into this endeavor, Jason had a very successful twenty-year career in the hedge fund industry, culminating in a six-year run as founder of Tourbillon Capital.

Our conversation covers Jason’s career in hedge funds across quant research, quantamental investing, and entrepreneurship. Along the way, we touch on lessons derived from checklists, poker, and chess, and discuss Jason’s sobering take on the hedge fund industry today.

We then turn to changes in his life, including moving from NYC to Austin and focusing on his lifelong passion for health and wellness. We discuss Jason’s autoimmune disease, testing the limits of human performance, and the sickness that led to the creation of Hu Kitchen with his wife and brother-in-law.

Lastly, we discuss the formation of HumanCo, a holding company investing in food and consumables that create clean solutions to common problems using only the highest quality ingredients. We cover the attractive attributes of consumable businesses, use of data and AI to source companies and improve inventory management, efficiency of a holding company structure, incubating companies, leveraging data science, and an example in the cannabis space to work on the controversy surrounding vaporization.