- Jacob Peters, co-founder and CEO of Superpower, joins The Luba Show for a wide-ranging conversation about the subconscious patterns that drive founders, how childhood wounds shape ambition, the origins of Superpower after a near-fatal health crisis, and the practical tactics he uses to build a mission-driven team. Jacob is a serial entrepreneur who previously built Commsor (a community intelligence platform) and Launch House (an early-stage incubator). He and Luba have known each other for about five years, and the conversation moves fluidly between personal psychology, company-building philosophy, and the mechanics of health optimization.
The Subconscious as the Hidden Operating System
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Jacob frames his entire life story through the lens of the subconscious, describing it as the “iceberg under the surface” that processes every piece of information before conscious awareness kicks in.
- He uses the metaphor of a language model: just as an LLM has system-level pre-prompts that shape its outputs, humans have invisible pre-prompts running before every interaction, shaped by childhood experiences, fear, shame, and conditioning.
- His own early pre-prompts were “you’re not good enough,” “you suck,” “hide yourself,” rooted in a childhood where he felt ashamed and fearful of judgment. He recalls hiding behind his backpack in preschool when his mom came to pick him up.
- These pre-prompts drove him from a place of “lack and protectionism” rather than abundance, which he describes as “dirty fuel” versus “clean fuel” for ambition.
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He distinguishes between operating from a wounded subconscious (chip on the shoulder, proving something to yourself) versus operating from a higher state of consciousness (abundance, love, alignment with genuine impact).
- He is careful to note this is an ongoing oscillation, not a destination: “I would be lying if I said I have or ever will reach a level of subconscious mastery where the conscious abundance mindset is fully driving the show.”
- He warns that even becoming “too conscious” is a trap, because the ego will co-opt that narrative and create a new form of hubris.
Interceptive Awareness: The Body as Data
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A concept Jacob returns to repeatedly is “interceptive awareness,” the ability to sense your own biochemical state in real time.
- He argues most people in the digitally-tethered modern world have lost this ability entirely. Superpower’s mission is to restore it by giving people granular data on what is happening in their body subcutaneously.
- He describes neurotransmitter dominance states (serotonergic, dopaminergic, gabaergic, acetylcholinergic) and how they map to whether someone is in fight-or-flight, focused, scattered, sleepy, or alert.
- He ties this directly to decision-making quality: if you don’t know your own biochemical state, you can’t make optimal choices, whether in recruiting, writing ads, or evaluating a co-founder.
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Jacob practices transcendental meditation, which he started six months ago through a Stanford professor who coaches CEOs.
- He describes a session where he hallucinated a FaceTime call from his future self telling him “just keep going” about Superpower, which he found euphoric and motivating.
- He sees TM as a tool for accessing altered brain wave states (theta and delta) that allow subconscious material to surface.
Origin Story: Legos, Hacking, and the First Arbitrage
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Jacob grew up in Virginia with a father in the military. His first business was buying and reselling Legos online with his brother when they were 14 and 15.
- They discovered that sealed, mint-condition Lego sets appreciate in value like scarce assets (comparable to gold or bitcoin), and that people were throwing away or donating sets worth 10 to 100x what they thought.
- They almost got shut down by local police after posting a Craigslist ad looking for another 14-year-old to help sort Legos, which triggered a sting operation that their parents had to intervene in.
- Jacob still has close to a metric ton of Legos in his parents’ basement and recently pre-ordered the $1,000+ Star Wars Death Star set (8,000 pieces).
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The Lego business taught him the concept of arbitrage: identifying a gap between the current state and the ideal state, then exploiting it. He sees this as the fundamental nature of all business-building.
- He later applied this thinking to technology, building a Twitter scraper with his brother that found people posting screenshots of flight confirmation emails, which could be used to edit travel bookings with just a confirmation number and last name. They won a hackathon with this project.
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After university, he accidentally started New York City’s largest AI and data science community (pre-LLM era, around 2014), which ballooned to 9,000 people. Managing it led him to build Commsor, a “Salesforce for community and go-to-market teams” that centralized community data for marketing intelligence. The company grew exponentially during the pandemic and is still a big company today.
Co-Founder Selection and the Power of Gut Intelligence
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Jacob has had three sets of co-founders across three venture-backed businesses and considers co-founder misalignment the number one cause of company failure, based on his experience helping nearly a thousand startups through Launch House.
- His tactical advice for evaluating co-founders centers on interceptive awareness: pay attention to how someone’s presence makes you feel in your body. “Do I just feel good in my gut when I interact with them, or is there something weird or subconscious coming up?”
- He admits he ignored gut feelings in past partnerships because his rational mind overrode them, and he now considers that gut data to be as important as any spreadsheet.
- He extends this principle beyond co-founders: the team chooses paid ad creative based on which assets “feel good” and evoke emotion, and he edits cold emails until he can feel an emotional twinge when reading them.
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He acknowledges that not everyone on his team of ~40 is on a transcendental meditation track, so the key is giving people a language and framework for these concepts so they can set intentions around developing awareness.
Building a “Cracked” Team and the Blood Oath
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Jacob describes Superpower’s culture as intense: most of the team works roughly 996/997 (9am to 9pm, 6-7 days a week), and the company has had significant intentional attrition because the culture is so defined that mismatches self-select out.
- About 15 team members are former venture-backed founders who could easily start their own seed-funded AI companies but choose to stay because they believe in the mission and want to work alongside similarly talented people. “Talent begets talent begets talent.”
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To cement mission commitment, Jacob created a blood oath ceremony at a team retreat: he placed a red ink pad and a box of fingerprint lancets next to a poster board with the company mission (“fundamentally change the trajectory of human health”) and invited everyone to thumbprint it in blood. All 43 out of 43 people participated, including some who were visibly shocked.
- Three employees have gotten Superpower tattoos (a fourth may be coming). Jacob himself has not, because he has concerns about tattoo ink containing heavy metals that accumulate in lymph nodes, and he views every decision through a health lens.
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He frames recruiting as a “cold start problem”: you must get the first few extraordinary people to set the bar, and everything compounds from there. For Superpower, that nucleus came from his co-founder Kevin’s batchmates, a group of elite technical founders whose company was winding down. Jacob flew around the country, talked to their families, and wrote an eight-page “love letter” Notion document to recruit them.
The Role of Delusion and Dissociation
- Jacob argues that a calibrated level of self-delusion is essential for recruiting and fundraising: “You can recruit better than you think you can. You really, really can.”
- His own delusion originated as a dissociative protection mechanism. He describes a household where his mother would yell and reprimand frequently, and his response was to dissociate, tune out, and create his own internal world. This became a “bug” (sometimes toxically positive, missing data) but also a “feature” (bedrock for dreaming big and taking swings others wouldn’t).
- He sees life as “a game of inches” where tiny advantages in internal programming, biochemical mastery, and subconscious pre-prompts compound into dramatically different outcomes in conversations and decisions.
What Makes Someone Prolific: An Eight-Factor Framework
- Jacob outlines eight factors that determine whether someone becomes deeply prolific, based on the thought experiment of a quantum computer that could perfectly predict every life trajectory if it knew every variable:
- Physical environment: Exposure to toxins (he had a mercury level of 34 at one point, which he estimates cost him a standard deviation of IQ points), nutrient levels in pregnancy, even natural vs. C-section birth and the mother’s vaginal microbiome can permanently affect brain wiring and immune function.
- Subconscious programming: The invisible pre-prompts installed in childhood that tell you what you can or cannot do.
- Early social circle and network: Whether you were surrounded by knowledgeable, ambitious people or not. “If you are around smarter, more ambitious people, you’re going to do smarter, more ambitious things sooner.”
- Knowledge accumulation: What you feed your mind and when you started. Jacob feels he was “behind” peers who started earlier, having only begun serious learning at age 20.
- Leverage: Whether you accumulated disproportionate output for your input.
- Compounding: Whether you took advantage of nonlinear growth.
- Genetics: Raw biological capability for high-dimensional problem-solving, which varies on a spectrum.
- (The eighth was mentioned but the framework cut off before he could list it explicitly; the conversation moved on.)
The Genesis of Superpower
- Three and a half years ago, Jacob nearly died. He was hospitalized for multiple months, underwent multiple surgeries including removal of his large intestine, and received a multi-million dollar bill that he describes as entirely unnecessary, calling the American healthcare system “neither health nor care” and himself “a very lucrative billing opportunity.”
- While hospitalized, he was struck by the terrible user experience: outdated Windows 95-era EMR systems, beeping monitors, and a fragmented experience from ER intake to discharge. As a technologist, he told himself: “If I ever get out of here, I’m going to start a company to fix this.”
- After his health story went viral on Twitter, he was connected to elite concierge doctors who charge $50,000-$300,000/year and who spend hours connecting dots across all body systems. He saw what healthcare could look like with aligned incentives and deep expertise, and identified the arbitrage: this level of care existed for the wealthy but was inaccessible to everyone else.
- He spent a year and a half getting the company off the ground, during which he recruited Kevin (his co-founder from Launch House, whom he considers the best technical founder to come through the community) and Max (a founder in Australia who was independently building a similar health company). Jacob and Max had a three-hour conversation, realized they were building the same thing, and decided to merge. Jacob describes the dynamic with Max as “effortless” and “almost ordained,” in contrast to the intense recruiting hustle required for other hires.
Personal Values and Mission
- Jacob keeps printed pages of his personal values and mission statement on his wall next to his bed, which he rereads every morning. The values include:
- Health first: Without energetic capacity, nothing else is possible.
- Community first: He gets depressed when operating too much as a lone wolf; life is better shared.
- Congruence: Alignment between what he says and what he feels; staying focused on reality rather than rhetoric.
- Love: Framed as a verb, actively loving. He argues that showing up hardcore and direct is itself an expression of love.
- Believe in magic: His personal favorite. He holds two worldviews simultaneously: the cold, rational, perfectly predictable quantum computer model, and a more spiritual, magical view where synchronicities are destined and life conspires in your favor. He finds beauty in operating from both.
Stakeholder Alignment and Virality
- Jacob is deliberate about choosing investors and stakeholders who are genuinely mission-aligned, citing Cyan Banister as an example.
- He contrasts Superpower with companies like Rippling, where he estimates stakeholder passion at “2 out of 10” and no one is championing the narrative beyond their job description. Even with big customers and famous investors, the lack of narrative alignment limits word-of-mouth impact.
- He frames virality as a function of the number of nodes, the reach of those nodes, and the cohesion of the message. Superpower benefits from a unified narrative across all stakeholders (customers, investors, teammates, advisors) around a topic humans deeply care about: their own health and vitality.
Who He Looks Up to and What He Wants to Be Remembered For
- Founders he admires include John (founder of Wander), Justin Mares (founder of TrueMed HSA Payments and Kettle & Fire), and Palmer Lucieri (founder of Anduril), whom he respects for making defense tech cool and mission-driven.
- When asked what he hopes people will remember about him 20 years from now, he says: “That he was really kind and he really cared.”