Elysium Health's packaging of its nutraceutical supplement resembles a luxury cosmetics brand, perhaps hoping to capture the same demographic that spends hundreds of pounds a year on luxury cosmetics.

​Although Elysium Health is a young startup, that is curiously branded like a luxury cosmetics company, with an MIT-educated scientist as one of the founders to give the perception of added legitimacy (who also had previously had been involved with a pharmaceutical company that eventually was acquired by GlaxoSmithKline), I was curious about exactly what was in this "anti-ageing" pill.

On the website, the "Basis" pill is formulated with 2 ingredients: Nicotinamide Riboside and Pterostilbene. According to the FDA, and the European Commission, all dietary supplements have to disclose the dosage of each ingredient in the label. On the Elysium Health website, I was able to browse their label:

Essentially 1 capsule has the equivalent of 125mg Nicotinamide Riboside and 25mg Pterostilbene.

Nicotinamide Riboside (NR) is a form of vitamin B3 that is a precursor to Nicotinamide adeninine dinucleotide [NAD+ (oxidized form) and NADH (reduced form)] which is a coenzyme found in all living cells. Forms of vitamin B3 include Nicotinic Acid (Na, also called Niacin), Nicotinamide (Nam, also called Niacinamide) and Nicotinamide riboside (NR).

NAD+/NADH has been studied for decades, and related to cellular energy and regeneration. Melatonin also preserves NADH levels under oxidative stress.
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Cigarettes also contain nicotine (the supposedly "addictive" ingredient that has been given a bad rep in the media) which actually turns into nicotinamide or niacinamide in the body, increasing a feeling of relaxation and calmness. Of course, cigarettes also have other toxins and chemicals such as bleach, that lead to accelerated cellular damage; however the nicotine itself in cigarettes is probably not all different from taking a niacin supplement.

​Elysium Health's Basis pill appears to me, an expensive version of what is already available on the market today. If we do a price comparison:

Basis- 1 month supply (60 pills-2xday) $50

Life Extension- Optimized Resveratrol with Nicotinamide Riboside, 1 month supply (30pills-1xday) $31.50

Nature's Way (fast-acting and not time-released) Niacin 100mg, 100 capsules, 50 day supply (100 pills-2xday) $3.84
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I also think eating a healthy diet full of the colours of the rainbow- with lots of fruit and vegetables and fresh juices is actually more efficient in absorbing nutrients than taking a bunch of supplements. When I was doing my undergraduate degree, my diet at that time consisted of Caffé Mochas in the morning and afternoon, cereal for breakfast and perhaps a bagel for dinner. This lack of nutrition and high consumption of caffeine lead to sleeping disturbances and feelings of depression and anxiety and when I was referred to university health, no one asked me about my diet; instead they sent me to see the university psychiatrist who was quick to put me on a cocktail of anti-depressants, ADHD and anti-anxiety meds after talking to me for 5 minutes.

Organic fruit and veg box delivery from UK's Riverford Organic Farmers

However, curiously at the time, I was attracted to melatonin and began taking melatonin 10mg nightly, and eventually stopped all the other medications. As a consequence, I recovered from malnutrition, and the other malnutrition-related behavioural disorders I had been suffering from at the time. In addition to lengthening telomeres, melatonin regulates the circadian rhythm and enhances DNA repair, and boosts the production of serotonin during the day, which leads to an elevated feeling of well-being. Melatonin is a hormone produced by the pineal gland in the brain that is also responsible for the regeneration of the brain during sleep.

I think it is important to know that a single pill isn't going to solve anyone's problems. It really is a combination of exercise, diet and personalised nutrition and supplementation that leads to overall good health.


By Sierra Choi
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[Disclaimer: This article is not intended to diagnose nor treat any diseases and are solely the opinions of the author.]

​Thomas Jefferson did not offer any public response to the personal attacks and he simply ignored that it ever happened. He went on to serve two terms as President, and post-retrospective DNA evidence later confirmed that the Jefferson family shared DNA with the Hemings children.
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The reason why Thomas Jefferson did not condemn the writer who outed him to the public nor did he attempt to even refute the information was due to his preference for "newspapers without government"over "government without newspapers". Jefferson was the key Founding Father who supported a free press:

This has been the tradition that has been in place in America for more than two centuries. It is naturally a given that when people in the public eye are caricatured and their private lives put on display in the name of celebrity gossip, political satire and general sensationalism, the subjects usually have no definable rights into privacy.

In The Right to Privacy (1997) authors Ellen Alderman and Caroline Kennedy give various accounts in which ordinary citizens have come up against intrusions by the government, businesses, news media, their own neighbours, in addition to patients' right to refuse further medical treatment, people suing squelch reporting by the media, and the intrusion of the press into the lives of people- private and public; and the bottom line is that the right to privacy is not a right in the United States. Having grown up in the public eye, Caroline Kennedy writes lucidly about many of these issues, and that a person in the public eye basically has no privacy protections.

​What might have been left of these illusory privacy rights have been further eroded by government intrusion into the monitoring of private individuals as released in the Edward Snowden documents and the advent of social media networks and search engines which have created an altered perception of online experiences by the active censorship of information and the subsequent creation of a business model that gathers information about people to sell to various businesses.

Peter Thiel has recently published an op-piece in the New York Times entitled: The Online Privacy Debate Won't End With Gawker. Having been outed as gay in 2007 by a Gawker editor before he had been ready to come out to the public, Mr. Thiel took 9 years to plan his revenge, and subsequently fund the lawsuit that would bring the publication down. Although one can certain agree with Mr. Thiel on the various injustices that gay men and women had to navigate through in the post-modern world, I wonder if Mr. Thiel realises that he has opened up the Pandora's box into the true, underlying intrusions of online privacy? From Facebook to Palantir, Mr. Thiel is making an argument against the various companies that have given him the power to take down a publication such as the Gawker. Although the particular case that Mr. Thiel had funded against the Gawker, already had legal precedents (i.e. "being photographed and filmed in a private place without consent"); his actions in the public eye have now cast a doubt upon the social networks and companies that have sold people's private information for a hefty sum.

Thomas Jefferson set a precedent in 1802 that a free press, even if one condemned him or personally attacked him, was a necessary evil for "newspapers without government." In 2016, two hundred and fourteen years later, Peter Thiel has set an entirely new precedent challenging that view.
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Peter Thiel writes, "Gawker violated my privacy and cashed in on it." This is true, and one has to sympathise with Mr. Thiel. However, what if all the online users of Facebook and Google said the same thing? "Facebook violated my privacy and cashed in on it?" We could be in for a new revolution, one that puts privacy on the fast-track towards legal reform, and it could be that Mr. Thiel has unwittingly begun a dialogue into the end of social networks and companies like Google, Palantir, doubleclick and many others that financially benefit from tracking and selling users' private information. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos said recently at the Recode conference that "seek revenge and you should dig two graves, one for yourself."
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A few months ago, I became acquainted with Sandy Wright, who was just on his way to do an elective placement at a paediatric hospital in Argentina as the final part of his medical degree at University College London, my alma mater. When he got back, we had time to catch up and he told me about the different projects he has been working on since then.
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​Although Sandy recently graduated with two medical degrees (MBBS BSc), his main passion is working in the creative industries. He has launched two startups: the first is the creative consultancy, Little Less Known, which he co-founded two years ago with a couple of friends as he was doing his bachelors degree. Little Less Known works with independent UK businesses to champion unique local spots that have not reached mass appeal. They also work with entrepreneurs and creatives who want to showcase their startups or skills. Founders and businesses are filmed in a distinctively post-modern way that defies the typical corporate video.

​Some of the Little Less Known businesses they have covered include Ernest Wright & Sons, a traditional scissors makers in Sheffield; Duke Studios, a co-working space in Leeds to Hoxton North, a coffee shop and wine bar in their hometown of Harrogate. They have also profiled artists such as Horace Panter, who is also a bassist from the band "The Specials"; and worked with startups such as PropertyScape. In addition, the team at Little Less Known have also filmed and produced videos for food and music festivals, charities, crowdfunding campaigns and local events around London that cater to entrepreneurs.

​Sandy also subscribes to Doctorpreneurs, an online platform that brings together a compendium of doctors around the world who are keen on going into entrepreneurship and focuses on MedTech health care startups. Sandy applied to go into medical school when he was eighteen years old, and it was the combination of the academic, clinical and science components all rolled into one which first drew him towards medicine. In his third year, he focused on pharmacology, a broad subject that exposed him to the fundamental principles of drug-receptor interactions as well as allowing him to apply pharmacological principles in the laboratory.

We had a very extended chat about the pharmaceutical industry and Sandy tells me that a book that really changed his outlook was by the British physician Ben Goldacre who had written Bad Pharma: How Drug Companies Mislead Doctors and Harm Patients, which dealt with various issues within the pharma industry.
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One of the differences between the U.S. and the U.K. is that although pharmaceutical companies can literally "buy" the opinions of doctors in the U.S., in the U.K. doctors must declare all conflicts of interest, especially if they are taking commissions from the pharmaceutical companies to endorse their drugs, and remove themselves from any decision making bodies as outlined in the ethical guidance from the General Medical Council.

As a medical student at UCL, the concept of polypharmacy (ie, multiple prescriptions and medications) is something that needs to be regularly reviewed by medical professionals. In Sandy's training, doctors have been taught to question whether a patient needs to be on multiple medications? Do the side effect profiles benefit and outweigh the risks? The general perception of his medical training was more on the stress on the importance of actual benefit for the patient as a whole to ensure patients aren't on unnecessary drugs that may actually cause more harm than good. This seems to be the opposite of medical practice in the U.S., which has been criticised as propagating a pill-popping culture.
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We also had a brief off-topic chat about homeopathic medicines, and Sandy tells me that is something not generally taught at U.K. medical schools. He emphasised how medications provided on the NHS are normally supported by a body of high quality trials and evidence. Often this is lacking with complementary and alternative medications. What Sandy found more exciting was the exciting advancements in personalized medicine and targeted treatments, particularly the new proton beam therapy centre currently being built at University College London Hospitals (UCLH).

​Sandy recently launched a second startup that began as an extension to Little Less Known, but became its own entity over the past year. By this coming December, his second company will launch a mobile application called STAMP that allows users to discover and experience the best independent places they have been to around cities in the U.K. He intends for the app to be available in Leeds, where he is from, as a testing ground before becoming available in London.
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Little Less Known currently offers a video package for early stage companies. From £1000, the team will film for a day and produce two videos. The first is a Little Less Known style video that focuses on the Founders and the product in order to showcase the startup. This video is usually distributed to various online platforms. The second is a promotional video for the company to spec as they wish. This could be a promotional video for their website of a specific series of content on their product.

​I asked Sandy what his plans were for 5-10 years in the future? Would he be a doctor at National Health Service (NHS) or would he take his current startups further? Although his intellectual curiosity had taken him to one of the best medical schools in the U.K., many junior doctors are becoming disillusioned with the health service due to the recent government changes in NHS contracts as a result of government plans to establish a seven day service. Although there are merits to this idea, Sandy tells me currently there isn't a credible plan to ensure there is appropriate cover and support within a seven day service. Ultimately, this would result in a lower quality of care for people in general, as there wouldn’t be enough healthcare staff, and without proper staff cover, there's a risk doctors would be overstretched and overworked.

Ultimately though, Sandy's passions have steered him towards becoming a founder of two creative companies, and he hopes to grow them organically into successful businesses within the next decade.


By Sierra Choi
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To check out more cool videos of independent businesses by Little Less Known, go here. Visit STAMP or follow @stamptheapp to find out more about the app he is launching. If you're interested in having a chat with Sandy, he can be contacted at sandy@littlelessknown.com

Typically the finance team issues are a combination of:

1. Process issues – lack of batch work, automation, convoluted processes, lack of clarity on the job - causing wasted time and mistakes in the financials.
2. Client demand alignment – unnecessary pressures of an urgent nature from your stakeholders (i.e. other departments/suppliers demands – causing wasted time)
3. Resource issues – lack of know-how, time and motivation in the finance team

With any task – either someone can’t do it (i.e. time or expertise related) or they are not motivated to do it. Each of the above problem areas could have a time deficient component or an expertise deficient component either potentially coupled with a lack of motivation by the team.  Firstly, you need to find which it is; it is most often a blend. Lack of expertise -> leads to time wasting -> leads to pressure -> and morale dropping and the circle continues. Low morale is easy to spot in team meetings by how engaged with contributions and upbeat colleagues are.
One good test I use (taken from High Output Management by Andy Groves): Consider “if someone’s life depended on it - could they achieve the task in question?”  If the answer is “Yes” then it is a motivational issue in the main that is present.


The Five Steps


This has worked for me in situations with all the problems described above present - I find they are mainly a mixture of lack of time and lack of know-how mixed with some leadership/motivational issues.

Prerequisite to solving: The team needs as a leader; someone experienced who has been in wars – (e.g. a finance expert who knows how to grind out results with expertise and an ability to drive process cross-functionally in the company). This leader needs support from the CEO for cross-functional changes.

Step 1: Find time for the finance team to perform real finance work.

(Part A) Don’t let payments rule finance – set payment runs periodically and set company terms with all suppliers – no exceptions (30 days net is typical). I’ve worked with companies in the past that have let the finance function erode into payables function only. How does this happen? A company may be growing strongly – and thus everything is urgent. Growth fever has taken over and requests for payments occurring first daily, then hourly start to eat into the finance team’s time.

​The pressure and demands on the finance team mount. Urgent payments are like a drug it is difficult to wean a company off. Slowly but surely without management intervention and strong policies – Finance has no time to do actual finance – just payments. (The drug addiction analogy is not from personal experience however the addiction to urgent payment runs is).



(Part B) Don’t let month end take the full month. I’ve seen companies closing April in July. Such a strain on a finance team working that far in the past while also dealing with the present. How to fix? Run bottleneck analysis on month end. (Israeli scientist Eli Goldratt developed the Theory of Constraints which is worth reading and using) How it works? Simple – if your last closing action is taking place on day 8 – there is no point moving a different closing action from day 4 to day 3 – you have achieved nothing - focus on the day 8 actions movement first! Move day 8 action to day 2 then tackle the day 4 action. Rinse and repeat. Your maximum performance can only be your slowest activity – it will hold all else back. The beauty of bottleneck analysis.

Know your enemy: Break month end activities into ones which have internal dependencies (e.g. the finance team itself) or external dependencies (e.g. suppliers & other functions). Also I find it good to analyse which activities are process volume based (e.g. bank reconciliations) versus which are more thought and opinion based (e.g. accruals, provisions estimates). This will allow estimation of workload and skillset needed and allow planning or resource which can be moved around your team. Get commitments on paper (e.g. email) on promised delivery from the external dependencies – their word is their bond.

Many month end activities can be moved to the last week and lessen the spike in workload in the first week (e.g depreciation and accrual calculations).

If bank recs are done weekly – then on month end there is also only a week to do – not four.
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The clothes we wear often reflect the impression we want to make onto the world. Oftentimes, people are unnecessarily judged by the clothes they wear. Paul Graham, one of the former directors of yCombinator has spoken in his blog about how he prefers California to New York City because he is able to walk into a posh restaurant in California wearing just jeans and a t-shirt and still receive excellent service, whereas in New York, he is treated with disdain. In a parallel manner, anyone caught wearing a full suit and tie will probably be subject to having rocks thrown at his car in Silicon Valley; as the uniform there has always been about having a nonchalant, relaxed cool style as there is a pervasive cultural distrust of anyone who is too dressed up. This kind of sensibility is probably closer to the U.K.'s institutional art world, in which people are expected to dress down at any event or private view, and often people achieve status by wearing the same ropey, old clothes everyday. However, this old attitude might be due for a re-invention as smart fabrics become more pervasive in our society.

If we examine where fabrics, textiles and clothes are moving towards in the next generation, the marriage of art and science has created an interesting array of smart textiles that could change the way we perceive clothes.
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Kazuhide Sekiyama, founder of Spiber, has been working on synthetic spider silk since 2007 and recently launched a spider silk moon suit through the North Face, available in Japan for $1000. His startup was the first to develop and launch this material- which has been engineered from a combination of proteins by recreating the DNA designs of spiders in an artificial environment that does not depend on petroleum like other synthetic fibers such as polyester and nylon.
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Another fabic in our new horizon is made from pineapples. Ananas Anam is a UK based startup based at the Royal College of Art that has developed an entirely new type of leather- Piñatex, which is derived from pineapples. Dr. Carmen Hijosa began her research in the Philippines and Spain before being based in the UK. Piñatex is made from pineapple fibres that are extracted from the leaves in the decortication process. This environmentally sustainable process leaves behind by-products that can be converted into organic fertilizer or bio-gas and the extraction of the fibres undergo an industrial process into a nonwoven textile.
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Leather traditionally has appealed to both the luxury world and the population at large, despite the fact that its production entails an unsustainable process of animal farming and cruelty and its tanning process toxic to the environment that often negatively impacts the health of workers involved in the tanning process. Although many alternatives to leather have been produced in recent decades, from pleather to synthetic leather derived from petroleum products to cork leather to even laboratory produced leather by Modern Meadow, a Brooklyn based startup that produces synthetic leather derived from animal DNA which recently raised $40 million in funding; Dr. Carmen Hijosa has produced a new kind of sustainable leather that can be said to be far superior to animal leather, with similar suppleness, texture, breathability and durability.
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Lauren Bowker, a graduate of Manchester School of Art and Royal College of Art, has launched her smart fabrics line of jackets that react to the environment and changes colour in her London based startup the Unseen. Her clothes and accessories are now available at Selfridges.

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Other applications of nanoparticle fabrics have included bullet proof clothes, and waterproof and stainless clothes. However, the problem with nanoparticles is that they are easily absorbed by the skin's dermal layer, and might potentially negatively affect processes in the human body. Nanofabrics often include an external layer of silica and titanium dioxide, with the latter element causing many reported health issues. In addition,nanoparticles in cosmetics and interior paints have been known to cause cancer and autoimmune diseases. It might be that nanoparticles in clothing may not be ready for mass production just yet, although its usages have varied military applications; for consumers, we may want to wait until it has been proven to be safe to wear.

However, the trend seems to be clear; we are moving towards synthetic versions of animal skins, and away from the farming of animals to be used in our clothes, bags and accessories.

​By Sierra Choi