Justin Mares

He attended the University of PittsburghUniversity of PittsburghThe University of Pittsburgh is a state-related research university in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States. It traces its origins to the Pittsburgh Academy, founded in 1787, and is one of the oldest institutions of higher education in the country.Open the full entry. An Entrepreneur article of September 2012 relates that weeks after moving into the dorms he was thinking about transferring because of a poor roommate match, and quotes him: “It really showed me how a bad match impacted the experience I had at school.” The article gives his age as 22 and describes him as a 2012 graduate.⁠[1]

He went on to propose online matching software, modelled on dating sites, to pair incoming students as roommates in place of colleges’ vague questionnaires. The article states that he pitched the idea to 100 college administrators and received positive feedback, won $2,000 from the Collegiate Entrepreneurs’ Organization, and worked with a psychologist on a questionnaire measuring traits from conscientiousness to verbal aggression; Dan Walker, a computer science major at the University of Pittsburgh, joined the startup, RoommateFit.⁠[1]

In 2011 Ohio University piloted the system, matching about 1,000 incoming freshmen on traits such as communication styles, opinions on social justice issues and personal habits; 40% of surveyed users planned to stay with their roommate the following year. He was then accepted into AlphaLab, a Pittsburgh startup incubator, receiving $30,000 in startup funds and office space, and within six months signed Ohio University, Southern Polytechnic State University and Northern Kentucky University, covering about 7,000 freshmen for 2012–2013; schools licensed the software for $2 to $3 per student. He planned a free-to-start consumer version for roommate-seekers in New York and San Francisco.⁠[1]

The interview page on Nat EliasonNat EliasonNat Eliason (Nathaniel Eliason) is a writer and entrepreneur who founded the content marketing agency Growth Machine and wrote Crypto Confidential, Husk, and The Birth of Paradise. His work spans content marketing, crypto industry writing, science fiction, and AI-assisted software development, and in 2026 he took part in building Founders School, an entrepreneurship high school program under Alpha School in New York.Open the full entry’s website states that in his sophomore year of college he started a company to help incoming students find better roommates and that the company later shut down; the newsletter The Founder in 2020 called the site “Roommate Fit” and described it as an eHarmony-style service that matched college roommates by personality.⁠[2][3]

He has looked back on his college years: in a 2021 Eight Sleep interview he said that he ate a standard fraternity diet in college and tried polyphasic sleep, which left him with very low energy for about a month; in 2024 he said he was “going through a rough patch in college” and responded with exercise, meditation, more whole foods and community activities. The earliest essay on his personal website, “Anti-Social Media,” is dated September 20, 2010.⁠[4][5][6]

His own accounts of when he took up the paleo diet differ: a 2020 essay says since about 2010, the 2021 Eight Sleep interview says 2011, after reading Mark Sisson’s writing, and a 2023 essay says he went “mostly Paleo” in 2012.⁠[7][4][8]

In an essay of January 2015 he wrote that in 2011, at 20, he moved to San Francisco to get into the tech world; that year he answered a QuoraQuoraQuora is an American question-and-answer and knowledge-sharing website and the company that operates it, Quora, Inc., whose core product centers on users asking, answering, and voting to rank content; since 2022, the company has also offered Poe, a chat platform that aggregates AI models from multiple companies.Open the full entry question on technology trends, writing that BitcoinBitcoinBitcoin (common symbol BTC) is an open peer-to-peer electronic cash protocol, network, and native digital asset. Full nodes independently verify transactions and blocks according to the consensus rules; transactions are recorded as UTXOs, and blocks are organized into a public ledger through proof of work. Bitcoin is not issued or managed by any single institution, but using, holding in custody, and trading it still involve key, privacy, market, and legal risks.Open the full entry would change the world by 2015, while two friends were mining and trading it, but although he had spare cash he did not buy any. He called this “a huge personal failing” and wrote that “nearly all meaningful gains come from going all in when you think you’re right.”⁠[9]

On October 26, 2011, in an essay titled “Graduation,” he wrote that he had several interesting choices for his next move and that he was going to try to “choose my own path.” In 2021 he recalled that it was at 20 that he first started thinking about startups as a career path.⁠[10][11]

The author biography for Traction states that he was director of revenue at Exceptional, a software company later acquired by Rackspace; the interview page by Nat Eliason says that he ran growth at Exceptional Cloud Services, and the newsletter The Founder says that he ran growth at Exceptional, which sold software tools to developers.⁠[12][2][3]

In a 2023 essay he recalled that in his early 20s he was part of a team rolling up software-as-a-service businesses in the developer tools space, which he found boring, and that he left the developer tools space at 23.⁠[8]

On March 28, 2013, Rackspace announced its acquisition of Exceptional Cloud Services, including the error-tracking services Exceptional.io and Airbrake.io and the hosted Redis service Redis To Go; the release said the technologies were used by more than 50,000 application developers and did not disclose financial terms; the Startupfest speaker page states that the acquisition was for eight figures.⁠[13][14]

In his review of 2013 he wrote that he worked on Airbrake for much of the year, running its growth until the acquisition by Rackspace, and had the experience of building his own sales team. In 2023 he recalled that after his team was acquired he explored a real estate business, a technology company in the drug addiction space and a cloud kitchen brand.⁠[15][8]

In November 2013 his parents travelled from Philadelphia to visit him in San Francisco. He wrote that they don’t travel often and are “pretty conservative”; he took them by cab to Twin Peaks, and wrote that he was enjoying his time in the city and had quickly made friends.⁠[16]

In his review of 2013 he wrote that he had moved three times that year, from Pittsburgh to Las Vegas to San Francisco; charged $100 an hour for more than 20 hours of consulting; paid off his student loans; read 72 books against a goal of 75; eliminated sugar; took improv classes; ran social groups in San Francisco; and felt “on solid financial ground for the first time in my life.”⁠[15]

Goals he missed included selling 10,000 copies of the Traction book, which he called “just naive from the start,” and travelling outside the country; he wrote that he had a publishing mentor and expected the book to launch, finally, in 2014.⁠[15]

He recalled in a 2020 essay that in 2014 friends at his CrossFit gym talked up bone broth, which he could not find for sale online and had no time to make, since it takes 20 or more hours; he guessed that others would pay for it ready-made. That April he resigned, in the HR representative’s office, from a job paying six figures, leaving the workforce two weeks later; his father, among others, thought he should be nervous.⁠[7]

In the last 30 days of his job he bought the domain bonebroths.com, built a landing page on Unbounce under the name “Bone Broths Co.,” paid $5 on Fiverr for a logo and priced 16 oz of “Beef Marrow Bone Broth” at $29.99, taking payment through PayPalPayPalPayPal Holdings, Inc. (Nasdaq: PYPL) is an American digital payments company that operates payment brands including PayPal, Venmo, Braintree, and Xoom, providing online and in-store payments, money transfers, and consumer credit to consumers and merchants worldwide.Open the full entry with no real product; about $50 of Bing ads drove traffic, roughly 30% of visitors clicked “Order Now,” and the test brought in nearly $500 over two weeks. He then emailed buyers that the product was out of stock and offered a full refund or a 50% discount with shipping in a few weeks; most chose the discount.⁠[7]

In 2015 he and his brother Nick Mares founded the bone broth brand Kettle & Fire. An article by ForbesForbesForbes is an American business media brand that began with Forbes magazine, founded by B.C. Forbes in 1917. It is known for rankings such as the Forbes 400, the World’s Billionaires list and 30 Under 30, and operates Forbes.com, ForbesLive events and licensed editions in 81 countries. Since 2014 a majority stake has been held by the Hong Kong investment group Integrated Whale Media; a 2021 plan to list on the New York Stock Exchange through a special purpose acquisition company was terminated in 2022. It is headquartered in Jersey City, New Jersey.Open the full entry reporter Chloe Sorvino, published by Forbes Argentina, states that he became convinced of bone broth’s benefits at 26, after Nick, then 19, tore two knee ligaments playing soccer; a CrossFit enthusiast at the time, he concluded that omega-3 balance and amino acids such as collagen and gelatin could aid health and recovery.⁠[17]

In a 2021 interview he said that he sold his first few companies to Rackspace and then started Kettle & Fire in 2015; a 2023 essay says that he tested the idea on the side, not thinking it would be a big business. The newsletter The Founder in 2020 described Kettle & Fire as simmering bones from humanely raised cattle and chickens, without antibiotics or hormones and 100% grass-fed and grass-finished, for more than 20 hours, in packaging that keeps the product fresh on shelves for more than two years, with flavours including beef, chicken, turmeric ginger and coconut curry.⁠[4][8][3]

Traction: How Any Startup Can Achieve Explosive Customer Growth, which he co-wrote with the DuckDuckGo founder Gabriel Weinberg, was published by Portfolio Penguin on October 29, 2015 (ISBN 9780241242537, 240 pages). The publisher’s description says the book argues that many startups fail because they focus on perfecting their product and neglect reaching users, and that it sets out nineteen traction channels, from viral marketing to trade shows, with a framework for testing them.⁠[18]

The book’s author biography says that he had founded two startups, had been director of revenue at Exceptional and lived in San Francisco; the Startupfest speaker page adds that one of the two startups was acquired and one failed, that he ran a growth meetup in San Francisco and that he was a member of the distribution team at 500 Startups. The interview page by Nat Eliason states that he became a mentor to companies going through 500 Startups.⁠[12][14][2]

In November 2015 he wrote that shortly before re-launching Traction he had put out a free 14-day email course, Traction Course, which without advertising gained more than 3,000 subscribers in just over a week and grew the email list by nearly 50%; it was posted to Product HuntProduct HuntProduct Hunt is a product-discovery and launch community founded by Ryan Hoover in 2013 and operated by Product Hunt, Inc. Makers present new products, while users vote, comment and review them and discover tools through categories, forums and AI search. AngelList announced its acquisition in 2016; as of November 2026, its official website lists Rajiv Ayyangar as CEO.Open the full entry, GrowthHackers and the r/startups subreddit, with Product Hunt bringing the most sign-ups, and over 20% of recipients shared the course.⁠[19]

The same essay says that he and his partner Nat built Programming for Marketers, a course teaching marketers basic technical skills, in a few weeks, and that it gathered more than 12,000 emails without paid marketing. Nat Eliason writes on his own website that Justin Mares was his first mentor in marketing, that they met while he was a junior in college, that he worked for Mares for a few months and that they then started Programming for Marketers together, which was later acquired by General Assembly.⁠[19][2]

The Forbes article states that he took part in Chobani’s 2016 incubator program for food entrepreneurs, and that Kettle & Fire raised just under $1 million in 2016.⁠[17]

In March 2016 he and an unnamed business partner bought an app called Notify; before buying it he had installed it on the Kettle & Fire site and found that showing recent orders raised conversion, by around 30%. Renamed Fomo, it adds social proof such as recent purchases and visitors to websites and online stores; on August 9, 2016 he announced its official launch, writing that running Kettle & Fire had taken up more than enough of his time.⁠[20]

The Forbes article states that two years after its 2016 round, in 2018, Kettle & Fire raised $16 million in venture funding led by Cavu Consumer Partners of Los Angeles, and that over the next 18 months it expanded from 3,000 to 10,000 supermarkets and passed $35 million in sales. In his review of 2021 he wrote that he had been angel investing since 2018.⁠[17][21]

He is a co-founder of the ketogenic products brand Perfect Keto. In episode 72 of the Keto Answers Podcast, released on August 19, 2019, he and his fellow co-founder Anthony Gustin discussed how Perfect Keto started and evolved, the origins of Kettle & Fire, the difficulties of working with food manufacturers, and lab-grown meat, regenerative farming, the Blue Zones and insomnia; the episode page says that he pulled Gustin out of his clinical practice and lists his side ventures as small SaaS businesses, Udemy courses, email courses and cryptocurrency investing.⁠[22][23]

On June 2, 2020, an issue of the newsletter The Founder featured him as co-founder and chief executive of Kettle & Fire and stated that his two brands, Kettle & Fire and Perfect Keto, together had almost $100 million in revenue in 2019. In May that year he wrote that Kettle & Fire now did “north of 8 figures a year.”⁠[3][7]

In his review of 2020 he wrote that his two main businesses, Kettle & Fire and Perfect Keto, did well and were not wiped out by the pandemic; the Forbes article states that Kettle & Fire became profitable in 2020. He did not travel that year, spent five months living with 15 or more friends in mountain towns, experimenting with communal living, and launched a non-profit, “well, technically two of them,” one of them helpkitchen.org.⁠[24][17]

He wrote that he hired a personal coach that year and was “easily the strongest I’ve ever been,” completed 301 stretching sessions and two three-day fasts, meditated on 250 days, and took up biking and cooking; in December 2020 he proposed to his girlfriend.⁠[24]

On January 11, 2021, Eight Sleep chief executive Matteo Franceschetti published an interview with him. He said that he lived in the Austin area of TexasTexasTexas is a U.S. state in the south-central United States, with its capital at Austin and its largest city Houston. It was admitted to the Union on December 29, 1845, as the 28th state, and the 2020 census (April 1, 2020) counted 29,145,505 residents.Open the full entry, lifted weights three to four times a week, stretched almost daily, went to bed around 10:30 to 11:30 p.m. and slept 7 to 8.5 hours without an alarm, avoiding his computer after 7 p.m.; that he ate a low-carb paleo diet of locally raised red meat, fish, bone broth and organ meats, avoided vegetable oils, and did a three- to four-day fast at least once a quarter; and that he did 10 to 20 minutes of breathwork a day; the products he listed included an Eight Sleep Pod Pro, blackout curtains, a sleep mask, a noise machine, magnesium, Levels glucose tracking, an Oura Ring, a Joovv light and CarbonShade blue-light blocking glasses.⁠[4]

He described his mornings in the interview: he wakes around 7:30 a.m., takes a 5- to 10-minute walk outside with his girlfriend, showers, meditates for 10 to 20 minutes in front of his Joovv light, makes coffee with Perfect Keto collagen and Navitas cocoa butter, and starts work on the one or two most important items on his checklist; he schedules no meetings before 11 a.m. and avoids SlackSlackSlack is a team communication and collaboration platform developed from an internal tool at Tiny Speck. It organizes work through channels, direct messages, searchable history and integrations, with features including Huddles, Clips, Canvas and AI assistance. Its paid service launched in February 2014, and Salesforce completed its acquisition in July 2021.Open the full entry, email and his phone in that window, and stretches and works out in the afternoon. The apps he uses include Sam HarrisSam HarrisSam Harris is an American author, philosopher and neuroscience PhD, host of the Making Sense podcast and founder of the Waking Up meditation app; he rose to prominence with The End of Faith and other critiques of religion and is regarded as a leading figure of the “New Atheism,” and has since written and spoken on morality, free will, meditation and politics, often provoking controversy.Open the full entry’s Waking Up for guided meditation, Inward Breathwork for breathwork, ROMWOD for daily mobility work (also stretching with it during calls) and Zero to track fasts.⁠[4]

He said in the interview that he and his girlfriend did MDMA therapy about every six months and pointed to the many ketamine therapy clinics that are legal and FDA-compliant for those who want to try psychedelics for mental wellness, and that work kept him up at night more than anything; his current tradeoff, he said, was “working more,” even if that meant not fully optimizing his health.⁠[4]

In his review of 2021, published in February 2022, he wrote that he lived in Austin, with six friends living within a few blocks of his home, and that he was engaged to his fiancée, who was born and raised in South Africa, with plans to plan the wedding in 2022 and marry within the next 18 months. He called 2021 a great year financially and in business; Kettle & Fire had crazy business swings, and his goals for 2022 included growing Kettle & Fire and Perfect Keto by 25% each and Surely by 200%, probably with a Series A raise, while Fomo was tracking well; he also planned another cohort of Inflection Grants and was considering syndicating deals, starting a rolling fund or working more closely with a fund.⁠[21]

He wrote that he lost a friend in 2021; that he completed more than 300 weightlifting workouts and a Whole30, learned skiing and pickleball, and went on two psychedelic journeys; and that he was “likely in the best shape of my life.” The Forbes article states that Kettle & Fire launched a “regenerative” broth line in 2021.⁠[21][17]

Truemed’s website states that the company was founded in 2022 by Justin Mares, with the aim that the health system pay for prevention and not just treatment; its legal name is True Medicine, Inc. TechCrunchTechCrunchTechCrunch is an American technology news outlet founded in 2005 by Michael Arrington and Keith Teare and headquartered in San Francisco; it mainly covers technology companies, startups, and venture capital, and hosts events such as TechCrunch Disrupt. Its ownership passed successively through AOL, Verizon, and Yahoo, and in 2025 Regent announced its acquisition.Open the full entry wrote in 2023 that he and Calley Means founded Truemed the previous year; Means had co-founded the wedding dress company Anomalie with his wife, Leslie Voorhees, and his sister, the physician Casey Means, co-founded Levels; together the two men had raised $100 million for previous ventures.⁠[25][26]

TechCrunch wrote on September 18, 2023 that Truemed had raised $3.5 million in simple agreements for future equity (SAFEs) from investors including the functional medicine figure Mark Hyman and founders of Thrive Market, Eight Sleep and Levels, and that at launch its partner businesses, including CrossFit, Magic Mind and Kos, represented $3 billion in gross merchandise volume. Shoppers choose to pay with HSA or FSA funds at checkout and answer a few health questions; a provider reviews the answers asynchronously and, where appropriate, issues a letter of medical necessity. Before launching, the founders met representatives of the White House and Capitol Hill to validate compliance.⁠[26]

He is the founder of Surely Wines, a maker of non-alcoholic and low-alcohol wines. A company release issued in Austin, Texas, on May 29, 2024 announced that Brandon Joldersma had become chief executive in February 2024, together with a new funding round led by Pure Ventures; he said in the release: “Brandon is the perfect leader to take Surely Wines forward and accelerate the company’s growth.” The founder story page on Surely’s website is signed by Ryan Hanson as founder and chief executive.⁠[27][28]

A NutraIngredients article of October 22, 2024 described Truemed as an 18-month-old company through which consumers can use HSA/FSA funds at brands such as Seed, Armra, Momentous and Timeline for supplements, exercise equipment and CrossFit memberships; he said that it had a network of 60 physicians, that 15% to 20% of participating brands’ new customers ordered through Truemed and that customers saved an average of 30% to 35%. He described Truemed as “much more of like a compliant payment network like PayPal, but with a doctor’s network built into it.”⁠[29]

In an interview published by Wellworthy on October 24, 2024 he argued that the US health system focuses on managing conditions after they develop, and said that “we have more control over our health trajectory than we think.”⁠[5]

An article by Forbes reporter Chloe Sorvino, published by Forbes Argentina with a link to the Forbes original dated March 9, 2025, gives his age as 35 and states that Kettle & Fire had annual revenue of more than $100 million, double that of two years earlier, and a valuation of about $200 million; its products were sold in 22,000 stores across the United StatesUnited StatesThe United States is a federal country in North America made up of 50 states, the District of Columbia as the seat of government, and territories such as Puerto Rico and Guam; its capital is Washington, D.C. The Continental Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776. The 2020 census (April 1, 2020) counted a resident population of 331,449,281, and the 435 seats of the House of Representatives are apportioned among the states on the basis of the census.Open the full entry, including Whole Foods, Walmart and Target, and through its own website, AmazonAmazonAmazon is a publicly traded U.S. technology and retail company founded by Jeff Bezos in 1994, with its principal corporate offices in Seattle. Its businesses span e-commerce, logistics and fulfillment, digital advertising, membership and entertainment services, consumer electronics, and Amazon Web Services cloud computing.Open the full entry, Walmart.com and Thrive Market, with entry into Costco and Walmart having boosted sales.⁠[17]

The article states that late in the previous year he and his brother, helped by Sam McBride, founder of Colter Ventures, bought out their early investors, with new investors putting in $43 million, leaving the brothers as minority shareholders; Brian Hack became chief executive in January to run daily operations, and he moved to chairman of the board. It adds that the company’s first own factory was to open that spring in Lancaster, PennsylvaniaPennsylvaniaPennsylvania (officially the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania) is a Middle Atlantic state of the United States; its capital is Harrisburg, and Philadelphia and Pittsburgh are its two great metropolitan areas. One of the original 13 states, it ratified the U.S. Constitution on December 12, 1787, the second state to do so. Its population in the 2020 census (April 1, 2020) was 13,002,700.Open the full entry, with 150 employees, and that it had recently launched a venison bone broth with HawaiiHawaiiHawaii is a U.S. state consisting of a group of volcanic islands in the central Pacific Ocean; its capital is Honolulu, on the island of Oʻahu. Hawaii was admitted to the Union on August 21, 1959, as the 50th state. Its population at the 2020 Census (April 1, 2020) was 1,455,271.Open the full entry’s Maui Nui; he spent three nights in Hawaii with the Maui Nui team hunting invasive axis deer in the dark; the company planned more such collaborations, including a bison broth. The article also states that the company had expanded into a range of soups and a high-protein keto line, and that it pays for certification that its broth is free of residues of the herbicide glyphosate, which it notes on the label.⁠[17]

On December 22, 2025 Truemed announced a $34 million Series A led by Andreessen HorowitzAndreessen HorowitzAndreessen Horowitz (a16z) is a venture capital firm founded in 2009 by Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz. It invests from the seed stage through the growth stage and provides operational support to its portfolio companies.Open the full entry, with Bessemer Venture Partners, Long Journey Ventures, BoxGroup and Trust Ventures participating; the company said that it had more than 3,000 merchant partners, including Peloton, Eight Sleep, Nike Strength and 24 Hour Fitness, that revenue had grown threefold year over year for the past two years, and that it had a strategic partnership with Navia Benefit Solutions. He said in the announcement: “HSAs and FSAs are one of the most effective tools available for addressing chronic illness and obesity.”⁠[30]

In an investment note published the same day, Andreessen Horowitz partners Daisy Wolf, Julie Yoo and Eva Steinman described him as co-founder and chief executive and a serial founder with a decade of building in health and nutrition, writing: “There are few founders better suited to bring this vision to life.” BloombergBloomberg L.P.Bloomberg L.P. is a global financial technology, data and media company founded by Michael Bloomberg in 1981. It began by providing terminal services that deliver data, analytics and news to financial professionals, and launched Bloomberg News in 1990. Michael Bloomberg has pledged the vast majority of the company’s profits to his philanthropic organization, Bloomberg Philanthropies.Open the full entry wrote the same day that he said Truemed was not yet profitable, and that its co-founder Calley Means was a top adviser to Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.⁠[31][32]Robert F. Kennedy Jr.Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (born 1954) is an American environmental lawyer, activist and author who co-founded the Waterkeeper Alliance and has been the 26th U.S. secretary of health and human services since 2025.Open the full entry

On April 20, 2026, episode 335 of the Fitt Insider Podcast introduced him as “Co-Founder & CEO of Truemed”; the conversation covered his Kettle & Fire background, letters of medical necessity, the survey and approval process, criticism of the approach as a loophole, the economics of prevention, employer integration and the funding from a16z.⁠[33]

An Entrepreneur article of May 28, 2026 called him a “6-Time Founder,” stating that he had sold four startups while steering a fifth, Kettle & Fire, and that Traction had become required reading in business schools. It relates that he noticed HSAs were on a growth path similar to that of 401(k)s at the 20-year mark, found that IRS rules allow preventive use of HSAs when a doctor prescribes it, spent time with industry skeptics, hired specialist lawyers and kept a document of objections and responses.⁠[34]

The article describes his habits: no meetings in the morning, keeping Tuesdays and Thursdays free of calls where he can, and six tasks a day. He said: “Finding a problem is far, far better than finding your passion,” and set out a framework for solving problems: ask whether you are uniquely qualified to solve it, define the one metric that would show the solution is right, generate and rank 10 possible solutions, and ask what new problems the solution would create.⁠[34]

As of November 2026 his personal website describes him as building companies at the intersection of health and technology; its “What I’m building” section lists Truemed and Kettle & Fire, and the About page states that he is co-founder and chief executive of TrueMed and previously co-founded Kettle & Fire and co-wrote Traction.⁠[35][36]

Founders SchoolFounders SchoolFounders School is an entrepreneurship high school program opened by the Alpha School network in Manhattan, New York, covering grades 9 through 12, which welcomed its first students in September 2026. Students complete their academics in the morning with AI learning software and spend the rest of the day running their own companies under the guidance of entrepreneurs; the school has drawn attention for its promise to refund tuition if a student’s business does not reach $1 million in profit and for its $150,000 annual tuition.Open the full entry, a school for grades 9 to 12 built on the Alpha SchoolAlpha SchoolAlpha School is a for-profit network of private schools founded in Austin, Texas, in 2014, covering pre-K through 12th grade and known for a model in which students spend only about two hours a day completing core academic subjects with AI tutoring software. It was founded by MacKenzie Price and others, with software entrepreneur Joe Liemandt funding its AI software; in recent years it has expanded to dozens of locations across the United States, and its claims about educational outcomes have been questioned by education researchers.Open the full entry platform, lists Justin Mares among its mentors on its website, with the affiliation “TrueMed, Kettle & Fire.”⁠[37]

His brother, Nick Mares, is a co-founder of Kettle & Fire; the Forbes article states that Nick was a 2016 fellow of the Thiel FellowshipThiel FellowshipThe Thiel Fellowship is a two-year grant program started by investor Peter Thiel and run by the Thiel Foundation that funds young people who skip or stop out of college to build new things instead. The program has been criticized by figures in education for encouraging young people to leave college.Open the full entry, was named to the 2019 Forbes 30 Under 30 list, left the chief operating officer role in 2020 while remaining on the board without day-to-day involvement, and co-founded Light Labs, a company that analyzes toxins in food.⁠[17]

In April 2021 he wrote that he was getting “within spitting distance of having kids” and proposed a “kids as a service” program that would make raising children easier through measures such as a bond paying one partner to stay home with the children, tax write-offs for childcare and cheaper food. In February 2022 he wrote that he expected kids to enter the picture over the next few years.⁠[38][21]

In a 2023 essay he wrote that he is “not a charismatic person” but is energized by talking about the food system, which he calls “one of the great mysteries of our time” in view of the rise in US obesity, chronic disease and health costs, and that his career is oriented around “fixing the food system,” which he expects to involve angel investing, starting companies and funding non-profits; in November that year he wrote that he had long identified as an entrepreneur and that many of his closest friends are entrepreneurs.⁠[8][39]

As of November 2026 the Essays page of his personal website lists 127 essays, the most recent dated April 2026, with titles including “The Peptide Tidal Wave,” “The Vaccine Question,” “Ray Peat and His High Sugar Diet” and “Why American Baby Formula is Uniquely Toxic.”⁠[6]

He writes the Substack newsletter The Next, described as “A newsletter exploring what’s next, in health, startups and society,” and the page metadata gives its readership as tens of thousands of subscribers. The Meat Mafia Podcast’s episode description says that he aims to improve the health of one million people over the next decade and lists the companies he founded as Kettle & Fire, Perfect Keto and Surely Wines.⁠[40][41]

Personal website: https://justinmares.com/ (opens in a new window).⁠[35]

X: Public account: https://x.com/jwmares (opens in a new window).⁠[35][36]

Substack newsletter The Next: https://justinmares.substack.com/ (opens in a new window).⁠[35][40]

Truemed: Official website: https://www.truemed.com/ (opens in a new window).⁠[25]

Kettle & Fire: Official website: https://www.kettleandfire.com/ (opens in a new window).⁠[42]

Perfect Keto: Official website: https://perfectketo.com/ (opens in a new window).⁠[43]

Surely Wines: Official website: https://www.drinksurely.com/ (opens in a new window).⁠[28]

Founders School: Official website: https://founders.school/ (opens in a new window).⁠[37]