Paul Coletta is the co-founder and CEO of Vero Bioscience, a predictive health company developing organ-age measurement technology. He built his career on storytelling and consumer marketing, starting with a decade at Disney before leading brand and product marketing roles at MTV Networks, Nickelodeon, and Hewlett-Packard. Paul then went on to build popular food brands including Jamba Juice and Pinkberry, and spent a decade as CEO and Chairman of Urban Remedy.

Two threads run through Paul's career: understanding consumers and telling stories that move them, and a decades-long curiosity about his own biology. They converged when his now co-founder, Markus Okumus, offered him an early organ-aging blood test, built on Stanford research. The result flagged accelerated aging in Paul's kidney, though his traditional labs passed with flying colors. An ultrasound follow-up found a renal cyst, and although benign, it was a real sign of aging his standard panel missed. 

Paul is blunt about the realities this gap exposed: there's no true sick-care system, because industry profits are tied to managing disease, not preventing it. Vero's moonshot, as he puts it, “is ending age-related chronic disease.” 

Most consumer health products compound the problem, handing people health insights without a next step. Vero's OrganAge assay is licensed from a decade of Stanford research by Vero co-founder, Dr. Tony Wyss-Coray, who was recently named one of TIME's Longevity Leaders of 2026. The technology uses a single blood draw to measure roughly 11,000 of the body's 25,000 gene-coding proteins, trained on a 45,000-person UK Biobank cohort followed for 17 years. Rather than a single biological-age number, it breaks the result down organ by organ, revealing which system is aging fastest and why. Vero Compass then pairs that result with a targeted intervention and checks back to see whether it worked. 

Vero is now testing the approach through IRB studies with clinical partners, including Biograph, comparing its measurements against clinical benchmarks such as VO2 max, brain imaging, and volumetric measures before and after organ-level interventions. The plan is an at-home, direct-to-consumer offering sold on an annual subscription, with Paul targeting a fall 2027 launch once clinical validation is established. Several thousand people are already on Vero's waitlist ahead of its planned commercialization.

Paul is blunt about a gap he sees across health-diagnostics companies: they hand people a number and leave them stranded, with no path to act on it. Vero's answer to the “what next?” dynamic is built into its Vero Compass product, which treats diagnosis as a starting point. The assay identifies which organ is most vulnerable, down to cellular resolution, pairs that finding with an evidence-informed intervention, then remeasures within months to confirm a real biological response. Paul calls that sequence closing the health loop, and says “it's what's going to be sort of game-changing about what we're bringing to market."

That same loop shapes Vero's path to market. The technology is already scientifically validated as a surrogate biomarker, published in Nature. Paul draws a sharp line between that and clinical validation, a separate bar Vero is now pursuing through IRB studies with clinical partners. In cohorts of 50 to 100 people focused on brain and arterial health, Vero is correlating its assay against established clinical benchmarks, which will inform the company’s eventual commercial launch.

Scientific validation is only the starting point. Publishing evidence that a technology works is different from proving it to be a clinical tool — the latter requires correlating results with established clinical benchmarks in real patients. A diagnostic closes the health loop only when it also points to what to do next and confirms whether it worked.

Paul says the most important thing a founder can do is build the zero-to-one team. Earlier in his career, he made the mistake of delaying hiring one or two “rock stars” because of concerns about cost and timing. At Vero, he corrected course, aiming high and hiring people who fill his own gaps, then making them owners with real skin in the game. His first major hire was Tali Livni, a former Meta product leader, who has since built Vero’s MVP.

Paul also looks for “patriots, not mercenaries,” people who care as much about the outcome as the income — and asks every candidate why they want to work at Vero. A gold-plated resume without a real answer loses him.

Culture is the next layer: an aligned belief system in pursuit of a common goal. Paul documents values early, then keeps them active through regular discussion. One value he's carried into every company is embracing change, pushing people to influence it themselves rather than wait on leadership. "My definition of leadership," he says, "is the ability to influence needed change." Vero does this through a monthly all-hands where anyone, including Paul, cites an example of living, or failing to live, a company value.

The early team sets the company’s operating culture. Hire people who fill your gaps, care deeply about the mission, and can own important parts of the business. Then turn values into something employees can use to challenge decisions, adapt to new information, and shape how the company actually works.

Most pitches fail because they don't fit a fund's mandate or stage. So, the deeper work is finding investors who already hold some version of the founder's worldview, then giving them evidence to strengthen that conviction, not just in the product, but in the team’s ability to uniquely realize the vision. "Investors don't create the conviction, you do, and you've got to bring it into the room," Paul says.

Paul spent a year or two building a relationship with Vinod Khosla, who asks nearly every founder he backs what they'd do today with $25 million. When Paul and co-founder Markus began exploring Vero’s consumer application, Khosla was the first investor he approached. Three weeks into the seed raise, Khosla offered a verbal term sheet, leading to a $6 million round.

Paul says every dollar he has raised has come through a trusted introduction or existing relationship. “Capital follows trust,” he says. His advice is to build that network before the raise: build a public platform, speak at conferences, share your perspective, and spend less time perfecting the deck and more time finding someone who can credibly get you into the room.

Fundraising starts before you need the money. Build relationships with potential investors well before a raise, and make your work visible enough that those relationships have something to build on. The goal is finding investors whose conviction is already aligned with the opportunity, not chasing universal approval.

Paul says a great board should make the company better, not harder to run, and bring value beyond capital, so look beyond VCs to independents and strategic investors who bring relationships, operating experience, or market knowledge you lack.

At Urban Remedy, Whole Foods invested in the company’s Series B and put a division president on the board, helping turn its biggest distribution relationship from a transactional vendor arrangement into a strategic partnership. Synergistic investors like this can also be a prelude to exit, with a seat at the table and the potential to become a credible M&A partner.

He draws a hard line on what a board is for: governance, not management. “The board does not run the company,” Paul says. A CEO’s job is to give directors the right information, be open about what is and isn’t working, listen to their advice, and ultimately make the call. When bringing his senior team to board meetings, he reminds them they’re not asking permission. They should explain what they are doing and why, then ask for advice. He vets prospective board members the way he'd vet a senior hire, seeking references they didn't provide, specifically how they behaved at a portfolio company during a hard stretch.

Build a board for more than capital. Look for investors and directors who fill gaps in your team, bring strategic relationships, and can create value beyond the boardroom. Then keep the governance boundary clear: ask for advice, not approval, and keep management decisions with the CEO.