From Start-Up to Grown-Up #107 Jonathan Wolf— Co-Founder and CEO of ZOE: The Growth of a Founder, the Most Important Leadership Skills, and How to Raise 7 Million Euros in 3 Weeks (Encore)
Dec 15, 2025
Jonathan Wolf is the co-founder and CEO of ZOE, a visionary in personalized nutrition leveraging AI and microbiome research. In this engaging discussion, he delves into his journey from scaling Criteo to founding ZOE, revealing how a sabbatical led to a profound identity shift. He shares insights on the importance of naivety in innovation, raising €7 million in a matter of weeks, and the launch of ZOE's app for real-time food risk assessment. Jonathan emphasizes that the way we eat is not only broken but also fixable, sparking a revolutionary approach to nutrition.
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From Sabbatical To Startup Spark
- Jonathan Wolf left a $2B IPO company, took a sabbatical, and felt lost despite external success.
- He discovered Tim Spector's microbiome research at a talk, which sparked the idea for ZOE.
Talent Misapplied Drives Mission Shift
- Jonathan realized top engineers were optimizing ads, not human health, which felt misaligned with purpose.
- That mismatch motivated him to pursue AI applied to meaningful human problems like nutrition.
Value The Process Over Outcomes
- Accept the process instead of obsessing over outcomes and define work by how you do it, not only by results.
- Use clear hypotheses and a scientific approach to judge progress, not just success metrics.
