What Combat Sports Teach Founders About Emotional Control

What We Need to Grow, Episode 027: You Don't Box Angry. A Founder Talk conversation with Max Reck, Co-founder and Managing Director of SYLO. Cleaned for readability; the words are the speakers' own.

Caleb Pedosiuk: And it's SYLO, correct?

Max Reck: Exactly.

Caleb: SYLO is not a traditional meditation app. In fact, from what I understand you have positioned this as anti-wellness wellness, so I'm interested to hear about that. Max is the co-founder here of a meditation app that is unlike others, and the thing that really stood out to me the most is that you are not looking for off the shelf, here's this, listen to it, feel better. You're not leaving it to chance for people to pick some random title of something, or some picture, to be their meditation. You're saying, enough with that, what's going on? And you actually use intelligence in your system to say, tell us a little bit about what's going on. People take one or two minutes, they do that, and then once you have that information you're able to customize a meditation. So Max, a little bit about the company, how you got into it, and by all means tell us more.

Max: Thank you, Caleb, for having me. Also a great intro. I will try to simplify it even more with my own words.

SYLO is basically a combination of journaling and personalized meditation. Both journaling and meditation are incredible ways for self improvement, to work on yourself, to sleep better, to have better focus time. The list of health benefits is that long. And with today's technology it just makes sense to personalize meditations. Why should it be generic when it can just be written for you?

I think it's important to mention the journaling reflection chat we have, which feeds into the personalized meditations. We built it together with three psychologists. So it's also a kind of mental treatment for you, to get rid of the things that bother you, that keep you awake at night. But on good days it's also a gratitude practice, because gratitude practice is also important. So we tackle both sides here.

And then each meditation is built for you. You can decide how long you want it to be depending on the day, and which variety it is. Do you want to be more focused on sleeping, more on motivation, and so on. We're quite flexible, and we use today's technology.

Caleb: Very cool. I'm curious to know how you arrived at this. Everybody has a different story about how they get into solving the problems that they do. Was this something that was on your radar?

Max: Thanks for asking that question. With three co-founders, two of us three have a financial background, and we needed to work heavy hours, the 80, 90 hour weeks. We never wanted to found something in finance, because it was just not appealing to us. So we thought, okay, let's build something that helped us in our life, and try to make a cool product for people.

My personal story behind it is pretty simple. I had two major issues in my life that I needed to fix. The one is simple. I always had problems falling asleep because I couldn't really turn my head off. I was always lying there for two hours, spinning the same thoughts around, every day. And for me journaling helped here. Just simply writing it down, and then your brain knows, okay, it's written down now, I don't need to think about it anymore. And it helps you sleep. But also on the gratitude side, as I said before, it's so simple, but just sometimes writing down what you're grateful for in your life, it makes the day better. As simple as that. So that's my personal part of the journaling.

The meditation part is a different story. I was lucky early on in my career to climb the career ladder quite fast, and in my mid twenties I was in management with bankers who were twenty years older than me. And sometimes, I don't know if you have been in those situations, Caleb, it gets political. And I hated politics in companies, a lot, because I always thought, come on, we work on the same goal, it's a win win if we all just collaborate. But that's a bit naive in terms of how it works. So I often got quite frustrated.

Meditation was the way for me to learn a bit about getting a negative emotion and reacting on it. It sounds pretty simple, but in practice it's highly relevant, because someone says something that absolutely annoys you, and you react emotionally, and then you already lost in the politics game if you show emotions. So controlling yourself, keeping a clear mind in those situations. Because Caleb, I don't know if you can agree with this, but if your brain starts negative emotions and you're just angry, you don't think straight anymore, right? That's also what a boxer learns first. You don't box angry, you box with a calm mind, then you're a good boxer. And in management politics, unfortunately, it's the same. So that's how the meditation angle came to me.

Caleb: Very cool. I'm curious to know about archetypes. If you have certain customer profiles, say someone who's in a high pressure environment. You mentioned your other co-founders dealing in finance, long work hours, sleep being one component, the stress, the political dynamics at work. Have you found certain archetypes for the app? And within that, what does user behaviour look like in an ideal sense? Are they using it three times a day, is this something the app is nudging them at certain points?

Max: Great question. To be perfectly honest, we're still growing, and we try to appeal mostly to performance-oriented people. So far the biggest persona we have is young parents, people between 30 and 40 who just have a lot on their plate. And our app gets downloaded the most between 12 and 4 a.m., so people who have trouble falling asleep download it the most.

In terms of archetypes, we do have some performance-oriented people in our customer base. And it's a hard way, to be perfectly honest here, it's a hard way to convince them, because the whole meditation topic has a historically esoteric touch. Many people, especially in these performance environments, just shake their head and think, yeah, come on, leave me alone with this esoteric BS. So we tackle it heavily from a scientific perspective, because the science base is pretty strong over the last 20, 30 years on the good effects that journaling and meditation have on you.

The biggest problem here is that performance-oriented people struggle with this if you don't see an outcome right away. You're not very likely to stick with it. So we have put a lot of effort into a little growth journey inside our app, to show the user, hey, if you stick with it for two, four, six weeks, these are the benefits you will see over time, because it's just a matter of practice. This is something we honestly are still working on, but we use the science base to convince those people. I hope I could answer your question.

Caleb: Is there a component, either in the current model or on the roadmap, where you're using biometric data live throughout the day? So it's coming from a smartwatch, or smart glasses, or something that's sensing either brainwave activity or heart rate, and then it's prompting to take some action.

Max: Absolutely. I should have added that in the previous question already. We have an Apple Watch integration, and this is basically the best indicator here. Because if you do your first meditation and you sit down for fifteen minutes, I would say 99 out of 100 people will be like, yeah, okay, what happened now? I don't see any effect. I mean, you're calm and a bit more relaxed, of course, and it's just good for your brain to do that. But your vitals will show it right away. On the one hand it's the pulse and the heart rate variability. This is something that you can really actively work on from the very first meditation on.

And I have a personal story for this, because people underestimate that a lot. Coming back to my finance time, we once had a company doctor who was checking vitals, also the biometric age, for example. And she took my pulse, and I had a surprisingly high pulse. I think it was 80 or 90 or something. And she asked me if I was mad about something. I had had one of those meetings again. It was more than an hour ago when I was angry about something, but at the moment I was with the doctor I didn't feel it at all anymore. She was also from the Stuttgart area, so we had a good talk, I had a great time talking with her, I was in a super good mood, while my pulse was still pumping from this meeting I had been bothered about.

And regarding the whole longevity topic, this is something people underestimate quite a lot. The connection between our mind and our body, and how long we actually carry those effects that are on our mind. So the wearable integration is a great way to showcase that right away. So far we only have Apple Watch, but on the roadmap is to have most of the wearables integrated with SYLO.

Caleb: It's super important for startups or early stage companies to really hone product market fit, to solve one problem really well before expanding out. But naturally I'm curious, and I'm sure the product development team is curious, as to how this integrates with so many other things, because you're dealing with a product where the cause upstream for stress is coming from other variables. Work being one of them. So I'm curious to know if there are integrations where the app, not just with meditation, might make suggestions based on other behaviour that would lead to better sleep, or nutrition, or consumption of things that might impact these things. Or even in downtime, in the same way it might suggest a meditation, would it suggest a form of entertainment? The whole nutrition world, lifestyle world, how active you are, as well as entertainment, the kind of things that you're watching and viewing, if they're leading to stress and anxiety versus leading to calm and peace. And if there is this intelligence layer where someone is using this tool as a reflection and journaling tool, some of the insights into what they're wanting to do with their life might naturally appear there, and could be matched to say, hey, actually if you're wanting to head that direction, here are some things to consider.

Max: Great point, and I need to give you a bigger answer on that.

What we have so far is that it's detecting your pulse already. Of course not when you do sport, because then clearly you have a high pulse. But if your wearable doesn't get that you're doing sport and you have a high pulse, it gives you a notification. Hey, check your pulse, maybe think about taking some deep breaths and having a few minutes to calm down and reset your body and your nervous system. This is already one thing we do have.

But a great point, also what you consume on social media, on video. There's one great mistake I also used to make in the past. I always loved UFC, it's a bit more than ten years ago already, but I also did kung fu and stuff like this, so I'm following UFC. But watching a UFC video at 10 at night in your bed on your phone is literally the worst thing you can do, because there's nothing pushing you up more than watching this before sleeping.

To the other thing you said. During my time in investment banking we did a quite deep dive on the whole health tech industry, and many experts were talking about how we are right now in the decade of personalized health, personalized medication as well. And I think we all agree that our body is quite a complex thing. One of the most complex things on earth, combined with our brain, I would say. And there are so many influences on our body. We need to measure the whole picture, sleep, sport, what you consume. It's just a huge data collection that we need to start on, and we're not at the end of that journey yet. But on the longer roadmap, this would be absolutely great.

Caleb: How has the response been from corporate? I'm thinking of two different customer avatars. One is consumers that are up late at night, they're looking for an app, they find it. How has the response been from a decision maker at a corporate level that might look for an engagement to make your app available to all of their staff as part of their wellness package or benefits?

Max: This is a good question. It depends highly on the country, to be perfectly honest. We're located here in Berlin, Germany. The whole DACH area, the German speaking area, is under a bit of economic pressure, and most companies, since our offer is based in the whole benefit section, employee benefits, this is currently a position that companies rather reduce than further invest in. Even though it's ironic, right? If you invest in that, the output of the people, the productivity, the focus, it just gets better. So from an economic standpoint it's a clear case.

To give you another example, with a lot of health insurances in Germany we measure a lot of data on when people are off from work, and mental health sick days are, since the first half year of 2026, the biggest reason why people are away from work. It grew again by 9 percent from last year. So the cause is there. But I'm telling you, it's still a hard sell in our area, while in the US it's way easier. If you find a champion in a company who already has a contact point with meditation or the whole field, it's an easier sell, because our product is also not too costly, and then it goes way easier. The US mindset is way easier than the European one. But here people want to cut costs, they want to cut employees, they want to cut on every position. So if the decision maker just hears from the HR people, hey, we want to invest in a meditation app, there is no further dialogue. So it's a hard sell right now. But the US goes well. Work in progress.

Caleb: I feel like anytime you're dealing with user behaviour you have this paradox, right? You either work with current behaviour, you integrate, and then you're going with the flow of things. But a lot of the time what people are looking for is a product or service to help them change an aspect of their life, which often requires changing their behaviour. So you have the opportunity, or the need, to shift user behaviour. Does that happen at the personal level, does it happen at the corporate level? From what I understand your competitors are Calm and Headspace, which are massive companies. You guys took a strict position on anti-wellness, which I'm really curious about. If there was some corner of the market where you sort of branded yourself as being anti-wellness. Was it a psychological thing, that certain users feel like they're not looking for a wellness product, and that's the niche you're wanting to serve?

Max: Anti-wellness is a big word that I also don't want to overuse. In the end wellness and fitness is the whole sector we operate in, and I wouldn't be so harsh. But the big point we want to make with those statements is about people who put meditation and journaling directly in the esoteric corner. We want to attract them from a different perspective. And that's why we say, hey, it's also a performance tool, it's something where you can just improve yourself. It comes a bit more from that direction. But anyone who already does yoga, or is already in that sector, we are so happy to also provide them our services. We just want to expand it to the bigger market.

And one point here is also, it sounds pretty simple and a bit cliché, but we have the opinion, all of us founders, that if anyone on this planet would meditate and would put a bit more mindfulness and journaling and control over negative emotions into their life, we highly believe the world would be a better place. And the more people, even politicians and so on, who would meditate and do that, I think that would be a great movement. So this is also our thinking.

Caleb: I'm curious on the biblical side of things, because I know some people that will look for apps to encourage them with prayer. So there's meditation, but with prayer. If the same thing would apply, if there's a niche audience where you have this conversation, this initial hey, where are things at, and it would reflect back with passages of scripture, or other thought provoking aspects of things to be reflecting on in prayer, or scriptures to consider. Just a thought.

Max: Exactly. I mean religion is a super important thing. But prayer, what do you do when you pray? You take your time, you take stillness, you are grateful for your life. We go in the same direction.

Caleb: With these tools, especially when you give an agent the ability to do some initial due diligence on a first pass, it does need to be double checked.

Max: I really know what you're talking about. And in the end our reflection journaling chat, we also use an LLM, not our own yet. We still work together with Claude so far. But this is one of our main tasks here, right? The model cannot hallucinate. So it's not only a Claude integration. We have like twelve agents sitting on our reflection chat for many, many different reasons. For example, if you text in our chat, hey, I want to harm myself, there's an emergency agent. So we spent quite eight months on that chat with psychologists, with a lot of tech security. Data security is also super important. Luckily our CTO has already done a few tech due diligences, also with KPMG. So we are well stacked here. Also important for the users to know. But it's quite an important topic actually. I'm glad we tackle it.

Caleb: I have one final question for you, and I typically ask everybody I chat with, which is what is the one thing that you feel like your team needs the most to grow right now. That could be a bottleneck, that could be a lever. Specifically, it could be investment, it could be exposure, it could be having influential people discover the product. If you could put your finger on one thing.

Max: That's a great question. We would be super happy for a quite experienced B2C investor, because my co-founders and me, the whole marketing and social media topic, we grew into it, and I think now we start doing quite well here. But at one point we want to also properly roll the whole thing out globally. And for this we need two things.

The one thing is definitely cash, because as you mentioned before, the big guys who have been in this space for more than ten years have a lot of cash, and it's hard to become competitive here in marketing budgets. And also it's really something that needs to be learned, to do that professionally. Someone who has already done this rodeo a few times would be amazing. To find a big partner who could help us in the seed round. We are starting to prepare the seed round, and no matter from where in the world, a big investor with B2C experience would be great.

Caleb: Very cool. Okay, well Max, thank you so much. SYLO, S Y L O, available in the App Store to check out. Awesome, thank you.

Max: In 60 countries. Thank you so much for having me.