Danny Yeung, CEO of IM8 & Prenetics: Operators Titans E009

We’ve all wondered what it’s like to build with a global icon, and today we’ve got the operator who did it, took a public company through a hard pivot, and hit over a hundred million in recurring revenue; this is Operators, Titans with Danny Young of IMA, let’s go—start us at the beginning with San Francisco, baseball cards, and that Beckett craze.

My parents brought my brother and me from mainland China with no money, I didn’t speak English, and by ten or eleven I already wanted to be a CEO, collecting cards and dreaming big.

I was a troublemaker who got kicked out of multiple high schools, grabbed a GED, and at fifteen worked phones selling timeshare appointments, learned to love rejection, got promoted fast, and even hacked lead stacks to convert better.

Tech sales at Keynote and then Barracuda paid well, I saved up, franchised a Hong Kong dessert chain in the Bay Area, worked brutal hours picking fruit at dawn, made okay money, and learned a ton about operations and management.

A friend needed hotel furniture, my first China order was a mess, I owned it, fixed QC, sold the dessert shop to my cousin, then chased bigger clients; I cold-called MGM, staged a credible ‘team’ for the meeting, kept following up, and after a year closed a 4,000-room deal I nearly quit on.

From where you sit now, do those early reps feel like the foundation—lots of practice that lets you make fast calls with limited information?

Absolutely, every swing—good and bad—compounded my judgment so I can decide quickly without overanalyzing.

I loved the Groupon model, tested it with my cousin’s shop, flew to Hong Kong in weeks, launched UBuyIBuy, used scrappy plays like reselling Starbucks vouchers to win real brands, hit a million a month in six months, and sold a majority to Groupon.

23andMe inspired me to build an Asia-focused genetics business, so I funded and rebranded a tiny team into Prenetics, skipped DTC due to CAC, went B2B2C with insurers, and raised more capital off those partnerships.

When COVID hit we spun up at-home PCR in three weeks at a fair price, then the Hong Kong government asked us to scale citywide testing; we handled hundreds of thousands of workers, became the top provider doing about forty thousand tests a day, and revenue jumped from ten million to hundreds of millions over three years.

We listed on NASDAQ in May 2022 to turn momentum into durability for shareholders, but as testing faded the stock fell and I cut headcount from a few thousand to under one hundred in one decisive move so the company could survive.

In 2023 a friend introduced me to David Beckham, we aligned on a science-first supplement brand with real scale, spent months diligencing product and reputational risk with weekly work sessions—including taste—then committed to building the biggest supplement brand in five years.

We insisted on best-in-class from day one—NSF certification, clinical rigor, custom octagon presentation, and hands-on brand work—and after launch we went from a few hundred day-one orders to roughly nine million monthly and approximately 108 million ARR in eleven months, all public and audited.

Celebrity attention only works if the product is elite, so we built a scientific advisory board with leading doctors and even a former NASA chief scientist, launched a premium longevity stack targeting the hallmarks of aging, and organically partnered with Arena Subalinka after her coach saw real performance and recovery gains—she even invested.

Rapid fire: the three numbers that tell you your business, a non-business book, a contrarian belief, one word for leadership and for business, and what’s overrated versus underrated in growth.

Give me payback period, LTV, and LTV to CAC; I don’t read books, I read targeted research; take big swings and dial risk as you scale; leadership is resilience, business is passion; early optimization is overrated, while founder-led speed and being deep in the details beats decision-by-committee.

I love that you keep swinging—from furniture to a Groupon competitor to COVID testing to a public, transparent supplement rocket—and the auditing matters in a space full of smoke and mirrors.

I felt responsible to our public shareholders, so we built IMA inside the same company, and if we keep delivering quarter after quarter I believe we’ll be a multi-billion dollar business soon; thanks for having me.