Force of Habit

THE CALORIE COUNTING CARDIO TRAINING STATIONARY BIKE GAMIFICATION STRESS REDUCING PSYCHO OPTIMIZING PEOPLE CENTERING WEIGHT LOSS SUBSCRIPTIONATING WHATEVER BEHAVIOR NEXT NEEDS CHANGING COMPANY | Noom’s founders built an overnight-success weight-loss app after years of failure. Now they’re working to parlay their big hit into a string of them.

- Tom Foster

NOOM CO-FOUNDER and CEO Saeju Jeong gets up in the morning in his Manhattan apartment near Central Park and blasts the kind of hard-driving heavy metal music that you might associate with mosh pits and death shrieks, not the perky weight-loss app his company is famous for. “It's my routine of meditation,” he says matter-of-factly. “I take a heavy metal bath, let it wash over me. It's the way I channel my mood, and then I am in the game, giving my every spiritual and physical energy to Noom. And then at night, I listen to help me detox any unnecessary doubts. I just nail them with heavy metal music.

This is not a put-on, some entrepreneurial personality quirk cultivated for the benefit of media and investor types. Sean Foster, Noom's chief marketing officer, a ponytailed veteran of several innovative fashion, beauty, and wellness firms, marvels at the time when his son was learning electric guitar and made some videos of himself playing various metal riffs, which Foster shared with Jeong as a kind of name-that-tune game. “Saeju got it right every single time. I mean, this is a guy who took his mother to see a Megadeth concert.

Put another way: Saeju Jeong is hardcore.

And he'd better be. Along with co-founder Artem Petakov, Jeong has led New York City-based Noom as it has become one of the breakout hits of the past two years.