My Why: From Breaking Down to Building Better
A year ago, I realized something I didn't want to admit.
I wasn't performing. I was negotiating with my own body.
On paper, I was an athlete — an endurance runner, a tennis player, someone who'd always taken health for granted. But at 35, the bounce-back was gone.
My endurance was tanking. My recovery needed more intention than ever. My gut was in a constant state of chaos.
General wear-and-tear had taken me from a high-performance athlete to someone who rarely exercised and was filling out around the edges. My bones ached. And the worst part? I couldn't find the source.
It was an uncomfortable realization. But it led me to one of the most meaningful discoveries of the decade: lactoferrin.
The more I learned, the more I realized this wasn't just another supplement. It was something worth building a company around.
The Problem Started with My Gut
For as long as I can remember, I've had horrible sensitivity to food. But I was reaching a breaking point.
I tried cutting trans-fats and alcohol. Then dairy and gluten. But the inflammation flared up almost at random, and I couldn't identify the source.
After a series of tests, I got my answer: SIBO — small intestinal bacterial overgrowth.
My microbiome had too much bacteria. And that bacteria was feeding off my body's iron stores, starving my muscles of the oxygen they needed to recover.
I tried every gut health supplement on the market.
Probiotics and prebiotics offered short-term relief, but the overgrowth kept coming back — just like my doctor said it would.
Colostrum had the biggest impact on my symptoms. But I wasn't comfortable with how most brands sourced it. The dairy industry, once you take a closer look, is pretty gross — and not something I wanted to build a daily habit around.
How Lactoferrin Actually Works
Lactoferrin is a signaling protein that does three things at once: it binds free iron in your gut, fortifies the intestinal lining through mucin production, and activates your immune system by triggering white blood cell response.
Most supplements work by flooding your system with bacteria and hoping something sticks.
Lactoferrin works differently. It regulates the environment your gut bacteria live in.
Specifically, it:
- Starves harmful bacteria by binding free iron — cutting off the fuel source pathogens depend on to replicate
- Reduces inflammation through antimicrobial and immunomodulatory activity that calms the immune overreactions driving most gut dysfunction
- Improves iron absorption by increasing bioavailability — so your body uses iron efficiently instead of letting it feed bacterial overgrowth
- Supports immune resilience and bone density — making it one of the few ingredients that benefits the whole body across every life stage
For endurance athletes, the iron piece is everything.
Iron is how oxygen moves through your blood. If you're training consistently but performance keeps trending down — slower splits, heavier legs, longer recovery — the culprit is usually low ferritin, the stored form of iron your muscles draw from between sessions.
Lactoferrin works at the root of that problem.
Why Vegan, Why Fermentation
When we first explored the space, we wanted to create a vegan version of colostrum — to solve what we called the "calf-first" problem.
But true vegan colostrum turned out to be scientifically improbable.
What we could do was isolate the hero protein — lactoferrin — through precision fermentation. A clean, animal-free biotech process that produces an identical protein without a single cow involved.
Waywyld exists today because of the advances in precision fermentation.
My co-founder Sam and I didn't set out to build a supplement company. We set out to solve problems we both had — my gut, Sam's immune system, and increasingly, our parents' concerns about bone density and staying active as they age.
Lactoferrin addresses all of it. It's one of the few ingredients clinically researched across every life stage, from infants to adults in their seventies.
More Than a Supplement
Right now, I'm training for the Trans Rockies Run — a three-day race through the mountains of Colorado.
My knees, shins, and feet have never taken this kind of punishment. I'm heavier than I've ever been.
But my recovery is holding. My gut isn't sidelining me.
And for the first time in years, I feel like my body is working with me instead of against me.
Waywyld isn't a performance brand in the traditional sense. We're not selling faster times or bigger lifts.
We're selling a body that functions the way it's supposed to — so you can do the things you love, longer and harder, without constantly negotiating with your own biology.
We started this for people like us.
Runners. Weekend warriors. Aging parents. Anyone who cares about quality — not just in what they supplement, but in how they live.
And that's my why.