Bryan Johnson

Bryan has never been content with the limits of biology – his own or humanity’s. After selling his payments company Braintree to PayPal for $800m in 2013, he could have taken the typical founder route: investing, relaxing, staying safely on the sidelines. Instead, he began preparing for a world where humans and machines think together, launching Kernel in 2016 with $100m of his own capital to build non-invasive brain-computer interfaces.

That leap wasn’t just technical. It was personal.

“I don’t believe I’ll die,” Bryan told an interviewer in 2025, referring to his now-famous anti-ageing regime, Project Blueprint – a meticulous protocol of 100+ daily supplements, strict caloric intake, sleep monitoring and full-body scans, all guided by algorithmic decision-making. At first glance, that might sound like a midlife crisis with a budget. But for Bryan, it’s part of the same arc: extending the bounds of human potential using tools we’ve only just begun to master.

Born in Provo, Utah in 1977 and raised in a conservative Mormon household, Bryan's early life revolved around religious commitment and entrepreneurial experimentation. He sold mobile phones door-to-door to fund his education and later earned an MBA from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business.

In 2007, he founded Braintree, an online payments company that quietly powered the early days of Uber, Airbnb and GitHub. When PayPal acquired Braintree in 2013, Bryan reportedly netted around $300m personally. Rather than retire, he launched OS Fund in 2014 – a $100m personal investment vehicle focused on biotech, AI, genomics and space, backing bold science with long-term timelines.

But Kernel was the bigger bet. While brain-computer interfaces were still largely science fiction or invasive (think Elon Musk’s Neuralink), Bryan believed real progress required measuring brain activity with precision without opening the skull. Kernel's two devices, Flow and Flux, debuted in 2020 and offer non-invasive neural recording tools to measure emotion, cognition and mental health in real time.

He sees it as a first step towards "high-bandwidth" communication between humans and machines. The aim? Not just treating mental illness, but evolving human intelligence altogether. For Bryan, this means giving humanity a new kind of self-awareness – creating tools that can reflect our internal mental processes back to us with scientific clarity, much like holding up a mirror to the mind.

Parallel to Kernel, Bryan became globally known for Project Blueprint, a live experiment in radical health optimisation. As of 2024, he reportedly spends over $2m (£1.5m) a year on anti-ageing protocols, regularly measuring over 70 organs and claiming to have the heart of a 37-year-old, the skin of a 28-year-old and the lung capacity of an 18-year-old – despite being nearly 50. His routines include nightly LED light facials, gene therapy trials, and blood plasma exchange with his teenage son – a controversial detail that made headlines and raised ethical questions around the extremes of longevity science.

His approach invites scrutiny, but for Bryan, that discomfort is the point. “I want to be the most measured human in history,” he said in an interview, describing his body as a data project, not a belief system. What some view as ego, he insists is simply iteration: a founder mindset applied to the self.

Alongside his technical ventures, Bryan has become a public provocateur – questioning the inevitability of death, pushing for AI-human collaboration, and sharing daily health data online. He’s written publicly about the failings of traditional healthcare, the importance of open science, and the need to make inner space as explorable as outer space.

Notably, Bryan isn’t part of Silicon Valley’s usual club. He lives in Los Angeles, and has taken a deliberately outsider approach – embracing public curiosity, scepticism, and even mockery as signs that he’s early, not wrong.

In 2025, Netflix released a documentary titled Don’t Die: The Man Who Wants to Live Forever, capturing the contradictions of his mission – technologist and mystic, quantifier and idealist, outsider and outlier.

Where others optimise for valuation or influence, Bryan seems to be optimising for legacy – not in a reputational sense, but as a biological experiment in staying alive long enough to see what’s next.

He’s not interested in ageing gracefully. He’s intent on challenging it – methodically, publicly, and on his own terms.