In the last 50 years, human sperm counts have fallen by more than 50% around the globe — a potential crisis in the making that could result in catastrophe for the human race.

Eric Zhu, the 17-year-old founder of 8VC-backed Aviato — an analytics platform for private market data which he says he launched from his high school’s bathroom — is hoping to draw more awareness to the male fertility crisis in the most innovative of ways: by launching a competition where competitors race their sperm on a microscopic track in front of thousands of cheering fans (and hundreds of thousands more watching online).

After attending the first sperm race last Friday in LA, I sat down with Eric to ask him about his inspiration for creating Sperm Racing, his background as a high school bathroom millionaire, whether or not he plans to go to college, and more.

Our conversation has been edited for clarity and brevity.

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Riley Nork: You’re 17 years old, and previously launched a startup from your high school bathroom that raised $2.3 million. Can you tell me a little bit more about your background prior to creating the world’s first sperm race? How does someone launch a multi-million dollar startup from their school’s bathroom?

Eric Zhu: Yeah, I started my company out of the high school bathroom. For context I founded Aviato, where we basically build data products for private markets. I had to talk to customers and take calls from 9-to-5, which was also when school was. So initially I was taking calls in the cafeteria, but got kicked out of that, so I started taking them in the bathroom.

The bathroom was like… crazy. There were drug dealers there, I was friends with a lot of them. At one point I was buying hall passes from them to get out of class. They were always there, and I was trying to figure out how they were able to do that until I realized they were literally stealing hall passes from teachers. So I would buy the passes from them and stay in the bathroom to work for five, six hours a day.

As the business scaled, there was one time where I ended up booking a meeting with a senator about bills that were coming up. And he was like, “You know, I don’t feel comfortable having a video call with a minor in a high school bathroom.” So I brought a green screen for the bathroom… and then the principal walked in. He found out about the calls, found out I was buying hall passes from drug dealers, and banned me from the restroom during school hours. If I had to use the bathroom from then on, my teacher had to call the principal, who would call the school’s security officer to chaperone me to the bathroom.

[EDITOR’S NOTE: the quote Aviato investor Eric Bahn gave TechCrunch last year about taking a meeting with Eric is hilarious: “He had his braces on… He clearly looked quite young, but he was oddly mature. The really strange part is he was clearly in the bathroom stall as a high school freshman, and I was like, ‘Where the f*** are you right now?’ I literally said that. He said, ‘I pretended that I had diarrhea, so I think I have like 30 minutes to chat with you.’”]

But yeah, I moved to SF two years ago, have a full-time team there now, and we’ve just been building. I actually spent some time at the University of Austin briefly. So what ended up happening was there was this billionaire who was familiar with the school, and he asked me, “What’s the craziest thing you want to do that you haven’t done? What’s the craziest idea you have for a company?” And I was like: “Sperm racing.”

So that’s how we started racing sperm. I put a manifesto out there, a lot of people shared it, and we ended up making Sperm Racing happen.

You framed the main sperm race at the event last week as a battle between USC vs. UCLA. As a 17-year-old, do you think a traditional, four-year college path is in your future?

Yeah, my mom’s Asian, so I’m probably gonna go to college eventually. My mom actually called me and told me to apply to all these colleges this year. I only applied to one (Stanford) and I didn’t get in.

But I don’t know. Maybe? We’ll see. I like the idea of college but at the end of the day it’s kind of hard to go to class and build companies at the same time.

Do you think college is sort of redundant for someone who’s as focused on building as you already are?

I don’t think it’s redundant, I think there’s a lot to learn. I just think that for most of the university experience, it’s not really about the classes that you go to. Like most of that stuff you can learn online, right? I don’t think people really go for the classes unless it’s really advanced ones. I’ve been to a couple of these classes, and I mean it’s interesting — it’s not like I don’t need school. It’s just hard building a company with school, and I know I’ll end up fucking around and trying to build a company either way.

How did you come up with the sperm race? Were you just sitting around with your friends, thinking this would be a cool way to compete with each other?

Yeah, so I’ve had the idea for a while — basically when I’m with my friends we only talk about sperm in degenerate contexts. But last year I was with some wealthy people who are also super healthy, and they were talking about sperm more as a biomarker. They were saying, “Hey, this is super important, have you gotten it checked out?”

So that’s where the idea came from, and initially, it was going to be sperm fighting. We would take two polar kinds of sperm samples, and they would actually fight each other. But that ended up being too hard, so eventually I said: “Wouldn’t it be sick if we raced sperm?”

Because as it turns out — when looking at sperm is a biomarker — the healthier you are, the faster your sperm is. There’s a strong correlation to that. And just like training for swimming or running leads you to become healthier, fitter, and faster, the same is generally true with sperm. By getting healthier and working out more, you make your sperm faster. So it’s this cool health connection where we’re trying to optimize biomarkers, but not only that — we’re also trying to make sperm less of a taboo thing.

Because sperm count is declining rapidly. In the last 50 years, sperm counts worldwide have been reduced by half — and they’re still declining. It presents this future where no one can have babies, and yet no one talks about it, primarily because it’s been this taboo topic. We’re trying to change the paradigm on that.

Kian from Nucleus Genomics was there at the race (getting in some incredible brand placement, I have to say). Can you talk a little bit about the event partnerships and how those came about?

Yeah, I’ve known Kian for a little bit. But also, we turned down a lot of money from casinos and stuff like that. We had a lot of sponsorship opportunities, but I just didn’t want it to become degenerate, if that makes sense. A bunch of big companies (I won’t say which ones) wanted to sponsor the race, but for us, we wanted this to be more of a health thing than a degenerate thing. Some companies offered us a ton of money, but at the end of the day, we wanted to be more associated with health sponsors like Nucleus — I think that was pretty important.

But also, sports betting is kind of a big part of sports, right? There’s two things that really work when it comes to getting people to buy in. 1) A school rivalry, where there’s already animosity built in. And 2) having money on the line. It gets more entertaining that way and people get really involved. Look at sports like the UFC, right? Or horse racing. They’re very entertaining sports, and a big reason for that is because there’s money wagered on them.

I think we had around $300K in total wagered through our partnership with Polymarket (we didn’t make any money from the bets). But a big reason for that partnership wasn’t just the betting. I also knew their marketing team way before, and they were down to spend money on marketing to make the race bigger. For the initial marketing campaign for Sperm Racing that made it go viral, I put it all together myself for around $2,000. But then Polymarket spent another 40 or 50 grand on marketing after that.

I also want to talk about some of the theatrics behind the event. You had people dressed as sperm, some incredible walkouts, a plot that centered around a guy named “Dick Gay” getting the sperm samples from the contestants, and really just some incredible puns throughout the production. Who was the mastermind behind Sperm Racing’s theatrics?

I came up with a lot of the ideas. I don’t think the scripting was perfect. But yeah, I came up with most of this stuff. This was a really rushed production. Realistically, we had like four days to put everything together.

Originally, it was just going to be the UCLA vs. USC race — we didn’t add the celebrity undercard until Sunday night. And then Tuesday was when the Hollywood Palladium [the event’s original venue] canceled on us, and it became this rushed thing where we had to fill all these seats by Friday. So the production was really put together in like three to four days. The last month or so was basically doing a lot of bio, that kind of stuff.

And I think some of this just came very naturally to me. I was like ‘Yo, we need this there, we need this there.’ It comes down to virality, right? At the end of the day, I think the one thing I understand really well is how to build viral brands and make things go viral. When I first launched Aviato from my school’s bathroom and the story started to take off on Twitter, a lot of that was really engineered — it had this whole plot behind it. I knew that everything needed to be in the right place. You need to build a storyline.

For a lot of the Sperm Racing clips — some of that stuff was staged, which was probably obvious. But also, there’s some stuff that wasn’t staged. At one point, I said to [contestant Jimmy Zhang], “Yo, you should shoot [contestant Noah Boat] with the water gun, but inside the water gun, there should be this white substance.” And then Noah got pissed and they got into a fight that was actually pretty real.

You clearly know what you’re doing with the virality — I had Sperm Racing content all over my timeline.

So the goal of the race was to raise awareness about male fertility, like you mentioned. Is it true that the better someone performs in a sperm race, the more fertile they are and the healthier their sperm in general? Is that a direct correlation?

Yeah, what’s interesting is the better you sleep, the healthier your diet, all of that correlates to sperm speed or sperm motility. And I think there were a lot of people who didn’t get that or thought that the race was fake somehow. I was actually in Noah’s room after he lost his race looking up at the screen, watching the livestream between [competitors] Asher and Tristan, and I was like: “Holy fuck, that does look so fake.”

But it was actually very real. How it works is we have this microfluidic device where we use something that basically pushes a current across the sperm sample and the sperm would then swim through the current. And before that, there’s an hour-long process where we use a centrifuge to dilute the samples and basically clean up the sperm. So each race we show for the crowd has about an hour and a half of behind-the-scenes preparation behind it.

But yes, there are things you can do in order to make your sperm swim faster, and it’s a lot of the same things we do to train for every other sport. Go to the weight room and be healthy, and you’ll have healthier sperm that swim faster.

Honestly, you couldn’t have scripted a better outcome for the race itself. In the last race between Asher and Tristan (which was a best two out of three), it came down to the third and final race which ended in a photo finish.

Actually, full transparency, what ended up happening for their race was that the winner ended up being Tristan, then Tristan again, then Asher. So we basically flipped which races we showed on the screen to make Asher’s victory appear in the second slot instead of the third one. [Editor’s Note: Going into the last race, the crowd thought both contestants were tied 1-1. As Eric explains here, Tristan’s sperm had actually won both of the first two trials before Asher’s won the third. This guy knows show business, folks.]

Got it, so the outcomes were the same, you just flipped the order of the last two races on the screen to build suspense.

Yeah, we basically just flipped the last two.

Makes sense. Well the event seemed super successful and earned a ton of publicity. Are you planning on running it back for more events?

Yep, Vegas in three months! Honestly man, I was surprised. When I was at the event, I was like “Bro, we are so cooked.” It did not entirely play out how I wanted it to go, there were a lot of quirks that came with it, the production was last minute.

But three months from now, I think it’s gonna be perfect. And a lot of the stuff we did went viral — I saw one of the clips got 40 million views, and it was just like one clip of the race. So I think we nailed something right, which is the race itself.

I think we just have to double down on it, iterate, and we’ll make this massive.

Awesome. And I’m a relatively young, healthy male — if you need some more contestants, I’ll hit the gym, I’ll get the supplements going, whatever you need, you can throw me in the ring.

Haha yeah for sure, and if you or Solana or anyone ever want to race your sperm — say less. We have our lab here but we’re moving it up to San Francisco, so just let me know.

— Riley Nork