B (3:20)

Here, I have one for you. Here you go.

A (3:23)

So knock on wood. Every company so far I've started has been wildly successful. You know, there is a method to the madness of how do you think about these audacious moonshot ideas? And I'll give you the framework for that. And then as we go along and we'll talk about that now, that once you become successful, how do you start to bring that type of hunger into the children? And how would you go about doing that? So with that, first of all, I want to thank you, Ilana, for hosting me here. You have been an unbelievable mentor to millions of people who listen to your podcast. And the fact that you're dedicating your life to improving other people's life is something that everyone could learn from. So it's not what I'm going to tell you that is going to be important. It is everyone who is listening to you every single episode, they need to know that your sincere desire to help the humanity, to help everyone who's listening to it, make them better. With every guest, you give your time, the most important thing you have in your life, your time to actually doing it for others, someone else. And that, to me, is so commendable. So my hat's off to you and thank you.

B (4:40)

That's so beautiful, Davine. Thank you. That means a lot. And it is a big passion. And you've been doing all these things to change millions of lives. So I would love to learn more how you started, what you've done, how do you come with these moonshot ideas? What do you do, Ilana?

A (5:00)

So, first of all, every time you start any project, you should ask yourself three questions, why this? Why now? Why me? And I'm going to explain these to you in very simple things, how you go about doing it. So why this is about go backward and ask yourself, God forbid I am actually successful in solving the problem that I set out to solve. Would it help a billion people live a better life? It could be 100 million it could be 10 million, it could be 1 million. Would it help people's life be better? If you can help a billion people live a better life? You can create a hundred billion dollar company, but you don't wake up in the morning and say, what should I do to create a hundred billion dollar company? Making money is simply a byproduct of doing things that improve people's lives, right? And a lot of young people who just don't seem to understand that concept, so I explained to them in a way they do do, which is making money is like having an orgasm. If you focus on it, you're never going to get it. You just have to learn to enjoy the process. So every time you start whatever it is, ask yourself, if you are successful, would it actually move the needle? Would it help lots of people live better life? The second part is why now? So why now has actually two pieces to the puzzle. Number one is ask yourself what had changed in the last two or three years? But more importantly, what do you expect to change in the next three to five years that will allow you to solve the problem at scale in three to five years? And this problem could not have been solved five years ago. That means are you actually intercepting and taking advantage of the technologies that are coming up and actually scaling as the technology, the price performance curve is coming down rather than using something that already existed five years ago, because then you're going to become commodity by the time you even launch. So really understanding what is changing and how do you intercept these technologies that are happening? So if you look in today's world, the cost of sensors are coming down, they're becoming faster, better, cheaper, right? So you look in the iPhone, number of sensors that are coming out, you look at AI that has been able to now process this massive amount of data. You look at these cloud computing, that means you can have so much data coming out of the sensors that can be stored and compute for at a very minimal cost and then using AI to actually be able to make sense of it. So what would you do? So now the question is, if you know this is what is going on, what industry would you disrupt? What is it that you care enough about to do that? So that's number one part. And the second part of the puzzle really is you never ever focus on how you're going to solve the problem. But you want to ask yourself, what are the set of problems that need to be solved for this big problem to be solved? So let's pick any examples, right? So let's say we want to live on Saturn. You don't say, ah, that's not going to happen, right? You simply say what would it take for us to be able to live on Saturn? Number one, you have to be able to leave Earth orbit. Number two, go from all the way Earth orbit to the Saturn orbit. Number three, land on Saturn and number four, find a way to actually live on Saturn. So there are four problems that need to be solved. And suddenly you will realize leaving the Earth orbit, we have done that many times, we call them a rocket going from Earth orbit to Saturn. Well, we have been to Mars, so we know. And we have taken Horizon that has gone beyond Pluto, out of our solar system. So we do know how to long distances. And if you're going to have people there, maybe we'll have to modify it a bit more about how we're going to do that. But that's a technology that does exist in terms of landing on Saturn. Well, we don't quite know that, but we do know how to land on Mars. And maybe the gravity on Saturn is slightly less or slightly more, but we landed on the Mars three different ways. We did the bouncing ball, we did the crane, we did the parachute. So we know multiple ways we can actually land on a different planet. And now maybe we have to modify a little bit, but we know it's the incremental problem. And the last thing is how are we going to go live there? And that really comes down to my last question, which is why me? And this is about the questions you ask is the problem you solve. So why me? Is really about how are you looking at the problem from a different perspective than everyone else has been looking in the industry. For example, if you say I want to solve a world hunger problem or I want to live on Saturn. It's the same thing. When people are talking about every single person who wants to solve a world hunger problem, if you ask an expert, they will tell you it is about increasing the yield of the crop so you have more food for more people. It is about reducing the wastage in the transport because so much of the food that's wasted in the transport. So how do you grow the food closer to where people are? But no one will ever ask the question why do we eat food? Because suddenly when you ask question why we eat food and you say, oh, you need energy and you need nutrition, what are the different ways can we get energy? Well, plants get energy from photosynthesis and there are bacteria that grow in the radioactive nuclear waste. They get the energy from radiation and they protect their DNA from radiation. So what if we can take a genetic material from these bacteria, use CRISPR to modify our cells, and now we are radiation resistant and we can get energy from radiation and suddenly it is like living on Saturn. Say, honey, do you want to go out and get some radiation? Not go out, get some pizza, right? And you have now opened up the problem to many more solutions that you would have by simply asking why we eat food, not how to grow more food. And that's the foundation to solving big problems.

B (11:06)

So what you're saying, the questions you're asking will actually decide what you are actually focusing on. And that determines basically the levels of solutions that you're starting to look at. One of the things that we notice with a lot of entrepreneurs is even that is scary. So even asking these moonshot questions, you don't necessarily want to hear the answers because you don't want to take something so big on yourself. So how do you work on the fear?

A (11:40)

Interesting thing is it's easier to solve a big problem than to solve a small problem. It's really counterintuitive, really. And here's why. If you have something that is so audacious, the best and the brightest in the world want to work on the toughest problems. The people who are successful, they want to create legacy. And what they want to work on is something, if they can, are successful, changes how humanity is going to live in the future, right? That means it allows you to get the best and brightest to focus on your problems. Number two, when you have the team and you have a great moonshot, good, audacious idea, everybody who wants to invest, they say, look, these guys have an unbelievably great idea. And look at the kind of people they have assembled. You get the investment. So it is really easier to solve a big problem than to solve a small problem. Imagine if you say, I'm going to develop another iPhone app that will help you find a roommate, People say, good luck, have fun with it. And when you come back and tell someone, hey, we are going to actually make humanity a multi planetary society. We are going to make illness optional. What if we can actually solve the problem that no one ever have to develop a cancer or have depression or ever have Alzheimer's, People say, sign me up, tell me how you're going to do that. And suddenly you now have the best and the brightest in the world who want to work on the problem that you set out to do. Let me take this framework and let me apply it to the company that I started because that actually will ground it so you can see how to apply it, right? So seven years ago, I found myself in a really tough predicament. My dad was diagnosed with stage four pancreatic cancer. And there is nothing I could have done at this point. He was given three months to live and unfortunately, that's all he got. And it occurred to me that there was nothing. There was no symptom, there is nothing we could have done. Why in this age, we can't find a way to detect early stage cancers. Why is it that we had to wait until he was at stage four and there was nothing that we could have done? I started to think back and looked at his life. He had high blood pressure, he had diabetes, he had all these chronic diseases. And we just accepted that's how it is. He's getting older. Obviously he's going to have high blood pressure, of course he's going to have heart disease, of course he's going to have diabetes, of course he's going to gain weight. This is all we accepted and we say, beta sacrifice. Why does it have to be this way? Because humans have not changed in the last hundred years as a species yet. Younger and younger people are getting more and more chronic diseases. There has to be something. We actually have changed. So this is how I started. I said, what if? And every moonshot idea, every project I do, I always start, what if. What if we can actually understand what changes in the human body at the onset of these chronic diseases, whether it is cancer or diabetes or heart disease or Alzheimer's. If we can do that, if we understand what is changing in the human body, then we will be able to potentially prevent the disease from happening, diagnose them early, and, God forbid, outright reverse them. If we can do that, then I ask myself if I could actually be successful in solving this problem. Would it help a billion people live a better life? And the answer was 8 billion. Every one of us is going to suffer from it. So he said, good. So why this is check mark? Because we know that this is a big problem that we could attack. And then I asked myself, why now? And we said, look, to solve this problem, there are three things that have to happen. We have to be able to digitize the human body. We have to be able to take massive amount of data that's coming from this digitization and to be able to process the data. And number three, the AI has to be powerful enough to be able to make sense of all this data. So I said, okay, let's understand what Is it that's going on in the industry that will allow us to do so? The cost of sequencing is still $1,000 to understand just the one simple sample. And if you were to sequence, it's $1,000. And we said that's too high. We can't solve this problem. But it used to be $100,000, $10,000. It is thousand dollars. In the next three to five years, it will come down to $100 because it cost is plummeting. Guess what? Seven years later, Ilana, it is now down to almost five dollars. Right? So think about it for a second. When we were 10 times optimistic, it turns out we were 20 times pessimistic because the costs were plummeting even faster than we imagined. And I will come back and explain. When technologies are on exponential curve, our human mind cannot ever fathom how fast they move, because human mind is designed to think linearly, whereas these technologies are growing exponentially. And for example, if you are to ask and say, Elana, you have two options. I'll give you a hundred million dollars right now, or I can give you $1, but for the next 30 days, I will double every time. So I'll give you $1 today and the $2 tomorrow. And I'm going to give you four and then the eight. And you do the math and say eight becomes $16, becomes $32, $64 and then 64, 1, 28, $256, $512, $1,000. And I'm already at eight days. And I'm thinking in 30 days, never is going to be a million dollars, let alone hundred million dollars. Give it to me now without realizing that 30 doubling later, it is a billion dollars. And that is the part of the thing that human mind just never because it looks at the early things and it forgets the part. So that was first part was cost of sequencing was coming down. And then we looked at and saying to process, we will never have access to supercomputer, but we can use the cloud computing. And we looked at the cost and they said cost was at that time was about $47. And we say, wow, that's a lot of cost to process a single person's data. But it has come down. Cost of storage is coming down. The cost of CPUs are becoming more and faster and cheaper. This should come down to about $10 in the next three to five years. And today we spend about $1.50 on that. And AI, by the way, everyone realized that AI was going to be more and more powerful and we will have the AI that we needed for doing that. So we realized the time to start was then. Then came the biggest part, why me? And again, I am not a scientist, I am not a doctor. And here is a problem that I'm trying to solve in healthcare. Know nothing about it. And most people will be so scared about not knowing anything. People say you're not a doctor, you're not a scientist, how are you going to solve it? And I think as I was telling you, that non experts are better at solving the problem than experts are. And here's why. Every expert takes the foundation to be granted because that's what makes them an expert, the foundation of the industry. They take it for granted because the foundational knowledge is what makes them an expert. Non expert are the only one that can challenge the foundation of everything that experts have taken it for granted. So here I am never done healthcare company and my first thing was pay. They said everyone in the industry is asking, they want to know about your DNA. And they were tens of companies doing DNA testing and everyone thought DNA is unique to every individual. If they could somehow understand the DNA which they understood software for body, if they knew your DNA they could find out what is going on. And my first reaction as in non expert was does your DNA change when you gain £100? So if you do my DNA test today and I gain £100, has my DNA changed? And the answer is no. Now if I become diabetic, has my DNA changed? No. If I have a heart disease, my DNA changes? No. I have depression, anxiety, does my DNA change? The answer is no. And my point was in fact even after you die, your DNA doesn't change. So if you were to look at DNA of a dinosaur, it's the same DNA. So if DNA can't even tell you you're dead or alive, how will it ever tell you you are becoming healthier or sicker? And that was my first thing was as a non expert ICA set. DNA is not the place to look for what changes. And then back to my Khan Academy, what happens to the DNA? And we say what DNA makes rna and it's the gene expression or your RNA that's always changing, but not your DNA. So your genes don't change, but your gene expression is always changing. So what does someone like me say, let's go measure gene expression. We don't know how to do that. But in my framework you never focus on how. You simply say okay, so we're going to go measure gene expression. Does that solve the problem. And then as I start to dig in, it turns out 99% of all the genes that actually are expressed in our body don't come from our mom and dad. They actually come from these microbiome that are in our gut, in our mouth, and all over us. 100 trillion these microbes. So I said, wow. So then I start doing the research. So you go to Google Research or Google Scholar and you say diabetes and microbiome, obesity and microbiome, Heart disease and microbiome, Parkinson's and microbiome. It turns out every disease has microbiome that is connected to it. My first reaction was, if everyone believes the microbiome is so important and everyone believes the microbiome causes all these diseases to happen, 10 companies probably they're doing microbiome testing, then why is this problem not getting solved? And then you go back to your first principle. What question are they asking? And it turns out to date, every microbiome company is asking the same wrong question. So every microbiome company is trying to find out what organisms are in Alana's gut, what organisms are in Naveen's gut, what organisms are in the gut of people who have Parkinson's or Alzheimer's or diabetes or obesity. And you know, my first reaction was organisms are like tiny human beings. Just like human beings, they make behave completely differently based on the environment. So same organism will produce something good in good environment and will produce something bad in the bad environment. Just like a human being, you take a human being, put them in a good environment, good behavior, put them in the bad environment, the bad behavior. So what if we focus not on what organisms are there, but we focus on what they are producing, what they are expressing and how it is interacting with the human gene expression. If we can do that, we can solve this problem. That's all. What my. Why this? Why now? Why me? So we know now we are going to measure the human gene expression and we are going to focus on what microbes are expressing and producing and we are going to look at the interaction of that and that's how we're going to solve the problem. Now comes the next part. How are you going to do this? And that's really interesting because I'm just going through the process of how I went through. So this is literally took me, you know, 30, 45 days of just doing the research and say, all right, so now we know what needs to be done, we just don't know how. So I'm thinking this got to be the really easy thing to do. If I'm thinking about it, somebody's probably done it, right? My first reaction was, you're going to think it's really crazy. I thought, you know, NASA JPL is sending these rovers to Mars looking for sign of life. They have to have figured out how you go out to figure out what these organisms are doing. So I'm going to go to the NASA jpl, I'm going to talk to the scientists and I'm going to say, hey, guys, don't you already know how to do this? And can I license the technology? And they look at me say, no, not really. We don't care about what organisms are doing. We're just trying to figure out any sign of life there. And I'm thinking, bunch of morons. If I need to go to NASA Houston, the headquarters, that's where they got all the good stuff. I went there, I'm touching the moon rocks, I'm talking to all the scientists, but it's still no solution. And then I'm starting thinking, wait a sec, I need to start looking at some of the universities. So I went to Stanford, I went to mit, and I'm now going to Duke, and I'm looking at all the universities. There's got to be someone who solved this problem. Still, I'm out of luck. So now I'm at Lawrence Berkeley, Lawrence Livermore, all these national labs trying to find out what to do. And they're saying, well, we are looking at multiple ways, but we don't have a solution yet. Then I was at Los Alamos National Lab, and as you recall that Los Alamos National Lab is famous for what, Lana, what is it famous for?

B (24:25)

The big atomic bomb. Nuclear.

A (24:28)

Yes, nuclear bomb. Right. So they developed a nuclear bomb and they were working on their next project.

B (24:34)

Which was fascinating story, by the way. Yes, for sure.

A (24:38)

So they were now working on biodefense and the biological weapon defense. Right. And think about the problem they needed to solve. So they were thinking that if there is a terrorism in our great country, how would we ever protect ourselves? They don't care what organisms are there in the biological bomb. They need to figure out what they are doing, what they are producing or what they are expressing so they can create antidote for it. So they spent 10 years developing this technology to figure out how these microbes or these organisms in the biological bomb, what they're going to be expressing, how it's going to interact with the human body so they can protect the citizens. And I'm thinking, hallelujah, that's exactly what I need. So all I had to do was now get the license to this technology, hire the people who actually worked on the project and build the company. And that's literally what I did. So I got the license to the exclusive perpetual license of technology. The person who was working on it, he became my chief science officer. I brought him on board. I hired the head of IBM, Watson Research, who was developing all the AI. I brought him on board. And then we started bio. So think about it. From the concept of simply understanding that why my dad had to die, to really going through step by step and looking at this problem and finding what needed to be done and then finding the technology and starting a company. And Ilana, just to complete the story, that is really what warms my heart. Seven years later, we have not only now analyzed close to 1 million samples. We in fact now when we analyze your body, we look at your saliva, which is oral microbiome, we look at your stool, your gut microbiome, we look at a finger prick, blood, to look at all your mitochondria and the human gene expression, your immune system, so all the cytokines. And then we can tell you specifically now, don't eat avocado because your uric acid is too high. It's going to end up causing you gout. Don't eat spinach or almonds right now because your oxalates are not being metabolized. Don't eat broccoli right now because your sulfite production is too high, causing lot of inflammation. But you can eat red meat if you want because your TMA production is very low and your TMA is going to get absorbed in the blood and your liver is not expressing enough of FMO3. That means you're not going to produce TMAO, which causes the heart disease. You can eat red meat, right? So we can now tell you what foods to eat and why, what foods not to eat and why. And then we say, look Ilana, you also need more nutrients. You need 22 milligrams of lycopene every day. You should take 18 milligrams of elderberry every day. Take 79 milligrams of amylase every day. And we go through every vitamin, minerals, herbs, digestive enzyme, amino acid. We tell you what you need in what quantity and we custom make those capsules for each individual. So just to show you mine, these are mine. Notice that it says manufactured on, doesn't say expires on every single month. It is custom made just for me. There is no two People get the same formula every month. I get my probiotics, I get my oral lozenges that are made for me to adjust my oral microbiome. And Elana, we get personalized toothpaste that are made for you in the morning and evening to adjust my oral microbiome. And what we did is we published the research that shows people who take the personalized guidance. Their diabetes comes down by 30% in three months. Placebo blinded, placebo controlled study. Fasting Insulin down by 25%. Depression, down by 49%. Their IBS, which is 15% of the population, down by 47%. Anxiety, down by 42%. And we published the research and here is the better part. Now we have a product that can diagnose stage one cancer in your mouth and throat. And we got FDA breakthrough device designation. So the whole thing I wanted to do was do this thing so we can collect enough data so we can diagnose the diseases. So today we are the only company that can diagnose stage zero and stage one cancer with 95% specificity and 90% sensitivity. So companies like Grail, they do the cancer test. Their stage one sensitivity is 24.1%. Ours is 90% because we use RNA and not the cell free DNA. Right. By the way, we can now do the IBD and we are now just doing it for colon polyps, which is 10 years before you develop a colon cancer. So imagine instead of waiting for cancer to happen, you can diagnose polyps so you can remove them and never develop a cancer. This is what we set out to do and now we are able to do that by building a product that consumers benefit today. The data that we collect allows us now to develop early stage diagnostics. And soon we'll be able to in fact develop drugs with the pharmaceutical companies to reverse them. Right. This is the mission, just tell you, from the idea, the concept to execution, how we did it. And I thought that's a good way of explaining how the framework works.

B (30:05)

That's so incredible, Naveen. And I think one of the beautiful quotes I think that I heard from you and I might be butchering it a little bit, but it's something like, what are you willing to die for? Figure that out and live for that. And I think you talk about obsession versus passion. Can you talk about it? I feel like that is so powerful because you're living that. That's exactly what you're doing. That's exactly the example that you gave.

A (30:33)

Passion is for hobbies, right? So each one of us Say, I'm passionate about this. Passion is for hobbies. Passion is not what moves the humanity forward. You have to have obsession. Not obsession for a person, not obsession for things, obsession to solve a problem. When you find yourself obsessed to solve a problem, that's what it takes for you to dedicate your life. Because nothing that you do in life that's meaningful is not going to be full of hurdles, right? And when you are obsessed about solving it, you actually are able to find a solution. Because whether you have to go through the wall, you have to go around the wall, you go under the wall, you go over the wall, it doesn't matter, you're going to solve the problem. When you actually care enough to me, whether you call that you're not star, this is something you're willing to die for, and then you live every minute of your life living for it. This is how you solve the problem. Every entrepreneur, I don't care who they are, whether it is Mark Zuckerberg or whether it's Larry Ellison, they all go through what I call near death experiences, right? Every company that feels these near death experiences. And what I realized is that life of an entrepreneur is to feel that they are alive. And the only way you know you're alive is you have a heartbeat. And what does a heartbeat look like? It goes up and down and up and down. And when it's smooth, you're dead. So anytime an entrepreneur finds themselves living a smooth life, they have chosen to live a life of a dead person, right? The ups and downs is what tells you that you're still alive. When you are down, all you have to do is hunker down and know the next beat is going to be up. And here is the lesson of life. When you are on top of that beat, never become too arrogant. Because always remember, the winter is coming and winter shall come.

B (32:34)

I think Richard Branson has a good quote that I love. The brave don't live forever, but the cowards don't live at all. I went through my own ups and downs. Every single entrepreneur will go through their ups and downs. And sometimes when it catches you at three in the morning and you can't breathe, it is hard. How many people are actually not able to go through these near death experiences, right? And they give up. And I think that's the majority. So how do you, maybe you can even share an example of something that was really, really hard and how did you get the power to get back up?

A (33:09)

I mean, look at Elon Musk. He went through this close to bankruptcy For Tesla, and he had three rockets that exploded and he had no money left. I mean, he would have been just completely bankrupt. And here he is, one of the richest men, if not the richest man in the world. So what is it? Near failure to actually a superb thing. Because his fundamental belief it is worth doing, right? When you put everything on the line that it is worth doing, there are people and the universe aligns itself to make it happen for you. And it's not that somehow I'm talking about some voodoo the universe does. What really happens is when you are laser focused, every single person you meet, you start to think about how can this person help me achieve my mission? Every single conversation is about how will it help me get to my mission. And you start to be so focused that you are starting to surround yourself with people who believe in you. You start to surround yourself with people who are actually going to believe in you. And they help you get to what you want to get done. And you could argue that even from non scientific perspective. But if you look at that, we as humans are made of atoms, right? What are atoms made of? Atoms are made of electrons and protons. What are they made of? Quarks. What are the quarks made of? Simple energy. So we are nothing but a bundle of energy. When we focus our energy on something, we resonate at a certain frequency. And the other human beings that are also resonating at a similar frequency, they amplify our frequency and then we align. And the people who are negative, they're resonating in a different frequency. Guess what? We don't get to see them. And that's the reason people find themselves in a depressed state. They surround themselves with all the people who are depressed. So my point I'm going to make is that this is really the way of knowing that things are going to be tough. And this is the time if you can just hunker down and don't give up on the other side when you come out. That is the bright side of the thing. The day before the breakthrough is a crazy idea. And the day after the breakthrough it's an obvious idea. And that literally happens every day in our life. So I always look at every single day, what can I do to move the mission forward. I may not know how far I have to go, but I know the direction I need to go. And as in the Eastern philosophy and the Gita, as they say, my goal in life is simply about action, not the results. Results will come from action. And in Sanskrit it says karmaniye vadikaraste ma faleshu kadachan that means focus your life on taking action and not focus on getting the results. The results are the outcome. And Amazon has a very similar philosophy where Jeff Bezos talks about input and not output. He said, I want to know what are you going to do? Why are you going to do it? If you can convince me your inputs are right, I don't care about the output, whether the output is right or wrong. It's not something you can control, but input is something you can control.

B (36:26)

It's exactly what we see because people just stop taking action and then shockingly, they don't get the results right. And we see it a lot, especially when there's fear or regret or, you know, rejection or something is taking them down. But what do you do in order to get back up when it's hard and say to yourself, I'm going to take that next step, even if it's scary, even if I don't know what's going to be the outcome, even if I may look like a fool, you still need to take that next step. What are some of the things that you tell yourself? Is it really just a focus? Is there something that helps you? Are there role models that help you? Talk to me a little bit about.

A (37:07)

It's not just a focus, it is you care enough the obsession that I'm talking about. You jump out of the bed at 4am Wanting to solve that problem. You go to bed wanting to solve the problem. When you're taking shower. All you're thinking about how to solve that problem, right? That is what takes you through the tough times. Because you know it is worth it. Because remember, when times are tough, you give up because you don't think it is worth it. Now imagine if your kids are in danger, what goes through your mind? You become the Superman, superwoman. Nothing gets in your way. You are willing to take your bare hands and if you have to kill someone with your bare hands, you're willing to do that because your kids are in danger. And that's what I'm talking about. When you have that type of a laser focus and a purpose, that purpose, what drives you. You notice when people, when they find the kids are in danger, the mom becomes a super mom. There's nothing stops them. And they have these laser focus eyes and nothing gets in the way. They get that power in their arms that they could probably take down the person of a three times their size. Because you do not want to get in the way of a mom and their kid. That's the power of purpose.

B (38:25)

I think with social media and everything that we see on someone else, it all looks easy. So we lose patience, right? We want everything yesterday. We're high achievers, we're driven. But the truth is you're just going to have to take those small, imperfect steps every single day to get there. And a lot of these things are a decade long of overnight success, right? So how do you keep the patience?

A (38:50)

And the way you do that is you take it, you know, large, audacious project and you break them down into smaller milestones and you start every time you achieve a milestone, you celebrate the milestone. So it starts to look like you're making progress because you can't see no progress and keep going down that path. So the thing is, if you say, hey, I'm going to live on Saturn, oh my God, look at my rocket is now fighting the fire. And by the way, I can see the pressure on that is 10 gigabits. Great. Love it. And you keep making these milestones to achieve. What are these milestones after milestones that you're achieving and that allows you to keep going because now you know you're moving in the right direction.

B (39:32)

So you wanted to ask something, but I also want to talk a little bit about Moonshot and the use formula. Like I don't know how you have time to write books. So that's a different story.

A (39:42)

I was going to actually change the subject on you and maybe we can talk about use formula, but I was going to talk about the kids, since I mentioned the mom and the kids. How does an entrepreneur raise unbelievably great children with the same audacious thinking that they had before they were successful? This something I always find very fascinating. So we have three children, Ilana. My oldest is Ankur, 33 years old. He runs a company called Bilt. And you probably know the Bild is another unicorn that he started about two years ago and he went to Wharton. And my daughter went to Stanford. She's a Stanford Mayfield Fellow and she started a women's health company called Evvy E V V Y, which is the best women's health company and it is another great company that she started. My youngest went to Stanford also, and he's a Schwarzman Scholar and he's a fintech company that's also a unicorn. So the interesting thing I'm saying, three children knowing that they are growing up in an affluent family, knowing they don't have to work for a day for a living, and they decided to take on the audacious projects and take on the challenges knowing that they don't have to do anything. They could live off the wealth that that created. And yet they want to go out and take on some of the biggest project that has never been done and still do that. So what was that? And this to me is about what I call the counterintuitive parenting. So I'm going to give you five or six tips here because every entrepreneur, that is one of the biggest thing I notice is that a successful person generally will end up having kids who are becoming bums. They just don't ever go out and actually have the same hunger, same desire to go solve the biggest problems, to help the humanity live better. So the couple of things, number one thing is you need to redefine what success is. So we told our children while they were young that your success will never be measured by how much money you have in the bank. It will always be measured by how many lives you improved. And more importantly, your self worth will never come from what you own. Your self worth comes from what you create. And if you haven't created anything and you own a lot, you're still a parasite on humanity. So don't be a parasite. Other lesson that we learned was that as a parent or as a leader, our job is not to take the kids to the water and make them drink. Our job is to make them thirsty. How do you make them thirsty? By giving them intellectual curiosity. Once you give them the intellectual curiosity, that is the thirst, rest of their life they will actually find their own water and they will drink it because they are thirsty. And the thirst come from this intellectual curiosity that what if that something was possible? And how do you create the intellectual curiosity? Is learning for them to challenge everything that they take it for granted. Just like I say as a non expert, Elana, if your kids were to say, mom, mom, look at such a beautiful blue sky, normally most parents will say, oh amazing, you're right, it's such a beautiful blue sky. But your job at that point, what if you were to say, you know, the sky doesn't really exist. Sky is not a physical thing, it is simply a figment of our imagination. And by the way, the blue color, there is no blue color. It is simply the electromagnetic waves that come to our retina, they go to our mind and we actually interpret these colors. And by the way, the dog may not see the same color, the bat may not see the same color, other species don't see the same color. The color doesn't really exist. We create the Colors in our own mind. The reason I mentioned that is not about to teach them about the science. It is about for them to know something they are seeing with their own eyes, something they are absolutely certain about. Even that can be wrong.

B (43:55)

Everything can be questioned.

A (43:57)

Everything can be questioned, right? And once you do that, it starts to change their perspective on everything they see in life. They can say, what if that was wrong? What if we could do it differently? What if that was not true? Right? And that is the intellectual curiosity why kids go out and challenge everything. Just to give you an idea. I still remember during COVID we worked together and said, dad, I want to start this company where people can pay their rent on a credit card and reward them for rent. And what if there was no charge when you put the rent on a credit card? What if there was no charge? And I said, uncle, what are you thinking about? The way credit card company makes money is when you put money, they charge you two and a half percent to the merchant. That's how they make money. But dad, you are the one who told me, what if that's not true? What if we can actually, what if we can actually convince them that they don't have to make money on that way? And I said, uncle, you're right. Why don't you go give it a shot? And he literally started this company based on the thought that what if you don't have to charge on a rent and MasterCard, say, you know what, there are $700 billion in the country that is spent on a rent and we get zero. So we're not going to lose anything and we're going to completely waive the credit card fees for that. And we would charge the money for everything else, but not for it. So that allowed him to rethink that. Just because that's how it is doesn't mean that's how it needs to be. The second part, really, Ilana, and then I'm going to stop here would be, you know, our kids were very, very young when I created my first company, Infospace. The company went on to become a $40 billion company and our kids were under 10 years old and the three kids under 10 years old. Most parents would say at that time, oh my God, I've had success. Now I'm going to spend time with my young children. Imagine what would have happened if I did that. And if I say I want to spend time with my young children, and most people are saying, you know, such a great who is now quitting everything and spending time with the children now imagine what the children see. Children see when they go to school that dad is sitting on the sofa watching cnbc. They come back from school, dad is at home watching cnbc. And dad tells now go to your room. Work hard, hard work is what it takes. And they're thinking, I want to grow up just like my dad sitting on the sofa watching on cnbc. Instead this dad, it starts a second company, it starts a third company because dad says money doesn't matter. It's about solving the problems that matter. Dad says now we're going to go build a company to go to the moon. And kids say, dad, you're crazy. Nobody has ever done that. It's never going to happen. Let me show you son how to do that right? Dad is now turning 60. Dad wants to start a healthcare company. And literally we had a family meeting. All the kids are now grown up and say, dad, you've had amazing success. You know the healthcare. You're going to get bloodied, you're never going to make it rise into sunset. You are high. You got plenty legacy. Why do you want to destroy your legacy? This is not something you want to do. And what is this microbiome thing you talk about? Nobody's going to give you a poop, nobody's going to know the microbiome. I don't know where you learned these microbiome things. You should stop this stuff. And I'm thinking, oh boy, looks like to me I haven't taught you anything yet. So let me show you one more time how this is done. And my point is children don't do what you tell them to do. Children do what they see you do. Think about that for a second. Many, many people who are parents, their dad is working at Microsoft or Amazon. Nothing wrong with these companies. They're working as a mid level manager or an executive in these companies and they're saying why are their kids are not becoming entrepreneurs? I want my kid to be an entrepreneur. And there was a guy who worked for me and said, you know Naveen, why is it that your kids are all becoming entrepreneur? My kids refuse to be an entrepreneur. And I say, ask yourself, when you were working on these large companies, you went home, you bitched about your boss and then you went back to work the next day. What does the kids learn? Kids learn. I'm going to get a job where I'm going to hate my boss, I'm going to come home, bitch about my boss and go back to work because that's how my dad did it. So point is if you want your kids to be an entrepreneur, you have to show them what to do and to do it yourself. They learn from you doing it, not from you telling them to do it. So when the kids were young, I won't read them the story. The daily ritual was, I would say, ankur, tell me a story about a monkey and an ocean and a palm tree. Your job is to connect the things that are seemingly not connected. And he will now tell me story. Now say, dad, now you tell me a story about this, this and this. And the idea we were creating was showing them that everything that looks disconnected can actually be connected together if you think in a different abstract way. When my youngest was applying for Stanford, he said, dad, I have nothing common. Everything I've done, I've done the neuroscience here, I've done the genetics here. I've done this. How am I going to explain to college application that these things somehow are connected? And I said, go back to what we did when we were telling a story. I said, you talk about how you were intellectually curious and your curiosity drove you to do these things. And the common thread is the curiosity, not what you did. And that's literally what he wrote, the college essay that my intellectual curiosity did not let me focus on just one thing because I wanted to understand everything before I decided, decide what is it that I want to do with my life.

B (49:42)

Oh, I love that. And I think that thread is so important. We would hike when my kids were little, they're still teens, but we would hike for hours, and we would just pick some random thing and we would make a whole story on it because we had a long time to drag, right? So I absolutely love this. The imagination is something that now, in the TikTok world, when everything is just coming your way, to be able to step back and actually use curiosity, use questions, use imagination. It's just so fundamental.

A (50:15)

I completely agree with you. Imagination is the only boundary, the only thing that limits us to what we can do is our imagination. If we can imagine it, we can achieve it.

B (50:26)

Maybe one last question. If you would go back in time to your younger self, what would be something that you would tell yourself?

A (50:36)

I was going to say, you're going to probably ask me, what would I change? You know, interesting thing is, first of all, you never, ever want to change anything about your past. And here's why. If you love just the way you are, if you changed anything in your past, you will become a completely different person. Everything that happened is what made you who you are. So fall in Love with who you are today. Because the day you fall in love with yourself is the day the world will fall in love with you, right? To answer your question, what would I tell myself if I was young? Is never let anyone tell you that what you're doing is simply a crazy idea and you should stop doing it. The more people think it's a crazy idea, that's the idea worth pursuing. So dreams so big that people think it's crazy. And never, ever be afraid to fail, because you only fail when you give up. And one of the lessons I learned from this is from my daughter, by the way, when she started Abby. And by the way, anyone who's listening to this, she's go check out abbvie.com, this is one of the best women's health company. When she was starting Abby, I said, sweetie, how is the company doing? How is your venture coming along? And she looks at me, said, dad, how little you know about entrepreneurship? And I said, wow, tell me why. And she says, dad, my job is simply to be experimenting. I am simply experimenting to see what might work. Until I figure that out, there is no company yet. So the entrepreneur's job is to simply experiment. And how many experiments you do actually gives the success. This is the idea that I just want to emphasize because this. Every entrepreneur should know when something happens, they look at a success or a failure. If you look at that as an experiment is this experiment has two outcomes, outcome A and outcome B. If outcome A happens, I do this. If outcome B happens, I do this. And if you think of this an experiment, there is no failure, right? There is no a success, and B is a failure. It is simply two outcomes, and each outcome has a different route. And as Edison says, I did not fail 10,000 times. I figured out the 10,000 ways the light bulb doesn't work. And that allowed me to find a way that actually works. And that is the power of experimentation, not failure. So you never look at anything as a failure. You look at them as an experiment.

B (53:13)

And we actually brought a lot of the idea of experimentation from the startup world to the world of careers, because I think we never look at the career as an experiment. And I don't know why. Right. I mean, it just makes so much sense because not everybody's meant for entrepreneurship.

A (53:27)

And, you know, someday we should really think about what is an entrepreneurship anyway. Entrepreneurship is simply about solving a problem. It's not about starting a company. You could be inside a company and be an entrepreneur because you're solving a problem. So there are three types of people in the world. People who come up with a problem, people who come up with a solution, and the people who go out and actually solve it.

B (53:48)

Exactly. I've been watching you, been a big fan. Just amazing to see the big, audacious ideas that you have and that you're not afraid to go after them, which I think is very, very inspiring for entrepreneurs to see and to realize that, yes, it's really more about taking those steps, taking constant action, not being afraid of failure, because it is about the progress. So I really, really appreciate your coming and sharing all these incredible insights, Naveen.

A (54:20)

Thank you, Alana. I really appreciate you. And we'll continue our conversation on our next episode. Exactly.