I watched someone I love almost die because there was nowhere for them to go between a weekly therapy appointment and a locked hospital unit. That gap shouldn't exist.
I was 22 when I started this. People told me I was too young to build a healthcare company. But the kids we treat are 15, 16, 17. They couldn't wait for me to get older.
I was CFO of Facebook and Genentech. I could have done a lot of things. But mental health is the biggest solvable problem in healthcare, and nobody was solving it well.
I was 24 when I started this company. People told me I was too young to sell to Fortune 500 HR departments. Turns out HR departments don't care how old you are if your outcomes data is better than everyone else's.
Dentists were still mailing physical molds through UPS in 2020. That's not an industry ripe for disruption — that's an industry begging for it.
Our first order was a book called "Leaving Microsoft to Change the World." We were leaving Amazon to change India. The irony wasn't lost on us.
We hit our first-year sales target in three weeks. We had a 20,000-person waitlist. Turns out people really hated paying $300 for something that costs $5 to make.
I was a CPA sitting in a cubicle thinking, this can't be it. I quit to teach yoga, started designing shorts in my apartment, and ten years later SoftBank valued the company at $4 billion. Life is weird.
I spent my whole career in advertising watching brands spend millions to be 5% funnier than their competitor. I thought, what if we just made the funniest brand in the world and put water in it?
Our first ad got 3 million views on Facebook before we had a single can of water to sell. That told us everything we needed to know. The brand was the product.
I read the back of a baby food pouch and couldn't pronounce half the ingredients. Then I looked at the expiration date — two years out. That's when I knew we could do better.
We started OpenSea in 2017 and nobody cared about NFTs for three years. Then one day in 2021, everyone cared at the same time. Being early is indistinguishable from being wrong — until suddenly it isn't.
CryptoKitties crashed the Ethereum network in 2017. That was simultaneously our greatest marketing moment and the moment we realized we needed to build our own blockchain.
I got food poisoning and wanted to find a good doctor online. There was literally nothing useful. That frustration became a company worth billions. Food poisoning is underrated as a startup origin story.
The wholesale industry was a $2 trillion market still running on handshakes, trade shows, and paper invoices. We just put it online. Sometimes the simplest ideas are the biggest.
We were four Square employees who saw small businesses struggle every day. The retailers had no good way to find products. The brands had no good way to find retailers. We just connected the dots.
I was 17, traveling across India, and every budget hotel was a gamble. Dirty sheets, broken AC, cockroaches. I thought, what if every cheap hotel room was actually clean and predictable? That question became OYO.
I made Google Earth. Then Google Maps. Then Pokemon Go. My career has been about getting people to explore the real world through technology. That thread has never changed.