This week Kahran talks to Lena Chaihorsky, founder of Alva10 not about her business but about how her growth as an entrepreneur has helped her in other areas of her life, in feeling joy and satisfaction as well as how she sees herself as a citizen, and the importance of emotional growth.
Satisfaction and success are not the same pursuit. You can feel deeply satisfied without any external marker of success, and wildly successful without any satisfaction.
Hi, I'm Divya. Hi, I'm Karn. And this is... Thinking. I'm thinking.
Hello, and welcome to this episode of Thinking on Thinking. This week, I talked to Lena Czajorski, an old friend, and also the co-founder of Alva10, a precision medicine company that is using diagnostics to revolutionize the pharmaceutical and health insurance industry.
But this week, we don't talk that much about work. We talk a lot about the things that come out of work. How do you feel satisfied in your life, and how does the role of work change as you go through life's transitions, whether that means marriage, kids, or whatever else it may bring?
Lena was incredible to talk to and shared such intimate details with me. It's a privilege to be able to share them with you all here. I guess something I've been thinking a lot about in the last year or so is the kinds of satisfaction that I'm looking for I think have changed. I started doing an MFA a couple of months ago in poetry,
or I guess a couple of weeks ago, in poetry. I also started doing classical Indian dance, and these are just things that I've always been curious about, but I could keep investing more in becoming a better product manager and a better product marketer,
but it doesn't give me the same... It's not satisfying for the same parts of me, or maybe it's not satisfying to me holistically as much as it used to be. So I was just curious about this. I feel like you're someone who built a company,
you're building a family with your husband, but you've built all these things, and I was wondering, do you feel like what has been satisfying has shifted across those different experiences, across those different things, or do you feel like that doesn't really resonate with you as a way of how you frame it?
I love this question, and I have to say I've done so many podcasts. Also, a lot of them have been subject matter expertise podcasts, but I've also done some life Who Are You podcasts, and I've never been asked this question. And it absolutely has changed, and I would actually say...
So I started this company with our founder, my co-founder, the person who originally had experienced so many of these frustrations that led her to want to do this, and then bring me on as a subject matter expert to help her do this. And I originally went into this because I thought to myself,
like, oh my God, there's a train that's leaving the station, and I must be on this train. Like, I don't know where it's going. There are so many things I don't understand, but like, the joy is in the leap, you know what I mean?
When I leapt onto the train, and I was 29, so when I leapt onto the train, for me, a lot of it was like, like, learning this and figuring all this stuff out. But there was all this stress of like, achievement, right? And so it was more like the achievement was the joy,
and once I jumped, there wasn't a lot of joy in the journey because it was all overcome by like the fear and stress of like, we got to do it, we got to do it, I have to achieve it, I have to achieve it. And when I think back over this past year, what I really see is a tremendous amount of joy.
Now my joy has shifted. Yes, of course there is joy and achievement, as with anybody, but now my true joy is in figuring this out. How I see the market changed, how is, how do I see all that? Now I can say there is joy in the journey,
because I also think I got a little bit older now, and now I'm starting to value it. Like I think when you're young, and people say, like, there's joy in the journey, you're like, yeah, yeah, yeah, there's joy in the journey, I'm really trying to get to the finish line here, right?
I'm not joyful about the journey. Now I feel like I am so much more. And then on the other side, what I see is I see the person that I am, how much I've grown, and how that has contributed to the joy of my family. Like I think that my marriage is so much stronger because I became an entrepreneur.
I'm a better mother because I became an entrepreneur. I know this for a fact. And so that's where I experience another huge amount of joy, where it's almost like I see so much joy in the journey, and I also see so much joy in like, yes, I leapt,
and it was the right decision, and there's been so many twists and turns around the way, but now I can look at myself as a person versus seven years ago, and I just feel that I've made these enormous leaps forward, and I think that's better for the people that I've made and the people that love me. So that's kind of my inner thinking when I think about that.
That makes a lot of sense. Would it be right to say, like, without having had the experience as a wife and as a mother, you don't feel like you would have gone to a point that you're finding the joy you find in your entrepreneurial journey? For me, I think that's true.
I also think part of it is age, and unfortunately, like, it's so hard to separate all this stuff, right? Like, who's to say, right, who you were going to be? But I do think that I can, I think you're right. I think that if I had not made these investments and made these choices
in my family life, then just age alone would not have brought me here. Because you almost like, I kind of have to, like, I see my choices now through the mirror of other people, and that really shows me a lot. Not to be troublesome here, but I mean, you know, you know how JD Vance has those comments, right, about like, to really be invested in the country, you need to have children.
Obviously, that's such an extreme way, and you know, there's all these things wrong with it, but I'm just curious, like, do you feel like there's some grain of truth in, like, now that you've had children and seen that it's changed your perspective? Like, do you feel like you, you can see kind of where that comes from, or like... You know what's so funny?
So, first of all, I was on Cape Cod this past weekend with my husband's family, and I literally opened one drawer next to my bed, and I saw that I had picked up a used copy of Hillbilly eulogy in somebody's, like, garage sale, and I was like, oh my god, I have this book, like, you know, now I should really read. So, I took a couple hours, and I read it over the weekend, and you know what?
It was this really nice, I have to say, it was a really nice little mini journey. First of all, because he did grow up in a place of extreme poverty. Interesting. I haven't read it at all, or read anything about it. Yeah, tell me, please. I think he said a lot of really intelligent and true things.
I think some of them are more intelligent, less in the book. He's also become, I think, he's also changed a lot of his perspective from what I understand since he wrote the book. But I don't think that having kids, like, I think that having kids is something that was really important for me, you know, and my co-founder said this a long time ago,
and I've never forgotten it. Being a working parent is a superpower. I feel like sometimes I'm still learning what she meant by that, but I do come back to that a lot in my mind, because I think combining work and being a parent gives you a perspective that just like supercharges your whole
being from a stress perspective, from an insight perspective, from all of that. But that aside, I don't think it's necessary in a society to bear children. I don't believe that. I think it is necessary to contribute to a society. And I think one of the things that I find particularly rewarding in my life is I
feel like I've chosen an entrepreneurial path that is actively trying to contribute to society. Like, I am not here to derive a paycheck. Of course, I need to derive a paycheck, but there are way easier ways for me to be making money than the way that I have chosen.
I can confirm this to you after seven years of being an entrepreneur. My God. But the journey that I'm on has a societal benefit, I believe, that also provides me a lot of joy. So, yeah, I think that all of these comments around, you know, who needs to have kids?
Is it necessary to have kids? I understand today we are not a society that supports children and working parents. I think that I have a lot to do with it as well, honestly. I understand people's perspective who do not want to have children or don't feel like they can afford to, because that is a reality we have created.
You said two different things that are really different that I want to talk about today. I know, I'm sorry. You said JD fans and I couldn't help myself. I had to go into this place. No, you're fine.
So, something that Gaurav and I end up talking about a lot, just because we're in this queer community in New York, and there's a lot of people who are not going to have kids. It's interesting because one of the contentions, one of my close Indian friends who's also queer was making was he's like, you know, I have this deep relationship with my nephews. I'm very connected to them.
And that's as much as I'm looking for, right? That it's giving me the kind of connection to the next generation. I'm invested in their lives. I care, but I'm not having to kind of be a full-time child bear. So, when you do feel like that is something really important for society, or do you feel
like contributing to society in any ways enough? You don't really need to be contributing for the next generation. I think that's a very interesting question. And when you pose it that way, and when I'm challenged in that way, I do have to say that I think that being invested in the next generation is a critical aspect of contribution to society.
But being invested in the next generation doesn't have to mean invested in them specifically. Like you are invested in your two nephews specifically. You also care about children. I'm sure, just knowing you. But I know that you care about those two particular children.
I also think that there are people who either don't have the capacity or the ability or the interest to care about particular children, but they care about what happens to children at large. So, I think it's a sliding scale, if you will. But I think that, of course, when you care about a particular child, I think it focuses your attention. You almost want people to care about a whole variety of unique, specific children in order to really get
an understanding of how our society is and what we should be improving. Because whoever cared about JD Vance as a kid was looking at an entirely different set of societal problems than whoever cares about your nephews, for example, or my children. Oh, interesting. So, you feel like it's beneficial for the kids to have all those different perspectives?
Am I getting it right or are you saying something wrong? I think it's beneficial for adults to have those different perspectives. Oh. I am not interested in being a spokesperson for JD Vance, but I also grew up in a state with extreme poverty. I mean, I grew up in Nevada.
Nevada is 49th in the country for public school education. Wow, I had no idea. Did you go to public school? I went to a fantastic school. I went to public school and I got into Tufts.
I was one of the two kids from the state of Nevada that went to Tufts in my year. One from Reno, that was me, and one from Vegas, the two major cities. So, you know, I grew up with kids who had heartbreakingly low levels of opportunity. So, that America is very real and huge and largely underserved. Well, you grabbed that to kind of make a little bit of a segue to something you were talking about a few minutes ago,
but you kind of hinted at that, you know, the satisfaction you're getting out of running a company is not just from the paycheck, right? And I just wanted to explore a little bit more there. So, like, where is the satisfaction that you're getting from the company? Yeah, I think that's such a, it's a great question. So, I would say that I was raised in a family of people who were all societal contributors.
Now, I was raised in a family of Russian people who grew up in communist Russia. So, there's a whole societal aspect there. But I would say that a large portion of my family was solving big societal scientific questions and wrestled with a lot of that. My grandfather was the chemist in the USSR that developed the atomic bomb for Stalin. He was the Oppenheimer of Russia.
And that had an enormous impact on my intellectual life. My father did a lot of work in health care, well, in biology. My uncle did a lot of work. And so, these were sort of the dinner time conversations that I grew up around. There's a lot of this, you know, this questioning, like, what are we doing and why and what is the goal and what is needed?
And so, I think that's a place where I always wanted to live in a way. And then the question becomes, you know, how do you contribute to that? There's a million ways to contribute to that and you do not need to be an entrepreneur to contribute to that. But I did feel in my last company, I was doing a lot of interesting things, but at a point I was just like, I don't feel like I'm contributing in the way that, for example, when I first started my career and I was working for a women's health company,
that we ultimately sold to this larger company where I was like, I'm stuck, I'm leaving. And so then you stop, you know, I think there's kind of a point where it's like, you look at yourself and you say, you know, what am I contributing to? What problem am I solving? And if you're a person that cares about that, I think you're naturally going to go toward, you know, yeah, I want to keep solving problems. And so today, and this is a question, you know, my husband's also an entrepreneur.
And so we talk about this a lot. It's like, you know, are you still happy to be solving the problem you're solving? Check in with yourself. Is this still the right problem for you to be solving? And then is this the best way to solve this problem? And is this a way to solve this problem that creates a paycheck and a lifestyle that is possible for you? Because we are a family of two bootstrapped entrepreneurs and two young children. We sometimes joke that we actually have four companies. But yeah, there's very much this element.
There's this element of that. And I would say I don't think it's for everybody, but like I do, I do think about life in that way. I think that we are gifted with intelligence and inabilities for a variety of reasons. I think we all have different types of genius. And I think that using that in the service of society is one of the basic reasons we have access to that. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Something I've struggled with a lot is just my father is someone who really loves to solve scale problems. Like this morning, he was on a call with the Pratham board and Pratham, of course, is working across India.
They touch hundreds of thousands of students a year. And this is where he spends a lot of his time now. And I think growing up, I just felt like I'm blessed to be good at a lot of things. Like there's a lot of things that have come easy to me. And I was like, I should be putting, you see, there's that should, I should be putting my talents in service of these big problems. And as I've gone older, I realized, you know, creating experiences for smaller sets of people that can really change how they see things is what really interests me. Right. I love to kind of create moments that will just, you know, people will remember forever and will kind of change the way they look at the life or they look at something or the way they see beauty.
But getting over that guilt was so hard for me. Whereas like I should be doing more. I was curious, it feels to me like you come from that scale place a little bit. So I don't know if you resonate as much with the guilt side of it or I don't know if you felt a different guilt in some ways. Yeah. You know, that's such an interesting question. So yes, I totally understand the should totally. I also understand the like immigrant should. So I feel like that's an extra should right to like put on. If you were important in this country, if your parents were important in this country, there's that's a whole other thing. But you know, when you just said that the thing that immediately popped into my mind is an episode years ago from the podcast How I Built This where the original Airbnb founders were being interviewed.
One of the things that they said was that in the originally with Airbnb, they told a quick story of like, why is no one, you know, why is it not working in New York? Why is Airbnb not working? So they went to like go to all their customers to find out, right? They went to Andrews and Horowitz and they're like, what should we do? And Andrews and Horowitz said, go talk to your customers. So they went and they realized that the really big problem was that everyone was taking pictures of their apartments on their crappy phone. And so no one wants to live in an apartment like go home right now to your apartment in New York and take a picture on your phone. And I don't think anyone wants to live there. So then they hired a photographer, they went back, they stayed, you know, it's amazing what some professional lighting will do.
And so the lesson from that was sometimes you have to do things that don't scale. Now, when you apply that to your world, it's different because I would say, you know, you're maybe not touching a million people, but you're maybe changing how five people interact with poetry. And that is a deep scale for a person. It doesn't have to be a wide scale, you know. And so I would say that I would say sometimes the definition of scale is different. And I would say sometimes forget the definition and just say, I'm doing things that don't scale.
You know, I think one of the things that has been a huge lesson for me is that you have to learn how to build relationships. You have to learn how to obtain insight, deep insight, and how to impact people deeply in order to just contribute to like your journey through life. Like that's a very non scalable thing, like relationships are not scalable, you know what I mean? Insight isn't scalable, good conversations aren't scalable. But these things transform lives, businesses, opportunities, you know what I mean?
So I will also say that my one opportunity business idea, it's honestly not a business, it's more like a, what maybe one of the things I want to do next is actually in the art world as well. So there may be just a crossover there, you know what I mean? Left brain, right brain stuff. If I don't do it, don't hold me to it. But if I do, this is the first time I've ever talked about it. So I want to create a series of art around how people argue.
I think that when you map people's arguments, there are different types of arguments that fall into different types of not just logical fallacies, but what people like where you're over indexing on a certain thing, you know what I mean? Or your storm and a teacup being over a larger issue. And I would like to find a way to bring this to life via art. It reminded me a little bit of I heard a podcast, I think it was this gentleman was doing a PhD where he had to look at the way words were being used.
And he basically, I can't remember what the research area was, but it was just like, it was something that was super heavy and expensive because you need people who really understood etymology in order to understand like the nuances of how words, the impact of certain word choice. But then he found that this is something that LLMs are super well suited for that being able to look at a passage and understand the sentiment of it is something they're very, very good at. And being like, so something my business partner has actually done a lot of it with. So she will write, she's writing bugs every day now, right? Something that she just wants to fail in public is something that she's really working on in both building that like scar tissue as well as kind of seeing, just seeing the progression. And so she's on, I think, day 300 every day she identifies something she tweets it and saying, you know, this was my bug today, this is what happened.
And she's been giving it to every 100 she's been giving it to chat GPT and having it do analysis on it. And it's so interesting to see because it's like, well, you can see how your perspective has shifted from it. She's become more like internal. It sees the more of like a spiritual element in the way that she's thinking about herself. And just fascinating to kind of, and you can push it on and be like, what makes you feel that way? What about these words is that and it will give you these kind of nuanced answers. There's just really fun.
Yeah, it's really interesting. And I also think that this also is kind of contributing to like this, you know, how we say like the evolution of intelligence is emotional intelligence, right? And there's this the evolution of emotional intelligence, I think is a knowledge of self and a knowledge of self is no one teaches it to you. You know what I mean? It takes years. It takes painful lessons. Would you think of that as as self actualization? Does that? Yeah, maybe self actualization. I think that's another way of saying it.
But it's interesting that it like it to me, it kind of like flows into that, you know, that there's enormous reward to be had in self actualization. We don't talk about it enough actually as a life skill and we don't talk about it enough as like the joy one receives from self actualization. I feel like I very much been on that journey recently, but I feel like it's been much more on I know much more of the practices that I think I've adopted like outside of work and more through like like therapy a little bit through yoga a little bit. I actually went on this really interesting workshop that was about like shame through shame and sexuality in March that was trying to unpack feelings of shame that you may feel in your sexuality and was for for gay gay men. And it was that was also just very fascinating because of course you put a lot of gay men in a group and then say talk about like your feelings of shame and your sexuality.
There's a lot to be unpacked. But I think it was really interesting because I never really had an experience where people were just like like all you seeing where everyone is right and so much it's like everyone's everyone's on a journey. Everyone is like there's different places where everyone is kind of struggling on saying, you know, this thing I have I have a pattern with and I'm starting to recognize I have a pattern but maybe not yet at a point I can unpack that pattern. So to me I think a lot of that feels like the journey of really like knowing yourself or finding self actualization is realizing what gives you energy what doesn't give energy and where are you putting energy into things that don't I know don't serve you as a classic yoga line. No, I think it's so true and also then and back to the should where are you putting energy because you were told you should or you feel that you should but there's no yield there.
And you know what's interesting I feel like this is also you know I don't know I'm very blessed I have a very close relationship with my parents and I'm amazed on my own journey of self actualization how my parents perspectives are changing. Like I sometimes think of my parents is like I'm going to go to you and I'm going to say this and you're going to say this, and then I kind of bounce everything back against the wall that I think I know. But the wall is moving. And that also creates a really, you know, back to the shoulds right. Yeah, you think you should do this, maybe because there was a familial aspect or a parental aspect or a societal aspect.
You know, I'm sure many aspects of the gay community deal with that just this didn't come from anywhere but it came in through the water, right. And then when you bounce things against it you see that all these things are moving and they're fluid and you're like, oh my God, I'm moving in a universe that's moving. You know what I mean? And there's a tremendous amount of freedom that comes with that. I did not realize this for so long. It's like, you know those t-shirts that say like get free, you have to free yourself.
Yeah, yeah. It was always like, what does this mean? Like the word freedom had other than like an American patriotic sense. Like I have a lot of associations with freedom because I was born in a communist country. But I never thought about it from the perspective of self actualization.
I would say that today I am probably the most free I have ever been because of my journey of self-actualization, which my entrepreneurial journey absolutely forced me on. Would never have gotten here if I didn't work for myself. See, I don't know, maybe I'm just a little further behind than you. But I feel like. Or maybe I'm wrong.
And a year later I'm like, we have to re-record this podcast. I was wrong. I thought I figured out the secret of life, but it wasn't it. Back to the drawing board. The really fun thing I love about our podcast, I think one of the things I really wanted to happen and I feel like it is happening.
So I was like, I want to take snapshots of where we are at different points. I want them to always be topical. I want us to be talking about what we're thinking about today because I want us to go listen to it from five years from now and be like, damn, like that's where we were then. It's just will be, you may have noticed I will ask you to do an introduction, but at the end because something I learned with one of the early ones I did is it's so easy for people to watch. We all want to make sure people understand us.
So when you do your introductions at the beginning, when you feel like people don't understand you at all, there's all this shit you want to put into it. So one of my podcasts literally had been on for 50 minutes and I was like, we need to stop recording. I lost control of this train. But no, so what I was going to say though is that I feel like I become so much more aware of how I constrained myself. Right?
Like I think that where I am today is I'm like, oh, you know, I think all these doors are not open to me and it's still it doesn't feel like they are open to me yet. Right? But I'm cognizant of like, oh, these are all these ropes I've tied myself with. And now I feel like I'm maybe kind of on that journey of starting to be like, okay, you know, is this a rope that's supporting me? Is this a rope that I need because this is something that's scary for me and I'm trying to protect myself and there's a reasons why?
Or is this something that, you know, I felt really alone when I was young, right? And so now when I don't like to feel that aloneness anymore, so it's like, oh, you know, what am I doing to try and make sure I never feel that aloneness? And is that am I okay by myself? You know, do I need to be as worried as I used to be? I don't know.
So I just I don't necessarily maybe I will get to that point of saying that I feel more free. I just now I feel more like I'm cognizant of the ways that I've not let myself feel free. If that makes sense. Yeah, I think no, I think that's huge. And I would say that was a really big door for me.
By the way, you know, sometimes I feel like there's a little bit of a hockey stick to this. So the life of an entrepreneur in a bootstrap company. So my first child was born, I took four and a half weeks off work, one of which he was in the NICU. My second child was born and I took three weeks off work. Now, to my team's fantastic credit, everybody was like, you can take more time off.
But my argument was I do not want to be stressed out of my mind when I come back six weeks later, like I would rather sort of ease into it. You know what I mean? And all of our clients and everybody was incredibly supportive. I felt tremendously supported. The postpartum year that this past year has been was just really hard.
I wouldn't say that I was postpartum depressed, but I think that there was just, it was just a lot. I mean, also I would say that like my daughter slept as well in the beginning as my son. Thankfully, they're both fantastic sleepers now, but I could just feel it eating in. You know what I mean? I could feel that.
I could feel the stress of work. I could feel so many different things. And there was a point where I was just like, what am I feeling trapped by? What am I feeling like I don't have access to? You know, what do I feel like my limitations are?
My husband is part of an entrepreneurial group that I think has helped him to see this. Like the number one limitation of a company is the founder of psychology. Totally, totally true. And I would say the number one limitation of a person is their own psychology. But once I realized what I had was some very deep limitations,
it was not an enormous leap for me to start freeing myself from them. I wouldn't say I'm totally free, but I think that, you know, I know it's sort of a joke, but if you're saying like, oh, maybe you're leveled up, I guess what I would say is like, maybe that's true, but I was where you are. I feel like I was dealing with the problem that you just verbalized six months ago.
So I think there's a hockey stick aspect to it, you know, because what gets seen gets changed, right? Once you name it, once you can really put the contours around it, a lot of things start to change in your, I think, internal dialogue and your psychology almost automatically. Yeah. And I think actually even the conversations that you have with people, you have from a different place, so it becomes a lot easier to be,
you're talking at a different level, right? So it's easier for you to get what you need from them versus kind of when you're talking at a different level to maybe make that more real. I had this experience a couple of weeks ago where there's a company I mentor in Peru that does English language for the tech industry,
and so it's trying to help people get to the English they need for doing sprint reviews and product prioritization. And the CEO, he asked for me to speak to his CEO, and I was just so taken aback after the conversation because the CEO and I, we're always just having conversation at a certain level, right? We're having conversation about the direction of the company and just more, I would say, at the macro forces level.
And we do kind of get into particulars, but it's not as much about just like solving these kind of individual cases. And with the CEO, it was just totally at a different level, right? He was struggling, I actually shared the story on our last podcast episode, but he was struggling with someone who he didn't trust their work, until he ended up redoing the work a lot, and then was having a resultant problem in ownership.
And it's like, I can help you think through this, right? But this was kind of an obvious between, you know? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So yeah, I just think there's a certain point where you're at where you're going to see problems in a certain way, and then when you have a different facet to your understanding, it can be really helpful.
Yeah, exactly. Do you have any support groups or CEO groups or just your husband? So first of all, yes, my husband is a, you know, I wouldn't say he's a performance coach or anything like that, but he's a fantastic sounding board. We also just have this like place of like very deep vulnerability with each other,
where we can just sit down and we can so easily be like, oh my God, I'm having this huge problem. I feel like I don't know what I'm doing here. I can't believe this happened or I can't believe. So I think that's really helps. I am also part of an organization called CHEF.
It's a private equity-backed company. It's designed to, you know, basically take women in positions of power and keep them there and advance them. Some of the coaching that I've gotten from CHEF has been incredibly helpful, and I would say that some of the analysis that they forced me to do on myself has really unlocked a lot of joy, where I was like, oh, I don't think I put that in the joy column,
and I definitely should have written that one down, you know what I mean? So then you kind of look at that and you see things differently. I've got a couple of friends that I rely on and I can always kind of go to for support or a different perspective. But to be honest with you, I wish I had more, you know? I'm thinking about getting a coach.
I had a couple this past year. I had some really transformative sessions with a therapist where I just was like, I think I need someone else's perspective on what the heck is going on in my brain because I don't even understand myself anymore. That was super helpful.
Yeah, I would like to have more. It's also, I think, a little bit to me right now. There's an aspect of law of diminishing returns where it's like, I feel like I just moved through a huge chunk of stuff, and now I need to really integrate it,
and then I'm going to be ready to see the next horizon of chunk of stuff. You know what I mean? There's no question that it's going to be there. The question is how do I actually move through it? Dare I say in a more linear way, just because that's accessible.
You know what I mean? There's all stuff all the time, but how can you actually think about it and a way that enables you to engage with it? No, that makes a lot of sense. I feel like I've done a lot of time in the last couple of years,
just like unpacking motivation, because when I reached that point where I was like, oh, I've made a moth money. I don't need to work for it. I'm like, what do I do now? It was just a weird place to be in.
And so I was trying to figure out what's going to be motivating enough that I'm going to want to do it. And I think I spent a lot of time with that, and I figured out these things that are giving me satisfaction, both in terms of satisfaction of helping people I care about,
satisfaction in growing and skills I care about, and then satisfaction also in the outcomes I'm achieving. But now I feel my focus has shifted a little bit where I'm like, I have so many things I want to do. I need to be more efficient with my time.
I don't have the time anymore to just throw everything. I used to spend five hours on whatever I wanted, and now it's like, shit, no, I have dance, I have writing to do, I have all these other things going on. So I think my focus now has shifted
in being like, how can I be more efficient with my time and less focused on saying, there's still things I need to unpack that are holding me back, and I think that's something that I just don't. You can only grow in that place for so long,
that you have to grow in the other parts that maybe are holding you back and not so much in that one aspect. And I think you're also, you know, you're saying something, which I also think is very important, because the question you posed is, I've made enough money now what?
We don't spend enough time acknowledging that most of the time people's first motivation is financial, and there's nothing wrong with that. It needs to be, particularly in our society, in American society, like you are not nearly supported
to achieve your American dream, and so finances are a critical aspect of that. The reason I bring this up is because when you ask people who are wealthy or financially independent for advice, the advice you get is often very different
than the advice that you ask people who are still in it. And a lot of times that advice is actually not accessible to people who are still in it. Like, I got a lot of advice early on in my career that I was like, now I'm like, oh my God,
that was exactly the right advice. Back then I was like, why are you wasting my time? This is not the advice that I need. I need the advice, like, I don't need the advice of like, how to be happy that I run.
I need the advice of how do I finish the marathon, right, to use our beloved Gorav's favorite. So, and I feel like the more, you know, the further ahead people are, the more they're trying to give you like existential lessons, existential advice, right, all of that.
When really you're looking, you know, you're like, no, no, I need something like 10 levels below here. And I think that's important from the perspective of building companies. And I think that's important from the perspective of building lives. You know, like, you want to get people to a place
where they can take higher level existential advice. But that sits on the luxury of, you know, I've struggled a lot. I've attained a level of financial independence that allows me to think these higher level thoughts now. You know what I mean?
Like, there's a reason that like so many individuals in like the monk community and the religious community are financially taken care of because you cannot sit here and think levels of God if you're trying to figure out how to eat every day. And that doesn't get discussed enough.
These hierarchies of advice vis-a-vis the places that they come from. Yeah, that is interesting. Something I guess I have thought about recently with my father is kind of like shifted in this way, which has just been so weird for me to see. Because my whole life he kind of had this really strong identity as a CEO
and as an operator and really, really much as an operator, right? And I think seeing him really back off that to this point where I'm like, Dad, like, what are you doing? We need to help you accomplish four things in your day. And he's just so chill about it.
I don't know, being able to kind of see that switch in identity. Because my perspective is that for a lot of people, it becomes an identity thing. It's like, you know, I may have worked past the point. I need the financial returns from it. But now my identity is around this job.
My identity is around working in this way. I don't know. I guess it's like you saying, it's fun seeing your parents change because it's really been interesting for me to see this. Some ways actually really gives me pause where I'm like,
I want to make sure that when I kind of want to back off my working identity, I have these other things in my back pocket. Because it's scary to me to kind of feel like I would sometimes be in that place where I don't, it's a lot of energy to figure out a new hobby really late in your career or a new passion or a new thing that feels like this is who I am.
I don't know. Do you feel like it becomes an identity issue in the way you think about it? Or identity never really comes as much into that? I think that if I wasn't working, it would be a huge hit to my identity. When I say working though, that doesn't necessarily mean working for a salary.
I think I really mean contributing. And by contributing, I mean solving an intellectual puzzle. And the reason I say it that way is because I think to kind of sort of my artistic ambitions, right? Where it's like, to me, that is an intellectual puzzle. Like I swear to God, like that is a series of like math equations.
Like I need to solve, I need to figure this out and then I want to do all this stuff with it. And that's not going to change society, right? But it's an intellectual puzzle. Like today I'm solving an intellectual puzzle that I believe is also a huge problem for society. And I would like to solve it or contribute to the solving of it.
So the societal problem is solved. The next time I have an intellectual puzzle, it doesn't necessarily have to be a problem for society. But I need to be solving, my brain needs to be solving puzzles. Like I need to be thinking about things. Because we could argue that like raising children today, right?
In today's society is an intellectual puzzle. Yes, yes. Like you're figuring out what are the inputs and... See, to me that's different. To me it's like there are raising people into good people.
Oh, there's a lot of intellectual puzzles inherent in them, 100%. But it's more than that. And to me I feel like it's not the same as applying your raw intellect to a standing problem, if you will. Like my God, children are like celestial bodies. They're filled with so many molecules just colliding with each other all the time.
And so what you're raising is more than that. But I also want to be a person who solves intellectual puzzles. Because that's what makes me feel more alive. Do you feel like it's part of it that they just change so fast? And it doesn't give the grounding for having a real like really being able to dig into that problem?
I think that they are creatures that adapt to their environment and to what they are learning incredibly quickly. And also they come from you. My friend recently said this when we were out west on vacation a couple weeks ago. She said, parenting yourself is tremendously difficult. And that is so true.
And then the other piece of it is like you're trying to give them what you had or better. But that doesn't mean giving them everything. The capacity to struggle is the thing that you have to give too. There's so much to balance there. I feel like we could have a whole separate podcast on raising children.
Not because I am an expert, but because I actually think that more people just need to talk about what it is that they are trying to do. What's working, what's not working. It's so interesting because my cousins have kids that are kind of the similar ages to my sister. And some of them were visiting from India this past summer and their son is maybe five or six now. And he was running into people in the park, running into other kids in the playground.
And his parents were apologizing. And I was like, guys, you really, this is New York City, you really don't need to apologize to your child running into someone. But they live in Delhi. And in Delhi the expectation would be there. The parents would look at you to be like, why are you such a rude child?
What's wrong with you guys? And I think that's just so interesting. And in India there's so much complaining, right? The kids don't grow up and we don't give them enough space and blah blah blah. But it's also culturally that's just what everyone signed up to.
But yeah, we do apologize for them. We don't give them that space to make mistakes. I will say that my son at three and a half has cultivated a level of self-confidence that I probably only cultivated maybe a couple years ago. He's like that. The other thing I'll say is that he says sometimes if he's like feeling overwhelmed or something, he's like, I need a minute.
That's amazing. And because he was taught to do that because we taught him to do that because his school taught him to do that. But also I only realize that I need a minute sometimes. Maybe also a couple of years ago. So I think there's that all of this EQ that our generation and others, but I think that is also hugely being led by our generation is pushing into the water is having hugely positive effects on the kids too.
Yeah, Divya, my business partner responded saying that your parent's ceiling is your floor. And I think there are some things where that's true, you know, that we do get to get our kids to be at that point, which we reached to. And then they can go so much higher. Yeah, I think that's so true. So, Lena, switching gears a little bit.
Can you tell me about how you introduce yourself as a person? I would say that I'm a founder. I'm an entrepreneur. I'm a wife, a mother, and I, and I think I'm a citizen. And when I say that, I mean, I try really hard to be very active citizen as a founder.
I built a company that is trying to change the US healthcare systems over reliance on drugs and therapies and create a healthcare system that values diagnosis and prevention. Our healthcare system is a careening disaster. And our health as Americans is also a careening disaster in a lot of different ways. And the two are connected. We are too sick.
We find our sickness too late. We treat our sickness too incorrectly and we treat it too expensively. And to change that problem, you have to create a healthcare system that incentivizes finding diseases as early as possible, treating it most correctly, and treating it at far more efficient price. The answer to that problem is multifaceted. But the one lever that we as a society, you know, we've looked at this problem and we've said, oh, we need different hospitals and we need different doctors and we need different all this stuff.
But the thing we haven't said is we need diagnostics. Diagnostic tests are a the unpulled lever to solve this problem. And that is the lever that I am tapping and pulling and pushing in every possible way to show the potential of the diagnostic industry, all of these labs that create all this information to actually improve our health. And a mini microcosm of all of this is the COVID pandemic. Because during COVID, everybody felt in their bones the value of the information that says that you have COVID.
You knew it. It was wonderful to know it before you went to visit your grandmother or before you got on a plane or anything else, right? Before that time, we had a society we didn't really meditate on the value of knowing and we didn't really look at, well, if we know, how much money do we save? And like, how much healthier are people? That's what I work on and that's the problem that I'm solving.
So I heard this really interesting thing on NPR a couple of days ago, which about obesity, right? And how in a lot of states we won't give people the drugs, especially Medicaid that will help with obesity until they have one of the diseases that comes as a result of being obese for an extended period. And I know, so in that case, right, like we know the problem, we know the solution, and we're still doing it. Does that give you like pause for seeing that even if you can prove the success of diagnostics that the system might just not accept it? Or do you think obesity is so much of like a sin, right?
In the way we culturally look at it, that it's like kind of special case and like, oh, you've been really bad. We can't help you. No, you know, I think I think that all these things are hugely, hugely connected. I think that we need a society that values diagnosis and prevention, which it will do. When the society values diagnosis and prevention, diagnostics will become valuable automatically. The question is, how do you change the society?
Is it a question of stacking 100 different success stories on top of each other and saying, now let's do by 1000, right? Let's scale. Or is it a question of starting to transform parts of the society and saying, oh, you know what can really help you with that, this technology over here? And the reason I guess talk about it this way is because the scale of the problem, like the difficulty of the problem that we're solving, I mean, our healthcare system is a money making machine that thrives on sickness. Now, no one's trying to take the money away. There's a hundred different ways to spend the $4 trillion we spend on healthcare, and most of them can make us a better, better, happier society. You know what I mean? They don't have to be spent the way that they're being spent. There's a lot of entrenched interest to keep them being spent the way they're being spent.
And so that's why emotional resilience and joy and self actualization, all of this is actually a really important part of the journey. Because the bigger the scale of the problem you're trying to solve, the lesser of an army you have to actually solve it. If you have a lot of entrenched interests, you need to keep a very close mental and emotional check on yourself to keep yourself going because this stuff is hard. I can't tell you how many people have come up to me or have come up to my business partner and just been like, you guys are doing fantastic work. You guys are doing God's work. And I don't say that. I say that to also say this counterpart of that is, wow, not a lot of people would get into that business.
You know what I mean? That's another way of saying like, you're trying to pull something up a mountain that I don't think I would want to pull up with you. Yeah. Right? There's some of that as well. And so really knowing yourself and knowing your own motivations. And did I know any of this at 29 when I co-founded this company? I did not. I did not. But I know a lot of it now. And so I think founders need a lot of emotional support. I think they need a lot of resilience.
I think they need help cultivating a lot of that resilience. But I think that America's sort of entrepreneurial societies are really, really important one. And I think a lot of the companies and movements that we start, you know, I think they have an enormous impact on the world because we really do solve really big problems. In this country, we just, we need more help solving them. Yeah. I think that is really interesting. You made a reference to how you think of yourself as a citizen.
And I was just curious if you could say a little bit more of that. Is that like a citizen of America? Do you think of it as like a local level? Right? Is it of being a citizen of your kind of community? I know once upon a time we talked about how when you moved to the suburbs, there was no mommy groups, right? And you kind of made them, right? So yeah, I'm just curious if you could talk a little bit more about how you feel about that. Yeah. I see myself as an American citizen. I think that I'm contributing. I mean, I will also say there are other health care systems that I think they have their own problems. Some of them have solved a portion of this problem already. Some of them haven't. But I really see myself as an American citizen.
I care very deeply about this country. I care deeply about our ability to execute on the American dream and make it more accessible for other people. I also think that from a geopolitical perspective, we are, my husband says this and I agree with his assessment that we're living, we're really living in the foothills of World War Three. There's a lot of different data behind that statement. Having a healthy, well-capitalized society is going to be a really critical priority moving forward. And so, you know, I see myself as contributing to that, frankly, certainly not solving the whole problem, certainly not trying to do it alone, but contributing to that. And I think that, you know, I can make a lot more money doing different things. And the fact that I don't is a sacrifice on my part and I consider that to be an aspect of my citizenship.
The music is by Akshay Ramuhali of BTRPT Music. Editing is by Beatnik.