Dinakar Singh

The axon is the nerve that connects your brain to your muscle.

And it happens to be the core part of what degenerates in spinal mastratrophy, which is the disease my daughter is diagnosed with.

And so from my perspective, an important factor in starting the firm and leaving Goldman at that time

was that on one hand, while I loved investing, I also just resolved that there was a glimmer of hope to save my daughter and other kids who had her condition, but that glimmer of hope was not going to last very long and time was not our friend.

And so I needed to go as quickly as possible to drive success as quickly as possible, obviously for its own sake, but more importantly, honestly, so that I could go and throw a veritable fortune at

into the research we needed to do to make sure we did it as fast as possible in time to save her.

Because she was diagnosed in 2001.

I had just come back from Hong Kong literally a month or two months before.

I'd become global head of the group while there.

I was in Hong Kong for four years setting up the Asian business and becoming global head at that time.

Came back, we were on top of the world.

Our group was extraordinarily profitable even during a couple of years of the firm.

came back and a month later, 9-11 happened.

And a month later, our daughter was diagnosed with SMA, spinal muscular atrophy.

And she was here and half that time, we'd been sort of shifting back towards Hong Kong and New York.

And as your first child, it's ironic because you actually don't know what is normal in terms of development.

And so we thought she was developing normally, but we were at a party and one of our friend's mother was a very good pediatrician and said, look, you want to go and have her checked out because just go have her checked out.

And that started the saga of getting test after test after test.

And eventually, literally a month after 9-11, I was sitting in my office watching the smoldering ruin of the World Trade Center, which was right in front of my window, and getting this all from the doctor basically saying that she has SMA.

For a bunch of reasons, it was a shock.