Naveen Jain
Appearances
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Naveen Jain: Turning Audacious Ideas Into Life-Changing Innovations | E66
When times are tough, you give up because you don't think it is worth it.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Naveen Jain: Turning Audacious Ideas Into Life-Changing Innovations | E66
So I'll give you $1 today and the $2 tomorrow, and I'm going to give you $4 and then the $8. And you do the math and say $8 becomes $16, becomes $32, $64. And then with $64, $128, $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 $100 million.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Naveen Jain: Turning Audacious Ideas Into Life-Changing Innovations | E66
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.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Naveen Jain: Turning Audacious Ideas Into Life-Changing Innovations | E66
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 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.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Naveen Jain: Turning Audacious Ideas Into Life-Changing Innovations | E66
And AI, by the way, everyone has 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 there. Then came the biggest part, why me? And again, I am not a scientist. I am not a doctor. And here is the problem that I'm trying to solve in healthcare. Know nothing about it.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Naveen Jain: Turning Audacious Ideas Into Life-Changing Innovations | E66
It's all the other straws that were there before, right? So it's really the strings of experiences together that makes us who we are. Every experience in childhood that you have, good, bad, how your parents actually nurture you. And then as we get along, I would love to tell you a little bit more about this idea of counterintuitive parenting and how we incorporate that into our own world.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Naveen Jain: Turning Audacious Ideas Into Life-Changing Innovations | E66
Making money is simply a byproduct of doing things that improve other people's lives. 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. 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.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Naveen Jain: Turning Audacious Ideas Into Life-Changing Innovations | E66
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.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Naveen Jain: Turning Audacious Ideas Into Life-Changing Innovations | E66
The foundation of the industry, they take it for granted because the foundation 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 a healthcare company. And my first thing was, wait a sec, everyone in the industry is asking, they want to know about your DNA.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Naveen Jain: Turning Audacious Ideas Into Life-Changing Innovations | E66
And there were, you know, 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 as the software of our 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 pounds?
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Naveen Jain: Turning Audacious Ideas Into Life-Changing Innovations | E66
So if you do my DNA test today and I gain 100 pounds, has my DNA changed? And the answer is no. Now, if I become diabetic, has my DNA changed? No. If I have 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.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Naveen Jain: Turning Audacious Ideas Into Life-Changing Innovations | E66
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, I say, wait a sec, 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.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Naveen Jain: Turning Audacious Ideas Into Life-Changing Innovations | E66
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?
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Naveen Jain: Turning Audacious Ideas Into Life-Changing Innovations | E66
And then as I started 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 say, why? So then I start doing the research.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Naveen Jain: Turning Audacious Ideas Into Life-Changing Innovations | E66
So you go to Google Research or Google Scholar and you see 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.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Naveen Jain: Turning Audacious Ideas Into Life-Changing Innovations | E66
My first reaction was, if everyone believes the microbiome is so important and everyone believes the microbiome causes all these disease 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?
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Naveen Jain: Turning Audacious Ideas Into Life-Changing Innovations | E66
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 Ilana'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.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Naveen Jain: Turning Audacious Ideas Into Life-Changing Innovations | E66
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.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Naveen Jain: Turning Audacious Ideas Into Life-Changing Innovations | E66
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 about my why this, why now, why me.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Naveen Jain: Turning Audacious Ideas Into Life-Changing Innovations | E66
So we know now we're going to measure the human gene expression, and we're going to focus on what microbes are expressing and producing, and we're 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.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Naveen Jain: Turning Audacious Ideas Into Life-Changing Innovations | E66
Because, you know, when you are born and when your kids are born, they don't come with a user manual. It's not like, here's who I am, here's how you operate me, and here is my user manual, right? I wish. I wish, right? The point is, we all wish that way, but that's not how it happens. And we do our best to raise children. But what's really interesting is that
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Naveen Jain: Turning Audacious Ideas Into Life-Changing Innovations | E66
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.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Naveen Jain: Turning Audacious Ideas Into Life-Changing Innovations | E66
I thought, you know, NASA JPL is sending these robots 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?
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Naveen Jain: Turning Audacious Ideas Into Life-Changing Innovations | E66
And they look at me and say, nah, not really. We don't care about what organisms are doing. We 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 headquarter, 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.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Naveen Jain: Turning Audacious Ideas Into Life-Changing Innovations | E66
And then I start 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.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Naveen Jain: Turning Audacious Ideas Into Life-Changing Innovations | E66
And they're saying, well, we're looking at multiple ways, but we don't have a solution yet. Then I was at Los Alamos National Lab. And as you recall, the Los Alamos National Lab is famous for what, Lana? What is it famous for? The big nuclear bomb, right? So they developed the nuclear bomb and they were working on their next project, which was- Fascinating story, by the way.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Naveen Jain: Turning Audacious Ideas Into Life-Changing Innovations | E66
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.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Naveen Jain: Turning Audacious Ideas Into Life-Changing Innovations | E66
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.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Naveen Jain: Turning Audacious Ideas Into Life-Changing Innovations | E66
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.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Naveen Jain: Turning Audacious Ideas Into Life-Changing Innovations | E66
I hired the head of IBM Watson Research, who was developing all the AI. I brought him on board, and then we started VIO. 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.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Naveen Jain: Turning Audacious Ideas Into Life-Changing Innovations | E66
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.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Naveen Jain: Turning Audacious Ideas Into Life-Changing Innovations | E66
If you grow up in humble beginnings like many of us do on who are the first time entrepreneurs, we all grow up in very humble beginnings. And we believe that shapes us who we become because we still have that hunger, that desire to actually do something. And it could be a desire to obviously be financially successful.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Naveen Jain: Turning Audacious Ideas Into Life-Changing Innovations | E66
We look at a fingerprint blood to look at all your mitochondria and the human gene expression in 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.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Naveen Jain: Turning Audacious Ideas Into Life-Changing Innovations | E66
Don't eat broccoli right now because your sulfide production is too high, causing a lot of inflammation. But you can eat red wheat 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 wheat, right?
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Naveen Jain: Turning Audacious Ideas Into Life-Changing Innovations | E66
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.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Naveen Jain: Turning Audacious Ideas Into Life-Changing Innovations | E66
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.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Naveen Jain: Turning Audacious Ideas Into Life-Changing Innovations | E66
I get my oral lozenges that are made for me to adjust my oral microbiome. And Ilana, we get personalized toothpaste that are made for you in the morning and evening to adjust my oral microbiome.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Naveen Jain: Turning Audacious Ideas Into Life-Changing Innovations | E66
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, 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.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Naveen Jain: Turning Audacious Ideas Into Life-Changing Innovations | E66
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 0 and stage 1 cancer with 95% specificity and 90% sensitivity.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Naveen Jain: Turning Audacious Ideas Into Life-Changing Innovations | E66
So companies like Grail, they do the cancer test. Their stage 1 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.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Naveen Jain: Turning Audacious Ideas Into Life-Changing Innovations | E66
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
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Naveen Jain: Turning Audacious Ideas Into Life-Changing Innovations | E66
will 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.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Naveen Jain: Turning Audacious Ideas Into Life-Changing Innovations | E66
But as you will learn, making money is simply a byproduct of doing things that improve other people's lives. And I'll give you how I look at starting every venture. I can't find wood here anymore in the office. Here, I have one for you. Here you go. It's a knock on wood. Every company so far I've started has been wildly successful.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Naveen Jain: Turning Audacious Ideas Into Life-Changing Innovations | E66
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. obsession, not obsession for a person, not obsession for things, obsession to solve a problem.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Naveen Jain: Turning Audacious Ideas Into Life-Changing Innovations | E66
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?
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Naveen Jain: Turning Audacious Ideas Into Life-Changing Innovations | E66
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.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Naveen Jain: Turning Audacious Ideas Into Life-Changing Innovations | E66
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
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Naveen Jain: Turning Audacious Ideas Into Life-Changing Innovations | E66
is to feel that they're 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.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Naveen Jain: Turning Audacious Ideas Into Life-Changing Innovations | E66
When you are down, all you have to do is hunker down and know the next beat is going to be up. And here's 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.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Naveen Jain: Turning Audacious Ideas Into Life-Changing Innovations | E66
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.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Naveen Jain: Turning Audacious Ideas Into Life-Changing Innovations | E66
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?
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Naveen Jain: Turning Audacious Ideas Into Life-Changing Innovations | E66
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.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Naveen Jain: Turning Audacious Ideas Into Life-Changing Innovations | E66
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.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Naveen Jain: Turning Audacious Ideas Into Life-Changing Innovations | E66
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.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Naveen Jain: Turning Audacious Ideas Into Life-Changing Innovations | E66
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?
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Naveen Jain: Turning Audacious Ideas Into Life-Changing Innovations | E66
They surround themselves with all the people who are depressed, right? 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 the crazy idea.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Naveen Jain: Turning Audacious Ideas Into Life-Changing Innovations | E66
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.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Naveen Jain: Turning Audacious Ideas Into Life-Changing Innovations | E66
Results will come from action. And in Sanskrit, it says, 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?
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Naveen Jain: Turning Audacious Ideas Into Life-Changing Innovations | E66
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.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Naveen Jain: Turning Audacious Ideas Into Life-Changing Innovations | E66
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 4 a.m. 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.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Naveen Jain: Turning Audacious Ideas Into Life-Changing Innovations | E66
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.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Naveen Jain: Turning Audacious Ideas Into Life-Changing Innovations | E66
And that's what I'm talking about. When you have that type of a laser focus and a purpose, that purpose is what drives you. You notice when people, when they find that kids are in danger, the mom becomes a super mom. There's nothing stops them. And they have this laser focus eyes and nothing gets in the way.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Naveen Jain: Turning Audacious Ideas Into Life-Changing Innovations | E66
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.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Naveen Jain: Turning Audacious Ideas Into Life-Changing Innovations | E66
They get that power in their arms that they could probably take down the person of 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.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Naveen Jain: Turning Audacious Ideas Into Life-Changing Innovations | E66
And the way you do that is you take a 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.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Naveen Jain: Turning Audacious Ideas Into Life-Changing Innovations | E66
Oh, my God, look at my rocket is now firing the fire. And by the way, I can see the pressure on that is 10 gigabits. Great, love it. And you keep baking 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.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Naveen Jain: Turning Audacious Ideas Into Life-Changing Innovations | E66
I was going to actually change the subject on you and maybe we can talk about youth 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 is something I always find very fascinating. So we have three children, Ilana.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Naveen Jain: Turning Audacious Ideas Into Life-Changing Innovations | E66
My oldest is Ankur, 33 years old. He runs a company called Build. And you probably know that Build is another unicorn that he started about two years ago. and he went to Wharton. 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. It is another great company that she started.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Naveen Jain: Turning Audacious Ideas Into Life-Changing Innovations | E66
My youngest went to Stanford also, and he's a Schwarzman Scholar, and he's a FinTech company that's also a unicorn.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Naveen Jain: Turning Audacious Ideas Into Life-Changing Innovations | E66
So the interesting thing I'm seeing, three children, knowing that they are growing up in an affluent family, knowing they don't have to work for a day for 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 dad created.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Naveen Jain: Turning Audacious Ideas Into Life-Changing Innovations | E66
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.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Naveen Jain: Turning Audacious Ideas Into Life-Changing Innovations | E66
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.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Naveen Jain: Turning Audacious Ideas Into Life-Changing Innovations | E66
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.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Naveen Jain: Turning Audacious Ideas Into Life-Changing Innovations | E66
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.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Naveen Jain: Turning Audacious Ideas Into Life-Changing Innovations | E66
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.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Naveen Jain: Turning Audacious Ideas Into Life-Changing Innovations | E66
Once you give them the intellectual curiosity, that is the thirst they will, rest of their life, they will actually find their own water and they will drink it because they are thirsty. And the thirst comes from this intellectual curiosity that what if that something was possible.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Naveen Jain: Turning Audacious Ideas Into Life-Changing Innovations | E66
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. Ilana, 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.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Naveen Jain: Turning Audacious Ideas Into Life-Changing Innovations | E66
But your job at that point, what if you were to say, you know, the sky doesn't really exist. The 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.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Naveen Jain: Turning Audacious Ideas Into Life-Changing Innovations | E66
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. Everything can be questioned.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Naveen Jain: Turning Audacious Ideas Into Life-Changing Innovations | E66
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.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Naveen Jain: Turning Audacious Ideas Into Life-Changing Innovations | E66
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 a 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?
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Naveen Jain: Turning Audacious Ideas Into Life-Changing Innovations | E66
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 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 to give it a shot?
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Naveen Jain: Turning Audacious Ideas Into Life-Changing Innovations | E66
And he literally started this company based on the thought that what if you don't have to charge on a rent? And MasterCard said, you know what? There are $700 billion in the country that I spend 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 will charge the money for everything else, but not for it.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Naveen Jain: Turning Audacious Ideas Into Life-Changing Innovations | E66
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.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Naveen Jain: Turning Audacious Ideas Into Life-Changing Innovations | E66
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'm going to spend time with my young children. And most people say, you know, such a great dad who is now quitting everything and spending time with the children.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Naveen Jain: Turning Audacious Ideas Into Life-Changing Innovations | E66
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 starts a second company.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Naveen Jain: Turning Audacious Ideas Into Life-Changing Innovations | E66
He 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.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Naveen Jain: Turning Audacious Ideas Into Life-Changing Innovations | E66
And literally, we had a family meeting. All the kids are now grown up and said, Dad, you had amazing success. You know the health care. 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?
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Naveen Jain: Turning Audacious Ideas Into Life-Changing Innovations | E66
Nobody's going to give you poop. Nobody's going to know the microbiome. I don't know where you learned these microbiome thing. 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.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Naveen Jain: Turning Audacious Ideas Into Life-Changing Innovations | E66
So 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.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Naveen Jain: Turning Audacious Ideas Into Life-Changing Innovations | E66
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 said, 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 is it? Kids learn. Kids learn.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Naveen Jain: Turning Audacious Ideas Into Life-Changing Innovations | E66
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 the 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 wouldn't read them the story.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Naveen Jain: Turning Audacious Ideas Into Life-Changing Innovations | E66
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 a story. Now I say, dad, now you tell me a story about this, this, and this.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Naveen Jain: Turning Audacious Ideas Into Life-Changing Innovations | E66
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.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Naveen Jain: Turning Audacious Ideas Into Life-Changing Innovations | E66
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.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Naveen Jain: Turning Audacious Ideas Into Life-Changing Innovations | E66
And that's literally what he wrote in the college essay, that my intellectual curiosity did not let me focus on just one thing because I wanted to understand everything before I decide what is it that I want to do with my life.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Naveen Jain: Turning Audacious Ideas Into Life-Changing Innovations | E66
Ilana, 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 this 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.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Naveen Jain: Turning Audacious Ideas Into Life-Changing Innovations | E66
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.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Naveen Jain: Turning Audacious Ideas Into Life-Changing Innovations | E66
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.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Naveen Jain: Turning Audacious Ideas Into Life-Changing Innovations | E66
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.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Naveen Jain: Turning Audacious Ideas Into Life-Changing Innovations | E66
So dream 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 Abbey, and by the way, anyone who's listening to this, you should go check out abbey.com. This is one of the best women's health company. When she was starting Abbey,
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Naveen Jain: Turning Audacious Ideas Into Life-Changing Innovations | E66
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.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Naveen Jain: Turning Audacious Ideas Into Life-Changing Innovations | E66
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.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Naveen Jain: Turning Audacious Ideas Into Life-Changing Innovations | E66
If outcome B happens, I do this. And if you think of this as an experiment, there is no failure. There is no A is 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 it actually works.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Naveen Jain: Turning Audacious Ideas Into Life-Changing Innovations | E66
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.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Naveen Jain: Turning Audacious Ideas Into Life-Changing Innovations | E66
If you can help a billion people live a better life, you can create a $100 billion company. Non-experts are better at solving the problem than experts are. And here's why. 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.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Naveen Jain: Turning Audacious Ideas Into Life-Changing Innovations | E66
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.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Naveen Jain: Turning Audacious Ideas Into Life-Changing Innovations | E66
People who come up with a problem, people who come up with a solution, and the people who go out and actually solve it.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Naveen Jain: Turning Audacious Ideas Into Life-Changing Innovations | E66
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 $100 billion company. But you don't wake up in the morning and say, what should I do to create a $100 billion company?
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Naveen Jain: Turning Audacious Ideas Into Life-Changing Innovations | E66
Thank you, Ilana. I really appreciate you. And we'll continue our conversation on the next episode. Exactly.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Naveen Jain: Turning Audacious Ideas Into Life-Changing Innovations | E66
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.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Naveen Jain: Turning Audacious Ideas Into Life-Changing Innovations | E66
So every time you start, whatever it is, ask yourself if you're 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,
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Naveen Jain: Turning Audacious Ideas Into Life-Changing Innovations | E66
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.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Naveen Jain: Turning Audacious Ideas Into Life-Changing Innovations | E66
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.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Naveen Jain: Turning Audacious Ideas Into Life-Changing Innovations | E66
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 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.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Naveen Jain: Turning Audacious Ideas Into Life-Changing Innovations | E66
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?
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Naveen Jain: Turning Audacious Ideas Into Life-Changing Innovations | E66
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 setter. You don't say, ah, that's not going to happen, right?
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Naveen Jain: Turning Audacious Ideas Into Life-Changing Innovations | E66
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,
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Naveen Jain: Turning Audacious Ideas Into Life-Changing Innovations | E66
Leaving the Earth orbit, we have done that many times, we call them a rocket, right? 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 go long distances.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Naveen Jain: Turning Audacious Ideas Into Life-Changing Innovations | E66
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.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Naveen Jain: Turning Audacious Ideas Into Life-Changing Innovations | E66
You know, there is a method to the madness, and I'll give you the framework for that.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Naveen Jain: Turning Audacious Ideas Into Life-Changing Innovations | E66
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?
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Naveen Jain: Turning Audacious Ideas Into Life-Changing Innovations | E66
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.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Naveen Jain: Turning Audacious Ideas Into Life-Changing Innovations | E66
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 crops 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?
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Naveen Jain: Turning Audacious Ideas Into Life-Changing Innovations | E66
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
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Naveen Jain: Turning Audacious Ideas Into Life-Changing Innovations | E66
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 set and say, honey, do you want to go out and get some radiation, not go out and get some pizza, right?
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Naveen Jain: Turning Audacious Ideas Into Life-Changing Innovations | E66
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.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Naveen Jain: Turning Audacious Ideas Into Life-Changing Innovations | E66
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.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Naveen Jain: Turning Audacious Ideas Into Life-Changing Innovations | E66
And what they want to work on is something, if they 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, everyone who wants to invest, they say, look, these guys have an unbelievably great idea.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Naveen Jain: Turning Audacious Ideas Into Life-Changing Innovations | E66
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're going to actually make humanity a multi-planetary society.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Naveen Jain: Turning Audacious Ideas Into Life-Changing Innovations | E66
We're 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.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Naveen Jain: Turning Audacious Ideas Into Life-Changing Innovations | E66
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's nothing I could have done. At this point, he was given three months to live.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Naveen Jain: Turning Audacious Ideas Into Life-Changing Innovations | E66
And unfortunately, that's all he got. And it occurred to me that there was nothing. There was no symptom. There's 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.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Naveen Jain: Turning Audacious Ideas Into Life-Changing Innovations | E66
He had diabetes. He had all these chronic diseases. And we just accept it. 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, wait a sec. Why does it have to be this way?
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Naveen Jain: Turning Audacious Ideas Into Life-Changing Innovations | E66
Because humans have not changed in the last 100 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
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Naveen Jain: Turning Audacious Ideas Into Life-Changing Innovations | E66
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,
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Naveen Jain: Turning Audacious Ideas Into Life-Changing Innovations | E66
It's really the strings of experiences, first of all, that makes you who you are. You know, a lot of us tend to go back and trying to find that one single moment that changed us, right? And it comes from this philosophy that we constantly keep saying, it's the last straw that breaks the camel's back. And we all know that it's never the last straw that breaks the camel back.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Naveen Jain: Turning Audacious Ideas Into Life-Changing Innovations | E66
Then I asked 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 I said, good. So why this is checkmark? Because we know that this is a big problem that we could attack. And then I asked myself, why now?
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Naveen Jain: Turning Audacious Ideas Into Life-Changing Innovations | E66
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.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Naveen Jain: Turning Audacious Ideas Into Life-Changing Innovations | E66
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 $1,000.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Naveen Jain: Turning Audacious Ideas Into Life-Changing Innovations | E66
In the next three to five years, it will come down to $100 because its cost is plummeting. Guess what? Seven years later, Ilana, it is now down to almost $5, 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. I will come back and explain.
Leap Academy with Ilana Golan
Naveen Jain: Turning Audacious Ideas Into Life-Changing Innovations | E66
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 were to ask and say, Ilana, 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.