S03|15: How Healthcare Founder Sameer Dhar is Reimagining Preventative Care

Sameer  00:02

The quicker you can move, I guess, the how do we attack this? And like, do we believe in this? And how much do we believe in this? And what are we gonna do next? And you start deepening your resolve. And it's experiences like that that do, actually, I think, make you more grounded in yourself, more resolute or determined to go on your mission, and honestly, like, I think we're in a better place now, having gone through that together.

Leah  00:27

Hello and welcome to season three of the founder mindset, brought to you by ATB. I'm your host, Leah Sarich, and I'm delighted to be back for another season of talking to founders about what it's really like to build a company from that first big idea. If you've listened to previous episodes, you know, I was a journalist for over 20 years. So I'm more curious about why anyone would ever want to become an entrepreneur, not so much about the business model, product, market fit and so on. I want to understand why entrepreneurs keep going, why they think they're the ones to solve a massive problem, why they want to make a real impact in the world. And if you're here, I bet you want to know why too. Let's find out. Joining me today is Sameer Dhar Co-founder and CEO of Nia Health, a health tech startup built to prevent disease with at-home lab testing and expert guidance. Sameer, thanks so much for being here.

Sameer 01:19

My pleasure. Thanks for having me on.

Leah  01:22

All right, so usually at the beginning of these conversations, I go right back to how you even became an entrepreneur. And in your case, Nia health is actually your second venture you started with Sensassure. Is that right? How did you even become an entrepreneur in the first place?

Sameer  01:38

You know, my journey into entrepreneurship probably started towards the end of high school. I really got involved in Student Council and kind of taking leadership roles and positions, trying to make change happen. And in that context, it was a lot to do with poverty relief and charitable work. As a result of a pilot project I had started in high school, in grade 12, I ended up co-founding a charitable organization that has ended up raising millions towards local poverty relief efforts across Alberta. That was my first foray into starting something… trying to solve a problem, not for profit.

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My arc as an entrepreneur has always been characterized by competing forces, of wanting to make a difference in the world, and truly like make social change and do good, and at the same time, realizing the realities of the world, where money and financial means is actually fairly important in terms of actually trying to make that change happen. It took the form, during university, of me actually thinking I needed to go the high finance route and become an investment banker. I realized I didn't want to be an investment banker while working in the industry at Morgan Stanley over one summer. And I would tell you that joining a program and getting admitted in a program called The Next 36 which you might be familiar with, was a life changing moment for me, because until then, even though I had started a charitable organization, had done something fairly entrepreneurial, I never thought that entrepreneurship was a viable path coming right out of post secondary.

Leah 03:20

Why did you think that?

Sameer  03:23

I would say, you know, I was a child of immigrants. So it is true what they say, that success in immigrant land is looked at as being a doctor, engineer, lawyer and academics are kind of the most paramount of importance, and the thing you needed to focus on as you're growing up. And having stability of career and job and whatnot, that was super important. And so my sister's, you know, a surgeon, and followed that track. So I didn't necessarily, when the immediate family have a path, where you take that less chosen path. And so yeah, Next 36 opened up my eyes to—Hey, entrepreneurship can actually be something you get into immediately, and that you don't have to be an expert or have a fully developed skill set and understanding of a space in order to solve problems and build a business in it. And my journey with Sensassure basically started with The Next 36 and saying, I want to solve a problem that makes a difference in people's lives and maybe make a business out of that. And so elder tech and elder care was a relatively unserved market, and still is, although there's much more hype around it these days, it seems. But 10 years ago, that was where I started, and I went and I talked to a ton of different stakeholders in the space, geriatricians, care home administrators, nursing staff, and said, hey, where does your day suck? And funny enough, they were the ones that elucidated this idea of incontinence to me, because I didn't even know what that meant, right? What that meant, right at 20, 21 years old.

Leah  05:09

Yeah, and so you solve this problem,

Sameer  05:12

It was,a case of, hey, go to a underserved market, understand the pain points, and then go as deep as humanly possible on the pain point, and then see if there's a marriage of technology and other things could help solve the problem.

Leah  05:31

And did. Did you not, though, like when you were doing this discovery, live in the nursing home for a while?

Sameer  05:38

Yeah, actually, that was during the course of the Sensassure journey, the team and I, we lived out of three different nursing homes across North America for 12 months, so two in the US, one in Ontario.

Leah  05:51

For 12 months, like a year. Yeah, that is a long time to be, like in your 20s living in a nursing home. Yeah?

Sameer  05:58

No, that's right but it was an incredible experience, not just from business perspective in terms of getting to know your users intimately and developing empathy and all that good stuff, but also from a life perspective. I think, personally, it's bonded me. It further entrenched my love of older people and my belief actually, that multi generational living is, and should be the way of the future. And so, there's a lot of wanderings I had around that whole idea.

Leah  06:34

There's a lot to learn from these people, for sure. So you went ahead and came up with this company and solved this problem, and this company was acquired back in 2016 is that right?

Sameer  06:43

Correct? Yeah, towards the end of 2016.

Leah  06:48

Wow. But, you know, I can't help but reflect on the fact that you also sort of skirted over this issue, that you also started a charity that's raised millions, and now you've, you've got Sensassure, and it's solving this massive problem for seniors that really improves their quality of life. This is a huge deal, and we haven't even gotten to Nia Health yet. Like that's incredible. How do you feel about that?

Sameer  07:06

I feel good about you know, having spent time working on problems that I think are worthy, and I think it was lucky enough, relatively early on in life, as I described earlier, to be able to get the feeling that you get when you make a difference in someone else's life, and often in the charitable context, you don't get anything back in return. And even from a charity perspective, I think motivating the heart of a volunteer, it's much harder to do that than it is to hire somebody for a paycheck, right? But the beauty and magic I think, comes when you have a mission that is social in nature, but someone can also get that paycheck, so you can create a truly remarkable team that's mission aligned and driven, no matter what enterprise you're going after. If that mission is true.

Leah  07:55

I love that, and we'll dig into that a bit more, because I'm very interested in this mission and culture business. I love that, but let's get to Nia Health. So tell me just a little bit about what it is.

Sameer  08:04

Yeah. So Nia Health is Canada's first end-to-end proactive health platform that leverages advanced diagnostics such as Advanced blood work, VO2 Max DEXA scans, gut microbiome testing, continuous glucose monitoring, you name it, the most evidence-based stuff, compiled and accessible, accessibly priced in one place. We also have clinician interpretation of the results and consultation with licensed clinicians across the country. Yeah. I mean, we're doing a lot of cool stuff in the platform these days, around integrating wearables and other streams of data that right now have not, in the public system context, been put together in that one cohesive picture, so you get a truly comprehensive view of your risks to health and longevity, and we're really striving to be that partner that stays with you through life on your health journey.

Leah  08:57

That's amazing. How does it actually work? Like is it a subscription model, I understand?

Sameer  09:04

Yeah. On the consumer side, we have a subscription, annual subscription models, three different packages starting at $299 so we're the most successfully priced platform of its kind in the country. You sign up, and all our assessments start based on blood. We'll send a phlebotomist to your house or office, or if you're in Manitoba or Ontario, you can go into a clinic, and we'll take your blood in just a couple minutes. We'll take your full medical history, and between that medical history plus your point in time set of blood work, we'll say, Hey, here's your biggest risks to health span, longevity, here's most actionable set of things you can do to get in front of that risk, and we're screening across the board for up to 160 biomarkers, so a far more comprehensive view than most people and most Canadians would have access to otherwise.

Leah  09:53

Wow, that's incredible. And so then is the goal that people have the information they need to take action and live healthier lives, I would imagine.

Sameer  10:02

Absolutely and we are continuing to build feature set towards being a partner. So in between checkups, you're not just coming to us once or twice a year to check on these different markers. You're also seeing us as that coach, that champion, that partner, that friend in your pocket, that's going to be there for you to help guide your behavior change and make sure that the action plans that we set out at those intervals are actually followed through on, and that your risk indeed does decline over time.

Leah  10:32

That's amazing. Talk about impact. So help me understand how you're thinking about it, in terms of how it works with the public health care system in Canada.

Sameer  10:40

So right now, the public health care system, and it's not just in Canada, but globally, public health systems were really designed to treat disease after the fact. I mean, a lot is talked about reactive versus preventative or proactive medicine, and so, yeah, that's what the public system set up. It does a pretty good job of telling you after you already have disease and then how you can, you know, take action to treat it. But it for various reasons, is not necessarily set up to provide best in class proactive health and preventative medicine at scale. I mean, different public authorities are trying to raise the importance of prevention, but it's hard to implement at scale. And so our vision is, we want to do the things that are challenging for the public system to do, but be complimentary in that sense. So we're not looking to replace in any way, primary care. And actually, we've designed our product and our solution to work quite well with primary care. So if you get risks flagged through our solution, everybody gets a letter to their primary care provider that's based on Canadian guidelines for any recommended follow up next steps you could take that in, and we found a lot of success with people getting the next steps they need through the public system with that. And then our clinician consults, again, we're dealing with licensed nurse practitioners across the country. We're well equipped to help provide that transitional piece to primary care as necessary. By taking this approach from the ground up and looking at ourselves as a responsible, complementary actor in this public system, we're seeing success. We're seeing success.

Leah  12:21

And to be clear, this is not executive health. You already mentioned your entry level subscription. It's very sort of approachable for a lot of people, but tell me how you're thinking about that too.

Sameer  12:31

We never came into this market to say, hey, we want to develop something that just competes against executive health, because our goal is to get our solution to millions, if not more people, and every Canadian in our dream world should have access to this type of care. So that necessarily means that you have to do everything possible to bring price point down to something that's accessible to the masses. And honestly, even at $299 we know we're not there yet, but we are the most accessibly priced provider in the country. We're going to keep pushing forward on getting price point down and other payers involved to increase our utility to broader set of people. But on the exec health side of the house, it's been interesting because we have also realized that we can compete directly against executive health as our solution has grown, in terms of the diagnostics we offer and our just our evidence based approach with a preventative lens, and actually, a number of major accounting firms and law firms across the country are now offering our solution. Now this would be the higher-end, more comprehensive packages that can go up to $1499 per year, but include a bunch of other diagnostics, like VO2 Dex, gut microbiome, multiple blood draws per year, et cetera. But we're basically being put right up against other executive health providers for partners to choose from as part of their annual executive health entitlement. So it's been interesting to see, when you start building from first principles, you can create something magical that has a lot of application across verticals.

Leah  14:04

Absolutely. Tell me a little bit, just some basics about the company. You know, how many employees have you got right now?

Sameer  14:10

Actually, that's a good question. We're growing pretty quickly these days, but we're around 13 full time employees right now.

Leah  14:17

Yeah, incredible. And how many clients do you have in?

Sameer  14:21

In the thousands. I don't actually know what the latest count is, but we've been growing 25 to 30% month over month. And keep in mind, we've only been around for 18 months, of which the first eight or nine months were focused wholly on building a best in class product experience and not much on growth. So we've been for less than a year focused on growth, yet we also have over 15,000 people across the country on our wait list. And so we're seeing this desire on the part of Canadians to get access to proactive health solutions and want to take control of their health.

Leah  14:56

Yeah, no kidding. Do you want to talk a little bit about the money that you've raised thus far?

Sameer  15:00

We're super fortunate within this 18 month period to have raised over $8 million between our pre-seed and seed round. We just closed our seed round a few weeks ago. We're super excited to have some of the top seed and early stage firms in the country backing us, including Version One Ventures and Golden Ventures, and then a host of other funds across the country and angel investors. So it's been a remarkable journey that way. And actually we were preempted on both financing rounds. So I think the interest even on the investor side of the house these days for proactive health and solutions around preventative medicine is has been very encouraging.

Leah  15:41

That's so exciting. Congratulations.

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As we all know, in the growth of these high tech companies, something always goes sideways. There's always things to fix and solve. So maybe just take a moment to reflect on I ask everybody in the chair this question, a do or die moment in the growth of your company when you just didn't know how things were going to go and how you were going to move through it. Have you got a story that comes to mind?

Sameer  16:29

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And actually, so funny, because I think this similar type story happened in Sensassure days. So my first company where, basically, after having taken money from people and from investors that you really respect, lost a very key Co-founder. Co-founder just decided that it was not the right fit for them at this point in life. And I think that's one of the risks when you partner with people who have not been through the startup journey before. Intellectually, you can kind of understand how hard it's going to be and what the sacrifices that need to be made are, but you don't really understand until you're in it. And so I give no fault to anybody who takes the leap and then understands after the fact that it wasn't necessarily the right path for them. They were such a pivotal member, because they were actually one of the clinicians. They were the clinician on the founding team. And you're stuck building a company that's that's heavily based on needing that clinician to even deliver the service. Forget about, you know, designing the whole solution, etc. And you gotta, you gotta just figure it out. And that happened to me in Sensassure too, by the way, like I remember at one point we were building a medical device. Every potential Co-founder that I was working with, including the technical leads, you know, everybody had had decided they need to go a different way. And so it was just Sameer, kind of hanging out trying to figure out how to build a medical device as a non technical person who'd never done anything in the medical field before. So, yeah, these types of things, I think they I don't know if it's normalized across the board, but for sure, for me, you know, when your backs up against the wall, really figure out how committed you are to something and and what you're, you know, willing to do to overcome it, I think is, is a character building exercise every time.

Leah  18:22

No kidding, it is every single time. I'm so curious though, about like, how that actually felt when your Co-founder said this to you. He's like, or he or she, I'm out like, I can't do it. What did that feel like in that moment for you?

Sameer  18:35

Initially, I would say it's a lot of anxiety and fear. You really wholly feel the weight of, you know, the expectations that you set for yourself and that you've committed other investors and whatnot, and, I mean, I think it's like, it's a moment where I called, you know, the other Co- founder that didn't quit. And it was funny enough, because he was on his honeymoon, of course, trying to make sure that he had some quality time with his spouse while he was in New Zealand. But I said, I think this type of situation, warrants a 911 call here. And so I and I think you know, through leaning on each other, you know, we deepened our resolve, I think that's the key always, is the fear and kind of like despair, almost, of what are you going to do? And you know how tragic the potential consequences are, is a very natural first instinct, the quicker you can move, to how do we attack this? And do we believe in this? And how much do we believe in this? And what are we going to do next? And you start deepening your resolve. And it's experiences like that that do, actually, I think, make you more grounded in yourself, more resolute or determined to go on your mission. And honestly, like, I think we're in a better place now. Having gone through that together.

Leah  20:02

Right for sure, yeah, but like, I mean, I'm sorry to keep it, but it's like, how do you actually get there? Like, I mean, I could see you, like, getting that phone call. You've just taken all this money and, I mean, yes, the anxiety and the fear, but then how do you make that shift to—okay, let's just start actioning this. Let's just start figuring this out. Do you take time to freak out?

Sameer  20:22

No, no, no, I don't. I mean, I know people do, but you're gonna have a billion different situations that are gonna put your, you know, your whole commitment, into question and whatnot. And I think there's no time, to me, there's no time to hold that, that fear and despair. It's all about action and, yeah, so, like, I'm talking like an hour or two to get back. An hour or two, yeah, 100% you can't, wow. You can't kind of sit on these things. You gotta get a get the only way to get out of these types of situations is to keep moving forward, right? So, I mean, if you get bogged down with despair and fear, I mean, it's paralyzing. So I think, you know, the quicker you can move towards the next right step, so it's like, okay, how do we go talk to 100 potential clinicians to figure this thing out? Like, I mean, that becomes empowering and kind of gets you out of any rut.

Leah  21:19

For sure, it does. How has moving through that experience sort of changed, how you continue to build?

Sameer  21:26

Interestingly enough, it opened up the space to move away from a physician operating model, you know, physician based operating model, to a nurse practitioner driven operating model. So if that situation had not happened, I don't know that we would have made that switch. You know, we still love our physicians and are able to, you know, collaborate and get the benefit of many aspects of their different specialties, etc, but we've been super excited about the impact that nurse practitioners have been able to make as preventative health practitioners and coaches and kind of companions, if you will, along their journeys, the health journeys of our clients. So I consider myself super fortunate to have gone through that experience, because I think we wouldn't have made this shift otherwise.

Leah  22:15

No kidding, that's incredible. Okay, so we've talked about like, how intense and scary and anxiety inducing being an entrepreneur can be but how wonderful is it as well? I mean, there's a reason you keep going back. I mean, this isn't your first journey, right? So why do you keep going back to this kind of work?

Sameer  22:33

There's a couple things. So one is just like a freedom to pursue your own path and to pursue your own curiosities and have a project of one's own and to pull on a thread that you genuinely, just personally find interesting, right? I think once you've tasted that where you wake up every morning and no one's really telling you what to do, right? I mean, you every day, have to make your own opportunity. You have to, you know, execute on your own ideas and your own vision in collaboration, you know, of course, with with the rest of the team and other people in the business. But once you've tasted that way of living, I liken it to being in the jungle, whereas I think a lot of the populations in the zoo. I'd rather be in the jungle than in the zoo, is the way that I kind of frame it. Once you've tasted that, it's really hard to go back. It's really hard to go back to a different way of being and living. And honestly, I can say that with some experience behind it, because I spent about four years in between businesses, trying to find the second business, or trying to find out what I wanted to do next with my life. You know, regardless of what I tried, I just kept returning back to wanting to again, build something and create something that made a difference in people's lives. So maybe it's a bug that, if you catch it, it's hard to let go of.

Leah  23:55

It's hard to shake. No kidding, I love it. But as we know, being an entrepreneur is like, not a nine to five job, you know, it's, it's very risky. It's super intense. How does that actually affect your personal life? If you don't mind me asking.

Sameer  24:10

That's a really good question, and let's just say this—I was, I was single during Sensassure, and I'm single now during Nia so it is very challenging because it takes a lot out of you, right? Like, you're working, I mean, I'm probably on the baseline, you're, you're averaging, on a good week, 60 hours. And it's not about the hours, it's not necessarily like I'm punching the time clock thinking about how many hours you're working, but you, you're just doing it because you want to right and it takes a lot out of you. So by the end of the day, you come back home and you sometimes ask yourself, like, man, like I don't even have the energy go on a date right now, but I do know that this is also characteristic of the phase of the business that we're in. When you're in the first couple of years, it's a real grind, right? Like, you just have to, it's a Herculean effort to create something from nothing, and a lot of that energy and the effort, where's the source of it, it's the founders, right? One of my co founders, Mike, he's got, he just had a baby earlier this year, in many ways. I mean, it's like, it's work, his marriage, and the baby, like that's all you have time for, if you're starting something the first couple years, and also have those types of personal commitments. So, yeah, I mean, it's, that's a very long winded way of saying that. I mean, on the personal front, I would say that I do prioritize my relationships. It's actually the number one. It's the number one kind of thing about Sameer, if you will. It's my friends, family, etc. Yeah, I'm still able to make time, you know, to go on trips, etc, with folks. But it's different, right? Like, when you're, when you're on those trips, you're, you're still always, it feels like you're always on, right? You can't, you can't completely disconnect at this stage of the business I find, although I'm sure there's a bunch of executive coaches and whatnot, that'll say how that's, you know, counterproductive, and it's not… But I don't know, to be honest, that wisdom aside, because, you know, I do meditate, journal, have some practices to help ground, ground yourself and all that. But this founder energy at the beginning, to just be there, be available. You know, I concierge the first couple 1000 customers, their experiences, just because you want to be so close to your customer and user. It takes that type of commitment.

Leah  26:33

Do you give any thought to… Well, I mean, you sort of mentioned you do a little bit of meditation and maybe some journaling. But do you give any thought to, how do I sort of fill up my own battery so I can keep going?

Sameer  26:43

Yeah, it's an ongoing struggle. I would say to you, like, I've never personally, quote, unquote, burnt out when you're pushing this hard. It's inevitable that you get closer to times where you might be, you know, getting into the danger zone and I think I've developed the awareness of some of those tells—I start to get much more cranky. I'm losing my cool more. I think there's this unproductive anxiety/impatience that then has an impact on others on the team. It's in those types of moments that maybe you take a step back and you say, hey, you know what I need to I do need to just go on a super long bike ride, or just not think about work for a day, or, you know, or whatever the thing is, and disconnect. So, as I observed, because this is a topic that we talk about on the team as well, especially given the fact that we're championing proactive health, it's one that each person, I think, at least, our culture right now is each person ends up finding their own equilibrium, if you will. And so I think the key is communication of—hey, I'm getting in the danger zone. Need your support to take x time off, or do whatever. And here's how we can, you know, support each other in terms of being able to be on the journey over the long term together.

Leah  28:03

That's impressive, that you've got the awareness number one, but then the ability to communicate those needs with your team. That's very impressive.

Sameer  28:11

Yeah. I wouldn't say we're perfect at it by any means, but having the awareness and wanting to create a culture and environment of psychological safety, where people can actually talk about how they're faring, like we have this weekly sync. One of the key things that I think is important is understanding yellow, red, green upfront—how are people feeling overall. Just could be personal, professional, whatever. And understanding where people are in their journeys, both personally and professionally, allows you to meet them where they are too. So, yeah, communication, transparency and support, I think.

Leah  28:49

So you've clearly given that thought and have prioritized that and made that a real thing, in the sense that it's not something you just talk about and don't do it. You know what I mean? You actually have prioritized it. Is there an actual meeting where you discuss this?

Sameer  29:01

Yeah. And, I mean, one of the privileges, it's funny, like, our our clinical director, like one of my Co-founders, she does a great job of—if somebody's getting into the danger zone, you know, helping to put an action plan in place for them, checking in, you know, helping to create the environment on the team, as well as one to one kind of as a practitioner to support our team. So we're trying to leverage some of the principles as well of what we're trying to do from a proactive health perspective, to help people on the team when we do get to that danger zone.

Leah  29:37

Yeah, that's great. That's amazing. And of course, one of the things that keeps people moving forward, even when things get tough, is this notion of impact. Impact is really important to us here at Thin Air Labs. But I also wanted to talk to you about that. How do you think about creating a sort of meaningful human impact in the world?

Sameer  29:55

I love that matrix or chart of… on the x-axis, you have the number of people impacted, right? And on the y-axis, it's potentially the impact per person that you can create. So you can imagine two extremes, let's just say one, where you have a medical device that's directly saving people's lives, but it might save 1000 people's lives, but it saves their life, right? So that the number of people impacted might be low, but the impact per person is pretty extreme. Whereas you might look at a, I don't know, Facebook, let's just say, or meta, where it's billions of people, and maybe a much lower impact per person. And I think the way that I look at it is the area under the curve could end up being the same regardless of, you know, the number of people impacted, depending on the level of impact. So I think, you know, that's just one philosophical way that I've always thought about impact and what to work on. But I think the other is much more subjective, because it's tied to every Founder's and every person's own perception of meaning and what what is considered to be meaningful, and that's been a driving force behind what I will and will not be willing to commit to. And it's a good kind of like back check, if you will, as you're running with an idea, you know, if you haven't started a company before, and you're trying some sort of experiments around some concept that you have, I mean, you find out pretty quickly if it's meaningful enough personally to you to devote your life towards, right? You can't discount just your own intuition on what each individual person feels is meaningful.

Leah  31:41

Yeah. And then, you know, carrying this thought through, if you're thinking of impact, how does that sort of directly line up with what you're doing at Nia Health?

Sameer  31:51

So to me, Nia Health could, if successful, change as a starting point, how the healthcare system in Canada works. So imagine a world where millions, tens of millions, maybe every Canadian, is using Nia as their center point of their health journey, and before they're ill, or before they're sick all throughout their life, they are understanding their metrics in a way that is common in business, but not when it comes to our own personal health, right? Like if you go to a business owner and you say, hey, all you need to worry about is increasing revenues and decreasing expenses, you don't worry about your operating metrics. I think they tell you you're crazy, right? But when it comes to our health, people say, Well, I don't need to know my metrics. I just know I need to eat better and sleep more and exercise, right? But imagine a world where people own their health from a very young age, all throughout life, and are empowered over their health journeys in a way that the system's currently not set up to facilitate. I think then what you do is you create health outcomes over time that require less and less use of public resources, and less and less disease, and better and better health spans and happier and more fulfilled and joyful populations as a whole. That is a future worth fighting for, like win or lose, it's a worthy cause I could wake up every morning and say that's worth fighting for.

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So that's how I look at impact within the context of Nia, and that's why, as I alluded to earlier, we're very, very conscious of price point. You know, how do we bring it to even more people? How do we bring other payers, like insurers? And I think eventually government should be paying for this, especially given we're the most efficient provider of prevention in the country already. So eventually, when we can prove enough of our outcomes, other payers should come in, and that's how we all change the world. So anyway, that's kind of how I see it.

Leah  33:53

I love it. I love it. I love how you think about this. And it lines up perfectly with our final two questions here. So you're the Co-founder of Nia. How do you hope the story goes for Nia?

Sameer  34:04

I will be satisfied if our impact is on millions of people. But I think that my stretch moonshot goal is that this is something global, and that billions of people end up benefiting from this movement. I actually have no doubt this movement, broadly speaking towards prevention and proactive health is going to be impactful in the billions, in the order of magnitude of billions over time. But I'd love to see Nia being a catalytic force behind making that happen. I truly mean that. I wake up every morning with that as my my North Star, and then starting with Canada first, I'd love for everybody to have access to Nia in a way that they feel good about, and they're not feeling stretched, wallet-wise, to be spending on the hour, that it's already covered by other actors in the system. To me, getting this out to millions of Canadians and every Canadian knowing what Nia is, that'd be a great starting point. How's that?

Leah  35:07

I love it. That's amazing. Okay, and you're the Co-founder of Nia. So, how do you hope your personal story as a Founder goes?

Sameer  35:16

A big differentiator in terms of our story, versus even other competitors in the space, is we have been very rooted in trying to be evidence based, in trying to understand what the public system does and doesn't do, and how we can fit responsibly within the constraints of some of the things in the Canadian health system. To be a responsible actor and evidence based in this world where we have a lot of hype, we got a lot of thought leaders, we got a lot of celebrities down south who are backing a bunch of companies. To me, I would hope that at the end of this journey, I'd be able to look back and know that we continued to build with integrity. We're able to tell that story in a way that got people excited in a similar way to where we're seeing the hype being built around celebs and celebrity physicians, for example, and things like that. I'd like to know that as a Founder, I didn't get caught up in hype, and then I always remain grounded and rooted in principle and doing the right thing for clients and being focused on driving health outcomes. That'd be a great thing to be able to look back on.

Leah  36:27

I love it. Sameer, thank you for this conversation.

Sameer 36:31

Thank you. I really appreciate being here.

Leah  36:42

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Leah  37:07

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