Amaan 00:02

Going back for me, growing up, I always knew I wanted to do something good for the world. I wanted to make a difference. I didn't know what that was, that you know, the flavour of that changed many times over, but ultimately, sort of kicked off with my time at the Clinton Foundation. And, you know, I've kind of weaved impact into my work and my story in different ways since then.

Leah 00:20

Hi, thanks for being here. And welcome to Season Two of The Founder Mindset, brought to you by ATB. I'm Leah Sarich, your host, and I'm super excited to talk to more Founders about the human experience of being an entrepreneur. In this podcast, we're digging into what it really feels like to build a company from nothing. I was a broadcaster for over 20 years. So I've interviewed thousands of people, but entrepreneurs, not that many. And yet they have the best stories. They're solving big problems. And they're creating incredible impact. But it is hard work. So why would they do this? Let's find out. Joining me today is Amaan Banwait, Co-Founder and Chief Commercialization Officer of PurposeMed, a company improving access to complex health care for underserved communities. Amaan, thank you so much for being here.

Amaan 01:19

Thank you so much for having me.

Leah 01:20

I just love the work that you are doing, to be very clear. I've done a little bit of research on you, and I'm deeply impressed. You're the Co-Founder of another company as well, with PurposeMed, but also Ilara Health in Africa. Both PurposeMed and Ilara, providing healthcare to underserved communities. This is incredible and deeply important work. Can you tell me, first, how you even got into healthcare as a Co-Founder, why this was something you wanted to tackle?

Amaan 01:44

Yeah, it's a great question. It goes back to my early days in management consulting. I worked for a firm called Bain in Toronto, and always knew I wanted to do international development work, and an opportunity came up to join the Clinton Foundation in East Africa, and Clinton Foundation happened to focus on healthcare. I wasn't necessarily drawn to healthcare, but I was really drawn to their approach, which was taking kind of business people from consulting, from finance, placing them alongside government, specifically the Ministry of Health, to really try and scale the efforts of governments in the countries that Clinton Foundation operated in. And so this approach of kind of taking business people, taking business approaches to like development problems, really resonated with me. And so, you know, fast forward, I joined them. Found myself in Uganda, where I spent two and a half years working side by side with the Ministry of Health on HIV, initiatives, on malaria, initiatives. It was professionally very rewarding that started my love for healthcare and my love and passion for HIV, which is a core focus for PurposeMed today. Uganda is also the country my mother was raised in, so it was very valuable for me personally as well.

Leah 03:00

Oh, how wonderful. That's incredible to do such impactful work and have such a history as well. I also read, though, that you really have always wanted to help. You've been that little kid that was always like, I gotta figure out a way to help and do something important. Does that resonate with you?

Amaan 03:18

It does. It sounds a bit cheesy when I say it, and when I hear it, but it does.

Leah 03:25

So this goes way back for you.

Amaan 03:27

Going back for me, growing up, I always knew I wanted to do something good for the world. I wanted to make a difference. I didn't know what that was, that you know, the flavour of that changed many times over, but ultimately, sort of kicked off with my time at the Clinton Foundation. And, you know, I've kind of weaved impact into my work and my story in different ways since then.

Leah 03:51

Wonderful. All right, well, let's dig a little bit into PurposeMed. Tell me exactly what it is and what you're trying to achieve.

Amaan 03:58

Our mission is to improve access to care for underserved communities. And so what we do is we build healthcare verticals that tackle problems that specifically face underserved communities and underserved conditions. We've got a few different brands. One is Freddie, that's focused on HIV prevention and HIV treatment. So if I tackle HIV prevention quickly for a second, there's a pill that is 99% effective at preventing HIV. If you take it every day, you essentially won't get HIV. It's free for most people in Canada, in the US, but there's still huge barriers for people accessing that treatment, and those barriers vary from people not knowing about the treatment, clinicians not knowing about it, there being stigma and accessing it. And so what we set out to do, and this was really kind of the start of our major brand, Freddie, and us really kind of achieving product market fit as a business, is, how do we from education to diagnosis to delivery, create an end to end experience that makes it really easy, convenient and free to access this treatment. I can definitely go more into that, but we took that model with Freddie and HIV prevention, and we've extended it to other areas of healthcare, from HIV treatment to mental health care to a gender affirming care. And it's you know, really, how do we take these conditions that people may not understand? How do we use various forms of community and digital marketing to actually educate end users, many of which don't even know they you know they have this issue or have this need, and how do we make it seamless from getting diagnosed to getting all the care you need, to getting delivery of medication all in one place.

Leah 05:45

That's incredible. And you even got ADHD in there too, right? With Frida?

Amaan 05:50

We do? Yeah. So Frida is a brand that focuses on adult ADHD as well as anxiety and depression care.

Leah 05:57

So these are really complex problems that you are trying to solve here. And you've, you've talked a little bit about that, but I am very curious about the barriers to access this care. Why do you think those barriers exist? And it's, they're very, very complex, but I'm very curious about how you think about solving that.

Amaan 06:18

There's numerous issues here, so one of which is people may not know they have these issues, or that solutions to these issues may exist. So if I take ADHD care for a second, you know, a lot of people have undiagnosed ADHD, the majority of folks and they may not realize that the symptoms that they're experiencing are actually consistent with ADHD. So that's one side of the coin. The other side of the coin is, when you think about family physicians in Canada and really in the world, there's such a breadth of things that they need to cover that they may not be fully up to speed or comfortable with some niche areas that can fall in the specialist realm of care. So, ADHD is an example, it’s often treated by psychiatrists. HIV prevention medication may not be something that's totally well known and understood by all family doctors, and so these are areas that you may get referred to a specialist for. However, Canada has the longest waiting times to see a specialist out of all OECD countries. And so, as we all know, it takes forever to see a specialist. You have this education problem, both for patients, occasionally with family physicians who are doing amazing work but are overburdened, right? And a lot of, 20% of Canadians don't even have a family physician. And so we try and solve that problem by going direct to patients, educating them about the services we offer, about how some of the symptoms they might be experiencing can be solved. That's really the entry point.

Leah 07:52

Fascinating. And explain to me how the technology is really helping get in front of these people you're trying to reach.

Amaan 07:59

We don't think of it necessarily as the technology. We think of it is the clinical experience that is enabled by technology. And so it starts from the marketing experience, but from the moment someone lands on the site, you know, we're thinking about that whole experience end to end, from, you know, the minute they land on the site, all the way to them getting their refill prescriptions, and how do we make that as smooth and easy as possible? So as a starting point, for example, with all of our brands, part of what we're doing at the intake is that the starting point is a medical intake questionnaire. We've put a lot of thought into the design, not only from a UI/UX perspective, but also from a clinical perspective. How do we identify the people that are a right fit for our services, and for those who are not, give them that feedback you know immediately, and try and direct them to you know where they may go for the care that's appropriate for them? So we there's a lot of people that, unfortunately we we can't see, and we just let folks know that right off the bat. Especially with our mental health brand Frida, there's about 75% of people who come to us where we say, Hey, we're unfortunately not the right fit for you. So that's one element of… part of it is technology, part of it is just smart design, and we extend that into the clinical experience in seeing our providers, how the technology we build for our providers in the back end, and how we deliver a clinical experience outside of the actual visit with the provider, because that experience kind of continues. We're trying to make the whole experience as seamless as possible.

Leah 09:36

It’s amazing. It's very challenging work. I don't know how focused you are with the patients in a sort of one to one situation, but I would imagine that you would hear very challenging and difficult stories. Can you talk to me a little bit about that? What that's like?

Amaan 09:51

We hear those stories all the time, unfortunately and fortunately. I say fortunately because it's positive affirmation and feedback. Back for the work that we're doing. It's unfortunate because, you know, the patients that we see are a fraction of the patients that need health care, both in this country and, you know, in other countries, and it speaks to the experiences that patients have. Through our work with Freddie we've heard of numerous, numerous stories of patients facing stigma, facing judgment in speaking to family doctors. Recently heard about a patient that was asked about their relationship with God by their family doctor. Through our brand Frida, we often hear about stories from patients who have gone 20 years experiencing symptoms, have been invalidated by the healthcare system, access care through Frida, and feel like they've they've started a new life. We get multiple stories, and you'll read this in our Google reviews, of patients breaking down, crying on the phone, and our clinicians crying with them. You know there's kind of public reviews about this, and we've heard numerous stories from our gender affirming care Foria, that the care that we provide has literally saved patients lives. And so it's, it's powerful. We're humbled by the feedback that we get. We also recognize it's, it's an unfortunate sign of the system that we have, that patients have these issues. And you know, we're happy to just be making a small dent in solving some of the healthcare challenges that we face in this country and globally.

Leah 11:26

No kidding. I'm really curious about how you personally feel about doing this work. I mean, the impact you're having is extraordinary, but it's very, very challenging work, and I'm curious about you, as you know, a Co-Founder of this company. How does this feel to you to do this work?

Amaan 11:45

It's funny, you ask. I think it seesaws, right? Part of growing a company and growing it very quickly is tackling the hardest problems that exist in the organization, right? And that's part of the role of a Co-Founder. It's part of the role of anyone in a startup, really, is just to lean into the difficult parts. And that's what we try and do at Purpose Med. And so it is challenging. And I think everyone here would say it is, it's challenging work because we lean into those challenges. The flip side of it is, you know, the feedback that we get from patients, and the growth that we see in the number of patients that we can serve, the change in health outcomes that we can see, because we measure that closely, is validating for us that we are, that we're having an impact. And so it kind of makes it all worth it.

Leah 12:39

Yeah, I bet, I bet. You mentioned this briefly off the top that you did work with the Clinton Foundation in Uganda, where you were instrumental in 1000s of HIV positive infants receiving drug treatment. I would love to hear a little bit more about that work specifically. ,

Amaan 12:54

Yeah, so my role at the Clinton Foundation was to work with the government at sort of three different levels. So the first level was at a policy level, and so as an organization at the Clinton Foundation, we had a team of scientists, researchers, physicians, that were always looking at the evidence around the latest and greatest new medications that were coming to the market that were either more efficacious or equally as efficacious as existing drugs in use, but lower cost. My job was to take the output from that team and advocate with governments. Hey, let's move to this new medication, or let's move to that medication. And how do we connect you with the experts? You can have the right conversations, and we can move this through the system very quickly. That was step one. Step two was, okay, now we have a policy change. We as a country are moving to this new medication. My job was to actually get that medication into the hands of patients. And so it was working with donors, working with the financers of medication, ordering the medication, getting it into distribution centers. And I was literally building, you know, with the government, the distribution plans to get it into actual clinics. And there were over 5000 clinics in Uganda. And then the third element of the work was designing training so that all the clinicians would sort of be able to understand these new treatments and administer them safely, so sort of supporting the government on those training plans. And so it's kind of, you know, how do we go from research, you know, comes out around a new medication to getting it in patients hands as quickly as possible, supporting the government in all levels of the system. And so it was really fun, powerful work.

Leah 14:42

I bet, an incredible training ground, of course, for what you're doing at purpose med. But here again, I mean, it just strikes me that you must have seen some really difficult cases there. I'm thinking of these, you know, infants that need this treatment so desperately. These are infants we're talking about. I mean, how do you emotionally deal with that. This is life changing work you're doing for babies, for heaven's sake.

Amaan 15:04

Yeah, it was, it was really tough. I have memories of being in HIV clinics and seeing people and children that were, you know, affected by HIV. And you know, there's numerous symptoms that you can physically see when, you know, when someone is really affected, and you know treatment existed, but that didn't mean necessarily that people were all able to access that treatment. And so you you saw it in health clinics, and it was, it was really sad. It was, it was really powerful, and it was kind of motivation to keep going. But, you know, goes without saying, especially the kids. Yeah, it was. It was really hard.

Leah 15:49

Wow. So how did you cope with that reality?

Amaan 15:53

Yeah, it's a great question. You know, it was, it was a while back, so I don't, I don't remember specifically, but I think it was, you know, keep going right. And I think, honestly, I don't know if I coped with it particularly well, and that I kind of would put it in a box and try and turn it into fuel to, you know, work hard. And we all worked really hard at the Clinton Foundation, and broadly, folks at the Ministry of Health, people understood what was at stake, but at the same time it was sort of put it in a box, try not to, like, feel all of it and deal with it. And, you know, maybe it wasn't the healthiest of approaches. Probably a little more mature of a perspective and approach on how to deal with those things now than I did, you know at that time, which was 10 years ago.

Leah 16:43

Right, right.That makes sense. We mature, don't we? But what I'm hearing here is a common theme, really, sort of a passion for healthcare, is as a human right. Would that be accurate?

Amaan 16:56

100%. 100% and you know, if I think about our mission at PurposeMed, we started in Canada. We've expanded to the US. So we've been operating in the US for seven, eight months now, which is great. The stats in the US are in some ways better, in many ways worse than in Canada. As an example, the CDC released a stat that one in two gay black men in the south in the US will get HIV. It's a little dated, but it's, it's probably one in three to one in two, so it's really sad, right? And that's the US. And so our mission will be a global one. It's a North American one for now, but, yeah, healthcare is, is a fundamental human right, and there's a lot of work to be done.

Leah 17:38

No kidding, everyone that sits in this chair, I always ask them to think back to the building of the company that they're working on right now. And a major roadblock, one of those Do or Die situations where you're like, I have no idea if we're gonna figure this out moment, and I love to hear that story and what you learned from it, and how you moved through it. Is there one that comes to mind?

Amaan 17:59

There's definitely one that comes to mind. So in one sentence, it was our transition from a revenue focused company to a bottom line focused company. And we went through that. You know, everyone knows kind of the tech winter that we went through. We went through this transition a bit earlier than that period, I think we we've always been very disciplined from a capital standpoint, in how we run the company. But to get a little more specific, we were growing and scaling Frida, our mental health brand, and we were seeing such tremendous revenue growth. And as we saw that growth, it was just, how do we keep up with the demand? And so it's just throw everything at it. Grow, grow, grow, grow. And we saw cracks in the business model, but we never got very deep in them, until finally, we're like, holy crap. Like, something's going on. We're burning a ton of money. Like, I think we know what the issues are, but we don't really deeply understand them. And it took us kind of saying, like, hold on, we gotta stop everything to deeply understand this. And so this is now going back about a year and a half. We did that, we did that deep work to, like, really understand, okay, let's, like, model this to the bottom line and model it, you know, every single kind of way you could and understand it. We had a fundamental flaw in our business model, and it, honestly, it sounds so simple when I when I think back, but, but I'll oversimplify a little bit. But the way Frida used to work is you pay for an initial assessment with the clinician to get diagnosed for ADHD, and we also covered anxiety, depression in that. And if you were diagnosed, and if you chose to move forward with care with Frida, you could then move into a subscription where you pay $30 a month and you get as many visits as you would want with the clinician in that time. And the thinking was, you know, people would sort of over utilize care in the early days, but use less care in the later days, and it would sort of all balance out. What we found was that patients were using a ton of care in the very early days because, hey, it was available, right? And you can't blame them. It was part of their subscription. And we were also creating, in our desire to create an 11 out of 10 experience. It was also the desire of our clinicians to see patients as frequently as possible, right? It was like, Hey, you, you have this little thing. Hey, book it with me three days from now. Let's talk about it again. No big deal. Like no issues was too small, and so we just saw massive utilization of care, and it was like we were just hiring clinicians like crazy, and it just wasn't sustainable, right? The rate at which we were getting people into that stage versus people kind of getting into the later stages, like the numbers just didn't work. And so we just sort of confront this head on and make a change to the business model very quickly, where we move from a subscription to a pay-per visit model, which was very hard from a technical standpoint, from a change management, management perspective, from a communication standpoint, to our patients. Ultimately, it was, it was a successful change. And through that, and through a number of other things, we were able to cut, you know, our burn rate substantially to a place now where, you know where we are, even though positive and just about profitable. But it was a really hard change. It was really hard change. So happy, I know it was high level, happy to go in more detail on that, but that was like a very pivotal sort of moment for the company.,

Leah 21:40

Well, of course, what I'm curious about is, because it's called the Founder Mindset. How did you feel about that? Like, how did you even think through that? I mean, I'm assuming it must have kept you up at night as you were moving through this process. What did it feel like to go, wow, we really need to change everything, and we need to do it fast.

Amaan 21:58

It felt terrible, you know, and there were, there were, there were kind of more issues at play that I would say were adjacent to that. But, you know, we were, at the time, burning a ton of money, and by most startup standards, and for our stage, it wasn't a ton of money to us, it felt like a ton of money. And for the Founders, we were we were losing sleep. We were like, What is going on? And we need to confront this like now, and we need to get this under control. And we were actively working on it, but we were still burning money. It was very, very stressful. I think the flip side of it was, we have 1000s of people entrusting us with their care, we need to make a change to the care that they're providing. How do we do this and ensure that we are not compromising on the outcomes? It may mean that patients aren't able to see us as frequently, but we are in no way compromising on the outcomes. And you know, that was also a stressful part of it. And so there was business model changes, there were clinical changes simultaneously. There was just sort of the stress. So yeah, it was one of the most stressful periods of my life, for sure. But ultimately, we made it through.

Leah 23:15

Clearly you did.

Leah 23:20

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Leah 23:42

So looking back on that now, what have you learned about yourself, particularly as a Founder, and then we can talk about what you learned for the business, but as a Founder, what did you learn about yourself having moved through that experience?

Amaan 23:55

Yeah, that's a great question. I think what I learned is, as a Founder, you're constantly being confronted with problems and needing to lean into the hard problems in the company. And it is nice to lure yourself into, I wouldn't call them vanity metrics, but the things that are really going well, right? And so for us, it's like, oh, look at this amazing revenue growth. And yeah, we've got, we've got a cost problem, but we're gonna figure that out. Like, look at how fast revenue is growing, right? Let's just, like, not think about the cost, or let's just push that a little bit. And what I learned about myself was, you know, how I fall into that trap, right? And how that's that's a pattern, like, focus on the good and not deal with the bad. And I see that showing up, you know, now, and I've learned from it. We've learned from it as a company, to put it very simply, model everything to the bottom line and be realistic about costs. Costs are always higher than you think they'll be. So there's been those kind of business learnings, but I think it's learnings, you know, for me as a Founder and a human being. So yeah, I'm glad you asked that question, because it kind of brings that, that learning to the forefront for me again.

Leah 25:06

I'm so glad it's one of the things I love to ask in this podcast, because I think Founders don't get asked about that part. They get asked about, okay, how does your business model change, and how has your product-market fit changed? But they don't get asked about, what did you learn personally? How does this change how you are as a leader, as a Founder?

Amaan 25:24

100% and that's that's giving me the motivation to lean into some of the problems we have today. So thank you, Leah.  

Leah 25:35

I love it. I’m glad to help. That's what we like to do. So we've talked about some of the hard things, but I really want to talk about what you love, about being the Founder of a company. Tell me about what is the fun part that you love?

Amaan 25:47

There's a lot to love. I think the thing I love most is creating. It's a very fortunate position to be in a company that is seeing growth, is is sort of seeing success. We are in the fortunate position that we get to use the capital that we have, and, you know, sort of the approaching break even, etc, like, use what we're what we have, and what we're about to generate to fuel the creation of new services. It just so happens that the services we get to create benefit people's lives. That is our mission, right? If they don't, then we don't do them. And so it is very fun. And so as one example, you know, as I mentioned, we launched in the US 7-8 months ago. That launch has been going incredibly well. Right now, we're focused on HIV prevention and STI prevention in the US, and we are about to launch HIV treatment, so care for people living with HIV in the US, and that's something I'm quite involved in. And creating that from the ground up, in a country where the US is really lagging its HIV treatment goals, and HIV is on the rise in both the US and Canada, is very exciting. So that creation, thinking about it, from the marketing standpoint, from a clinical standpoint, from operations standpoint, you know, end to end, I love it.

Leah 27:04

Awesome. That's such important work. So this is fun work for you. Obviously, I can see it. Your face lights up when you talk about it. It's wonderful. How does it, though, affect your personal life? Because it's all consuming, whether it's good or bad. How does it affect your day to day life? Because, of course, you need to stay well if you want to keep executing, right?

Amaan 27:21

Yeah, it's hard, like, you know, it's been really hard, you know, I, I've done a better job over the years of putting constraints on my hours. I found it very difficult to shut off, because even when you're outside of those hours, you're thinking about things, right? And so it's, it's hard for me to be present with family during the week. I've just given hours and mind space about to sacrifice a lot of relationships, like with extended family, with friends, like I only have time for work and my immediate family and a handful of friends, and like, That's it, and I've come to terms with that. So I'm at a stage now where I'm like, Hey, I'm doing work on myself so that I can shut off and I can be, you know, more present outside of sort of work hours. So this is more sustainable, right? Because our mission like, we feel like we're just getting started, and so we got to keep going. But you know, it's how do I do it in a way that's, like, sustainable for for me, physically, mentally, all of those things. And, yeah, it's been really hard for me that that part is has been one of the biggest costs, if you will, of being a Founder.

Leah 28:32

Yeah, I hear that often on this podcast, but I also hear that a lot of people are starting to recognize it and figure out, okay, well, I actually do need to address this? Would you be willing to share you had mentioned you're doing some work now. Would you be willing to share what some of that work looks like for you?

Amaan 28:46

Yeah, I'm going through personal development and sort of leadership transformation program. It's called Atlas. There's a bunch of them out there, Landmark etc, that I think is a more popular one that people have heard of. So I found that to be really powerful. Outside of that, I was previously working with a coach that, honestly, I would say, was like half coach, half therapist. He had this sort of off board beams full with other higher paying clients. And so I'm on the search for, for for another coach, but I think it's like Coach, therapist as well, and then spending time on like, gratitude and journaling. And, you know, we all hear about those different tactics, meditation, etc, etc. For me, it's like taking less of a tactical approach and more, like, how do I just be mindful going into each day and trying to sort of retain that throughout the day.

Leah 29:40

Absolutely, thank you for sharing that. I know we've talked about it already a little bit, but I know that one of the things that continues to motivate you and drive you and fuel your passion, if you will, is this idea of impact. We think about impact even here at Thin Air Labs, creating meaningful human impact with the companies that we support. How do you think about creating impact?

Amaan 30:02

Yeah, it's a great question. To put it somewhat simply, its number of people impacted times depth of impact times likelihood that that impact would have been created if you didn't do the thing you did. And so you know, as I think about our work at PurposeMed, and like my work personally, actually, a good example of this was our decision to launch a gender affirming care service in Canada called Foria, where, you know, gender affirming care is is a problem everywhere in the world. It's also maybe less of a problem in Canada than it is in other places, but it's still a problem. And, you know, honestly, the economics of it are not great. The market is like, you know, there's a lot of people who need it, but it's still a relatively small market, not a lot of money to be made. And we were deciding, like, do we do this? And we're like, at best, this will be break even for us, like at best, but if we don't do this, no one will do it. That was our belief, and we also believe we were the best people to do it, because through our work with Freddie, we were primarily working with the LGBTQ2S+ community. We have a lot of expertise around LGBTQ care, and so we're like, hey, like we're the best to do this. No one else will do it. We just got to do it. And we will, like, if it's break even, great, if it's not, it's not, but this is, like, our mission, and we just have to do it. And so that, I think, for me, is an example of that third pillar of, like, the incrementality of what you're doing, you know, as I think about hitting those first two pieces for us at PurposeMed, you know, eventually, and this is not going to happen tomorrow, but we want to take purpose med internationally where, you know, the reality is the healthcare needs that people have are so much deeper and so much more, you know, basic, than some of the challenges we have in North America. And I think the depth of impact that you can have there is very significant. So, yeah, that's kind of my framework for impact personally. And yeah, so much to do.

Leah 32:12

It can be overwhelming. I would imagine.

Amaan32:14

It is. It is overwhelming because you think about the individual power that we each have to make a difference, but you realize, hey, it's like you got to start small and take put one foot in front of the other.

Leah 32:25

Yeah, definitely. As we come to close here, I always ask you are a Co-Founder of this incredible company, PurposeMed, you're writing the story, if you will, for PurposeMed, how do you hope the story goes for PurposeMed.

Amaan 32:38

I hope the story goes that we put a meaningful dent in HIV transmission rates in North America in the next five years. From some of our data, we're already doing that in Canada. We'll extend that to the US. And you know, if you take a 10 year view, we're putting a dent in HIV transmission rates globally, both by preventing HIV and also treating folks who have HIV. And there's a concept called treatment as prevention, which I won't kind of bore folks with, but that kind of fuels the HIV prevention mission. So yeah, that's really like how I think the the story goes for PurposeMed that I would love, the story that I would love to see for purpose.

Leah 33:24

Yeah, yeah, wonderful. Okay, then we need to talk about you as a Co-Founder, specifically. How do you hope your own personal story goes? What would you like to tackle?

Amaan 33:34

You know, it's like, at some point the like, if I'm just honest, like, at some point the purpose med journey will end, right? And at some point it'll make sense to like pass the baton to someone who is more capable than me. My hope is to keep growing it and to keep working towards those impact goals that I outlined. And then my goal is to take everything that I've learned from the PurposeMed journey and apply it to the next thing that I do. And that's what I've been doing for the last you know, however many years, like I founded multiple companies before PurposeMed and some really took off, right? And different levels of sort of success or quasi success, but there were so many learnings there, and PurposeMed has been an incredible journey. It's like take all of that and apply it to the next thing, which will most likely be in healthcare, which will most likely be in emerging markets, which will most likely be focused on, you know, underserved people. That's kind of what I know, and we'll keep doing it.

Leah 34:34

I look forward to hearing more about that. Amaan, thank you so much for this conversation.

Amaan 34:39

Thank you so much for having me, Leah, and thank you so much for the thoughtful questions. This has been an awesome discussion.

Leah 34:53

As the lead investor in Thin Air Labs - Fund One, Sandstone Asset Management believes in building the commons through innovative Founders who are creating meaningful, positive impact, both locally and globally. Sandstone is doing just that by backing the next generation of emerging entrepreneurs. Picture this, a Founder start-up goes from idea to international impact supported by strategic investors who believed in their vision. That's the power of Sandstone's approach. Sandstone doesn't just manage wealth, they cultivate it, supporting Founders at all stages. Visit sandstoneam.com to learn how sandstone builds legacies that last.

Leah 35:37

Calgary is a city of innovative companies, ideas, and talent. The Opportunity Calgary Investment Fund is investing in Calgary's future by finding, fueling, and fostering innovation to build a diverse and resilient economy. Find out more at www.opportunitycalgary.com  

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