[00:00:28] Tarun Kapoor, MD: Hi everyone. I’m Tarun Kapoor, Chief Digital Transformation Officer here at Virtua Health, doing a chat today, a podcast with Aditya Bansod from Luma Health. We’re doing this through the Think Medium platform of Day Zero. So thank you very much Aditya for joining us.

[00:00:44] Aditya Bansod: Hey, it’s my pleasure. TK. It’s really exciting to be here with you.

[00:00:48] Tarun Kapoor, MD: First thing, we’re going to talk about Luma Health and how you helped co-found that company. Just full disclosure, we at Virtua Health are working with the folks over at Luma. That’s how we got introduced. But first, foremost, tell us a little bit about yourself.

[00:01:02] Aditya Bansod: Yeah, happy to. So my background myself is I’m that very boring Silicon Valley product manager type. I started my career working at Microsoft. You really can’t get much bigger than that. And eventually I was on a glide path over the last 15, 20 years to get to a company that was about zero, starting my own shop. And through there, I worked at Microsoft, Adobe, these big Fortune Three, maybe to Fortune 500 to venture back startups. So, halfway through my career, I made a switch into working in venture back companies and, took my first opportunity at a Series B company. Then after that, I took my next shot at a series B company, really that glide path I was saying was my path to like founding what became Luma Health. But my entire process, my entire career through that was about building software. I have a passion for making great software, and through my life, I’ve always wanted to make software that impacts people’s lives. And one of the things that I really wanted to do around my entire career, and when I left the Fortune 500, kind of went to the venture back world, was really build software that helps kind of everyday people where it’s an all boats ride situation. And I think that’s been like a real guiding principle for me is like, when I build softwares around, how do I make software where everybody wins. And so that’s my path, but you know, the easiest quote there is super boring, Silicon Valley, product manager, dude type.

[00:02:12] Tarun Kapoor, MD: Microsoft, not your typical mom and pop shop, to building Luma and co-founding it now. So tell us a little bit more, you were one of three co-founders.

[00:02:22] Aditya Bansod: There’s three total co-founders. There’s myself, and so I’m the CTO at Luma. There’s Adnan Iqbal. He is our CEO. And, Tashfeen Ekram. And he’s a radiologist, a practicing radiologist, and he’s about two to three days being a radiologist in, about two to three days being our Chief Medical Officer. The way we split it up, it’s for a help tech company I think that is an ideal founding team, because you have the clinical, the voice of the doctor, the voice of the actual care delivery in Tashfeen. And then, Adnan, his background is more, he came up through Genentech and more pharma and research. And so he’s kind of more focused on the sales and marketing aspect, sometimes the presale universe. And myself and that product delivery mindset. I focus primarily on product engineering, implementations, customer success, and that sort of thing. So kind of Adnan and I are the day to day operators who as we run the company, he’s really focused on everything about getting customers to Luma, and I’m all about deliverying them value from what they purchased.

[00:03:16] Tarun Kapoor, MD: So, how did three of you meet?

[00:03:18] Aditya Bansod: So, it’s funny. Adnan and I have known each other in each other’s social universes for, since undergrad. So he went to Cal, I went to San Diego and Tashfeen went to Cal as well. And he, Tashfeen, and Adnan were college roommates. I was in the social circle. I had a lot of friends at UC San Diego who were kind of gone to high school in Northern California with Adnan and some of his folks. So we’ve always been in each other’s universe for quite some time. Like never particularly close. And then, when I was talking to one of my friends, one of those shared friends actually, it’s like, Hey, you know what? Like, I’m kind of interested in looking at my next thing, really interested in health tech. And I really was focused on three key opportunities, health, education, and financial services, and really where products I could build that could explain to my mother was the moniker for the next role I wanted to take. And my buddy Miguel, he was like, Hey, you should talk to Adnan. He’s trying to get this thing off the ground, which is in healthcare. So me, my background is not healthcare. Now after doing it for eight years, I can say I’m a healthcare person, but my kind of background was communication technologies. I worked at Hotmail, I worked in the Flash and Air teams at Adobe. I worked at Remind, which is K12 communication software. So my background was communication. So you can see with what Luma does, which is patient success, are really about connecting patients and providers and operations teams. That became a big piece where Adnan and I found a really good mind meld, where he had this pieces of this idea, him and Tashfeen had key sense of this idea. I had a really strong background communication. And we known each other for a while, so we were like, let’s take this, let’s take this jump together.

[00:04:44] Tarun Kapoor, MD: So you weren’t thinking healthcare. Adnan was thinking healthcare. So then why 2007-ish. Right? This is when Luma kicked off?

[00:04:52] Aditya Bansod: 2015.

[00:04:54] Tarun Kapoor, MD: Oh my goodness.

[00:04:54] Aditya Bansod: Yeah, a little bit after that, but I wasn’t specifically, I should say, thinking about healthcare, it was among the areas. I thought I could build products in education, and to some degree financial services, where I could explain them to my mother. Right. So just to give you kind of the black versus white, my role prior was at a company called Sencha, and we built embedded HTML5 frameworks for developers to use to build mobile and desktop and blah, blah, blah applications. So when I explain it to somebody, layperson, my mother being the best litmus test there is. They’re like, Cool, so does that mean my phone works faster? Like, No, well, it actually reduces operational costs for developers to bring products to market faster. And so it’s kind of like, Okay, I’ve done a big arc in my career around doing that sort of stuff. I want to do something where I can explain it to, you know, my mother. So actually TK, the original idea for Luma was a lot simpler than kind what we became, which was a waitlist product. And it came from Tashfeen’s clinical background, which was as a radiologist, he’d leave the office on a Friday, packed schedule Monday, packed schedule Tuesday, packed schedule Wednesday. But by Monday four o’clock, Tuesday was looking like Swiss cheese. Wednesday was looking like Swiss cheese. And you knew there were patients who wanted to get access to him when he was a radiologist at Michigan. It could take weeks to get that imaging appointment done. So really original product idea was about liquidity that matching supply and demand. And it’s so simple, right? Like I try to get care before. You as a provider, I’m sure when you try to want to give care, patients can very rarely get access to providers if they are kind of timing or the convenience that they want. So our initial product was so small, so simple, and it turned out to be really just like an iceberg, which was just what was above the water. What became underneath was really about what we talk about is patient success now.

[00:06:27] Tarun Kapoor, MD: So the along those lines, I think you tap in a recurring theme, and that is what you thought you were solving for didn’t end up being what you solved for. And it’s only once you multiple-ly peel back layer after layer. How long did that take for you to realize and figure out weight loss, and now where Luma is today?

[00:06:47] Aditya Bansod: Waitlist, not weight loss

[00:06:48] Tarun Kapoor, MD: This is yeah. Weight loss. Yes.

[00:06:50] Aditya Bansod: I could use a little weight loss myself,

[00:06:51] Tarun Kapoor, MD: Yes, exactly. Yes.

[00:06:53] Aditya Bansod: Not the problem way to solve. For us, it’s been very simple. The idea around the Waitlist was around patients getting access to care, and it turns out that problem definition is so simple that the solution set under it is incredibly broad. So we rolled out our first product as this waitlist opportunity, and we rolled to a friend and family cardiologist who’s in San Jose, and then to another friend and family Interventionalists, I think in somewhere in the Northern California area. And what we really realized was, how are we going to figure out and identify patients who are not going to show up? And so we kind of then built a reminders product, and then we’re like, Hey, should we actually ask the patients, was this a positive experience after they came in for care? So we built our feedback product. So a lot of it, a lot of that discovery, the peeling back of the onion was like, Okay, and then what’s the next problem? What’s the next adjacent problem. What is the next piece of value that you can deliver your customers now that you have a customer kind of trusting you for one piece of the problem set that they’re looking to solve? So really I think it’s an onion is a really great example. Also the kernel is also another really good analogy for, which is the beginning problem was so small, which is around a waitlist. But really, as we went and unpack next level, there’s so many additional adjacent problems. And for us, what was really important was solving adjacent problems, not orthogonal problems, right? Like it’s very tempting when you’re early stage like, should we do pharmacy benefit cards? So we had this conversation, we’re messaging patients. Could we send ’em PBM cards, let them know they can get a discount and blah, blah, blah. It’s like, Wait. We know nothing about this. We know a lot about supply and demand. We know a lot about actually connecting and communicating with patients. Let’s go solve the next problem that looks like that. And I think that’s really where that peel back of the onion becomes your peeling back in onion. And suddenly you realize, you know, hey, don’t go grab the orange.

[00:08:31] Tarun Kapoor, MD: Yeah, I think that’s such a great analogy and a key takeaway for the listeners here of having that balance of curiosity of what’s next to you, but not the hubris to say I can do anything and right. And that right. No one ever went out of business cause they focus too much. And is one of the things we heard through. So you settle now again, you realize this is where we’re taking Luma, and Luma was falling into this category of Patient Communications platform, whatever the KLAS, KLAS, review section you would look you up under. And recently you rebranded yourself as Patient Success platform. Tell us about that.

[00:09:10] Aditya Bansod: Yeah, that’s right. And the moniker under which we operated for a long time was called total patient engagement. And patient engagement was the framing in the industry, which is how do you engage patients? And I think the more we dug into how we talk to customers, partners, prospects, industry experts, and that sort of stuff, what became this bubbling Zeitgeist inside the company is, patients don’t really want to be engaged. Engagement is what the health system wants. What patients want to do is be successful. And that was this concept that we started really banding about called the great disconnect, which is, what patients wants to be successful, what provider groups and health systems want to do is engage patients. Like, whose voice should we be listening to as we try to build products? It’s really the patient’s voice. And so we started to build up this concept called patient success, which was what are the tools, techniques, best practices, all the stuff you need to do, to help a patient with the moment they know they want to get care to the moment that they’ve received and been successful in the care outcome they’re looking for. And I think that’s become a really big reframe in how we even think about, branding the company and talking about our market opportunities, but also in terms of the brand promise. And an interesting thing is the part of this exercise, one of the things our product team did is they’ve really taken this back, which is this making the patient successful? And they articulated that’s a brand promise into their own product planning activities. So they say, Hey, I want to build this in your future. It’s like, well, is that actually going to make the patient successful? Does it actually satisfy the brand promise? And I think that’s an evolution in our own way that we think, which is, patient engagement was good, success is better. And then now can we flow that into how we talk about the company, how we talk to prospects, what products we build? And it’s a very broad evolution how the company even thinks about itself. And that’s really where it came from. Was this revelation or this thought that bubble up inside the company which is, patient engage is what health systems wants. Patients really want to be successful. Like the rest is immaterial.

[00:10:55] Tarun Kapoor, MD: I think that’s such a profound revelation that, even health systems need to be thinking about it from themselves. A lot of times and being in health system, we’re thinking things around how do we get our clinicians more engaged? How do we get our staff more engaged? And maybe we’re asking the wrong question. How do we make our clinicians more successful? Right. You got me thinking about it, and I got a long drive today, this evening, here. So, you gave me something to think about.

[00:11:18] Aditya Bansod: Good. Like engagement. Like, no, engagement’s like really interesting, and it’s powerful, right? Because we can measure it. We can metric it. We’re in surveys about it. Success is hard, right? Like if a patient comes in for a knee replacement or whatever it is, success is actually a very long road, versus engagement’s kind of easy. So, I think we have to all pick the harder thing to do, because we want to do that thing which I think was that career hypothesis I had, which is I want all boats to rise. Right. I want to build a product where all boats rise, and I think success outlines the ability to do that.

[00:11:45] Tarun Kapoor, MD: What allowed for that conversation to have in the company? Is there something in terms of a setup, is there something in terms of the culture of the company that allowed this type of insight?

[00:11:56] Aditya Bansod: Well, I think there is. One, we have a couple key things we talk about in Luma culture. One of them is the willingness to get dirt under your fingernails, where in the other side of that coin is there’s no job is too small, right? Like, doesn’t matter if you’re a manager, or if you’re a developer. Like you should be able to, a developer should be able to look and see the sales metrics. The sales person should be able to go look and see how the product’s configured and maybe want to even do that, like that real sense of getting the dirt under their fingernails. And so I think that really led to this ability where we try our best not to silo like only your peak customer people, you only talk to customers. The developer wants to sit in on a customer conversation, they’re more than welcome to. If a salesperson wants to sit in a product planning meeting, they’re more than welcome to. And I think it’s that getting those internal flywheel of dialogue where it’s like our sales folks are marketing folks. They’d be like, I’m hearing. We’re fighting this thing around patient engagement. We’re just like talking about metrics, and our customer success folks are like, well, we heard about these patients not being successful. They’re getting bombarded with say messages, or they’re being overly engaged. A lot of our conversations they have with their health system partners is, Hey, like, are we over engaging our patients? Are we trying to push them too hard. And so I think it really bubbled up from that sense that like, people inside the company, we put a high premium on having people outside their standard 9 to 5, spend time with each other. So I think that’s one of those kind of motions that we have inside the organization that helps us make sure that what you’re hearing in one part of the team is actually influencing what someone else is going to be able to do as well. So maybe a bit apocryphal, but I think that actually helped quite a bit in actually helping us understand what was actually needed in order to frame where we were wanted to go.

[00:13:21] Tarun Kapoor, MD: That’s such a great pivot point, because we’ve been talking a lot about the internal dynamics that is driving Luma. Now, let’s talk a little bit about some of the external dynamics and in a shift, right? So, the last seven years, a pretty interesting, pretty frothy market for startups. And we’re in a little bit of different place now. Tell us a little bit more about how you’re thinking about the financial instability, the inflation in the market and lessons you’ve learned before, even previous companies, of potentially building a company during a tough financial

[00:13:53] Aditya Bansod: Building a company now.

[00:13:54] Tarun Kapoor, MD: Yes.

[00:13:55] Aditya Bansod: Well, I actually, I’ll rewind the tape to 2015 before I go to 22, which is, when we founded the company, it was not sexy to invest in health tech. It was not like a thing where you wanted it, like there was no exits, there was no Teladoc. There’s no Livongo. There’s no transactional activity in the market. The only real highlight was Practice Fusion, which I think took down $400 million and basically went down bankrupt along the way. And so like 2015 was an awful time to start a health tech company. For any other entrepreneurs out there, when we raised our seed round, it was all cats and dogs. Our biggest check was like a $100 thousand. We had like piles of like $25, $50 thousand checks, which compare in contrast to like 2022, 2021. you’re seeing seed rounds that are like $7 million with like a $4 million lead. And we’re like that wasn’t our world whatsoever. And I think for a lot of companies raising now, longevity is a function of actually wanting to get it done. And I think we really wanted to make this happen. And so right now, it feels a little bit for the early seed stage organization seed stage companies, you know, two, three people trying to get something done three, four, five people, 2015 was a probably good comp, right? Because now we’re seeing like, oh, Livongo and Teladoc, Teladoc specifically, mark-caps gone off the cliff. There’s going to be IP. There were supposed to be IPOs that never happened from a lot of health tech organizations. And so, it doesn’t feel so different than what 2015 did, but, I think a lot of the VCs who have weathered downturns and stuff like that saying out of the crucible comes the strongest companies. And some of the, like Google, was founded in the downturn. Right. And so, I would like to believe that valley, that we were sitting in 2013, 14, 15, specifically for tech. Other org, if I was creating a company, which is Bitcoin Forecast in 2015, 2016, I would’ve raised like $150 million in year one. But, health tech wasn’t that. So I think this is an opportunity for capital to go after good ideas. And I think the tough part, and I help a couple companies who are like early stage, one of the things Luma did early on was we joined the Stanford Startup Accelerator. And so out of that, we coach a couple of younger organizations that are coming up now. And I think the lesson to a lot of them is, build a great product solves a real problem. And with that, there’s money to be had. There’s money to be invested. And I think seed of money is available for those folks whose starting really early. But, the days of easy money and that $7 million seed round, yeah, it may be a little tough to get for a couple years, but great companies are built out of the crucible.

[00:16:09] Tarun Kapoor, MD: Yeah. Airbnb was founded right during the great recession and other ones coming through. So founding is not the issue. In terms of how you’re trying to focus on results, or different types of results, in this, I don’t want to call it full downturn, but in this pause, has that changed at all.

[00:16:26] Aditya Bansod: Well, I think the biggest thing that’s changed is who are the most important people in the buyer’s persona in the buying panel. In the boom times, the innovation teams, the digital transformation teams at health tech, they have a lot of sway, right. In kind of the downturn, what we started to see is CFOs will have a lot of say in the buying purchase now. And it’s not necessarily a negative in terms of buying. It’s just you have to present a more ROI focused, a much more vision oriented. How do I sell that? How do I help the innovation officer actually achieve their goals, and then spell it out from like an ROI perspective, comps, metrics? The bar is a little bit higher. The CFO is a larger voice. But especially in health tech right now, I think that evolution towards a digital transformation is giving people in the transformation seat a much larger voice, but now they might have gotten a partner that they might not have had before in the CFO. That’s the only big change, but the need and demand that hasn’t changed whatsoever. Just a little bit more discerning, people who are not willing to go through, the people who are looking for the easy sale from an economic perspective, that might be tough. You need to come in a little bit more disciplined, ready to talk to a CFO persona.

[00:17:31] Tarun Kapoor, MD: All right. Really, really interesting. So, seven years ago wasn’t so sexy to talk about health tech. Now, It’s really exciting to talk about health tech. But guess what? It’s not only sexy to talk about health tech from a startup, from a new engine perspective, but the incumbents are really thinking about this. Right. So, the big ride or the big gripe against the big EMR players in the space was you’re a system of record. You’re not a system of engagement or even if they were

[00:17:54] Aditya Bansod: of action.

[00:17:56] Tarun Kapoor, MD: Right. Yeah. Well, they’re starting to really think about this space. Aren’t they now? So, how is that driving chain top conversations at Luma? How is that causing you to think through now as the cums for saying these guys are onto something.

[00:18:09] Aditya Bansod: Yeah. Honestly, I think if you sit in any ecosystem you expect the incumbent to be asleep of the wheel forever, you’re expecting your lunch to get eaten. I think the technology industry at large, and I’ve been in this market in the tech large for 20 odd years, you look on Microsoft release like Windows 95 or 3.1, and included a Defragger. And if you’re old enough to know what that means, it like used to buy separate software to defragment your hard drive. And suddenly one day Microsoft shifts it, three 50 to 60 million companies are out of business in a year. And I think those lessons are, many times in the tech industry, the platform will always want to consume as much of the capabilities of the vendors on top of it. That’s the natural evolution. So if you’re going to be somebody like ourselves, and for the folks who don’t know out there like Luma, our lifeblood is actually one of our senses of pride is how good we are at integrating with EHR, electronic health records and electronic medical records. And if we sat and looked at the products we had in 2015 as the things that are going to get us to the next stage of our company’s evolution, we should go the way of the doto. That’s completely acceptable. That would what be what I expect. So it’s incumbent on us to build those next products, to build the next set of capabilities, whether, we are investing in things like our payments capabilities, our chat bot capabilities, things are on IVR and call deflection to make sure that call centers. There’s so many problems to go solve in healthcare and to make health systems operate more efficiently, with having but keeping the EMRs, that system of record, but making, taking the action that we need to do to other parts and solve other problems. So we’ve got a great franchise here that helps fund the next set of things that we’re going to go do. Because if we’re sleeping at the wheel, yeah, we should have our lunch taken from us. That’s the only fair thing to happen in the market.

[00:19:46] Tarun Kapoor, MD: Would it be fair to say that for the entrepreneur in the healthcare ecosystem, you have to be a serial entrepreneur within your own company.

[00:19:55] Aditya Bansod: I think that’s a really good way of saying it, honestly. The company’s grown quite a bit, right. It used to be three of us. And then it was like four of us. And those four people lasted for almost a year and so on. And, you have this sense and a lot of folks will say this, there’s a concept in Silicon Valley startups, it’s like founder crazy. Cause they always want to build the next thing. They always want to go figure something out. And I think if anything, it comes from a sense of paranoia, which is if we rest on our laurels on the existing franchise, someone else is going to take our lunch money. And you say it a little more eloquently than me, which is you should always be innovating. I’m just saying, I’m paranoid that someone else is going to take my lunch money from me. And if don’t innovate, it’s going to happen. And the technology industry has like chapter inverse written about it, time and time again.

[00:20:34] Tarun Kapoor, MD: Yeah. And someone said it probably more eloquently than both of us. Right. Only the paranoid survive. I think it was Andy Grove. Right.

[00:20:40] Aditya Bansod: Andy Grove.

[00:20:41] Tarun Kapoor, MD: From Intel. And it’s probably so true. So, just as we wrap up here, if you could share a couple of those, I’m sure it has not been always a smooth, straight linear path for you, making that assumption just because it’s never that way for any entrepeneur.

[00:20:56] Aditya Bansod: It never is.

[00:20:58] Tarun Kapoor, MD: What are a couple lessons you can share with budding entrepreneurs out there on how you overcame some of the darkest days or the darkest challenges, as much as you can share.

[00:21:09] Aditya Bansod: Yeah. I mean, there’s a handful that come to mind. So the one of the first ones is financing, right? Every entrepreneur has a dark spot, almost every entrepreneur has like a dark memory, a dark place they went to when that investor they thought they were going to land for the big check that they were going to let them unlock, the next thing didn’t happen. And, I can tell you the amount of times that, Adnan and I walked into a VC’s boardroom, we walk back out and it’s like, we killed it. Like, it’s going to be amazing. They’re going to give us a term sheet tomorrow. And then you don’t hear from them for a week and a week later, you get like the text message that says like, hey sorry, the partners wanted to go different direction. The amount of times that you just get the air taken out of you, like the balloon deflates on things like that, that happened probably a dozen times. And there’s no good answer here. It’s just a war story that entrepreneurs go through, eventually you find a great partner, and we’ve got great investors now who see eye to eye with what you want to do with business. It takes lot of no’s. It takes a lot of no’s to get to a yes. And there’s some organizations, some startups where that’s not true. I think health tech that’s more true than not. And, we went through dozens of no’s before we got to our A round. We went through dozens of no’s before we got to our B round and our C round and all that sort of stuff. And each one’s a gut punch. Because you walk out of every one of those meetings and you think, that’s the one, this is going to be what’s going to catapult us to the next level. And you don’t hear from them, you get a text message, you get an email, maybe the associate gets back to you say, Hey, like the partner is like not interested in the next meeting. You’re like, oh, talk about taking the air out of the balloon. So that’s a definitely a dark area. I think one of the other areas where I think for a lot of like founders, early entrepreneurs is how to react to losing a deal that you really cared about. And so, we’re in the business making software, and the business making softwares to sell it, and you’re not going to win every deal. But a lot of SaaS metrics you’ll probably lose 60 to 70% of the deals that you actually get in front of, and losing only 60 to 70% actually pretty good. But, you believe so strongly in what you built, why you built it, why it makes perfect sense for the customer, I think that’s like this place where it requires a lot of introspection to say, was that the right customer? Should I qualify and better? Do I have the right product? Do I have the right pricing? Do I have the right packaging? Do the right partnerships? Like a three or four P’s exercise around each one of the deals you lost, that’s actually some discipline we didn’t have in the beginning. And we built a lot of product we didn’t need. We thought, oh, if we only had that one feature, they would’ve bought it nine out of 10 times, that’s actually not it. In early stage, you’re building more than you’re selling. And so taking time and discipline out of what you lost to figure out what you should build, I think, is a lesson that we could taken better ourselves.

[00:23:37] Tarun Kapoor, MD: Yeah. And the story you just mentioned reminds me of story I’ve heard even from on the military front, special ops, et cetera. After a mission, you could have been up for 36 hours, they debrief on the mission before they’re done. The mission is never complete before the debrief, what went well, what, when didn’t go well, and just the discipline, just to, because it’s probably on some of those days when it didn’t go well, like yeah, well, meet you at the bar. No, we’re sitting here and we’re going to.

[00:24:05] Aditya Bansod: the hard work.

[00:24:06] Tarun Kapoor, MD: We’re doing the hard work when you are probably the least in an emotional state of wanting to do the hard work is a really important lesson that you emphasize here. Just some closing questions and thoughts here from you. We talked about what fuels you, what fuels the company from an innovation and advancement. What also fuels you outside of that? Does the entrepreneur literally have to give up everything to keep the lights on and keep it moving forward? Or, have you been able to find some degree of something you’ve been able to carve out from yourself from the rest of the world?

[00:24:44] Aditya Bansod: Yeah, it’s a really great question, cause it’s very much a life stage question. When I founded Luma Health, I hadn’t met my now wife. I met my wife, got married, had kid, all within the time that we’ve had Luma Health. Luma health, a lot of people joke as my first wife, my actual wife is my second wife. But you have to make time for real life to happen. I think a lot of folks, especially, where I am in my life stage, my age, my grades, you can guess a little bit on my age there, that stuff becomes much more important. And when I was in my 20s I was working at Hotmail, working until two in the morning, sitting, eating flat foods that could get slipped under a door like pizza was totally acceptable, and it was great. It was fun. And I called those years my grad school. I felt like those were years where you do want to invest that amount of time. But, I think because I was able to invest that time then, it gave me opportunity to be able to create some space now. And I think if you’re asking Luma, they are like, what are you talking about? This guy works 24/7. I don’t feel that, because I love what I do. I love building software. I love building Luma. But I do feel for myself. I have time for my family, my time for my friends. I have time to go out to dinner, whatever it might be or go to the gym whatever it is. It’s a labor of love, and the time I invested earlier in my career gives me the time to understand where should I focus? What’s most important to me? Is it this poll request and GitHub? Is it this Zen desk ticket, customer ticket? Is it this marketing plan I need to review? Understanding what’s most important right now. And then stuff I can defer to tomorrow. There just always is. And so being able to take that stuff, kick it to the next day so I can spend time with my daughter and wife.

[00:26:05] Tarun Kapoor, MD: So I’ve peppered you with a bunch of questions, Aditya. Was there anything that I didn’t ask you that you wanted to share with the audience?

[00:26:13] Aditya Bansod: That was around the world in Luma Health, like the Jules Verne novel, in where 30 odd minutes it’s been? No, I mean, I think honestly, for the young entrepreneurs out there, you’re entering an area, time where it will be typical to do some fundraising. But many companies have come before you who’ve done this before. It’s like, good products solve real problem. And then sky’s the limit. Honestly. It’s just like, that’s what you know, that’s where big problems and big opportunities come from. And the funding, it happens, right. You’ll get a lot of no’s before we get some yeses, but you will get some yeses. And I think that was a lesson that we learned dozens of times over the course of 2015 to 2022. So for me, doing this is super fun. I love building software. It’s kind of in my DNA, like I’ve written code myself since I was probably like 8 or 9 years old. And being able to do this, like I think if you can marry up like the opportunity to solve a big problem, drive real value, and you do something that you love along the way, like I think you could do this for 100 years.

[00:27:08] Tarun Kapoor, MD: Aditya Bansod, the self-proclaimed boring Silicon Valley tech guy, I think we have hopefully dispelled any notion of the boring par,. And absolutely just enjoyable conversation with you. Very enlightening, thrilled to be able to talk to you about your journey, talk about Luma, and the opportunity to continue to work with you in the future. Thank you.

[00:27:29] Aditya Bansod: Yeah, TK, real pleasure. Thanks for having me.