Naveen Jain
Naveen Jain
Founder & CEO @ Viome
“The underlying problem is short term thinking versus long term gains. Mainstream culture manifests in different ways, but there is an underlying root cause of all of it. From addiction, to privacy, to carbon emissions, they’re all symptoms of the problem”
Action Prompts
// SELF REFLECTION
In a previous feature, we had you take stock of where you invest your time & energy. Revisit your responses to that self reflection. Choose one of the four areas you explored around learning, relationships, or community.
Create space for a 10 minute meditation and find a quiet space to sit uninterrupted.
Close your eyes imagine yourself one year from now having accomplished the intention that you set. Deepen into sensing and imagining that future scenario.
--What does it feel like?
--What’s happening around you? Who is there?
--What are you saying? What is being said to you?
--How do you feel more connected to yourself, your people, and purpose?
Share your vision in conversation with someone who is invested in you. When you share your intention with someone else, it allows your dreams to take flight and brings you one step closer to realizing what you see possible.
Take one action, big or small, to step closer to your vision.
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// TEAM EXPLORATION
Naveen shared in detail how each of their company values lives as a compass for making decisions, and reminds us to insist on 100% integrity and alignment.
The purpose of this exploration is to get a pulse on how aligned your team is with existing values, and see how they are (or aren’t) alive in the day-to-day experience of your organization.
1. Create a survey (We recommend Typeform)
2. List each of your company values & description statements.
--Ask: Rate how alive this value is on a scale from 1-5
--Ask: How are you seeing this value expressed?
--Ask: Where are you still seeing opportunities to grow it?
Resources
Go deeper into understanding microbiomes & the work of Naveen’s company Viome. Here is Naveen in conversation with Deepak Chopra.
Check out Navine’s book Moonshots: Creating a World of Abundance
Need a refresher on creating a solid value set for your company?
Use this Values Quick Start Guide from Great Mondays.
Naveen Jain (he/him), serial entrepreneur, space enthusiast, and author of the book, Moonshots: Creating a World of Abundance, is an audacious and driven leader with a bold vision for his company, Viome. Born from imagining a world where illness is optional, Viome weaves connections between gut microbiome health, gene markers, and overall health through analyzing aggregated data from its testing kits, and providing recommendations based on pioneering artificial learning algorithms.
We loved his deep commitment to his values, and the way he leads with a bold decisiveness rooted in quantifiable science and cutting edge technology. He’s at the tip of the spear in this particular “exponential technology” (a term used in his book). As systems thinkers, we loved the nod to growth patterns that are mirrored in nature and the universality of the wellbeing he envisions, as the barriers to access it are reduced over time.
As a serial entrepreneur with a string of successful ventures and awards under his belt, Naveen utilizes his privilege to implement a sustainable incentive structure for his company. He takes no salary, and speaks at length about the perils embedded in short term executive bonuses and short sightedness in general.
Naveen gives us a tour of his company values in this feature, so we think it’s a great opportunity to examine this with your team for this week’s team activity.
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Empowering People To Own Their Health
At this point of my life, I’m dedicated to health care, really focusing on one simple goal: Can we prevent and reverse chronic diseases? The reason I focused on that as opposed to infectious diseases, is because chronic diseases don't happen to you. It's not something you wake up in the morning and say, “honey, I was out with the boys last night I think that might have caught diabetes”, right? You don't catch diabetes, you don't catch obesity, you don't catch depression. You don't catch chronic diseases. These are the diseases that can be prevented and reversed.
If you're not born with these diseases, how do we understand what is causing the progression of these diseases? Can we actually prevent them before they happen, or reverse them after they happen? I suspect that even though every doctor takes a Hippocratic Oath to do no harm, they actually forget what Hippocrates actually said, which was that food be thy medicine. They never talk about diet .
We’re making everyone a CEO of their own health by empowering each individual to take control of their own actions.
Access To A Vision For Global Wellness
When we started the company, we said, let’s imagine living in a world where illness is optional.
In terms of access, we brought down the cost of measuring what's happening inside your body. It used to be $10,000 when we started the company, now it's gone to $200. So yes, we’ve made it affordable, but it's still not affordable to 90% of the people in the world. Now, just like anything else, when you look at technology like cell phones, when they came out, it was actually only the big Wall Street guys carrying the brick. We all thought, God forbid! I don't want to be contacted by anyone! Today, we can't go anywhere without our phone.
All the latest cutting edge technology starts out for the people who can afford it, but then the exponential cost of digitization and everything starts to become so cheap, they ultimately become part of everyone's life. That’s the beauty of exponential technologies, especially digitization of something, allows you to dematerialize it. Once you dematerialize something it actually becomes free. It becomes like air.
Values Deep Dive
Our success isn’t measured by how much money we have in the bank, our success is measured by how many lives we're able to improve, and doing that in a sustainable way.
That means we can’t be losing a lot of money, because then we will run out of money, and we have to be able to do it in a way that allows us to help more and more people. Every time we ask ourselves the same question, “Are we moving towards our goal of helping billions of people live healthier lives?” Yes has to be the answer to anything we do.
We set out essentially five values for our companies. Literally every decision everyone in the executive team makes, they ask themselves, “Are we in violation of any of these five rules?” If so, that becomes a veto.
Number one is, are we empowering consumers? It sounds really, really simple. But that rule came about when we walked away from millions of dollars. We were working with a very large hospital chain. They said, we want to offer your services to all the employees of the corporation that are currently with us, with only one caveat: all the results, all the information goes to our doctor, and the doctor would provide that information to the consumer. We said, no, that cannot be done. Because we want consumers to know what is going on. I want them to be responsible for the action. They said, “We are the doctors, we decide what they get, and we decide what they need. You don't decide that.” We said, sorry, that violates rule number one. We walked away. There were 50 people in that room, and everyone looked at me, like, you don't just walk away from this. I say yes we do. We walked away.
Clayton Christensen wrote a book that’s one of my favorites, How Will You Measure Your Life. It’s all about, you’re either 100% honest, but you can never just be 99% honest. Because once you go down that slippery slope, “just this time,” “only for this.” It's only a matter of time, where they’ll be more of “just this time,” right? That’s the trick. You can’t say, “We will empower consumers every time, but this time is big enough, let's take this one,” right? Because then you will stand for nothing. That’s a crucial part. It's not about just you, your employees watch. Then they’ll say, “Don't tell me that bullshit about empowering consumers when you go out and do that.” Now they can stand up with their head high, and believe in what we do.
The second thing we value is everything we do must be actionable. We don't go out and provide services that are not actionable. So you won’t see us do a test and say, based on your DNA, you are six times more likely to get Alzheimers, enjoy! What's the point of telling you information that you can’t act on? Every time, we ask ourselves, “Why are we doing it? Is it actionable?” If the answer to that is no, I'm sorry, you shouldn't be doing it.
The third thing we value is everything we do must be based on science. That means we really look and ask, “Is there a good scientific basis for doing what we are doing?” If we can’t get a good scientific basis, we walk away from it.
Number four is, everything we do must move humanity forward. We always look and ask, “Are we really doing good in the world, or are we just doing it to make money?” If we’re not doing something that actually does good for the world, I don't think we need money to be living here.
The last part is more internal to us, which is, we inspire and educate people to buy our product, we never sell them our services. That means we simply say, “here's the information, here's why you need it”, we give all the reasons, and say, “Please join us. If you don't join us, we can't solve this problem, we need 2 million of you to come together. It is not my problem. It is our problem.” That's our part of inspiration. Please join us or else our children, and our grandchildren are going to suffer. That’s when people say, “I want to buy your product.”
A Business Mindset For Sustainability
Mainstream culture manifests in different ways, but there is an underlying root cause of all of it. From addiction to privacy, to carbon emissions, they are all symptoms of the problem.
The underlying problem is a short term thinking versus a long term gain. When you have a short term thinking, you're saying, “You know what, I don't really care how much carbon I'm putting out, my margins are 20% better today than they would be if I didn't do that.” So I am focused on today's 20% margin, rather than wondering, in the long term, my business will not be around if I keep doing that. Leaders don’t focus on long term because all of our incentives are defined in short term.
What is my quarterly quota? My stocks are vested in four years, do I really care about what happens after that? I'm going to sell my stock, I'm going to buy a house, I'm going to go on a trip that I want, and I don't really care.
In our company, the way I deal with that is, I personally take no salary. Every single thing that I earn is going to be when the company is wildly successful, and the equity in the company is going to be there. That allows me never worry about what happens today, because I know it makes no difference to my life what happens today, next quarter or the quarter after. It allows me to focus on my goal, which is to create value that will be sustainable, and it has to be sustainable over a period of time or else I get nothing. That changes everything.
I feel it's my job to continue to focus on doing good for humanity. It's not because I'm philanthropic, because I know the only way you can do that is to create a sustainable, profitable organization. If you want to do a small good in the world, do a non-profit. If you want to do a large good in the world, do a for profit business, because profit is the engine that allows you to continue to scale and help more people.
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Join The Tour & Get Your Free Guide Book!
Use this collection of 28 self reflection prompts and team activities. Each one is designed to support you in exploring empathy, and building a work culture in alignment with your values and vision.