Lessons - Solving Impossible Problems | Naveen Jain - Billionaire Serial Entrepreneur

In this lessons episode, explore how moonshot thinking helps entrepreneurs pursue world-changing problems while building real businesses, discover how better questions unlock overlooked breakthroughs, understand how exponential technology turns impossible ideas into viable ventures and uncover why resilience through constant highs and lows defines lasting entrepreneurial success. I feel like you could just talk about everything you're passionate about for the next next five hours if you wanted to, but I appreciate the framework. I guess I want to understand how you've applied it to what you're working on right now, but when you ask questions like that, when you ask questions that change the lens that we look at a problem through, that's a scary concept for an entrepreneur. And what I mean by that is when you're saying something to the point of, well, we can go through, we can potentially change the way that we actually have to consume food, that for most people is not a problem that can be solved in a lifetime. So when you tackle a problem, you aren't looking to solve a problem in the next 10 years. You're looking to solve something that is truly moonshot. Now, is that something in different context, an entrepreneur should still think about something that can last outlast their lifetime? Remember just because you have a moonshot doesn't mean that you don't have the steps along the way that you actually have business around, right? So the interesting thing about moonshots is you have a North Star. You have your pointing direction where you want to go. And then you say what are the steps that needs to be done along the way for this to happen and everything you go along the way actually creates a business. So it's not like a moonshot is a binary thing either you are in or you are out. Along the moonshots, you develop tremendous amount of technologies that actually can be applied for to create businesses today. And now that we are here, maybe I should actually explain my latest healthcare venture and a moonshot and exactly how we build that moonshot that created a business because that actually allows you to see that this is not some theoretical framework. This actually works in real life, right? So most people who may not know, I started a healthcare company called Wyoming. And as an Indian guy, I cannot pronounce the word V. So it's V as in Victor. Don't ask me why, but that's just why would you name a company that you cannot pronounce? I just fell in love with the name. So V, as you know, is life in French is life. And as Omics is science. So it's really science of life. So when I started Wyoming, the fundamental belief was what if we can find a way to prevent and reverse all chronic diseases, including cancer and aging? So you're talking about diabetes, heart disease, you know, you look at obesity, you look at depression, anxiety, Alzheimer, Parkinson's, and you go on and on and including every cancer. And aging because aging is a chronic disease. If you could prevent and reverse these chronic diseases, the first question was, would it help a billion people live a better life? The answer is 7.4 billion people, Jeff Mark. Good. Now you say, why now? Well, the now was we said, okay, in the law, to solve this problem, you have to be able to digitize the human body, understand everything that's happening in the human body at a molecular level, at a biochemical level, everything that's going on in the human body. Well, we say, wow, that's a tough problem. In the last 10 years, the cost of actually digitizing that even a single sample used to be billion dollars came down to million dollars came down to 100,000 dollars. And now it is six years ago was about $1,200. We said, that's too high. But we're looking at the price trend, we know in the next three to five years, that will be down to $100. And I think that's affordable. So we started the company believing the technology will come down and price will come down to about 100 bucks. Guess what happened? It came down to about $18. Right. So while we thought we were 10 times optimistic, it turns out we were actually five times pessimistic. And that's the power of exponential technology. The next thing was we said, look, even if we could digitize the human body, we won't have access to super computers. So how are we going to process this massive amount of data that's coming in? And we said, look, this cloud computing is really, really starting to take off. And we're going to start using this cloud computing and we launched our first thing. And it cost us $40, $43 to process one single sample. We took a deep breath and say, wow, that's expensive. But we knew that cost has already come down from five other dollars to $43. In the next three to five years, it should come down to $10. Guess what? It came down to about $50. So literally, as you start to see when you find these technology at a trend, the last part was even if we process all the data, would AI be powerful enough to be able to actually analyze all this data and tell you what's causing what to see? No one had argument about that was going to happen. So we took that for granted. And guess what? Everybody was right that we have the technical AI now, right? The last part was the most interesting part, which is why me. I am not a scientist. I am not a doctor. I'm going into this area. And I don't understand anything about human health. But guess what? That as opposed to being really worried that I don't know about it, to me, that was the biggest asset I brought to the industry was I wasn't going to take what experts have said, taken it for granted. I'm going to challenge the foundation of everything that people have taken it for granted. And once you do that, you're able to look at the solution that no one has ever looked at. So there were two things we saw. Number one was everyone in the industry was focused on genetics, your DNA. They wanted to know if I could get your DNA that's so unique to you, I will be able to tell you why you have a certain disease. And being naive, I see a great asset. You DNA never changes. They say, yes, it never changes. Wow, interestingly. So if I do my DNA test today, year later, I get 400 pounds. My DNA hadn't changed. I get depression. I'm like, DNA didn't change. I get diabetes. My DNA didn't change. Hard disease. And then I get, you know, Alzheimer Parkinson's and I die. Even after I die, 10 years after I die, you take my DNA is still the same. So if DNA can't even tell you your dead or alive, how can it tell you that you're healthy or sick? So if your genes are not changing, what are you changing? People say, of course, you know gene expression in changing. The RNA is all the changes. Holy shit, let's go. Imagine that. And we never say, how are we going to do that? Nobody has ever done that. It's a great. So if we could measure the gene expression, because then we know you're causing the onset of a disease or you're developing a disease, how you're progressing, let's measure gene expression. So I asked, great. Don't ask me how, but if you could measure all the gene expression on the human body, would that solve the problem? Isn't that quite? Would it be not quite? I just saw the world hunger problem here. Well, their human body is not just homogeneous coming the DNA from our mom and dad. 99% of all the genes that are expressed in our body actually are not our own. They are the 100 trillion microbiome that's in our gut, in our mouth, in our nose, in our ear, all over our body, 100 trillion of them. In fact, of all the genes that are expressed, 99% are actually coming from these microbiome. So I started reading that, you know, I went back to my research and say, all right, obesity and microbiome, obesity is connected to the microbiome. Wow, it's interesting. Diabetes and microbiome. Literally, you can Google anything you want. Parkinson's and microbiome. Parkinson's starts in the gut 15 years before you see the symptom. And Simon and my background cancer and microbiome and literally every disease is directly connected to microbiome. And at that point, most people would say, you're a government, right? I found it. And that's the time you ask yourself and say, you must be a complete moron. If everyone believes that is the problem and their tens of companies doing the same thing, why is this problem not getting solved then? Then you go back to the framework. What questions are they asking in microbiome? Well, it turns out everyone was asking exactly the same wrong question, which was, I want to know what organisms are in your gut. I want to know what organisms are in the people's gut who have different diseases. Now, don't laugh. I have no idea what these organisms are. In my mind, I'm thinking these organisms are like a tiny humans doing shit in my body. I say good. In that case, wouldn't it be possible that could be thousands of different organisms doing exactly the same thing that's making me sick? So I take two people with diabetes completely different organism yet producing exactly the same thing that's causing me a disease. So I think we need to focus on what they are doing, not who they are, because the same organism could do something good in Scott's gut, because it's in right environment, a nice friendly environment, and the same organism can make me sick because my environment and the gut is fighting amongst each other. Just like I thought, human being, you take a good person, put them in a bad environment, they do bad behavior, you take a bad person, put them in a good environment, they do good behavior. So let's focus on what they are doing, not who they are, and that was fundamentally the I ask and say, what if we can find out what these microbiomes producing, and we can find out every gene that's expressing the human body, and then we look at the totality of that, would that solve the problem? Everyone say if you could do that, this problem can get so great. So I went on a mission trying to find this technology that could do that. Kid, you know, I went to every single university, and first my first stop was by the way, NASA JPL, as you know I was coming from the space side, I knew these guys have tons of technology they developed, and they're sending the rovers to the Mars trying to find the them organism on the Mars, they have to have solved this problem. So I go there at NASA JPL, and I'm like talking to the director, talking to scientists, and they're saying, we don't care, we just need to find out there's something there, we don't really care what they're doing. And I say, you guys have a bunch of morons, I'm going to go to the NASA Houston, they probably got this figured out, and then NASA Houston, and I get to touch all the moon rocks, I get to play with all the cool stuff, but it's still no technology. So I now at a NASA Kennedy Space Center, no good. So I started going to the national labs, I went to Lawrence, Berkeley, Lawrence, Livermore, and I'm like everyone, I'm starting to get like people say, yeah, it's possible, but we haven't done it. I am now at Los Alamos National Lab. And by the way, if you don't know Los Alamos National Lab is famous for, come on Scott, work with me. I don't know, I don't know what I'm so enthralled by this story. I have so many questions. What is what is what is what is the lab famous for? I can't remember. Atomic developing atomic bomb. Oh, okay, so I should know that. That's that's my mistake. Okay, that's my bad. Okay, so they they they have a little bit of technology there. A little bit. So they basically even though it was called Manhattan Project, it wasn't done in Manhattan. It was done in Los Alamos. Right. So anyway, so these guys, I was there and now I am like at the end of my road and I'm thinking, God, I don't know this problem is solvable or not, but I'm going to throw out a challenge to all the scientists and say, is there anyone out here? Let alone what these guys are doing. Can they actually tell me if these guys, what is a bacteria? What is a virus? So that when you are sick, you can find out you need antibiotics or not. Now, these one guy, so I have 12 scientists pitched me like a sharp tank and they all have the idea. I can have a 3D microscope. I can do this. I can do that. And one guy comes up and says, you know, the not only I can tell you what my what whether it's a bacterial virus, I can tell you exactly what they're producing. I can even tell you whether antibiotics are going to work or not going to work or I can tell you which antibiotics are going to work and I can tell you exactly what they are. And my first reaction was really, so what project are you working on? And the guy looks at me and he says, what's your security clearance level? And then he says, stop. And he says, it doesn't matter. Even if you told me you work at CIA, I can tell you that you don't have a security clearance level. So stop asking me questions. And what do you see when I can entrepreneur? I'm like bullshit. Yeah, it's nice to know. Tell me. Show me. Yeah, bullshit. I said, totally fucking bullshit. You giving this my security clearance level. I said, forget it. I don't need to know what you're working on. Can you tell me how it works? And it's of course I can tell you. And he goes on to describe what they have done in the 10 years, developing a technology to be able to analyze RNA. And basically it is a bio defense project. And I just all I know that is basically to protect our country and bio weapons. Right. You could argue a lot of cynics out there and say, protect they probably were developing bio weapons. Not by far. I'm not going to get. But let's just assume they're protecting our country from bad, bad actors. And if they're protecting our country from bad actors, what problem they have to solve? Which is, hey, if there was a terror, we don't care what all millions of them. We need to know what they just produce so we can build the antidote for it. Right. So they needed to solve the problem that I was trying to solve. And they literally, so it took me six months to actually license the technology and hired the guy who was working on it, got him out of his federal job and he's my chief science officer. Right. And then we said, and then I said, God, now we have the technology to analyze this. I need the AI guy. So what do I do? I hire the guy, the head of IBM Watson to quit his job, bring his whole team to go to the AI for me. And that's literally so what we started, why? So what point I was trying to make was we asked a slightly different question. And that's what allowed us to solve the problem that had remained unsolved. And the last part of why me is really important. And I think just from the perspective of any business you start, Scott, it is going to have ups and downs. And I think you probably know every entrepreneur who tells you they don't have ups and downs either lying or they just don't know what the fuck is going on in their business. Every business goes through. In fact, almost every successful business has gone through what I would call near death experience, Facebook, Oracle, Apple, I mean, literally Apple, Amazon, everyone went through the near death experience, every one of these businesses. Right. Apple was almost a dead company Microsoft saved them. Now they're taking it. That's right. I mean, every one of these companies go through near death experience. In fact, what I, you know, I don't know if you ever follow me, I always tell people life of an entrepreneur is being alive. How do you know your alive? You have a heartbeat. It goes up and down, up and down. When you are, when you have a smooth line, you're dead. So if you're looking to live a life, which is smooth, you're looking to live a life of a dead person. You're not looking to live life or heartache. The beauty of the thing is when you are down, all you have to do is hunker down and know the next beat is going to be up. And when you're on the top of that beat, never get too cocky because remember the winter is coming and winter shall come. Thanks for tuning in. If you found this valuable, don't forget to hit that subscribe button so you never miss an episode. And if you want to dive deeper into this conversation, check out the links in the description to watch the full episode. See you in the next one.