Entrepreneur Ardy Arianpour l Solving an Enormous Pain Point that led to a Meeting with Bill Gates

Hear Ardy Arianpour, CEO & Co-Founder of SEQSTER, a healthcare technology startup.  Ardy shares his journey to solve a giant pain point in the healthcare industry, achieving funding and his one-on-one meeting with Bill Gates to discuss his disruptive model. SEQSTER is on the frontline of healthcare innovation, breaking down health data silos, using an enterprise operating system which aggregates disparate health data from a range of sources to provide a single, 360-degree view of a patient in real-time. 

Transcript

Jeanne Gray: I'm Jean Gray, publisher of American Entrepreneurship Today, and host of the podcast series Experience Voices, where I talk with highly accomplished people who share the critical elements that led to their success. 

 Our guest today on Experienced Voices is Arti Aryanpour, CEO and co founder of Seegster, a technology startup on the front line of healthcare innovation. Arti shares his passion for solving an industry pain point that led to a one on one meeting with Bill Gates. Almost every entrepreneur's dream. He shares the milestones the company has passed on their path to providing a 360 degree view of a patient in real time, breaking down health data silos, using an enterprise operating system.

Welcome to experience voices, Artie.

Ardy Arianpour: Thanks so much for having me. Very excited to have a insightful discussion for you and the audience. 

Jeanne Gray: Oh, great. So, let's start just telling me about your startup, and then we'll get into some of the details. 

Ardy Arianpour: Great. You know, in 2016, , I had this crazy idea of bringing all your health data in one place.

, I actually founded Seekster and January 10th of 2016 at JP Morgan Healthcare Conference running around with my idea on a piece of paper and my to me backpack. I have a picture of it still actually running around downtown San Francisco, trying to talk to the best of the best in healthcare life sciences industry where

new York city and the world move over for one week to San Francisco for this amazing financial conference. And at that time I had about 16 years of experience. running and building clinical diagnostic companies, , genomic type of products. And Seekster was going to be my little like pet project to be honest with you.

I never thought I would be where I am today. , we're coming up on eight years and I'm excited to share the story with you. 

Jeanne Gray: Well, you kind of hinted a little bit that you went to this conference and you circulated around, were you hitting the idea off of very specific people or, and then sort of, and, or what were you doing on the side or outside of that conference to validate your idea?

Ardy Arianpour: Yeah. So, at that conference, my whole objective was to see if. You know, people that are much smarter than me thought if this is a good idea, and I was pretty connected to the industry, , at that time, , because I've had some successes at various different companies building and expanding, businesses within healthcare and life sciences and pharma services and so forth.

But, what I didn't know is when I spoke to a high powered person from J. P. Morgan or Goldman Sachs or Blackstone or Deerfield or a private equity firm, , I would get pretty much the same answer and. They were more around. This is fantastic. But how are you going to monetize this? And then when I would talk to the industry experts within, the pharmaceutical sector, they didn't really understand at the time patient centricity, but they thought, oh, wow, if you can.

You know, create a data sharing platform. This can help us save hundreds of millions of dollars on recruitment. And I didn't understand what that meant at the time either. And then when I went to my biotech friends and genomic geneticists who understood the value of DNA sequencing, because the first idea was really.

Sponsoring folks to get sequenced, hence the word Seekster and SEQ standing for DNA sequencing and STIR was supposed to be all the other data like your EMR data, your wearable data, , all that stuff. I mean, now everyone knows what an Apple Watch is, but in 2016, you would be surprised. A lot of people didn't.

Fitbit was the big thing in 2016. So, you know, I thought, how can we bring all this stuff that's been siloed together? For research and what's amazing is since then we've never really had a business plan. I never had a business plan. I just had this crazy idea. That's the number 1 problem in health care.

And I later learned at the end of that conference. Spending time talking to probably 4 500 people in that week. That this is an interoperability issue. And I came home, I'll never forget this, and I had to practice the pronunciation of interoperability in the mirror because I couldn't even pronounce the damn word.

And for those of you that don't know what interoperability is, it's a $45 billion plus annualized ballooning. problem for just the United States. And that's all the healthcare data doesn't talk to one another. And so that hurts intervention that hurts caregiving, that hurts every disease from Alzheimer's to autoimmune, to rare, to cancer, to, you know, the one off diseases.

, to er visits to you name it. And, , I did not know that we would be falling on that. That was a complete accident. 

Jeanne Gray: Now the, the patients, the individuals, I think, I don't know if it's just obvious, but of course they would want all their medical records. You know, being transferable, you know, more easily or put into a, , a central database.

But are you also addressing this from what I'm hearing is from the, really the, the doctor medical research. There's a whole breadth of players on the other side of the equation that you're saying you're, you're also, , dealing with, so you're doing both sides. 

Ardy Arianpour: Yeah, this is so amazing. And you know, this is such a great example of America and an immigrant like myself coming from nowhere with nothing, coming up with something that actually impacts lives at scale.

Of course, we have an amazing team that I put together. It's not just me. But look, someone has to light the spark and, , you know, that's what keeps me going. I look back every day when I wake up, I think of when I started the company. It's so profound for me getting on that Southwest flight, going to San Francisco with a green backpack and just running around.

In my suit and then, , you know, I actually put the suit down. Now. I only wear six per year. I don't wear anything else. I think I actually donated all my suits. Maybe I have 1 black suit for weddings or something and my tuxedo left. But, , I think. What's really profound is you never know where the journey is going to lead to.

And since we started with the patient at the center of healthcare to disrupt all these data silos, , it all came from my, , passion actually for Napster and that's why Seekster was named what it is back in the nineties. There was a program called Napster where you brought all your music in one place.

And there was a great. Music sharing platform. And so I thought, what if you could do this for healthcare life sciences, but I didn't know how hard the engineering was. I had no clue. And, , we started with the patient and then we led to understanding that we actually needed to keep the lights on and get it in business done, , to enterprise B2B and that involved.

a person that everyone knows on this, , wonderful podcast of yours, and that's Bill Gates when he found out about Seegster and, you know, , we shared a commonality of, , family members suffering from Alzheimer's and, , we started with an Alzheimer's use case at the beginning and that's what led us to Bill Gates because his dad was.

Suffering at the time and dying from Alzheimer's and no one actually knew. And, , you know, I think his dad died like a year, year and a half ago or something, but this was back in 2018 and that changed everything for us going to the enterprise because we had this amazing user interface, , for the patients that we built.

We had thousands of patients, women, because I spent over a decade and a half in women's health, trailblazing breast cancer. , and different, , clinical diagnostic tests for breast cancer. My mom's a breast cancer survivor, so I had my mission there. And then, you know, at Seekster, we were even able to save my dad's life with colon cancer by running a tumor board and bringing all his data in one place.

And, you know, that involved many different specialists and pathologists looking at the data and Kaiser Permanente. A big health system, out on the west coast and. You know, it's just been an incredible journey. So 

Jeanne Gray: are you saying then, especially in the case of where you were describing with your father is because you were able to bring all of the information to one central location, you were also able to pull in the experts more 

Ardy Arianpour: quickly.

Yeah. And the reason being is because experts, , first off, you have to be connected in healthcare and that's unfortunate. I'm very connected in healthcare, very connected in science, very connected in data sciences and all that good stuff because I've been doing it for 20 plus years now. , 22 years to be exact.

, And that's only because I got started so early at the age of 21 in the industry, but, I think no 1 from the physician specialist side or research side ever thought that. You could actually look at someone's data in a de identified manner and communicate with them. It sounds simple. It is so complex.

You know, imagine bringing UCSF data with NYU data, with MD Anderson data, with Memorial and Sloan Kettering data, and you know, with Massachusetts General Hospital MGH data. Those are seven, eight different health systems that are run by different architecture and , different clouds and different E. M. R.

S. And different systems. And unfortunately, in the U. S. It's been built like that so they can make money off us, right? And it's a great moneymaker. Health care is a business, unfortunately, and I realize that through my family journeys and our. System operating system Seekster cracked the code on bringing both patients, researchers, doctors, specialists, any human being together in one platform so they can view, analyze and translate that data to make Actionable insights 

Jeanne Gray: that that is very exciting.

So when you got into conversation with Bill Gates, what was the opening and where, or what stage were you that opened up the conversation with him? 

Ardy Arianpour: Yeah, I'll never forget it. It was a Saturday morning. I got the call and I got this random call from someone that was representing his office. Saying, hi, I'm blah, blah, blah.

I, you know, we've found you through, , some news article. Looks like you're working on some Alzheimer's related data. I had a story come out with Hatch magazine on the innovation. They interviewed me early on and we are still in stealth. I was trying to keep the company in stealth as possible. And so remember I founded the company in 2016 in January.

This is early 2018 now, and, , once we came out with our Boston University, , research portal partnership in March of 2018, that was when I got the call from Bill Gates office right away. And I was put on a plane literally within a week. He said I would have 30 minutes. And when I got there, it was just me and some folks from his team.

, there was also, , a Diet Coke filled at room temperature and the room was super quiet. And I asked the guy that was my chaperone, escort, whatever you want to call him. Why are you pouring the Diet Coke with no ice? And he said, that's because Bill likes it at room temperature and, , he'll be coming in the next 10 minutes.

And then, , he was giving a talk actually at Harvard. And I was sitting at this undisclosed location that I signed my NDA that I couldn't share with anybody. No one even in my family knew that I was meeting him other than my wife. Wow. I had to tell her where I was flying to. I think so. And. , when he came in, I don't get starstruck, you know, I've grew up in Southern California, San Diego, Orange County, LA.

I mean, I've got the Kardashians to come to our last company and we're on the show keeping up with the Kardashians and I'm not starstruck at all, met many stars just because Southern California is not a big deal. , but it was the first time in my life that time actually stopped when he walked in, because how many times in your life will you create something out of nothing where the richest man in the world at the time is going to walk in that room and want to meet with 

Jeanne Gray: you?

So when the time portal or time continuum started to move forward and. Bill Gates is settled down. How, did he ask the first question or, because he, if he knew about your venture, you weren't really there to do a pitch. So how did you get to sort of like the, the nut of, of where he was looking to engage with you?

Ardy Arianpour: So here's, what's so interesting. I'm very observational and I have a very high, I would say EQ, but my IQ is completely normal. I've been tested. It's completely normal. I'm not some genius or something, but my EQ is off the charts. And so I have a very high sense of awareness and it's just through my personal journey.

I've. You know, adapted to so many situations and been around so many different types of folks and powerful folks that, you know, I know how to handle a situation. I guess you could say good or bad, ugly or pretty, whatever that may be with bill walking in, he had. A pen on his, you know, left pocket chest, took it out, he had no electronics, he had a notepad that they put for him, and then they put this stack of papers, and I saw that it was like, Seigster and my information, it's as if he had like some, CIA file on me or something, it was crazy and I didn't get intimidated by him, but I got intimidated on the fact that, wow, what does he know that I don't know about me and our company?

And it was amazing how much he knew about interoperability. Of course he's, he knows software engineering, he created Microsoft and all that good stuff. But when we got to it, we just jumped right into the fact that, , show me the demo of Seekster and I had it loaded on the, on the screen, we went to the demo, I did a 10 minute demo presentation, and then we spent the rest of the time chatting and, , you know, he told one of his guys in the room to connect.

Me to, you know, this person connect me to that person, connect me to even Warren Buffett. He actually mentioned that they never did it. Those guys never helped. They never, they just never followed through, but bill helped in the way that, , he said, you got to take this enterprise. We tried this with Microsoft Health Vault and it failed and we were too early.

What you just showed me already is 10 times more user friendly and powerful than my team built at Microsoft. And we spent way more money than you did on this. Wow. I mean, I think they spent, you know, billions of dollars or something on their, their product for health and they had to shut it down. And this was at the same time that Google Health was coming out with, and that didn't work out either.

And it's because everyone tries to go provider to provider. Everyone tries to go payer to payer. But what we did at Seekster that was genius, was that we started with the patients. And I never steered away from that mission. Not to this morning. And so when you put the patient at the center of healthcare, and you can visualize all their data in one place and stitch it together on the back end, With a mint dot com type interface, I took a FinTech approach for the user ability because I was obsessed with, you know, financial software, because I thought that was the best for user ability because people use it to see their money to trade to, you know, make deposits and wires.

How do you do that with healthcare data? From various different systems, various different labs, various different DNA providers, you know, various different insurers. How do you do that? There's gotta be a way there's always a way. You just never know how long it takes, but I could say that was the moment where I thought, okay, this is definitely Seekster OS.

It's the Seekster operating system, the same way that, you know, MS DOS was built the same way that Microsoft Office was a suite software for, you know, Office. What if you had that for researchers, for doctors, for innovators, for patients, for caregivers? Oh my God, you can really not only save the healthcare system with, you know, hundreds of billions of dollars that are being wasted globally, not just for the US, but you could actually save lives.

And that's what's driven my team and I. To be where we are today, 

Jeanne Gray: and that's what I was going to ask you next next is the is the whole tech team component of this because you're, you know, you're the visionary. You also are very outward looking to meet the Bill Gates of the world, but you're doing that because there's a bunch of techies behind you.

Can you describe a little bit about who they are or how they got involved? Yeah, 

Ardy Arianpour: so , I was very fortunate in my late 20s to hire and build bioinformatics teams within research and development. I was given that task because of just my leadership skills. , you know, I have to thank my parents, I guess, and my grandpa for being, you know, a leader and having that leadership DNA.

You can't learn leadership. You're either born with it or not. , you can learn how to write, you can learn how to read, you can learn how to talk, you can't learn how to lead. You either know how to lead or you don't. It's innate. , at least that's my personal opinion. What you can do when you have a little bit of it is you can learn to be better.

And you can learn how to use your sixth sense to find really good talent. That takes a specific characteristic and you can't just be a visionary, a visionary, I think there's lots of visionaries, but how can you actually execute on the vision and how do you put engineers, scientists, data folks together to build something that doesn't exist?

I mean, it's as if you are, you know, , a Leonardo, Michelangelo painting something. Sikster's are Sistine Chapel. It is so complicated. It's taken years to get to where we are. Even though the idea was brilliant at the beginning, but it would never happen without phenomenal folks that were part of my team before that followed me to this venture.

It would never happen. 

Jeanne Gray: So, so the next question is, is funding in because many of the milestones for startups. Is tied to having that money at the right time and not having to spend a full, another full, , career or position just looking for funding. So, because what you're sharing with me is from 2016 to 2018, where you did the demo with Bill, phenomenal amount of work was accomplished.

So, did you guys, did your team start part time? Did you? How did you get through those first couple of 

Ardy Arianpour: years? Yeah. So that was another domino effect of hard work meets luck. And the harder you work, you get luckier. And I'm sure so many people have their version. Our version is like this. Well, we built one of the most profound clinical diagnostic labs before Seekster.

And, , that company, past company, had a major exit. It actually sold for over 1 billion to the sovereign funds of Japan and Kanaka Minolta. Long story short, I put the first 1 million from that exit that I had in Sikster to start it. Because that's how much I believed in the idea. And then all the folks that made, , some funds from that previous exit too, they weren't getting any more shares.

And so I convinced them to come to build something that's going to change humanity. Because after you make a little bit of money, you actually don't need that much after you pay off your home and your cars and you have like. Vacations. What are you going to do? I mean, you know, it's better to give back.

And so I motivated the team on the fact that let's do this for the rest of our life and give something back because you know, the time is now what I didn't know is we were way ahead of our time and no one wanted to fund us. , Venture capitalists would take a look at what we're doing, but they're like, yeah, no, this is never going to, you know, work out.

You're never going to be able to build this yada, yada, yada after Bill Gates, though, and once the word got out, Dr Eric Topol, one of the most profound And well known and skeptical folks in medicine, , tweeted about his own experience using Seekster, how he was able to bring all his data together from 1985 to present four different health systems, plus his Fitbit, plus his, you know, DNA data, plus his, , my fitness pal nutrition data, all in 24 hours, step in the direction we got like 7 million hits on our website.

Our website broke. And this was when we were transitioning from direct to consumer to that operating system. And because, , we were working with Boston University and Bill Gates funded that. So we got, you know, non dilutive funding there to build out our research portal. That's when pharma found out about us and wanted to invest in us.

And they came and they tried to kind of squeeze us because they knew this was the best idea. So they gave me really bad terms for a very long time. And so we just kept funding it ourselves, working on sweat equity. You know, I had a team of about 20 folks that were doing this. And we said, Hey, you know, we believe in this.

We're just going to keep doing it. We'll get it funded and we'll pay back the loans and whatever we have to later. Let's not worry about that. Let's just try to get it to a customer. And what's crazy is it took five years for us to really get a commercial customer because the innovation was so forward thinking and organizations, whether they're small, medium or large.

Move at different speeds, and we can't control that. I can't control that. I can only control what I can control. I cannot and I won't control what I can't and, , we got funded by Takeda Pharmaceuticals, a top 10 pharma company, and then afterwards, we had funding come in and do a series a financing at the start of basically COVID, which was so hard at the time, , And it was because we had all this hard work for five years, where once COVID hit, things exploded for us because everyone was working remotely, people needed to get data remotely, so the timing was perfect.

And then we got into clinical trials. , with that, we built an enterprise data backbone with Takeda. We started, you know, working with various different types of data files. , the system became, you know, a 911 Porsche GT3, as I call it. And what I mean by that is, I'm a car guy. I love cars other than science and medicine.

, but, , when Dr. Eric Topol tried it, it took 24 hours. It was like a, you know, UPS big truck going across the United States or something. But once pharma got Involved. We upgraded our architecture and everything. And now, you know, we get data in milliseconds, milliseconds. It's crazy. And at scale, you know, , and then, we signed multi year, multi million dollar deals with, you know, Boeing or Ingelheim, , one of the top German pharmaceutical companies.

, we signed multi year agreements with national, , patient registries, one to be specific that's public is the NPF Foundation, which is the National Pancreatitis, , Registry. We signed, , deals with, , Contract research organizations, CROs, such as United BioSource, a medium sized CRO in the patient centricity space.

We pioneered a longitudinal health record and. I feel like it's just the beginning. 

Jeanne Gray: I'm not sure if I know the next question to ask you because it sounds like you have hit a, , a sweet spot of success. And so maybe that's the question, how Where, where does Seekster stand today? Because you did, you said you've gotten a series A.

So the challenges with all of these contracts that you're getting is scaling the operations of your own company. So how have you pivoted in the number of employees to project out the next couple of years of demand that you've, you're bringing in? Yeah, 

Ardy Arianpour: we had, you know, a record year this year and a record year last year.

, and it's, we're on hyper growth. Every dollar that we've, , made, we put back into the system, back into our own R and D, back into making the data better, making the experience better for our clients, we've automated so many things with artificial intelligence. And last week we had one of our, I would say, if not biggest announcements and developments.

It was years in the making. We launched Seekster CORD, C O R D, and what that stands for is Connected Research and Development, and that's just years of working with pharma, and we found one of their biggest pain points is How we can bring in deep insights to the data just last week, when we made that announcement, we got 58 requests for certain projects and RFIs and RFQs.

So we're just, you know, drinking from a fire hose all over again, I feel like, and, you know, , when you build something that actually works, that can save lives, that can change medicine, that can advance medicine, that's bigger than you yourself, you have to realize that every dollar needs to go to innovation there, and so that's our, you know, strategy, you know, I don't think it's going to change.

very much. But I, what I can share is our next announcements and partnerships are even much profound than what we've done in just the past couple of years. And, , we don't need to raise another penny to do what we're doing for our clients, for the patients, for the researchers, for the physicians, for the innovators, for the industry.

That's what's nice. At the same time, could we always make it better? Are people calling me to invest? All those people that churned us down in 2016, 2017. I get calls on a weekly basis. We don't have an issue if we want to raise funds. It's not about raising funds. This is where I think entrepreneurs get it wrong.

It's about making good partnerships and having the right strategics involved. So that they don't ruin your company.

Jeanne Gray: So you have to recruit a lot of personnel and a lot of talent. So it's no longer about you as the visionary bringing on a COO or. How are you changing now the hierarchy of the, of the company? Can you kind of give a little hint as to the, the first moves you made internally people wise that kept the fire hose from knocking you all over?

Ardy Arianpour: Yeah. I mean, that was really hard. I mean, I went through like a complete, like almost being clinically depressed cause I didn't know where it was going to go to the dark side of entrepreneurship. To, you know, , the deep abyss of the unknown. And, , I think what's really hard about startups where only founders can understand and relate.

If you haven't been a founder, you can't relate to it because you haven't been there. It's as if, you know, if you haven't had some sort of disease, you can't relate. I can't relate to what it feels like to have breast cancer, like my mom, because I've never had breast cancer. So I can't. I can feel bad for her, but I can't relate.

I don't know what her experience was going through radiation and chemo and all that. So, you know, I think building companies is kind of the same. You have to go through some sort of pain in order to withstand it to get stronger. And it's part of the journey testing to see if you can do it and how long you can do it.

And then you have to figure out how to delegate the right tasks to certain individuals. That are going to not make your life easier, but so you can go faster and deliver better. And so, you know, we did that by bringing on senior C level execs that had experience in both tech and also in data and sciences.

And that had a cultural match. , we did that. We did that right when we got our series a, when we got our series a of 12, 000, 000, we threw all the, you know, , gas, , in the tank to hire the right people that could not only work remotely because it was in the pandemic. But more importantly, , that had connections, experience, and could, you know, understand and take the vision to next levels as well.

And so I'm very grateful and thankful for that. And the hardest challenge is keeping it all together, keeping it all together, no matter how good your people are, , is the hardest challenge because glue. You know, last so long, you have to always reapply some glue. 

Jeanne Gray: The participants in your series, a, do they bring something to the table besides the funding?

Ardy Arianpour: Yeah. You know, , I think you don't know everything and you have to find people again, that are thought partners with you. And, , you have to find folks that can bounce ideas. You have to find folks that. Tell you what not to do. And I've been doing that my entire career. And I think that's why I've had so many wins.

It's not because of just being in the right place at the right time. I, I I'm an ultra networker that spends time. And my secret actually is I don't say no to a meeting. I was better at that before. , maybe, you know, I'm not as good now. I do say no sometimes here and there, or it takes a couple of times to ping me.

Cause just. Of time. There's only 24 hours and I put in 25 hours. , this isn't a job. This is a way of life for me. That's what's amazing. And it's not a job for our team or our employees. And I've created that culture in a way where You know, , you could go get up and get a job anywhere, but there's only one Seekster and you're never going to be able to do what we're doing today.

So while you're doing it, if it's for a day or a month or a year, 10 years, , let's just do it right. I've had one person leave since 2016. It's pretty amazing. The average Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, , Google engineer only stays two years and then they leave. That's why they can't actually create things like how certain startups can because the talent moves and the talent leaves.

And once that leaves, you lose a lot of just.

Jeanne Gray: Where do you see Seekster in three to five years? 

Ardy Arianpour: So I really do have this ultimate dream that you'll have this Netflix, Amazon one click experience in healthcare. I've had that dream and I see it very clearly. We're not there yet because not because Seekster of not being there. We're not there yet as a society.

And so in the next three, five years, I think. If we can keep the innovation and lead the industry with this patient centric real world data in real time that we have innovated and come out with things like CORD for connected research and development that involves the enterprise side even more, , and, you know, cheers are made because of our system, publications are made because of our system, , families, families.

Are stronger because of our system. Imagine you're a caregiver for, you know, your mother or your grandmother across the country and you can control the data. This sort of thing, it's not, is it going to happen? It's when will it happen? , and how will it happen and who will make it happen? And it's going to be delivered through the patient.

I really do believe that. But enterprises need to adopt it and we're doing a good job. Getting enterprises involved, we're not some, you know, Microsoft or Google or, you know, Tesla or something. We're a small company, but all those companies started real small too. So it just depends how our technology gets adopted in the next 3, 5 years.

And if I had to bet on our track record of the last 3 to 5 years, Well, you know, it's going to be 10 to 20 X more. 

Jeanne Gray: That's a great story, Artie, that you shared with me, , from your vision all the way through meeting Bill Gates to how it's going to impact people's lives. You know, every, every family is going through some sort of medical issue at some time.

And I think a lot of people who have very serious conditions, , These days, keep thinking, you know, a tech breakthrough is around the corner because of everything that's changed, you know, with digital and, and now AI. So you've, you've really shared quite a bit. So I guess I'll give you, you know, maybe the, the one last question that a listening entrepreneur is on your darkest day in from 2016.

How did you get past your darkest day? To say the darkest day usually is I'm done. I'm not going to do this anymore. Did you hit that point? And, and how did you work your way through it? 

Ardy Arianpour: That's such an interesting question. I've had so many people, and I think this is like my 65th podcast that I've done. I try to, you know, spend time actually sharing the story because.

I love listening to other people's stories, so I want to learn too. , no one's asked me that question before, so that's a really good question, , Gene. I, I've never actually hit a day or a moment that I don't want to do this in anything in my life. I mean, I have some weird DNA. I, I should have, not just with Seekster, but in so many different things.

, personally and professionally, but, , you know, I'm very lucky to just be so resilient and I've, I have my stars and my scars and you can't just have stars. If you don't have scars, then, , you're not going to be able to walk through the fire a hundred times and not even feel the heat, but that being said, they're the darkest moment.

Was probably when you're negotiating certain terms and you've worked so hard for a team and other people's, you know, lives are at stake, meaning patients and your employees. And if you can't fund it, you're going to lose your team. , that was a damn dark day because to be frank, investors are assholes.

And, , most entrepreneurs wouldn't say that, but it's the honest truth. And you have to find the ones that aren't assholes to work with. , you don't want to do everything and then they give you a term sheets and then they try to change things last second because they see you have something hotter and they know you need the money.

This world, unfortunately, when it involves the dollar is very corrupt. And you only learn that through entrepreneurship. You see certain things that you would never think that you would see. It doesn't matter if it's a small investor or if it's Bill Gates, a big investor, at the end of the day, you know, , there's the good guys and the bad guys, and a lot of it can be controversial.

Jeanne Gray: And so you gutted it through and you found the investors that you felt really confident about. 

Ardy Arianpour: Yeah. And that, you know, could support the vision and mission. And it's not just about making another dollar. It's very hard. Of course you need to have a business. You need to keep the lights on. People don't want to lose money, but you have to be able to believe in the team.

In the product and in the vision, and more importantly, are they going to be able to execute all three together? 

Jeanne Gray: Did you spend a fair amount of one on one time with the investors before pulling triggers? 

Ardy Arianpour: So it's crazy. I went through maybe a thousand plus interviews with investors, not because couldn't get a check, but it's like I was churning down tens of millions of dollars, and that was killing me because.

You know, my co founders were telling me, Oh my God, you got to take this term sheet. This is great. Come on, let's just do it. Who cares? And for me, it was more about, look, let's get the right terms. This is going to be very valuable. And I see where this is going. We're going to help a lot of people. And if someone else comes and runs this, I'm not interested in, in doing it.

I'm doing this to land. 

Jeanne Gray: Well, that's, that's great to hear. So, , I wish I had two or three more hours with you, Artie. , but I'm just going to wrap up by thanking you for being a guest on Experienced Voices and, , wishing you even further success because Like I said, every family has some type of medical challenge and when you're bringing relief to that in some form, it's, it's a phenomenal contribution.

Ardy Arianpour: Thank you so much, Jean, for having me on Experience Voices podcast. , just a pleasure to be on your wonderful, , show here and there's nothing like doing well by doing good. So thank you so much.

Jeanne Gray: You have been listening to the podcast series, Experienced Voices. To hear more and subscribe, visit AmericanEntrepreneurship. com forward slash podcast, where you will also find a form for listener feedback.