Enhancing my Journey

My mother was diagnosed with Leukemia at an age of 55 in late 2007 with a prognosis of 6 months. Like many families we could not accept the news and wanted to fight it by getting her better treatment in a city. However, she wanted to spend her last days at home in our town with friends and family. While the balance between quality of life and longevity is a difficult choice all of us will have to make as individuals, I felt that there is definite room for improvement  to help individuals spend more time at home with their loved ones while fighting illness.

With this goal in mind, I embarked on a journey to do something towards this cause with the little knowledge I had about Health IT working for the Center for Medicare Medicaid (CMS) at the time. A Google search led me to follow instructions to build an electronic health record (EHR) system on Amazon Web Services (AWS) in 2008. The promise and the excitement of the art of the possible with Cloud completely changed my life. The last 12 years have been an amazing journey of learning about people, process, technology, operations, entrepreneurship, principles, values and leadership.  

This week, I will be starting a new journey with the launch of REAN Foundation, a non-profit dedicated to  focus on helping people improve the quality of life as they battle difficult health conditions in their family. I will be sharing more about this in the months and  years to come.

Today, I want to take this time to thank my wife (Rupa), kids (Anu and Renu), friends and family, my dearest REAN colleagues, customers, AWS colleagues, partners, and all the well wishers that motivated, inspired and supported me through ups and downs in the REAN journey.  

It would be a miss if I did not acknowledge the profound impact these authors had on the success. The learnings from these books changed my ways of thinking and empowered me to inspire change in many people.

• Gene Kim - The Phoenix Project for amazing insights on how to help a business win
• Jeff Patton - The user story mapping for helping me understand how to get teams to build products with customer in mind
• Ray Dalio - Principles: Life and Work for giving me the confidence to be honest and transparent to withstand political forces to maintain focus on the mission

I have received so many notes and phone calls from my colleagues at REAN and Hitachi that are so humbling. It is amazing how much we accomplished in a short span -  being on Gartner magic quadrant, being the top company of the year in Northern Virginia, and winning a historic DoD contract. 

While I could not be happier about these accomplishments, what makes me really proud is the number of ex-REAN colleagues that have become new entrepreneurs or intrapreneurs. There is nothing more satisfying than seeing people grow in their personal and professional life.

Finally, the note below from Ivan Fedarau, one of the early employees of REAN, brings tears of joy every time I read it. Thank you Ivan, you have summarized what many others said.

Thank you all for making the last decade so much fun and purposeful. I owe you all so please do not hesitate to contact me if there is anything I can do for you to return your favor.

My Colleague Ivan Fedarau's Note

When you onboarded me, the team at Radian had a big  2-3 day meeting and it was the most productive meeting I've seen in my life. I was even telling everybody about it back in Belarus. I've never seen so detailed and meaningful explanations and diagrams before. For me it was a big surprise that everything that was decided went straight to life and was created in code. People that you onboarded were able to figure out what to do and do it right without asking twice and walking around. Everything was explained so well that we had very few arguments after and all our focus was moved to coding. That gave a fantastic result :)

I still don't understand how you see people so good. I had a few conversations with team members and all of them were surprised how you interview people. You're like scanning a soul. And I can say this scanner works. Team we had at Radian was one of the best teams I've had in my life. Also on people's topics. Thing that always surprised me was your ability to believe in a person and give opportunity to do/decide/think/grow. BTW I still don't understand how I passed the interview with the level of English I had ...

In one of the meetings I've heard from you about "The Phoenix Project" book. I've read it and it was a game changer for me. I started to see industry from another angle and realized that I need to fix my thinking here and there ... It would be nice if you will share a list of books that changed your understanding of life and thinking process. It could help me to grow and to understand what a better person is and how to be it.

Our team parties were the best in industry. Good memories. No more words needed here :)

Thank you for assembling the team together. You've done amazing things. It was a home run. Yesterday during that call people were so bonded that I found myself thinking that "Possibly, I've had to move to VA instead of CA".