Why This ? Why Now ? Why Me?

This weekend was full of learning opportunities for me personally. Given a choice between so many conferences and events happening, (virtually these days due to the pandemic restrictions) when an opportunity came along to have a fireside conversation with a self made billionaire and exponential thinker and entrepreneur extraordinaire Naveen Jain, my choice was made!

For those that may be unaware, Naveen has founded many companies and transcended few industries in his career. From Infospace focussed on internet technologies in dot com boom days to aerospace via Moon Express to now health / life science through Viome.

It was a rapid paced keynote fireside chat at the American Society of Engineer's (ASEI) 33rd National Convention on December 6th and the allocated time just flew! Naveen and I spoke about a number of things as we chatted about exponential technologies to solve humanity's grand challenges. We explored how innovative technologies and audacious goals can change the world and especially transform the healthcare life sciences industry not by incremental means but by exponential methods.

As Naveen explained, exponential technologies are those which are rapidly accelerating and shaping major industries and all aspects of our lives. For a technology to be “exponential,” the power and/or speed doubles each year, and/or the cost drops by half.

Exponential technologies include artificial intelligence (AI), augmented and virtual reality (AR, VR), data science, digital biology and biotech, medicine, nanotech and digital fabrication, networks and computing systems, robotics, and autonomous vehicles. Solutions to the world’s most pressing challenges lie at the intersection of these exponential technologies. That is, when two or more of these technologies are used in combination to attack a persistent challenge, the possibility of developing a sustainable solution becomes much more likely.

The convergence of many exponential technologies has disrupted the foundation of how we look at the health of our body. Naveen explained that our bodies are an ecosystem made up of not only our own genes, but also trillions of microbial genes — and it is these entities together that dictate our health. Balancing this ecosystem is the key to a better life. Viome’s cutting edge research and technologies enable to perform deep molecular analyses of an individual’s Microbiome. They have collected perhaps the world's largest health diagnostic data set of its kind. Using that data, power of thousands of computing cores on the cloud and the custom AI they have developed, with a saliva sample, they can predict for example, with 98% accuracy the probability of developing cancer. Pretty amazing stuff! It was sheer music to my ears and the data science geek in me was just about ready to ask for algorithmic details and confusion matrices!

'Let food be thy medicine and medicine be thy food '- Hippocrates

Citing knowledge from Ayurveda in ancient Indian culture to quoting Hippocrates, our discussion could have gone on forever and I came out of it realizing that some day in not too distant future, we may be able to prevent or eliminate many common ailments we see today and may even end up doubling average human life expectancy!

Other nuggets :

Exponential Technologies to solve Grand Challenges 

“I really believe one day we could save billions of people not having to suffer through chronic diseases" -Naveen Jain

How To be 10X better at something?- Some Quotes from the chat:

• Read multiple books (20!) on the same topic from different authors to get a bigger view that will help connect the dots later on
• Academic papers predict what would be important 5 to 10 years down the line 
• Don't rely on experts .. Read & think outside the box 
• Applying the knowledge of what you learn to different industries is key

"Not about knowing everything from the start but about asking the right questions.

Question you ask is the problem you solve!"

Bottom Line: 

3 Point Framework to follow before investing time or resources in anything: Why This, Why Now & Why Me 

“Dream so big that people think you're crazy. Continue to pursue your dreams and know that everything is possible “

Secret to Success:

"Success is defined simply not by how much money you have in the bank, but how many lives you'll be able to improve . Every one of us has the potential to be an extremely successful "