On today’s episode, Apollo sits down with Navid Alipour, Co-Founder & CEO of AI Med Global, and the Co-Founder & Managing Partner of Analytics Ventures. The conversation focuses on Navid's work in the healthcare industry and the impact he is making through AI and precision medicine.
On today’s episode, Apollo sits down with Navid Alipour, Co-Founder & CEO of AI Med Global, and the Co-Founder & Managing Partner of Analytics Ventures. AI Med Global is a roll-up of two companies Navid co-founded, CureMetrix and CureMatch. And Analytics Ventures is a fund dedicated to the inception of new ventures harnessing innovations in Artificial Intelligence.
Navid is Apollo’s first guest to score 0 points in Execute on the PLE test, and scores slightly higher in Leverage than prioritize, which aligns with his role as a business leader who leverages the expertise of others to drive innovations in AI and healthcare. The conversation focuses on Navid's work in the healthcare industry and the impact he is making through AI and precision medicine.
Throughout the interview, there is an underlying theme of perseverance and tenacity in the face of challenges and setbacks. Navid's accomplishments, including FDA clearance and CPT code recognition, highlight the impact his companies, CureMetrics and CureMatch, are making in prolonging lives and improving healthcare outcomes. He credits the success of his companies to the combination of his operational and business expertise and the domain expertise of his team, including renowned oncologist Dr. Rizal Kurzrock. The conversation also touches on the balance between confidence and humility in leadership, as well as the need for continuous learning and adaptation.
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Guest Bio
Navid Alipour is the Co-Founder & CEO of AI Med Global, and the Co-Founder & Managing Partner of Analytics Ventures. AI Med Global is a roll-up of two companies Navid co-founded: CureMetrix and CureMatch. Analytics Ventures is a fund dedicated to the inception of new ventures harnessing innovations in Artificial Intelligence.
Navid serves on the Board of Tech San Diego, helping build a thriving ecosystem in San Diego. He is on the Board of CureMetrix, CureMatch, DynamAI, and AlphaTrAI. You can also see him as a panelist, judge, speaker, and moderator at various forums such as UCSD, USD, SDSU, CyberHive, MIT Forum, RSNA, U.S. News STEM Conference, and CONNECT.
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Guest PLE Score
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Guest Quote
“My family came from Iran. I was six years old when we came here. And when you come from a place where your life is on the line, you almost have a different perspective. It's almost in your DNA that your life was at risk, and so everything else is easy to a degree. So you have to have that level of, you know, ‘I'm gonna do this even though there's a thousand and one reasons that I should fail.’” - Navil Alipour
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Time Stamps
*(4:06) Navid’s Achievement Index
*(8:37) AI and Leverage
*(14:57) Being an entrepreneur is delusional
*(16:33) Finding confidence in your team
*(19:00) Why Navid is invested in healthcare
*(28:13) Making the whole greater than the sum of it’s parts
*(32:42) Why you should look for unsuspecting founders
*(42:29) Get a second opinion
*(45:27) Apollo’s Takeaways
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Links
[00:00:00] Apollo Emeka: Improving your leadership skills will help you in every area of your life, but it's tough to know where to get started. And that's why we created the Achievement Index Assessment. You can take the assessment at theachievementindex. com. It takes about five minutes and it's going to generate a personalized report that breaks down how you prioritize, leverage, and execute.
Go to theachievementindex. com. Or, find the link in the show notes.
[00:00:27] Navid Alipour: When we first started CureMatch, it was a former Vietnam vet. He found us and they literally had given him two weeks to live. And he had his lab work from Foundation Medicine. And so he had that at the ready for us. That's our input. And we came out with our report that says these are the combination of drugs that make sense for this patient's cancer.
And the doctor said... I would have never thought of that. That's where we use this technology to help prolong lives and save lives. So cancer is not a death sentence. It's something that people, if not cured of, could live with for decades and decades.
[00:01:02] Apollo Emeka: Welcome to The Achievement Index, a podcast designed to help you understand and accelerate the ways you perform.
I'm Dr. Apollo Emeka. I created The Achievement Index based on my experience in the FBI, U. S. Army Special Forces, According to the Achievement Index, vibrant success is the result of doing well in three areas, or as we like to call them, orientations. Prioritize, leverage, and execute. On this podcast, I'll be getting inside the minds of noteworthy leaders to explore how their unique orientations inform the successes and challenges they've navigated throughout their lives and careers.
On the show today, I'll be speaking with Naveed Alipour. The co founder and CEO of AIMedGlobal and the co founder and managing partner of Analytics Ventures. AIMedGlobal is a roll up of two companies Naveed founded, CureMetrics and CureMatch. And Analytics Ventures is a fund dedicated to the inception of new ventures harnessing innovations in artificial intelligence.
Naveed serves on the board of Tech San Diego, helping to build a thriving ecosystem in San Diego. He's on the board of CureMetrics, CureMatch, Dynam AI, and AlphaTrey. You can also see him as a panelist, judge, speaker, and moderator at various forums, such as UCSD, USD, SDSU. So basically, if you go to school anywhere in San Diego, you have seen this dude.
Uh, CyberHive. MIT Forum, RSNA, US News STEM Conference, and Connect. How are you doing today, Naveed? Apollo, I am
[00:02:51] Navid Alipour: fantastic and excited to be
[00:02:53] Apollo Emeka: here with you. I'm so excited to have you. You're doing so much interesting work in the tech space. But before we were recording, before we were live, uh, we were starting to get into some really personal issues kind of right off the bat around, around health and healthcare and loved ones.
So I can't wait to, I mean, that the intersection of the work that you're doing is, is just fantastic. And I can't wait to get into the conversation with you.
[00:03:18] Navid Alipour: And I'm excited to share with you and your listeners. And again, if we, uh, impact one person that's listening that benefits, then, then, uh, I'm happy.
[00:03:27] Apollo Emeka: I love it.
So this, you know, the podcast is called the Achievement Index and you took the assessment with the same name, the Achievement Index, and you got a score. Were you able to check that out yet?
[00:03:41] Navid Alipour: Yeah, I did. I actually did it twice to see how. Accurate it would be and how much it would change. And it was fairly similar.
And it was interesting because, you know, as I was sharing with you on our, before we started recording, you know, I wear the investor hat having started analytics ventures, but I'm also. Uh, entrepreneur, a founder, and I wear the operator hat and you know, with all respect to my VC colleagues, I'm frankly more proud of saying I'm an entrepreneur.
I think of myself as, you know, I like to say I want to be the dumbest guy in the room and depending on how mad my wife is at me, she says that's pretty easy to do, but I like to surround myself with everyone that's smarter than myself. So I think one of the things I'm Goodat is helping find the right people to put together to then solve and achieve to the best of our abilities.
And so, in one way, I think I'm good at execution, and in another, I'm not, right? I'm not tactical in some ways. So I think that was actually really reflected well in the test.
[00:04:48] Apollo Emeka: And so, did you take it kind of one through the VC lens and then one through the operator lens? Is that what it was? Or like, what was the difference in you taking it twice?
[00:04:57] Navid Alipour: So I, good question. I actually did it once, you know, from an operator perspective. Um, and then another from, you know, where I think I'm probably naturally better is from, yes, I can co found a company and I could. You know, be the CEO and be on the board. But I feel like once I get a company to a certain place, I always think that the job of a good CEO is at some point to replace themselves.
And I think once I get a company at a certain place, then. I bring someone else in to replace myself as I'm still on the board and investing and starting in other companies. And so I think there's good, you know, there's good people, there's good CEOs for the early stage, the middle, and then larger organizations.
And, you know, you can't drop a CEO of a, you know, a company with 10, 000 people necessarily into a startup with 10 people. And you certainly can't do the, the opposites. Uh, there's very few people that I think can grow the whole way from... You know, starting the company in their garage to they're still the CEO, i.
e. the Zuckerbergs of the world, the Elon
[00:06:04] Apollo Emeka: Musks of the world. Yeah, yeah, that's really interesting. That's one of the things that we grapple with a lot over here, um, because we're helping leaders and companies kind of navigate those inflection points, and in some cases, quantum leaps. So we're always trying to figure out, okay, is it, you know, what are the right people, right, seats look like?
including the most senior leadership positions for these companies. So I love that call out and that perspective. And you're, you kind of achieved two firsts here on the show. You are first, the only person to take it twice, like looking through these two different lenses, and you are also the first person on the show to take it and have zero execute on one of those times that you took it.
This is the one I am really interested in because for those of you who are not familiar, the Achievement Index Assessment measures your kind of mindset and your propensity to either prioritize, which means, you know, thinking about we use this, this, this mountain climbing analogy. And so prioritizing is all about choosing which mountain you're going to climb and kind of planting that flag and pointing towards that destination.
Leveraging is now Building the base camp at the base of the mountain with the right technology, information, people, and systems that are going to help you scale that mountain as easily as possible. And then execution is all about charting that course and taking those steps up the mountain. So typically, you know, the executives that we have on the show have very low execute because they are so focused on prioritizing and leveraging and they have teams to do the execution.
But like I said, I think you're the first to have no execute and really be leverage dominant. So you're 52 percent leverage and 48 percent prioritize on your most recent test. And I'm curious about because the technology space that you're in is AI, which is such a high leverage thing. It seems like leverage.
Is your, is kind of your jam.
[00:07:59] Navid Alipour: Yeah, I think you really articulated that well. And you know, the fact is, and I'll, I'll take a moment to, to kind of give the San Diego ecosystem a pat on the back. It's truly one of the birthplaces, one of the epicenters of artificial intelligence going back to the beginning of UC San Diego.
Uh, so there's a ton of talent that's here from all over the world that, uh, they come here to go to school and then. Um, you know, they don't want to go back to the snowy, cold weather of Germany or Sweden or Russia or wherever else. And they stay here and they start companies and they join companies and it becomes part of the DNA of the community.
And so we met these incredible scientists, and I'm not a data scientist. I have a long business background, but some of these really incredibly sharp people, you know, their IQ could be off the charts, but they forget to pay their electric bill. They can't, you know, look you in the eye and have a conversation.
And, you know, part of that is Asperger's on the spectrum. You know, Elon Musk, for example, said he's, you know, has Asperger's, and I have a son who has Asperger's, so I have the kind of respect and appreciation for those that have autism, and there's various degrees of it, of course, but that's where there are so many incredibly sharp people, but they will never turn their ideas into a business, they will never commercialize it, and they are their own worst enemy, and so I think what I'm decent at doing is finding those People finding the idea and saying, okay, there is something here.
Let's build a company around it and then bringing in others that can help get that point, the company to a point where we are now. I mean, at Curemetrics and Curematch, these are two companies that, but for us would literally not exist, but at Curemetrics, we are the first company in history to get an FDA clearance for an AI product detecting breast cancer.
This was back in 2019. Someone can google it and find it. So we're the first company with, certainly many companies have raised much more money than us, whether in San Diego or in your neck of the woods, or anywhere in the world, you know, we got that accolade. And then on the CureMatch side, we also are the first company in history to get a CPT code from the American Medical Association, the governing body that gives the code, for CureMatch, where it's a new category called Assistive Intelligence.
And... To get this is no joke, you're in front of a panel of dozens of doctors for the pathology caucus and the American Medical Association and they're not there to be your friend, they're there to say no, they're there to say this is nonsense, this doesn't work. And they came back and gave us the first CPT code in history.
Um, and so I think that speaks to the fact that we have an incredible team, incredible expertise, and what I think, you know, my role is in that is in helping. Identify that, find the right people to surround, uh, you know, and build and, uh, you know, and, and leverage that to then get it to a point where, you know, whether, you know, there's a saying good companies are bought, not sold, but, you know, so we're not out there to say someone should buy us.
However, if there is a company that is much larger, that has the distribution could then take the technologies we've developed. To impact more lives faster than we have succeeded in impacting countless lives. Or if we now raise a larger amount and do it ourself for longer, then at some point that you bring in different people into the company and organization.
Right. To get it to the next level.
[00:11:44] Apollo Emeka: This is such a balancing act. It's one that, as a leadership coach, I help leaders navigate a ton. And it's the balance between confidence and humility, or between open mindedness and commitment to an idea. It's so hard for leaders to understand exactly how committed should I be and how open minded should I be.
Hey, how much should I be listening to others on this and how much should I follow my instincts and be the driver of a decision or the driver of change? And Navid has found a really comfortable balance where he says, Hey, I'm good being the dumbest guy in the room because it means that I'm surrounded by super smart people.
And at the same time, he's not afraid to dive headfirst into these challenges. I mean, I think most of us, our instincts are when we feel like, Oh my goodness, I'm, I'm in over my head here. I, I don't know. I can't tell exactly what's going on in this room. That's when we're least prepared. to take on a challenge.
But Naveed has found this balance and I'm super curious as to how he navigates that.
How do you navigate this from just like a confidence perspective? In saying like, okay, um, the technical subject matter, like these folks know way more than I do, but then also I'm relying on their smarts and their know how to go in and get this kind of approval that is... One, a business differentiator, if you can get it, but two, it also means that you have accomplished something that's going to significantly impact people's lives and how disease shows up in the world, right?
So, like, how do you navigate this thing of being like, okay, I'm not going to be this heroic, I know everything kind of leader, and I'm also not going to shy away from some of the greatest challenges that are in my field. Where do you find the confidence?
[00:13:38] Navid Alipour: So I'll make a slight joke about it and then get serious.
There, there was, there was an article I read once somewhere, you've probably seen it, people have seen it. It says the definition of the entrepreneur is someone who's delusional, right? You have to have a certain amount of delusion. To be an entrepreneur, there's a thousand and one reasons for us to fail.
There is a thousand and one reasons for Tesla to have failed, but it didn't. It, you know, came down to the story, infamously, of course, that people know that, um, if it wasn't for Sergey Brin putting in 500, 000 at one point, Tesla might not exist, right? And Elon Musk takes incredible risk where, you know, he put all his money into doing this.
Uh, at some point, I think he said he barely had enough to pay the next month's rent, right? Even though he had sold PayPal. So those are true definitions of, of someone that takes incredible risk. And I think, by the way, this does tie partly into the immigrant story, right? He came from South Africa. Um, you know, my family came from Iran.
I was six years old when we came here. And when you come from a place where your life is on the line, you almost have a different perspective maybe, right? I mean, I was only six years old, but it's almost in your DNA that. Like, your life was at risk and so everything else is easy to a degree, right? So you have to have that level of, you know, I'm going to do this even though there's a thousand and one reasons that it should fail.
But the second that I think gives me a level of confidence with what we're doing is having 100 percent confidence in people at the core that we have because of what they've achieved. And so, when we have a scientist who worked for NASA and for Los Alamos, and when NASA couldn't detect anomalies in space weather better than 65 percent accuracy 20 years ago, they sent these data sets to Stanford, MIT, Carnegie Mellon, UCSD.
No one could do better than 65, 70%. And, you know, our data scientists said 90%. And it's a machine learning algorithm, so they gave more data, and it got better to the tune of 99 percent accuracy. So, I, I have faith. And trust that I know that technology is sound and that we will hire people that are vetted, leverage, and build upon that.
And on the clinical science side, our chief science officer, you know, worked with Craig Vendor at Human Longevity, Inc., where Craig's genome was the first human genome mapped. And HLI attracted a ton of very incredible people. And then she went on to Viome with Naveen Jain, the serial, you know, billionaire entrepreneur and was instrumental in building up Viome before we were, you know, fortunate to have her join us.
And so when I have the confidence in my team, then I can portray that confidence in my storytelling, which is half the job of a CEO is to communicate the story and be confident that what you are saying. Can be achieved in the paths to achieving that and then once you start getting the accolades the FDA clearance first in history The first CPT code in history.
Well, then the results speak for itself And so, you know to a degree success begets success Absolutely, you know not and not just for other people but for ourselves to say, okay, we're not just drinking our own Kool Aid Yeah, we're detecting heart disease in women from their mammogram and no one else in the world is doing that and We can impact tens of millions of women's lives because, sadly, heart disease is called the silent killer amongst women.
And that's part of what I was sharing with you before we started recording on a sad level of someone in our community that, uh, passed.
[00:17:23] Apollo Emeka: I mean, yeah, the impact is, is unbelievable. I, I, could you talk a little bit more about You unfortunately have this example from yesterday of losing someone who is close to you.
But can you talk a little bit more about the underpinning, the underlying motivations? Like you're, you're looking specifically at healthcare. When if you're saying, Hey, I'm a business guy who likes to leverage the kind of smarts of others and the accolades of others to To create a whole that's greater than the sum of the parts.
There's a lot of places that you could have done that. I mean, why healthcare?
[00:17:55] Navid Alipour: That's an important question. You know, when we started Analytics Ventures, we were very much investing and not operational. And, you know, sure, getting on, you know, being on the board and helping companies to the degree that we could.
And I always used to say to CEOs of, you know, startups, whether there are portfolio companies or others, that The CEO is not the boss. The CEO serves at the pleasure of the board. And it's the board and that fiduciary corporate governance responsibility, right? To help drive the company, which is its own entity to the best location and best outcome.
And so I think with that, I always said that, you know, I didn't necessarily say I want to be a CEO. It was a necessity, right? I'd co founded these companies before we raised the current fund. I was on the board and Uh, the board asked me to step in for a variety of reasons, um, and, but I have to say, I feel, and not to be cheesy about it, but I feel like this is the most important thing I've done in my life is to be at the helm of these two companies because healthcare does resonate with me.
I would not have stepped in if it was a sales enablement app or a dating app or deliver pizza to you faster app. I don't think that would have excited me. Fintech, crypto, you name it. Nothing against any of those, that wouldn't have resonated with me. With healthcare, it's, I feel like I can get up every day with an urgency that what we're doing is going to impact someone's life.
And on the family side, um, you know, my, my father's a retired cardiologist, both my brother's a doctor, my wife's dad, her stepdad, her sister. So, healthcare has always kind of been... In my genes, and while I'm not the doctor that is delivering medical care, it's kind of like, I'm not the pilot flying the plane, but if you're air traffic control, you got more lives in your hand than a pilot, right?
And so, so we're, Alex, I'm air traffic control, not the pilot, but by what I'm doing, I'm. Able to impact countless lives.
[00:20:01] Apollo Emeka: It's so awesome. And so, it's so funny because during the show, I always have a prioritize, a leverage, and an execute column where I'm like taking notes on the things that people say that stand out to me as like, Oh, this is a prioritize kind of quality or trait or thought.
This is a leverage one and this is an execute one. And, uh, the, the leverage column is just continuing to stack up. So, uh, it's, it's just really interesting to hear this. Um, and then it sounds like your big, your kind of your big why was almost baked in subliminally through childhood of being able to see, okay, this is what my parents are doing, and this is the impact that they're having on the world.
And now that's going to be my big why too. It, to
[00:20:43] Navid Alipour: a degree it was, I mean, when I, Went to the VC side and started a VC fund, you know, my father didn't understand it. He's like, what are you doing? Yeah, you went to law school. Why are why don't you want to practice law? Right? And like good good Middle eastern family.
You're a doctor, engineer, lawyer, right? And I was like, you know, didn't quite get it but you know, that's where I think by having this background both on the Sure, the upbringing side of, you know, be of service to people, you know, also then the educational side. I think it, you know, gave me a, a different, I won't say unique because there's plenty of, uh, incredible entrepreneurs out there and I'm happy to be doing what I'm doing, but gave me this kind of characteristic and combination to help, again, get these technologies to the point where.
You know, but for us doing this, uh, these companies wouldn't exist. And so it's too important to not fail. There's times where, sure, you'd get down and, uh, you know, you got a door slammed in your face or a no or whatnot. And then someone said they credit you for saving their life three years ago when they got a CureMatch report done and a combination of drugs that we recommended in our report.
That then the oncologist administered, they say saved their life. You have oncologists that say, CureMath changed my therapy decisions. I gave a treatment that, but for that report, I would have not given. I would have never thought of giving Merck's Keytruda drug that was initially meant for lung cancer for this patient that had stomach cancer.
Should
[00:22:26] Apollo Emeka: you follow your passions or should you play it safe? This has been a false dichotomy for as long As I can remember, I firmly believe that following your passions is the safest possible thing that you can do. But most people think, oh, you know, I'm passionate about this, but I need to have a backup plan or I'm passionate about this.
And so I'll do it on the side of this thing that I actually am not passionate about. What kind of sense does that make? We can see here that Naveed is clearly following his passions. And, I mean, passion or not, life is just tough. Business is tough. Careers are tough. But, the difference between following your passions or not is that when you hit those tough spots, are you going to have the energy and the motivation to get back up and go at it again?
Naveed talks about going into these rooms and... Being rejected by these big official boards and being able to dust himself off, rally the team, figure out what they need to do, get back in the room, and get a yes. Now, if you hate what you're doing, it's gonna be really tough to find the energy to do that.
So yeah, they've had some business wins as a result of following. Passions. But, let's see the deeper impact that he made as a result of following his passions.
[00:23:46] Navid Alipour: You know, when we first started CureMatch, it was a former Vietnam vet. He found us, and they literally had given him two weeks to live, um, and he had his lab work from Foundation Medicine, which is owned by Roche, and they do the next gen sequencing, or NGS, you know, for short.
And so he had that at the ready for us, that's our input, and we came out with our report that says these are the combination of drugs that make sense for this patient's cancer, and the doctor said, I would have never thought of that. And so, you know, that's where we use this technology to help prolong lives and save lives, or as oncologists say, increase the PFS and so cancer is not a death sentence, it's something that, You know, people, if not cured of, could live with for decades and decades, just like, you know, HIV and diabetes were, you know, before they were death sentences and not anymore, necessarily.
Yeah.
[00:24:47] Apollo Emeka: Wow. That's incredible. I want to go back to this. I get the delusional part about being an entrepreneur. Trust me, I, I get that one. Um, but there's almost this idea that if you get the right people in the room, you're going to get the right outcomes. That's, there's, I think there's something that you're maybe taking for granted about your own actions or your own abilities, because you're saying like, Oh, we got this person who has done this amazing thing.
And this person who's done this amazing thing. There are all these instances where you can have the right people in the room and still. not get the outcomes. I mean, I don't follow a ton of football, but there are instances where, again, it's like, oh man, this year is going to be great for this team because they have, because all their positions are stacked, right?
But then it just doesn't play out that way, right? Um, ask, um, ask the Broncos. So, so I guess, what is it that you think, you know, you're clearly, you're getting the right people in the room, but you're also doing something that is, again, making the, the whole greater than the sum of the parts. What, what are those things that you think you're doing or thinking?
[00:25:53] Navid Alipour: I wish I had a perfect answer for that, Apollo, but I don't. And using your sports analogy, whether it's now the Los Angeles Chargers, before there was San Diego Chargers, or, or the San Diego Padres now, Uh, I was at Petco Park watching a game on Saturday, and look at this incredible team on paper. Yeah. Uh, I think they have the second largest, you know, dollar amount in what they spent outside of the Yankees, and all this talent, and they like to dance around on the field, but they're not delivering.
Yeah. Yeah. Um, and so people go, why? Why are the potteries not delivering? Right. And there's no, there's no perfect answer for that. And you could say. They don't have the right coach, they don't Right. Have the right management. They could say you're in the right, wrong geography. Right. You know, to switch it to football again.
Um, you know, with the Chargers when they were in, in San Diego, you know, we always said there's too many distractions for them. And if you're in Green Bay, you have nothing else to do. You play football. Right. . And, and whereas in San Diego there's distractions so. Again, just here I am, you know, armchair quarterbacking, but I don't know if there's a perfect answer to that.
I think that as an entrepreneur, as a CEO, you have to have obviously enough confidence in your own abilities and the team to put yourself out there, to be knocked down countless times and get up and do it again. We didn't get our CPT code the first time we were in front of the AMA. Um, you know, we knocked out some of their balls, but they had other questions, so we had to come back.
So two times. We could have quit, but we didn't quit. And so I think that perseverance and that tenacity, I think, are traits that I may have to fault, my wife would say, but I think you have to be tenacious and persistent and believe in what you're doing and that it's, again, Like I said, you, you have to be passionate about it.
If, if it was a dating app or, you know, something, you know, more trivial, I don't think I could have the same tenacity behind
[00:28:10] Apollo Emeka: it. Yeah. It's still, it still feels like there's this, there's this quality that you must not be aware of, because again, I'm thinking about this, right? You get a bunch of people who are at the tops of their field, and now you're saying, I'm going to...
Be tenacious and persevere and have persistence and navigating those people, those personalities, those roles, and, you know, like their own passion, like the things that wake them up in the morning, right? Like that's, you're bringing all of this together in a way that could very easily not lead to success.
And again, like Most businesses are doing some version of this, but it's just an incredibly specific thing to say, Hey, I'm a lawyer, not a doctor, but I'm going to go into healthcare. And not only am I going to go into healthcare and just say like, how do we create, you know, the most efficient patient management system, let's say, right.
We're going to go in and we're going to actually help diagnose diseases and prescribe medicines that no one else would think to prescribe. That's, I mean, that's just, it's, it feels like an incredibly. Challenging thing to do just on its own and then you bring in all of these experts who have their own opinions and experience and things that they're also in uncharted waters.
So I don't know. I'm gonna I'm gonna keep kind of circling back around to this thing of like, what might that thing be that you're doing? Because here's the thing. If there's somebody listening right now, and they're like, Oh, man, that's so cool. Like, I feel like I can do that. I feel like Yeah, I have business knowledge.
I have business expertise. That's great. Let me go put myself in a position where I can surround myself with a bunch of subject matter experts and build a business on it. And I think that the way that you're talking about it, it almost sounds like a get rich quick scheme. And it's like, you know, so I think that there's a nuance to your leadership style, and maybe it's a nuts and bolts thing.
Maybe it's a mindset thing. This is not a slam dunk, people. This is not a slam dunk, what Navid is doing, right? Like, I guess maybe, can I ask you then, when does this not go well? Let's talk about some of the times where you feel like you're knocked down, or what are the, what are the setbacks or the drawbacks?
And when does this not? Not go so well.
[00:30:22] Navid Alipour: Sure. Well, first off, Apollo, I want to say that we've been at this at CureMetrics since 2014. So nine years and change and 2016 at CureMatch. So it's certainly not a gut rich quick scheme and a lot of work gone into it. And there's been so many times, and I think you'll hear this from other entrepreneurs that there have been so many times that we were close to failing.
Um, and you know, whether it was a result that didn't go our way or a financing that didn't close. Yeah. And so you only hear the success stories and of course, yeah, sure you hear the failures too if there's anything, you know, tantalizing about it, but you mostly just hear the success stories. And so I think there is an element there of, it's not.
Easy. If it was easy, everyone would do it. Exactly. If it was easy to say, I'm an entrepreneur, everyone would do it and everyone would be successful. It's not easy. But that's why we do it, because then, if we are successful, we have the financial reward, and we also have given people a service that has made their life better, whether it's in the healthcare sense, or it is a deliver something to you app, right?
It made someone's life more enjoyable. And, and so I think it's really important to emphasize that you have to believe in yourself, obviously, but that's such a bland statement to say. Um, you have to know that you have, there's a competitive advantage that your team has, that you have, that others don't.
And so... You know, one of our, our co founders that I'll mention by name, and your listeners can Google, is a lady by the name of Dr. Rizal Kurzak. That's K U R Z R O C K. Amazing lady, one of the top oncologists in the world. You Google her, you'll find ton of content on her, papers published, videos of her speaking at top conferences around the world on precision medicine and oncology.
And, she's my partner, she's my co founder, she's our board member, she's a world renowned oncologist helping now patients, working with patients every day, and continuing to do research, and works with numerous pharma companies that want her involved. And so, that's where, you know, when we met Dr. Kershrock, by the way, um, so you say necessity is the mother of invention, we'd started CureMetrix, and about a year in, my business partner.
Blaze was diagnosed with cancer and they basically in short said you have four years to live at best But why don't you come back next week for chemotherapy? And he didn't really like the sound of that and so through some serendipity and luck we met dr Kurzrock here in San Diego at the Morris Cancer Center where she was at the time having come here from MD Anderson and Two things came from that meeting one.
He's cancer free because of combination therapies of combining on label and off label treatments So, but for that, he likely would not be with us right now in 2023. He would have been gone before 2019. And two, we started CureMatch with her because we said, Dr. Kurzrock, it's amazing what you have done.
Have you thought of starting a company? And she kind of, she kind of scoffed at us, frankly. She's like, I'm not going to start a company. I'm a, she was running the Precision Medicine Program in Morse Cancer Center. She's like, I'm a doctor. I do research. I see patients. That's my passion. We said, don't quit your job.
Keep seeing patients. Let's start a company together. Let's marry your domain expertise as an oncologist with our AI operational business expertise.
[00:34:10] Apollo Emeka: Oh snap! I think I just figured it out. You can tell I was really pushing him during this conversation like, hey man, what is it? How are you able to be successful amongst these diverse, really brilliant people?
And after reflecting on it, I think that a big part of the success is that there are clear swim lanes. The doctors know their skill sets. They know their expertise. Naveed knows their expertise. The doctors know Naveed's expertise. And so, Naveed's not going to peer into a microscope and say, hey, I think that you should be doing it this way.
And the people on the team are not going to cross over into his lane and start prescribing, pun intended, actions for him to take on the business front. And this is really tough. In businesses where people have similar skill sets, on teams where everybody kind of has similar skill sets, it's easy to cross over into each other's lanes.
But when the skill sets are so disparate, it's really hard to cross over into each other's lanes. So that means that you can be pushing as hard as you possibly can in your lane. And the biggest thing that you have to worry about is, how are these actions going to impact And most leaders and teams get caught up arguing over the same data points or decisions or forks in the road because they have similar skill sets, perspectives, and backgrounds.
That's not happening here. So, what this calls out to me is that if you are on a team that's pushing really hard, To accomplish a big thing, to climb a big tall mountain, you've got to have clear lanes, roles, and responsibilities so that each person can push as hard as they possibly can in their own lane, not only without stepping on each other, but in ways that are wildly supportive of each other.
I think that's a big piece of it, folks. All right, let's get back to the interview.
[00:36:10] Navid Alipour: We'll put in the first money, we'll put our money where our mouth is, and we'll build. The company, and you guide us as a co founder, as a board member, as an advisor, to ask the right questions, get them, talk to the right people, vet the team so that we don't make mistakes that otherwise would have been fatal.
And so that when I say I'm the dumbest guy in the room, trust me, I always feel that way when I'm around.
[00:36:34] Apollo Emeka: Maybe, maybe most humble. I don't know about dumbest, but probably most humble. Um,
[00:36:40] Navid Alipour: in the room with her, uh, other rooms that, uh, if you're the smartest guy in the room, run the other way.
[00:36:49] Apollo Emeka: Yeah, agreed. You know, I've been thinking a lot about confidence lately and my background, um, is in army special forces and there's.
A lot of, I, I think there's a misconception around the special operations mindset is that, you know, that they're, that seals and green berets, that we're, we're always, um, we're always confident where, I mean, I guess I should say we always believe we're going to win and we're not okay with losing. And to me, you know, the strongest kind of confidence isn't the one that says.
I'm gonna win, no matter what. It's, it's like, uh, it's the kind of confidence that says I kind of don't care if I win on a day to day basis. Like, I don't care, I, well, I don't care if I lose, I should say. I'm not gonna be destroyed if I lose or I get bad feedback or, you know, I get, uh, I hit some kind of a setback, um, I'm going to learn what I need to learn from that, and I'm confident enough to sit in that failure, to sit in that setback, and learn what I need to learn from it, so that way I'll never get, you know, it's fool me once, I'm never going to fail in this way again.
And now, tomorrow, I'm ready to fail in a new and different way on a higher mountaintop, right? Um, and so it sounds like that's really, uh, your confidence, it sounds like it's It's like, yeah, we want to win, but we understand that winning is a combination of, of small wins and small losses. And you learn from both of them and you keep, and you keep it pushing.
[00:38:24] Navid Alipour: I could not agree more, Apollo. And one thing you may not know is I live here in Coronado in San Diego. And we're Fighter Town USA, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I have, you know, former Navy SEAL as a neighbor here, retired general there, or admiral there. And so hats off to you and everything you've done for the country.
And it takes a special person, truly, to do what you guys do day in and day out. And it's not
[00:38:49] Apollo Emeka: easy. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Well, do you have anything that you... Would like to share as we close. Yeah,
[00:38:58] Navid Alipour: I would say if anyone has, uh, interest in what we're doing from the business level, you go to our website, curemetrics.
com, curematch. com, or AIMetGlobal is just the DBA name. You go to AIMetGlobal, it'll drive to either one. Our contact info's there. I'm easy to find on LinkedIn or Twitter or elsewhere. So if anyone has an interest in any way, whether on the business side or on the personal side, because they themselves or a loved one is dealing with cancer, please reach out.
We're trying to get the word out. And the second thing I would leave, say, is outside of anything we do, I'm a huge advocate for Get a second opinion for any major medical advice or treatment you're about to get, whether it's cancer, heart disease, back surgery. Please get a second opinion, because, again, with all love for the medical profession, and again, all my family, my wife's, but doctors are people, and there are good ones and bad ones, and mistakes can be made, and there are different opinions.
It's not just, uh, you know, one way or another. And, and so... Yeah, get a second opinion before going through a major medical procedure. That's
[00:40:11] Apollo Emeka: such valuable advice, and yeah, my mom was complaining about abdominal pain for I think probably around 14 months before they finally ran the test that showed that she had really advanced pancreatic cancer.
Um, when I was 17 and she was just 57 and she passed away four months later. Um, but that second opinion piece, because she was like, we're, I mean, my family is not one to go to the doctor and she kept going back like, no, no, no, this is not right. This is not right. But she kept going back to the same place.
So I think, you know, to your point, had she gone somewhere else and got a second or even a third opinion, things might've played out differently. So thank you for that message and thank you so much for your time and for sharing. And I suspect that what's going to happen is sometime over the course of the next days, maybe, maybe it's days, maybe it's weeks, maybe it's months.
You're like, man, I got to hit up Apollo and get back on the show because I think I boiled down the secret sauce to, to being the, uh, you know, to being surrounded by all these smart people and being able to turn a business around out of it. Um, because again, like doing what you're doing, business is not easy.
But also navigating the complexities and the personalities and the accolades of others and really leveraging that into a specific impact in the world that also is generating, you know, business outcomes. That's a fine needle to thread, my friend.
[00:41:34] Navid Alipour: Well, thank you for the kind words, Apollo. And again, we keep getting up and fighting the good fight.
And that's it. And that's all we can do. Put one foot in front of the other and And eventually we'll score a touchdown.
[00:41:47] Apollo Emeka: I love it. Well, thank you so much for sharing your, your stories and your experience, and we'll have to have you on the show again. Would love to, would love to come back. Awesome. Thanks, Navid.
Thank you so much, Navid. Man, what an amazing feat he has accomplished. And now it's time for everyone's favorite part of the show. Bumper number. The takeaways! Alright, from a prioritized perspective, Naveed says to find something that you are passionate about. Something that's going to get you out of bed every day saying, Oh yeah, I want to take on this challenge.
He said, you know, a dating app or getting pizza to you faster. That doesn't really light me up, but you know what does? Health outcomes. That lights me up. So, what is... Your passion. And if that passion is something that maybe diverts from what you were trained in, or what your degree is in, or what your previous experience is in, that is okay.
And the faster you can double down on that, the better. Another kind of practical thing that he says, from a prioritized standpoint, is to find these external milestones. So getting these designations from the American Medical Association, or the FDA, serve as External milestones that are clear cut. You can tell if you hit them and achieve them or not.
Now let's dive into leverage, which as we know from his score, he is a high leverage individual. First, he says. Don't be afraid to be the dumbest person in the room. Now, I know what you're thinking. That dude sounds pretty smart and I'm with you. And so imagine the other people that must be in the room with him.
He is surrounding himself with high caliber people. Leverage and lean on other people's accolades. So bring people into your company who have done stuff and have a reputation that you can lean on and leverage. And along those same lines... Leverage the accolades that you gain within your company. You know, it's so easy as an entrepreneur or even any kind of business team to just keep putting one foot in front of the other and then you hit some milestone and you have a victory and then you just keep looking towards the next one.
But Navid sounds like he's done a really good job of celebrating those victories and then using them as launchpads to the next milestone. From the execute perspective. He talked about how important it is to have perseverance and tenacity to when you get knocked down or you know you get some feedback or you hit a failure to be able to get right back in the game and learn and move forward.
He was also surprised that in one of his achievement index scores, he had zero execute. He's like, wait, I execute stuff, but I am executing to help other people execute. And guess what people, that's what we call leverage. All right. Well, thank you so much again, Navid, for being on the show. Thank you all for listening.
And I will see you out on the mountain. Remember you. can find out what your Achievement Index is by going to www. theachievementindex. com. Take the assessment. Takes about 15 20 minutes. Make sure you're in a nice, calm state of mind in a quiet place. And you can find out your own Achievement Index and figure out how you match up against our guests.
I'm Dr. Apollo Omeka. If you like the podcast, please rate us on whatever platform you're listening and remember to share it with your Thanks. See you next time.