Founder's Story - From $5 in His Pocket to Billion-Dollar Moonshots—Naveen Jain on Purpose, Profit, and Reinventing Healthcare | Ep 259 with Naveen Jain Founder of Viome

Episode Date: August 21, 2025

We begin with the myth of becoming a billionaire and land on Naveen Jain’s first principle: wealth is a byproduct of helping a billion people. From there he traces the mindset behind Viome—naming the company and mission directly—arguing that healthcare should move from clinics to homes, guided by AI and deep molecular readouts. Instead of DNA, which doesn’t change when you gain weight or get depressed, Viome measures RNA to see what’s actually happening inside the body and then turns those signals into precise food and supplement guidance. Jain challenges fatalism with an Eastern-philosophy lens—events aren’t good or bad until you label them—and shows how that stance fuels resilience through the entrepreneurial heartbeat’s ups and downs. Key Discussion Points:Jain demystifies “overnight success,” likening real entrepreneurship to a living heartbeat: the highs and lows prove you’re alive. He reframes failure as experimental outcomes that simply dictate the next move, and he illustrates how asking different questions unlocks different industries. With Viome, he asked why the field obsessed over DNA when chronic disease reflects gene expression; that shift, plus licensing biodefense tech from Los Alamos, enabled large-scale RNA testing and one-million-person datasets. He explains why there is no universal “healthy” food—what heals one person can harm another—and why personalization beats pop-nutrition rules. He also shares how perceived liabilities, like his accent, became superpowers for presence and clarity, and why founders must make others comfortable while staying anchored to purpose over ego. Takeaways:Impact precedes income; aim to improve a billion lives and the valuation follows. Treat life and company-building as experiments rather than verdicts, and resist labeling moments as wins or losses. In health, test—don’t guess—because the body’s changing biology lives in RNA and the microbiome’s activity, not static DNA. Personalization turns farms into pharmacies, with food and targeted nutrients prescribed to the person, not the crowd. Closing Thoughts:Jain leaves us with an operator’s mantra—do good and do well—and a provocation: if illness can be optional, founders should build for optionality at scale. The next chapter of healthcare, as Viome envisions it, lives at home, guided by AI, measured by RNA, and delivered by the most personal medicine of all—what you eat. Get more leads and grow your business. Go to https://www.pipedrive.com/founders and get started with a 30 day free trial. Ditch the other hiring sites, and let ZipRecruiter find what you’re looking for — the needle in the haystack. Try it FOR FREE at this exclusive web address: ZipRecruiter.com/WORK. FOUNDER10 - Save 10% on your first six months of a Viome Health Solutions Plan, including Full Body Health Plans, Gut Health Plans, and Oral Health Plans. https://www.viome.com/plans Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Today's episode is sponsored by Pipe Drive, the number one CRM tool for small to medium businesses. I am excited to share more about them later in the episode. So, Naveen, this is my first question because you didn't want to know, and I love that, but I want to be a billionaire. How can I be a billionaire? And is it just about focusing on money? So first of all, making money is simply a byproduct of doing things that help other people's life. So if you can build any product, any service that helps a billion people live a better life, you can create a $100 billion company.

But you never wake up in the morning and say, what should I do to create a billion dollar company? It is like having an orgasm. If you focus on it, you're never going to get it. So just enjoy the process. I've never heard that before, said that way. and I love it. So you came to America with $5. What was the moment that you realized

or you said to yourself, I will never be poor again? You never, honestly, anyone who tells you that there was a particular movement that changed their life, it's really true. It's like telling someone

that it is the last straw that broke the camel's back. It is really all the straws that came before that is what breaks the camels back. So our life is really these strengths of experience. And every single moment in your life makes you a different person.

Every conversation, every interaction changes who you become. And one day you wake up and someone who has not seen you for 20 years, he said, oh, my God, you're such a different person. And you live with a person like your spouse. And you say, you're still the same moron that I married 20 years ago. So how do you deal with that? Because I've seen that too, right? You know, you go back to see people that you grew up with and you realize you have nothing to say

or even maybe because of your success and fame and notoriety, they just don't want to talk to you anymore. Well, you know, to be honest with you, you can't control what other people think. You can't control what other people say. You can control the world around you. But what you can control is how you react to it. So it's your job to make them feel comfortable.

It's your job to make them feel that you are still the same person and you still care about the same thing and your friendship still matters. I mean, the fact is, when I came here, the people I knew at that time are still the same people I know today. There's nothing had changed. This idea, Dan, that I have heard time and time again,

that money makes you an asshole. I can tell you that's completely not true. You have to be an asshole to begin with and money simply allows you to become who you were to begin with. And if you were a good human being, money doesn't make you a bad person. If you were a terrible human being, money just simply allows you to be terrible now. Amplifies, right?

What do you think that is the biggest misconception around either A, founders who have created billion-dollar companies, unicorns, whatever, or just billionaires in general? And they say money doesn't make people what they are. The misconception, I think it's a common thing. Everyone knows there's no such thing as overnight success. And behind every success, these years, if not decades of hard work that goes into it. And one day you wake up and say, oh, my God, I can't believe that company is so successful without realizing. Someone has been slogging away day out, right?

People think the success is a straight line forward. And more of us who have been a founder realized, as a founder, you live like you live like you're alive. and how do you know you're alive? You have a heartbeat. What does the heartbeat look like? It goes up and down and up and down. When it's smooth, you're dead. So the day you find yourself living a smooth life,

you're chosen to live a life of a dead person. These ups and down tells you that you're still alive. When you're on top of that beat, you always never become too cocky because you know the winter is coming. And when you are at the bottom of the beat, you never ever worry because you know the next beat is going to be the update.

I always think to myself that, you know, it's not that people can't be an entrepreneur. Anyone can, but I think if you're going to be successful, it's a very small, because of those ups and downs, it's so hard. So what was for you, obviously, you know, building billion dollar companies and really being at the forefront, I'm sure you've had some dark moments, like you said, those down moments. Maybe what was a moment for you or maybe you were like, I'm just going to give up. This is too much. You know, to be honest with you, this is one of the things that come from my Eastern philosophy.

When things happen, it is when we label them as good or bad is when you start to feel good or bad. When things happen, you simply say that happened and what am I supposed to do with that now, right? So think of it that everything you do in life is an experiment and there is no success and there is no failure. An experiment has an outcome A or outcome B. When outcome A happens, you do C and D. When outcome B happens, you do E and F. And when you do, you know, each one of them allows you take the next step. And that's what entrepreneurship is all about.

You take the next step. It gives you two more possibilities and you take the next route and gives you two more possibilities and you keep moving forward. And that is really what the life is all about. There is no up and down. There is no success. There is no failure. And I can give you the stories in every culture.

There is a story about, you know, do you think it's good or bad? So in Indian culture, there's a story about a king and his wise man. So they go out on a forest to hunt. And the king falls down from his horse and breaks his arm. One of the biggest game changers I've seen for founders isn't another pitch deck, another tool or even another investor. It's how you manage sales. And I'll be real, when we first started, we were getting leads, we were getting business, but the pipeline was so messy. Leads were falling through the cracks. We weren't following up.

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Over 100,000 companies are already using it, and you can try it right now. Go to pipe drive.com slash founders for a 30-day free trial. no credit card, no commitment. Just head to pipedrive.com slash founders and see why I trust it every day to grow my business. And the wise man say, so that happened, and, well, it's probably good. And the king is so angry and says, what do you mean so it is good? And he puts the wise man into the dungeon.

He said, now let me show you what that is, what that good means. And he said, so that happened, it's good. And now the king goes off to the forest again. and goes hunting. This time he gets caught by the native tribe and they catch him and they want to sacrifice him. So they get him ready for sacrifice and the priest comes and priest says, let him go. Why? We don't sacrifice a broken man in front of the god. We only sacrifice a man that's not broken. Let him go. He's a broken owl. He has a broken owl. He goes home and he goes to the wise man and he says, oh my God, you were so right, that was so good. And that's a good. And that

you saved my life. The wise men say, no, I'm so glad it was so good that you put me in a dungeon because you saved my life. If I was with you, they would have sacrificed me. Right. The point is there is no such thing good or bad. Good or bad you may not know for years to come. So when the moment happens, you believe the universe is your friend and everything that's happening is for your good and you keep moving forward. You know, something I gathered from what you just said was enjoying how you feel in those moments because i think for me i get trapped in the feeling right it's not necessarily what's happening it's the feeling anxiety fear if you tell yourself if your mind says you know what that fear is actually a nice feeling it feels good then it feels good it doesn't

create anxiety and i'm sure yeah i've here we've had some guests on talk about how anxiety and all this stuff can cause like really difficult you know our body can just die basically from stress and everything that could, you know, and it creates, and it creates a loop that allows you to spiral down because just by labeling that this is bad thing, just simply labeling it bad, it allows you to spiral down. If you say, well, universe is my friend. If this happened, it's probably for my good. Suddenly, you say, oh my God, look at all the goodness that's coming out of that experience that I had. The girlfriend that I thought that broke up with me was going to be out of my life.

And I'm thinking, oh, my God, what a nightmare I avoid it. That is true. That is true. So since you're talking about, you know, somebody breaking their arm, I'm very fascinated with how AI and emerging technologies are transforming health care. It's one of the most exciting things I'm finding when it comes to technology. And you said illness can be optional. So what is, what does that even mean?

because I imagine that people are shocked when you say that. And is there something that you're finding that is shocking about what we can solve? Absolutely. So first of all, Dan, we all believe being healthy is a choice. You agree, right? If being healthy is a choice, don't you think the reverse of that? That means being sick is also a choice. And that's what I mean.

What if the illness was optional? And so that means is, can we provide people? people with insights and information of why, what is going on in their body, why it is happening, and what can they do about it so that they don't have that particular disease. Now, it's up to you to follow the guidance and not to follow the guidance. That's what I mean. Illness is optional. You tell people, smoking is bad. And you take the thing and people say, I'm going to light up the cigarette and smoke. Well, that's your choice. So being sick is a totally a choice you make. So the interesting thing about being a founder is your liabilities generally tend to be your assets.

And I'm going to expand on that because if this is one concept, if I can teach entrepreneurs, that would change their life. Asking you as an entrepreneur, the problems you solve are the questions you ask. So what questions are you asking that no one else is asking by simply changing the question, it changes the problem, right? So let me give you two examples. started Viome to actually say, look, what if we can actually understand what changes in the human body at the onset and during the progression of these chronic diseases, if we can find out what happens, then we will be able to diagnose them early, prevent them from happening, and God forbid, outright reverse them. But what I noticed was that every single company in the industry,

they were experts and they were looking at your DNA and your genes. And I thought, oh my God, Why is it? I am not a scientist. My first question was, does your DNA change when you develop a chronic disease? So, for example, you do my DNA test, and I gain 200 pounds. Has my DNA changed? No. Now I have diabetes. Has my DNA changed? No.

Now I have depression. Has my DNA changed? No. Then I get a heart disease. My DNA does not change. Then I die. And you look at my DNA 100 years after die. It's an identical DNA.

So if DNA can't even tell you you're dead or alive, how will it ever tell you you're becoming healthier or sicker? So I realize the things that are changing is your gene expression or your RNA, but you're not your DNA. So why not measure RNA? You know what hiring feels like? Like searching for a needle in a haystack. You post a job, get flooded with resumes,

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get a quality candidate within the first day. Try it free at ZipRecruiter. dot com slash work one more time ziprecruiter.com slash work zip recruiter the smartest way to hire and that was my number one breakthrough number one breakthrough was I started to look at what is happening in the human body and it turns out then that 99% of all the genes in our body don't come from a mom and dad they come from these microbes that live in our gut in a mouth and all over us 100 trillion microbes and I start Googling, Parkinson's and microbiome, heart disease in microbiome, depression and microbiome, it turns out that microbiome is more than all these different diseases. And then it occurred to me

there are 10 companies doing microbiome testing. And then why is this problem not getting solved? But turns out every microbiome company until we started and to date, every microbiome company simply tells you what organisms are in your gut. And we thought, wait a sec, it doesn't matter what organisms are there, what matters is, what are they doing? Are they doing good things? Are they doing bad things? It's like in my mind these microbiome is like a tiny, tiny people. If you put them in a good environment, good behavior, you put them in the bad environment, the bad behavior. So why not focus on what they are doing, not who they are? And that changes everything. And all I had to do was find the technology that can allow me to do that. So not being an expert, my first thing was, why not do the RNA

testing and every expert told me it can't be done as an entrepreneur i don't know it can or cannot be done i'm thinking if that's what we need to do we're going to find a way to do that turns out at los alamos national lab they were working on a bioweapon and biodefense project actually trying to understand what these organisms do and how they interact with the human body to create antidote for biological bomb guess what i took that technology exclusive license started while eight years later brother We have now analyzed one million people and collected over 100 quadrillion data. And when you do a test, I take a split of your saliva, four drops of your fingerprint blood, and a touch of your stool. And I analyzed for 100 million biomarkers, not 100 biomarkers, 100 million biomarkers.

I can tell you now everything that's happening in your body, your biological age, your cognitive health, your heart health, your immune health. But more importantly, now I look at this stuff and that's happening in your body and I tell you why it is happening. So Dan says, look, I'll have constipation for a long time. What should I do? And my answer is, I don't know. I analyze your body and I say the reason you have constipation is you have a high methane gas that's slowing the mortality down and this is what you can do. Or do you have a low butreid or do you have a low sulfide or do you have a high bile acid or do you have a low serotonin? So once we know the underlying root cause, then we can tell you what to do about that. And so what we do is we tell you, don't eat avocado right now, Dan,

because your uric acid production is too high, you're going to get up gut. Or don't eat spinach or almonds because your oxalates are too high. Or don't eat broccoli because your sulfide is too high. But you can eat red meat if you want because coline and carnitin in the red meat is not microbiome is not making TMA, that your liver is not condominant to TMAO, which causes the heart disease. So we can tell you what foods to eat and why and give you a science paper for it,

what foods not to eat and why and give you a science paper for it. Then we tell you every nutrition your body is lacking what mitamin, minerals, herbs, and we custom make it for you. We make you personalized probiotics. We give you personalized oral loz and this. We make a personalized toothpaste.

And then you follow that, did double-blinded placebo-controlled studies that shows 64% of the people who had IVS, 15% of us suffer from it. Sixty-four percent of the people in 90 days became healthy compared to 10% on placebo. People who were pre-diabetic, their A1C came down by 0.42 in 90 days from pre-diabetic they became healthy. Now imagine depression and anxiety, we were talking about anxiety, down by over 70% in the people in the intervention group compared to the 28% on placebo. So now imagine a person who had no knowledge of the science and biology, simply asking a different question as a founder, putting together, assembling a team of experts and challenging

them to do the things they thought was not possible. Eight years later, we have helped a million people live healthier and longer. Now, we are just beginning, right? Imagine what you can do. The second thing is, my liability was what? I am born in India. I speak with a thick Indian accent. Everyone thought I should learn to speak just like everyone else. And my thinking was, no. That is how I control the room I go walk into.

If I'm in the room, you can't be multitasking and make any sense of what I'm saying. So you have to give me 100% of your attention. That is my asset now. That when I walk into the room, everyone gives me 100% of this. attention. So my liabilities become my asset. Hey, I like that. I've tried to do a British accent. I've tried to do other accents. It sounds terrible, by the way. So I'm curious, based on this data that you've seen, what would you say is the biggest lie that we've been told about our bodies and how is science and the things that you're doing proving it wrong?

So number one thing we were told that these are the food, the broccoli, the spinach. Remember that pop I told you, the spinach is good for everyone. one should take spinach, right? What we are, what we learn is there's no such thing as universal healthy food. A food that's good for one person may not be good for another person. What we find is 45% of the people are harmed by eating spinach because of the oxalates degradation. 42% of the people are harmed by eating broccoli and cabbage and Brussels sprout. Think about that. 37% of the people are harmed by, for eating avocado. This is what, was, something I would have never thought is basically we all knew what Hippocrates says 2500 years ago.

All diseases begin in the gut. Let food be thy medicine. Let thy medicine be the food. And one man's food is another man's poison. That's it. I mean, that's really what we learned. There is no such thing as universal healthy food. There is no such thing as universal healthy supplements. So people are saying everyone should take NAD. Guess what? Unless, your name is everyone, just don't do it because NAD can be good for some people or NAD can actually cause the progression of cancer, right? So don't take these things because they are medicine. You won't take a medicine just because. So don't think of food and supplements as anything but a medicine. So test, don't guess. Test don't guess. I feel like I need to throw out everything I've

known. Like everything I've known just needs to be thrown into the trash and I need to do this test. My final question for you, and I love, I'm like blown away. We need like three hours of our time to keep going. But based on what you know about technology, advancements in technology, you've done so many different industries. If you had to start over tomorrow with something totally brand new and you were going to build a totally brand new billion dollar company, what would it be? Look at any problem today you see that is impacting. a billion people, 100 billion people. If you can solve that problem, you have a massive company, right?

So you look at energy, you look at food, you look at agriculture. It doesn't matter which industry, healthcare, is a $4 trillion economy just in US alone. Every one of these companies, every one of these things we call social problems, are the entrepreneurs waiting for some entrepreneur to solve them. If you want to do a small good in the world, you do a non-profit. If you want to do a large good in the world, you do for-profit company because profit is the engine that allows you to do more good in this world. So do good and do well. That is my philosophy.

And I really believe in the next five years that healthcare will be delivered at home using AI because they will know more about your internals of the body using the test like Y home. And they will use AI to tell you exactly what to do that your doctors will know. So the healthcare will be delivered at home And the pharmacies are going It's not going to be the pharmacies that deliver the medicine It's going to be the farms that deliver the medicine So the medicines of the future are going to come from farm, not a pharmacy Do good, sorry, say it one more time

Doing good and doing well Doing good and doing well I love that. This has been amazing The farm is the pharmacy Don't worry when I quote this I'm going to put your name on there I swear. If people want to get in touch with you, they obviously, I mean, everyone, like you said, a billion people, they need this. 8 billion people, 6 billion people. How can they do so? Please go to YM.com, V as in Victor, I-O-M-E.com.

The reason I'm spelling is because people from India can't pronounce the word V. So I always say, V as in Victor, I-O-M-E.com. And please go do the test. It will help you. It will help your family. And it will help the billions of people live a better life. So please spread the word. The next time we do an interview, I'm going to first talk about what came about from this. And I'm going to do a follow-up every week. How is that?

This is going to be. I'm fascinated because I got a lot of stomach problems and I got a lot of problems. That maybe that's why I was negative before we talk. But now I don't have problems because I'm enjoying the ride and my mind is switched now. So thank you for that. I needed this conversation today. Oddly enough, but this has been amazing. Viome.

volume. Everyone needs it. Go and get it. But I'm super inspired by what you've done. And thank you for joining us today on Founder's Story. First of all, Dan, I want to thank you for two things. Thank you for doing what you do, because stories of every founder inspires other people to go out and solve bigger and bigger problem. So what you're doing, I want to, my heads off to you because you inspire everyone to go out and solve a massive problem. And that means, humanity will be better because of every single founder who goes out and solves a problem. You might be the kindest, most humble person I've ever had a chance to speak to. That's amazing.

You know, thank you. You got to come back. In a couple months, you're coming back. Promise you, promise you that.