UChicago founder goes $15,000 in debt to do tangible good
An interview with Perspective Health's Nick Kovalsky
Nick is a former UChicago pre-med undergrad and Army medic who dropped out to build Perspectives Health.
This interview is lightly edited for clarity.
Doing tangible good
Diego Scanlon: Nick, welcome and thank you for coming. I always start off with a question that is definitely vague and broad, but it’s intentionally that way, so interpret it however you want. What led you here, and where is here?
Nick Kovalsky: Right now, we’re at the University of Chicago at Botany Pond. It’s been closed for most of my time here, so it’s good to see it open. But what led me here?
I moved 17 times as a kid. I never knew what I wanted to do in life, but I knew that I wanted to do something big and I knew I wanted to help people. I’ve spent most of my life debating what helping people really means, and every time I tried to get to the first principles of doing good, I realized that things could always be interpreted by somebody as bad. But I decided that the most tangible good I could do was saving someone’s life or helping someone stay alive. So, after struggling in high school having moved 17 times, I ended up joining the military out of high school to try and do that. I enlisted as a combat medic and thought I would figure out if I enjoyed the reality of doing that, as opposed to the theory, and I found out that I did. But I found that I didn’t want to be doing that for the US military. There’s a lot of awesome career paths, but I think I realized that I didn’t want to be serving a government or anyone that was making decisions that could impact me in that sort of capacity.
So I ended up getting out of the military to try going pre-med. I thought I could open my own practice and try to help as many people as I could just stay alive, the most tangible good I could understand. It turns out that in order to get into a good med school, which will allow you to help more people, you need really good extracurriculars. So, I ended up trying to find people on campus that believed in the same sort of concept as me. I found a student organization called the UChicago Harm Reduction Project which was focusing on distributing Narcan for people overdosing – people are overdosing, we could stop that, and we would be saving someone’s life, which was the message I stood for.
So I started working on this project, teaching classes, and helping pick Narcan distributions. I soon found that the person running the project, Eshan, was doing all sorts of other cool projects that I agreed with and so I got heavily involved in them. I soon found myself joining him in Berea, Kentucky, in the Appalachian Mountains, where there wasn’t a government supplying and pushing different resources to help people after the opioid pandemic and Covid. So we brought our supplies and resources down there and ended up focusing on a housing transition program to help people get off the street and get whatever services they needed. I got to take in, instead of just the first principle of saving someone’s life, how to help turn it around for the first time. I thought a lot about how my life had turned around, now that I was at a good school and doing good things, and I realized that this was the adventure that I wanted to go on.
I also enjoyed seeing something scale, especially when it started from nothing. Eshan and the other leaders of the Project ended up raising over $30,000 and rehoming over 40 people at this point, which was more individual good in a short amount of time than I perceived possible. It caused me to readjust my expectations of what was possible and I realized that scaling a system that would really help people was the best way I could spend my time. Also having been someone who grew up poor but around wealthy people all the time, the idea of making money and setting up my own family for security along the way became enticing, which kind of led me to start a company.
Eventually, as all the stories go about starting a company, you realize that you have to do something insane to get going, which led us to drop out and go into credit card debt. I hit minus $15,000 at one point in order to get this off the ground, to get investors, and get a team going. But it was an awesome journey and we’re back on the UChicago campus surrounded by awesome people supporting us.
DS: I want to go back to the idea that seems to be the root of all the things you do, which is doing tangible good. Why is that the leading value in your life? Has it always been that way or when did it start?
NK: To my understanding, It’s always been that way. I’ve gone very deep in my mind to try and understand it, but I’ve heard stories since I was like six or seven that I would get groups of kids together to fight boys that were older than us. I guess what I’ve always seen very clearly is that the world is happening and you’re just an individual component in it. You can impact it in a way that makes it better, or you can do things that make it worse. I’ve always wanted to be on the side of making it better. I’ve also moved around a lot and experienced a lot of pain – being an outsider, not being connected to people. Just knowing what it was like to suffer made me never want anyone else to feel that way.
The path to Perspectives
DS: Let’s now connect the manifestations of that value together. I think we can do that by looking at the transition between one experience and the next, or how a particular experience influenced the way you think about Perspectives now – so two ways you can take that question. Maybe we can start with you working in the ER in Korea or as a medic in the Army.
NK: It was as simple as what an ER medics stood for, but I will say I was not in a position with many options at the time. I had spent most of my high school just having a good time and rebelling against the system that was school. (laughs) I didn’t believe in school. At first, I think it started off as an ego thing, that I could connect the dots and understand first principles better than my teachers. But then it turned into a love for hanging out with the people I was hanging out with, and that became infinitely more appealing to me. But there aren’t many options for a kid with no family money and a 2.1 high school GPA. After about a year of struggling, (laughs) I actually played competitive League of Legends during this time, but after that year of struggling, I decided that it was time to really do something with my life.
My sister was trying to join the Air Force Academy at the time, and I had been talking to her a lot about those options, but I kept telling her over and over again that I didn’t want to join a place that was about killing people. She said “no, it’s not like that” and I said “but it is.” But she eventually made the point that there are a lot of other jobs that aren’t about killing people. At first I was really interested in being a Coast Guard rescue diver under the DOD, helping people on our soil and oceans. But the wait time for that was a year, and I really wanted to get going. So I stepped into an army recruiting station and told them where I was mentally, and they said I could be shipped out in three days if I wanted to be a medic. I went home, watched one YouTube video about being an Army medic, and said, “I think I could do this.” So I did and got shipped off.
DS: Do you think that experience changed the way you think about Perspectives now? Or was it just one experience in a whole line of experiences?
NK: Absolutely. I think I got to see the world from so many different perspectives. (laughs) There you go, the word Perspectives. There was a point in my life where my family did have money, and a point where we had no money. There was a point where we almost went homeless, and a point where I was surrounded only by more elitist people. To go from these experiences, and being in the army with working class people with different types of mentalities, travelling the world, that more than anything shaped my perspective. But I also saw people work really hard and believe in different messages, which stays in my mind too.
DS: You said that high school wasn’t the thing that you were most focused on, and eventually you came back to school because you wanted to go into medicine. Can you talk more about that decision to go back to school and pursue pre-med? What was that choice like at the time?
NK: I really want to scale helping people. The options I saw were: I could either become a higher rank in my position, and I didn’t really like the outcome of that; I could go into special operations, but I didn’t want to be tied to the military in that sort of capacity anymore; or I could go pre-med, which seemed to make the most sense for me. Obviously I still had worries about whether or not I could do the school aspect of it, because I had never done it before. But I had belief that I was capable enough from the result I saw of me trying in the military, so I went with it.
DS: You briefly talked about the Harm Reduction Project at UChicago, but could you talk a bit more about how that specifically led to the formation of Perspectives?
NK: I realized that I worked really well with Eshan Dosani, the founder of UChicago Harm Reduction Project, who’s now one of my co-founders. I love the work, seeing real good, and I loved how fast we could create things. I think everybody lives in their mind with what is possible, and we decided to live for a while on let’s find out, instead of just thinking about it. We saw that we could do real things, that we were learning faster, and that we could repeat processes which meant that the growth was exponential. Once you get over hurdles that are hard, you live with the knowledge of how to do so. It showed me that if we just went out and did the things that were hard, and just got over them, we would be able to do really big things, and that excited me.
DS: Why do you think that you’re someone who puts things out into the world? You mentioned that you didn’t want to just keep ideas in your heads, that you wanted to go and do it. Not everyone does that – some people just let ideas sit in their head and don’t act on it. So why do you act on these ideas? Maybe what you just said about learning is your answer to this question.
NK: My life forced me to learn how to do that. Moving a bunch of times as a kid, it’s a lot. If you want to have friends and survive, you have to just get over it and start talking to people all the time. But I think the biggest takeaway I had was to just start small and grow bigger. In order to go from the situation where I was divorced and out of money and had no idea how I was going to survive during that year of time I talked about earlier, the only way out was to simply begin. I didn't need to have a grand plan, I just needed to have action. You then see for yourself the tangible results you’re capable of producing and what you’re capable of doing under different timeframes, but you have to begin. There’s a lot of people here that do action, and if you just start with those people, you can see how you’ll be able to work together.
DS: I want to start talking about Perspectives, but I think there might be one experience before that would give helpful context, which is you working at a recovery center.
NK: The recovery center came about after me and Eshan had been working to help people get into treatment during street outreach in Chicago. One of the places we had partnered with was the Above and Beyond Family Recovery Center. They had a very unique first principles style of addiction recovery, and this was super intriguing to me because my mom is an addict, she would say that herself. I have thought deeply for a lot of years if the systems that she was going through were the right systems. And it felt to me, as an outsider, that other people weren’t thinking that way. But when I came across this recovery center, they were thinking this way, and I was excited by that. So having done some projects with them, when it was time for my first college internship, I said that I just wanted to be around people who think about things differently and who are really trying to help with a new approach. So I ended up interning there, and that gave me some unique insight on what it meant to try turning a theory of how things should be into reality.
Pivoting and web extensions
DS: Let’s get into Perspectives now. I think your current product is the result of a pivot. Can you talk about the original thesis behind Perspectives, what the product was, and how you decided that you needed to pivot?
NK: Eshan was working at the White House for his summer internship, and he came across an application for the National Institute of Drug Abuse Startup Competition. We decided to put a team together and enter it. While I was working there, the most interesting thing I noticed was they had all this data from different systems and processes, but nobody was using the data to figure out the best treatments. I had seen over and over again people go into class for treatment, not vibe with the teacher at all, and just walk out of class right then and there. So the idea became to use this data to match the therapeutic modalities that these teachers taught to patient profiles, creating a model to predict what teachers, groups, and treatment types they should be going into. This is very difficult to build, and I think it’s also super difficult to sell. People like making treatment plans with their providers. I do think that in the future we will have the model that I’m talking about. However, that wasn’t the place to get wedged. And I think a lot of getting started is just getting started – what can you do now? A lot of people have these grand ideas, like in politics, which is awesome, but good luck convincing someone of that. Go start somewhere where people agree and expand outwards. Prove your first proof of concept, then expand outwards. So that’s the lesson we learned.
DS: What was it like realizing that you needed to pivot?
NK: It was a little hard to accept because I think it’s still right, and I think it will get done. But even if you can do all these awesome things, we should start with a problem most people recognize as pressing. Once we do that, we can figure out the rest. It was the same concept I had been doing with my life.
DS: The current solution that Perspectives makes is a web extension. I’m going to ask you something with a lot of noise, but I’m curious to hear if you’ve gotten feedback from VCs or the tech industry that they don’t like web extensions. Is there any merit to that comment?
NK: I’ve heard this and I can’t remember where I heard this. But I had a meeting with a very big name investor, we showed him our demo, and he said that this was the future. He said he knew exactly what we were doing and to let him know when we were ready for a bigger investment. So I think it varies among individuals. The hard thing about the Chrome extension is depending on how it looks, people imagine an entirely different product in their mind. What I’ve noticed about recovery centers is something they think about how many different data sources their patients are interacting with. They already have an EMR, why have another system they have to run their patient’s data through?
Missionary versus mercenary
DS: Was the investor who immediately understood it someone who had some connection to the problem? What I’m trying to ask is since this seems like a mission based company, as opposed to a mercenary one, do you see some connection between the VCs you talk to that get it and those who don’t?
NK: I think at first, but I realized my role was to make sure that anybody could understand. Right now, we go about explaining it top down to bottom up. I’ve now created it where most people just recognize what we’re doing as a long tail. It’s just a Chrome extension long tail to beat out the existing products. So I don’t think understanding what we’re doing requires a deep understanding of our mission or empathy.
DS: When you think about expanding the team and who you want to work with, including investors, do you think about the missionary versus mercenary question?
NK: Yeah. I think everybody that I've talked to says they want to do something that helps people, and if they can make money while helping people, they’re happy. But this might be something they say in theory, but in reality it becomes much different as they’re not super engaged in the day to day. I think the important question is asking if they’re passionate about the thing they have to do. Why they’re passionate doesn’t really matter as much. Other founders might want their team to share an overall mission, and it’s great to have a team mission, but if there’s some reason why someone wakes up in the morning and stays up all night working on this problem, I would double down on that. Our first engineer would stay up all night becuase he loved the technical challenge. If that’s the thing that gets him excited, then that’s the thing that gets him excited. Find more of those and learn how to use that. So to me, everybody has their own way of living, they don’t need to live according to mine, as long as it naturally winds up creating value and we’re all happy.
DS: It seems that your motivation comes from personal or non-monetary reasons; you talk about wanting to do objective good. Do you think this gives you some advantage over the mercenaries?
NK: I want to say that I’m both. I’ve spent most of my life trying just to do good. I’m not going to lie to anyone by saying I’m not looking to become a unicorn. I want to get to the point where I’ve overcome everything and accomplish that. So I’m trying to get to a financial point as well.
I think being a missionary makes you less likely to pivot out of angst or boredom. I’ve noticed that people who aren’t mission driven start with something interesting, but when some other interesting thing crosses their path, they’re willing to switch right away. For us, we’re always asking if something new and interesting is helping people. Maybe one day we’ll pivot, but it would have to be such a crazy idea that we had to do it. We avoid shiny object syndrome, and I think that does give us an advantage.
DS: You already mentioned this briefly, but in order to raise the money you did, you had to go into a fair bit of debt. A high credit score is a real risk! Why do you think you were ready to do that?
NK: It wasn’t just me, Jesse, one of my co-founders, did it too. But I went into debt to make it to UChicago, so I already knew what that experience was like, and I had even more belief that it was possible to do this than it was to get into UChicago. I had been here before. I had gone backwards to go forwards. And I knew that this was another point in my life where I had seen the indicators that I needed to see to know that it was possible, that everything else was on me from this point on. So everything in the world became a resource in order to make it happen: money, physical location, people. Everything that existed was on the table and the only outcome was for me to accomplish this. So I didn’t get uncomfortable going into debt, but my girlfriend and my family, they saw this as a little bit insane. A lot of very successful business people leverage debt all the time, but (laughs) probably not at the interest rate I was.
Selling AI to healthcare
DS: I know you have a few free pilots going, so the pivot seems to have been productive, at least right now. I know we already briefly talked about this, but can you talk a bit more about the process of selling AI, particularly in regards to their sentiment towards AI. Is this something that they’re willing to adopt, or do they want to stick with the legacy solution? And how does that change the way you sell?
NK: It’s so interesting because when I read Reddit or something online, everybody’s against it. But my real life experience is that pretty much every person I know is really excited when you tell them that you’re going to automate their notes and that they’ll never do paperwork again. AI, not AI, they’re ready to sign up. Their hesitations are about other things. How much work is it to set up? Is it safe? What about my patient? Where is the data going? Can these conversations be used against my patients? What are the downfalls? Then it’s just about empathizing with them, and saying that I’ve worked at a recovery center helps. I know what it’s like. I don’t want to harm your patients. Our goal is to do the opposite. We got into this because we wanted to support your efforts to help people, and we’re taking the appropriate measures to make sure everything is safe and secure.
DS: From a removed, maybe objective perspective, how does your experience of being in the positions of your customers help you sell to them?
NK: You have to understand what it’s like to be the person you’re selling to. I would recommend, no matter what avenue you’re in, to spend at least a week following your customers around, asking them questions to fully understand what their problems are, and gain the ability to empathize with them. Otherwise, you could be saying something that’s completely false, and you won’t know it, but they will, and they’ll start resenting you a little in their head. That’s what I’ve noticed. And that resentment builds up. My investor pointed out that every small mistake might not matter individually, but the small mistakes build up, and if you don’t know which small mistakes you’re making, you’ll just think that somethings not going your way.
But I do think I have a unique perspective, especially for substance use centers where I was in the administrative role and got to see a full overview of everything. That being said, I don’t know what it’s like to live day to day as a clinician, which I think is important to recognize. To say “I did do this, but I am totally aware that I don’t know what it’s like to have been doing this for 10 years, and to see things change, and to know frustrations from your perspective.”
DS: This is probably a leading question, but does it feel weird trying to go and sell software to them now?
NK: Yes, definitely. I think the idea of selling, or of money in general, is super weird. And I thought that way especially when we were raising the money that we did. But after raising that money, I kind of realized what it actually is, or I reframed what it is, to where it doesn’t feel weird anymore. It now feels representative of a value that we add. It was still an uncomfortable hurdle to get over, but I think that most people realize, especially when you’re working in a business capacity, that money is just an exchange of value for goods. We have to provide value in order for someone to pay for our service, and we will use that money to scale and help more people. I’ve been surprised that most people see it that way – I’ve talked to a lot of CEOs who just love what we’re doing and no one is upset about it. It’s just how it works.
Free versus paid pilots
DS: My understanding is that the customers you have are on free pilots, not paid pilots. And I also understand that you’re maybe trying to raise a round?
NK: We’re not raising right now, but we’re doing what the industry calls temperature checks. It’s testing the waters to see if your ability to pitch or communicate is catching the eye of investors. So when it comes time, you can position yourself better with that information. If I present it in this way and I’m able to articulate it as such, does that lead to second meetings? Are these people interested enough in our team and our personalities to actually close a real deal?
DS: What are some of the things that you learned from this latest round of temperature checks?
NK: No matter how good you thought you were at pitching last round, there will be a new expectation, or you should think that there’s a new expectation as you’re asking for more. There was a time where I was pitching so often that I was really good at answering questions and had thought of every question that could be asked. I’m not as good now. I’ve been thinking about the actual business, not investor questions. So some questions did throw me off, but it was good to get back on track with remembering how this process goes. And this time, we definitely have more access to getting meetings than we did before, so it might be a very different process this time around.
A lot of the advice I’ve been getting is that in a seed round, if you’re asking for more than a million dollars, investors are expecting for you to bring them a plan that you’re actually going to do. And if you’re going to pivot from that plan, it better be successful. Otherwise, your reputation is on the line if you ever want to do this again.
DS: Going back to the free pilots, can you talk about the decision of making them free? Why aren’t you testing if there’s some willingness to pay?
NK: This has been such a controversial topic, which is interesting. To me, it isn’t ethical to go to a recovery center with a product that doesn’t exist, that doesn’t work, and make them give you money. The way we went about getting customers is just telling them what we’re trying to build, what we think it’s going to do, and the value we expect it to provide them. We then asked that if it provided you that expected value, would you pay for it in the end? And sure, it’s just a word; they could say yes and not mean it, but we try to pick centers that weren’t just saying yes, but were ecstatic. “I’ve been wanting this for so long! If you guys did this for me, it would really change my life.” People have actually said that in our pilots. Then working with them, making the product not just the way we think it should be but how they think about it too, having them as design patterns, becomes much easier. We can go to the most ecstatic clinicians and clinical directions and everyday ask them what they think of some feature or if we’re solving their problem.
I think the reason why people want revenue right away is to prove that someone will pay for it. But the advice I got was that you could get anybody to pay for anything if you ask enough people and ask the right way. That doesn’t actually mean your product is good. If you’re trying to validate if the product is worth something to them, can you use other proxies, like customers letting you into their centers and giving you access to meet with all their clinicians every day, disrupting their entire pattern? We think the answer is yes. And we think that is a better decision than asking them for $5,000 for a product we’re building at home and that doesn’t currently have a front end.
DS: It seems that validating if the pain is real and if the product is good are two different issues. How do you separate those things? Or what does the latter look like for you?
NK: I should probably have a better answer to this, but I’ve looked at all the other tools that exist for this, I’ve looked at the feedback that everybody’s given them, and I know why, generally, they like the ones they like. I think ours can not only be better than all of them, but can reach a part of the population that wants this but currently doesn’t have access.
I said better, so what does better actually look like? What are the things they really want to work? I know that magic moment during every demo when I show them that all they have to do is start a recording button and press a populate button and their notes are done. So everything else to me is just noise. If you can just have someone click one button and it can record their interaction, and populate across their entire document instantaneously with no errors, then I think we’re done. That’s what success looks like right now. Then there’s the ability to scale into everyone’s hands quickly. That’s the next thing we work on.
Problems of scaling
DS: How do you think about doing that?
NK: This is a more interesting problem for us right now, especially with the amount of people we have signed up for a pilot, which is over 100 clinicians. So how do you finish a product and scale it instantly, and what do you anticipate going wrong here? If you can’t instantly scale to 100 people, how many can you scale it to, and then what happens? I can get on the phone and if I call 20 people from my network, someone will say they want it right now. But that doesn’t mean I can get it to them right now. So what has to be done in order for me to sell it and get it into their hands?
There’s another question of onboarding time becoming the biggest problem with B2B SaaS companies. That’s what I’ve noticed but I’m still new to this, so someone out there probably knows more than me. One of the pain points we experienced is getting an agreement signed. We thought we would use lawyers to write a business associations agreement, which is like a nonclosure. We tried to send these off to clinics but we realized that this document was going to scare people, so we had to figure out a way to make it something that doesn’t scare them, that they can sign instantly. So this was one barrier.
Another was how do we onboard and integrate our tool with them as quickly as possible? Essentially, you have to try to reduce every single thing that takes time down to taking zero time. You want to be in the meeting, and all they need to to get the product is give you their credit card and press a button.
Then you realize that even if you can do all of that on the business side, there’s going to be bugs because someone new is going to be using it in a different capacity. So how are you going to deal with bugs? These are questions that led to the pilot choice as well.
Responding to negative feedback
DS: This is a question for me more than anyone else, but how do you go about collecting feedback? What is your customer success relationship like with your users?
NK: We’re doing it two different ways. Me and Eshan hypothetically know enough to test it and guess what needs to be done. But we know we’re not actually the clinicians, so we could be wrong. So we also have the clinical director, the one who was smiling and jumping up and down when we introduced the idea of piloting, to tell us what’s wrong with it. Then we go back, fix it, and iterate for a little. We’ve been doing this with only two centers right now. One is with a very tech forward CEO who first told us that our product would never work, but has really begun to like us.
DS: What was it like to hear that? Obviously you’re expecting negative feedback, but how did you decide to be persistent in the face of that first comment, and continue pursuing him as a customer?
NK: His comment was really interesting because everyone else who had given me negative feedback didn’t have a real reason. I asked him if he would do a demo of our product and I got a three paragraph response about how OpenAI would render us irrelevant. I then looked into him, saw that he works in Silicon Valley, and a lot of users for his platform work in big tech. So he was clearly around this sort of thought a lot. But I ran into him at a conference and we had a longer talk. He told us the reason he thought this way was because another founder came and tried to work with him before and ended up not doing it because he thought the same thing. We told him why we thought OpenAI wouldn’t render us irrelevant, which I think helped. But I also think he just liked us. So more than anything, he started working with us because he liked us. He also told me at one point that we were so committed to this problem that we overcame the barriers of the other founder, which was an interesting validation point.
DS: What were those barriers?
NK: It was that either current players were going to build it, or it was going to come down through Epic. There are players in our space, like Clinical Notes AI, and people think that they’re going to take the space and there’s no point in trying since they have so much money and distribution already. Or that it’s becoming easier and easier to make this – eventually, someone at home will be able to hop on their computer and just say they want this, and it’s coded for them, so there’s no point in trying. That it would take too long. It would be too hard.
The future and sacrifice
DS: What does success look like for Perspectives? I think there are a few ways you can take that question – is it going outside of recovery clinics, or is it doing recovery clinics really well? Do you think about it from an impact perspective? Or a VC return perspective?
NK: At first, we thought we were really going to focus on substance recovery. But like I said, there are other players that exist. Yet, what I’ve realized is the way we went about building allows us to go to a different vertical more quickly than any other tool. I know there are a lot of verticals right now that have no ability to take on tools like this but are begging for them. So I think we’re going to end up transitioning to them faster than I originally anticipated, if we don’t build anything else for this one. And it seems that the quickest way to grow is to not build anything more than just making this work perfectly because this is a pain point that people are willing to pay for in health care. We’re still digging as deep as we possibly can to understand this space, but if a better idea comes out that helps people, we’re not opposed to pursuing it. This is the tricky part with investors because everyone wants you to have a super solid and straightforward plan, especially if you’re going to raise a big seed. But it’s hard for me to be committed to a plan without all the information, and the information is always growing. So I’d be curious how other founders have navigated this. Why would I commit myself to a plan just for some money that I don’t really need right now?
DS: If Perspectives fails, why does it fail?
NK: I think we should acknowledge why we could fail. I think the easy one to always point out is if there’s a breakdown in the team. 60% of companies fail because the team breaks up. The other one is that I think we’re dreamers – my team and I really like to think about the future, and we have a tendency to want to think a year and a half in advance, but there’s no way to predict what happens a year and a half from now. So I think we’re maybe a bit too risk tolerant in this capacity. We have to reel ourselves in. And if the rest of it is a skill thing, I just believe in my team skill wise. I think someone could come out with the same idea, the biggest company in this space, to try and beat us. But if you have a team of four people that are highly motivated, highly competitive, highly intelligent, we will pivot and sell to the right people. So even if they have the same product as us, even if they have more money, we have more time and energy, and we care more than them. So I’m not really worried about an external competitor.
DS: How do you make sure that the team is doing well?
NK: This, I think this is an important question and one that people probably don’t acknowledge out loud. In my opinion, there will always be fights and disagreements, no matter how close of friends you are. I think the traditional wisdom says that if this is happening, something is wrong. But I actually think that you came together as a team because you have different opinions and styles. Most people I’ve met, if they’re capable of working 18 hour days, have created a system that works for them. Those systems are not going to overlap perfectly with your system. At first, this will cause pain, and I don’t know how else to put it besides pain. I think the quicker you realize this truth, the quicker you can iterate on the systems. You have to work together to create new systems – systems that prevent you from running into each other, to where you’re working better together because your systems are synchronized. The first guess of synchronous systems is going to be wrong. And so will the second and the third and the fourth. So both people have to be emotionally understanding enough to know and accept this. But eventually you’re going to get to the point where working together is actually infinitely better than if you were working apart from each other. So again, you need acknowledgment from everybody that they’re willing to try. We all want this so bad, and so if we’re able to get over this stuff, everything will be so much better. But it’s also important to acknowledge that we’re still iterating on systems. Nobody’s ever not iterating on systems.
DS: How happy are you?
NK: I’m going to interpret this and say that the part of the startup journey that people say is hard is not the part that is difficult for me. I’m very happy doing it. The hardest part is that I feel riddled with guilt 24/7 that I’m either not doing enough for my company or not doing enough for my relationship. It’s always one or the other. Right now, I feel like this interview is helpful for my company and for my personal stuff, but I have been working so much that I haven’t booked my sister’s wedding, which is in a month. And my girlfriend is currently waiting for me to study with her. I don’t say this to call them out. I say this to be very real. You are not going to be there in the capacity that you want for your relationships, and that feeling is unfortunate and stings. For me, it isn’t how hard is this or how many hours will this take? It’s knowing that I can’t be the person that I dreamed of becoming. I can't do both at the same time. But I definitely try, and that’s the most painful part. Trying to do both and always feeling like you’re failing at one of the two.
DS: Do you think you’ll come to terms or peace with that question? Or do you find some balance at the end?
NK: How do you accept that? Maybe you try to find some balance. I just talked to one of my mentors who is at the end of her journey, which is going to turn out well for her. She said that she never stopped feeling this way. She said that she never got to do both. There’s always sacrifice at every given moment.
DS: Is there else you want to share?
NK: Good luck to everybody out there. If anybody wants to do this, it is very serious, please reach out. People helped me and I think that the cycle that needs to keep going if we want more entrepreneurs at UChicago.