How To Sustain High Performance - Sami Inkinen of Virta Health

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1:31Sami Inkinen:I think as a founder and founding team, it has to resonate with you on a kind of bone marrow level, which for me personally, without going too deep into the Werder story, was as a world-class triathlete, realizing that I was pre-diabetic and on my way to type 2 diabetes. I have to understand this and figure out a way to help not just people like me, but the people who are truly suffering from type 2 diabetes. Running a business means solving problems. I tell you how the smartest entrepreneurs do it. Hi, I'm Jason Pfeiffer, Editor-in-Chief of Entrepreneur Magazine, and this is Problem Solvers.

2:11There's this thing that you will always hear from experienced founders, which is that there is a gap between outward markers of success and how it's actually going. How it's actually going at the company maybe, but certainly how it's going personally. That just because something's outwardly going really well, that you're hitting your milestones, that the company is growing, does not necessarily mean that it is personally satisfying or frankly that you're just feeling good about it because this stuff is really hard because look, there's no point in building something that you can't maintain. There's no point in building something that makes you miserable.

2:50You want to build something that makes your customers, your clients, and you and your team really happy. So how do you do that? Well, today I am joined by someone who has learned that, experienced it, figured it out, and has lots to share. His name is Sami Inkanen, and he is the CEO and co-founder of VertiHealth. And Sami is going to walk us through his own experience and also some really valuable, practical things that he has learned and does to close that gap between outward success and inward. Sami, welcome to Problem Solvers.

3:24Sami Inkinen:Well, Jason, thank you so much for having me here. So set us up here. Tell us a little bit of your background and how you came to understand this gap between the outward success and the inward success? Yeah, well, briefly background. Again, you may detect an accent. I was born and raised in Finland on a farm, physicist by training, started my career in a nuclear power plant at the time when they were still in fashion, at least in Finland. And obviously now it's coming back to fashion with AI and energy needs. Came to America 2003. So I've been here now for 23 years and a proud citizen. I'd say my sort of formative work experience is that I've started three companies and straight out of Stanford Business School 2005, co-founded Trulia, this real estate marketplace, online real estate marketplace that went public 2012 and Zillow acquired us 2014.

4:20Sami Inkinen:And since then, for the last decade, I've been building VertiHealth, where we are on a mission to reverse metabolic disease in 1 billion people. It's still a privately held company, but, you know, 1 ,000 plus employees and hundreds of millions in revenue. So it is a real business. So I would say, I guess I've been a founder, operator, and builder pretty much nonstop since April 2000. So that's 26 years. And obviously, there's a lot of ups and downs there. And you need a fair amount of tools not to crack along the way. So that's a little bit about my background. Can you remember the first time as a founder that you looked around and you said, this is going well.

4:59So why doesn't it feel like it's going well?

5:02Sami Inkinen:Well, I'll give you two examples. I guess one is I feel very fortunate that I feel like I've never had a job. I've always followed and done something that's been exciting to me and then just kind of followed my nose. And that's the story behind the three companies that I've started. But I guess to give you one example, the driver for me building Trulia, which again, I co-founded with a gentleman called Pete Flint around 2004, 2005, was to build something. I was an immigrant fresh off the boat in America, in Silicon Valley, which just felt like a dream. And then somebody wrote a check and said, hey, go and build this thing.

5:41Sami Inkinen:And I was very motivated by this process of building a product, building a business, just making something out of nothing. And then, you know, fast forward seven, eight years, and we had hundreds of employees. The company was just about profitable, about to go public, tens of millions of users. So you could say lots of outboard with success. But for me internally, I said, wait a second, wait a second. Mondays are starting to feel like work. I've never had a job in my life. And we've accomplished these products built, and tens of millions of users, and there's real revenues, and companies are about to go public.

6:17like, I'm not sure why I'm doing this.

6:21Sami Inkinen:So I think that was kind of the first time when I started asking myself, wait a second, what's happening here? And I will just briefly mention, this is sort of one lesson that I had from that, which I then applied to Virta Health, is that if there is no mission beyond a specific milestone, like if there isn't a specific mission as a founder that you can feel in your bone marrow, So it can be hard to sustain that sort of multi-year, multi-decade process that's usually needed when you build something from scratch. So I would say that's sort of my lesson number one. Well, actually, let's stay with that before you move on to it, because what you just gave is an orientation point, which is really important.

7:07But I'd love to have you unpack what you mean by mission. Are you talking about a personal mission? Are you talking about a company mission? How are you establishing something that feels steady in the ground?

7:20Sami Inkinen:Yeah, it's probably all of the above. So let me just give you the truly example, which, again, a phenomenal product and still tens of millions of people using every month, for which I'm grateful for. But my driver personally was just build something. It could be anything. This is so exciting that I'm in a privileged position and can actually build something. but never sat down and said, what is the deeper purpose here and a mission for the company that resonates with me and perhaps even something I can tell to investors and employees that I'm hiring. And if you ask me today, what was Trulius' mission?

7:57Sami Inkinen:I can't tell you because I don't really know. And I only realized that seven, eight years into the journey after kind of building the business and realizing that, well, we've now built the product, we've built the business, but why am I doing this again? Building a real estate website? Is that the mission? And sure, that was exciting initially to try to get that thing together, but it kind of ran its course. So to answer your question specifically, now with my current company, VertiHealth, and we can go into details how that came about, but the mission is to reverse metabolic disease in 1 billion people.

8:33Sami Inkinen:And not just reverse metabolic disease, but show the world that many of these chronic diseases that we're dealing with, like type 2 diabetes, they are reversible. There's almost like a rebel, like a revolutionary force behind to show the establishment and even tell the patients like, hey, there's actually hope we can nutritionally reverse this disease. So having that kind of a mission, one, it's been super helpful for myself. So I'm now more than 10 years, more than a decade into this further journey. It's been super fun, rewarding, but also ridiculously hard. like many many hard moments so it's been very helpful for me as sort of number one to have a mission that's like okay this is why i'm doing it even if the practical work happens to be a spreadsheet on a sunday evening when my kids are like dad come and play with us no i need this so for myself it's been very helpful with investors to kind of you can go into all the details and signs of what are you doing but grounding and saying hey the reason we exist is we are going to reverse metabolic disease in one billion people.

9:32Sami Inkinen:Same with recruiting employees. So it's kind of like a note star that you can always come back no matter how confusing or stressful or something. It's like, that's why we are here. So I want to just poke at the nuance there so that people can really appreciate it and then apply it to their own work. Because the thing that you're describing there sounds like a mission, but it also maybe just sounds like the description of the thing that you're doing. How would you take the thinking that drove the language that you're using to describe the mission of Virta Health. And let's just say, apply it to truly.

10:03If you could go back in time and give the truly a version of yourself, this kind of thinking, what would you have done at that business to think differently about what that business was so that you felt more grounded and focused in it?

10:18Sami Inkinen:Wow. You're really challenging me. He had to think deep. So let me tell a little bit about the Virta story and then try to apply that as a kind of a template to Trulia. I think a couple of things, again, this mission, reverse metabolic disease in one billion people, it's one, it's an insight that's new somehow, new but feasible and possible, kind of like a revolutionary. And the insight was, hey, this chronic disease, this is the health epidemic of our generation can actually be reversed. Again, like type 2 diabetes being one example, or everybody was telling me, even when we were starting a company, like it's impossible.

10:59Sami Inkinen:It's a chronic progressive disease. You have it. All we can do is prescribe more insulin. So one is the insight that kind of opens your eyes to say, wait a second, that's different. Is that really possible? So that's one thing. I would say the second thing is it has to be aspirational and big enough that you can't hit that milestone in a year or 10 or maybe even ever. So hence for us, billion people. Why billion? And a lot of people have asked me this. Why not 100 million? It's kind of like, well, there's 100 million people in metabolic diseases in America. We want to be global, but it can't be 10 billion because there's only 8 billion people on this planet.

11:36Sami Inkinen:So hence the number. So insight is one. Second one is this kind of aspirational kind of magnitude and impact. And then thirdly, and this is something you can't engineer with a template. I think as a founder and founding team, it has to resonate with you on a kind of bone marrow level. And that is not something that I used to work at McKinsey way back when, and we could solve everything. But that's the one thing you can't solve. It's kind of like you go on a first date with someone, you know, boyfriend, girlfriend, whichever, and you get that feeling. I'm going to do whatever it takes to have the second date.

12:15Sami Inkinen:You can't engineer that. that's something very personal, I think, for founders. And I would say that's the third one, which for me personally, without going too deep into the Virta story, was as a world-class triathlete, realizing that I was pre-diabetic and on my way to type 2 diabetes. And it just didn't make any sense to me that an athlete who's lean, 8 % body fat, exercising 10, 15 hours a week, could actually be on his way, my way, towards poor metabolic health. And I was like, I have to understand this and figure out a way to help not just people like me, but the people who are truly suffering from type 2 diabetes.

12:52Right. And the reason I asked you to think through it like that was because I wanted to articulate a way in which someone could take this thinking that you have and now retroactively apply it to their business if they are realizing, hey, wait a second, I haven't really articulated the mission of my business. And I'm just trying to unpack ways in which anybody, regardless of what they're doing, can start to think about the greater impact of the thing that they're doing so that it's not just the product or service that they sell. It's not just the technology that they build, but it's about ultimately the benefit and the impact of using it.

13:27And if you're thinking about that and you're thinking about how that can scale, then you've really given yourself some kind of vision of how the thing that you've built matters.

13:38Sami Inkinen:Exactly. Very well said. And I'd say the two sort of words that I would attach to that is There has to be something emotional and aspirational, emotional and aspirational. And something like improving EBITDA by 20 % has neither one of those. It's true. Unless you really are emotionally attached to EBITDA, which some people are. Simon, let me ask you about something else that I know you've thought a lot about, which is building multiple identities for yourself as a founder. And this is something I think people struggle with in general is they don't know how to separate the stress of the work life that they have with everything else that's going on in their lives.

14:24And they might leave work as the stressed out founder and then come home to their families as the stressed out founder. And that's not something that the kids need necessarily. And so can you tell me more about how you started to think about multiple identities for a founder?

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15:13Sami Inkinen:Yeah, totally. And this kind of, this multiple identities concept, it's part of a bigger picture that I have used to be able to sustain my performance over decades as a founder and operator. I call it, I actually call it for myself and my team, sustainable high performance. Sustainable high performance. And what do I mean by that is, here's the truth. If you are founding a company and building something meaningful at scale, it's a minimum a decade, more likely many decades. And this concept of, I think there's a lot of like a hustle, still, I think there's a little bit of old term now, but like hustle culture in Silicon Valley, like, oh, you just sprint for 18 months and sleep under your desk.

15:58Sami Inkinen:Well, guess what? 18 months really gets you nowhere. You may have a sprint, but to build something meaningful from scratch, we're talking literally decades, literally decades. And so the only way to be able to do that, you have to take this concept of sustainable high performance. These sprints kind of only work and last A, short term, and B, when everything's going well. But every company kind of hits some sort of a wall or air pocket or something like that. And if you don't have the stamina and perseverance, you are going to crack as a founder. So how does this multiple identities concept? I sort of have a toolkit that I've used.

16:40Sami Inkinen:Again, this is N equals one, but it has worked for me as a founder operator for 26 years or so now. One is this multiple identities concept. What I mean by that is sort of a mental trick that you have two or three, at least, outlets where you can go all in and what has happened in one of the other outlets doesn't really affect it. And for me personally, that's obviously founder, CEO of where the hell now, athlete. So I done a lot of triathlons and I raced bicycles and my competitors and the group that I ride my bikes with, they couldn't care less about like, oh, what's your job again? And so that's the second one.

17:22Sami Inkinen:And then the third one is a husband and father. And the beautiful thing about this is almost never all three are thriving and rocking at the same time. And so when one of them are kind of falling apart or two, at least you have one out of three, hopefully, where you're like, oh, I'm kind of ringing the bell and everything's, you know, all roses and everything's fantastic. I wanted to pick up on this funny point that you mentioned about how the people in your athletic circle are not interested at all in what you do professionally. And that got me thinking as you were talking about how the multiple identities that we have are also oriented around what do the people that we're surrounded with in certain environments need or want from us?

18:14because I think, for example, that when I'm with my kids, they do not need or want workplace Jason. They're not interested in it. All the skills that I bring to bear in my workplace are absolutely irrelevant to them. And so I have to be oriented towards what is relevant to them. And then, of course, also be open to how they are relevant to me, right? You don't just move through the world giving you want to get to. But these ways of thinking about different environments that your different identities are in, I think can be really anchoring because you can just remind yourself, you're not going to have any fun in the athletic version of your life if you are trying to be the work version there.

18:57Those people don't want that. They don't need that. To fully immerse yourself in that scene is to just be thinking about what do these people need from me? And And is that a part of me that I want to lean into and really become right now? Does that sound about right?

19:11Sami Inkinen:Oh, 100%. And by the way, you can then learn. Like I mentioned before we started, I have two kids, two girls, nine and son 11. And they have taught me more than anything else in my life, which I can apply as a leader as well, whether that's kind of being much more tuned to my emotions and emotional connection and realizing that there's a lot of arguments where you actually don't want to win them. you just want to be there for them and sometimes as a manager that's the same thing like you just want to hold space so anyway so you can learn these things from these other identities and environments that you can then apply as well right okay i had interrupted you before you were going to move on to some other pillars yeah absolutely so some of these tools in my toolkit to kind of enable sustainable high performance over decades so one is these multiple identities second one uh is just foundation of metabolic health and i'm not going to go into details but this is i try to treat myself like an olympic athlete and all the science shows that your kind of your brain and body and your health it's all it's all biology so that's essentially it's nutrition sleep and you don't have to be a bike racer but some amount of exercise so those are the basics nutrition sleep some amount of uh exercise and sleep is one of the things that i would say um is one of the top one or two priorities in my life that i get certain amount of sleep so that's sort of a second tool in a toolkit third one is as a ceo a peer group um i can't i don't have long hair but i can't really let my hair down fully with with my team like i may have a hard day But when I bring my full self to work, sure, I'm going to be authentic.

20:51Sami Inkinen:But if I'm very, very stressed, I don't want to show that. Fourth one is I've had an executive coach for a long, long, long time. In fact, during COVID, I had two of them. It's like athletes, again, Olympic athletes. I don't care how good you are, but pretty much all of them have a coach who can hold a mirror and say, hey, that's you're just believing your own BS. Let's let's talk about this. So those are some of the some of the key things. I guess last one, I would say just understanding your mind. And for me, meditation since 2013, so that's 13 years. And we don't have to go too deep in there, but just realizing that the brain is having a life of its own and having some ability to observe what's happening in your mind, I think is very, very critical as a CEO because it's so easy to kind of get locked in there and believe your own thoughts.

21:45Sami Inkinen:and the decisions that you make as a leader, it's very easy to make decisions that soothe yourself as opposed to make decisions what's right for the business. Even like team decisions, hiring, firing, sometimes you kind of, if you don't notice that your emotions are driving you to maintain status quo and make the hard decisions, it's very, very hard to do it. And there's different tools for that. But I would say it's been a process for myself over the last 15 years to really be able to, I guess, observe what's happening in a brain without identifying with it. So those are some of the tools that I've used in the toolkit over the last two decades.

22:23Yeah, that's really great. And I guess as we think about how all of this solves for the problem that I set us up with, talk to me in conclusion here about how you lead now that maybe feels different from how you had led in the past? Now that you've picked up all the tools of this toolkit, I assume that you're, you know, look, it's never easy. It's never perfect. I'm sure there are lots of times where you just like me will kind of forget some of the basic things that we had set out to do. We get too stressed and we don't have the time for it and so on. But generally speaking, how often are you relying on these things and how much do you feel like the steadiness of your leadership now is a result of it.

23:10Sami Inkinen:Yeah, well, I rely on these tools all the time, just to make sure that I can operate at the high level and hopefully don't crack. I think, first of all, number one is I think I'm way more sort of even keeled. When amazing things happen, then sure, we're going to celebrate, but kind of pull back a little bit. And when something falls apart, which happens all the time, and sort of a crisis to deal with, I just realized that this too shall pass. This too shall pass. And all I can do is manage my mind and then decide what are the next steps to take, as opposed to go into any kind of a loop like, oh, my God, why is this happening to us again?

23:56Sami Inkinen:So I would say that's one. And the second thing is just as an operator and CEO realizing, particularly as a founder, now second or third time around, knowing that there's very, very few things in the middle of this crazy busy life in building a business that truly matter. It was, for me, very high anxiety provoking when you feel like I have 50 things to do. I can only get to five. And I know there's 500 others that I don't even know about. I'm constantly thinking about that. The thinking, unless you could take action, doesn't really help. And so now, second or third time around, I'm fully aware that there's sort of two or three things that make or break this year and generally that I have to be focused on.