268. Meet One of the Only Female CEOs on NASDAQ w/ Devika Wood | Brain+

0:00I'm one of eight CEOs on the NASDAQ who's a woman, which is out of 562.

0:05Amardeep Parmar:That's Devika Wood, currently CEO of BrainPlus. She previously co-founded both We Are Arla and Vida Care. We've developed digital therapeutics for people living with dementia, digitising the world's leading non-drug interventions. We see an improvement in cognitive function within seven weeks and a delay in cognitive decline by six months. Devika's story is full of overcoming very difficult situations. God protect yourself, I just went into so blindly, like so naive. I'm proud of myself actually for what I've managed to achieve in this short period of time. She feels passionately about being a role model for the future generation.

0:42I need to set a precedence for making sure that number improves and I have to prove to people that you can be a female CEO with a family and actually make a success of it.

0:55Amardeep Parmar:great to have you in today and you've obviously done so many different things in the health space can you tell us what you do today yes so brain plus i'm the ceo of this company joined um last year but took over as ceo in april um phenomenal product and solution we've developed digital therapeutics for people living with dementia specifically mild to moderate um and it's um essentially digitizing the world's leading non-drug intervention for dementia which is called cognitive stimulation therapy there's a lot of words here but to break it down cognitive stimulation therapy is um the world's leading kind of therapeutic intervention for people living with mild to moderate dementia it's um generally delivered in a group based format so you'll have like five to eight people um sat around the table cst is delivered by a trained cst facilitator and it's a blend of activities physical games music um cognitive kind of reminiscence therapies and the beauty of it which is what made me fall in love with it head over heels that the thing that keeps me going is the outcomes that we see are phenomenal we see an improvement in cognitive function within seven weeks and a delay in cognitive decline by six months so that's what i do on a day-to-day basis so i'm going to go back to the history at the moment but i just said you joined a company then became CEO right yeah how is that experience I guess that's new for you compared to what you previously did right yes super weird so I think um becoming a CEO of a company that's already been running and has like a huge legacy is so strange because you have to blend into a cultural dynamic foundations and processes that have been embedded for years and years and years and it's quite difficult when you come in as an individual and you've been used to kind of founding businesses that you can put your kind of I suppose blueprint on or touch it in a way that you like really resonates with you and um it was quite difficult at the start mainly also because the company's Danish so it's headquartered in Denmark and there's also cultural differences between the way people are and that's just at its core right every human is different and so learning how to understand how the team was running things in Denmark their personalities how they kind of behave and communicate was different to how i also what i was used to and i've just been really honest um but and then having that blended approach then running the uk entity and then having the danish entity as well as the kind of cultural and legacy system my god tough really tough not gonna lie and obviously you're sticking at it right so you're enjoying it yeah so what's like been the bit that you've learned the most like where have you think you've adapted well what have you had to change you said about talking to the people from Denmark what gives a change to maybe work better alongside them yeah so I think one of the things I've really had to learn to change is carrying legacy legacy things so decisions that were made by the previous CEO and founder good bad ugly you name it they're not decisions that I ever made or put in place and when you have those decisions that maybe you don't fundamentally agree with or things that you kind of think well that i don't i would never have done that and then you carry that legacy in and you have to kind of then affect it change it lead with it that's so tough really tough and um that's one of the things i've had to learn to get around like how do you manage decisions that were made that and then kind of either dispel them or kill them or innovate on them or you know um improve them i think that's really challenging um and especially when you've kind of been you know an entrepreneur and used to kind of running businesses from ground up it's difficult to then come in understand how to change those things so that's been my biggest learning curve and I'd say the other thing was learning how to run obviously two countries that's really difficult I did do that with Orca on my previous job where I was running in the US and the UK but I think that when you've got a heavy team that's headquartered in Denmark and then you've got the UK entity that you're running time management process management operational management is just one of those things i'm like wow this is like cross-functional team delivery at its like best and it's really refined me as i think as a leader i hope i mean they can attest to that what's been the most fun part of that like what have you enjoyed the most about it visiting copenhagen no i'm joking no copenhagen is the most beautiful unbelievable city by the way so beautiful i think the most fun part is like you know when you evolve and you learn new things i think anyone that's like you know has the entrepreneurial spirit inside of them constantly wants to learn and evolve it's just part hardwired into us and we never want to settle we're just like i want to do something else want to learn a new skill i want to be better bigger bolder braver and it's just who we are right and i think stepping into this role as ceo of a public listed company i'm one of eight ceos and the nasdaq who's a woman which is out of 562 like which are all men like that in itself even though you know i don't need with that that in itself carries it might be the title of this podcast now but yeah yeah do it that in itself carries a lot of like you know imposter syndrome things that can come out and it carries a lot of um like i need to set a precedence for making sure that number improves and i have to prove to people that you can be a female ceo with a family and actually make a success of it because there are so many nuanced gender stereotypes that exist and I've witnessed them you know to this day which is mental in 2025 but I think it's that kind of learning growing evolving and I've really stepped into this power of like I know who I am as a leader who I want to lead like how I want to lead and this the example that I want to set I'll always grow and try to be better but I think that I've really I'm proud of myself actually for what I've managed to achieve in this short period of time.

6:42Amardeep Parmar:And obviously the reason why they wanted you as a CEO is because of all of the work you've done in the previous parts, right? I hope so. And you obviously had your own startup originally. Yes. Tell us about their journey. Like what happened there? Vida. Oh my goodness, Vida. Vida was me and I was Vida. And I find that, I don't know if you probably might resonate with this. Yeah, but it's kind of dissociate a bit, but it's hard. It's hard, isn't it? Because you've become that, you've developed that brand from the ground up and it becomes your identity and it's really difficult to kind of step away from it.

7:12Vida was that for me. Vida was like, I co-founded it when I was 26. I was a baby. That's baby age. And it was at the time when it was like 2016. So it wasn't really like the industry as it is now. So many amazing communities, investment sort of is really pro on female founders. And there's so many things around there that kind of promote being young founders as well. You're not seen as like this idiot that doesn't know what they're doing.

7:35Amardeep Parmar:You're seen as like, yeah. you're seen as like a smart super kid but back then it was almost like you can't be 26 and be a fan and what the hell like mark zuckerberg was the only example and it was like you know that was the unicorn status so so veda started because i was a young carer of my nanny for 12 years um i'm half indian so you know when when a loved one in the indian culture gets sick they move in with you most of the time they live with you forever my mom's gonna live with me and my dad everyone's gonna live with me forever um but she had dementia and it left a profound mark on like how I cared for her and I was only 10 when she got dementia but she was like a mum to me before that so um I experienced nothing that a young young person of my age should go through no one at that age should really experience you know losing somebody that they love so much and seeing them disappear before your eyes any illness you know not just dementia so for those 12 years I looked after her we witnessed such poor care and support we kept her at home so we had domiciliary care so people coming in to support her and it was just a travesty honestly the level of care was subpar the there was no technology being used in terms of kind of communicating with us or managing her medication and so Vida was essentially the first ever tech enabled care provider so we built a logistics platform to streamline and improve the way that carers were matched to families and then also we had a big dream that we would do predictive analytics so kind of at home monitoring to um see when people's kind of illnesses were going to get worse monitoring their sort of um data points and so um yeah founded that 26 and exited when i was 29 so i can relate to a lot of my similar thing where my grandma moved in with me i had dementia and then it's one of those things that's quite difficult to talk about something because it's like it's such a weird thing where almost some of the things that happen you don't also tarnish their like it's a weird thing isn't it it's like it's very difficult thing because it's what happens i think well a lot of say asian families that they don't talk about their friends so much because they don't want to like almost put down their family member but then how do you get that support to actually understand what's going on it's taboo it's a really taboo subject yeah which obviously i think attitudes are hopefully starting to change now remember that time you didn't talk about like oh yeah this happened at home this happened no no no at all right no and as you said so it's not that funding is easier now it's easy now but back then as you said like there was a lot more there's a lot less headwinds or a lot less communities existing and you did raise venture capital of that right so how did that journey come about how are you able to come as this person as you said like young young founder female obviously as well and convince people that when this bias existed what did you do how did you go about that yeah so i think my i was really really i wouldn't say lucky i've not had luck i think i've just i've just been resilient persistent and stupid but i've just kind of like constantly pushed through any challenges but um things didn't come easily to me but I basically decided to leave my PhD that was doing cancer research because I got connected to um Ali Parsa who was the CEO of Babylon and it was back in 2012 so it was like very new there was like he'd had I think four people in the company or something and um he hired me as an intern and I decided to basically go into it because PhD life and and lab life was not for me and I walked into that office and met him and walked into this room I always remember I walked into this room and there was like a chalkboard and they were just basically designing the wireframes of the app just using it like you know the old school kind of ux uy ways doing it and the guy that was a cto i think used to work for spotify um and he was just so cool and we were talking about things i was like this makes so much sense how we can use technology to basically change the way people receive health care i was like i am obsessed and ironically like when i was care of my nan I had a few ideas about things that we could do to kind of streamline how we would speak to the carers about medication we'd given them and I was thinking why can't we send always in my head I was like we can send them a text message or there could be some like notification that goes in the phone and anyways when I started working at Babylon I was like this is like I think this is my call it sounds weird this is my calling I think there's something here like I really want to be part of it luckily I ended up in the digital health space when it was like at the precipice it was just starting so I think I had this luck of like going into it at that point and then that just basically propelled me forward I then obviously had worked at Babylon I'd worked at Google before that and so that was another wild journey and then I managed to work a number of different startups before I then got sort of approached by Don Perks who was the founder of Hamburg Perks or co-founder of Hamburg Perks and he was hiring entrepreneurs in residence to basically lead these incubators of health tech incubators where people would come up with great ideas and he would fund them and he was like I want you to join this health tech incubator and at the time I was moving to Australia Sydney to work as a healthcare consultant and had got my one-year visa and was basically wanting to move there and within three months of going to Sydney I was like oh no I don't want to be here I experienced some horrific racism side note yeah it was called curry muncher um in the organization I was working in which is mental I mean I never even heard that word being used in anywhere else but and I think that sort of made me be like I I don't want to work in a place or maybe be in a place where racism was so apparent, which is so bizarre to think back to that now.

12:54So I basically went, actually, I'm going to leave Australia. I'm going to go do this. So I went to Hamburg Perks, joined as an entrepreneur resident. And within about four months, I was paired up with the co-founder in Hamburg Perks. And we came up with the concept, which was Vida, which was a tech-enabled care provider. and it grew from being one thing into something else quite rapidly and yeah we got our first 250 000 pounds terrible term sheets terrible so absolutely screwed myself over from the set from the get-go but that's because i didn't understand equity or term sheets at all so i ended up by the time i was three years in only owned about six percent actually so it was pretty gnarly but and the on the on the other side you know he was taking a risk on putting in um risky capital at the start when you've just got an idea it's high risk capital right so they're going to take more but at the same time i think that it was it wasn't great it was not setting us up for success so yeah that was the that was where we raised and then we raised about 6.5 million in total over those four years um and ranged from mvc to obviously angels what are you most proud of about what you did there as well what am i most proud of oh my god i went through some really challenging times there I'm not gonna lie really defining moments at Vida like really broke me um I think what I'm most proud of was that really showed my that really showed me what I was capable of doing I think I you have to have those defining moments where you really kind of slaps you in the face and you go my god I I am I'm so able to achieve more than I realize I had a lot of confidence issues self-worth issues I've always had that I never really known what I can do never really seen how good I am and a lot of that stemmed from like I experienced domestic violence when I was in my early 20s at university from my my partner and I spoke I speak about it openly but I think that sort of led me to feeling really worthless for a really long time and I left that abusive relationship and then which is awful and managed to kind of fulfill my degree and I still was kind of walking around thinking like I'm never going to be good enough because those voices were always in my head and then when I did Vida and started it and started started generating revenue we did two million in revenue in year one like mad amounts of money and created the like most well-known brand in like domiciliary care at that time and we were like achieving awards left right and center my face was in Times Square like it was mad and every single moment it was like it was giving me like a little tiny crumb of confidence I needed to build myself back up so in actual fact Vida became this like thing that actually built me as a person back up and I know we said it before about like the association piece but it kind of saved me in a lot of ways which I owe a lot to um and yeah I think it made me the person I am today for sure yeah so it's always sucks you even had to go

15:56Amardeep Parmar:through that situation in the first place right and then it's good what vida did to you but it's like ideally you shouldn't have had to have confidence back right that's that's the challenging thing and it's obviously if anybody's listening is going through a similar situation you had like get the help you need right yeah it's like get the help yeah it's like it's not normal people shouldn't have to go through those experiences and obviously that it's great to see that confidence and obviously it shines through now and obviously i know the confidence always gonna be different things going on you mentioned about imposter syndrome being listed and things but the fact you keep going and that resilience piece you said is that's going to be the bit that hopefully is going to inspire a lot of people listening as well yeah i hope so i think um you know i've i made it my mission i think what was so powerful was that i was suddenly given this platform with vida um because i was being put on panels and here there and everywhere like face was everywhere un like united nations ambassador it was just it was mad it was mad when i look back on it i'm thinking like what but I think I then used that platform to like every opportunity I could speak about my story and my journey which was like domestic violence and what I'd experienced because when I went through it no one spoke about it like it was just really not a thing um like and every time I looked at kind of like what it was I'd experienced it was the poster child was always a certain socioeconomic standing or a certain type of individual all the charities represent it in a certain way so I was like well this can't be me and you know to the point that he even got arrested because he tried to take my life like really intense stuff but it's like I was walking around in this like shroud of like like guilt and shame and it was awful and then all of a sudden I got this opportunity when I started Vida to write a letter to my younger self to the guardian and I basically was like do you know what I'm gonna I'm gonna I'm gonna write this story to my younger self and say you will get through it you are going to be the most powerful version of yourself you are going to achieve what you never thought you could achieve because you are a badass and I wrote it and honestly the amount of women that contacted me I was like oh my god and it was just people saying like I've experienced the same thing I feel the same way thank you for sharing your story I've never thought I could talk about it and it's what then led me to start like I am Ila which was a community during covid which was unbelievable and so I do genuinely believe and I probably not even answer your question here but I really believe that like everything happens for a reason you're given challenges that like you are meant to have had and you're given them for a reason so that you can inspire other people or you can change the world and that's what I've learned to kind of put that thing I went through into a really positive spin and um and I feel like I have in some way or another which is all you could ever ask for to do isn't it so I can't remember my question either so no the question was it doesn't matter you gave a good answer and you mentioned I am Allah right yeah what exactly is that community tell us about it so Ayamala started actually during COVID um because um properly because obviously I'd got this platform to speak about um what I'd gone through and um during COVID there was a rise in domestic abuse cases we were seeing um women being shut behind doors not only for women just men as well it's not this is not gender um there's no gender discrimination in domestic violence it happens to everyone anyone um but I think it had risen to one in two during COVID which is like really sad and charity lines were overburnt and people were kind of stuck in indoors with their abusers it was really awful and um I basically thought um why don't we launch a community online that um starts off with Instagram which was let's talk about this topic let's create a new openness about it um so people don't feel ashamed create an online community where we can have workshops and practitioners that can lead sort of these lovely like circles of trust that you can join into but it wasn't framed in a way of like this is for people who experience domestic violence this was like it was a community for women and I was hoping by doing that we would end up with like people being able to contact us and be part of this because it you know in lots of cases if you're showcasing is that then often the abuser will see it and you get kind of cut out from the world um and so we started that and it was unbelievable and we had practitioners that would come on that would lead sessions that were free everything was free and um we then had women sharing their stories so women would write in their stories and they would put them front center on the website and they could write anonymously or they could write with their name and it gave women this voice and this power and it was essentially what I'd done with the Guardian I was just basically doing it for everyone and we were inundated with people sharing their stories with us and so that's basically what it became and um it's it's it was there for a purpose and reason and um it's done an amazing kind of job and now i'm just sort of um it sort of runs itself a little bit like it's just there as like an online um like instagram to kind of empower and like acknowledge what dv is um but it was just so pertinent to that point in time it had a purpose hello hello i hope you've enjoyed the show so far i'm amudi palmer co-founder of bay hq and the host of this show.

20:57Amardeep Parmar:For those of you who don't know, BayHQ is the community for high growth Asian heritage founders and investors in the UK. Over 7 ,500 people have attended our events, 200 people have been for our impact programs and obviously there's been over 250 episodes of this podcast. If you want to join us and take part in the programs and come to the events, go to www.fahihq.com forward slash join we also just released our first ever book called startups for outsiders which you can get amazon now and the link is in the bio hope to see you soon at event hope you enjoy the rest of the episode and obviously since you exist in the company as well right there's been different parts of that journey that i felt to get to where you are today with britain what are some of the other things which you think are really been important in terms of your learning to make you a better CEO today oh that's such a good question um backing yourself do you know what you know um you know when you're so young and naive and you just don't have the courage of your convictions and like as soon as you hear somebody say the opposite to what you believe you'll just be like I mean yeah that's right but and you don't back yourself I did that so much during Vida and actually like my whole 20s I was always like yeah no no what I'm saying is not yeah it's not right it's not important and i think that that's the biggest learning curve that i had was like learning to back myself like get as many facts as possible so that anytime someone refutes it or you know has a rebuttal you you can go back in and slam dunk it that's what i've learned is the power of like being able to kind of refute people when they're trying to kind of you know say that you're wrong um healthy dialogue healthy communication healthy discourse is so good in business like you want your board to disagree with you you want your management to disagree with you but I got to a point where it was like my voice was so low I wasn't even people would disagree and I'd be like yeah okay and that's not a healthy way to be a CEO or a leader so that was one of my biggest learning curves was learning to trust my voice and have a voice the other thing was you can't like you're you can't be sort of everyone's friend I think a lot of women especially like we struggle to kind of and then this is not for everyone i'm probably talking myself but i know that it happens with a lot of women it's very difficult to um to lead without emotions we are naturally very like emotionally in tuned we're empathetic we're emotionally intelligent um and sometimes it can be quite difficult to um make those really hard decisions because we can see the decision we're making is impacting somebody for example like firing someone that you genuinely like is so difficult making a decision that's going to impact an entire team the worst thing in the world but learning to kind of not lead with like okay i need to be their friend first but learning to lead with like i need to have this business decision first and i will then manage this in a way that shows that i am emotionally in tune to what they're going to go through that's so important i learned that really really fast and hard and and you can then learn to be the feminine leader and the i don't want to call it masculine energy because that's really really bad you can you can lend yourself into being a beautifully feminine leader like you know step into your feminine intuition and empathy but also being able to put boundaries down say what you need to say be strong and firm and not be shown as aggressive another thing and getting that fine balance is so important right and when you do that you really step into your define i think leadership abilities as a woman yeah i mean i'm not a woman i feel like i struggle with the same thing it's like you're not a woman no as far as i know um but it's that thing that i struggle with a lot because of the nature of what we do it's just that there's obviously so many people that want help from us yeah but i like i said like i always say like i can't be everybody's best friend and everyone's like oh let's go for a coffee and be like i can't do that yeah and the hard thing is now is like how to it's that management of like oh but then you used to do that and it's like but now i've got like more stress with more responsibility and it's hard to navigate that's not thinking like you're above people which is the case of like yeah i've got to focus on the business needs yeah as opposed to who i like the most and it's that i like is a fun space to navigate like and it's tough it's evolving yeah and you've got to also find time for yourself the whole the whole thing is like as your pressure increases right and your responsibility increases as bay hq is becoming bigger and better and bolder you're going to have less time for yourself and this is what i'm finding it's like how do you then you have to set boundaries like you can't just give two hours one hour 30 minutes here because then you don't have time just to fill up your own cup and then it ends up in burnout area and you don't want to go down that road because then you end up just being absolutely crap for everyone and everything so on that as well right so you obviously joined as um cco right yeah so obviously your commercial skills are gonna be like very top notch for you to come in that role in particular to begin with what what was it about that role that really because obviously before you were going to go to ceo you went for that role first yeah what was it about the commercial side of things that you found really interesting i think it's like the the commercials is so much more than sales like if i think about the sales aspect i don't enjoy like the cold call i would never be an sdr or like a business development manager because I just would hate the whole hi hi hi hi my thing that I love about commercial is that you're creating you're bending that product that's been developed into something that people can tangibly use you've got an ability to basically communicate something that is there into something that that person can touch and alongside that you create the most beautiful relationships with people that end up using that product especially in healthcare healthcare is so personal so mission driven so like you can have the most phenomenal conversations ever can't you like with people because that most of the time if I talk about dementia because it doesn't it does it does affect one in three people most of the time someone says I've experienced that and then you can have this beautiful kind of rapport that you can create and um I love that I love that so much I think the other thing that I love is that in the aged care space there is so much that we can do to innovate so I just saw such an amazing opportunity a brain class to actually carve out something in the sector that was going to tangibly change people's lives with vida i don't think that this is me being quite self-reflective but i don't think that we were really doing anything to really tangibly change someone's lives using data and outcome we were creating a better way to connect carers with clients that yes would have an roi impact and people would have better relations with their with their carers because we were matching them in a better way we were creating like logistical benefits to being able to use a matching algorithm to speed up kind of getting people out there so then that had you know a better impact on regulatory and governance and no shifts being missed etc and um the future was you know predictive analytics but actually when i look at it was i changing an individual's life really if i looked at it no was i mean i feel like you're being harsh on yourself no i'm i'm not i genuinely think i we were going to we were going to see the returns right this is the thing i couldn't see it straight away but we were going to make those things happen because we're going to start tracking the data and we're going to see the improvements in the way that our dom care agency could basically effectively deliver more hours of care that were better and put the money to the carers but it was a long-term play with brain plus what we're developing is like you we can see the improvement in seven weeks it's an evidence-based clinical therapy that when people start doing it you see the magic and I think that's something that's just so powerful and that's what basically made me want to get into it and when we first when I first joined you know we hadn't put all of the the kind of beautiful aspects to it and brought it into this like world that people could understand and and then I did that and I did then and brought in the team and just seeing what we've managed to achieve in such a short period of time it's just it's just remarkable.

28:58Amardeep Parmar:You mentioned that what your plans for Vida work but then obviously you exited before that what made you exit at that point so Vida um was was really tough um I set I was set up to fail in terms of like my term sheets were not great because no founder should have such a low amount of equity because you're never going to have decision making power and then obviously the more investment you raise the less equity you've got so you're getting more and more diluted so I had no real board decision making at that point um I had to get rid of my co-founder because he was just not a pleasant person and had to go through a really awful co-founder divorce and which loads of people will resonate with and it happens to so many people which is why I say co-founder relationships are probably as important as a marriage you just got to be so careful about it um and so I went through that and and then but a bunch of his friends who'd invested in the business then decided to make my life pretty tough um they kind of bullied me online and set up fake profiles and started saying really nasty things about me because they were protecting their mate um which was not cool and um yeah not cool and so then it became really difficult for me to manage because it was essentially bullying and harassment which actually I never used to say it but now I say it quite freely because it was and it is and I need to call it out a spade a spade and my mental health was really suffering really suffering and at the same time I was at that point then solo solo founder because I didn't have anyone to do what I was doing with we had a company that was 45 people delivering I think half a million hours of care in um over like six to twelve months which was like a lot of 500 hours is a lot of hours of care I was out in the field delivering care on a daily basis nightly basis when carers weren't turning up because I kept kept true to my core which was I'm not going to allow people to not have good care and so that was breaking me and um and at the end of it i was given a really crap ultimatum by one of the shareholders who basically said i want you to step down as ceo or i'm not going to invest any more money into this and he was pals with my ex co-founder and he um had essentially promised to invest some money into the business and then decided to not do it within 24 hours of us needing the money in the bank so i was given this really crap ultimatum and actually to be honest I turned around and I was like I'm sick of this I'm done I'm done like this is not the way to treat people this is not the way that this is done and I remember I wrote a really powerful letter that basically to everyone in the shareholders and the chairman saying the way you're treating me is absolutely devastatingly awful this is what I've achieved for the business you know created the biggest well-known brand in this space we've delivered x number of hours of care um you know delivered x amount of revenue like and actually at the core of it i've done everything i possibly can to to lead this business with heart and soul and you've not you're not doing the same back to me and so i took the decision to basically walk away and um and ask them for a value of my equity which was nowhere near what i should have got um and then after that they made a series series of very stupid decisions and the company no longer exists yeah it's i think what's good is like a lot of people might have gone for something like this they don't necessarily talk about it yeah and then when people don't talk about it then aspiring founders of the early stages they don't really necessarily know what they're getting into no and like i know on this side of the table where like you can't a lot of people won't talk about their co-founder relationship being bad when they're currently in that relationship yeah of course yeah but then there's so many people that i know it's like okay there's different dynamics there but you can't see it publicly and that makes it really hard for other people to learn if you don't see the realities of what can happen yeah and it's one of the things that i've got like this book is like startups about us right the thing i want to do in the future is like startups insiders and it's all this kind of stuff because i know all this stuff where you've been able to say it publicly but a lot of people don't say it publicly but i might know some of that gossip and like how do i then help founders yes to take the information because you need to know this kind of stuff right what happens if like your co-founders friends are invested in your company and the co-founder leaves like what how do you do like that stuff is a more advanced but it's like you don't want to walk into that blind right you want to have something to guide you on that right yeah protect yourself like honestly that's the biggest learning for me was like i wasn't protecting myself at all i just went into so blindly like so naive so like i'm gonna change the world and like first time founder so young and everyone around me was like i was like oh my god what's this is oh my god and um learned the really hard i learned hard way and now i'm so passionate about talking about it because what i went through was absolutely like horrible and it almost broke me like my mental health was in absolute disarray like it was so bad um and i don't want other people to go through what i went through because it's an it's an awful experience and um it takes away all the elements of like i remember so vividly that i when i wrote my leading post of about Vida when I'd finally you know the all the legal terms being signed and I could write this thing that was then put online and it went live and a lot of my founder community friends knew exactly the truth about what had been happening because obviously they were my like close circle and um they'd helped me through some really difficult times around the kind of negotiating the terms and negotiating my exit and they knew the history behind the shareholders they knew everything that I'd gone through and um because at the end of the day no one knows the truth apart from you right and I couldn't say anything it was really crap but anyway this post went live and the first two comments were from these two friends of his openly this time didn't even bother to like cover themselves and they were like yeah well and one of them wrote oh the shareholders know the truth about um how little you've basically done for this company and I was like at that point I think I remember sitting there and just crying like cried my eyes out about two days thinking wow I've built this company put everything into it to the point that I've almost killed myself by doing it and you have the audacity to write that back to me like you don't have power because you've given me 10 ,000 pounds into this company how dare you think you've got the power to make someone feel so small and little because of your feelings hurt or you feel like you've lost out on something there's a whole dynamic that needs to be worked out in this space that because there's a power dynamic between investors and founders and it's like they have the control and can say and do whatever they want to make you because because they control you that's not the case they've chosen to invest in you they've chosen to do what they need to do if you as a founder are doing everything you possibly can to give them a return you are updating them you are telling them exactly what you're doing you are being open honest and doing things with integrity even if it doesn't succeed you've done your very best but the end of the day those investors have taken a risk in you I think that that narrative needs to change dramatically and I've seen some really shit things said about me in the public market recently that about me being a woman and a female CEO from people that are anonymously sharing it and like I can see it and it's and it's awful and like i'm just experiencing the same shit that i dealt with when i was in my early 20s and i think why is why is this not changing why is there not better regulations and rigor around what people can and can't say about other people who are building businesses and where's that control boundary um so i don't even know i'm asking your question again but it's ranting really it's interesting because like i think one of the challenges i have is that people are nice to me because I'm useful so then I have to very much rely on like okay if someone's nice to me it doesn't necessarily mean that they're a good person and I'm very much like I hear all the stories from different places right so it's kind of getting that bigger picture I think what sometimes happens to some people is that they'll be nice to the people who are useful to them and then there's people like oh no they wouldn't do that kind of thing right and it's that dynamic I think over the investment world that is starting to shift where people are calling people out a bit more and as everyone's more connected in the community it's a lot harder to get what it's still it happens like more than often it should but it's harder to get away with because somebody would just message me like oh hey this person said like said they know you and like oh yeah don't work with them and i get those kind of messages all the time right people like oh this person said this or like and obviously on the other side i'm generally i'm saying oh this person's amazing work with them but i think that's part of the element of the community that really comes to the play is like someone like like what there's like 220 people in this podcast right people investors are asking like oh i know you interviewed that person what are they like and it's that kind of soft influence that can kind of go around that way it's like and that's hopefully that's one way that people get held more accountable it's like if you if i see you act in a certain way someone who works me but then you're being really nice to me it's like what does that say about you because okay you're treating me nice because you think i'm whatever status but it's only my team you're if you like however and i think that's one way i can kind of try to navigate that too and obviously with like what you're doing today is like i mean future investors you're looking at like people to come in and leadership team how are you trying to guard yourself so that this kind of thing doesn't happen again or like what are you looking for what's the stuff that if there's other founders out there who now like okay i'm kind of worried about show work with this person or not what's red flags or green flags to look for do you know what i don't i don't know what the red and green flags are I'm still learning that because people can really surprise you and that's the problem isn't it I think you just have to basically have your guard up in the best possible way and you've got to be you got to be so measured in how you how you talk things that you share you just got to be really like protecting of yourself and I think sometimes I've I've kind of not done that and I've and I know a lot of people don't do that and people kind of forget about themselves but I think the biggest thing that I've done now that I've learned is like like continuously reporting in a way that is showing X, Y, Z that I'm achieving on, you know, this month, being really open and honest and candid in communications with boards and people that I meet.

39:11I don't overhype. I don't oversell. I don't ever say things are amazing. I'm doing so good when they're not, you know, I'll call a space page. And as I've always said, it's like, I don't go around saying things are great if they're not and vice versa and I think that's really important because then you're leading authentically and then automatically you're protecting yourself because you're being authentic people can't come back and say well you said this that's definitely not true and also like authenticity attracts authenticity I think

39:40Amardeep Parmar:that's what I've learned and we've talked about some of the hardest times right at the moment but before we get to a question it's like what's the dream right so in 200 episodes time if we get you back sitting here again we're going to get like a little tv there and we're going to play this moment back so okay like what's that dream what what's the optimism what do you hope will happen the next two years with the work you're doing at brain and the work you're doing in other places next two years um i think the dream is that we would have embedded um cst which is this evidence-based evidence-based therapy across all the care homes so it becomes like a framework that you need to have implemented as your first line defense for people living with mild to moderate we would have collected an incredible amount of data that proves that we can actually delay cognitive decline by this amount and actually that's having an ROI impact on so many different aspects of the healthcare system and um the final one is I've got a I've got a good work-life balance as a mum and a CEO and I kind of look back and I think I've not lost time with my daughter but I've also achieved something that she's proud of I think that's what I would call success So, who are free Asians you think are doing incredible work and you love to shut them up Yes, so Anushka Pachava, absolute badass Shall I look there or there?

41:00Amardeep Parmar:From top two Anushka!

41:05Then Vishal Shah who's absolutely phenomenal he's one of my board members at Brain Plus, he's mentored me since sort of becoming CEO he does so much in the social care sector around championing social care he's just phenomenal he's a human and the final one is Ayuti Rai she's just one of the most authentic leaders I've ever met she's so successful, so warm, so kind speaks to me so openly about motherhood and about her upbringing and it's just so lovely to have those conversations with her So, yeah.

41:44Amardeep Parmar:Okay, awesome. And then if people want to hear more about you and what you're up to, where do they go to? LinkedIn. Devaka Wood. There's only, I think there's only one Devaka Wood. I think there is actually only one Devaka Wood on LinkedIn. I need to check that, actually. It's that heavy, otherwise I'm coming for you. And yeah, if you want to learn more about Brain Plus, the website isla-care.com. Isla's spelled A-Y-L-A. And is there any way that the audience could help you today? Help me. if you know people in the care home sector uh pass them on to me um and um if you're just um if you also um just want to have a chat about um anything i've discussed around um gender-based violence or dv then i'm always open because i think it's a really important topic so that's my give back awesome so so great to have you here today thank you and it's gonna be a funny edit I think.

42:36Hilarious.

42:38Amardeep Parmar:Have you any final words? No, you're amazing. That was a really nice conversation.