Sandra:

Yeah, let’s start there. So New Startup Mindset, it’s about my journey, founder’s journey building my company Seeker Health. So back in 2015, I had this opportunity to start a company and I went for it. Not having starting a company before… not having been a programmer or not having been any of these things that you think you might need to start a company… I just went for it. And it turned out well. We had lots of customers, and we had revenue and profit. And we were making an impact in our area, which was to help find patients for clinical trials. And then eventually, companies came along to acquire the company. And so I wrote the book because I actually had gotten an opportunity to go through this entire startup cycle: start, build, and then exit… and how to do that in a very non-traditional way, while being a person that doesn’t really fit the formula.

 

So I wrote the book for the people that don’t see themselves in the Silicon Valley formula. They may not be these men… programmers, white, Asian or Indian… who are just young and say ‘I’m going to raise VC (venture capital) and I’m going to get a co-founder’… and they’re going to follow this very standard playbook.

So I didn’t do any of that. And that’s why I wrote the book to sort of show a different way, and help those people who want to do it differently… who want to create a company on their own terms; for them to have a bit of a playbook and some company as though as they’re doing that.

 

Loree:

That’s fantastic. I think there is definitely this myth that gets perpetuated by shows like Silicon Valley on HBO, that there is this formula of many of the things that you just mentioned. I really like how in your book, right upfront, you dispel a lot of those myths, and you share all these things that you don’t have to be in order to be a successful startup founder. I just really love how confident you are and how you went into this with all of these societal messages about you not being the ideal person of what we expect a startup founder to be like, and you were like that whatever, I’m gonna build a company.

 

Sandra:

So pretty much. I mean, I’m a woman, I’m an immigrant. I am a mother of two school-aged children. My kids were seven and 12 when I started the company. I’m a person who needs eight hours of sleep a night in order to function. I like to go to sleep around 10:30 at night. And, you know, I’m not a programmer. Yeah, so all of those things, all those labels can be used to say, Well, I’m not the person that these people are looking for, right? And yet, that’s fine. It’s like, okay, who cares, but I’m on my own. I know what I know. I know what I don’t know. And I know that I want to do this. So I’m going to go ahead and do it.

 

Loree:

Awesome. So I’d love to hear more about your leadership journey. And as a child, when was the first time you really saw that you could influence somebody to take action?

 

Sandra:

Yeah, this is gonna be, I think, a funny story, but I have a younger brother. He’s three years younger than I am, and during that time, he always kind of had this like snotty runny nose right like his nose was always snotty and it would be all different colors, you know yellow and green and sometimes like black if he was played with mud. And so I came to him and I said, ‘I have solution for you. All you need to do is you need to lay in bed, I’m going to tie you to the bed and I’m going to perform a surgery on your nose. And after the surgery is done. You will be as good as new there will be nothing coming out of your nose anymore.’

 

Loree:

Wow.

 

Sandra:

A moment to influence another person and of course he was, I don’t know, like four years old or something. And he was like ‘yeah, I think that this is really the next step in my life… to be tied to the bed by my sister.’ So I tied him to the bed with some rope, and I dug in his nose with it. I did the surgery. This was the first time that I remember being sort of like powerfully influencing someone… we sort of had this vision of a shared future that would be better for him and for all of us… to have a clean nose. And I got him going along with it, like really buying into this vision and letting me execute on it.

 

Loree:

Amazing. It’s like your first healthcare startup at a very early age.

 

Sandra:

Well the next day he was probably full of snot again.

 

Loree:

Too funny! How about as you grew up, who are some of your leadership role models?

 

Sandra:

Yeah, honestly, I was surrounded by them. I was really lucky in this regard. First of all, the first person that comes to mind is my grandmother; I close the book talking about her. She was a refugee from the Second World War. And she left on a boat with nothing really from Poland to come to Uruguay, a country that she never heard of, she didn’t speak the language and basically to start from zero. And I grew up pretty close to her. She worked at my father’s hardware store; they both work together at the store. So I would see her almost on a daily basis. And you could tell that she was just made of something different. She was very petite, very short, like a tiny little container, but she was very strong. And that was a really great person to grow around because it was sort of like it kind of like it didn’t matter what life was going to throw your way, you’re going to get up and keep going in some way. And that was amazing to have.

 

Then my father was also a great leadership role model, a different type of leadership. His leadership focused much more on the well-being of the other person and that we are these whole people who both have a productive aside and have a side that requires some nurturing, right? We want to be working on things that are close to our purpose. We want to feel like our soul, and our heart have a place in what we’re working on. So he was very much a show of that.

Then my mother was also a great leadership role model. She was always a working woman; she had three children, and went back to work three months after each maternity leave. For a lot of the time as a family, she was the primary breadwinner because of my dad around this hardware store that was more of like a mom and pop store that sort of struggled. She showed me sort of this leadership of, you know, perseverance of just, you keep going, and you keep building, and you don’t give up the first time that something happens.

 

Loree:

Yeah. Nice. It’s interesting. Your grandmother really set those expectations for you in a way that it sounds like you just expected that from yourself. When you have that type of influence it almost gets embedded in you from a very early age, that those are the things that you’re capable of doing.

 

Sandra:

Absolutely. Yeah. Like it was a kind of natural right to see her restart her life right in South America. And so yeah, it was it just sort of an incredible role model.

 

Loree:

What would you say is the best leadership advice that you’ve been given?

 

Sandra:

Yeah, I think the best leadership advice that I have been given comes from this book that I ran into maybe about seven years ago or so called, Choose Yourself, by James Altucher. And the whole book is about choosing yourself; not necessarily waiting for any gatekeeping type of institutions to choose you. And that was really important and timely advice for me because I had spent about 15 years working at biopharmaceutical companies who are generally medium to large size corporate enterprises where lots of politics and lots of people that have to choose you. There was a person that had to choose me to work on a project and the person that had to choose to promote me, and a person that had to choose what my salary was going to be. And this book, Choose Yourself, came at a perfect time when it was like, ‘You know what, I don’t need anyone else to choose me, I am going to choose myself.’ I can set up my own company. I can promote myself to the title of CEO and Founder and my income is going to depend purely on what I build, and to what extent that is meeting and exceeding the needs of our customers. So that has been really definitive for me. And I think it’s really great leadership advice in general because many times we’re waiting for somebody to give us our mission, or to give us what we need to do or enable us, and that’s not necessary. You can go on your mission today. You choose yourself to go on your mission today.