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Positive Enterprise Value Blog Combining Entrepreneurship and Health Span
Combining Entrepreneurship and Health Span

Combining Entrepreneurship and Health Span

January 5, 2022

52 minute listen

Portsmouth, NH

Most of our podcast interviews have been with CEO’s of mature, highly successful enterprises. Today, we have the fun of interviewing Bill Kapp, MD who is the CEO of a two year old startup—Fountain Life. Fountain, originally conceived by Tony Robbins and Peter Diamandis, is bringing together state of the art therapies with world class practitioners to address health span—not merely lifespan, but health span.

If you are accustomed to thinking about your personal or family’s health in a “sick care” model, where you only seek care once symptoms of a problem have appeared, then I expect you will be challenged by Fountain Life’s proactive model.

I appreciate Bill’s expertise of exponentially changing, state of the art scientific medicine, combined with his 30 plus years of practical application.  Listen and learn.

Listen to the interview here:

What I am Reading / Listening to

Principles for Dealing with The Changing World Order: Why Nations Succeed and Fail (2021)
By Ray Dalio

You gotta love Ray Dalio—there are no other entrepreneurs I can think of who have taken on the challenge of explaining the changing world order by researching, creating, and writing a serious minded roughly 600-page book about it. He is insatiably curious, clear eyed, willing to ask tough questions, and from his writing, ready to face potentially challenging answers to those questions. You gotta love Ray Dalio too, because he adheres to the scientific method. He may advance a hypothesis and then give us all the confirming and disconfirming data allowing room for him to be wrong. He prefaces his statements by explaining “based upon what we understand now”; and avoids declarative statements as “truths,” but instead identifies them as his own personal view. Incredibly refreshing in our world of hopelessly unscientific talking heads.

I appreciated how this book took me back to an apt overview of the Principles of Macroeconomics. To me Dalio is most informative and valuable when he takes us to a high altitude by explaining the concept of  “Understanding the Big Cycle,” where he goes back to Darwin and outlines evolution, cycles, and bumps along the way, which he illustrates in the following picture.

Throughout this work, Dalio consistently emphasizes an incredibly important theme overlooked by almost all of us: the confluence of external and internal environments combine to result in really big world events episodically over history. He points out that almost all these big events happen only once in a human life (e.g., if a human life is 80 years and these events happen in a 100 year time cycle then you only get one in your life).  And those events—whether the Great Crash, or the Depression, WWII, September 11, 2001 or a Lockdown Quarantine (missing years of school or not being present for the birth or death of loved ones)—affect the future lives of those people alive to remember them which is a memory that is then lost in the succeeding generations. So, you will have to be prepared to be surprised by events which you view as unusual (but, which in reality have happened many times before in history, just not in your lifetime). In my domain we consistently see the result of this in enterprises where it’s “shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations.” Completely understandable, really.

Dalio concludes with a short chapter on the future. I liked it (hopefully not merely because I agreed with it, but I did do that too). He makes distinctions between know-able and not know-able, and even has some advice. When you stack up his historical analysis against where we are today, you can’t help but think soberly about the Roaring 20’s we are living through and what it means for the future—short term and long term.

While I admire Dalio and his thought leadership in so many ways, boy oh boy could he use a good editor. During the reading of this book I was reminded of some of the written work of Roger Babson. Babson verbally dictated all his books to a recording secretary who was typing as he was talking. It was never clear to me how much editing happened after the fact because the writing read as conversational—a lot like Dalio. Maybe Roger had recording secretaries and Ray had Dragon Systems? I guess we’ll never know. Whatever the length, a worthy read for the intellectually curious, not merely business minded at all, just those looking for learning.

Entrepreneur Owner-Manager Quote

“I am so appreciative of Bigelow’s professionalism and hard work. Their team was in lockstep with me from beginning to end. I felt personally taken care of, and I knew the company was in good hands. I don’t imagine we could have achieved the same success without Bigelow’s involvement.”

-Jan L. Blomstrann, former Chairwoman & Owner of NRG Systems, Inc.

 

Energy Creation

Do you get positive energy from new beginnings? I sure do. Can’t think of almost anything that is so filled with promise as a new beginning…a sunrise, the beginning of a new friendship, moving to a new neighborhood, exploring a new cove, it all feels like discovery to me. A blank canvas. Love that.

So here we are at the start of a New Year. Discovery of new potential, new learning, new contributions, new appreciation.

New Beginnings PEV Post

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