Some people are natural conversationalists. I’m not one of them. 

Like many people, I’ve always felt awkward in conversation. That’s especially hard as an entrepreneur, where talking to people is half the job. Good conversations can drive our businesses and relationships. We like to buy from, work with, and collaborate with people who are easy to talk to. 

That’s why I spent the past two decades studying the patterns of master conversationalists for my latest book, Conversation: How to Connect with Anyone & Make Every Interaction Count. I learned that people who come off as instantly likable use certain phrases over and over again to build rapport. Now I’m passing those phrases along so that you can use them in team meetings, investor calls, and client sessions to make your small talk infinitely better. 

The phrases involve compliments and moments of connection, so only use them if they feel authentic. Never fake it. Here are five to try. 

1. ‘I was just thinking about you!’ 

Everyone likes to be remembered. So telling someone, “I was just thinking of you!” immediately sparks connection. For example, I wanted to check in with a certain VIP but wasn’t sure how. She had been on my mind, so I just reached out and told her exactly that. Here’s what I sent: 

→ Subject: I was just thinking about you! I stopped by the pier this weekend and stumbled upon the national skimboarding competition! Of course, it made me think of you. Did you ever end up designing your own board? I took a video of the winning skim, attached. Incredible, right? 

She immediately wrote back raving about the video I sent and attached a picture of the skimboard she had designed. It triggered a request for a catch-up call, then a taco breakfast, and then an invite to speak at her company’s corporate retreat. 

This is a powerful phrase you can use absolutely anywhere. For example: 

→ If someone pops into your head, text them: “Hey! I was just thinking of you and wanted to check in. Anything new and exciting?” 

→ If you see something that reminds you of someone in your life, share it with them and say, “I just saw this amazing [blank], and it made me think of you!” 

→ If you need to reach out to someone, say, “Long time no talk. Someone recently mentioned a [blank], and, of course, I thought of you.” 

These are casual, immediately put someone at ease by reminding them they are top of mind, and make them feel good. Magic. 

2. ‘Tell me more!’

The research is clear: Asking people questions, especially follow-up questions, makes you more likable. It shows that you’re engaged, responsive, and genuinely interested. 

And here’s the simplest follow-up of all: Just say, “Tell me more!” 

For example, I once visited the emergency room for very bad food poisoning. (I was fine, but I’ll never eat scallops again.) My nurse seemed grumpy, but I was very grateful for her help and wanted her to feel appreciated. I noticed a little pin above her name badge, so I asked, “Is that a pin for Mellow Velo? I just walked by there last week. It’s a bike spot, right?” 

She brightened. “Yes! I’m an avid biker and I’m helping them organize a big bike ride for families.” I was tired and wasn’t sure what to say next. I also don’t know how to ride a bike (true, and embarrassing). So I just said, “Tell me more!” 

Then off she went, telling me about their great local initiatives. She spent far longer in my room and stopped by frequently to check on me (once with a warm blanket!). 

Here’s an advanced way to use this question. Let’s say someone is mid-story at a networking event or group dinner, and they get interrupted. The waiter arrives, someone asks for the salt, and the conversation shifts. The person might never get to finish their story — unless you say, “You were saying something so interesting. Please tell me more!” They’ll love you forever. 

3. ‘Last time we were talking, you mentioned…’ 

Want to become effortlessly likable with someone you’ve met before? Just say: “Last time we were talking, you mentioned…” paired with something that lit them up the last time you talked. 

For example, you could say: “Last time we spoke, you mentioned you were going to Greece on vacation. How was that?” Or ask about the big project they mentioned, or a show you both love. 

This packs a powerful emotional punch. It shows that you pay attention, have a good memory, and consider them worthy of being memorable. 

In fact, this is how Earvin “Magic” Johnson first impressed the woman who became his wife, Cookie. They attended a Michigan State University party. Shortly after, Magic showed up at her dorm room with a carefully selected surprise — yellow roses, because she had mentioned she likes yellow. It was, she said, the “sweetest thing any guy who’d ever showed romantic interest in me had done.” 

4. ‘Same here!’ 

Research consistently shows: We like people who are like us. We’re more likely to start conversations online with people whose profiles show shared interests. Teams collaborate better when members have shared interests. And we’re even more likely to be persuaded by someone we can relate to. 

This is why, at the start of a negotiation or meeting, it can be valuable to highlight mutual likes — to make someone say, “Same here!” The common ground can be as simple as your age, hometown, or background. 

I discovered this myself in 2025, when I got an unexpected email from Khloé Kardashian’s team. They said she’s a fan of my work(!) and wanted me on her podcast. I’d never met someone so famous, and I was terrified of the small talk we’d have before the interview. So I made a list of things we have in common to spark “same here!” moments — like how we both attended all-girls schools and we both have two kids. I told her these when we met, and it was like activating instant bestie mode. Suddenly, everything flowed. When our recording was done, she told me, “I didn’t want that to end.” 

That’s the power of “same here!” energy. It isn’t just chemistry. It’s psychology. 

5. ‘You’re so…!’ 

What makes someone instantly likable? You might think it’s charm or cleverness. But often, it’s this: making others feel valued. 

In every conversation, people are quietly wondering, Am I being boring? Am I doing well? Do they like me? Your job is to answer those questions before they’re asked. Humans love to be validated for who they are, not just what they do. Frequently. Don’t assume you’ve said it before, or that someone knows how valued they are. We can almost never receive too much validation if it’s genuine. 

Doing so is simple. If you appreciate something about someone, tell them! Just say: “You’re so…” then you can highlight their humor, charisma, or even punctuality. 

In fact, this is how legendary fashion designer Cristóbal Balenciaga got his start. He grew up poor and shy in a small Basque fishing village. Every Sunday, he’d catch glimpses of the town’s fashionable Marquesa de Casa Torres descending the church steps in her couture. One morning, unable to contain himself, he exclaimed: “How elegant you are!” (In other words: You’re so elegant.) 

That stopped her in her tracks. She asked Balenciaga about his eye for fashion and discovered his love for style. A few days later, she handed him the dress he had admired so much and asked him to copy it. He did. A career was born. 

Positive labels help people see themselves in a new light. And when you give someone a label they want to embody, they often rise to it. NOW I CHALLENGE YOU: Use one of these five phrases in your next conversation. And watch how quickly your connection with them improves.   

From CONVERSATION: How to Connect with Anyone & Make Every Interaction Count by Vanessa Van Edwards, published on October 6, 2026, by Portfolio, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC. ©2026 by Vanessa Van Edwards

Some people are natural conversationalists. I’m not one of them. 

Like many people, I’ve always felt awkward in conversation. That’s especially hard as an entrepreneur, where talking to people is half the job. Good conversations can drive our businesses and relationships. We like to buy from, work with, and collaborate with people who are easy to talk to. 

That’s why I spent the past two decades studying the patterns of master conversationalists for my latest book, Conversation: How to Connect with Anyone & Make Every Interaction Count. I learned that people who come off as instantly likable use certain phrases over and over again to build rapport. Now I’m passing those phrases along so that you can use them in team meetings, investor calls, and client sessions to make your small talk infinitely better. 

What does success look like? Hustle culture would say put in more grit, grind things out, and you’ll succeed. But that view can feel outdated. And honestly, the “work harder, and everything will be fine” mantra has been difficult from day one. 

Success doesn’t have to mean working harder. It doesn’t have to mean climbing higher on that corporate ladder. You don’t need to constantly chase the next milestone. 

Technology was supposed to make life easier. Workdays should be shorter by now. Instead, it created a warped view of success defined by endless hustle and acceleration.

The solution? To redefine success itself. Here are five books that challenge what the key elements of success look like. They break away from hustle culture and explore a more intentional approach to achievement, built around freedom, fulfillment, purpose, and knowing when enough is truly enough.

1. Brian Herriot — Time Freedom: Rethink Your Work and Money to Create a Life You Love Now

While hustle can be lucrative, it has the opposite effect on the great equalizer: time. Everyone has limited time, and buying into the hustle lifestyle can leave you with less.

That’s where Time Freedom: Rethink Your Work and Money to Create a Life You Love Now comes in. Fresh off the press from Page Two Books, the book captures Brian Herriot’s thoughts on balancing time and money. Herriot is an author, speaker, business coach, and financial advisor. He understands money as the fuel for life’s engine. But he also knows money is a means to an end, not the end itself.

Time Freedom starts reclaiming balance by redefining financial freedom. Instead of treating it as a finish line, it shifts the goalposts entirely. The new goal for a balanced life? Time freedom. 

This book is about reclaiming time while maintaining flexibility. It doesn’t abandon responsibility, but puts it in its place. You’ll feel empowered to design your days around your own values, not the corporate code signing your paychecks. If the endless hustle has you struggling to find the time, this is a useful place to start rethinking what a more balanced version of success could look like.

2. Scott Galloway — The Algebra of Happiness

If you’re struggling with what success looks like, here’s a question for you: What’s the formula for a life well lived? Author Scott Galloway explores that question in his book The Algebra of Happiness: Notes on the Pursuit of Success, Love, and Meaning. 

Galloway compares key concepts, like a lucrative career versus a meaningful one. He assesses the metrics of work-life balance and considers how relationships impact life. 

If you’re expecting a hollow “don’t worry, be happy” gospel with this one, think again. Galloway is as grounded a person as you’ll get to know through text. He’s known for his direct insights and practical perspective, reflected in his candid, first-person writing style.

He also knows what it means to succeed. He’s a serial entrepreneur who has launched 12 different firms. He teaches brand strategy and digital marketing at New York University’s Stern School of Business and was named one of the “World’s 50 Best Business School Professors” in 2012. 

Galloway knows what it means to succeed. He just doesn’t believe that it has to be mutually exclusive from finding happiness. 

3. Mandy Balak — Chasing Enough

Another title from Page Two Books worth considering is Mandy Balak’s Chasing Enough: The High Achiever’s Guide to Sustainable Success, an ideal entry if you’re trying to get out of overperformance mode.

The hustle is all about relentless pushing. Never stop. Keep going. At a certain point, though, you have to admit that you’re a finite human being. How do you slow down and not collapse? How do you maintain success and stop flipping between flying high and burning out?

In Chasing Enough, Balak addresses the endless demands of hustle culture head-on. From disintegrating workplace boundaries to an endless barrage of notifications in your pocket, Balak calls out modern life for what it is: an endless cycle of raising the bar “a little bit higher.” 

As an award-winning entrepreneur and leadership advisor, Balak steps back and introduces a refreshingly honest, psychologically new metric for success: pursuing wholeness. The message at the heart of her book? 

Earning your worth through effort is a myth. Stop believing it.

For Balak, you can’t productivity-hack your way to sustainable success. You have to balance out the hustle with the ignored (but critical) stuff. Things like rest, boundaries, presence, and curiosity. If you struggle to slow down and see the value in things outside of the hustle lifestyle, this is where you need to start.

4. Tonya Dalton — The Joy of Missing Out

Who better to help manage success in a hustle-driven world than a CEO who doubles as a productivity expert? But Tonya Dalton doesn’t use her experience and executive power to drive herself or her people harder. She uses it to gain perspective. 

That’s what she explores in The Joy of Missing Out: Live More by Doing Less. In it, Dalton makes a critical distinction: feeling overwhelmed often isn’t about having too much to do. It’s about failing to see the starting line. 

Dalton’s solution? Do less. Pare things down. Identify what’s important, then cut what you don’t. 

That is what brings clarity. It unleashes real, high-quality productivity. It helps you order priorities instead of chasing every opportunity or taking on every obligation. In short, it helps you discover your purpose outside of the hustle.

5. Viktor E. Frankl — Man’s Search for Meaning

Finally, there’s Viktor E. Frankl’s bestseller Man’s Search for Meaning. Yes, this book is often included on book lists for good reason. The bestseller has sold over 18 million copies over the past two decades for a reason. In it, Frankl uncovers what it really means to find your purpose. (Hint: it isn’t by hustling harder.)

In the book, Frankl looks at success in life through the lens of meaning. If you know your “why,” you can handle the “how” in almost any situation. 

Frankl’s psychological theory around purpose is called logotherapy, rooted in the Greek word for meaning. It moves away from pleasure as humanity’s core driver (a concept hustle culture rewards profusely). Instead, the author presents the drive to discover and pursue meaning as the main driver of success in life.

The book doesn’t deny life’s resistance. It acknowledges that obstacles are always in the way. But beneath it all, real resilience and sustained success come from understanding that the most significant part of life isn’t money, achievement, or material success. It’s the act of living.

Finding success outside of hustle culture

Hustle culture isn’t sustainable. One of the reasons it fades as you get further into your career is that it becomes obvious that burning hotter than the next person isn’t a sustainable path to success — and the further you get into life, the clearer it is that sustainability is more important than intensity. 

If you want to find real success, you have to think outside of the hustle. These five books will help you break the cycle of intensity and replace it with a definition of success that is more rewarding than anything hustle culture can ever produce on its own.

What does success look like? Hustle culture would say put in more grit, grind things out, and you’ll succeed. But that view can feel outdated. And honestly, the “work harder, and everything will be fine” mantra has been difficult from day one. 

Success doesn’t have to mean working harder. It doesn’t have to mean climbing higher on that corporate ladder. You don’t need to constantly chase the next milestone. 

Technology was supposed to make life easier. Workdays should be shorter by now. Instead, it created a warped view of success defined by endless hustle and acceleration.

A few years ago, I wrote an article exploring something I have always found fascinating: how writers, filmmakers and producers have repeatedly imagined technologies decades before they actually existed. From holograms and intelligent machines to futuristic interfaces and robots, entertainment has often created the fictional blueprint that technology entrepreneurs, scientists and engineers subsequently turned into reality.

At the time, I was looking at this from the perspective of the filmmaker and technology innovator, and how closely these two worlds have always been connected. What I find even more exciting today is that the relationship is changing. We are moving into a period where the creator does not necessarily have to wait for somebody else to build the technology they have imagined. We are increasingly able to imagine it, tell the story around it, visualize it, prototype it, develop it, market it and put it in front of an audience ourselves. That’s an extraordinary shift.

Creators no longer have to wait for builders

For generations, the filmmaker could imagine the future but had to fake it. We created props, sets, visual effects and computer-generated environments to show audiences things that did not yet exist. We would create a fictional product for a film or television series and make it look real enough for the audience to believe it existed. Sometimes, those fictional ideas would ultimately inspire somebody to go away and build the real thing.

Today, the same creator can potentially take that fictional idea and start building the real thing.

We can tell the story, develop the concept, generate the visual identity, create the first prototype, rapidly iterate it, test it with an audience and use social media to distribute the story and potentially generate sales. The creator can sit at the center of an entire ecosystem that previously required multiple companies, departments and specialists. And I think we are only beginning to understand what that means.

We are living through one of the most exciting periods in history for anybody who considers themselves a creator, entrepreneur, inventor, filmmaker, designer or simply somebody with an idea that they want to bring to life. The tools are becoming increasingly accessible, the cost of experimentation is falling and the ability to reach a global audience has never been greater.

New technology needs a new workspace

Yet something slightly strange is happening. Most of us are still working in almost exactly the same way we did before all of this technology arrived.

We are sitting at a desk looking at a screen, opening documents, spreadsheets, presentations and browser windows, moving information around a two-dimensional workspace. We have added AI into that environment, but in many cases, we are still using it in a fundamentally two-dimensional way.

I find this particularly interesting because I studied architecture at university. We would design buildings and spaces in three dimensions, but much of the actual creative process happened on a two-dimensional drawing board. We were trying to represent a three-dimensional world on a flat piece of paper. Even our 3D drawings were ultimately being created on a 2D surface.

I believe the next evolution of work will be very different.

We are going to have to start thinking much more multilaterally rather than simply horizontally across a screen. Our work environments are going to become increasingly visual, spatial and interactive, with three-dimensional models, heads-up displays, holographic interfaces, projection mapping, augmented reality, mixed reality and other technologies becoming increasingly integrated into how we create and communicate.

For anyone who has watched “Minority Report”, there is a reason that futuristic working environments have always looked so compelling. The idea was never really about having a bigger computer screen. It was about changing the relationship between humans and information so that information could exist around us rather than being trapped inside a rectangle sitting on a desk.

We are now beginning to have the technology to make elements of that vision possible.

AI will be an important part of that transition because it is not simply another piece of software. It is increasingly becoming an interface between our ideas and the things we want to create. It can work with words, images, video, audio, data, code and increasingly complex combinations of all of them. The more these capabilities converge, the less sense it makes to think of our work as a sequence of separate tasks performed in separate applications.

And the data suggests we are still extremely early in this transformation. Microsoft’s 2026 Work Trend Index found that 66% of AI users surveyed say AI has allowed them to spend more time on high-value work, while 58% say it is enabling them to produce work they could not have produced a year earlier. At the same time, McKinsey’s latest State of AI research found that 88% of respondents say their organizations are regularly using AI in at least one business function, yet most organizations are still experimenting or piloting rather than scaling these technologies throughout the business. That gap is fascinating.

The technology is moving incredibly quickly, but the way we work has not yet caught up. We’re effectively putting incredibly powerful new machinery into an old factory.

I don’t think the opportunity is simply to use AI to make our existing jobs faster. The much bigger opportunity is to rethink what the job actually is, how we work, how we create and even what the workspace itself should look like.

From an idea to a business

Imagine an entrepreneur who has an idea for a new product. Traditionally, they might need to write a business plan, find a designer, brief a product developer, commission prototypes, approach manufacturers, build a website, hire a marketing agency and then spend money trying to get the product in front of customers.

Now the same entrepreneur can begin telling the story of that product immediately. They can create visual concepts, explore different designs, develop a prototype, generate marketing material, build a community around the idea and use the extraordinary distribution power of social media to find out whether people actually want it.

That does not mean every idea will become a successful business. It means we can experiment with far more ideas, far more quickly. that’s where I think the real excitement lies.

We’re moving towards a world where storytelling, innovation, product development and marketing are no longer necessarily separate disciplines. They can become part of one continuous creative process.

This is particularly exciting to me because it brings us back to where we started with film and television.

For decades, filmmakers have been creating visions of the future. We have imagined flying cars, intelligent computers, holographic interfaces, robots, virtual worlds and machines that can interact with humans in ways that once seemed completely impossible. We built those things as fictional objects because the technology was not yet available to build them for real.

Now the creator has increasingly powerful tools to move from the fictional version to the experimental version. That’s a very different world, and one we should embrace.

There is, understandably, plenty of fear surrounding AI. There are serious questions around jobs, misinformation, privacy, intellectual property and the way these technologies will affect society. We should absolutely be having those conversations.

But we need to remember that technological evolution has always created new possibilities alongside the disruption it causes. The internet did not simply destroy old business models; it created entirely new industries. Smartphones did not simply replace existing devices; they created an ecosystem that nobody could have fully predicted. Social media did not simply change advertising; it created entirely new categories of creator and entrepreneur.

AI has the potential to do something similar, but perhaps on an even more fundamental level because it is increasingly becoming part of the creative process itself.

The extraordinary thing is that we don’t have to sit around waiting for the future to arrive, we can participate in creating it.

We can be the writers who imagine the technology, the filmmakers who visualize it, the entrepreneurs who develop it, the designers who prototype it and the creators who tell the world about it.

We can use AI to help us build things that previously existed only inside our heads, and then we can use the same ecosystem to put those things in front of the world. That’s why we are entering a creator’s paradise.

Not because AI is going to do everything for us, but because it is giving ordinary people access to an extraordinary range of creative and entrepreneurial capabilities. The person with the idea no longer necessarily needs to wait for somebody else to give them permission, provide the resources or build the first version.

The tools are increasingly in our hands — the question now is whether our thinking is ready to catch up.

We need to stop thinking about the workplace as a desk, a computer and a collection of software applications and start thinking about it as a creative environment that can exist across multiple dimensions.

We need to start designing our workflows around what technology can now make possible rather than forcing new technology into workflows designed decades ago. Most importantly, we need to remain curious.

If the history of film and technology has taught us anything, it is that today’s impossible idea can become tomorrow’s everyday reality. The difference now is that we don’t necessarily have to wait decades for somebody else to build it.

A few years ago, I wrote an article exploring something I have always found fascinating: how writers, filmmakers and producers have repeatedly imagined technologies decades before they actually existed. From holograms and intelligent machines to futuristic interfaces and robots, entertainment has often created the fictional blueprint that technology entrepreneurs, scientists and engineers subsequently turned into reality.

At the time, I was looking at this from the perspective of the filmmaker and technology innovator, and how closely these two worlds have always been connected. What I find even more exciting today is that the relationship is changing. We are moving into a period where the creator does not necessarily have to wait for somebody else to build the technology they have imagined. We are increasingly able to imagine it, tell the story around it, visualize it, prototype it, develop it, market it and put it in front of an audience ourselves. That’s an extraordinary shift.

Creators no longer have to wait for builders

For generations, the filmmaker could imagine the future but had to fake it. We created props, sets, visual effects and computer-generated environments to show audiences things that did not yet exist. We would create a fictional product for a film or television series and make it look real enough for the audience to believe it existed. Sometimes, those fictional ideas would ultimately inspire somebody to go away and build the real thing.

When Sarina Virk Torrendell decided to leave Amazon in September 2025, she knew that the safer choice was to stay put. 

Torrendell had spent two decades building a consumer technology career. Her compensation at Amazon was in the high six figures, enough to support a family in New York City. At the time, Torrendell had two children and had just learned that she was pregnant with her third child. 

Then she quit to start YouPop, an AI startup for content creators and founders that combines all of their different ventures onto one platform.

Why she started YouPop

YouPop arose out of Torrendell’s conversations with content creators. She noticed a pattern. People were no longer simply posting videos or building an audience online. They were instead creating multi-platform businesses by launching courses, writing books, hosting podcasts, selling products, taking speaking engagements and landing brand deals. 

Torrendell believed that the problem was that the tools supporting those businesses were fragmented. Creators had analytics in one place, sponsorship work in another, storefronts somewhere else.

That insight became YouPop, the startup Torrendell describes as an “intelligence layer” for modern content creators. The company aims to help creators make more informed decisions about what to build, sell and prioritize to make more money.

“There is just a massive opportunity ahead of us,” Torrendell tells Entrepreneur in a new interview. “We’re really setting out to build the next unicorn in this space.”

She notes that the venture “was certainly risky.” But she believed the time was right to start YouPop and that the timing mattered more than the comfort of a corporate job. 

Torrendell faced well-meaning advice from her family and friends about her decision to leave Amazon. They pointed out that a high-paying job with paid maternity leave and stability had its appeal — especially for a mother who was five months pregnant in an expensive city. 

Even Torrendell’s husband, whom she calls her biggest supporter, initially questioned if the timing made sense. 

“He was like, ‘I don’t think this is the moment to do this. Why don’t you wait until you have the baby?’” she says.

But Torrendell believed waiting could mean missing the market entirely.

She believed in herself

Torrendell did not approach the decision to leave Amazon impulsively.

She gave herself 90 days to raise the money needed to begin building YouPop. If she could not do that, she had a backup plan: return to the job market.

“I had all the scenarios mapped out,” Torrendell says. “And I also just had high conviction in myself.”

That confidence was grounded in both her experience and her network.

Torrendell’s career has put her at the center of shifts in how people buy and sell. She joined Apple in 2018, leading global App Store partner marketing before moving to Apple Pay to help expand contactless payments.

At Meta, she helped small businesses move online as the pandemic upended physical retail. She then spent about three years at Amazon working on creator partnerships and live shopping.

Those roles taught her to spot changes in consumer behavior before they became mainstream, she says. With YouPop, she is betting on the rise of creators who turn professional knowledge and audiences into multiple income streams.

Torrendell deliberately limited the fundraising process, targeting investors who understood consumer technology and the creator economy. Rather than taking every possible meeting, she estimates that she spoke with about 20 investors.

From those meetings, Torrendell raised about $1 million, enough to finance a technically ambitious first build.

After raising the funds, Torrendell moved fast. YouPop built its beta product in roughly five and a half months. To build the product, Torrendell hired employees, including a chief of staff and principal AI engineer. She created it with a trusted team of engineers and a product designer.

How YouPop works

Torrendell describes YouPop as an “agentic operating system” for creators. The AI-powered platform combines a creator’s online presence in one dashboard, then provides insights to help them grow their businesses and identify new income streams.

Torrendell gave the example of a content creator who is thinking about writing a book. If they want to decide what kind of book to write, they can go on YouPop and ask the engine. YouPop then goes into the creator’s proprietary data set from their various platforms and will say something like, “Your audience is really interested in your fundraising journey,” and mention three topics that the book could cover. 

The tool doesn’t stop there. After identifying topics, it might offer to draft or outline a book proposal.

“We’re really creating data that’s an insight layer that understands you specifically and then helps you understand what new revenue opportunities you can get as a content creator,” Torrendell says. 

The venture is still in an early stage. YouPop launched its beta in August and has not yet begun reporting revenue.

Betting on creators

YouPop plans to charge creators a fee to use the platform. Its initial growth has been heavily relationship-driven. Torrendell began with her own network of creators, then benefited from public support from investors, advisors and creators already using the platform.

Torrendell says the result is a waitlist approaching 1,000 people. The company’s biggest challenge is the technical complexity of what it is building. It isn’t easy to create a platform that can pull the most important parts of a creator’s online presence and translate them into reliable recommendations and tools. 

But Torrendell says the scale of the opportunity has surprised her, too.

She knew creators were increasingly building businesses beyond social media. What has become even more apparent is how many professionals with traditional jobs are beginning to build public expertise online and have a social media presence. 

For founders, Torrendell’s advice comes back to a balance of conviction and discipline. She says to know your competition, but avoid reacting to every rival’s funding announcement or product update. Pivot only when the market gives you a meaningful reason to do so.

“It’s very important to trust yourself and have conviction in what you’re building,” she adds. “People are going to give you their opinions without having all the context that you do. Feedback is critical for growth, but to also just really have that conviction and confidence in yourself, I think that’s what makes a really strong founder.”

When Sarina Virk Torrendell decided to leave Amazon in September 2025, she knew that the safer choice was to stay put. 

Torrendell had spent two decades building a consumer technology career. Her compensation at Amazon was in the high six figures, enough to support a family in New York City. At the time, Torrendell had two children and had just learned that she was pregnant with her third child. 

Then she quit to start YouPop, an AI startup for content creators and founders that combines all of their different ventures onto one platform.

Picture this: It’s a scorching hot afternoon in Texas. Luckily, you’ve got a shady porch, a pitcher of ice-cold lemonade and a very effective fan. You’re enjoying passing the afternoon playing dominoes with your family when suddenly, out-of-the-blue, your father-in-law comes up with a terrible idea: why not drive to Abilene for dinner, more than 50 miles away?

Why not? Here’s why not, you think. The car doesn’t have air conditioning. It will be a cramped, sweltering and miserable road trip, hours in each direction. Before you can say anything, your wife says the trip sounds fun. Your mother-in-law says the same. You hate to be disagreeable, so you say the only thing you think is allowed: Sounds great. 

The trip is just as bad as you imagined, and, adding insult to injury, your meal is bad, too. After all that, you have to pile back into the car and make the reverse journey home. 

At long last, you get back to the porch and the fan. Everyone is silent for a long time. Lying through your teeth, you say to the group, “Well, that was fun!” 

No one agrees. One by one, every family member confesses they thought it was an awful plan before leaving — but felt pressured to go by everyone else. Even your father-in-law said he’d have preferred to stay home — he was just worried everyone else was bored. 

This was an actual experience lived by the management professor Jerry Harvey, who published the story in 1974, calling it “the Abilene Paradox.” Ultimately, his point wasn’t really about road trips; it was about the perils of phony consensus. Here’s why being too agreeable is a genuine risk that can hurt your team. 

The cost of false alignment

Everyone loves consensus. We assume that if agreement is unanimous, we must be doing something right. 

Unfortunately, agreeableness comes with a cost. I’m reminded of the show Silicon Valley, one of the best depictions of startup culture I’ve seen. A beta version of the fictional startup Pied Piper’s platform is released to almost universal adoration — except for a board member named Monica, who hates it. As the only non-engineer to try it, she assumes she’s in the wrong, so she keeps her feedback quiet. Turns out, she’s spot on — the product is a huge flop with the general public. 

This is what false consensus looks like in practice. Monica was the odd one out, and it seemed like the failure was with her for not understanding the platform’s value. She felt pressure to fall in step with its many fans, because frankly, it was easier. When you’re the one dissenting voice, all eyes turn to you. Suddenly, you have to justify your thinking and defend your reasoning. That’s a whole lot harder than simply saying, “yep, looks good!” 

In The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, the consultant and speaker Patrick Lencioni concludes that smart teams make bad decisions thanks to a preference for keeping things pleasant at the expense of keeping them honest. When people don’t feel safe to disagree openly, it’s not that they don’t stop disagreeing; they just move the conversation to the sidelines. “It’s as simple as this,” Lencioni writes. “When people don’t unload their opinions and feel like they’ve been listened to, they won’t really get on board.”

The alternative to consensus (hint: it’s not dictatorship) 

If false consensus is the problem, the obvious fix sounds like this: the leader decides, everyone else falls in line. But that’s not the answer, either.

As leaders, I believe it’s our job to gather information, weigh options, analyze data and yes, hear opinions. Jeff Bezos uses a principle he calls “disagree and commit,” in which teams are encouraged to voice their opinions and argue in favor of what they actually believe. But once a decision has been made, everyone gets on board, including people who voted the other way. 

Bezos has applied this rule to himself: when he’s deferred to a direct report’s judgment over his own, he’s been explicit about what that means. “I’m not going to be second-guessing it, I’m not going to be sniping at it, I’m not going to be saying ‘I told you so.’ I’m going to try actively to help make sure it works,” he said. 

When you’re the head of a company, the buck stops with you, but that doesn’t mean you’re always right. There have been times at Jotform where I’ve learned this the hard way — I’ve wasted time and energy seeking a consensus that was never going to materialize. Now, I follow a version of Bezos’s principle: I listen, I consult, I gather data. When I make a decision — even if that decision is at odds with my original thinking — I own it. 

In order to hear dissent, you need to create a culture that makes space for differing opinions. Harvey’s sweltering Texas family and Silicon Valley’s Monica had one important thing in common, which was that they didn’t feel comfortable sharing what they actually thought. Leaders have to make sure they’re fostering an environment where raising an objection won’t come with negative consequences. 

Artificial consensus might be peaceful and efficient. But it’s also built on a fundamental lie. Good leaders will aspire to something deeper, messier and ultimately, better for everyone. 

Picture this: It’s a scorching hot afternoon in Texas. Luckily, you’ve got a shady porch, a pitcher of ice-cold lemonade and a very effective fan. You’re enjoying passing the afternoon playing dominoes with your family when suddenly, out-of-the-blue, your father-in-law comes up with a terrible idea: why not drive to Abilene for dinner, more than 50 miles away?

Why not? Here’s why not, you think. The car doesn’t have air conditioning. It will be a cramped, sweltering and miserable road trip, hours in each direction. Before you can say anything, your wife says the trip sounds fun. Your mother-in-law says the same. You hate to be disagreeable, so you say the only thing you think is allowed: Sounds great. 

The trip is just as bad as you imagined, and, adding insult to injury, your meal is bad, too. After all that, you have to pile back into the car and make the reverse journey home. 

The most expensive problems in a business rarely appear overnight. They develop gradually while the owner is focused on growth and the daily pressure to keep moving. That is one of the paradoxes of entrepreneurship: The closer you are to your business, the harder it can be to see it clearly.

Owners know their companies better than anyone, but that familiarity can create blind spots. Decisions become habits. Risks feel manageable because they are familiar. Questions without urgent deadlines keep getting pushed aside.

My new colleague Tom Matthesen, who leads business advisory at Balentine, has spent decades helping owners navigate growth, capital decisions and business transitions. He has identified four areas where capable leaders can lose significant value: capital, people, earnings and succession planning.

These issues are connected. A weakness in one often creates problems in the others. Examining them early can strengthen the business and preserve an owner’s freedom to decide what comes next.

Capital: Are you funding the business you’re becoming?

Many owners think about capital only when they need it for an acquisition, expansion, equipment purchase or unexpected shortfall. By then, circumstances may be dictating the available choices.

A capital strategy should evolve with the business. The funding that helped a company launch may not suit its next stage of growth. Bank debt, private credit and minority investment come with different costs, restrictions and implications for control.

The blind spot is assuming that capital is interchangeable or that the lowest apparent cost is always the best choice. The right funding depends on what you are trying to accomplish, how quickly the company is growing, how predictable its earnings are and how much flexibility you want to preserve.

Capital decisions can also affect a future sale. Restrictive debt, a complicated ownership structure or poorly timed financing can narrow your options when flexibility matters most.

Ask, “What kind of company are we building, and what capital structure will help us get there without creating unnecessary constraints?”

People: Is the team built for the next chapter?

Loyalty matters, especially in closely held and family businesses. Many companies succeed because a small group of people has worked together for years, wearing multiple hats and solving problems through trust and persistence.

But growth changes what a company needs from its people.

That does not mean replacing loyal employees each time the company reaches a new stage. It means assessing whether roles, responsibilities and capabilities are keeping pace. A longtime employee may grow into a larger role with support. The company may also need expertise it has never required before. Often, it needs both.

Owners can become part of the problem without recognizing it. If every important relationship, decision or piece of institutional knowledge runs through you, the company remains dependent on one person. That dependence limits growth, increases risk and can reduce the company’s value to a future buyer.

Ask, “Do we have the leadership, accountability and depth to operate successfully without everything flowing through me?”

Earnings: Are you building profit that is worth something?

Revenue growth is gratifying, but earnings have a greater influence on what a company is worth. The quality of those earnings matters as much as the amount.

Two companies can report the same profit and command very different valuations. Buyers, lenders and investors look at whether margins are durable, profits are predictable and the business converts revenue into profit efficiently. They also examine how much of that performance depends on the owner.

A growing company can still be financially shallow. Its top line may be strong while rising overhead and weakening margins leave little room to invest or withstand a disruption. Because margins tend to erode gradually, the change can be difficult to see from inside the business.

Comparing current results only with your company’s history may not be enough. Outside benchmarks can show how your margins and operating efficiency compare with peers and with what the business could reasonably achieve.

If you have a target value in mind for the company, work backward from it. What level and quality of earnings would support that value? What stands in the way? The answer may involve pricing, operating efficiency, overhead or margins that have slipped over time.

Earnings quality affects more than a future transaction. It determines how much room you have to invest, absorb setbacks and make thoughtful decisions instead of reactive ones.

Succession and exit: Are you preparing before you have to?

Succession planning is easy to postpone when you are busy running the company and do not know when, or whether, you want to sell.

Exit planning covers more than a sale. It prepares the business to keep creating value without depending on its owner.

Starting early preserves more choices. You might sell to a third party, transfer the company to family members, create an opportunity for management or retain ownership while stepping away from daily operations.

Each path requires different preparation. A family successor may need years to develop. A management team may need new incentives or financing. An outside buyer will examine earnings, customer relationships, leadership depth, operating processes and dependence on the founder.

Those weaknesses are difficult to repair during a transaction, health crisis or family change. By the time you decide to exit, many of the factors that determine value have already been established.

Ask, “What needs to be true for this business, and for me, to be ready?”

Seeing the business clearly

Blind spots are a natural consequence of building something complex while standing at its center. Addressing them requires disciplined financial analysis, candid conversations and trusted advisors who will challenge your assumptions.

Capital, talent, earnings and succession deserve attention before a crisis or transaction forces the issue. Owners who treat them as ongoing leadership responsibilities build stronger companies and preserve more choices. When circumstances change, they are better prepared to choose their next move instead of having it chosen for them.

The most expensive problems in a business rarely appear overnight. They develop gradually while the owner is focused on growth and the daily pressure to keep moving. That is one of the paradoxes of entrepreneurship: The closer you are to your business, the harder it can be to see it clearly.

Owners know their companies better than anyone, but that familiarity can create blind spots. Decisions become habits. Risks feel manageable because they are familiar. Questions without urgent deadlines keep getting pushed aside.

My new colleague Tom Matthesen, who leads business advisory at Balentine, has spent decades helping owners navigate growth, capital decisions and business transitions. He has identified four areas where capable leaders can lose significant value: capital, people, earnings and succession planning.

Ally Walsh eats the same snack every day. Thick bread, almond butter, a pinch of salt and a drizzle of olive oil. Her mom used to make it for her. Now it’s one of the items customers line up for at Canyon Coffee, the roaster and cafe business she co-founded with Casey Wojtalewicz in 2016.

Getting here wasn’t easy. Walsh and her son evacuated their Altadena home in January 2025 as the Eaton fire swept the region, The Wall Street Journal reports. Her mother died of ovarian cancer soon after, and the two bounced between more than a dozen places that year.

Walsh kept the coffee business running through all of it. Canyon has cafes in trendy Echo Park and Brooklyn’s Prospect Heights, where she says the shop handles roughly one order per minute. A new El Sereno location opens this month.

She finally landed in a Mount Washington house last October. “It was a whole new start, and that’s what it felt like I needed,” she tells the Journal.

Ally Walsh eats the same snack every day. Thick bread, almond butter, a pinch of salt and a drizzle of olive oil. Her mom used to make it for her. Now it’s one of the items customers line up for at Canyon Coffee, the roaster and cafe business she co-founded with Casey Wojtalewicz in 2016.

Getting here wasn’t easy. Walsh and her son evacuated their Altadena home in January 2025 as the Eaton fire swept the region, The Wall Street Journal reports. Her mother died of ovarian cancer soon after, and the two bounced between more than a dozen places that year.

Walsh kept the coffee business running through all of it. Canyon has cafes in trendy Echo Park and Brooklyn’s Prospect Heights, where she says the shop handles roughly one order per minute. A new El Sereno location opens this month.

She finally landed in a Mount Washington house last October. “It was a whole new start, and that’s what it felt like I needed,” she tells the Journal.

Early in building my venture fund, I made a mistake many founders make: I worked alone and rushed decisions.

Even after I built a team, I would walk into a meeting, feel like I understood the opportunity and start connecting the dots out loud. I thought I was being decisive. In reality, I had blinders on. I was seeing what I expected to see and missing what I should have been asking. The turning point came when I forced myself to do something different. Instead of talking, I paused and asked a few simple questions. Then I went around the room and got input from the team. What I heard changed the direction of the decision.

My team raised issues I had completely missed. Risks, gaps and constraints that were obvious to them were invisible to me in the moment. In a few cases, they talked me out of decisions I was ready to make. In others, they strengthened the case in ways I hadn’t considered. Either way, the outcome was better because I stepped back and listened.

That shift made something clear: Asking questions isn’t a leadership weakness. It’s a leadership advantage. It makes you sharper, makes your team better and protects your business from blind spots you can’t see on your own. The best entrepreneurs understand this. They don’t try to have all the answers. They learn to ask better questions and actually listen to what comes back. Here are the four types of questions I rely on most.

1. Foundation questions: Get back to what matters

Every decision benefits from clarity at the starting line. Foundation questions cut through the noise and force focus.

Ask: What problem are we solving? What are you excited about?

I often start conversations with founders this way. It sounds basic, but it quickly reveals whether an idea is grounded or drifting. When founders can clearly explain the problem and why it matters, the rest of the discussion sharpens. When they can’t, there’s work to do before anything else moves forward.

In one conversation with a group of student founders who had just won a design competition, the room was full of excitement. They were energized and eager to talk. Starting with these simple questions brought the conversation back to first principles and gave it structure where there had only been momentum.

2. Practical questions: Surface the gaps early

Vision matters, but execution lives in the details. Simple, practical questions bring those details into focus.

Ask: Where are you in the build? Do you have a minimum viable product? What does your market actually look like? Have you talked to any potential customers yet?

With those same student founders, a few targeted follow-ups revealed big gaps that wouldn’t have surfaced otherwise. They hadn’t built a minimum viable product, let alone talked to prospective customers. Without those questions, it would have been easy to move forward on enthusiasm alone. With them, the next steps became clear and grounded in reality.

I’ve seen this play out again and again. Teams move faster when constraints are visible early. Practical questions reduce rework by exposing what needs attention before resources are committed.

3. Perspective questions: Open the door to better thinking

In my experience, blind spots usually come from a limited perspective. You can widen that perspective by tapping into your team.

Ask: What are we missing? What else should we be thinking about?

This has become one of the most valuable questions I ask. It creates space for ideas that would otherwise go unspoken.

In one team meeting, I closed with a simple version of it. A team member pointed out that our investors would soon expect a performance dashboard with key metrics, something I hadn’t considered. It was the right call at the right time. That moment turned into action. Our analysts and interns built the dashboard, which strengthened how we communicated progress and added value for our investors. The idea didn’t come from the person leading the meeting. It came from making room for others to think out loud.

4. Alignment questions: Turn input into ownership

Great decisions require more than input. They require commitment.

Ask: Where are you on this decision: yes, no or hold? Why?

When we began making investment decisions as a team, I made a point of hearing from everyone, from experienced professionals to student interns. I went person by person and asked where they stood and why.

The impact was immediate. Sometimes the team talked me out of deals I initially favored. Other times, strong alignment gave us the confidence to move forward. Those early investments turned out well, but the process built something more important than any single outcome: shared ownership. People support what they help shape, and alignment questions make that possible. Over time, this became part of our culture. Everyone knew they would be asked, so everyone came prepared, which improved both our decisions and our execution.

Make it a daily habit

You don’t need a formal system to use this approach. You need consistency.

In meetings, one-on-ones and major decisions, build the habit of asking instead of telling. Start with these four questions:

• What problem are we solving?
• Where are we really on this?
• What are we missing?
• Where are you on this decision, and why?

Used consistently, these questions reshape how teams think. They move conversations from assumptions to clarity and replace resistance with ownership.

The real advantage

Entrepreneurial leadership is often framed around decisiveness and speed. Those matter. But leaders who consistently outperform understand something deeper.

They know when to pause, and that a well-timed question can do more than a well-crafted answer. By slowing down at the right moment, they give their teams the chance to move faster where it counts.

Early in building my venture fund, I made a mistake many founders make: I worked alone and rushed decisions.

Even after I built a team, I would walk into a meeting, feel like I understood the opportunity and start connecting the dots out loud. I thought I was being decisive. In reality, I had blinders on. I was seeing what I expected to see and missing what I should have been asking. The turning point came when I forced myself to do something different. Instead of talking, I paused and asked a few simple questions. Then I went around the room and got input from the team. What I heard changed the direction of the decision.

My team raised issues I had completely missed. Risks, gaps and constraints that were obvious to them were invisible to me in the moment. In a few cases, they talked me out of decisions I was ready to make. In others, they strengthened the case in ways I hadn’t considered. Either way, the outcome was better because I stepped back and listened.

In 2022, when YuChiang Cheng invested in Hero Bread on behalf of 444 Capital and stepped in as the company’s interim chief marketing officer, the low-carb, zero-sugar brand was at a critical crossroads. 

Cole Glass had founded the company in 2019 to address his severe food allergies related to pollen. By October 2021, a partnership with Subway seemed like an exciting path forward. The idea was to get the macro-friendly bread products into as many hands as possible so people could taste it for themselves. 

However, around the time Cheng joined the company, it was clear the unit economics didn’t make sense. The Subway deal wasn’t profitable; Hero Bread was running out of money. 

“ We were just too small at the time and couldn’t service it, didn’t have the resources and all the infrastructure put in place to effectively deliver that,” Cheng says. “So we backed out of it.”

Hero Bread brought in $54 million in revenue last year

Cheng pivoted to a direct-to-consumer (DTC) strategy, allowing the brand to receive feedback from consumers more quickly and drive word-of-mouth sales, he says. 

Cheng assumed the role of CEO in November 2023 and has continued to grow the company.

In a funding round announced in June 2024, Hero Bread raised $21 million in under 90 days. The round, co-led by Cleveland Avenue, DNS Capital and Composite Ventures, brought the company’s total funding to date to more than $68.5 million. 

Hero Bread brought in $54 million in annual revenue last year. Additionally, the company more than doubled its retail presence in two years, expanding from about 4,000 to 10,000 doors, which includes a recent Target launch. 

But Hero Bread’s successful push into retail — a feat many CPG brands that launch DTC hope to achieve — doesn’t mean the company plans to put the brakes on its DTC strategy anytime soon.

Entrepreneur sat down with Cheng to learn more about what he calls the “third chapter” of Hero Bread’s DTC playbook, and how it’s continuing to unlock growth for the company. 

Hero Bread experimented with different retail channels

After walking away from the Subway partnership and prioritizing DTC sales, Hero Bread focused on five SKUs: white bread, seeded bread, burger buns, hot dog buns and flour tortillas. 

The line-up also made sense as the company entered retailers: The goal was to offer everyday staples that would drive repeat purchases on a weekly basis. 

Initially, though, Cheng and the team weren’t quite sure which retailers would be the right fit. 

“It’s a very mainstream taste profile,” Cheng explains. “So there was a lot of debate, if this is going to be more of a Publix, Target type product, or is this going to be more of a natural Whole Foods, Sprouts, type of product.”

So Hero Bread opted to experiment with different types of retailers. The company launched in Market District, Publix and Sprouts and planned to lean into whichever channel performed best. But six months later, the company’s products had an impressive track record at all three. 

“We were very, very fortunate in that,” Cheng says. “So instead of picking [retail] channels, we decided to pick retailers that were more enthusiastic regardless of what channel they were in.” 

It’s a different tactic than many CPG brands use; they tend to zero in on one retail channel and go regional, the CEO notes. 

Striking the balance between affordability and convenience

Of course, CPG brands that expand into retail have the advantage of economies of scale. 

“You can move tons of pallets on a truck much more affordably than you can send individual packages through ecommerce,” Cheng says. 

As a result, retail typically gives consumers a more affordable way to buy. DTC, on the other hand, serves as a more concierge path to purchase not only Hero Bread’s staple products, but also other offerings that might not be able to hit retail shelves as seamlessly. 

Hero Bread’s Crafted Collection, which includes items like croissants, lemon poppy seed scones, shortbread biscuits (hand-baked in Sonoma with brown butter made by a Michelin chef), lends itself well to the model. The company’s recent collaboration on pretzel bites with Auntie Anne’s does too. 

“ [These are] small-batch, largely handmade products that are exclusive to hero.co, where it just wouldn’t make economic sense for us to hand-roll 300,000 to 400,000 croissants,” Cheng explains. 

What’s more, DTC can act as an invaluable testing ground for products with the potential to sell effectively in a brick-and-mortar setting. 

That’s exactly what the company did with its bagels, unveiling a limited-edition launch online in December 2024. 

“ We weren’t sure if people would want to buy bagels from us,” Cheng says, “so we initially made them in smaller batches, sold them at hero.co, and they quickly became one of our best-selling items.” 

Hero Bread’s bagels landed on retail shelves within six months. 

Meeting Hero Bread’s consumers wherever they may be

Cheng doesn’t believe a successful entrepreneur or business leader is defined by how many times they win. 

“It’s how many times you can try again, regardless of how many times you’ve fallen down or how much blood you get on your face,” the CEO says. “There is a level of courage that is really necessary.” 

It’s a tendency toward resilience that’s helped Cheng lead Hero Bread through some crucial years that required an enthusiastic willingness to adapt to every challenge — and the CEO looks forward to what comes next. 

“We’re always trying to meet the consumer where they are,” Cheng says. “There’s a specific Hero fan, and then there’s the overarching bread fan. We believe that the more people who try us, the more people who will believe [in us].”

In 2022, when YuChiang Cheng invested in Hero Bread on behalf of 444 Capital and stepped in as the company’s interim chief marketing officer, the low-carb, zero-sugar brand was at a critical crossroads. 

Cole Glass had founded the company in 2019 to address his severe food allergies related to pollen. By October 2021, a partnership with Subway seemed like an exciting path forward. The idea was to get the macro-friendly bread products into as many hands as possible so people could taste it for themselves. 

However, around the time Cheng joined the company, it was clear the unit economics didn’t make sense. The Subway deal wasn’t profitable; Hero Bread was running out of money. 

When Dr. Darshan Shah, a board-certified surgeon, set out to create a different kind of medical clinic, he took out a whiteboard and made a list of everything people hate about going to the doctor. Bad parking. Old furniture. A grumpy person at the front desk. Long waits. Old magazines.

Then he set about doing the opposite. “This needs to be a beautiful space that inspires you to want to be there,” Shah says. The result was Next Health, a longevity clinic that Shah says has been described as “the Apple Store of health and wellness.”

Next Health now has more than 25 locations around the world, offering everything from advanced health testing to hormone optimization and IV therapy. But Shah’s path to becoming a longevity entrepreneur started long before wellness clinics became a booming business. On a recent episode of the One Day with Jon Bier podcast, he explained how his own health crisis while working as a surgeon forced him to reconsider what he’d been taught about keeping people healthy, and why he thinks the doctor’s office should be as focused on keeping people healthy as it is on treating them when they’re sick.

The surgeon becomes the patient

Shah was a bit of a child prodigy. He entered a combined medical program at the University of Missouri-Kansas City at 15 and graduated as a physician at 21. He went into surgery, eventually becoming chief resident and pursuing further surgical training at the Mayo Clinic.

But caring for others meant he seldom cared for himself. Shah was spending 12 to 14 hours a day in surgery, sometimes six days a week. “I was at my unhealthiest myself,” he says. “I was diabetic, 50 pounds overweight, hypertensive, on 10 different prescription medications.”

He eventually developed an autoimmune disease and was prescribed methotrexate, an immunosuppressant. He says the medication made him feel worse. 

At the same time, Shah was seeing many of the same problems in his patients. Before elective surgery, patients had to be medically cleared by their primary care doctors. Many had high blood pressure, diabetes, obesity, and other conditions that prevented them from being cleared. 

“I was witnessing the problem that needed to be solved, and I was also experiencing it myself. I decided that I needed to learn the science of health because all I was getting was the science of disease management,” he says.

That decision led to a deep dive into the burgeoning practice of functional medicine, which focuses on identifying the underlying causes of health problems rather than simply treating their symptoms.

He began applying what he learned to himself and his patients. “I was getting my patients so healthy they even canceled their surgery, so they didn’t need it anymore,” Shah says. “I was like, ‘This is what we need to be doing in medicine.’”

A clinic people actually want to visit

As Shah sees it, one of the biggest problems with traditional healthcare is that people don’t want to be there. For many patients, he says, visiting a doctor evokes feelings of “number one, fear, number two, of annoyance.”

That presented a business problem. He could offer all the health testing and longevity treatments he wanted, but if people dreaded coming through the door, they weren’t likely to come back. “I knew I had all these tools to get people healthy,” he says. “But I was like, people aren’t going to want to do this unless we change the experience.”

Next Health combines medical consultations and testing with services ranging from IV therapy and hormone optimization to red-light therapy and other wellness treatments. “We spend 45 minutes to an hour with our patients every time they come in,” Shah says.

That kind of healthcare comes at a price. Some testing and treatments cost considerably more. Its Executive Physical, for example, is currently listed at $14,500.

Shah acknowledges the criticism that longevity medicine can seem like healthcare for the wealthy, but says, “Next Health has been very mindful in creating programs that almost anyone can afford.” Memberships start at $99 a month, an amount Shah says is low enough to be covered through a health savings account. “Of course, we have concierge-level memberships as well, but we have equal numbers of members across all the different levels,” he says. “As we continue to scale, our goal is to drive down costs and make this affordable longevity care for everyone.”

Why brick and mortar still matters

The concept started with a single West Hollywood location in 2016. By the end of 2024, Next Health had five locations. Then the company began expanding through franchising, with now more than 25 clinics. 

That growth has required Shah to double down on something many healthcare companies have tried to move away from: brick and mortar. “People still think we’re crazy to be opening all these four walls,” he says. “Because they’re expensive, there’s employees you have to hire, there’s so much you have to do.” 

But Shah believes the physical space is an essential part of the product. “Every corner of your brick-and-mortar location inspires a feeling that you want the person to have,” he says. “It’s not just the location, it’s also the people in the location and what experience they are providing.”

The whiteboard may be long gone, but the idea behind it remains. Patients shouldn’t need so much patience to get healthy.

When Dr. Darshan Shah, a board-certified surgeon, set out to create a different kind of medical clinic, he took out a whiteboard and made a list of everything people hate about going to the doctor. Bad parking. Old furniture. A grumpy person at the front desk. Long waits. Old magazines.

Then he set about doing the opposite. “This needs to be a beautiful space that inspires you to want to be there,” Shah says. The result was Next Health, a longevity clinic that Shah says has been described as “the Apple Store of health and wellness.”

Next Health now has more than 25 locations around the world, offering everything from advanced health testing to hormone optimization and IV therapy. But Shah’s path to becoming a longevity entrepreneur started long before wellness clinics became a booming business. On a recent episode of the One Day with Jon Bier podcast, he explained how his own health crisis while working as a surgeon forced him to reconsider what he’d been taught about keeping people healthy, and why he thinks the doctor’s office should be as focused on keeping people healthy as it is on treating them when they’re sick.