Inspired with Alexa von Tobel
00:02:52 · Jeremy Gurewitz, Alexa von Tobel
[00:02:52] S0: Yeah. Well, first of all, thanks for having me on here. Super excited to be here. And yeah, as you said, you guys have been with us since basically the very beginning. It's been wonderful to work with you. I'll give the plug right now for any founders who are considering working with folks you need to at least be having conversation with Inspired. So we'll just kinda get that out of the way. But I'll I'll repeat it again. [00:03:11] S1: Yes, later. Love you. We did... We didn't we didn't pay you to say that. Thank you.
00:03:11 · Alexa von Tobel, Jeremy Gurewitz
[00:03:11] S1: Yes, later. Love you. We did... We didn't we didn't pay you to say that. Thank you. [00:03:15] S0: Well well, it's true. So, yeah, when I when I think about my childhood, I think a few things come to mind. First of all, and, you know, we'll talk about kind of my mom and my whole... My my family story in a bit. But my parents always really encouraged me to just go for whatever I felt was right and important. My mom had this saying of have like, a bad day and... Or whatever. And she'd say, tomorrow, walk out with your right foot forward. And it was like this, like, thing of just, like, go out there and, like... You know, especially on my mom's side of the family, like, comes from a super accomplished family. Her dad, so my grandfather was actually the first chiropractor in the state of New York. He actually had license number one. He developed the field of chiropracty as something that was super important. Just growing up, like, the... My entire family just really encouraged me to go for things. And so, you know, when I think about, like, childhood, it was just, you know, whether it was, you know, I wanted to spend a summer doing research somewhere. They just said, go forth, we'll figure out a way to make it happen. It was really just encouraging me to pursue something that I believed in, I think is what kind of has set me up for success here.
00:04:28 · Alexa von Tobel
[00:04:28] S1: Well, first of all, I think in honor of your mom, that quote is officially now burned into my head. If you have a bit bad day, start tomorrow on the right foot. That's a that's a beautiful quote. If we think a little bit about sort of a story or a moment in your life that you almost credit to be one of the ones that is kind of a pillar of how... Where you draw strength from as you try to do very hard things in your life, Solace being one of them. Is there is there, like, anything that you think of as, like, a direct line from your past to your future?
00:05:06 · Jeremy Gurewitz
[00:05:06] S0: So I I think I, again, go to my mom. And I I guess, you know, we'll talk about, again, the story behind Solace. But my mom's passion for the work that she did was very significant. And I remember her saying... Because, you know, we would get up in the morning, she would take us to school. And, you know, she would... She was a doctor, and so she would have kind of a full day. And I remember, you know, she was kind of, you know, tired one morning and had an extra large cup of coffee and was kind of, you know, getting herself, like, ready for the morning and just kind of, like, kinda, you know, giving herself some motivational kind of talk. I was asked her, like, mom, like, what... What's going on? She's like, there are people that are seeing me. And, you know, for them, this is their life. And so it's, you know, regardless of what I have going on, they need to see me as the best possible version of myself because they're putting their lives in my hands. And so my mom was a radiologist. She was diagnosing breast cancer in women, and she felt that the the patient doctor interaction was so critical. And so I thought about that a lot. I thought about that various times in my life as I've been working with people and certainly with Solace when speaking in front of people and almost kind of regardless of what I have going on. It's being there for people is something that really kind of I remember very deeply.
00:06:45 · Charlotte Ross, Alexa von Tobel
[00:06:45] S2: And Jeremy, in addition to your kind of passion for the humanity behind every patient that comes through Solace, I think one of the things that stood out to us when we first met was your quantitative background, right? Like you went to Wharton, you worked in finance after college, and you know numbers really well. So could you talk a little bit about just like how that specific background has shaped what you do now and kind of how you built Solace? [00:07:17] S1: Yeah, you studied economics at Wharton. Like, again, you have a strong background in finance. Talk about that.
00:07:24 · Jeremy Gurewitz
[00:07:24] S0: Yeah. So I as you said, I I went to Wharton undergrad. I started out my career in quantitative finance. I did that for a number of years before deciding that it was fun to make the number go up, but it wasn't, like, my passion in life. And so I I I worked for start... A variety of startups where it turned out that skill set was really effective in growth and in growing companies. And I think there are people that have very strong quantitative skill sets, but they're very stuck on just calculations and numbers. And I think for me, if I had to kind of give a reason for why I've been effective and, I think, successful in what I do is numbers are representations of actual reality. And so when you're doing calculations or when you're making decisions based upon numbers and looking at the impact in the future, you really want to take the representations of the calculations and try and translate them into how reality is changing. And I think that, you know, part of what you do as a founder is you are, you know you know, it's like this... The famous quote, you're making a dent in the universe from Steve Jobs. You're you're kind of changing changing reality. And so the quantitative skill set is effective in so far as it helps me encapsulate the changes that I'm trying to make, whether it's on a company or whether it's on people, and then having that representation occur and be manifested in, like, the difference that's represented in the numbers.