What Silicon Valley Taught Me About Surviving Cancer
I spent decades building and selling technology companies. I never imagined that the habits I picked up in conference rooms and product reviews would be the same ones that helped me face a Stage 4 diagnosis. But they were.
Define the actual problem
In a startup, the first job is to name the real problem, not the scary version of it. A diagnosis is overwhelming as one giant thing. Broken into specific questions — what is the treatment plan, what can I control this week — it becomes a set of problems you can actually work.
Run small experiments
You don’t bet the company on an untested idea; you ship something small and learn. I did the same with healing: try one change, watch what happened, keep what worked. MEDS came out of dozens of those small experiments.
“You don’t bet everything on one untested idea. You ship something small and learn.”
Build a team
No founder does it alone, and no patient should either. I leaned on my doctors, my family, and a few people who had walked this road before me. Asking for help was not weakness; it was good strategy.
Hold grounded hope
The best operators I knew were honest about risk and still moved forward with conviction. That’s grounded hope — not denial, not false promises, but a clear-eyed decision to keep building anyway. It carried me further than optimism ever could.
An engineering mindset didn’t make the fear go away. It gave me something to do with it.
“I’m not a doctor, and this isn’t medical advice. It’s my lived experience. Always talk with your own care team about your diagnosis and treatment.
”