Y Combinator group partner Surbhi Sarna is living proof that you can do things differently—and be different than all the people around you—and still become a successful entrepreneur or investor.
Sarna started building the ovarian cancer-detection medical device company, nVision Medical, without a Ph.D. or MBA when she was 24. She fundraised $17.5 million (and sold nVision to Boston Scientific for $275 million) as an Indian American woman operating in femtech—a segment of the health tech industry some male investors were then referring to as “bikini medicine.” She landed her first customer during a gynecology appointment. And, increasingly rare in today’s venture capital world, she became a prolific venture investor without opening a Twitter account (that is, until a few weeks ago).
Sarna doesn’t want to be the exception—she wants to be an example, she tells me. It’s one of the reasons she agreed to become Y Combinator’s first group partner focused on health tech and biotech, where she has invested in 23 women-founded health companies in two years, including Adventris, Glass Health, or Diffuse Bio. And it’s why she wrote Without a Doubt, her first book which was just released this morning. Sarna’s memoir offers a raw and honest portrayal of her own experience building a company and getting into venture, and overcoming significant doubt.
There’s a plethora of takeaways for women or minority founders—or anyone planning to launch a health tech company—including how to turn an ovarian cancer health scare into a company, how to navigate a sense of “cultural in-betweenness” as an Indian American woman, why not to depend on just one investor to come through in a round, and how to network while at an OBGYN appointment.
I asked Sarna if I could publish an excerpt of her new book in today’s newsletter, and there was one section that really stood out to me—perhaps because it’s something I’ve recently been thinking a lot about myself. How do you balance the “good shit” that is happening in your personal life that is—well, “good shit”—while keeping all the other balls you juggle in the air?
I’ll let Sarna take it from here, in her words. You can get a copy of her book, which is available as of today, here.
Falling to the floor is a recurrent theme in this story, and here I was, in June 2016, on the cold tile floor of my Chicago hotel room, crying. With everything I had been through and all of the rejection I faced, I had yet to shed any tears in front of anyone. Yet, I was now bawling my eyes out to a professional investor—the one who had put the most money in our company.
Darshana patiently listened on the other end of the phone, talking me through the details of what was making me so upset. How could a Series B fundraise make me so emotional? Yes, the deal terms were terrible and came as a surprise, but something else seemed to be going on. In fact, I wasn’t just stressed—it was hormones. I was pregnant, I just didn’t know it yet.
[My husband] Raj and I had begun discussing starting a family, and we wanted a baby. But now? Right in the middle of one of the most critical deals of the company’s life? We were about to close a hard-earned financing of $12 million, one that I didn’t want to jeopardize. I couldn’t believe that I was pregnant. (I mean this literally. I didn’t believe the + on the first test so I ran down the three flights of stairs of our apartment building to return to Safeway and buy more tests to confirm it.)
Sometimes bad shit happens that’s troubling and distracting, and sometimes good shit happens that’s equally distracting but wonderful, like expecting a child. “Work-life balance” is a misnomer, implying they should be given equal weight, with a “balance” between the two. Instead, work is just a part of life. When trying to give equal attention to everything, you can miss prioritizing another thing that’s important—you. It’s easy to forget about your own health, both physical and mental, when trying to keep all of the balls in the air. If you’ve had to face down doubters your entire life, getting those balls into the air in the first place is even harder. What are you supposed to do now? Let them all fall to the ground so that you can sleep more or have a little time to yourself? The more you feel you have to prove, the more likely you are to make decisions that may seem impressive and ambitious in the moment but can be self-sabotaging in the long run. I learned the hard way and made a fair share of mistakes in this department.
If you’re working on building something that satisfies a good indignation, you often will try to make it all work and push everything forward, like I did. But you have to be okay with the fact that most likely, something unplanned, something that commands your attention, is going to crop up somewhere. If you can be flexible and accept that there will be curve balls, you’ll be better prepared to handle them—and potentially let certain things go. I know that can be a challenge for many industrious personalities, especially when surrounded by doubters, as the pressure to prove oneself is a fierce driver. Before I became a mother, this life lesson had not become clear to me.
This Wednesday…My colleague Emma Hinchliffe is hosting a conversation with Nisha Dua, managing partner of BBG Ventures, on how her firm is broadening access to venture capital. Tune in to the LinkedIn live conversation on March 8 at 12 p.m. EST/9 a.m. PST by going to this link.
See you tomorrow,
Jessica Mathews
Twitter: @jessicakmathews
Email: jessica.mathews@fortune.com
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Jackson Fordyce curated the deals section of today’s newsletter.
