Episode 09: Fertility, career, entrepreneurship and impact, with Naseem Sayani
Motherhood, family, fertility and entrepreneurship…oh my!
These are words and topics that don’t often go together. In fact…many would argue that these do not blend in this industry.
Naseem Sayani is a trailblazing consultant turned entrepreneur turned Venture Capitlist and General Partner at Emmeline Ventures. Naseem shares her health and fertility journey and struggles openly and transparently and in ways that many won’t. Starting with fertility challenges, through to IVF, and ultimately her adoption journey and how these experiences taught her about the environment that women live and navigate today when it comes to fertility and how this drove and inspired her to create Emmaline Ventures to fund companies that are solving these types of problems that millions of women experience.
Lack of consistent and reliable information for women about fertility leaves women disempowered and in positions where they have to make big choices with incorrect information, often from a disempowered place of social perceptions and cultural and society biases. Not exactly the recipe for modern women (and men) who want to have both careers and families.
Join Genevieve and Naseem to dig in to the topic with matter of factness and frankness.
Transcript:
(00:00) Hi adventurers! I am thrilled to be here with you today and introduce you to Naseem Sayani she is a venture capitalist she runs Emeline Ventures and she has a really really amazing story to share with us and so much wisdom and I cannot wait to dive in with her but before we get there I want to share a
(00:24) little bit with you guys about family family helps you take control of your fertility Journey Couples are waiting longer nowadays to start families and they're bringing some new challenges to the table that really weren't a thing for us a long time ago so family really gone are the days of trying for months
(00:42) until you can visit your OB-GYN about your fertility challenges only to be sent straight to invasive expensive IVF treatments that often aren't even necessary so family offers fertility Telehealth at home Labs customized protocols and prescriptions as a fertility treatment before you go to IVF women will family helps women identify
(01:02) and treat these critical hormone imbalances and ovulation challenges they often aren't even aware is impacting their fertility and it helps them just take control so that they can have the family that they dream of Adventures podcast listeners can use code adventurous and be sure to check that spelling for a hundred dollars off your
(01:22) family fertility program find the link and learn more about family to get this special offer it'll be in the show notes or on our website at adventuristpodcast.com so next up here we have Naseem I'm so happy to have you here with us thank you so I'm excited to be here so let's start off I'd love to have you
(01:45) just share a little bit about yourself your adventure capitalists you're based in Los Angeles what else is there to know about and see me it's a great question so a couple of things on the career front I grew up in management consulting as I call myself a recovering consultant in a lot of ways
(02:04) lots of years in digital Innovation and digital strategy work which all kind of serendipitously led me to a place where I was then part of an agency then I was part of an incubator and we were like actually launching startups and it was through all of that experience the exposure to venture also happened
(02:20) and lots of we'll get into it but there are lots of instances of wanting to see change or do things differently or have different impact with different sets of people that became really apparent and it's it's what led me to then launch the fund and on the personal front I live in LA I have a four-year-old he's turning four in two
(02:40) weeks and so we're in like party planning mode and yeah and I have a dog I have a small dog named Lola oh okay so we I just talked about family I'd love to hear I know this is a topic that you and I discussed very briefly just a couple of days ago actually I think I don't know time's not a thing in my brain but
(03:03) about entrepreneurship women fertility and children like loaded subject if there ever was one you know so I'd love to hear a little bit about your story of a four-year-old son while also having it sounds like an extremely busy career becoming a venture capitalist share a little bit about that yeah it's a
(03:26) good question there's so many layers in that question and so I will start with you know having a small child and running a fund is super fun it makes the logistics really entertaining and so it but it's really good in that he gets to see what I'm doing every day and he gets to hear what we're
(03:48) talking about and we're a fund that focuses on issues that are important to women so he's going to learn a language that you know that like my father didn't learn until I started saying the words to him so yeah it's nice that his Baseline kind of starts in a fundamentally different place the
(04:03) other the other part of that is that you know my fertility experience was complicated as probably an understatement so I had like most of us like you know got my period when I was 12 or 13 years old kind of dealt with all of that the way we always do yeah I started taking birth control when I was went to college and so it was
(04:23) on birth control for the next like 15 like everyone and then my I got married in 2008 and I was 29 at the time I had just come out of business school and we waited a few years before we decided to start trying to have kids and so many people like many people we started trying when I was 34. and in
(04:44) my mind I was like 34. great this is fine right like mid-30s I'll come off the pill everything should work because I've never had any reasons I don't get sick often I have no reason that it wouldn't like period has been fine you know cycle has been very reliable but we were trying for probably 18 months
(05:03) and just couldn't get pregnant and I was tracking my ovulation and I was like I started to like have this spreadsheet and all the things yeah and something was wrong I was like this something's not right like we should be pregnant by now and so we went to go see a fertility doctor just to get
(05:19) some added insight and get more serious about the whole thing yeah and in my first session there we found out that I have a very mild form of endometriosis and I did not know until that meeting that I had it and there was like layers of reasons on why the first is coming from a very traditional South
(05:40) Asian family we don't we didn't talk about our periods growing up right because it was just you just don't you don't say the words out loud it's because you handle it in a hushed corner in the bathroom and your mom gives you a pad and you move on yeah but like excess pain heavy bleeding like all the
(05:55) things were just things that never surfaced so it just never got diagnosed early on and then once you get on birth control it pretty much subdues all the symptoms so then I didn't know for 15 years because birth control was otherwise some doing the system symptoms and so suddenly that was that was the
(06:13) issue was that was affecting my ability to get pregnant and so we went through then two rounds of IVF from there so had to do all the crazy shots and all the things and two extractions and then we ended up with about 11 eggs out after the two rounds of IVF it fertilized the nine of them
(06:34) fertilized appropriately six of them got to the right size and then all six had genetic problems so we couldn't transfer anything is kind of an optional step we could have not done it right and people were like no just do it we're here we may as well make sure we did all this work already let's make sure we're all good
(06:58) so we couldn't transfer anything and so now we're like eight months into this process right two rounds of IVF and the physical burden of IVF is one thing like it just it's exhausting physically you literally feel like you have marbles in your stomach and like it's and the shots are awful like you
(07:15) just it's hard the emotional burden of it is completely another right that you just the what I tell my husband all the time now and what I told him then was like 90 of the work of having a child is on the woman ninety percent of it he has a contribution to make but like all of the mechanics of the biology of my body
(07:34) that has to work in that moment if something is off we're not going to get there and I didn't and it was through this process that I realized because I was then you're deeply researching I was on Google old I'm reading everything I can get my hands on there's no consistent information about fertility for women there are completely
(07:52) Divergent sources of information I was by now I was like 38 38 turning 39 soon we had done two rounds all the data would indicate that if you get at least five embryos to the right size one of them will be viable and you can transfer I had zero of six it's like there's no data to tell me that scenario could
(08:11) have happened because all the data says you should be fine but there is data that says if I do one more round and I'm headed into my 40s my likelihood goes down by like 40 to 50 percent so now I'm 39 and I literally don't have any more options and there's not enough information on and what could adjust the next IVF cycle
(08:31) should we decide to do it because our fertility doctor was like let's try one more time and we'll add acupuncture we'll do this we'll do a different formula on the meds but I was like I is that going to help do we know that going to work and he's like wow we don't know for sure let's throw some
(08:47) stuff at the wall yeah but let's try and I was like I just I just can't I just I couldn't go through the third round without better information and it was it was that experience where I was like we don't know this we don't know anything about our bodies as humans as women the system doesn't know anything
(09:04) either and it's like it's not like they're not telling us they literally don't know and that was the first time I was like there's got to be a better way there has to be a better way there's got to be a different way to help women understand their bodies early enough that we can make better fertility
(09:20) decisions when we want to make them yeah and that it simply didn't exist right and I wasn't close enough to the spaces to have in impact on it and so we ended up not doing a third round of IVF we ended up deciding to adopt we got into an adoption process with an agency that a friend of ours had used and we
(09:39) adopted and now he's turning four in two weeks so it all ends in a really happy story but you know those couple of years going through all of that was like one of the hardest things we've ever been through my brother and my sister-in-law recently adopted a baby he's a month and a half old now amazing yeah I visited him last
(09:57) weekend for the first time and similar story you know multiple rounds of IVF yeah you know she had other things going on but similar but different you know and I know for me you know I was I was 35 and I took a modern fertility test was single I was I was in a relationship but I it wasn't I wasn't
(10:18) really sure if it was the right relationship and I was like I you know my window's closing I'm a little worried here and I'm not willing to compromise yeah you know and so I took modern fertility tests and it showed that I had low amh which is ovarian reserve and I had a complete meltdown like in bed crying four days like all
(10:38) this stuff because I was like and there was no information almost nothing and it was just moving me towards IVF and funny enough I ended up making friends with another VC named Ryan who actually has a fund called fast lane capital and he was going through something you know a fertility process with his
(11:02) wife and he was very knowledgeable yeah so he started kind of saying like hey like this and that and you know I looked that led me through things to discover like wait a minute amh isn't necessarily the only thing you know I read all these things and what I decided to do is say I can take this into my own hands and give myself the
(11:27) best possible chance so if I ever meet the right person I gave myself the best chance and if it doesn't work at least knew I did everything I went on a specific diet and did it for years I basically like ate the fertility diet for years took the supplements for years like eight yeah you know like
(11:44) really modified My Lifestyle because I was like this is the only chance that I'm gonna have you know but had I have not done that test in that moment yeah or even been the type of person to go like read science papers and try to understand it and like look and really understand you know because I'm a
(12:06) healthcare VC you know there are so many other people that really don't realize that there are options it's just like we don't know so this led you this this is like a catalyzing moment right yeah you know and so this led you to inspired you you know so yeah it's what you do today yeah yeah it was one of the
(12:33) drivers right so that my own Health Management fertility experience was a big big lever because it's one I didn't know enough about endometriosis two I didn't know anything about my body growing up and the rest of my health was fine so there were no indicators to say that like I should have asked a question differently and
(12:50) then the other part of it was just growing up in those corporate spaces in the Consulting World The Adventure World in the incubator world in the agency world you know there's not enough people that look like us in those spaces and so as we're building businesses and launching companies because that's what
(13:05) I did in the incubator I was at we weren't as and I was in parallel to my fertility experience and I was putting a lot of time and effort into building businesses that weren't solving problems that I had in the moment right yes and so that was like a disconnect for me was like we I can actually take the
(13:23) same skill set and focus it on things that would actually help me because I'm not the only one because as I told the story to other women every other woman I talked to was like oh I have Endo I have Endo I have this I was like how do we not talk to each other about this also there's so many of us some kind of
(13:40) solutions should be out there to start to help us one have better information and to make better decisions earlier and was that like diversity problem of the world I was working in combined with my own fertility experience and I was like I'm just going to do this differently I'm going to launch a fund I'm gonna put
(13:56) money against companies that can help solve these problems well like with with the sponsor on this episode family you know one of my experiences with that company you know it's a growing company it's a startup yeah but like I was trying to explain to people other other investors everyone just said to me
(14:13) why wouldn't you just get IVF it's not that simple it was expensive oh my gosh you know like what if you don't want it or what if it's not necessary and the founder of Family actually told me one just anecdotal Story one of her patients had been in IVF and it hadn't worked in you know all these different things all she had was a
(14:33) vitamin D deficiency really it was that simple yeah it's that simple yeah so they corrected that yeah and like a couple months later she's pregnant naturally yeah I was like oh my gosh yeah it's incredible the thing is that we can like you did right the things you can eat differently
(14:53) you can sleep differently you can take better care of your you know your health and your wellness and you can actually have a dramatic impact on how your body will function but we don't know enough yeah and I think what would you say to people and I'm sure you do have to rebut this a lot because you're you know in the
(15:12) process of raising deploying Emeline Ventures when people kind of they maybe don't come out and say this is not a man's problem or this is only a women's problem but how what would you say to someone who's like this is kind of exclusively a man's problem and this doesn't really have anything to do with
(15:27) me so why would I put my money resources time effort or energy towards solving problems that are women's problems and not mentals it's like that makes me angry when I hear things like that even if they don't say that you know what they're thinking it yeah well the responses it's not it is it's a
(15:44) human problem it's not a woman's problem or a man's problem it's all of our problems because one you want the species to continue so we need to get ahead of these problems two like the stress and the frustration that my partner felt during all of this was no less than what I was feeling right like there was almost compounded because
(16:03) there's a little bit of helplessness involved because he couldn't actually do anything differently there was nothing he could change that would make my biology work better and you felt more helpless maybe than I did because I there are things I could do to maybe affect the outcomes so I think we can't we can't put things into that
(16:22) issue is a female issue because it affects family and it affects growth and it affects economics and you know if we can't if women can't keep their health in a good place it affects their financial outcomes quite directly and that affects their family and it affects the Next Generation and so it's not
(16:42) gesto female problem it's an everyone problem because it ties into all of our economic next steps so directly something like IVF it's like easy to say just do IVF it's expensive procedure it's like 15 to 18 000 per cycle not everyone can afford to do that and even if you can't afford to you may not want to and so there you we have to have
(17:05) better ways to support families and when families want to have children that has to go well beyond IVF because that is completely inaccessible to an entire swath of people unless you have health insurance that's going to pay for it which is not necessarily as prominent yeah I know too there are some employers that are starting to
(17:24) cover offer assistance and coverage with IVF yeah which means if we make that the standard for how couples get pregnant yes not all employers are going to be able to not only afford that but afford the downtime of their employee going through the rounds of IVF yeah on top of you know like they you know if
(17:46) you worry about productivity challenges or whatever the cost to IVF to just the bottom line is massive and so if we force people down that route we don't offer them other Solutions which is education in many ways yeah and yeah our creating a very expensive problem so and we the other the other thing I'll add on that is that we
(18:08) actually have a lot of work to just take stigma away right it like doesn't even it only gets to the point of IVF because we won't talk about fertility early enough and really talk about women's health in an appropriate way like we should be talking about menstrual cycles early we should be talking about
(18:24) endometriosis early and get all these words out into regular conversation because then it it doesn't end up in the shadows and if we could get the stigma out we would start to have way better conversations about fertility much earlier on the stigma is something I want to talk about because you know aside from even
(18:43) just the stigma of having the discussions yeah there's a stigma and a Prejudice still existing especially in our industry not just towards women but towards motherhood and working moms it's like you know people are like oh we love motherhood but like you better not actually try to like be successful you
(19:03) know like it's sort of yeah you know there's this there's this thing and so you know getting out there and not only having those conversations but what else do you how else do you envision the future of what it is that you're creating creating a better world for you know not just not just men but a
(19:24) better world for women maybe not even just in our industry but and working women and women yeah yeah I think things I mean the care economy is a big part of it we have to be able to support parents in better ways with care options because then we saw it during the pandemic predominantly the people
(19:44) that left the workforce were women because they had to stay home because their kids were out of school yeah and so we lost a lot of women from the workforce at all levels right and even executive-level women ended up having to de facto take a back seat because they're the primary Caregivers for their
(19:58) kids and so we have to there have to be better ways to support care and I think a lot of that will right now a lot of that is coming from family wallets and I think more of it needs to come from corporate wallets I think it needs we need to start thinking about how employers are subsidizing or supporting
(20:14) care so that their entire Workforce can stay productive and there are solutions emerging to help do that and provide subsidies or credits and things like that so that it's part of your benefit package to have options around care the other thing is you know we have to think about the kind of health insurance that's being
(20:35) provided to women because it's a little bit of a data in-data out problem whereas all the things that insurance has typically always paid for they continue to pay for but as new things are being discovered because suddenly we have more women actually solving problems around Women's Health we don't have a code to support an endometriosis
(20:51) based code yeah billing code right and so we need there needs to be more problem solving of thinking around the billing codes embedded in what insurance I actually think that's that root cause yeah our health care absolutely don't ask me why is the health system so broken I'm like you have to look at what
(21:09) we pay for what because we pay for what we value and we do not value preventative care because we don't pay for that and we don't value nutrition or any of that because you don't pay for it and you know we value pills yeah because those get paid for yeah and it's like procedures which usually the pill leads
(21:26) to a per person they're you know because that is what gets paid and it's just you know actually hospitals and the health system it's almost to their advantage to see patients Christ well they're in the business of keeping people alive and a little bit sick rather than alive and healed because there's more money to be made
(21:48) yeah it's morbid but like that's true and they'll argue but it's it's all comes down to the billing system and what yeah we you know you value where you put your money yes where you is what you value and that is this the billing system that we live in our country and it's very matter yeah yeah so yeah
(22:11) oh go ahead then the third thing I was going to add was the language and the awareness of women's health across the healthcare system and we've all read the articles on how women symptoms get misdiagnosed over and over again we're getting gaslit all over town like all these things but if we if
(22:31) the system gets better at listening to women around the symptoms that we walk in with we're going to be able to diagnose things better we're going to be able to support her life better and so that's happening but it's like it it's got to happen in bigger Bolder ways so that it's women feel more trust with the
(22:48) health care system because I think that trust has been broken in some pretty big ways massively I'm curious so let's say that you were going to Mentor female entrepreneur and she was you know in her 30s and you know she was like I want to have a family at some point and all these things like that and but you know
(23:11) maybe she wanted to get adventure maybe she wanted to you know go up in her career or whatever that might be you know what kind of advice would you want to give to women who are in their 20s or early 30s knowing what you know today and what kind of experience that you went through yeah it's a good question
(23:29) one would be don't take your fertility for granted just because you know you will want to have kids one day and the data says that you'll be fine until you're 40. don't it doesn't matter because every single woman's body is unique and different and all of those parameters didn't work in my case and
(23:46) and I was healthy and I am healthy and everything was otherwise fine but I just didn't know enough so that's one don't take it for granted two if you have the potential or the flexibility to freeze your eggs do it because that is your it's one of your option cards right and find that gives you room to kind of
(24:04) flex your fertility in a way that you know previous generations didn't have the third is really really think about lifestyle and the things you eat and how you live and what you wear and you know it everyone's gonna college is gonna be college for everyone and everyone's going to do all the things they want to
(24:26) do which is fine and you should right but I think really being thoughtful about how you maintain your health and it doesn't have to be dramatic it has to be things like making sure you drink enough water or making sure you're sleeping well or whatever it is because those little things can have a pretty
(24:42) high impact on your mental health on your productivity and you know your future decisions around fertility and even things like endocrine disruptors yes I learned like regular perfume oh yeah like it's everywhere you'll love it it messes up every hormones in pretty big ways a lot of chemicals that
(25:02) we use in the hall like I cleaned out my whole house of chemicals like only clean with like natural stuff because it because of the endocrine disruption yeah I would say too it's like probably for women it's one of the best gifts that they could give your future relationship you know yeah whether you're in one or
(25:20) not in one is just making these small lifestyle tweaks today to make sure that's yeah you know you did everything you could you know but I think that the lack of information is just completely that's a big one that's a big big problem yeah so when you look at what the future is what's the future that you would like
(25:40) to create with emiline it's a great question so our our thesis is focused in three places so we invest in female Founders and we're looking for businesses that are helping women manage their health build their wealth and live in a cleaner safer world so everything we're talking about is embedded in that
(25:58) right it's women's health is one big pillar Financial Services things that are giving women real economic freedom is the second big pillar and then the third is a combination of content and climate because health and wealth for women as I mentioned are so deeply tied and you have to wrap climate and content
(26:14) around that because the things we read the things we wear the things we we breathe and sleep or whatever like all of that affects how we live and all of that affects our health and that our health affects our wealth and vice versa so the world told that we want to build with how we're investing in
(26:31) emiline is a play is a world that's safer and cleaner and more aware and cognizant of what Women's Health requires and what our unique situations might be such that we can make better decisions sooner I want more information in women's hands when they're in high school yeah and I want like sex ed to be
(26:48) a smarter more inclusive conversation and not one with a diagram that shows me where the uterus is right like oh I'm laughing I don't think we learned that yeah and like you that it's not about telling me all the risks it's about telling me things I can do and the questions I can ask and I also I just want we want to build a
(27:09) world where women have more information sooner and in more thoughtful ways so that they can make better decisions so they can choose when they want to have kids they can choose you know how they want to build generational wealth and when that starts and how they're going to do it and that's how we
(27:26) invest is we're trying to make sure that everyone after us has more options than we had I want to transition a little bit to your entrepreneurial Journey yeah so you know you went from you know Consulting and things like that to the corporate world into basically being an entrepreneur
(27:45) starting a VC fund is an entrepreneur entrepreneurial under activity I you know one of the things I often tell on to ask entrepreneurs when I'm interviewing them you know or hearing pitches is you know this is probably the hardest thing that you can do starting a starting a startup is like out of the
(28:04) scale of hard things it's a 10. starting a VC fund on the scale of hard things isn't is it eight yeah as hard because we don't have to like build a product you know but like it's and so why are you doing this because you would have such an easier life doing something else and like everyone has a very deep why
(28:22) like you do but also everyone will have a moment whether they've had it or not where they should quit or they should have quit yeah and either they didn't or they don't and you know kind of that Dark Night of the soul and Entrepreneurship that's sort of like that burn the boats moment not really
(28:42) the burn the boats I'm trying to think of the hero's journey but anyway you know what so you know when you got into this and you've started you know you made that transition from the cushy corporate life to entrepreneurship you know yeah when was the moment when you were like I made a big mistake and
(28:57) and I should quit you know tell me so it's it you know I haven't had that moment with the entrepreneurial Journey so far the quit moment there are moments that are really really hard like they're you know fundraising is not easy especially in the current market environment so there are moments where
(29:19) you're like I could just go get a job for a year and come back to this when the market is better right yeah oh yeah but the reason I don't do that and what I always come back to is impact it's a question of right now the energy is very very high around Women's Health there is an appetite for Solutions
(29:37) because there's demand for it there are we came out of the pandemic with much more Awareness on where the big pain points were around the healthcare system and in particular around Women's Health and so we have a inflection moment in front of us right now where we can actually do some good and make some real
(29:55) change and of course, make some money right like that we will make money and we will do good and make change at the same time and I think the energy and the ambition around that is what keeps me in it versus the notion that I would the alternative of like finding a job and having like a full salary and
(30:16) benefits again yeah it just I wouldn't be I wouldn't be flexing the impact muscle that for me has now become a really important part of how I find my own peace and quiet and fulfillment yeah and I can't do those things that I feel like I'm not doing enough and I think in my previous careers there were moments
(30:37) where I stayed in the Consulting role probably a little too long I probably stayed in some of those jobs a little too long and it was because it was scary on the other side and it's very very unknown on the other side yeah but it was comfortable and it was easy but the it was that impact lever for me
(30:53) that wasn't getting serviced and now that it is it's very hard to say that I could go do something else and still feel content with what I'm doing yeah yeah I often hear a lot of people who are in the corporate world kind of Yearning to get out of it but it's hard you're on the other side and the only thing you can do is just
(31:14) leap you have to just do it and a lot most people never do you know I think we call those entrepreneurs instead of entrepreneurs but I used to tell people as well and this Rings true day in and day out for me is this being founding a startup or running fund or being an entrepreneur is it the money is
(31:34) not enough like it's not enough to get you up every day like I do not get out of date out of bed every day to make a buck I don't yeah like it's almost one of the last reasons you know it's like when you wake up in the morning and you look at the ceiling and you just think to yourself really yeah really again
(31:52) really you know like there has to be something there that's gonna get you out of bed on that day when you've been getting rejected and like beat down and kicked in the teeth for weeks yeah what's gonna get you up yeah on those days when it would be so much easier to go get a job and yeah well and it's it's
(32:14) right absolutely and it's those moments where like I find I have to kind of get out of town for a day or two like I've gotta like drive somewhere that's not my house, not my home office and just take a beat and say you kind of take stock of what you're doing why you're doing it what are the goods what are the
(32:34) bads make the pros and cons list and I'll do this when my husband will laugh at me but I'll like do it at breakfast and be like here's all the things I could go do here's the pros and cons of what I'm doing right now and I have to remind myself why I'm doing it and yeah take two days to get out of
(32:48) town really think about it and hopefully come back Alicia's episode which was I think episode two of this podcast she talks about finding the last known point and for me I had a moment a couple of weeks ago where like it's it's just been like one thing after another and I was driving home and I was like
(33:10) oh my gosh I think yeah you know and I listen I remember it all of a sudden find your last known point and actually listened to a minute of that episode with her and like listen to her and I kind of thought back to that I realized my last known point was when I wrote this thing called The Phoenix
(33:31) Manifesto so I went back and I read that and I was like this is why you started this thing yeah this is it does this thing you know doing all these other things yeah but yeah it's it's you definitely have to Center and recenter yeah when you talk with entrepreneurs and they're in that tough
(33:53) place you know and you've invested in them or you know whatever that is and they and they come to you or maybe sometimes they don't come to you can just tell yeah what do you what would you typically share with an entrepreneur who was just in a really tough spot to help I I had a conversation like that this morning
(34:15) and it what it comes back to what I what I usually suggest because it also works for me in those moments when I get out of town is go back to the feedback so if you've already provided the service or the business model or the thing you're doing and you've provided it to users and you have gotten feedback go back to
(34:31) that feedback read those messages over and over and over again because that's what you're doing you have to keep doing that right and like I have a stack on my desk over there of notes I've gotten from Founders emails and really beautiful emails notes and the handwritten notes in the mail and like
(34:51) it's I keep them there and they're going to fill up this wall behind me at some point I'm like that's what I'll go back that's my last known Point mm-hmm here's the impact here's what we're doing that's different that's bigger that's Bolder that's creating change go back to that and if you still feel the way you
(35:06) do after you go back to that and we'll have a different conversation but if you go back and you read those things and your energy doesn't come back it will because that's what you're doing so go back to that's great advice yeah wonderful well do you have any final pieces of wisdom you'd like to leave for our
(35:28) audience here at Adventurous oh it's a good question I think you know the hustle is it's real and it's hard and you will have really great days and you have really hard days but having good friends good partners good people around you who can keep supporting and reinforcing what you're doing and keeping you sane as very very
(35:51) important so you know build your village and keep the village close because it will bring everything you need to keep going yes and you will need it in those dark moments yeah as an entrepreneur for sure yeah well so how can people reach you if they want to connect with you further yeah about you know maybe it's an
(36:11) entrepreneur who wants to learn more about funds or anything else you're up to yeah so I'm on LinkedIn I'm fairly active on LinkedIn so you can find me there send me a message or ping me and that's an easy one and our website for Emmeline Adventures it's emelineventures.vc we have a pitch us link and there's an email at the bottom
(36:31) you can reach out to all of that comes straight to me so you can find me that way as well and then we're I'm on Twitter I'm not very active on Twitter but I am there so it's just at the same say honey I think I tweeted one thing like a year ago I check in every now and then I'm not too you'll find me
(36:46) on LinkedIn before you find me on Twitter so yeah those are probably the easiest places okay wonderful I will put those links in the show notes so that people can follow you connect with you and I'm on this amazing journey that you are on and thank you this very very important mission that you're taking
(37:04) thank you so there I sound like a pirate it's Friday afternoon it's okay there you have it Naseem Sayani on this episode of Adventurous and we will see you back here for the next episode.
Naseem on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nsayani/
Emmeline Ventures website: https://www.emmelineventures.vc/
Check out our episode on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/adventureous-podcast/id1649818194
Adventureous YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCoufuBui3ZQuUTddIRALYlQ
Adventureous on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5a3Y1lXjVjtvz6hS2Mivw7