Founder's Campfire Tran Le

🎤 Tran interviews Shobha Dasari, a recent Stanford graduate and YC alum, who shares her journey from growing up with a chronic condition to founding Flair Health, a startup focusing on chronic disease management. Shobha discusses her early healthcare experience as she dealt with her chronic conditions, her research leading to the creation of the “Hacking Healthcare” book, and the experiences that shaped her understanding of the healthcare system's shortcomings. Shobha stresses the importance of building a sustainable business model and describes how Flair Health leverages insurance billing codes to offer nutrition counseling and health coaching for patients with chronic conditions, integrated into existing clinics. Shobha reflects on the challenges of confidence and managing a health condition while being an ambitious founder, and invites listeners in the healthcare and autoimmune condition space to connect with her.
00:50 Shobha's Healthcare Journey: From Chronic Condition to Hacking Healthcare
09:17 Flair Health: Revolutionizing Chronic Disease Management
14:30 Building a Team and Business Model: Insights from Flair Health's Journey
23:24 YC Experience and Personal Growth: Shobha's Startup Journey
27:51 Shobha's Key Takeaways: Facing Challenges and Embracing Confidence
31:53 How to Support and Get Involved with Flair Health
❤️ If you or someone you know is dealing with an autoimmune condition, the Flair Health team would love to learn more about your experience. You can reach out to Shobha at hello@flairhealth.com.
Check out Flair Health: https://www.flairhealth.com/
Follow Shobha’s journey: https://www.linkedin.com/in/shobha-dasari/
🔥 Founder’s Campfire is a podcast show created and hosted by Tran Le, a senior at Stanford studying computer science. Through reflective conversations with early founders, Tran hopes to build a community of founders focused on reflection, sharing, and growth at Stanford and beyond. Whether you're a founder, dreamer, investor, or simply a curious listener, there's a place for you around the campfire. Join us as we share stories, insights, and lessons from our entrepreneurial journeys.

🎤 Tran and Jason (both Stanford CS '24) were co-founders who applied to the Y Combinator (YC) Winter 2024 batch. Despite receiving offers from both the YC and Neo accelerators, they decided to decline the offers due to differences in their personal goals and values. In this episode, Tran and Jason deep dive into their journey from conceptualizing their startup idea to navigating the YC interview process, and to ultimately parting ways. They discuss the importance of understanding one’s financial and personal readiness, ensuring alignment in co-founder values, and evaluating the desire to commit to the startup space in the long term. While sharing common values, Tran and Jason also explore their differing viewpoints in finding the right co-founder and startup idea. Through their story, they aim to offer aspiring founders insight into the nuanced decision-making process involved in joining a startup accelerator program.
00:00 — Our Startup Idea and How We Met
05:32 — Our Y Combinator Interview Process
10:41 — Weighing the Y Combinator Offer and Exploring Other Opportunities
15:14 — Reflection of Our Decision, Differing Perspectives, and Lessons Learned
❤️ Connect with us! We’d love to hear your thoughts.
Tran Le: https://www.linkedin.com/in/trannble/
Jason Chao: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jchao01/
🔥 Founder’s Campfire is a podcast show created and hosted by Tran Le, a senior at Stanford studying computer science. Through reflective conversations with early founders, Tran hopes to build a community of founders focused on reflection, sharing, and growth at Stanford and beyond. Whether you're a founder, dreamer, investor, or simply a curious listener, there's a place for you around the campfire. Join us as we share stories, insights, and lessons from our entrepreneurial journeys.

🎤 Tran interviews Jason Chao, her former co-founder and a current master's student in computer science at Stanford. Jason’s early entrepreneurship journey began as a high school dropout when he raised a million dollar through an ICO to build a wireless mesh networking company. Although this venture ultimately did not succeed, it inspired him to pursue computer science at Stanford with the goal of becoming a technical founder. During his Stanford junior year summer, Jason built a real estate transaction management platform. He shares his struggles of being a solo founder, building a solution for one customer that didn’t scale to others, and ultimately pivoting away from real estate. Leveraging his experiences and learnings, Jason discusses his current start-up, Loral Labs, and on building the future of APIs for AI agents.
00:00 — Raising a million dollars and dropping out of high school
03:11 — Returning to high school and entering Stanford
05:04 — Exploring telecom and real estate tech
14:36 — Pivoting away from real estate tech
16:31 — Building Loral Labs and AI agents
❤️ Follow Jason on his journey: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jchao01/
Check out Loral Labs: https://lorallabs.com/
🔥 Founder’s Campfire is a podcast show created and hosted by Tran Le, a senior at Stanford studying computer science. Through reflective conversations with early founders, Tran hopes to build a community of founders focused on reflection, sharing, and growth at Stanford and beyond. Whether you're a founder, dreamer, investor, or simply a curious listener, there's a place for you around the campfire. Join us as we share stories, insights, and lessons from our entrepreneurial journeys.

🎤 Sreya Halder, a master's student in computer science at Stanford, discusses her experience building Club Cardinal, which attracted thousands of Stanford users. She also delves into how her personalized wardrobe avatar app went viral, amassing over 180,000 downloads, and her decision to pursue her passion for fashion full-time after graduating from Stanford by developing an AI-powered personalized shopping app. In this episode, we dive deep into the pivotal decisions in Sreya’s entrepreneurial journey: turning down an offer from Pear VC, choosing to focus full-time on her startup after a summer internship at AWS, and selecting the right co-founder and pre-seed fund to collaborate with.
❤️ Download Your Amie, AI-powered personalized shopping: https://www.youramie.com/
Your Amie’s Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/shopyouramie
Sreya’s TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@sreyahalder_
Sreya’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/sreyahldr
🔥 Founder’s Campfire is a podcast show created and hosted by Tran Le, a senior at Stanford studying computer science. Through reflective conversations with early founders, Tran hopes to build a community of founders focused on reflection, sharing, and growth at Stanford and beyond. Whether you're a founder, dreamer, investor, or simply a curious listener, there's a place for you around the campfire. Join us as we share stories, insights, and lessons from our entrepreneurial journeys.