What happens when you achieve the success you spent your life chasing—and realize there may be something more?
Narges Baniasadi has lived many lives in one lifetime: immigrant, Stanford researcher, entrepreneur, founder, executive, professor—and through it all, a human being navigating the same questions of identity, loss, belonging, and purpose that so many of us face.
In this episode of Del be Del, I sit down with Dr. Narges Baniasadi for a deeply personal conversation about ambition, identity, entrepreneurship, grief, health, belonging, and what it means to redefine success.
Narges is the Founder and Executive Director of the Emergence program at Stanford, where she develops educational and translational programs focused on improving societal health through entrepreneurship. She is also an Adjunct Professor in Stanford’s Department of Medicine, teaching impact entrepreneurship in areas related to prevention and health equity.
Her career has spanned more than a decade at the intersection of technology and life sciences. She founded Bina, a pioneering bioinformatics company born from research at Stanford and UC Berkeley that developed high-performance computing and AI solutions for cancer research and genomics. Bina was later acquired by global healthcare company Roche, where Narges served as VP of Informatics at Roche Sequencing, leading clinical software development and AI research.But this conversation goes beyond the résumé.
Narges shares her journey from growing up in Iran to building a life in the United States, navigating the worlds of Stanford and Silicon Valley, and confronting the question many ambitious people quietly carry: “Am I good enough?”We talk about what it means to be an immigrant and a woman in leadership, the pursuit of achievement, and the invisible costs that can come with constantly pushing forward. Narges reflects on selling her company at the same time her mother became seriously ill, the experience of grief and saying goodbye, and how her own health challenges eventually forced her to reconsider the way she was living.
Our conversation also explores health equity and the powerful idea that sometimes your “zip code beats your genetic code”—how the conditions in which we live can shape our health and opportunities.Ultimately, this is a conversation about transformation: moving from proving to being, from trying to control outcomes to accepting uncertainty, and from a life driven primarily by ambition toward one with more room for connection, joy, art, poetry, and dance.
CHAPTERS
00:00 Introduction
03:00 Growing Up in Iran and Family Influences
11:30 Being Seen as a Human First, Not a Woman
13:13 “Am I Good Enough?” — Ambition and Self-Worth
22:40 Becoming a Bridge Between Different Worlds
24:17 Stanford, Silicon Valley, and the Meaning of Success
32:54 Navigating Entrepreneurship as an Immigrant Woman
43:04 Leadership and the Glass Ceiling
44:46 When Success and Grief Collided
55:29 Saying Goodbye and Losing Her Mother
1:00:21 “Zip Code Beats Genetic Code” — Health Equity
1:07:04 Human Connection and Our Need for Each Other
1:10:44 Health Challenges and Learning to Slow Down
1:16:06 Letting Go of Control and Redefining Purpose
1:21:24 Identity and Refusing to Be Put in a Box
1:28:28 Beyond Ambition: What Matters Now
Del be Del means “heart to heart” in Persian. It’s a podcast about the conversations underneath our accomplishments and identities—the experiences that shape who we are and who we are becoming.
If this conversation resonates with you, subscribe for more heart-to-heart conversations about life, identity, purpose, love, loss, belonging, and the moments that change us.
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