The Stanford Daily Podcast

Tran Le interviews Shobha Dasari, a Stanford graduate and YC alum, who shares her journey from growing up with a chronic health condition to founding Flair Health, a startup focusing on chronic disease management. Dasari 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. Dasari 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. Dasari 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 Dasari'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: Dasari's Startup Journey

27:51 Dasari'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 Dasari at [email protected].

Check out Flair Health: https://www.flairhealth.com/

Follow Dasari’s journey: https://www.linkedin.com/in/Dasari-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, Le 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 Le and her guests as she shares stories, insights, and lessons from their entrepreneurial journeys.

In this episode of Founder's Campfire, Tran Le joins forces once more with her former co-founder, Jason Chaos, for an insightful conversation and startup accelerators. Le and Chao (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, Le and Chao 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, Le and Chao 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 them:

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, Le 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 Le as she shares stories, insights, and lessons on entrepreneurship.

Producer: Tran Le, Managing Editor: Ellen Yang

In this episode of Founder's Campfire, Tran Le 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 dollars 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 junior year, 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, Le 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 Le as she shares stories, insights, and lessons on entrepreneurship.

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.

For more podcasts by The Stanford Daily, visit stanforddaily.com/category/podcasts

Producers: Tran Le, Managing Editor: Ellen Yang

Caroline Winterer has been fascinated by dinosaurs since her childhood. She remembers thumbing through illustrations of prehistory growing up, intrigued by the distant past. In her forthcoming book, How the New World Became Old, she honors her inner child with the historian’s eye for change over time – deep time. 

Coined by the writer John McPhee, deep time refers to the new idea that Earth is not thousands of years old but millions, indeed billions, as modern scientists established last century. An intellectual historian and historian of science, Winterer tells the story of how the idea of deep time transformed the worldviews of nineteenth-century Americans, from scientists to artists to ministers to ordinary Americans. 

In this episode of Office Hours Air, Professor Winterer discusses her upcoming book, her formation as a historian, and her philosophy of teaching. Winterer also discusses her ongoing exhibit in Green Library’s Hohbach Hall co-curated with Professor Jessica Riskin: Apes and Us: A Century of Representations of Our Closest Relatives. The exhibit features some dozen painted portraits of apes and monkeys by the Austrian painter Gabriel von Max, as well as six display cases on major themes in historical human thinking on apes and an interactive wall. Open to the public at no cost, The Apes and Us is on display in Green Library until June 2024. 

Office Hours Air is a new Daily podcast and radio program. The show, created and hosted by Noah Sveiven, features guests in conversation about their work and the experiences in their lives that drew them to that work. Sveiven hopes the program will be of interest to anyone interested in exploring new ideas and ways of thinking, especially undergraduates discerning their callings. Office Hours Air is produced weekly and available online on all major podcast platforms. A one-hour version of each show is also broadcast in the Bay Area on KZSU Stanford Radio 90.1 FM, Thursday mornings from 10am to 11am.

After working as an emergency medicine physician for 19 years, including here at Stanford, Dr. Bruce Feldstein suffered an injury that made it impossible for him to continue. With the encouragement of other medical professionals, he began to consider, and then pursue, chaplaincy. Two decades later, Feldstein has served as a hospital chaplain longer than he worked as a physician.

In this interview, conducted a few weeks before his seventieth birthday, Feldstein discusses spiritual care in the hospital setting and then reflects on his own mortality. He also describes his transition from physician to spiritual care provider and shares stories from the bedside of patients past and present. 

Feldstein’s sense of awe, which he describes throughout the show, is rooted in his daily experience accompanying people in intense moments of pain, beauty, and meaning. In his work as a chaplain Feldstein witnesses the full range of human life on a daily basis: from the first breaths of newborns to the final words of the dying. 

Office Hours Air is a new Daily podcast and radio program. The show, created and hosted by Noah Sveiven, features guests in conversation about their work and the experiences in their lives that drew them to that work. Sveiven hopes the program will be of interest to anyone interested in exploring new ideas and ways of thinking, especially undergraduates discerning their callings. Office Hours Air is produced weekly and available online on all major podcast platforms. A one-hour version of each show is also broadcast in the Bay Area on KZSU Stanford Radio 90.1 FM, Thursday mornings from 10am to 11am. Office Hours Air is produced by Noah Sveiven and Ellen Yang.

In this episode the Rev. Dr. Tiffany Steinwert joined Office Hours Air host Noah Sveiven in conversation about her life and work. Rev. Steinwert is the Dean of the Office for Religious and Spiritual Life at Stanford University, a post she has held since February 2019. Steinwert discusses her religious formation, the role of pastoral care on an inherently interfaith campus, and the challenges and opportunities facing religious life on campus today.

For more podcasts by The Stanford Daily, stanforddaily.com/category/podcasts.

Managing Editor and Producer: Ellen Yang

In this episode of Office Hours Air, former Stanford University Archivist Roxanne Nilan discusses her new biography of former Stanford University President Wallace Sterling, who shepherded the university through a period of extraordinary growth in prominence from 1949 until 1968. Published in October 2023, Stanford’s Wallace Sterling: Portrait of a Presidency charts Sterling’s time at Stanford as well as the contributions of other figures. 

In conversation with Karen Bartholomew, the contributing editor to the book, and Larry Horton, the current president of the Stanford Historical Society, Nilan discusses the legacies from Sterling’s time that shape university life today. During Sterling's presidency, the medical school moved from San Francisco to campus during his presidency; ambitious new faculty raised the profile of the university; admissions became increasingly selective. 

Toward the end of the program, Nilan, Bartholomew, and Horton remark on their relationship to the university. Cumulatively, the three have lived and worked at Stanford for more than a century, and the memories of time past endure in their minds. 

In this wide-ranging conversation, Alexander Nemerov discusses his life and work with Stanford senior Noah Sveiven. Topics include the art history professor’s two most recent books – The Forest: A Fable of America in the 1830s and Fierce Poise: Helen Frankenthaler and 1950s New York – along with Nemerov’s relationship with his parents, some recollections from childhood, and reflections on university life. 

Office Hours Air is a new Stanford Daily podcast and radio program. The show, created and hosted by Noah Sveiven, features guests in conversation about their work and the experiences in their life that drew them to that work. Sveiven hopes the program will be of interest to other undergraduates discerning their callings, as well as anyone else wanting to try out new ways of thinking. Sveiven also envisions the show as a way to archive the experiences and perspectives of his guests. Office Hours Air is produced weekly and available online on all major podcast platforms.

For more podcasts by The Stanford Daily, stanforddaily.com/category/podcasts.

Managing Editor and Producer: Ellen Yang

In this first episode of the Health Around the World, a series focused on interviewing Stanford experts on topics such as global health, health disparities and health equity, we interview Clinical Associate Professor at Stanford's School of Medicine, Dr. Clea Sarnquist. We ask Dr. Sarnquist, who works in the Infectious Disease Division within the Department of Pediatrics, about her experiences and interest in the field of global health.

Graphic: Michelle Fu

Producer: Joy Molloy

Managing Editor: Helena Getahun-Hawkins