Annual Letter To Shareholders 2025

Eudaimonia is an ancient Greek word that loosely translates to “a life well lived.” Aristotle used it to describe a life of flourishing, purpose, and integrity, where your actions are aligned with your values. 

2025 was a year where my actions revealed my values, which in turn, inspired my actions.

This is the sixth edition of my annual letter to shareholders in which I share my reflections and insights on the year gone by. Writing this was both difficult and rewarding, and I’m grateful you’re taking the time to read it. Here are the past years in review:

2020 | 2021 | 2022 | 2023 | 2024

Since I began writing these letters in 2020, I’ve realized how hard it is to distill a year into words. This is because each letter forces me to look more closely at what mattered, why it mattered, and let go of the things that didn’t. But 2025 was different. 

Everything mattered. For everything revealed something important to me, all of which crystallized toward the end of the year, as I enter 2026 with renewed clarity and conviction.

It would be easy to describe 2025 in terms of progress made, lessons learned, groundwork laid. All of that would be true, but incomplete. So instead of cataloging events, I want to talk about the year at a higher level, letting the specifics show up where they belong.

Conviction

I’m grateful to be building our company alongside Nickhil Jakatdar and a thoughtful, committed team as we work to help healthcare experts scale themselves. What’s been striking is that what we started with and where we’ve landed so far feel both very different and strangely the same; the form has evolved; the intuition hasn’t.

But if there’s one quality that’s mattered most to me through this process, it’s conviction, both in myself and in the direction we’re pursuing. Conviction is the willingness to keep working on a problem when the evidence is still incomplete, because you’re prepared to be wrong and adapt. It’s the ability to take an idea seriously enough to test it, stress it, and stay with it even when it doesn’t immediately fructify. 

Much of this year was about learning how to operate inside that uncertainty. Startups don’t offer clean structure. They come with open loops, partial information, and long stretches where belief precedes proof. I’m learning to navigate the narrow line between delusion and conviction, to believe in a reality that doesn’t yet exist, while staying grounded enough to adjust as reality itself pushes back. 

That discipline showed up in concrete ways. For example, reducing our entire narrative to a two-minute pitch at the Stanford Founders Pitch Night sharpened my appreciation for how powerful simplicity really is. 

A conversation in Gstaad led to our first client. We recruited four strong engineers. We raised $1M from our customers in the community, people whose lives we’ve impacted. We’re running pilots and iterating constantly. 

I’ve also come to appreciate that work, at its best, is an excuse to spend time with people you like, solving problems you like. When the problem is meaningful and the people are right, momentum and morale reinforce each other. Iteration becomes energizing.

As I’ve gone deeper into the healthcare AI space, my conviction has become less about answers and more about context, for specific knowledge compounds slowly and context is scarce. What looks obvious to others often hides surprising complexity underneath. So learning to listen deeply has turned out to be a superpower.

What began organically has now settled into something more durable: a belief that health is a problem worth working on seriously, and that solving a specific, well-defined part of it matters more than the label of “doing a startup.”

Conviction, then, is the willingness to believe in something long enough to give it a real chance to exist. That’s how clarity emerges. And I’m grateful to be learning how to do just that.

Joy

At some point in the year, startup stuff started to follow me home. It became natural to wake up thinking about it and go to sleep still turning the questions over. The tradeoffs felt worth wrestling with, and what had initially felt like effort began to feel effortless. This was a moment of great joy for me, for it’d been a while that I felt this way. 

But joy didn’t come only from work.

It came from physical effort. A four-day climb to Machu Picchu reminded me what progress feels like when the body is the constraint and forward motion is earned step by step. At other times, joy came from experiences: skiing in Verbier, paragliding in Gstaad, floating in a hot-air balloon over Alula in Saudi Arabia, each one sharpening my attention in a different way. 

Joy came from people and shared moments. Weddings of close friends. Formal events at school. Tuxedos and sherwanis marking friendships. Long walks when no one is trying to arrive anywhere. A chaotic night in Vegas (the Stanford FOAM tradition) followed immediately by the clarity of leaving. Watching a cricket match in the Bay carried an eerie comfort with it. There were dinners, and more dinners. Hikes. Conversations that stretched. And through it all, a deep sense of belonging to friends, to community, to a life that felt full in more than one dimension.

Joy also came from beauty and craft. Visiting Solomeo at Brunello Cucinelli’s HQ, and Paris at Van Cleef & Arpels HQ reminded me how care shows up in details most people may never consciously notice. Long drives, from Verbier to Venice, and across Europe in our Land Rover, offered hours with no agenda beyond just moving forward, watching landscapes change, thoughts settle.

Music became another source of joy. I found myself drawn to psychedelic pop and opera, noticing how each altered my internal pace. Coldplay at Stanford felt communal in the best way. The Book of Mormon reminded me how humor disarms seriousness, as did TA’ing Dr Jennifer Aaker’s + Naomi Bagdonas’s + Connor Diemand-Yauman’s Humor class and Burt Alper’s + Allison Kluger’s Strategic Communication class. Watching Lady Gaga, Travis Scott, and Ed Sheeran at Coachella marked my second-most deeply immersive music festival after Dekmantel, and it was one of the year’s most absorbing experiences.

Travel stitched the year together with joy interspersed everywhere as well. France kept calling me back, with:

• Bastille Day in Paris, 
• Le Negresco in Nice, 
• Château Eza in Èze, 
• Cap 21 Les Murènes in Saint-Tropez, and
• Le Clos des Sens in Annecy.

Each place offered a different idea of rhythm and rest. In contrast, Switzerland felt precise and deliberate: Geneva, Gstaad, Verbier, Lausanne, and the Earth One conference. Italy, Peru, Saudi Arabia, Dubai, Chile, Oman, and Mexico… Each place expanded my sense of what a “normal” life could look like.

There was also joy in doing something different: stand-up comedy. Getting on stage for my first stand-up comedy set was so rewarding and so humbling in the best ways. Comedy rewards deep observation, honesty, and sincerity. This experience has stayed with me because it continues to remind me how alive it feels to take a small, real risk.

In Season 9 Episode 27 of The Office, Andy Bernard says, “I wish there was a way to know you’re in the good old days before you’ve actually left them.” This year taught me that way. 

Joy, I learned, is about being fully where you are, whether that’s inside a hard problem with people you trust, or floating above unfamiliar terrain, or walking with someone with no agenda other than the walk itself.

In hindsight, these moments mattered because they taught me what a well-lived life is.

India, Seen From Both Sides

2025 was the second time I organized a Stanford Trip to India. The 2024 one brought 29 classmates. The 2025 one brought 20 students with Professor Yossi Feinberg. What began as a ‘Global Study Trip’ gradually became something more meaningful: The chance to help build a bridge between Stanford and India. I’m grateful to have done that alongside my co-leaders Devanshi, Sarah, and Juliana.

Coming to India through Stanford offers a distinct vantage point. This time, I looked at India as a living system: complex, ambitious, and evolving, and I saw it through conversations with people working inside its institutions and markets. Experiencing the country this way, and helping others experience it too, made clear how much specific context matters, and how grand India’s ambition, tech stack, infrastructure goals, and population’s potential are.

Ideas don’t move cleanly across borders or institutions without someone willing to carry the nuance. Helping Stanford better understand India, and helping Indian business and political leaders see how their work is interpreted globally, felt important to me.

This experience also helped me look at my own identity in a more nuanced way. I’ve spent much of my life moving between worlds that could be treated as opposites: India and America. Stanford and Berkeley. Delhi and Dehradun. Humanities and Computer Science. News Media and Preventive Health. Earlier, I felt pressure to resolve these into a single story. Now, I see them as complementary lenses. In a world increasingly shaped by AI, the ability to hold multiple perspectives at once, to resist flattening complexity, feels essential to me.

Above all, what inspired me most was a shared ambition I sensed across conversations with businessfolk: to build systems that last and to scale without losing trust. The idea of progress with responsibility resonates deeply with how I want to work going forward, especially at the intersection of health and tech.

This second Stanford India trip sharpened my sense of where I sit in the world and the kind of bridge I want to keep building between people, institutions, and countries, as I navigate a future shaped by rapid techno-sociological change.

The Life You Live, The Person You Are.

Two classes were deeply impactful as they changed how I understood life and myself: Engineering a Remarkable Life and Interpersonal Dynamics aka Touchy Feely. At Stanford GSB, these are among the most sought-after courses because they focus on the harder problem beneath business and finance: not what you build, but who you become while building it. 

Engineering a Remarkable Life starts from the premise that most lives aren’t consciously designed so much as slowly drifted into, shaped by external incentives and unconscious habits. The class kept circling back to the core idea: A remarkable life isn’t one you admire from afar; it’s one you can recognize as your own while you’re living it.

The lecturer Joel Peterson had lived a full life. He had been a chairman, an investor, and a builder, but what mattered more to him than anything was that he had forged lifelong relationships. With his students, his mentees, his wife, his kids and 31 grandkids, his friends and business partners, and more. You could almost feel that he was speaking from a depth of experience.

About two weeks before Joel passed away, I had my first and only office hours with him. Joel talked about coherence. About whether the life you are building actually holds together when you zoom out far enough. When I asked about the three big decisions (where to live, what to build, who to build it with), he reframed my question. “Those aren’t decisions”, he said. “They’re trade-offs.”

He talked about how most people drift: They respond to events, opportunities, incentives, and other people’s expectations. They wake up one day and realize they forgot to choose. He had seen that regret up close, both in others and in himself. The work, he said, is not to design a perfect life, but to become reflective early enough that you don’t outsource your identity to Brownian motion.

What he cared about most was “human capital, relationships, and trust.” He described how his business partners once gathered with his son for breakfast while Joel was away, and they spoke of Joel in such high praise that some of them even cried. His son later told him it felt like a rehearsal for his funeral. And Joel said, “That is what I optimize for.”

What stayed with me was the weight of our conversation. There was no urgency in his voice. He asked questions that were so simple they were impossible to dodge: Who do people become around you? What are you outsourcing to success? What matters to you?

Two weeks later, Joel passed away. The loss changed the class without anyone needing to say so. What had felt like a thoughtful exercise now felt finite. 

I think about that office hour often as a reference point. It is a reminder that meaning is found by making sure the pieces of your life actually line up. Meaning is found by aligning actions with values. 

If you’re interested in learning more from the lectures, here are my class notes from the last edition of the iconic class at Stanford GSB, Engineering A Remarkable Life. 

I’m grateful to Joel for his wisdom. 

Touchy Feely, officially called Interpersonal Dynamics worked at a different layer. The name makes people laugh, and that’s perhaps part of the point. It lowers your guard just enough to do the real work. The class is not only about expressing feelings but also about how people actually experience you in real time. It’s a live laboratory of self-knowledge and self-awareness. A few insights:

• Feedback is a gift, because it reveals the gap between intent and impact, and that gap is where growth actually happens. 
• You can connect through conflict. Avoiding tension preserves harmony but erodes trust; naming it, calmly and directly, often does the opposite. 
• Self-disclosure and vulnerability are powerful tools to forge connection. They create safety, and safety is the precondition for honesty.
• Feelings are data points. If you acknowledge them, it brings greater clarity. 

Through 10 weeks and many hours of interpersonal conversations, I learned more about myself than I have through any other compressed experience.

Taken together, these two classes reframed quite a few things for me in a way I didn’t expect. Engineering a Remarkable Life pushed me to look at my life from far enough and see whether it coheres. Touchy Feely forced me to look close enough to notice how I actually show up moment to moment. One worked at the scale of decades; the other at the scale of micro-conversations. Both asked the same question from different angles: Are you living deliberately, or are you just moving forward?

I don’t feel finished with these lessons. If anything, they’ve made me more aware of how easy it is to drift, and how much attention it takes not to. But I’m grateful for the clarity they offered at this point in my life. They helped me see more clearly who I am becoming. Focusing on that feels like the right work to be doing.

Sunshine

I’ve been thinking a lot about why the Bay Area, and South Bay in particular, has been such a powerful place for me to build, think, and feel alive. I keep coming back to a simple, almost embarrassing answer: Sunshine.

My day-to-day happiness is directly correlated with sunshine. And happiness, for me, is a core attribute to build well. 

Something about the weather and the Sun in the Bay makes everything feel idyllic. Effort feels effortless. The days are bright. Predictable. Recovery is faster and easier. Failure is inspiring. I’d say this matters much more than what it sounds. Entrepreneurship is powered by perseverance. And weather makes it easier to weather the pitfalls of entrepreneurship.

You wake up, the light is good, the air is clear, so the default impulse is to do something useful. There’s a calmness here that lowers friction because ambition doesn’t have to fight the environment to survive.

That calmness pairs with something rarer: high intellectual density per square mile. The average conversation you overhear at Coffeebar in Menlo Park, at Verve in Palo Alto, or walking across the Stanford Oval, is unusually substantive. People talk about building companies, systems, and ideas that affect millions as part of daily life. Ambition here is ambient. You absorb it slowly, until one day you realize it has reshaped what feels possible.

There’s also a strong sense of belonging for me. Berkeley during undergrad, Stanford now for my MBA. These places anchor me. They give emotional continuity to a region that others may, at times, describe as transient.

Also, South Bay is suburban and limited in distractions. There are only so many restaurants and so many places to go. That constraint nudges me inward to working, thinking, and building relationships. I end up spending time with the same people, returning to the same problems, making steady progress that compounds. And I find that to be deeply fulfilling.

Add to this access to world-class education, healthcare, capital, and talent, and you get a place where the ecosystem produces “the ones who see things differently.” From Steve Jobs:

Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They’re not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can’t do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.

It’s in this environment that herculean work starts to feel possible again. Small groups of high-agency people take on problems that are too big for them and decide, irrationally, to try anyway. 

Place shapes perspective. Geography shapes destiny. For me, the Bay, with its sunshine, seriousness, and constraint, has offered clarity and energy in equal measure. It’s where I feel happiest because it makes fulfilling things feel pleasurable. And that, I’ve come to believe, is the real advantage.

In Closing

When I look back at 2025, what stands out is a sense that my actions and values spent more time in alignment than they ever have before.

This year taught me that a well-lived life is built through attention to what you’re working on, who you’re working with, how you show up, and the environments that shape your energy over time. Conviction gave me direction. Joy gave me texture. India gave me perspective. Stanford gave me language. The Bay gave me space and light.

I’m entering 2026 with fewer illusions, better questions, and a deeper respect for trade-offs. Less interested in speed for its own sake, more interested in coherence. Less focused on outcomes I can point to, and more focused on whether the life I’m building holds together when I zoom out. Less focused on more, and more focused on less. 

Eudaimonia is about living a flourishing life in accordance with your values. This year mattered most so far because it made flourishing accessible and values visible.

Thank you for reading. I’m grateful you’re here.

To levity,

Abhinav