CEO of Virta Health Sami Inkinen is On a Mission to Reverse Type 2 Diabetes For 100 Million People by the Year 2025

**Sami Inkinen** (0:00)
I'm the last person in the world who would ever need to deal with pre-diabetes or type 2 diabetes. And people who have it, they should just blame themselves. You know what you should be doing. Don't eat too much and exercise. It's your fault. It is your fault. And there I was personally becoming or on my way to becoming type 2 diabetic. So it's almost like I had this experience where I thought sun's rotating around the earth. And then I kind of personally experienced that, no, no, no, no, that is not true. It is the earth that's rotating around sun. There's a key to unlock this whole thing, not just to myself, but potentially hundreds of millions of other people.

**Spencer Rascoff** (0:44)
This is Office Hours and I'm your host, Spencer Rascoff. I co-founded Zillow and ran it for a decade. And in early 2020, I co-founded.la, the preeminent news service covering the tech scene in my hometown of Los Angeles. On this show, you'll hear from founders, CEOs, and thought leaders from around the world with a focus on the innovators in LA. Sami Inkinen is the CEO and co-founder of Virta Health, which offers the first clinically proven treatment to safely and sustainably reverse type 2 diabetes without medications or surgery. Previously, Sami was the co-founder of real estate marketplace Trulia through its IPO and sale to Zillow Group. He also worked on Microsoft's strategy team for MS Office and was a consultant at McKinsey & Company. In 2014, Sami and his wife rode from California to Hawaii 2,750 miles to raise awareness about the dangers of sugar and its connection to diabetes. I'm a proud angel investor in Virta Health. Sami, welcome to Office Hours. I'm so excited to have you here. Thanks for coming.

**Sami Inkinen** (1:48)
Well, Spencer, good to be here.

**Spencer Rascoff** (1:50)
So let's go back and why don't you tell listeners about your first entrepreneurial experience?

**Sami Inkinen** (1:56)
First entrepreneurial experience. So maybe a tiny bit of context. So I grew up in Finland on a farm, very kind of low middle class existence, picking potatoes on a farm. So this may be surprising with that context. I think my first entrepreneurial experience was in my team years, I started running a BBS, so bulletin board system for those who are not pre-internet kids. And so I was charging people to access some premium features of that BBS way back when from a farm in Finland. And I think my first modem was like a 2400 BBS. So I'm dating myself here, but I think that was my first.

**Spencer Rascoff** (2:41)
And what did that BBS enable people to do? It was like an online marketplace or what type of business?

**Sami Inkinen** (2:47)
Much, much, much simpler. So back in the days, it was mainly two or three things. One, you can message, so you can send messages to other users and using video on it. You can kind of use that, connect with other users from other BBSs, and then file transfer. Upload, download, all kinds of files, and no comment on whether they were copyrighted or not. But as you know what is happening, when 1980s and 1990s, that was big fun.

**Spencer Rascoff** (3:13)
Amazing. By the way, it's so interesting how many entrepreneurs got their start just sort of toying around with early technologies in a gray area, let's just say. So tinkerers, it's okay, tinker away and it's okay to be in the gray zone sometimes. How did you get to the US and to Stanford Business School? Walk us through that part of your career.

**Sami Inkinen** (3:35)
Yeah. So I had started once after a company in Europe, in my native Finland, and part of that experience, I also lived in Singapore and Hong Kong, which is another crazy story in my 20s. But then I came back to Finland and I was in my mid-20s, and I guess the analogy I've used is if you're a hockey player in Finland, by the way, there's many of them, hockey juniors, you absolutely want to go to the NHL because that's would be the best league, best coaches, best everything. I was entrepreneurial minded, and I was like, I have to get to Silicon Valley. I just absolutely have to get to Silicon Valley. That is the NHL of entrepreneurs. So that was my dream, and it may seem like easy just hop in a plane and fly to Silicon Valley, but this was 2002, 2003 I couldn't even figure out how to get a visa to legally come to America. And that was my number one obstacle. And I figured, well, if I get to an American grad school, you get a two-year visa. So that's going to be my golden ticket. So I applied to Stanford Business School, the only business school I applied. Afterwards, I was told that that not a good strategy.