Pod Insights How I Built This with Guy Raz Meet The HIBT Fellows: Mark Atlan & Zach Correa About this episode As a part of the 2021 How I Built This Summit (At Home) we have selected 10 Fellows, and we'd like to introduce you to each of them. In this episode: Mark Atlan co-founded ZappCare to help make sure that people living on tribal lands have access to health and medical services close to their homes. And Zach Correa hopes to connect users of lemonGRAFT to the people in their own neighborhood that grow fresh produce.
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Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Guy Raz? We get support from US Bank. A question I love asking founders. What's the one decision you almost didn't make? The one that changed everything? Because it's never the obvious stuff. It's never, I decided to start a company. It's the small, boring, Tuesday afternoon decision you barely remember making until you realize it's the reason everything after it either worked or didn't. Say you're 18 months in. Business is growing. You've got expenses coming from six directions. Gas for the van, office supplies, your phone bill, team lunches that are actually client meetings, and you're putting it all on whatever card you grabbed in year one. You're not thinking about it. Why would you? You've got bigger problems.
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1:30 Guy Raz? based on one small decision. Visit usbank.com/business to learn more. The creditor and issuer of this card is US Bank National Association, pursuant to a license from Visa USA, Inc. Some restrictions apply. Our presenting sponsor today is Anthropic, the team behind Claude. Every founder on this show started with a hard question. Not the marketing plan, the 2:00 AM kind. Is this idea any good? Am I the one to build it? Should I quit my job? Anthropic got built the same way. A public benefit corporation founded on one Hard question. How do we make sure AI goes well for people?
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5:23 Guy Raz? Hello, everyone, and welcome to How I Built This Fellows edition. So as a lot of you know, in normal years, we have a How I Built This conference and summit. And in recent years, we've been doing it in San Francisco. Well, this year, we're going virtual. But one thing that hasn't changed is our How I Built This Fellows program. Every year, we invite a group of entrepreneurs to become How I Built This Fellows. And this year, we selected 10 fellows to participate in a pitch competition where the winner will receive a $50,000 grant. So for the past week, we've been introducing some of these fellows here on the podcast and getting to know them a little bit better.
6:05 Guy Raz? And today's fellows are focused on making their communities healthier and more connected. Mark Atlan is co-founder of ZapCare. He wants to provide mobile medical services like eye exams, dialysis, cardiology to members of tribal nations. And he wants to start with his own nation. Tribal nations often experience delays in healthcare delivery, which is a problem that became more obvious in the past year.
6:32 Speaker 01 Covid just completely ravaged tribal nations and specifically the Navajo Nation where I'm from. There's about 320,000 Navajos on the reservation. If you can understand this, 43% don't have access to running water, electricity in their homes. So through Covid, how are you supposed to wash your hands? In the winter, how are you supposed to stay warm? Just to give you a quick statistic guide, the United States has about a 9.4% diabetes rate and the Navajo Nation has an 81% obesity and diabetes rate. And so we really are trying to solve that problem by offering these services like eye care, cardiology, or preventative care to our people. These are our nation's first people.
7:14 Guy Raz? Yeah, I mean, Mark, explain this to us. For people who don't, you know, who may not be familiar with it, because I think a lot of people don't, in the United States, don't understand. There's something called the Indian Health Service. It's funded through the Health and Human Services Department. It's designed to provide health services to indigenous people all over the United States, but it's very troubled. I mean, there are huge challenges and the health outcomes among Native Americans are really problematic. Can you, can you kind of just give us the background of the situation for folks living on tribal lands or beyond who are Native American today?
7:56 Speaker 01 Yes, absolutely. So there is Indian Health Services and I want to make it clear that some are run by the government and some are run by a federally recognized tribe. So it's different. Each entity is different. One IHS in a certain region can carry eye care, but the other one 200 miles away doesn't, or vice versa. So there's a lot of travel time in between. And this is the big delay of healthcare that we're trying to solve.
8:21 Guy Raz? First of all, not all indigenous Americans, Native Americans, live on tribal lands, but for those who do, why is it so difficult to get good healthcare?
8:32 Speaker 01 The Navajo Nation is about the size of New Jersey. It's 27,000 square miles and there's only nine IHS locations. But you have to factor in Mother Nature, winter. When winter comes, it gets well below freezing. There's snow, there's rain, and a lot of Navajos or natives live off of paved roads. So they can't even get off of their land or come out of their home to get things that me and you take for granted, like urgent care. Or they can't get preventative care like insulin at the nearest pharmacy. And so we're trying to solve that by bringing it to them.
9:06 Guy Raz? So the idea that you have is to basically create a mobile medical service to serve tribal nations, indigenous people in the United States?
9:17 Speaker 01 Yes, and like I said, we're really focused on solving the diabetes issue. Eighty-one percent is absolutely unacceptable. And we're implementing education, we're implementing the services to try to prevent that and bring those numbers down.
9:31 Guy Raz? Mark, tell me a little bit about how you came to this idea. You mentioned you are Navajo yourself. So I'm assuming that you grew up seeing this firsthand, seeing these challenges are all around you.
9:45 Speaker 01 Yeah, and another factor to add, you know, growing up, we're blessed enough to have heat. But our heater was broken. And I specifically remember being five years old and talking to my grandma. She used to, it used to be so cold in our house, guy. It would get well below zero. And she used to turn on the oven and open the door. And me and my sister would come out and huddle by the oven there. And I just asked my grandma, you know, why is this? Why do we have to go through this? And my grandma just looked at me and said, you know, you're not hungry, you're happy, and there's somebody else that has it worse than you. And so I really want to thank my grandma for pointing that out because I think that's
10:28 Speaker 01 really highlighted what I need to do for my people. It really got my imagination moving on. We need to solve this problem. We need to come with an energy of New York and Los Angeles and technology and bring it to the Navajo Nation. And we need to bring healthcare, we need to bring internet, we need to bring running water, electricity. But we'll start in one place, healthcare. We want to extend lives. My grandma was taken from us by COVID and it was extremely hard for me. I was raised by my grandmother, my mother, my aunt and my sister. And they really taught me the importance of the power of the woman's perspective. And one of the last conversations I had with my grandma is, Mark, you have to step into your calling. You're going to change the world.
11:11 Speaker 01 And as we focus on bringing healthcare services directly to the patient, starting with the Navajo Nation, we want to go to the next tribe, which is Cherokee Nation, or in Florida, and eventually come off of the reservation and offer our services. But we really want to focus on developing this model and giving access to healthcare to, again, our nation's first people. We deserve more.
11:32 Guy Raz? So Mark, let's talk about the business model because it's not a non-for-profit. This is set up as a for-profit business. How are you going to generate revenue?
11:43 Speaker 01 Yes, so we have various ways. There's a payer mixture. There's private insurances that we charge. There's Medicaid, Medicare, and then also partnering with local governments. We can discount rates. But the key to our business is we have priority status on the Navajo Nation, which means by Navajo law, since we're native-owned, they're required to use our services, they're required to source our services over anybody else. So we have a big competitive advantage there.
12:15 Guy Raz? And so the idea would be that you would provide services that that could be paid for by the state, by Medicare, by private insurance, maybe even cash payments, cheap, inexpensive services?
12:29 Speaker 01 Yes, we would accept cash and eventually cryptocurrency.
12:34 Guy Raz? All right. And what kind of, tell me how these mobile services would work. It's a van, it's a bus, it would pull up. How does it operate?
12:43 Speaker 01 Yeah, so we're hoping to partner with local chapter houses. And a chapter house is a region in the United States, which they have elected officials, kind of thing like Congress. And so we're hoping to partner with the 110 chapter houses across Navajo Nation, where we would set up our services, as you mentioned, RV, van, semi, Sprinter van type vehicles, where we would park out outside during the day and even through the night. And remember, a lot of these services like dialysis treatment or eye care, they only run from 8:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. We want to be able to offer our services 24/7 eventually, so that people can have access whenever they need to. There's sparse Internet service around. When we get Internet service hooked up, we want to offer telehealth services as well.
13:28 Speaker 01 So that way, people can call directly from their homes, and then we can fulfill their prescriptions by doing our mobile delivery services.
13:37 Guy Raz? These mobile vehicles, whether it's a van or a semi, they're going to be like moving offices or moving medical clinics, where you literally walk inside and there's a doctor on site or maybe a nurse practitioner or, and the vehicle will, would stay put at one location for a few weeks, or would it constantly move around, or what?
13:58 Speaker 01 Depending on the vehicle. So you have, say, we'll take eye care for example. Eye care will be equipped with a qualified, vetted, and certified optometrist, a few techs, and then a secretary. That way, we can move the clients as fast as we can to get them on their way. If we're doing mobile dialysis, that takes a lot more effort. We're talking 60 gallons of water per treatment. Each treatment is four hours long. There needs to be a nurse on staff, there needs to be an M.D. on staff. Each patient needs to be monitored every single day. And so- When we introduce, we're going to lead with eye care, cardiology and prescription delivery, and then eventually bring in dialysis, dental and intel health.
14:39 Speaker 01 And so, yes, each vehicle will be equipped with a certified, vetted crew of medical doctors and nurses and techs. And then each vehicle will be deployed to certain chapter houses, certain locations, depending on demand. Again, we have to perfect this model. This has never been done before. And so, the beauty about being mobile is we can adapt quickly.
15:02 Guy Raz? When do you expect to have, to be able to buy your first mobile unit?
15:07 Speaker 01 We have our first mobile unit being built as we speak. You would think the easiest part about building a business is to go out, get a truck and a trailer. It's been the hardest part. I had to drive across a few states to get a truck, and I had to interview about seven different medical developers to find a good builder or have it within 10 months.
15:29 Guy Raz? Mark, you do not have a medical background, as far as I know, you worked in finance. Why do you think you are the person who can pull this off?
15:40 Speaker 01 This project needs to come from within. This project needs to come from a native. I've lived where I grew up, what I grew up with. I know the culture. First, it needs to start within. And then, I've hired medical doctors as advisors to tell me exactly what to do. They're telling me exactly what we need to do to provide the highest level of care. But we've also hired culture advisors. We want to respect the culture, we want to respect elders, because if you think about where we're operating, the Navajo Nation, it's surrounded by five other federally recognized tribes. And I always put it in perspective, there's Italians and there's Irish. They're white people, but they're totally different cultures. And it's the same thing with Native Americans.
16:25 Speaker 01 We're all different. We have our own culture, we have our own language, we have our own dialect, we have our own dress. And so, when you step onto another reservation, things change. And we have hired those culture advisors to tell us exactly what to do.
16:38 Guy Raz? Mark, if you win the competition and are handed the $50,000 grant, what will you do with it? How will you use it?
16:46 Speaker 01 Right now, the Navajo Nation has a 48% unemployment rate. Again, an unacceptable number to me. What we're going to do is we are native preference. We are hiring preferably native nurses, native techs, and we're recruiting from Native American schools. And so with this $50,000, it's going to be earmarked to pay the salaries of those people, of those individuals. Because they not only support themselves, but most of them support their elders. And so this really means a lot. When they can work, they can give back and really have a passion to help others, but also be rewarded for that. And so that's really where the $50,000 is going. And I really hope that we win that.
17:29 Guy Raz? Mark, you had started businesses in the past and they failed. And oftentimes, that's actually the best experience an entrepreneur can have, starting and failing. Why do you believe this time it will succeed?
17:41 Speaker 01 Yeah, I started my first business when I was 15 years old. I sold Native American jewelry on local flea markets to pay for college. And I was able to successfully sell that at 18. And I moved to Los Angeles and I was able to pay for college. I co-founded another business. And I believe it was too early. This was early 2010. We were developing mobile applications. And I would go to local coffee shops and I would say, Guy, you have a great coffee shop. I'm going to build a mobile app for you. And every single person said, who's ever going to need that? Turns out 10 years later, COVID hit and everybody needs one. So we failed tremendously on that. And so this time, we have the energy, the expertise. We know the area. We know the people. We know the culture.
18:25 Speaker 01 Once we perfect the model there, we start small. And then we gradually grow. And then we move from reservation to reservation.
18:35 Guy Raz? That's Mark Atlan, co-founder of ZapCare. When we come back, we'll hear from another How I Built This Fellow who's connecting his community through fresh produce. Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz, and you're listening to How I Built This Fellow's Edition from NPR.
19:06 Guy Raz? Hey, welcome back to How I Built This Fellow's Edition from NPR. I'm Guy Raz. So Zach Karahia co-founded LemonGraft, which he envisions as a kind of peer-to-peer for fresh produce. So something like Airbnb or Uber, but instead of your house or car, Zach wants to connect people to their neighbor's vegetable garden.
19:26 Speaker 02 What we're doing is we're looking at people's land and saying, we can make that much more productive. So if you have a backyard or a small garden of some sort, you can start to plant things in your yard. And where you couldn't sell it in traditional markets because the quantities aren't high enough, and oftentimes the barriers to entry are too high and it's just very inefficient. What we do is we remove all those barriers. We add some technology to it. We take all of the small-scale products that people have and we bring them together to create a market for people to buy online.
20:00 Guy Raz? So basically, let's say you grow carrots. You can grow some vegetables in a vegetable box or in your property. And your company connects people with people who are growing the produce, so you could buy fresh produce, like, let's say, from your neighbor or somebody down the street?
20:17 Speaker 02 That's correct, yeah. And it's actually only local. So we don't let people purchase from too far away, which is about as fresh as it can get, aside from harvesting it in your own backyard, which is, it turns out to be what people want, anyway.
20:29 Guy Raz? Just kind of walk me through it. You have an app, like Airbnb or some other app, and then what do you do? You open the app and then what happens?
20:36 Speaker 02 So our app is still in development, but once it's built, the idea is that you would open up the app and search your community. Your community would have a series of drop points. These drop points would be other people in your community that are hosting a community. We actually call them lemon drops. So you would see all these different lemon drops in the area. And that's where the growers would come and drop off their produce. And then you can search those drop points to see what produce you're interested in buying. Once you purchase the produce on the platform, you go pick it up at the drop point at the designated time, and then you enjoy.
21:11 Guy Raz? And how did you come up with the idea? Where'd it come from?
21:14 Speaker 02 My background isn't actually in produce or in technology. It's in architecture. I actually have a really strong focus on sustainable communities. And one day, we had a developer that had asked me and my teammate to design, it was like a 400-acre sustainable community, design the master plan for that. So he asked us, he said, you know, you guys are still college students and I want you guys to think of some crazy ideas. You know, how can we design a master plan for sustainable communities? And as I was going through this thought process, I hit a wall when I realized that it would actually be impossible to design the master plan of a sustainable community from the built perspective.
21:55 Speaker 02 Because we needed a kind of soft infrastructure or a framework to precede that, something that was very malleable, that could pool and almost model a kind of cultural identity. And that couldn't be a built form because once it's built, it's static. And I realized that sustainability was so, it's such a big umbrella of things. But food, it turns out, is at like the base of this big problem. And if we can just build a regenerative food supply, then that is the one thing that will grow and branch into all other categories of sustainability. And all the other infrastructure will begin to fall into place. But the starting point we've identified is food.
22:38 Guy Raz? Is this something that can work in any part of the United States? I mean, I mean, there's certain states where it's easier to grow produce year-round. You're in Florida, I'm in California, obviously a little easier, not as easy in northern Minnesota. Can this work everywhere?
22:56 Speaker 02 That's a really good question. And even more than that, I would say, can it work in places without internet? Right? I would say yes, but as a people, we have to start asking ourselves the question, should I be able to... Get this kind of produce out of season in an area where it cannot grow, right? There's a lot of research that is starting to give us this understanding that like actually we should be eating the food, not only that's in season, but food that's grown near us because it's grown in a similar kind of environment that we are. And it starts to kind of build up our bodies in a way that that helps us to adjust to a lot of the stressors in our environment. So when people in these communities, obviously they can use greenhouses and there's a lot of methods to to kind of block wind and insulate areas.
23:41 Speaker 02 But one of the things that we're really excited about at Lemon Graft is being able to create a market for wild edible plants and native, really a lot of native plants, plants that would that grow like weeds in a lot of your local environments. And we've forgotten how to eat. And so what we're trying to do is we actually have a team of chefs who are working on creating recipes from these wild edible plants that we've forgotten about and starting to bring identity, like local geographic identity, back to our communities. Because I think that that's actually how cultural identity in a lot of ways began. It starts with the native plants and then the connection between the people and the plants, we find uses for them, those turn into dishes, those have become culturally relevant dishes, like you can't eat that anywhere but here, right?
24:25 Speaker 02 Because it just doesn't, you don't have the plants where you where you come from. And in a world of industrialization where everything is the same, I can go all around the country and I can eat pretty much exactly the same thing. And what we do is we market it in meals. So we can actually on the platform, we can show dishes and you can say like, wow, that looks delicious. I would love to eat that this week. You click on that, we aggregate all the farmers that are currently growing the ingredients that make up that dish with the right quantities and then you can you can order and then we'll send you the recipe or you can see it on our website and then you can make that that meal. And that's truly the right direction. But it requires a little bit of technology and a little bit of behavioral change. But I think that it helps us to see the direction that we should start going.
25:08 Guy Raz? And how will LemonGraft make money? What's your revenue model?
25:12 Speaker 02 So whatever is sold on the platform, we collect a percentage of that sale. And we use that money to help cover the expenses of the hosts, because the hosts will take a percentage of the different packages that they collect. But it's just based off of sales. The platform in general for buyers is still free. And for sellers, it's still free to list it. But the moment you make a sale and you start making money, then we have a percentage.
25:35 Guy Raz? So where are you right now? Tell me about, I know it's still early days, but is it just you right now?
25:42 Speaker 02 So I've been working on this idea for a couple of years now. And we now have, I want to say about eight, no, seven of us. And then I would say we are, we're looking at launching in about four months, having the minimum viable product complete in about four months. We're already developing that.
26:00 Guy Raz? How are you financing the team right now? Is everybody kind of working for free?
26:04 Speaker 02 Everyone's working for free. Yeah, that's exactly right. We did partner with a development team. They are also working for free. But they are, as a partner, they're developing the software.
26:14 Guy Raz? Got it, okay. You are obviously a How I Built This fellow. You've been going to the fellows programs. You were able to attend the Building Meaningful Communities workshop that was hosted by Michael Horvath and Bailey Richardson. What did you take away from that session?
26:30 Speaker 02 The biggest thing, I think, that I took away from that session was understanding that as a community leader, we are really the first follower of the mission.
26:44 Speaker 03 Starting a company is really hard. It takes a lot out of you. It pulls a lot of your life. It steers you in a particular way. So if it's going in a direction that you really believe in, stay true to that and try to avoid the distractions that come with some success, for example. So you're going to have real world communities where people are producing produce and consuming produce. And then you have people at other places where that doesn't happen here. I don't have access to that yet, but boy, I wish I did. Many people come, oh, now that you did that, you should do this too. You should do other things. So be really conscious of that, trying to. Yeah, you probably will do more than the one thing you're starting with.
27:24 Speaker 03 But the thing that is going to be so important in the long run, it's the thing that started this in the first place for you. And stay true to that. Wouldn't be part of this workshop if there wasn't already something happening that was working, so stay true to it.
27:40 Speaker 02 Our identity and who we are as a company will evolve as we grow in a user base because they'll each bring something to the community that is unique and different. And then that's OK, because that changes a little bit. But the values that we bring don't change. See, the culture adapts and changes, but the values don't. And I think that that was probably the most enlightening piece of wisdom that I pulled from that.
28:03 Guy Raz? Zach, if you win the competition and you receive the $50,000 grant, how will you use it?
28:10 Speaker 02 Our biggest hurdle that we have to bridge is reaching people. So we'll be using that money for a lot of marketing to try to get the word out there to people so they're aware. Because so many people, when they finally hear it, I mean, I've had people cry. They're like, is this built now? Because my brother's losing everything right now because the brokers aren't buying his food, so he needs another way. And so at the heart of this, we're really trying to provide an alternative, decentralized platform for people to be able to make a living. So we just need to reach those people.
28:46 Guy Raz? That's Zach Karia, co-founder of LemonGraft. More stories from our How I Built This fellows will be in your feed this Thursday. To learn more about the fellows or to get tickets to the How I Built This summit, you can visit summit.npr.org. And to find out more about NPR's live events, visit nprpresents.org. This episode was produced by J.C. Howard with music composed by Rantin Arabluie. Thanks also to Janet Wu-Jiang Li, Gianna Capadona, Bruce Grant, Farah Safari, Liz Metzger, El Mannion, Joanna Palowska, John Isabella, Jessica Goldstein, Niba Grant, and Jeff Rogers. I'm Guy Raz, and you've been listening to How I Built This, fellows edition from NPR.
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