S 02 | Ep 9 From Trulia ’ s $ 3 . 5B Exit to Virta Health : Rethinking Leadership That Lasts Sami Inkinen is a co - founder and CEO of Virta Health , a company on a mission to reverse type 2 diabetes and obesity in one billion people . He previously co - founded Trulia , scaled it to an IPO , and sold it for $ 3 . 5 billion . He has also completed the Hawaii Ironman World Championship seven times and rowed unsupported across the Pacific Ocean with his wife . In this episode , Sami talks about what happens after the milestones arrive . After Trulia went public , with financial security and every reason to feel content , he found himself consumed by anxiety over something as trivial as a broken washing machine . That moment sent him to a ten - day silent meditation retreat in Taiwan and began a twelve - year practice that has shaped how he leads , competes , and lives . He shares his philosophy on building teams around self - motivated people rather than trying to engineer motivation from the top , and why authenticity matters far more than modeling yourself after a particular leadership archetype . He also unpacks how Virta approaches one of the hardest problems in healthcare , convincing people who have failed five or ten previous programs that the failure was not theirs . The science matters , but what actually moves doctors to refer patients , he reveals , is seeing one of their own patients come back transformed .