Lily Sarafan WHCE Award Acceptance

Good evening, everyone. Thank you, Women Healthcare Executives, for honoring me as Woman of the Year. I'm quite overwhelmed right now. It's a great privilege to be here addressing a room full of illustrious leaders and champions and experts. Thank you dearly to Mom and Chen and Roya and Howard for your very humbling remarks, which I will strive to live up to every single day. I'd like to thank my colleagues and friends and family and husband who are here for taking time out of your busy lives to share this special occasion with me. I'm sure some of you are wondering where I've hidden this version of Lily Sarafan we've all been hearing about. And if you ever find her, please introduce us because she sounds so much cooler than I could ever be. My story begins at age 3, I told my mom that I was to be in a cast of bumblebees in our preschool theatrical production. You have to realize that we had just arrived in pre-internet America, and my mom didn't realize what a bumblebee was, let alone that there were ready-made costumes in stores. So my mom, the woman who launched a candidacy the year after the revolution to make a point, the woman who crushed the country's notoriously difficult university entrance exam, found herself in a new land with a new language and new responsibilities that she had never before faced. She was going to get this right. She asked me to explain what a bumblebee was. I explained that it was a cute black and yellow insect but offered no additional details. So my mom, in true form, bought a poofy yellow dress and proceeded to sew black lace and cotton balls onto said dress There it is. The afternoon that we arrived at school, we were mortified to find that every other child had a nearly identical bumblebee costume of black and yellow stripes. You could say that this is the first failure that I can recall, but from every crisis arises an opportunity. My mom and I co-conspired and told the principal that because my ensemble wears so distinct Perhaps I should be the queen bee. And so it was, my very first leadership role. And you can see that I took it very seriously. I was pretty outgoing from a young age and found myself drawn to leadership positions in speech and debate and student government and journalism. Any opportunity I had to influence outcomes, I took. In high school, it was the first time I took a personality test, and a couple of you who went to high school with me will remember that our career center administered the Myers-Briggs. When I took the test, I found out that I was an ENTJ, and the short phrase for it was Rational Field Marshal. So I thought, fantastic! Well, quickly did I learn that having a leadership-oriented personality is not at all the same as effective leadership. From President Obama to Warren Buffett to Abraham Lincoln, if you think to the leaders you most admire, you'll probably find that you have many thoughtful introverts and that personality is not necessarily a common thread among them. Over the years, I've had the amazing privilege to make key contributions and advance the discourse across so many exciting domains. You've already heard from my mom, my amazing role model. I'm so proud to honor the sacrifice you made every day by creating a meaningful and complete life. You also heard from the one and only Howard Wolff, among the fiercest leaders and executives in higher education today. Stanford has had a tremendous influence on my life, helping me to realize the breadth of the world around me and focus my energy on the role that I can play within it. Yes, Howard, as you heard from my mom, I did consider some other East Coast institutions when I was young and naive, but I believe it's fate that Stanford became the first love of my adult life. Not only did the university introduce me to some of my dearest friends, but also some of the most incredible and diverse leaders of my generation. The way the Stanford journey promotes a broad liberal arts education, interdisciplinary approaches, original critical thinking, and engaged global citizenship has deeply influenced my life, and I feel privileged to continue drawing inspiration as an active alum whose company headquarters looks out over our beautiful campus. Our collaborations with the Stanford Center on Longevity, Stanford Neurosciences, and Stanford Health Care are the very definition of coming full circle. And then, just as I stumbled upon the role of queen bee, I also stumbled into healthcare. I remember the exact weekend that the notion first entered my mind. I was studying the changing demographics in society because you know that's what I do for fun, and how it could all impact our communities in the decades to come. Around this time, I reached out to Jim and Kathy Johnson, two clinical psychologists who were then. soon-to-be geriatric care managers. On an otherwise ordinary afternoon, the 3 of us got together to discuss the rapidly aging population and the vast potential of home care. I did my research following that conversation, and frankly, I couldn't imagine an industry more ripe for 21st century thinking. We have these staggering statistics about how quickly our population is aging. 4,000 Americans turn 85 every single day. How committed Americans are to aging in place— 9 out of 10 prefer to age at home. Not to mention how many millions of older adults need daily assistance— more than 15 million now and twice as many by 2050. And yet the senior care industry was fragmented into hundreds of local mom-and-pops with care delivery models still in their infancy. The overall concept of healthcare in the home has existed for centuries, but without consumer-focused infrastructure or an eye on operational excellence. So even though it wasn't an obvious segue from my studies at Stanford, and despite the fact that almost all of my classmates were going into mainstream tech or finance or grad school, I had a hunch that this would be a great area to explore in what I thought might be a gap year or two before before law school. At the nexus of healthcare and consumer services, Home Care Assistance was the company that could. At first, we were a scrappy startup with 30 clients in downtown Palo Alto. The experiential learning of being thrown right in was invaluable. I did everything from design our CRM to create care plan templates to write our operations manuals in those early years. Soon after, I was lucky to negotiate 6- and 7-figure agreements with future partners, to co-author an 8-book series on healthy longevity with Jim and Kathy, and to open up new markets, all before consumer services to the home or on-demand healthcare were even part of the Silicon Valley vernacular. 2 major paradigm shifts over the last several decades have dramatically altered how we think about aging. First, aging has changed as we've become better at combating illnesses. There are more older adults suffering from chronic illness than acute medical conditions today. That's been the case since 1995, and the trend continues. Lifespan is increasing, and nearly half of the 85-and-up population has some form of dementia. Essentially, we're faced with a population of older adults that is simultaneously enjoying a longevity boom And requiring more regular assistance, both in the level and duration of care. As a result, while many providers in the healthcare ecosystem interact with patients a handful of times in short spurts, we have the great fortune of working with our clients day in and day out for months and often years. The treasure trove of insights from these interactions combined with predictive analytics means that we're on the cusp of truly quantifying care, longevity, quality of life, and patient outcomes. The second is the changing geography of the family. Older adults are more likely to desire stability, aging at home, staying in their communities, maintaining dignity. Simultaneously, our connected world and the changing nature of travel and work mean that more adult children live far apart from their parents and work full-time. Which limits the effectiveness of traditional family support models. When we began expanding home care assistance more than 10 years ago, we knew we wanted to do home care better. My own lack of a traditional healthcare background allowed me to operate without preconceived notions. We drew from seemingly unrelated industries and sectors to design a new type of company, culture, and service, reimagining home care. without constraints. Our original headquarters were literally down the street from the original Facebook headquarters in downtown Palo Alto. We were the first home care company to harness the power of the internet, leading to our being featured by Google in an official case study for being an early adopter of a cloud-based OS. And we pioneered the community-based model with our retail storefronts and consumer branding. Case studies I worked on as a Stanford student included ones on Apple's global retail strategy, Sony's AIBO robot to address loneliness, and the role of the internet in circumventing traditional sources of information and authority. How these dots would connect later, I would never have foreseen. The idea of taking healthcare to the home is as old as our republic. Think physician house calls or the village doctor. So what made this different? Well, to use a very current example, what makes Uber different from a local transportation or taxi business? Innovation is one thing, but it needs to scale in order to have an impact. There are many companies in the new service economy that are trying to figure out how to scale beyond a few markets or to develop a sustainable model that meets the requirements of a fast-changing regulatory landscape. How have we translated our innovative model into large-scale impact? through talent, systems, metrics-driven operations, basically execution. You heard from Chen, our fearless CFO, or now I will call him Anne Hathaway from now on. Who has worked tirelessly alongside our entire home care assistance team to help build the nation's leading provider of in-home care. The past 5 years have seen us more than triple our footprint and our revenue. Expanding to 150 retail storefront locations, including a dozen in the Bay Area, employing thousands of team members, and having served tens of thousands of families. We've grown revenue every year, but we've done it all organically, truly a company built from the ground up. That's allowed us to build a unique culture where the client and caregiver always come first, and everyone is encouraged to think outside the box about any strategy that might enhance our business and our operations. As a result, we've led the way on a number of unique initiatives in our industry, including our award-winning Balanced Care Method for healthy longevity and our landmark patent-pending cognitive therapeutics method to address brain health and the global Alzheimer's and dementia pandemic. Of course, we're still focused on our geographic expansion, and it won't be long until we're in the fabric of every community in America. We're also helping the nation adapt to the upcoming demographic shift. This past summer, as you heard, I participated in the once-a-decade White House Conference on Aging, and we remain committed to working with our partners across healthcare and in government, local and federal, to realize the benefits of in-home care and bring that option to millions more Americans. We've always kept an active pulse on the world around us. Our team has consulted with such healthcare visionaries as Dr. Cynthia Kenyon at Calico, an Alphabet company, who's researching novel genetic therapies to double human lifespan. Dr. Gary Small, who leads the UCLA Center on Longevity and is one of the leading minds in the fight against dementia. Dr. Frank Longo, who also leads extraordinary research into the causes of cognitive decline and possible therapies to prevent or delay its onset. Sometimes inspiration for the company comes as we review the latest research on medicine or business, or even groundbreaking nonfiction like Siddhartha Mukherjee's Emperor of All Maladies or Atul Gawande's Being Mortal. I'm sure many in the room have read one or both of these books, and since both authors are not only physicians but also Stanford alumni, I'm confident Howard is in regular touch with them, and Mom, soon I'll post a picture to Facebook having lunch with both of them. We've also taken every opportunity to focus on our company's future, expanding not only on our internal research efforts to provide a higher level of service and more tailored experience for our clients, but also our commitment to innovation, which is not technology for the sake of technology, but for better outcomes, as the underlying current of our services, and through partnering with some of the most exciting new startups in Silicon Valley. My parents were very enthused when I included them in a pilot we're doing right now with robots in the home. They asked for me to spend more time with them and to be more engaged, and now they're going to be careful what they wish for because I follow them around the house remotely using the robot. If anyone wants more information on this, feel free to see me after. When we started Home Care Assistance, in-home care was definitely not a hot sector. Now we've seen more than $100 million invested in new in-home care concepts in the past year alone, and countless millions more in innovative technologies to help older adults. Partnering with some of these companies has kept our thinking fresh and will give us the ability to help the best products scale quickly and reach the widest possible audience. I'm delighted that our company and this story were worthy of this award, in part because it signals the importance of non-traditional entrepreneurial thinking to the massive enterprise of healthcare. None of this would be possible without the amazing Home Care Assistance team. I'd like to thank the team members who are here tonight for your support and hard work. I can remember when each and every one of you started at the company, each at a different stage in the company's evolution. And of course, an equally large thank you to the thousands of team members across North America who cannot be here tonight but who live Home Care Assistance's mission every day to change the way the world ages. I hope you're all deeply satisfied with the company that you've built and the opportunities and paradigm shift you've created. Together, we've built one of Inc.'s fastest-growing companies, one of WPO's 50 fastest-growing companies, and the most respected brand in our industry. I'd also like to thank our board and our partners for their continued support and for helping us to nurture our company through every phase of our development so far and to even more exciting days ahead. Thank you. Thank you especially to Craig Francis from Summit, who's here in the front. He's a doctor with a vision to transform healthcare and a visionary leader who challenges me to think even bigger on a daily basis. Having the opportunity to work with Craig as a mentor and board member has been one of the chief highlights of this journey. Before I conclude, I'd like to take a minute to speak about women's leadership. Organizations such as Women's Health— Women Healthcare Executives are invaluable in promoting and closing the leadership gap. you for all you do and have done for decades. I'm very lucky to have a number of women leaders in healthcare among my friends, some of whom are here this evening representing everything from medical device to biotech to hardware. And I've already had the pleasure of meeting many other amazing women across the healthcare continuum. We're also all very fortunate to have someone like Roya Soleimani in her role in social impact at Google and in our broader Bay Area community. She's a force of nature, community advocate, woman leader, and someone that I'm happy to call a partner in progress. In general, there's no discounting the role that leaders and mentors have had on my life, and there's nothing partisan about it. Oh my God. Recently, I built a relationship with Maria Shriver, a passionate icon I'm sure you all know. Her new nonprofit initiative, Move for Minds, is focused on women's health and brain health for the sandwich generation. As Maria and I spoke, it became clear that she would be building something great because it was born out of her own deeply personal experiences of raising young children while dealing with the challenge of aging parents. We waxed philosophical, but then eventually got tactical about what to do and how this issue disproportionately impacts women who are responsible for family health and community wellness, and how that affects women's leadership in general. Home Care Assistance was proud to be selected by Maria Shriver to partner with the Move for Minds, which is happening across 6 cities in the United States on May 21st. I'm personally excited to kick things off in San Francisco and invite all of you to join the Move for Minds initiative. You can find more information on our website about it, homecareassistance.com. I know Megan's very happy that I plugged our website. You're welcome, Megan. And finally, one of my greatest joys in serving at the helm of our organization has been helping to create the next generation of leaders who bring so many perspectives to the table. I've always believed that if 2 people are exactly the same, one of them would be unnecessary. So I'm excited that we continue to assemble such thoughtful, diverse rock stars who are completely different from one another. Our overall team just happens to be majority women, as Jesse, who's sitting right there, can attest to. And we happen to be at the top of our game. There's a body of research around companies with gender diversity and parity having stronger returns. and a longer-term focus, and I'm proud that HCA is an example of that trend. Creating an environment where talented people can come together and build an aspirational company, that is an unparalleled joy in my professional life. And yes, we're always hiring, so please do let your friends know. I will wrap up by sharing a quote that I came across recently that really had an impact on me. Sometimes I can hear my bones straining under the weight of all the lives I'm not living. In the absence of being able to live multiple lives, and I expect someone in our audience is working on that right now, we can live one complete, dazzling, authentic life. And it may not make sense now, but all the seeds we're planting and all the paths we're charting today will make sense on our 1-year, 5-year, and 10-year lookbacks. Of that I'm confident. So here's to all the trailblazers who came before, and thank you again for this award, which I accept Proudly on behalf of our entire team. Woo!