She, an ordinary girl and Y Combinator partner, exchanged her illness for 2 billion

Written by: Amelie

Edited by: Manman Zhou

Today is March 8th, and we want to tell a cool story about a woman in the venture capital circle.

She is a female partner at the world's top incubator, Y Combinator, who awakened her entrepreneurial thinking from her own experience with illness, and her first company was valued at 2 billion.

01 A Cancer Experience Awakens the Entrepreneurial Mind

Like many new-generation immigrants in the United States, Surbhi Sarna realized from a young age that she was different from most of her peers in her environment, feeling somewhat out of place.

Surbhi moved to Silicon Valley from India with her parents when she was two years old. Her father was one of the many Indian software engineers in Silicon Valley, working as an engineer at several tech companies before joining the newly established internet company Netscape, where his career flourished.

Surbhi's childhood was not filled with much joy, as she constantly struggled with a sense of identity confusion while trying to fit into two completely different cultures. American kids saw her skin color and appearance and thought she was a foreigner; Indian kids at school didn’t want to play with her because she showed no interest in Indian culture, classical dance, or Bollywood dance classes. Surbhi longed for a friendly companion, but most of her childhood was spent alone. Although she felt that her Indian identity was her home, she was still excluded by most of her Indian peers.

In the summer of 1995, Surbhi was sent by her parents to the best private school in the Bay Area—this was a consensus among most Indian immigrants, to provide the best educational opportunities for their children. Her father's company, Netscape, went public, bringing a good income to their family.

The cultural shock in high school was even greater than in childhood; her skin color was too dark. However, as more Indians made money during the internet boom, the school saw an increase in Indian students. Surbhi made new friends and joined the basketball team, and her life and studies gradually got back on track.

One day, when she was 13, she suddenly fainted due to severe abdominal pain. After being taken to the emergency room by her mother, doctors discovered an ovarian cyst and informed her it could be cancer. This was an incredibly sudden life blow for a 13-year-old girl.

The wait to find out whether the cyst was benign or malignant was excruciatingly long. Surbhi worried about her health and began to genuinely pay attention to the significance of life sciences. To understand her body's predicament, she went to the library to look up literature and learned various medical terms like "ovarian cyst" and "ovarian cancer" on Google.

In her anxiety, Surbhi became more eager to learn about this field. She read various academic articles and medical reports, hoping to find medical guidance. Six months later, she fainted again in her Spanish class.

This time, after going to the emergency room, she was finally diagnosed. The cyst was benign and not cancer.

Surbhi recalled that when the overwhelming fear suddenly disappeared, a new emotion quickly replaced it—anger. She was very angry.

During the two years from 14 to 15, new cysts appeared from time to time, and abdominal pain came and went, like ticking time bombs. She couldn't carry a backpack because it increased the risk of developing more cysts, and she couldn't play basketball anymore, as it would lead to excessive fatigue. Her grades fluctuated like her health, sometimes good and sometimes bad.

When it came time to apply for college, Surbhi felt her grades were not good enough to get into her dream school, the University of California, Berkeley. However, encouragement from her English teacher, Sharron, gave Surbhi a goal: to pursue a top biology program at Berkeley and one day start a company focused on women's health.

02 Starting a Real Career

Why have women always been considered second-class? Especially in the healthcare system. Surbhi wanted to understand this question during her studies at Berkeley.

Gender creates an unequal divide that is evident in all aspects of society yet is often overlooked. Surbhi felt that the more she learned, the angrier she became.

Berkeley truly opened the door for Surbhi in the field of bioengineering research and exposed her to the world's injustices. Until the 1970s, female patients were not even included in clinical trials for life-saving drugs. For example, in the case of ovarian cancer, 300,000 women in the U.S. undergo oophorectomies each year, but only 20,000 are ultimately diagnosed with ovarian cancer; more than one uterus is removed every minute in the U.S., while common diseases like endometriosis take 4 to 10 years to be diagnosed. Women are often required to have their uterus removed due to the risk of cancer, and the subsequent risks are borne solely by the female patients.

At 21, Surbhi graduated, dreaming of starting a company but unsure how to formally begin. So, despite not being interested in making money, she found an internship at a medical device company, Abbott.

During the 2008 economic recession in the U.S., Abbott paused its catheter development, and Surbhi was laid off. She then found a job as a research consultant at a medical startup. The startup environment became the best battlefield for her to learn about entrepreneurship, and in her junior research position, she was exposed to all aspects of medical device startups.

After a few years of work, she finally landed on her entrepreneurial direction: to create a visualized fallopian tube catheter for detecting blockages. Surbhi realized that her most direct customers were gynecologists in hospitals; if they were willing to use the new technology, they would pay for it, thus updating outdated testing methods and benefiting more women.

In 2009, with her entrepreneurial direction set, she named the company nVision Medical.

03 Fundraising, Collaboration, and Acquisition

Surbhi built her potential customer network through friends, her gynecologist, and various social connections from work and life. Through a friend's mother, she met an expert in clinical trials in India, who then introduced her to venture capitalists focused on investing in Indian startups. Through these investors, she met a professional and experienced fundraising consultant, Anula, and further expanded her network of medical advisors for her startup.

After several rounds of innovative research and development on the fallopian tube catheter and applying for several patents, she aimed to create a pill-sized miniature camera that could be used in the fallopian tubes via a specific catheter.

While developing her business plan, Surbhi continued to work full-time at a cardiovascular startup during the day. After work, she would meet with various investors, using dinner time to advance her entrepreneurial efforts, often staying up until two or three in the morning to revise her business plan.

When she participated in the Harvard Startup Competition, she faced defeat; despite having a great business project, she lost to another project. The sense of defeat followed, and two key team members left after the loss. Surbhi experienced the real feeling of failure and began to realize the pressure that entrepreneurship entails.

From her failures, she discovered that not everyone needs to believe in you on the entrepreneurial journey. You only need a few people with the right background and enough belief to stand with you and fight alongside you.

The fundraising process is about boldly telling your story.

In the first year and a half of nVision Medical's startup, at least over 50 investors rejected Surbhi's fundraising requests. Gradually, Surbhi began to introduce her project in a storytelling format, making it easy for investors to understand her direction and the goals related to their interests.

Finding investors who can truly empathize with your story is often difficult; the fundraising process is one of continually enduring rejection. Even if you secure funding, it comes with the dilution of shares and blows to your self-esteem, difficult negotiations, or unavoidable betting agreements. Fundraising is a battle of overlapping doubts from others and self-doubt, where being underestimated is the norm, and unfairness is a reality.

Her first funding round was made possible by the persistence of female investor Darshana Zaveri.

After being rejected by Darshana, Surbhi still called her, expressing her determination to start a business and promising that if she secured funding, she would not take a salary for two years. The key was that she really hoped Darshana could become a partner in the company. Ultimately, Surbhi secured her first funding of $100,000 and found a trustworthy business ally. After some twists and turns, she found two more investors and raised a total of $250,000.

From her continuous fundraising experiences, she realized that rejection is an important part of the success process; others' rejections may be significant, but what matters more is your reaction to them. Accepting defeat in the face of rejection may be the norm, but you can also find infinite possibilities to turn the situation around within those rejections.

Thus, the fundraising story of nVision Medical is a story of women helping women. After applying for relevant patents in 2009, nVision Medical was officially established in 2012 after securing funding. At that time, Surbhi officially resigned from her full-time job and dedicated herself to building a women's health startup.

From the establishment of the company after funding in 2012 until June 2013, there were no other full-time staff besides Surbhi on the team.

Later, Surbhi applied to attend the startup school founded by investor Tim Draper and successfully secured $250,000 in seed funding.

With the $50,000 seed funding, Surbhi began to refine the technology on the fallopian tube catheter, found the direction for nVision's final product, and began the research and production of nVision's ultimate device through extensive iterations and improvements with AI technology and engineers. Soon, more investors recognized the commercial value, and in the second round of financing for nVision Medical, Surbhi's team successfully raised $4.5 million.

Subsequently, the professional team they hired completed the first human study and obtained FDA approval.

During the Series B financing, Surbhi began discussions with Boston Scientific about potential funding. At the same time, Surbhi became a working mother, balancing the care of her newborn with running her startup.

In April 2018, the sixth year since Surbhi founded nVision Medical, Boston Scientific announced its acquisition of nVision Medical for $275 million (approximately 2 billion RMB).

Surbhi sold her company at just 32 years old.

04 After Achieving Financial Freedom

With the powerful resources of a publicly traded company, innovative medical devices can be brought to market faster, helping patients detect potential diseases more quickly.

After the acquisition deal was completed, Surbhi ensured that every employee, investor, advisor, and everyone holding shares in nVision received their corresponding benefits. If we measure the value of dreams in monetary terms, they realized 2 billion in 6 years. Dreams are indeed incredibly valuable. But she was still young enough; having achieved financial freedom shortly after starting her career, a broader stage was waiting for the victorious entrepreneur to re-enter.

Until 2021, she left the medical company and officially joined the most renowned incubator in Silicon Valley, Y Combinator, as a partner focusing on healthcare and biotechnology.

Surbhi's mission at YC is simple: to help deepen and standardize YC's strategies regarding participants in biology and life sciences, while supporting other entrepreneurs who may not fit the traditional biotechnology venture capital model, especially female entrepreneurs.

Perhaps in Silicon Valley, and even globally, there are not many examples of young women like Surbhi who have successfully started their own businesses.

But women like her also show us more possibilities in the world.

She does not have an Ivy League MBA, nor does she hold a master's or doctoral degree, and she is not considered an expert in the medical field. Yet she can still build a team to support her childhood entrepreneurial dream, targeting a specific niche market and maximizing commercial value.

From creating innovative medical devices to benefit female patients to joining YC as an entrepreneurial mentor, starting to teach more young entrepreneurs with her entrepreneurial knowledge, giving them the tools to succeed, may be the most suitable new starting point for a successful entrepreneur.

Since graduating from college, Surbhi has aimed to achieve three things: first, to improve women's health; second, to elevate women's status in the business world; and third, to encourage more women to break free from conventional thinking patterns and gender constraints to make a difference.

She believes that after joining YC, she can continue to work on these three goals.

She has also said that the greatest achievement she learned in entrepreneurship is to bravely take a new step. If you do not try a new beginning, change will never happen.

On this day that belongs to all women, let us encourage all women with dreams and those who want to persist in their dreams to pay more attention to themselves and have more courage to step out of their small family circles, integrate into society, and realize their aspirations and dreams—it's never too late.