This is Part 1 of a four-part series on the Stanford Consumer Health Conference. Part 1 covers the origin story — from the idea through the rejections, breakthroughs, and the moments of doubt that almost ended it before it started. Read the introduction and key themes here.
Why this started
The consumer wellness industry has long fascinated me. In my Stanford application, I wrote about a desire to help people improve holistic health: physical, mental, social, and spiritual well-being. I was lucky to grow up in a home where nutrition, physical fitness, and mental health were priorities. My mom cooked healthy meals for my brothers and me every night. I worked out with my dad each morning. I attended seminars on intention setting, gratitude, forgiveness, and emotional regulation.
Professionally, something clicked as I thought about my career after Stanford: for the first time, a growing number of people were spending hundreds — if not thousands — of dollars each year on their personal well-being. Consumers were demanding more transparency and control over their health (a trend that accelerated post-COVID). They were becoming more informed and more engaged. I wanted to learn where this industry was headed. Who was winning? What did it take to build a scalable business? How did investors evaluate startups? And who was actually moving the needle on behavior change and lifestyle improvement?
For some reason, I had an extreme conviction that this was what I wanted to be involved in for the next 50 years. I thought, “If I can spend my life learning how to live a healthier life and helping others do the same, I’d be content with how I spent my time.”
The summer that started everything
Stanford’s two-year MBA program allows students to take an internship between their first and second year. After being rejected by Stanford’s sponsored entrepreneurship programs, I had two choices: join someone else’s early-stage company or trust in myself and spend the summer figuring it out. I went with the latter.
I spent the summer creating a comprehensive market map of the consumer health industry, podcasting and interviewing people in the space, and posting my thoughts on LinkedIn. My overarching goal was to establish a brand at Stanford as someone passionate about the industry’s future.
The idea for a conference around Consumer Health came about around May of 2025. The reasons were straightforward: I wanted to meet amazing executives in the space, and a conference would open doors to get in front of them. Everyone told me to leverage the Stanford brand while I was still a student. I loved community and bringing people together. And a conference was a binary data point that I actually did something with my time. Lastly, it sounded fun to start something new — and it was clear to me that this conference addressed a real market gap.
Finding the niche: “We don’t need another conference.”
There were two ways to host a conference at Stanford: through a club or through a faculty sponsor. Only faculty departments or clubs may reserve campus venues. I missed the deadline for the Graduate School of Business’s Major & Prime events — the school-sponsored series that gives clubs access to campus space. Even with every suggestion I had, I was met with resistance and a hard no. There was no way the GSB could support me. No club path, no school support. I would have to raise all the funds myself.
That left option two: find a faculty sponsor. It took a month, 50 emails, and 13 conversations. The first twelve said no.
One rejection stands out. I’d been going back and forth for several weeks with a pair of faculty members who had already organized their own conference at Stanford focused on the science behind longevity. I thought they’d be the perfect people to understand why this industry mattered — not only for the research, but because they’d done this themselves. Their feedback was direct: “We don’t need another conference at Stanford.”
That response was frustrating, but it was also the most important thing anyone said during the entire planning process. It forced me to find the niche that made this conference necessary. Understanding that we couldn’t just host another event that wasn’t unique in its own right, I identified a clear niche: a conference that brought together students, founders, investors, and scientists — and focused specifically on the intersection of business and science in consumer health. Not pure research. Not pure venture. The space in between. The unique melding pot of attendees that would actually create momentum.
But before that clarity came, there were a lot of no’s. Some faculty told me they didn’t have time. Others said they couldn’t risk it. After being told no again and again, I started to doubt that anyone at an organization like Stanford would ever want to support this. Even though I had complete clarity about why this was important and where it would go, no one else could see the vision or trust in me to make it a reality.
I almost didn’t take the thirteenth call.
The call that changed everything
The thirteenth conversation was with Kevin Schulman, director of the Clinical Excellence Research Center (CERC) at Stanford Medicine. Kevin took a chance on my ambition and offered his department as the holding tank for the funds. With that, we had a venue, a date, and a deadline. I had until October 10th to raise at least $30K from sponsors. It was August 4th. Two months to raise the money for an inaugural event with no confirmed speakers.
This process of rejection from faculty sponsors was also a process of refinement. In each conversation, I had to clarify the conference’s purpose and vision. It was my job to articulate what made this conference unique and why it was necessary to host it at Stanford. By the time I got to Kevin, I had been sharpened by twelve no’s.
Defining the day
With a venue and a date, I needed to figure out what the day would actually look like. The conference was built around a single question: what does the next decade of consumer-empowered care look like, and who are the companies defining it?
The challenge with wellness is its breadth. Physical health, mental health, nutrition, sleep, recovery, supplementation, diagnostics, care provision, longevity — the list goes on. See a comprehensive breakdown in my market map.
Covering all of it would require a multi-day event with 100+ speakers. That wasn’t what we were building. Instead, three overarching pillars came to mind:
Perform: What are the companies and technologies that allow us to feel optimal in our physical bodies? This covered nutrition, wearables, and recovery.
Connect: How are people forming deep relationships with themselves and with others? Something that over-optimizers of wellness miss is the importance of social connection to overall health. Why live a healthy life physically if we cannot enjoy it with others?
Extend: What does the future of health look like, and how does science integrate with business? There is a proliferation of longevity clinics, preventive care models, health care delivered beyond the hospital, and a new class of non-FDA-approved but RCT-backed products.
These pillars don’t represent a comprehensive overview of the consumer wellness industry. But they represent core drivers of change in today’s society — technologies, communities, research, and businesses that have fundamentally altered how individuals interact with their health, the healthcare system, and one another.
After the pillars were defined, I brainstormed talk tracks within each, outlined the companies I’d want to invite, and started mass outreach. As interest grew, some talk tracks stayed true to their initial design while others blended based on confirmed speakers. The pillars and the core question never changed, but the specific panels adapted to create a cohesive narrative throughout the day.
Getting people in the room
Hosting a conference is a crash course in stakeholder management. There were six main groups to coordinate: faculty, sponsors, speakers, volunteers, media/PR, and attendees. Each group played a critical role, and one of the most important learnings was to identify what each stakeholder valued and market the conference accordingly.
Faculty valued putting together something that would uplift Stanford’s brand. Everything had to be communicated and aligned with that. Sponsors valued access to potential clients, brand awareness, and alignment with the mission. Speakers cared about having a platform to share their work, access to students and potential hires, and relationships with other leaders in the room. One speaker even said yes because their daughter wanted to tour Stanford’s campus, and the timing matched up. You never know.
Securing speakers was one of the most fun parts of the process because it was a chance to talk to the executives who were actually building the businesses. In pitching the conference, I over-indexed on its potential impact, emphasizing that the event was meant to inspire more people to invest their time and money in this industry. Each speaker could get behind that message.
The speaker lineup still blows my mind. We had 30+ CEOs, VPs, investors, and entrepreneurs on stage at Li Ka Shing at Stanford Medicine. They represented companies with a combined valuation of $20B+, hundreds of employees, and thousands (if not millions) of lives impacted globally. The range spanned pre-seed startups through multi-billion-dollar late-stage companies. The list included WHOOP, Oura, Hyrox, Headspace, Noom, [solidcore], Function Health, Midi Health, Eight Sleep, Eudemonia, and many more.
Volunteers — about 20 students — managed everything from check-in to crowd management to clean-up. Their value lay in closer access to speakers, internal motivation to support the industry, and front-row seats to the planning process. Partnering with a PR team brought credibility and professionalism, helping attract the right media outlets and organize interviews.
The sponsorship grind
Once the venue and date were secured, the next step was funding an inaugural conference. This was much harder than I expected. I reached out to 180+ individuals and ultimately secured 10 sponsors.
My cold emails were customized for each person — their role, their company, their specific interests, and the value of being at Stanford and participating. The warm introductions came from two powerful channels. First, my classmates at Stanford were willing to connect me with the right people. That’s how I got in front of companies like WHOOP and Oura — through classmates who were investing in those companies or had personal relationships with people there. Second, because I had been posting consistently on LinkedIn for months, people reached out to me about ways they could support and connect me with the right person. That was a revelation about the power of building in public: it creates inbound warm intros you could never have planned for.
The hardest sponsorship to close was a law firm. It took weeks and weeks of conversation. They needed to understand the value of partnering with an inaugural conference, and they expressed concern about the risk for a first-time event. I had initially been speaking to five different law firms and was confident I could land at least two, but watched them drop off one by one. I realized they were critical to secure because they had the budget to actually invest.
What got it over the line was getting on the phone and selling the vision — the journey, what this could become — as much as the transactional value. I promised I would connect them with the right people, which would make their investment valuable. Relationship and conviction, not just a sponsorship deck.
One of the ten sponsors came from a classmate at Stanford, highlighting the power of leveraging your network. Two of the ten were also speakers — not because it was pay-to-play, but because they believed in the vision. One was our PR partner. That means it took 180 outreach attempts to get six people who had no prior connection to me to say yes. Across all these conversations, the sponsor value proposition came down to three things:
Access to new potential clients and customers
Brand awareness and marketing
Alignment with the conference mission
Thank you again to our sponsors for making this event possible.
The post that changed everything
Early in the process, I realized that a consistent social media presence would be essential to building awareness. If I waited until tickets were ready to sell, it would be too late to build interest. So, at the beginning of the summer (May), I committed to posting on LinkedIn at least four times a week — not just about the conference, but about wellness content in general: a podcast I started, my thoughts on the industry, a market map I built, and updates on the conference planning process.
The strategy was deliberate: first, establish myself as someone genuinely interested in the industry; then, as an entrepreneur launching a conference. I also believed that in a world where AI-generated content is everywhere, trust comes from showing up over time.
When I started in May, my total LinkedIn impressions were around 10K. By the time I’m writing this, I’ve crossed 1 million impressions in under a year.
About four months before the conference, I posted the speaker lineup we had confirmed so far, with a call to action to sign up for an interest form. There was intentionality in the timing and the content — I had been building toward this moment. But the scale of the response was not something I anticipated.
The post was the culmination of months of work: the speakers, the companies, the vision all crystallized into one announcement. The reason it took off was the concentration of quality. These were tier-one companies in the consumer health space, and seeing them all in one place signaled something real. Within 48 hours, it hit 60K impressions and drove over 600 sign-ups on the interest form. Two months later, a follow-up post with the final lineup reached over 130K impressions and drove another 700 sign-ups.
Watching the sign-ups roll in was such a validation. It felt like product-market fit — people were pulling the thread, saying, “This is important, and we need to be part of it.” It gave me the confidence that we would sell out and make this a success.
The trademark scare
10 days before the conference, I ran into a legal issue with a trademark around “Consumer Health Summit.” That was truly scary. I was concerned that I had completely messed up and risked ruining Stanford’s image. I remember the sinking feeling in my stomach, thinking the conference was going to be canceled or that there would be legal trouble. It was a stark reminder that when something high-stakes comes up, the right move is often to pause and get counsel before responding. We resolved it, but the fear was real.
The people who kept me going
Throughout the planning, people showed up at the right moments.
One early sponsor believed in the conference from day one and told me it would be a hit. When others couldn’t see the potential, he kept encouraging me to keep going during our regular check-ins. Our PR partner reached out proactively as I was starting to gain traction and simply wanted to put their name behind it — that provided enormous validation for what we were doing. I had mentors and friends in the industry who shared their excitement and pride. Classmates reached out to congratulate me and encourage me to keep hosting and keep writing.
These relationships are the things I’m going to cherish going forward, beyond the conference itself. More than anything, they were a constant reminder of why I wanted to put a conference together in the first place. It was and is an excuse to meet incredible people doing fascinating things in a growing industry.
The day itself
After my keynote, I had a chance to sit down and welcome Daniel Kraft, our other keynote speaker. For the first time all day, I could actually survey the room. More than 400 people packed into a building — something that had not existed as a concept seven or eight months earlier. That was surreal.
The other thing I didn’t expect was the warmth. I was hugging people I had no prior relationship with — speakers, sponsors, attendees — and just celebrating together. This was a collective effort, and the energy in the room reflected that. People were networking, forming new relationships, and staying engaged throughout the entire day. More than 250 people stayed for over eight hours.
The morning after
After the conference, the feeling was mixed. There was excitement about what could possibly happen next — real momentum, real relationships, real proof that this mattered. But there was also a hollowness. This enormous thing that had consumed my life for the better part of a year was suddenly over. The question shifted from “Can I pull this off?” to “What do I do now?”
That tension — between the high of what we built and the uncertainty of what comes next — is something I’m still sitting with. More on that in Part 3.
Next week: Part 2 — What the industry’s best told us about the next decade of consumer health.
Interested in attending or getting involved in next year’s conference? Sign up here: https://forms.gle/tBqzqdGgdrW9qEtj9
i wish i could have been there! so much courage, resilience, hard work, and grit all throughout. congrats :)
great story ! 🏄🏽♂️🚀