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“Anybody in enterprise who says, ‘How do you earn a living?’ is asking the fallacious query,” says longtime entrepreneur Alex Tarnava. “What want do you’ve that you simply want society had? Ask your self that, after which ask your self: Is it useful to different folks?”
Tarnava is the inventor, producer and patent holder of hydrogen water tablets, which he describes as a number one technique of hydrogen remedy. His product is private-labeled by roughly 100 manufacturers, together with Gary Brecka, Dr. Gundry, Cymbiotika, Sports activities Analysis and The Wellness Firm, and he presently sells round 40 million doses monthly.
He’s additionally the proprietor and co-inventor of Inhale H2, a patent-pending system for delivering medical gases and aerosolized medicine. Launched in December, the machine has already offered out twice, with 1,000 models offered at a $6,499 MSRP.
Clearly, Tarnava is being profitable. However he insists that was by no means the purpose. That declare is strengthened by the truth that he has refused to take ANY venture capital, as an alternative bootstrapping his companies from the bottom up regardless of rising up under the poverty line.
“Lots of people assume if I pull in capital, it helps me obtain my mission, however that’s a lure,” Tarnava tells Entrepreneur. “It’s important to quit in your mission. As a result of now the mission turns into cash and it’s empty.”
Making {dollars} however not making sense
From a younger age, Tarnava was fascinated by philosophy and theoretical science. What he couldn’t perceive was why pursuing these fields appeared to require working underneath another person. “How are you going to be a thinker or a scientist when you need to beg another person for cash?” he puzzled.
At 17, round 2002, Tarnava took a extra sensible route, touchdown a commission-based door-to-door gross sales job. He earned upwards of $35,000 working part-time — greater than his mom was making on the time. The job sparked an early curiosity in how cash labored.
“It was throughout an financial increase, and it was 7% compounding curiosity if I saved my cash within the firm,” he says. “I began trying into curiosity and fascinated with it deeply. Then I used to be taking a look at inflation, and none of it was making sense. It wasn’t reconciling to me. I’m like, this isn’t sustainable.”
He didn’t have all of the solutions, however his instinct informed him one thing was fallacious. “It simply sank in my intestine like a concern, and so I made a decision that I wanted to enter enterprise to make as a lot cash as I might to guard myself,” he says.
For a time, that’s precisely what he did. “Every little thing sleazy in gross sales on this planet, I turned, and I taught that,” he admits. However the cash got here with a price. Tarnava started actually dropping sleep over the existential angst his work was inflicting him. “It simply felt so empty and fallacious,” he remembers.
In his mid-20s, he turned to alcohol, medicine and ladies to numb the despair earlier than finally reaching a breaking level. He shut down the enterprise and moved again to Vancouver to work together with his father, the place he rediscovered his curiosity in philosophy and science, spending hours every day studying.
Then a virus abruptly modified his trajectory. “It made me stare at my mortality, and the entropy that all of us cope with,” Tarnava says. “I redirected into well being, and that’s after I began inventing all these applied sciences.”
From experiment to enterprise
Tarnava’s hydrogen capsules are designed to unravel a basic problem with hydrogen supply: getting sufficient hydrogen into the physique in a sensible means. The capsules use elemental magnesium and natural acids to react with water, producing hydrogen gasoline whereas leaving the hydrogen suspended within the resolution.
As a result of hydrogen has restricted solubility, Tarnava says conventional strategies wrestle to ship doses corresponding to these utilized in analysis with out requiring folks to devour unrealistic quantities of water. His expertise creates extraordinarily small hydrogen nanobubbles that stay suspended within the liquid, permitting the capsules to supply what he describes as a supersaturated hydrogen resolution with as much as eight occasions the standard focus.
Tarnava argues that the upper dose issues as a result of hydrogen might assist set off a course of known as hormesis, the place a light stress on mitochondria results in constructive variations. Much like train, warmth or chilly publicity, he believes hydrogen can activate the physique’s pure resilience mechanisms whereas providing a decrease threat profile than many different stress-based interventions.
Tarnava didn’t begin with a marketing strategy. He was pursuing hydrogen as a DIY venture till the constructive indicators turned too sturdy to disregard. “At no level did I believe, how am I going to earn a living doing this? How a lot do I must cost for it? I didn’t run any of the numbers. I simply moved ahead till I had an MVP,” he says.
As soon as he had a product, Tarnava reached out to the authors of hydrogen analysis papers, providing samples and placebos for medical trials. He initially launched the capsules as a shopper model, however rapidly pivoted after corporations started approaching him about licensing the technology for private-label merchandise. From there, he describes the method as “a slog.”
As a result of he was self-funding and bootstrapping the enterprise, he says he needed to turn into “a jack of all trades,” studying every a part of the enterprise nicely sufficient to know whether or not the consultants he employed really knew what they have been speaking about.
“There’s a lot right here, and none of it is smart when mixed,” Tarnava says, referring to issues like patent legislation and regulatory filings. “Principally, you need to be taught to play the sport and current half-truths in fully alternative ways relying on what area it’s, and the type of siloing of all these fields signifies that no person can talk with one another. It’s like becoming a spherical peg right into a sq. gap.”
The constraints of capitalism
Tarnava might have introduced on a VC associate to ease a few of the burden and fill in his data gaps, however for him, that was by no means on the desk.
Except for just a few shares owned by “very shut mates that I didn’t want a prospectus for,” Tarnava owns each share of his firm. Even these trusted mates signed ethics and morality agreements and clauses waiving their rights to shareholder primacy. “I’ve full oversight of what the corporate does,” Tarnava says. “And I believe that’s essential as a result of how do you keep mission-based if the authorized precedent, the contractual precedent, is in the direction of revenue?”
He continues: “Entrepreneurs are typically individuals who need to do one thing large, and it’s been perverted to considering, ‘Oh, doing one thing large is making a lot of cash.’ Effectively, that’s not essentially true. We neglect individuals who simply had some huge cash. We keep in mind individuals who did one thing that modified the world, no matter how a lot cash they’ve.”
The friction between the pursuit of information and capitalism just isn’t distinctive to Tarnava’s story. What makes his case extra attention-grabbing is that, regardless of the conflicts he sees between the 2, he nonetheless believes in capitalism — he simply thinks the system must be held accountable.
“One in all my missions is: How will we get again to trustworthy capitalism and trustworthy management?” Tarnava says.
He paints an image of a younger, altruistic founder who starts a healthcare company to make a constructive affect. The enterprise beneficial properties traction, investors come calling, and the founder sees a chance to take the corporate to the following degree. Then the incentives change.
“The information is available in, and really the best revenue is by shifting this element in a course that switches the product from actually enhancing folks’s well being to being both innocuous or parasitic,” Tarnava says. “Nevertheless it’s maximizing revenue.”
Below the precept of shareholder primacy, he argues, executives are sometimes pressured to prioritize these earnings. “In case you uncover an avenue to extend earnings, your morals or ethics can’t cease you from that, otherwise you’re going to get sued, and lose your organization anyway,” he says. “What number of founders usher in capital, combat with the traders and the board, and get ousted from their very own corporations?”
Regardless of his gripes with the system, Tarnava nonetheless believes in capitalism’s energy to drive constructive change. He just lately funded the Wellness Science Initiative, a nonprofit that gives free academic modules on vital considering, scientific rules and foundational science, together with the right way to consider life-style interventions.
The Wellness Science Initiative will launch its first Olympiad at Udemonia in West Palm Seashore, Nov. 5–8, with about 8,000 attendees and $70,000 in prizes. The occasion will function dwell science competitions, lightning-round questions, and collaborating cubicles the place attendees can problem organizations on their scientific claims.
“The concept is, you may’t have knowledgeable consent when you don’t know the right way to assume and don’t have the essential information,” he says. “If customers have extra data, they know the right way to ask higher questions. They know the right way to assume higher. They’re going to decide on higher corporations and keep away from shittier corporations.”
As a result of capitalism follows shopper demand, Tarnava believes better-informed customers can in the end power companies to adapt.
Wealth past cash
In the end, Tarnava’s enterprise philosophy is rooted in a broader definition of wealth. To him, true wealth isn’t cash, however the sources that make society perform: pure sources, human capital, data, creativity and the flexibility to work. Cash is solely a device for transferring these sources round.
That philosophy extends to how he leads. Somewhat than pushing workers to “bust their ass” for the sake of financial progress, Tarnava needs folks to pursue work they’re enthusiastic about and provides them the autonomy to steer of their areas of experience. “Except what you’re doing goes in opposition to my total imaginative and prescient, you’re the professional right here,” he says. “What can I do to help you?”
For Tarnava, the aim isn’t merely to build a profitable company, however one the place folks’s data, skills and ambitions coalesce into one thing higher than the sum of their elements — one thing cash alone might by no means measure.
“Anybody in enterprise who says, ‘How do you earn a living?’ is asking the fallacious query,” says longtime entrepreneur Alex Tarnava. “What want do you’ve that you simply want society had? Ask your self that, after which ask your self: Is it useful to different folks?”
Tarnava is the inventor, producer and patent holder of hydrogen water tablets, which he describes as a number one technique of hydrogen remedy. His product is private-labeled by roughly 100 manufacturers, together with Gary Brecka, Dr. Gundry, Cymbiotika, Sports activities Analysis and The Wellness Firm, and he presently sells round 40 million doses monthly.
He’s additionally the proprietor and co-inventor of Inhale H2, a patent-pending system for delivering medical gases and aerosolized medicine. Launched in December, the machine has already offered out twice, with 1,000 models offered at a $6,499 MSRP.
