What if illness was optional?

Naveen Jain has built seven companies. He was on top of the world running Moon Express, the first private company ever granted permission to leave Earth orbit, with a $2.6 billion NASA contract to mine the moon, when his father was diagnosed with stage 4 pancreatic cancer and given three months to live.

He got exactly that.

That moment broke something open. Naveen walked away from space and started asking a different question: if we can land on the moon, why are we still finding cancer by a dentist running a finger across someone's gum?

In this episode, Naveen sits down with Jessica to share the framework behind every company he builds: why this, why now, why me.

That framework led him from helium-3 mining to founding Viome, the company now running 1.5 million tests, sitting on 400 quadrillion biological data points, and holding FDA Breakthrough Device designation for detecting stage 1 oral and throat cancer with 95% specificity.

A stage 1 pancreatic cancer test launches in the next three months.

Jessica and Naveen go deep on:

• The three questions every founder must answer before starting anything
• Why DNA testing companies are asking the wrong question, and what RNA reveals instead
• The 100 trillion microbes producing 99.9% of the genes expressed in your body
• How a classified Los Alamos biological defense project became the foundation of Viome
• Why cancer immunotherapy works for 1/3 of patients, and what changes when you fix the gut
• The double-blind data: HbA1c down 0.42 in 90 days, IBS reversal in 64% of patients, anxiety down 50%
• Building a culture where loyalty shifts from the founder to the mission
• Why Naveen, at 66, still believes he owes a debt to his fellow humans
• The advice he'd give every leader: dream so big people think you're crazy

A masterclass in first-principles thinking, mission-driven leadership, and the radical idea that chronic disease isn't a feature of aging.

It's a signal we've been ignoring.

Truth Works is hosted by Jessica Neal, former Netflix CHRO, here to interrogate what actually works in leadership and life.

If this conversation shifted how you think about your health, your work, or what you're capable of building, share it with someone who needs to hear it.

She built one of the first podcasts in the world.

She turned down the CEO job after twenty years.

And she wants you to ask yourself one question: if not now, when?

In this episode of Truth Works, Jessica Neal and co-host Peter Clarke sit down with Debbie Millman, the founder and host of Design Matters, the longest-running design podcast in the world, now in its twentieth year.

Over two decades, Debbie has interviewed more than 700 of the world's most creative people, written eight books, and shaped some of the biggest consumer brands on the planet, including Burger King, Häagen-Dazs, Star Wars, Tropicana and the No More campaign.

She co-founded the world's first Masters in Branding program at the School of Visual Arts, is President Emeritus of AIGA, and in 2024 was named an Executive Fellow at Harvard Business School.

This conversation goes way deeper than the résumé. Debbie talks about failing as an artist, writer, and designer before stumbling into branding by accident.

She explains why she turned down the CEO offer at Sterling Brands. She shares what hundreds of interviews have taught her about confidence, insecurity, and reinvention. And she gets refreshingly clear-eyed about AI, and what it is quietly doing to the next generation's brains.

TOPICS COVERED

• Failing as an artist, writer and designer before finding branding
• Becoming the rainmaker at Interbrand and Sterling Brands
• Why she turned down the CEO offer after four months of deliberation
• How Design Matters began in 2005 as a paid internet radio show
• What hundreds of interviews taught her about insecurity and legacy
• Career advice for creatives and knowing your value proposition
• Marrying Roxane Gay and acquiring The Rumpus together
• Writing Love Letter to a Garden
• Why AI should have a drinking age
• The one question she now asks herself every day: if not now, when?

What makes this episode hit differently is not the résumé. I

t is the reminder that even the most accomplished people on the planet built their lives the same way the rest of us have to, one brave decision at a time, often with no clue what was coming next.

Debbie's story is proof that reinvention is always available, that confidence is built and never gifted, and that the best chapters of a life can absolutely come after sixty. If you take one thing from this conversation, let it be her question.

Whatever you have been waiting to start, finish, or finally claim as yours, ask yourself honestly: if not now, when?

He joined when Snowflake had 0 customers, no CEO, and no website. The company was in stealth mode, he wasn't even allowed to list where he worked on LinkedIn.

Twelve years later, Snowflake was doing well north of $4 billion in annual revenue.

Chris Degnan was Snowflake's first sales hire and spent over eleven years as its founding Chief Revenue Officer, growing the company from zero to one of the fastest-scaling enterprise software businesses in history. He joined in November 2013 as employee number 13 and spent the early days cold-emailing thousands of people a week just to get meetings.

He is now semi-retired, sitting on seven boards, and advising companies across Silicon Valley.

Denise Persson joined Snowflake in May 2016 as employee number 120, when the company had $3 million in ARR and fewer than eight people on the marketing team. She had never worked at a company that small.

She is still Snowflake's CMO today.

Together, they have one of the longest CRO-CMO partnerships in the history of enterprise technology. They survived three CEO transitions together, multiple executive team overhauls, a global pandemic IPO, and a company that grew from a handful of believers to over 8,000 employees.

They wrote a book about it. It's called Make It Snow.

In this episode of Truth Works, host Jessica Neal sits down with Chris Degnan and Denise Persson to pull apart exactly how they built the sales and marketing alignment that most companies never achieve — and why most people in those roles don't last long enough to find out.

They discuss:

• How Chris joined with no customers, no website, and no CEO — and why two French founders were the reason he said yes
• What Denise did on day one that built more credibility with the sales team than her entire resume had
• Why Snowflake was always a customer-led company, not a sales-led or marketing-led one — and why that distinction changes everything
• The 3am text message, the new CEO, and why every executive on the team was getting fired except the two of them
• How they gave each other feedback that most colleagues would never survive — and why acting on it was the only way to keep getting it
• Why heads of sales typically last 18 to 24 months — and what made this partnership last over a decade through four CEOs
• What the book Make It Snow gives founders, CMOs, and CROs that most go-to-market frameworks completely miss

Chris Degnan and Denise Persson are proof that the tension between sales and marketing is not inevitable. It is a leadership failure — and it is entirely fixable.