TAKING CARE OF BUSINESS. AND YOURSELF

You recently went public with your cancer diagnosis. Why?

Last year, I got an executive physical. The doctors found a nodule. They suggested taking out part of my thyroid; it could be cancerous, they said, but there was a chance they would be taking out a perfectly good part of the gland. I told them to do it anyway. It turned out it was stage-two cancer.

I didn’t want everyone to misunderstand and think that I was dying. I know that it’s a touchy subject for a lot of people who have lost relatives to cancer. But I also know that people put their heads in the sand and go, “It’s a big world. It probably won’t happen to me.”

I realized that I wanted people to see me running around, doing what I do, cancer free. I wanted them to say, “I want to be like him. I’m going to get a mammogram, or a biopsy, or a colonoscopy.” There was a slight chance I could save one, two, or 10 people’s lives. And after I started speaking about it, I got letters from people saying they got checked out and caught their disease early enough to treat it.

Founders aren’t always the best at taking care of themselves.

They take care of everybody else first. They’re running around miserable. They say, “We’ll get to it tomorrow.” They say, “I need this money to buy a