Zain Kassam, MD, MPH is a physician-scientist and serial entrepreneur who currently serves as Chief Medical Officer at Seed Health, an ARTIS portfolio company bringing evidence-based microbiome science directly to consumers. While the impact of his work is hard to overstate, having co-founded the first public stool bank in the United States and helped build a category of medicine that did not exist when he started, Zain grew up the son of immigrants with no roadmap, working the counter at the family convenience store and understanding there were only three acceptable careers: doctor, lawyer, or engineer. He nearly chose law, ranking among the best competitive debaters in North America, until a meeting with a judge on the Supreme Court of Canada nudged him toward science instead. A fascination with the gut, shaped in part by watching his father live with ulcerative colitis, would run through everything that followed.

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The key takeaways from Zain's spotlight are:

1. Go to the room that's not full: the biggest impact lives in the problems others overlook
2. A fresh pair of eyes is a founder's superpower, because the person with the fewest assumptions asks the question everyone else has stopped asking
3. Sometimes the most valuable thing you can build is not the product, but the infrastructure everyone else needs