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The Identity You Have to Leave Behind

Most people work their whole lives toward a goal. Fewer actually reach it. And almost none of them walk away from it once they do.

Ashley, co-founder and CEO of Rue Four, spent her entire childhood pointing toward medicine. Her mother’s side of the family is full of pediatric and prenatal surgeons. By the time she was eight years old, she was handing out Tic-Tacs to neighbors and telling them she was curing them. That was not a hobby. That was a preview. She went on to practice reconstructive hand and burn surgery, completing one of the most demanding professional paths available to anyone in any field.

Then she left.

What made her go was not dissatisfaction with medicine. It was a recurring frustration that the tools available to doctors were failing them in basic, fixable ways. Fragmented systems, paper charts, and workflows that had no business existing in a modern clinical setting. Ashley was wasting time on infrastructure, not patients.

“I always felt like what I was doing could be a lot more efficient,” she said. “That was the first thing that showed me.”

She started small: a no-code app, something closer to a well-organized spreadsheet with a cleaner interface. She shared it with colleagues. They used it. And then she started wondering whether the problem was big enough to build a real company around.

Meet Rue Four, and the Sister Who Co-Founded It

Rue Four is building an operations platform for medical practices. The company connects clinical workflows to the financial and administrative systems doctors rely on, creating what Ashley describes as a single front door for communication between teams that rarely share the same information. The target customer is a surgeon or practice owner who is moving fast, has no patience for friction, and would rather focus on patients than toggle between five disconnected tools.

The company she built to solve this problem was co-founded by her sister, Jessica de Mier, who came from a journalism career that included time at CNN. The two of them grew up moving across continents, including stints in Germany, California, Mexico, and Spain, and their closeness as siblings traces directly to that peripatetic childhood. When you keep changing schools and cities, you hold onto whoever stays constant.

Jessica is the growth engine and Ashley executes. “Jessica’s a little bit more of a visionary and a dreamer,” Ashley said, “and that balances out someone like me, who gets really deep in the details.” Their roles do not overlap much, which is part of why the partnership works.

When investors first learned they were siblings, reactions were mixed. Typically, investors were already 20 conversations deep into due diligence. “I mentioned it down the line,” she said. She believes their relationship is one of their biggest superpowers.

Getting Kicked Out on Fifth Avenue

The first serious test of whether any of this was real came when Ashley stopped building for herself and started trying to sell to others.

She was in New York, working out of a “WeWork” on 18th Street, and she needed early customers. So she went to get them the only way available to her: walking up and down Fifth Avenue in the cold, knocking on doors at plastic surgery practices. “Nine out of 10 times I got kicked out,” she said. Surgeons were in surgery. The front desks had no idea who she was. Nobody was interested in whatever a stranger was selling from the street.

She tried paying for lunch-and-learns to get five minutes of a surgeon’s attention. She tried booking patient appointments. She did whatever it took to get face time because cold emails and calls were getting her nowhere.

What eventually worked was credibility. Once a practice realized she had actually been a surgeon, the dynamic shifted. She walked into a plastic surgery office on the Upper East Side, pitched the founding surgeon on the product, and walked out with her first angel check: $50,000. He had first tried to hire her. When she made clear she was going to start the company, he invested instead.

“For any founder,” she said, “the first time you find a paying customer or someone who believes in what you’re doing, that was enough for me.”

Two months later she left medicine entirely.

That transition was not clean. She had no apartment in New York. She was sleeping on friends’ couches while launching a product and learning a profession she had never trained for. The financial language, the operational language, the venture language: all of it was new. She had spent years mastering how to mend a broken bone. Now she was figuring out what an engineering manager actually does.

“Ask me two years ago,” she said, “I would have never thought I would be doing this.”

What Building Actually Looks Like

The early mistakes were predictable in retrospect but painful in the moment. Hiring moved faster than judgment. The initial go-to-market approach created friction that only became visible after repeated failure to grow past it. “I was approaching it from the wrong side,” she said. “I realized I was going to bang my head against the wall a million times.”

The correction required slowing down, interrogating the assumptions baked into the product, and reframing who it was actually for and how it was being sold. Rather than treating the pivot as a failure, she used it to fuel her initial assumptions. The learning-from-mistakes posture she developed in medicine, where the stakes of overconfidence are permanent, carried directly into how she runs the company. “Surgeons, you’re always kind of learning with what’s happening,” she said. “You never grow out of imposter syndrome in the clinic, and it keeps you very humble.”

On hiring, she has landed on a framework that several of her peers recommended: take your time bringing people in, and move fast when something is not working. When evaluating whether someone belongs on the team, she asks a simple question: Knowing everything she now knows about this person, would she hire them again? If the answer is not a confident "yes," she treats it as her answer.

Her broader philosophy for navigating decisions she does not yet know how to make is equally direct. When she needed to build out an engineering team, she cold-messaged Uber's former chief technology officer on LinkedIn. He responded. One conversation led to introductions, and some of those introductions became the engineers now leading Rue Four’s technical team, people who came from Uber and DoorDash. “One of them ended up leading our team,” she said.

That approach, asking people who have already done the thing, has become her primary operating system. She calls friends with companies when deals start going sideways. She reaches out to people she has never met when she hits a question she cannot answer alone.

“You’re only as smart as what you know,” she said. “The ability to just ask people has 10x’d anything I could have done by myself.”

This is a meaningful shift from the culture she trained in. “The motto in the clinic was, at the end, you’re always alone,” she said. In a tech company, that kind of isolation is a liability.

Where Rue Four Goes From Here

In 2026, Ashley’s focus is on building the team that can carry the product to the next stage. Rue Four has onboarded hundreds of clinics and is continuing to grow. The engineering team is expanding. The product roadmap includes Agentic workflows, AI forecasting and streamlining supply chain built specifically for clinical operations, capabilities that did not exist in a form that worked for the people who needed them most.

The vision is to make modern operational infrastructure available to every medical practice, a category that has historically received less attention from technology builders than its size and complexity warranted. Ashley sees AI as the accelerant that makes this moment different from what came before.

But the North Star she returns to is simpler than any roadmap. “When I have a doctor get on the platform for the first time and say, you’ve changed my day-to-day,” she said, “that’s what makes me so bullish on the decisions we're making.”

She built her first career around the idea that one person with the right training could help one patient at a time. She left that career when she realized the math could be better. The identity she shed to get here was not a sacrifice. It was a trade: one kind of impact for another, larger kind, scaled through software instead of surgery.

This season is supported by Perkins Coie. Perkins Coie is a leading international law firm known for providing high-value, strategic solutions. The Emerging Companies and Venture Capital team counsels startups and the investors backing them, supporting clients from formation through exit. In the past three years, clients have raised more than $23 billion in private markets between the pre-seed and growth stages. Perkins Coie combines tailored counsel with sector experience, so when it’s time to accelerate, whether for the next financing round, a strategic deal, or going public, your team is ready. To learn more, visit perkinscoie.com

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For most founders, the narrative would end there, somewhere between the wire transfer and the celebration dinner. For CK, that moment was less a finish line and more a hard stop sign he finally had the permission to read.

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From Seoul to Silicon Valley, One Accidental MBA at a Time

CK did not grow up thinking about startups. He grew up in Korea in an academically rigorous household. His father, a university professor, set an expectation that anything short of a PhD represented personal failure. CK aimed for medicine, studied natural sciences, and enrolled at the University of Michigan, though military duty pulled him back to Korea before he could finish his degree.

That detour, as it turns out, was the sharpest education he ever received. The Korean government ran a program during the dot-com era allowing men to fulfill their mandatory military service by working at designated tech companies. CK landed a role at a 30-person startup with no engineering background and no business training. He was, by his own description, cheap labor. When nobody else could handle the non-technical work, including fundraising materials and eventually the company’s listing on the Korean Stock Exchange, it fell to him.

“I was grumbling a lot,” he said. “I was working until midnight. But in hindsight, that was the best real-life MBA I could ever have.”

The company grew from 30 to 300 people during his tenure and went public. Then, like many ventures that succeeded too fast during that era, it struggled under the weight of its own capital. The IPO was successful enough to attract investors and partners with ideas in every direction, and the discipline that had built the business gave way to scattered priorities. CK watched it happen and filed the lesson away.

After completing his degree at Michigan and a four-year stint at Samsung, where he kept one foot in the startup ecosystem even while drawing a corporate paycheck, CK co-founded his first real company with a serial entrepreneur named Chester. They built the leading blogging software platform in Korea during the Web 2.0 wave, growing the service into the country’s top destination for content creators. Three years in, Google came calling.

Korea is one of only three countries in the world where Google does not hold majority search market share, alongside Russia and China. A dominant local player had walled off its content from outside indexing. Google’s response was to acquire a content platform of its own. CK and Chester’s company fit the brief. The deal took nearly a year to close, and on a Friday it was done. CK was at the Google Seoul office on Monday morning.

Nine Years, One Number, and What It Actually Cost

The Google chapter lasted four years and carried CK to California, where he eventually earned his green card and his fully vested stock. Before he officially left, he had already been quietly building the foundation for his next company on evenings and weekends, refining the idea for six or seven months before making any move. That preparation mattered, because what came next was not a sprint.

His second company operated in the mobile publishing and storytelling space, a content creation platform built for the smartphone era. It took nine years to reach acquisition. The exit price was $510 million.

The financial outcome rippled outward in ways CK still speaks about with visible satisfaction. The company had about 70 employees at the time of the deal. Roughly 15 percent of them became millionaires. Investors who came in at the Series B, a round of approximately $7.5 million, achieved a 30x return. Earlier investors did considerably better. “I was really happy about that,” he said simply, and the simplicity of the statement was its own kind of credibility.

But nine years is a long time to carry something. CK describes the founder experience during those years as permanently occupying one edge of his awareness, even when the business was performing well. Sleep was difficult. Stress was ambient. He was expected to project certainty in every room, regardless of what he actually knew. “You’re supposed to know things,” he said. “You’re supposed to be the smartest person in the room even though you may not be.”

When the deal closed and he eventually walked away from the acquiring company two years later, he made a decision that no previous version of himself would have made. He would take a year off. He ended up taking a year and a half.

What Listening Taught a Lifelong Builder

CK approached his sabbatical the way most founders approach a product launch, with research. He read Lenny Rachitsky’s newsletter piece on the subject, absorbed the recommendation that a year is the minimum useful duration, and then did something fundamentally out of character: he refused to make a plan.

“I wanted to kind of unlearn that,” he said, referring to the reflex to schedule and optimize. “I’m not doing work here, so let’s not plan things and see what happens.”

What happened surprised him. He started meeting people. He invested as an angel in 55 companies and participated in a number of funds. He took calls that gave him energy rather than drained it, a distinction he had never meaningfully considered before. Having moved from the Bay Area to Los Angeles in 2020, he deliberately sought out people outside the technology world, people working across entertainment, hospitality, and any number of other industries. He asked them a single question: how is your life going?

“People would speak for 20 or 30 minutes,” he said. “People want to be heard and they have amazing stories.”

His wife noticed the change before he fully did. She told him he was a different person. Coming from the person who had watched him work through 20 years of uninterrupted intensity, including the sleeplessness and the constant edge of stress, he took that seriously.

The sabbatical also produced a question that became the seed of his current company. A friend suggested an exercise: imagine a doctor tells you that you have three years to live. What would you do immediately? CK’s answer included a desire to share what he had learned, to write more, and to build something that helped other people express and distribute their own knowledge. He had built blogging platforms and storytelling tools twice before. This time, he wanted to do it with artificial intelligence.

Building the Platform That Listens Back

CK is the co-founder and CEO of Saywise, a company that uses AI to help people extract and share their knowledge through conversation. Rather than asking users to write, Saywise asks them to talk. The platform generates topic suggestions and talking points, then conducts a voice or video conversation with the user, or calls them directly by phone. The AI listens, asks follow-up questions, and transforms the exchange into polished written content or video.

The premise is a deliberate inversion of how most AI content tools work. “There’s so much AI-created content and it’s going to flood the internet,” CK said. “What we want to do is take it upside down. What if humans continue creating their authentic content, but AI is helping them?”

The 2026 roadmap centers on building team-based use cases, allowing companies to use Saywise to involve multiple contributors and keep company accounts active and substantive. The platform is also integrating with meeting notes, internal tools like Notion, and employee profiles to surface content opportunities from existing internal discussions.

For CK, the arc from a Seoul military posting to a $510 million exit to a platform designed around human expression is not a detour. It is a straight line. Every company he has built has placed the act of sharing knowledge at its center. The only thing that changed during the sabbatical was who was doing the listening.

“What would I do if I’m not doing this?” he said, describing how he kept going through the difficult years of his second company. “I’ll probably do something about content creation. That’s the same thing I’m doing right now.”

He kept going then. There is little reason to expect anything different now.

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A Cold DM and a Calculated Leap

The first move Sam Gibson made toward building Hadron Energy was sending a direct message to a founder he had never met. He was living in Kansas City, working a steady engineering job, and describing a business idea that even his eventual mentor, podcast host Kevin Jurovich, privately filed under “crazy or genius.” Kevin, a founder himself who makes a point of responding to early-stage builders, got on a phone call with Sam. Then another. Then several more.

“I thought you were partly crazy,” Kevin admitted during their recent sit-down on the Founder Uncovered podcast. That was in 2023. Sam was 22 years old.

By July 2024, Sam had packed his car and driven to what he thought was the Bay Area’s promised land. He landed in East San Jose, a neighborhood Kevin described diplomatically as “the opposite of quintessential San Francisco,” and signed an Airbnb lease that doubled as his founding office. He officially incorporated Hadron Energy there, with roughly $10,000 to his name and no investors yet on the cap table. The first check he received was $2,000. He took it.

What Hadron Actually Builds

Hadron Energy is developing what Sam calls Lightwater Micromodular Reactors, a compact nuclear power system that produces 10 megawatts of electric output, enough to power 10,000 homes simultaneously. The company is targeting data centers, critical infrastructure, and remote communities as its first customers, positioning clean nuclear energy as the most direct answer to what Sam describes as the defining constraint of the AI era.

“Power is the limiting factor for AI,” Sam said. “When you’re talking to hyperscalers and data centers, that’s the most important thing.”

The company’s engineering headquarters remains in the Bay Area, where Sam draws from a hiring pipeline anchored at Berkeley and other regional universities. Sam himself now lives in New York City, where he leads the capital markets work for the company’s pending NASDAQ listing.

To date, Hadron has raised just over $8 million across pre-seed, seed, and a small Series A. The company is currently merging with GigCapital7, a Special Purpose Acquisition Company (SPAC) with $212 million in trust. Bankers have valued Hadron at $1.2 billion. Sam expects net proceeds of approximately $200 million after what he anticipates will be a low redemption rate, plus an additional private investment in public equity (PIPE) raise he is actively leading.

The Builder Behind the Company

Sam’s background is in mechanical engineering and engineering leadership, which explains both how he got here and how he thinks. He does not describe himself as someone who woke up one morning with a billion-dollar idea. He describes himself as someone who always knew he would start a company and spent years building toward the moment when it made sense to stop preparing and simply move.

“There always comes a day when you have to stop studying and just make the jump,” Sam said. “There’s always the analysis paralysis where you get stuck in a loop of doing constant research. There’s something to be said about trusting your instincts.”

At 24, Sam leads a team that includes engineers and professionals significantly older than he is. He addresses the age dynamic with a straightforwardness that reflects how he approaches most things. “If you surround yourself with the right people, age doesn’t matter,” he said. “There shouldn’t be an age requirement for success. I don’t subscribe to that mentality.”

His personal routine reflects someone who treats operational consistency as a professional edge. He goes to bed early, wakes up early, and keeps regular dinner hours. He called himself “an old soul” with a laugh, but the point underneath the joke is a genuine one: he structures his days to protect his capacity to work.

Two books he returns to are Robert Greene’s “The Laws of Human Nature,” which he recommends for any founder navigating investor and team relationships, and “Meditations” by Marcus Aurelius, which he credits with shaping his long-term mindset. “If you have the right mindset, you can do basically anything,” he said.

How Survival Became Scale

The hardest stretch of the Hadron story is not the merger or the regulatory meetings in Washington. It is the months between Sam’s first $2,000 check and the point when checks started arriving fast enough to keep the company alive.

“I started the company when I had like $10,000 in my bank account,” Sam said. “Many months later, I had $20,000 and I’m like, I’m going to be patient. We’re going to keep pushing. There were many times where I felt if I don’t receive this investor check, this is going to put me in a really hard spot.”

He does not frame those months as a crisis he survived. He frames them as the natural cost of operating at the idea stage in a capital-intensive industry during a difficult fundraising environment. What kept him moving was a belief that persistence in the right direction compounds over time. The first round target was $500,000. It took longer than he expected, but he closed it through friends, family, and former colleagues. Then the checks grew. A $100,000 investment. Then $200,000. Then several at $500,000. Then the first million-dollar check arrived.

“It’s a lot of work and legwork to get from the early day angel checks to the more institutional, sophisticated investors,” Sam said. “Those are the folks we’re talking to now.”

The regulatory side presents its own sustained challenge. Nuclear energy requires ongoing engagement with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the Department of Energy, and other federal bodies. Sam travels to Washington frequently, describing the process as one that rewards consistency and direct contact. “It’s about showing up and having boots on the ground, face to face interaction,” he said. “That is really what drives the ball forward.”

He described the diligence process behind the SPAC merger as something he will never forget, and not because of the valuation number. “I cannot believe how much diligence went into that merger and going through the process,” he said. “It was obviously very exciting.”

What the Next Chapter Looks Like

Sam’s goals for 2026 center on completing the NASDAQ listing, scaling the engineering team, and making measurable progress on the licensing work that will eventually allow Hadron’s reactors to connect to the grid. He also wants to build the brand into something recognizable beyond the capital markets audience currently paying attention.

“I really want to make Hadron a name brand so that when people think of clean energy, they think Hadron,” he said. “A nuclear reactor is pretty complex, but what we’re doing is trying to make it as simple as we possibly can for the average person to understand.”

The mission framing is consistent and specific. Sam has repeated throughout this journey that the valuation and the capital story are tools, not the destination. Putting reactors on the grid is the destination. Everything else is infrastructure toward that goal.

When Kevin asked Sam what personal quality he credits most for how far Hadron has come in under three years, Sam did not hesitate. “I am very stubborn and very persistent,” he said. “If you truly believe this is the right way, you stick to your guns. Naturally, people will follow that the longer you do it. I know for a fact where I’m going. It’s a matter of if this person wants to join.”

That is not the language of someone chasing a valuation. That is the language of someone who once sent a cold DM from Kansas City with a nuclear energy idea and a very clear sense of what came next.

This season is supported by Perkins Coie. Perkins Coie is a leading international law firm known for providing high-value, strategic solutions. The Emerging Companies and Venture Capital team counsels startups and the investors who back them, supporting clients from formation to exit. In the past three years, clients have raised more than $23 billion in private markets between the pre-seed and growth stages. Perkins Coie combines tailored counsel with sector experience, so when it’s time to accelerate, whether for the next financing round, a strategic deal, or going public, your team is ready. To learn more, visit perkinscoie.com

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