How one founder turned painful personal experience into the solution for a huge gap in healthcare

A lot of startup founders think there’s a dire need for their product in the market, but Liya Shuster-Bier knew for sure that there was one, because she’d required it herself prior to building it — yet nothing like it existed. Liya’s company Alula provides a new kind of shopping platform, organized based on treatment types, and includes both registry and care calendar features for helping a whole network of caregivers rally around someone’s cancer diagnosis.

On this week’s episode of Found, we talk about Liya’s entrepreneurial journey, as well as the challenges of managing a cancer diagnosis, even after remission, and how that provided her with the inspiration not just for what Alula does, but also for how the company functions. She provides us tremendous insight about what it means to be a leader, and how you can build a company that has mutual respect and concern for our shared humanity as a core value that’s also a commercial success.

We loved our time chatting with Liya, and we hope you love yours listening to the episode. And of course, we’d love if you can subscribe to Found in Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, on Google Podcasts or in your podcast app of choice. Please leave us a review and let us know what you think, or send us direct feedback either on Twitter or via email at found@techcrunch.com, or leave us a voicemail at (510) 936-1618. And please join us again next week for our next featured founder.