How to raise entrepreneurs when the world keeps pushing jobs
Mark Gaunya did not sit his kids down and hand them a business plan. He handed them a mindset. "Think of something that society needs," he told them. "Create value for people who need that, charge for that value, and most days it won't feel like work. That's called being an entrepreneur." All three of his kids, now in their mid-to-late twenties, are running their own operations or building inside entrepreneurial environments. None of it happened by accident.
Mark grew up watching his parents run a six-facility, three-state outpatient physical therapy company. His father, a Columbia-educated orthopedic physical therapist, rehabbed NFL players out of the family home. His mother, a Yale-educated cardiac rehabilitation nurse, helped heart surgery patients re-enter the world. Both of them left corporate medicine because the system did not serve the people. That decision gave Mark a front-row seat to what it looks like when principles drive a business, not just a paycheck.
Entrepreneurial parenting: guardrails, not helicopters
Mark describes his parenting philosophy in one image: a guardrail on the highway of life. "You're going to bang into the guardrail. You are, you're going to have accidents on the road. But I don't want you flying off the road and disappearing from the earth." He let his kids swim. When they looked like they were going under, he threw a life raft. When they were not going under, he watched.
His son told him at 17 that he hated the white-collar world and needed his hands in the dirt. Mark's response: "I know a lot of people who are blue-collar, who are multi-millionaires." That son now runs a multi-million dollar cannabis cultivation operation in Massachusetts with 12 employees at 27 years old.
His daughter Brooke's story is harder and more important. She was borderline suicidal a year before this recording. Mark, who is in the healthcare and benefits business and knows every resource available, still felt helpless. He found her help, encouraged her to take it, and watched her pivot. She went on to sell a million-six in individual health insurance premium in her first year, crushing the nearest competitor by $500,000. "She went from the brink of something horrible to now being able to afford her own car, her own place, her own bills."
Why principles-based entrepreneurs break the right rules
Mark spent 10 years in corporate health insurance. He describes himself as not employable but "employeeable", a distinction he makes with a straight face. Every large company he worked for was eventually exhausted by his quick-start energy and his refusal to accept "we don't do it that way here" as a final answer.
His Kolbe score is a nine on quick start. He is a simplifier by nature. And the thing that finally gave him room to operate was building his own platform, Captivated Health, where the rules he makes are the ones that serve the client, not the structure.
"I don't care about selling insurance," he says. "I care about making healthcare easier and more affordable for people. Insurance is the mechanism."
The healthcare transparency principle and the $40 million result
Mark has spent three decades watching four rulemaking entities, government programs, large hospital systems, health insurance companies, and pharmacy benefit managers, operate an opaque billing system that keeps consumers in the dark. His core argument is simple: "Name one product or service you buy where you don't have access to the price or quality information before you make a buying decision. Healthcare is the only one."
The Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2020, signed before President Trump left office in his first term, began requiring price transparency across the system. Mark sees it as a principle becoming law, not a solution in itself. The solution is what comes next: data tools that let employers and employees actually compare quality and price before they walk into a provider's office.
His platform, Captivated Health, now in its 11th year, puts middle-market employers, those with 50 to 500 employees, into a self-insured captive structure that makes every dollar visible, targets solutions to actual population health data, and breaks the cycle he calls the less-bad renewal bet: accepting a 10% increase because it could have been 17%, while inflation sits at 2.5%.
The result across his client base: tens of millions of dollars in savings, and a tagline that doubles as a principle. "The greatest wealth is health."
How to raise entrepreneurs: the one-step framework
Mark's advice to anyone sitting on an idea is not a strategy deck. It is one word: jump. But before the jump, one step a day. "There will never be the right time. Take one step. Doesn't have to be a hundred, one step." The guy who put wheels on luggage is wealthy beyond belief. The guy who invented Velcro is too. It does not have to be a rocket to Mars. It has to be something that makes somebody's life easier, and the courage to start before the conditions are perfect.
