A Million Babies and What It Cost to Save Them

In this episode, Daniel Epstein sits down with Jane Chen, co-founder of Embrace Global, the organization that has helped save over one million infant lives with a portable incubator that costs a fraction of traditional hospital equipment. Jane built the company from a Stanford class project into a global operation, then watched it collapse after a decade of setbacks, burnout, and a failed acquisition where every document was signed but the wire transfer never came. What follows is one of the most honest conversations about what happens after the thing you built your identity around falls apart. Jane talks about the panic attacks, the inability to read a book, the healing journey that took her from Indonesia to frog poisoning ceremonies to parts work therapy. She shares the moment she realized her relentless drive to save babies was rooted in feeling powerless as a child. And she describes surfing in Hawaii with Nathan, a boy she once held as a two-pound abandoned infant in a Beijing orphanage, now 14 years old and catching waves beside her.