Pooja Ika had a pitch prepared for David Ortiz. She had known him since meeting him at a charity event years earlier, and now she wanted him involved with the company she was building. They arranged a Zoom call. About ten minutes in, the former Red Sox slugger interrupted. In Ika’s recollection, his answer was: ‘Pooja, stop, I’m in.’ Some presentations apparently benefit from an early finish.
The partnership eventually brought Ortiz to Babson’s Govoni Field for a commercial shoot in September 2021. Ika had graduated from the college in 2019. Returning with a production crew and a Boston baseball celebrity was a rather different sort of campus visit. The student who had incorporated a company before leaving college was back to put it in front of an audience.
The photograph of the two together captures the public part of that work: sunglasses, smiles, the company’s name behind them. Building the organization behind the photograph would demand a different set of skills. Getting a famous person to listen was one assignment. Getting experienced colleagues to follow a young founder was another. That second assignment runs through Ika’s story.
A company before commencement
Ika grew up in Massachusetts. Her parents gave her an unusually close view of working life: her mother, Gayatri, built enduring relationships with the people she served; her father, Ravi, built businesses. In her own account, watching them enjoy their work made her want a career that could produce the same feeling. Work looked like something a person might choose enthusiastically, rather than merely endure until Friday.
She attended Babson College and graduated in 2019. Her company had already entered the picture: she incorporated eternalHealth that April, during her senior year. There is something wonderfully literal about studying entrepreneurship and leaving with an incorporated enterprise. The diploma and the company paperwork belonged to the same season of her life.
In a December 2021 account of the launch, the business had raised $10 million in seed funding from friends and family. That detail puts useful weight beneath the familiar young-founder story. Ika began with access to people, expertise and capital. Those advantages belong in the account alongside her initiative. A founder’s decision can be her own while the conditions that make it possible are shared.
Hiring people who knew more
Being the youngest person in a leadership team introduces a practical problem. The title may belong to the founder; much of the experience belongs to everyone else. Ika has described recruiting executives older than herself and looking for people willing to collaborate, reconsider established practices and work without ego. Competence alone would not settle the question of whether a team could work together.
Her mother’s lesson about earning respect gave that problem a personal vocabulary. A CEO cannot borrow authority indefinitely from a business card. She has to make decisions, accept scrutiny and keep colleagues willing to bring their judgment into the room. Ika’s hiring criteria suggest she understood how much of her job would depend on the quality of those conversations.
That is a more revealing ambition than simply wanting to be in charge. Selecting colleagues who can challenge familiar habits requires the founder to tolerate challenge, too. Her description of the team she wanted leaves room for expertise without treating seniority as a veto. For a young executive, that is a demanding balance: confidence sufficient to lead, and enough curiosity to keep learning from the people she has hired.
Experience at the table. Room for a different approach.The hiring question running through Ika’s story
A boardroom with a different guest list
Ika’s professional circle soon included John Sculley, the former Apple and Pepsi CEO, as eternalHealth’s board chairman. Ortiz became its spokesperson and partner. The names carried very different kinds of recognition: one associated with corporate leadership, the other with Boston’s sporting life. Together they gave a small company connections to audiences far beyond a founder’s immediate network.
The company also reached a multiyear Red Sox partnership announced in April 2022. Ika publicly thanked her team and the people who helped arrange it. Her message had the texture of work completed together: specific colleagues, outside partners and appreciation for the opportunity. The announcement was a business milestone, and also a glimpse of how much coordination sits behind a prominent logo at a ballpark.
There is a temptation to let famous names become the whole story. They are easier to remember than a hiring decision or an operating meeting. But the interesting question is how Ika connected those relationships to an organization that still had to function after the photographs. Visibility can get a company a hearing. The work of making good use of that hearing remains with its leadership.
Recognition, with the address attached
In 2023, Ika appeared on Forbes’ Under 30 Local list for Boston. The word ‘Local’ matters. This was recognition within a particular city’s entrepreneurial community, and Boston is the setting that makes much of her story legible. She grew up in Massachusetts, studied at Babson and built a company based in Boston. Her public partnerships drew on relationships people in that region already understood.
Her conference appearances supplied another setting for the same questions about experience and intent. TiEcon East listed her for an April 2023 keynote titled ‘Emerging or Experienced: Intentional is the Keyword.’ The wording fits a founder whose age has so often preceded the rest of her biography. Intent points toward choices someone can make; age is considerably less open to negotiation.
The recognition brought her into conversations beyond her own staff. In October 2024 she appeared on iHeart’s CEOs You Should Know Providence series. These are different forms of public work: an award acknowledges a record, a conference asks for an argument, and an interview asks someone to explain herself. Each requires a founder to turn private decisions into a story other people can understand.
Who gets to picture herself here?
Ika has spoken about being one of the few Indian children in her town and about the absence of young women who looked like her on the screens she watched. That memory helps explain her interest in Junior Achievement. She described serving on its Massachusetts board and supporting the connections and entrepreneurial opportunities it could offer children. The appeal was personal: a wider view of who gets to imagine a particular future.
In 2023, she chaired the New England Women’s Leadership Awards for Boys & Girls Clubs of Dorchester. Her welcome letter thanked sponsors, volunteers and committee members, and celebrated women who could serve as examples for young people. It was a role with a different emphasis from running her company. For that evening, the purpose was to direct attention toward other women’s work.
The educational thread continued in June 2026, when she was announced as the keynote speaker for Vidyabharati’s annual gala in Burlington. The event supported educational opportunity, particularly for girls in India. These commitments give her public life a recognizable shape. She has repeatedly chosen settings where leadership is discussed in relation to who has access to it, who can see it and who might attempt it next.
Boys & Girls Clubs of Dorchester
Brooks has other plans
Away from company business, Ika’s accounts of her free time are refreshingly ordinary. She has described spending it with family and friends, walking around the city and shopping with her dog, Brooks. In a 2022 interview she identified him as a toy poodle and included trying restaurants among their shared adventures. A CEO’s calendar may be crowded; a dog still has a persuasive case for going outside.
She named Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist as a favorite book, connecting it to the idea of living without fear. Asked about a rare talent, she described her determination to turn a refusal into agreement. Those answers are consistent with the optimism she has expressed elsewhere, although optimism is easier to state in an interview than to sustain through the repetitive work of building a company.
Her description of the workplace she wanted was more concrete: openness, honesty and mutual respect. These are aspirations about how colleagues should experience their day. They make an interesting companion to the public ambition. The company might carry its founder’s ideas into a market, but it also creates a place where other people spend their working lives. Ika has said she wants that experience to feel worthwhile.
The next assignment is less photogenic
The company’s later record brings a harder chapter. In August 2026, Massachusetts placed eternalHealth under administrative supervision and required it to stop writing new business until specified financial requirements were met. A federal notice dated August 27 subsequently imposed an enrollment suspension on two company contracts. These were concrete constraints on the business Ika led, and they belong beside its earlier financing and recognition.
For a founder, this changes the texture of the assignment. Announcements and partnerships have a public rhythm: a date, a photograph, a congratulatory message. Financial requirements demand another kind of attention. They must be satisfied through the organization’s actual operations. The notice set out a condition for lifting the restriction: state confirmation that the company could operate in good standing and removal of the state order.
Ika’s story remains a story of responsibility as much as ambition. The college senior became the executive, the executive became a public example, and the public example still had a company to answer for. The early Zoom call ended with an encouraging interruption. The more consequential conversation continues in the daily work of leadership, where being taken seriously means accepting the full weight of the job.