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“Anyone in business who says, ‘How do you make money?’ is asking the wrong question,” says longtime entrepreneur Alex Tarnava. “What need do you have that you wish society had? Ask yourself that, and then ask yourself: Is it helpful to other people?”
Tarnava is the inventor, manufacturer and patent holder of hydrogen water tablets, which he describes as a leading method of hydrogen therapy. His product is private-labeled by roughly 100 brands, including Gary Brecka, Dr. Gundry, Cymbiotika, Sports Research and The Wellness Company, and he currently sells around 40 million doses per month.
He’s also the owner and co-inventor of Inhale H2, a patent-pending system for delivering medical gases and aerosolized drugs. Launched in December, the device has already sold out twice, with 1,000 units sold at a $6,499 MSRP.
Clearly, Tarnava is making money. But he insists that was never the point. That claim is strengthened by the fact that he has refused to take ANY venture capital, instead bootstrapping his businesses from the ground up despite growing up below the poverty line.
“A lot of people think if I pull in capital, it helps me achieve my mission, but that’s a trap,” Tarnava tells Entrepreneur. “You have to give up on your mission. Because now the mission becomes money and it’s empty.”
Making dollars but not making sense
From a young age, Tarnava was fascinated by philosophy and theoretical science. What he couldn’t understand was why pursuing those fields seemed to require working under someone else. “How are you going to be a philosopher or a scientist when you have to beg someone else for money?” he wondered.
At 17, around 2002, Tarnava took a more practical route, landing a commission-based door-to-door sales job. He earned upwards of $35,000 working part-time — more than his mother was making at the time. The job sparked an early interest in how money worked.
“It was during an economic boom, and it was 7% compounding interest if I kept my money in the company,” he says. “I started looking into interest and thinking about it deeply. Then I was looking at inflation, and none of it was making sense. It wasn’t reconciling to me. I’m like, this is not sustainable.”
He didn’t have all the answers, but his intuition told him something was wrong. “It just sank in my gut like a fear, and so I decided that I needed to go into business to make as much money as I could to protect myself,” he says.
For a time, that’s exactly what he did. “Everything sleazy in sales in the world, I became, and I taught that,” he admits. But the money came with a cost. Tarnava began literally losing sleep over the existential angst his work was causing him. “It just felt so empty and wrong,” he recalls.
In his mid-20s, he turned to alcohol, drugs and women to numb the depression before eventually reaching a breaking point. He shut down the business and moved back to Vancouver to work with his father, where he rediscovered his interest in philosophy and science, spending hours each day reading.
Then a virus abruptly changed his trajectory. “It made me stare at my mortality, and the entropy that we all deal with,” Tarnava says. “I redirected into health, and that’s when I started inventing all these technologies.”
From experiment to enterprise
Tarnava’s hydrogen capsules are designed to solve a fundamental challenge with hydrogen delivery: getting enough hydrogen into the body in a practical way. The capsules use elemental magnesium and organic acids to react with water, generating hydrogen gas while leaving the hydrogen suspended in the solution.
Because hydrogen has limited solubility, Tarnava says traditional methods struggle to deliver doses comparable to those used in research without requiring people to consume unrealistic amounts of water. His technology creates extremely small hydrogen nanobubbles that remain suspended in the liquid, allowing the capsules to produce what he describes as a supersaturated hydrogen solution with up to eight times the typical concentration.
Tarnava argues that the higher dose matters because hydrogen may help trigger a process called hormesis, where a mild stress on mitochondria leads to positive adaptations. Similar to exercise, heat or cold exposure, he believes hydrogen can activate the body’s natural resilience mechanisms while offering a lower risk profile than many other stress-based interventions.
Tarnava didn’t start with a business plan. He was pursuing hydrogen as a DIY project until the positive signals became too strong to ignore. “At no point did I think, how am I going to make money doing this? How much do I need to charge for it? I didn’t run any of the numbers. I just moved forward until I had an MVP,” he says.
Once he had a product, Tarnava reached out to the authors of hydrogen research papers, offering samples and placebos for clinical trials. He initially launched the capsules as a consumer brand, but quickly pivoted after companies began approaching him about licensing the technology for private-label products. From there, he describes the process as “a slog.”
Because he was self-funding and bootstrapping the business, he says he had to become “a jack of all trades,” learning each part of the business well enough to know whether the consultants he hired actually knew what they were talking about.
“There’s so much here, and none of it makes sense when combined,” Tarnava says, referring to things like patent law and regulatory filings. “Basically, you have to learn to play the game and present half-truths in completely different ways depending on what domain it is, and the kind of siloing of all these fields means that nobody can communicate with each other. It’s like fitting a round peg into a square hole.”
The constraints of capitalism
Tarnava could have brought on a VC partner to ease some of the burden and fill in his knowledge gaps, but for him, that was never on the table.
Aside from a few shares owned by “very close friends that I didn’t need a prospectus for,” Tarnava owns every share of his company. Even those trusted friends signed ethics and morality agreements and clauses waiving their rights to shareholder primacy. “I have complete oversight of what the company does,” Tarnava says. “And I think that’s important because how do you stay mission-based if the legal precedent, the contractual precedent, is towards profit?”
He continues: “Entrepreneurs tend to be people who want to do something big, and it’s been perverted to thinking, ‘Oh, doing something big is making a lot of money.’ Well, that’s not necessarily true. We forget people who just had a lot of money. We remember people who did something that changed the world, regardless of how much money they have.”
The friction between the pursuit of knowledge and capitalism is not unique to Tarnava’s story. What makes his case more interesting is that, despite the conflicts he sees between the two, he still believes in capitalism — he just thinks the system needs to be held accountable.
“One of my missions is: How do we get back to honest capitalism and honest leadership?” Tarnava says.
He paints a picture of a young, altruistic founder who starts a healthcare company to make a positive impact. The business gains traction, investors come calling, and the founder sees an opportunity to take the company to the next level. Then the incentives change.
“The data comes in, and actually the highest profit is by shifting this component in a direction that switches the product from really improving people’s health to being either innocuous or parasitic,” Tarnava says. “But it’s maximizing profit.”
Under the principle of shareholder primacy, he argues, executives are often forced to prioritize those profits. “If you discover an avenue to increase profits, your morals or ethics can’t stop you from that, or you’re going to get sued, and lose your company anyway,” he says. “How many founders bring in capital, fight with the investors and the board, and get ousted from their own companies?”
Despite his gripes with the system, Tarnava still believes in capitalism’s power to drive positive change. He recently funded the Wellness Science Initiative, a nonprofit that provides free educational modules on critical thinking, scientific principles and foundational science, including how to evaluate lifestyle interventions.
The Wellness Science Initiative will launch its first Olympiad at Udemonia in West Palm Beach, Nov. 5–8, with about 8,000 attendees and $70,000 in prizes. The event will feature live science competitions, lightning-round questions, and participating booths where attendees can challenge organizations on their scientific claims.
“The idea is, you can’t have informed consent if you don’t know how to think and don’t have the basic facts,” he says. “If consumers have more information, they know how to ask better questions. They know how to think better. They’re going to choose better companies and avoid shittier companies.”
Because capitalism follows consumer demand, Tarnava believes better-informed consumers can ultimately force businesses to adapt.
Wealth beyond money
Ultimately, Tarnava’s business philosophy is rooted in a broader definition of wealth. To him, true wealth isn’t money, but the resources that make society function: natural resources, human capital, knowledge, creativity and the ability to work. Money is simply a tool for moving those resources around.
That philosophy extends to how he leads. Rather than pushing employees to “bust their ass” for the sake of economic growth, Tarnava wants people to pursue work they’re passionate about and gives them the autonomy to lead in their areas of expertise. “Unless what you’re doing is going against my overall vision, you’re the expert here,” he says. “What can I do to support you?”
For Tarnava, the goal isn’t simply to build a profitable company, but one where people’s knowledge, talents and ambitions coalesce into something greater than the sum of their parts — something money alone could never measure.
“Anyone in business who says, ‘How do you make money?’ is asking the wrong question,” says longtime entrepreneur Alex Tarnava. “What need do you have that you wish society had? Ask yourself that, and then ask yourself: Is it helpful to other people?”
Tarnava is the inventor, manufacturer and patent holder of hydrogen water tablets, which he describes as a leading method of hydrogen therapy. His product is private-labeled by roughly 100 brands, including Gary Brecka, Dr. Gundry, Cymbiotika, Sports Research and The Wellness Company, and he currently sells around 40 million doses per month.
He’s also the owner and co-inventor of Inhale H2, a patent-pending system for delivering medical gases and aerosolized drugs. Launched in December, the device has already sold out twice, with 1,000 units sold at a $6,499 MSRP.
