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Piya Saliba: what would you do differently starting again
27 Sept 2026
A conversation about hindsight
Piya Saliba is CEO of Fountain Capital and a longtime supporter of the Nalin and Naseeb Foundation. She also gives time to the Cedars-Sinai NICU Parent Council. In this conversation, she looks back at decisions she would make differently now, and what changed her mind along the way.
If you could go back and start over, what would you do differently?
"I would have separated the two halves of myself much sooner. Growing up, I treated the creative side, the singing and acting, as something separate from the business side I was learning at home through my family's furniture business. I thought I had to pick a lane eventually. It took me years to understand that the two were never in competition. I wish I had trusted that earlier instead of spending so much energy trying to choose."
Was there a specific moment that made that clear to you?
"Not one moment. It was more like a slow correction. Early in my career I would show up to meetings and leave the parts of myself that felt too soft, too expressive, at the door. I thought that was professionalism. Looking back, I was just less useful in the room. The instincts I built performing, reading a room, sensing when something is off before anyone says it out loud, are the same instincts that make me better at my job now. I just didn't have permission to use them yet."
Knowing that, what would you tell yourself at the start of your career?
"Stop asking whether something belongs on your resume before you decide if it's worth doing. I spent time early on filtering opportunities through what would look serious. That's backwards. The work with families at Cedars-Sinai doesn't look like a career move on paper. It has changed how I run meetings, how I listen, how I decide when to push and when to hold back. None of that shows up as a line item, but it shows up in the room."
Are there decisions from your time at NMS Capital or earlier that you would make differently now?
"I would have asked for feedback more often, and earlier. When you're young in a role, you assume the people above you will tell you when something is wrong. Most won't, not because they're unkind, but because it's not their job to manage your growth for you. I learned to ask directly: what did I miss, what would you have done differently. It's an uncomfortable question to ask on repeat, but it's the fastest way to get better."
Is there anything about how you built the Nalin and Naseeb Foundation's work that you'd change?
"I'd have set clearer boundaries around my own time from the start. When something matters to you personally, it's easy to say yes to everything connected to it. I did that for longer than I should have. Eventually I had to learn that saying no to some things is what let me stay useful for the things that mattered most. That's a hard lesson for anyone who cares this much, but it's a necessary one."
How do you weigh a decision differently now than you did ten years ago?
"Ten years ago I weighed decisions by how they would look. Now I weigh them by whether I'd still think they were right a year later, after the applause or the disappointment had faded. That's a different question. It slows me down, but it's kept me from a lot of choices I would have regretted."
What's something you got right early, that you didn't realize was right until much later?
"Staying close to my family's business roots instead of treating them as background. I grew up around an import business built out of Bali, watching how relationships and trust mattered as much as any contract. I didn't think of that as training at the time. It was just home. But those habits, patience with people, understanding that trust takes time to build and no time to lose, turned out to be the foundation for everything I do now, in business and in the foundation work."
If you had it to do again, would you have gone to USC?
"Yes, without hesitation. Not because of any single class or connection, but because it was the first place I had to hold my own outside the world I grew up in. Indonesia and Singapore shaped me, but USC is where I had to figure out who I was without that context following me into the room. That's a different kind of education, and I don't think I could have built what came after without going through it."
What's the hardest habit you've had to unlearn?
"Assuming that being busy meant being effective. I used to measure a good week by how full my calendar was. Now I measure it by whether the handful of things that actually mattered got real attention. A packed schedule can hide a lot of avoidance. It took me a long time to see that in myself."
Last one: if you had to start your career again tomorrow, what's the one thing you'd keep exactly the same?
“The people I chose to stay close to. Not the jobs, not the strategy, not even most of the decisions. Just the people. The ones who told me the truth when it wasn't flattering and stuck around when it wasn't convenient. Everything else I'd happily reconsider. That part I wouldn't touch.”
