As 29-year-old Ben Munoz lay in the ICU fighting for life, he stared at the white walls and began his negotiation with God.
“I thought: If this is it, that’s OK — I’ve lived an amazing life. But if I survive, I’ll make the rest of my life count,” he says.
Munoz survived his brain hemorrhage. And he kept that promise by creating Ben’s Friends, a nonprofit website that hosts support groups for people living with rare diseases worldwide.
Fast forward 20 years. The 48-year-old CEO and YPO member lives in Austin, Texas, USA, where he runs Nadine West, a personal styling service that delivers professionally curated outfits to women’s doorstep each month.
And while Munoz deeply loves his work at the clothing company and the success it has brought him, it’s his secondary passion. The nonprofit, born from his promise in the ICU, fuels his real passion — service and impact.
The beginning of an entrepreneur
Munoz’s story begins in Houston, where he grew up the youngest of four children. His parents, Mexican immigrants, worked tirelessly to provide Munoz and his siblings a loving home and a quality education. They also instilled drive and self-sufficiency.
“If you need something, go out and get it” was their mantra, he says. So, when he set his heart on a Sega Genesis in the 1980s, he started his first “hustle” — mowing lawns until he had enough money to buy the gaming system.
— Ben Munoz share
“I guess that started my entrepreneurial streak,” he adds.
That drive continued throughout his teen years and carried him all the way to Stanford University in Northern California, his dream school. He still remembers the moment he boarded the airplane, leaving for his freshman year. It was his first time on a plane.
A life-changing turn
After graduating from Stanford, Munoz spent six years as a software engineer in Southern California before enrolling in Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management, where he thought he’d go into investment banking or management consulting.
But before starting his second year at Northwestern, Munoz was having dinner with a friend when something felt off — nausea, disorientation and a strange pressure in his neck. Realizing he needed medical attention and unwilling to wait for an ambulance, he climbed into his car, and with one hand on the stick shift, one hand holding a vomit bag, and his knee steering, he sped to the nearest emergency room.
As he waited in the long line, Munoz called a friend who was a doctor and shared his symptoms. The friend instantly recognized what was going on.
“He said: ‘I want you to go to the front of the line and hand the phone to the nurse,’” Munoz recalls.
Doctors rushed him into a CT scan. Minutes later, still fully conscious, he heard the whir of a medical drill as surgeons bored into his skull to relieve pressure from a massive brain hemorrhage — a rare arteriovenous malformation, or AVM.
As Munoz slowly recovered, he looked for others like him, scouring the internet and coming up short. That’s when he decided to create his own support group — his entrepreneurial spirit driving him to break away from the pack.
“I thought, I’ll just build something myself,” he says. “I used my skills from technology to launch a website, and then I used whatever little marketing skills I’d gained at that point to promote it.”
Making an impact
That first site — AVMSurvivors.org — was a lifeline for him and a few others. When a business school friend suggested he expand, he launched new communities for other rare conditions. Munoz eventually united all of them under Ben’s Friends.
The model is simple but powerful: use technology to serve people by creating safe, disease-specific, online communities for patients living with rare diseases or chronic illnesses, as well as their caregivers, family and friends.
Nearly 20 years later, Ben’s Friends hosts communities for 45 rare illnesses and has more than 80,000 members. With only five paid employees, the website, which is completely free to patients, relies on donations and volunteers to sustain the company.
But it’s not the numbers that inspire him — it’s the people and their personal stories: the high schooler who survived a brain bleed and now volunteers for the website or the retired tech founder who became one of their largest donors.
“The ability to help someone else going through what you went through — it fills you with meaning and gratitude,” he says.
Jasmine “Jaz” Gray, an assistant professor at Pepperdine University, is another survivor who has been impacted by Ben’s Friends. She believes in the mission so much that she published a video encouraging others to donate to the nonprofit.
“Loneliness, desperation, overwhelming fear. These qualities often describe the kind of person urgently seeking an organization like Ben’s Friends,” she says in the video.
Balancing passion and business
Inspired by the neurosurgeon who saved his life, Munoz enrolled at Baylor Medical School but two years into the program, he pivoted when approached with an opportunity to launch a fashion subscription company.
The pull of entrepreneurship was stronger than his dream of becoming a neurosurgeon, and soon he was living on the warehouse floor, packing boxes by hand and surviving on credit cards. That experiment became Nadine West, his now thriving company.
“I still don’t know much about fashion,” he laughs. “But I know culture, technology and logistics. I hire people who know the rest.”
Despite the time this new venture demanded, Munoz remained dedicated to Ben’s Friends. He continued to run it — even allocating shares of Nadine West to it, aligning his for-profit success with his nonprofit mission.
Making your ‘what’s next?’ matter
Now, nearly two decades after his brain bleed, Munoz splits his days between his two companies. The nonprofit runs lean — with hundreds of volunteers, a handful of paid moderators and just enough funding to keep the digital doors open.
He is not chasing size or status. Munoz simply wants Ben’s Friends to serve those who need his help.
Munoz’s life echoes the purpose of YPO: “The world needs better leaders … to make a difference in the lives, businesses and the world we impact.” In turn, YPO has supported Munoz — especially the Purposeful Living group, a dynamic community of CEOs dedicated to living with purpose and inspiration.
“Led by Seth Streeter, the group quickly became a meaningful part of my YPO experience. Seth has been a trusted mentor, and his dedication to helping members explore deeper meaning through transformative retreats around the world has been both inspiring and profoundly impactful on my own journey,” Munoz says. Streeter, also a YPO member, is founder and chief impact officer of Mission Wealth, a wealth and family office management firm.
As founders and CEOs confront the “what’s next” question in their own journey, Munoz’s story serves as a blueprint for transformation.
“If you’ve reached the first summit, that’s wonderful. Congratulations,” he says. “But the second mountain — that’s where you’ll find fulfillment.”
