‘Think out of the box’: A business maverick’s mission to cure disease
BY California Stories Staff – Giselle Fernandez
PUBLISHED 6:00 AM PT Aug. 24, 2026
Lou Weisbach has spent a lifetime betting against conventional wisdom. He started selling stamps at 8, coached high school basketball at 16 and eventually built a multi-million dollar promotional branding and merchandising company after his mother lent him $3,500 to get started.
When investment bankers told him his industry could never go public, he decided to prove them wrong. That instinct to see possibility where others see limitations now drives the most ambitious chapter of his career.
As Weisbach puts it, “every success that you have makes you know and believe in yourself that if you really believe in something, you can get it done.”
For Weisbach, the fight to find cures is about more than business strategy. It is personal. His father, a rabbi, died of a heart attack when Weisbach was 12, giving him an early understanding of the pain of losing someone to disease. But he says his motivation also comes from watching people suffer from illnesses that he believes no longer need to exist.
After stepping away from his business career, he began looking for a way to apply the skills that made him successful to a larger purpose: “I realized that you have to, to be successful in business, you have to think out of the box.”
Now, with his American Center for Cures, Weisbach is taking that vision to Washington with a plan he believes could fundamentally reshape the nation’s approach to diseases including cancer, Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, diabetes and ALS.
He argues that the country has the technology, accumulated research and artificial intelligence to make breakthroughs possible but needs a new system built around a clear mission and accountability. Weisbach’s motivation is deeply human: to turn his own experience of loss into the possibility of a different future for others.
Speaking to families facing devastating diagnoses, he says the goal is not just to help those suffering today, but to spare future generations from the same pain: “I don’t want to see my children live through that anymore.”