David Block was holding his newborn daughter in one arm when two thoughts collided. The first was the one nearly every new parent understands: This is the most precious thing I’ve ever seen and held.
The second changed the direction of his business—and, in some ways, his life.
“There are parents just like me holding daughters just like mine who are going to lose them to preventable things like malnutrition,” he remembers thinking.
At the time, David’s company, Previnex, was struggling. He had launched the nutritional supplement company in 2013, and by 2016, he wasn’t sure it would survive.
Then his daughter was born.
David began researching childhood malnutrition and learned that vitamin deficiencies contributed to the deaths of children around the world. Suddenly, something that had always been business became deeply personal.
“I felt God very strongly impress on me, ‘I’ve given you this business. I’ve given you this passion for health. I’ve given you this passion for children. I want you to think bigger about how you can serve me for my glory,’” David says.
Following God’s lead, he made a decision that didn’t make much financial sense: Previnex would develop a high-quality children’s vitamin and donate vitamins to malnourished children with every customer order.
To date, the company has donated more than 5 million servings of vitamins to children in 24 countries, working with World Vision as its distribution partner.
Where he is today is a long way from where David once thought his life was headed.
Raised in Southern California in a Jewish family, David attended Hebrew school. His Jewish heritage runs deep: both of his grandfathers were Jews living in Germany as World War II approached. One escaped before the Holocaust. The other survived a concentration camp and escaped twice as his parents and brother died in the gas chambers at Auschwitz.
David attended UCLA on a water polo scholarship and later earned a law degree from Pepperdine. He built a successful career in finance, becoming a senior vice president of equity research covering the health and wellness industry.
He moved to New York in his late 20s and achieved what he thought he wanted: running his own hedge fund. But he wasn’t content. “On paper, I should have been really happy,” he says, “but yet I was the most miserable I’d ever been.”
One night, he prayed a simple prayer: “God, if you exist, I’d love to be in relationship with you.” True to his analytical nature, David researched Christianity intensely, asking questions about Jesus, Scripture and the resurrection.
Then he walked into Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York, where Tim Keller was preaching. The sermon that day was about giving your life to Jesus. And the direction of David’s life began to change, as did his definition of success.
That change eventually led to the company he built around both health and impact. It also shaped the family he and his wife are building. His wife, a former NICU nurse, is now a full-time mom to their three children, ages 9, 4 and 2. Together, David says, they are “all in on kids”—their own and those they may never meet.
The Blocks’ journey also brought them somewhere neither expected: Indiana. David had visited Indianapolis since childhood because his uncle lived here. He remembers being struck by both Hoosier hospitality and the economic disparities he saw within a few miles of downtown.
Years later, after living in New York and New Jersey, he and his wife began praying about where their family belonged. A visit to her brother, who had relocated to Carmel, brought Indiana back into the picture. They eventually moved to Westfield, with Previnex headquartered in Carmel. David laughs when friends from the coasts ask how he likes Indianapolis. “This is the land of milk and honey,” he tells them.
It was also here that he found another thing he values deeply: community. Soon after arriving, David attended a Faith Driven Entrepreneur gathering where he began meeting other Christian business leaders. Those relationships eventually led him to Citizen 7.
What he found was more than another networking organization: He found men willing to go deeper.
David was part of one of Citizen 7’s early small-group pilots. Discovering a place where they could be vulnerable, several members continued meeting after the pilot ended. David believes men need relationships where they can be known, challenged and encouraged. He has experienced that kind of community in Citizen 7 and in a CEO group that has become what he calls a “brotherhood.”
“Don’t try to build something meaningful alone,” he says. “Find people who will challenge you, encourage you, and refuse to let you settle for less than who you’re capable of becoming.”
This is advice he hopes his children will understand someday, along with two other lessons he has learned from experience: don’t be afraid to fail, and don’t be afraid to walk by faith rather than sight.
David has done both.
He left a successful career and started a company that nearly failed. He followed a faith he once questioned. And he moved his family halfway across the country without knowing exactly what awaited them.
Then nearly a decade ago, when the future of his company looked especially uncertain, he held his firstborn daughter in his arms and saw beyond her to children he would never know.
That little girl will soon be 10 years old.
Someday, David hopes to take her—and eventually his other children—to see some of the communities receiving the vitamins she unknowingly helped inspire.
Perhaps then she will understand what her father has spent years learning himself: sometimes the clearest view of where your life is going comes when you cannot even begin to envision the path ahead.
You simply take the next step, walking by faith and not by sight.
Q & A
Hobbies: Playing piano and guitar, and athletics (watching, playing, and working out)
Core value: Creating
Recent bucket list trip: Skiing the Swiss and Italian Alps with friends
Favorite vacation spot: Santa Rosa Beach in Florida
A favorite local restaurant: Garden Table in Broad Ripple
Secret dreams: 1) Eliminate the problem of kids dying from vitamin deficiency; 2) Buying or building a business with each of my three children