Timestamps:

3:52 - Breaking up and getting back together with McKinsey

9:36 - Gathering the Oviva team

12:01 - Certified dieticians vs nutritionists

16:52 - Working with health insurers

34:59 - Keeping in touch with your investors

About Kai Eberhardt:

Kai Eberhardt is the co-founder and CEO at Oviva, an app which provides personalized advice and individual support for targeted dietary changes. He holds a PhD in Physical Chemistry from ETH and previously worked for McKinsey and Groupon.

Kai left McKinsey to get a taste of the startup life at the rapidly growing Group, but ended up having a mixed experience. Due to its IPO goal, Groupon cultivated unsustainable company growth, which often came at the expense of employees and customers, and was, in Kai’s experience, a “ruthless” environment – which explains the crash they suffered right after going public. Kai nonetheless considers his time there a valuable personal growth opportunity.

In 2014 he founded Oviva together with co-founders Manuel and Mark, and the inspiration actually came from his past: during his time as a student, Kai suffered from cancer (which fortunately was treatable), and this motivated him to help people live healthier and happier lives. Kai and his co-founders saw that dieticians weren’t meeting often enough with their patients, and hypothesized that a much better way to reach these patients would be through their phone, which they already used for copious amounts of time anyway.

Oviva offers not only one-to-one nutritional assessment, advice and continual support, but also nutritional tracking, through pictures that patients take of their meals with their phones, and which dieticians review. Oviva employs these dieticians and tries their best to have users be reimbursed by their health insurance providers. They mainly acquire users through their doctors, and to both doctors and health insurers Oviva shows metrics like program completion, weight loss (when relevant), a calculation of the hospital visit reduction, and also how many patients were able to go off (expensive) medications by following their dietary protocol. This proves to doctors and insurers that Oviva saves hospitals their resources and insurers their money.

Memorable Quotes:

"I didn’t want to stay at McKinsey forever because there you never get to own anything you work on."

"Nowadays integrated medicine only happens in specialist clinics, despite the fact that obesity and type 2 diabetes are absolute epidemics."

If you would like to listen to more conversations on medtech apps, check out our episode with Bettina Hein.

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Raking In The Leaves/Sunday's Gospel