Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots

Dominic Holt is CEO of harpoon, a drag-and-drop Kubernetes tool for deploying any software in seconds. Victoria talks to Dominic about commoditizing DevOps as a capability, coming up with the idea for drag and drop just thinking through how he could do these things in a visual and intuitive way, and using Kubernetes as a base for Harpoon. Harpoon Follow Harpoon on Facebook, or LinkedIn. Follow Dominic Holt on LinkedIn or Twitter. Follow thoughtbot on Twitter or LinkedIn. Become a Sponsor of Giant Robots! Transcript: VICTORIA: This is the Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots Podcast, where we explore the design, development, and business of great products. I'm your host, Victoria Guido. And with me today is Dominic Holt, CEO of harpoon, a drag-and-drop Kubernetes tool for deploying any software in seconds. Dominic, thank you for joining me. DOMINIC: Yeah, of course. Thanks for having me, Victoria. VICTORIA: Yes, I'm really excited to talk all about what Kubernetes is. And I have Joe Ferris, the CTO of thoughtbot, here with me as well to help me in that process. JOE: Hello. VICTORIA: Excellent. Okay, so, Dominic, why don't you just tell me how it all got started? What led you to start harpoon? DOMINIC: I got into the DevOps space fairly early. It was, I don't know, probably 2012 timeframe, which sounds like not that long ago. But, I mean, DevOps is also still a baby. So I have a software background. And I was starting to figure out how to do the continuous; I guess, automated way of standing up cloud infrastructure for Lockheed Martin at the time because people didn't know how to do that. There weren't a lot of tools available, and nobody knew what DevOps was. And if you said it to somebody, they would have slapped you. VICTORIA: Aggressive. [laughs] DOMINIC: [laughs] Maybe not, maybe not. Maybe they'd be nicer about it. But anyway, nobody knew what DevOps was because it wasn't coined yet. And I started realizing that this was not some system administration voodoo. It was just common sense from a software development standpoint. And I ended up leaving Lockheed shortly thereafter and going and working for a small business here in San Diego. And I said, I have no idea what any of this stuff is, but we're going to do it because, in a few years, everybody's going to be doing it because it's common sense. So we did. We grew quite a large practice in consulting and DevOps, among other things. And predominantly, I was working with the U.S. Navy at the time, and they needed a standardized way to deploy software to aircraft carriers and destroyers, the ships out there in the ocean. And so, I came up with a design for them that used Kubernetes. And we built a pipeline, a CI/CD pipeline, to automatically deploy software from the cloud to Navy ships out in the ocean on top of Kubernetes. And everything worked great. And it was there, and we tested it. But at the end of the day, handing over the maintenance, what we call day two ops, proved to be troubling. And it never quite made it onto the ships in the way that we wanted. So after that, I did a bunch of consulting with other groups in the Navy, and the Air Force, and Space Force, and all kinds of different groups across the government. And I also started consulting in commercial, fortune 500, startups, everything. And I just saw that this problem was really pervasive, handling the day two operations. You get everything up and running, but then maintaining it after that was just complicated for people because all of the DevOps implementations are snowflakes. So if you go from Company A to Company B, they look nothing alike. And they may have a lot to do with somebody named Jim or Frank or Bob and how they thought was the best way to do it. And so, running a DevOps consultancy myself, I just knew how hard it was to find the talent, and how expensive they were, and how hard it was to keep them because everyone else was trying to hire my talent all the time. And I just thought to myself, all of this is completely untenable. Somebody is going to commoditize DevOps as a capability. And what would that look like? VICTORIA: Right. I'm familiar with the demand for people who know how to build the infrastructure and systems for deploying and running software. [laughs] And I like how you first talked about DevOps, just it being common sense. And I remember feeling that way when I went to my first DevOps DC meetup. I was like, oh, this is how you're supposed to build teams and organizations in a way to run things efficiently and apply those principles from building software to managing your infrastructure. DOMINIC: Yeah. Well, I had lived the life of an enterprise software developer for quite a while before then. And I had gone through that whole process they talk about in all of DevOps bibles about why it is we're doing this, where the software development team would have their nice, fancy dev laptops. And the operations team with the pagers or whatever would be the ones managing the servers. And the software developers were never really sure exactly how it was going to work in production, but were like; I'm just going to throw it over the fence and see what the ops people do. And inevitably, the ops people would call us very angrily, and they would say, "Your software doesn't work." And then, of course, we would say that the ops people are all crazy because it works just fine here on my laptop, and they just don't know what they're doing. And, I mean, we would just fight back and forth about this for six months until somebody figured out that we were running the wrong version of some dependency in the software on the ops side, and that's why it didn't work. So that process is just crazy, and nobody in their right mind would want to go through it if they could avoid it. VICTORIA: Right. I'm sure Joe has had some stories from his time at thoughtbot. JOE: Yeah, certainly. I was interested by what you said about working with...I think it was Frank, and Ted, and Bob. I've definitely worked with all those people in their own snowflakes. And one of the things that drew me to Kubernetes is that it was an attempt to standardize at least some of the approaches or at least provide anchor points for things like how you might implement networking, and routing, and so on. I'm interested to hear, you know, for a drag-and-drop solution, even though Kubernetes was meant to standardize a lot of things, there are a lot of different Kubernetes distributions. And I think there are still a lot of Kubernetes snowflakes. I'm curious how you manage to tackle that problem with a drag-and-drop solution to hit the different Kubernetes distributions out there. DOMINIC: Yeah, I mean, I think you nailed it, Joe. Standing up Kubernetes is a little bit complicated still these days. It's been made a lot easier by a lot of different companies, and products, and open-source software, and things like that. And so I see a lot of people getting up basic Kubernetes clusters these days. But then you look at companies like ARMO that are doing compliance scans and security scans on Kubernetes clusters, and they're making the claim that 100% of the Kubernetes clusters they scan are non-compliant [laughs] and have security issues. And so that just goes to show you all of the things that one has to know to be successful just to stand up a cluster in the first place. And even when I...like for a client or something, over the years, if I was standing up a Kubernetes cluster and a lot of it was automated, you know, we used Terraform and Ansible, and all the other best practices under the hood. A lot of the response I got back when we handed over a cluster to a client was, "Okay, now what?" There are still a lot of things you have to learn to maintain that cluster, keep it up to date, upgrade the underlying components of the cluster, deploy the software, configure the software, all those things. And can you learn these things? Absolutely. Like, they're not rocket science, but they're complicated. And it is a commitment that you have to make as an individual if you're going to become proficient in all of these things and managing your own cluster. And so we were just...we had done this so many times at different companies I had worked with, for different clients, and seeing how all of the different pieces work together and where clients were having problems and what really hung people up. And so I just started thinking to myself, how would you make that easier? How would you make that more available to the pizza guy or an 18-year-old with no formal training that's on a ship in the ocean? And that's why I came up with the idea for drag and drop, just thinking through how can I do these things in a visual way that is going to be intuitive for people? VICTORIA: Well, I have, obviously, a very thorough understanding of Kubernetes, [laughs] just kidding. But maybe explain a little bit more about to a founder why should they invest in this type of approach when they're building products? DOMINIC: So I think that's a great question. What I find these days is DevOps is almost a requirement to do business these days in some sort of nimble way. So you have to...whether you're a large enterprise or you're a garage startup, you need to be able to change your software to market forces, to stuff that's happening in the news, to your customers don't like something. So you want to change it to something else quickly or pivot because if something happens, you can get your day in the sun, or you can capitalize on something that's happening. And so the difficulty is I think a lot of people have an impression that DevOps scripts are sort of like a build once and forget type of thing, and it'll just work thereafter. But it's actually software, and I like to think of software as living organisms. You have to take care of them like they're people, almost because if you don't, they'll become brittle and unhealthy over time. If you have a child, you have to feed them probably multiple times a day, brush their teeth. You got to tuck them in at night. You have to be nice to them. You have to do all the things that you would do with a child. But with software as well, if you just take the quick route, and quick fix things, and hack, and take shortcuts, eventually, you're going to have a very unhealthy child on your hands, and they're going to have behavior problems. At the end of the day, you have all these DevOps scripts, and they can be quite complex together. And you have to take care of them like they're your own child. And the problem is you're also taking care of your software products like it's your child. And so now you're taking care of two children. And as somebody that has two children, I can tell you that things become much more complicated when two children are having behavioral problems than just one. And you're at the store, and it's very embarrassing. So I guess the point is that harpoon is a capability that can basically take care of your second child for you, which is your DevOps deployments. And then you can just focus on the one child that you, I mean, this is turning into a terrible analogy at this point. [laughter] But you should love all of your children equally. But, in this case, you're looking to take care of your products and get it out there, and harpoon is something that can take care of your DevOps software for you. VICTORIA: I agree. I think when your software or children are problematic, it's more than just embarrassing sometimes. It can create a lot of financial and legal liability as well. From your research, when you're building this product and, like, who's going to be interested in buying this thing, is that something that people are concerned about? DOMINIC: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, the fact that we can stand up your cluster for you, stand up all of your cloud infrastructure for you, and then dynamically generate all of the configuration as code as well, and how to open those things securely up to the network and control everything such that you're not going to accidentally do something that's really bad, can definitely help out a lot of people. The interest has been really overwhelming from so many different groups and organizations. We have people that are interested in the Department of Defense in both the U.S. and other countries. We have fortune 500 companies that see this as a pathway to accelerate digital transformation for legacy applications or even to use it as a sandbox, so people aren't bugging Frank, and Joe, and Bob, who run the Kubernetes clusters in production. We have startups who see it just as a way to skip over the whole DevOps thing and work on getting a product-market fit so that they have a production environment that just works out of the box. So it's been really interesting seeing all the different use cases people are using harpoon for and how it's helped them in some way get to some and realize some goal that they have. JOE: I'm curious if it's been a challenge as somebody managing the underlying infrastructure as sort of a plug-and-play thing. One experience I've had working more on the operations side of DevOps is that everything becomes your problem. Like, if the server misbehaves, if there's a database crash, whatever, certainly, that's your problem. But also, if the application is murdering your database, that becomes your problem. And it's really an application problem. But it surfaces visibly in the infrastructure when the CPU spikes and it stops responding to requests. And so, how do you navigate that agreement with your users? How do you balance what's your responsibility versus theirs to not kill the cluster? DOMINIC: One thing that's great about Kubernetes and why it's a great base for our product is that Kubernetes is really good at keeping things running. Certainly, there are catastrophic things that can happen, like an entire region of EC2 and Amazon Web Services goes down. And that is, obviously, if you have your clusters only running in that particular region, you're going to have a bad day. So there are things beyond our control. I mean, those things are also covered by the service-level agreement, the SLA with AWS, since you're using your own AWS account when you're utilizing harpoon. So it's like a hybrid SaaS where we deploy everything into your account, and you own it. And you can adjust those infrastructure things on your own as you'd like. So from that standpoint, you're kind of covered with your agreement with AWS as an example of a cloud service provider. And certainly, Kubernetes also kind of knows what to do in some of those instances where you have a container that is murdering everything. In a lot of cases, it can be configured to, you know, just die or go into a CrashLoopBackOff or something if it's just taking up all your resources in the cluster versus destroying your entire cluster in a great fireworks display. So we put some of those protections into the platform as well. But yeah, to your point, being an ops person is a difficult job because we're usually the ones [laughs] that get blamed for everything when something bad happens, even though sometimes it's the software team's fault or sometimes it's even just the infrastructure you're built on. Occasionally, AWS services and Google Cloud and Azure services do go down, and things happen. We've had instances, even during harpoon development, where we're testing harpoon late at night on AWS, and sometimes AWS does wonky things at night that people don't realize. It's not completely perfect capability. And we're like, oh, why does it only happen at 11:58 on Tuesdays? Oh, because AWS updates their servers during that time, and it slows down everything. It's still good to understand all the underlying components and how they work, and that could certainly help you regardless of if you use harpoon or not. But ultimately, we're just trying to make it easier for people. They can spend less time focusing on those things. We can help them with a lot of those problems that might occur, and they can focus on their software. VICTORIA: Great. I think that's...it's interesting to me to always hear about all the different challenges in managing operations of software. So I like that you're working on this space. It's clearly a space that needs more innovation, you know, we're working on it here at thoughtbot as well. Has there been anything in your, like, any theory that you had going into your initial research that when you talked to customers surprised you and caused you to change your direction? DOMINIC: Yeah. I mean, we run the gamut there. So we did a lot of early customer discovery to try to figure out who might be interested in this product. And so, our first thought was that startups would be the most interested in this product because they're building something new. They just want to get it out there. They want to build their MVP, and they just want to throw it on the internet and get it rolling and not have to worry about whether the software is up and down while they're doing a bunch of sales calls. Because really, during the MVP phase, if you're doing lean startup-style company development, then you really just want to be selling. You want to always be selling. And so we thought it would just be a no-brainer for startups. And we talked to a lot of startups, and some startups for sure thought it was valuable. But a lot of them were like, "Yeah, that's cool, but we don't care about DevOps. [chuckles] We don't care about anything. Like, I'll run it on my laptop if I have to. The only thing I care about is finding product-market fit and getting that first sale." And so, at least as far as the very first customers that we were looking for, they weren't the best fit. And then we went and talked to a bunch of mid-market companies because we just decided to go up to the next logical level. And so mid-market companies were very interested because a lot of them were starting to eyeball Kubernetes and maybe sort of migrate some of their capabilities over there. Maybe they had a little bit of ability to be a bit nimble, in that sense, versus some of the enterprise customers. And so they were very interested in it. But a lot of them were very risk averse, like, go find a bunch of enterprise customers that will buy it, and then we'll buy it. And so then we went to talk to the enterprise customers. And that was sort of like an eye-opening time for us because the enterprise customers just got it. They were like, "Yeah, I'm trying to migrate legacy capabilities we built 10 or 15 years ago to the cloud. We're trying to containerize everything and refactor our existing software. I got to redesign the user interface that was built ten years ago." And if somebody's got a DevOps easy button, then sign me up. I would like to participate because I can't spell Kubernetes yet, but I definitely know what it is, and I want to use it. So working with the enterprise customers was really great for us because it showed us what the appetite was in the market and who was going to immediately benefit from it. And then, ultimately, that rolls down to the mid-market companies. And maybe later-stage startups as well are starting to find a lot of value in the platform from, you know, have maybe started finding some product-market fit and care a little bit about whether people can access my software and it's maintainable and available. And so we can definitely help with that. VICTORIA: That's super interesting, and it aligns with my experience as well, coming from consulting companies and the federal government who are working on digital services, and DevOps, and agile, and all of those transformational activities. And so it's been five years, it looks like since you started harpoon. What advice would you give to yourself if you could travel back in time when you were first starting the project? DOMINIC: So I made lots of mistakes along the way. I'll inevitably make more. But when I first started building this thing, I wasn't even sure how it was going to work. Kubernetes can be a bit of a fickle beast, and it wasn't really built to have a drag-and-drop UI on top of it. And so there are lots of things that could go wrong, trust me, [laughs] I learned them. But building an initial prototype, like, the very base of can the capability work at all, came together pretty quickly. It was maybe three or four months of development during my nights and weekends. And building an enterprise scalable product took quite a bit longer. But once I had an initial capability, I was very excited because, again, I didn't even know if this was possible, certainly not five or six years ago. So I didn't even really want to raise a round or make money. I do know how venture capital works. So it wasn't even my expectation that people would want to give me money because all I had was an MVP and no product-market fit. And I had just thrown it together in three or four months. But I was just excited about it. I'm a software developer at heart, and technology excites me. And solving problems is kind of what gets me up in the morning. So I just called all the people I knew, a bunch of VCs, other people, and they're like, "Yeah, I would like to see that. Let's set up a time." And so I think maybe they interpreted that as, like, I want to do a pitch to you for money. [laughs] And I just proceeded to go to, like, this dog and pony show of showing a bunch of people this thing I built, and I thought they would just understand it and get what I was doing. And I just proceeded to get my ass handed to me over and over and over again. Like, "This isn't that great of a product. How much money are you making?" Blah, blah, blah, blah. I'm like, "No, no, you don't get it. I just started. It's just a prototype at this stage. It's not even a finished product." And they're like, "Well, you're definitely going to fail. [laughter] You're wasting your time. What are you even doing here?" And so that was...I like to think that I have thick skin, but that's hard to hear as an entrepreneur; just people don't get your vision. They don't understand what it is you're building and why it's going to be valuable to people. And it could be a long time before you get to a point where people can even understand what it is you're doing, and you just have to sort of stay the course and, I mean, I did. I went around on some rock somewhere and hung out in a tent on an island for a while. I just kept going. And you just got to pour all your heart and soul, and effort into building a product if you want to make it exist out there in the world. And a lot of people are not going to get it, but as long as you believe in it and you keep pushing, then maybe someday they will get it. For the first year after we had a working enterprise-grade product, we kind of did a soft launch. And we had a small set of customers. We had 8 to 10 people that were sort of testing it out and using it, things like that. We kind of went, you know, more gangbusters launch at the end of last year, and it was crazy. And then...what? I don't know, maybe 60 days since we did a more serious launch. And we have gone from our ten soft users to 2,000 users. VICTORIA: Wow. Well, that's great growth. And it sounds exciting that you have your team in place now. You're able to set yourself up for growth. Mid-Roll Ad: Are your engineers spending too much time on DevOps and maintenance issues when you need them on new features? We know maintaining your own servers can be costly and that it’s easy for spending creep to sneak in when your team isn’t looking. By delegating server management, maintenance, and security to thoughtbot and our network of service partners, you can get 24x7 support from our team of experts, all for less than the cost of one in-house engineer. Save time and money with our DevOps and Maintenance service. Find out more at: url tbot.io/devops VICTORIA: So now that you're getting more established, you're getting more customers, you have a team supporting you on the project; what parts of the DevOps culture do you feel like are really important to making a team that will continue to grow? DOMINIC: I've been an individual contributor for a long period of time. I was a first-level manager and managed people. At a very granular personal level, I've been a director, and a VP, and a CTO at a bunch of different places. And so all of those different roles and different companies that I've worked at have taught me a lot about people, and teams, and culture, and certainly about hiring. I think hiring is the absolute most important thing you can do in a company, and definitively in a software company. Because there are just certain people that are going to mesh well with your culture, and the people that do and that are driven and passionate about what they do, they're just going to drive your company forward. And so I just spend a lot of my time when we need to grow as a company, which happens here and there, really focusing on who is going to be the best next person to bring on to the company. And usually, I'm thinking about this far in advance because whenever we do need that person, I don't want to have to start thinking about it. I want to just know, like, it is Frank, it is Bob, it is Jamey, or Alex, or whoever else. Because it is...at a personal level, there has to be people who are very aligned with your visions, and your values, and your culture, and they care and are going to push the company forward. And if you're just hiring people with a quick coding interview and a 30-minute culture fit session, you're going to make a lot of hiring mistakes. You're going to find people who are just looking for a nine-to-five or things like that, and, I mean, there's nothing wrong with that. But in a startup especially, you really need people who buy into the vision and who are going to push the thing forward. And I'm looking for people who just care, like; they have an ownership mentality. Maybe in a different lifetime or a different part of their career, they'd be an entrepreneur at their own company. But you just give them stuff, and they're like, cool, this is mine. I'm going to take care of this. It's now my child. I will make sure that it grows up and it is healthy and goes to a good university. Those are the type of people that you want in your company, people that you would trust with your children. So those are the criteria for working at harpoon, I guess. VICTORIA: Yeah, that's good. So what does success look like in the next six months or even beyond the next five years? DOMINIC: I think it's still very early market for us. Certainly, we have an explosive growth of users using the platform, and that's really heartening to see. That's really awesome that people want to use the thing that you built. But again, there are so many companies out there and organizations that are still not even doing DevOps. They're just doing manual deployments, maintaining clusters manually, not using containers or Kubernetes. Not to say that you have to use these things and that they're a panacea, and they work in every sense because they don't. But obviously, there's been a major shift in the industry towards containers and container orchestration like Kubernetes. Even some of the serverless platforms that people like to use are actually backed by Kubernetes, so you see a major shift in that direction. But there are still so many different companies and organizations that, again, are still locked into legacy ways of doing things and manually doing things. There are companies that are trying to get their products off the ground, and they're looking for faster and easier, and cheaper ways to do that. And I think that's what's really exciting about harpoon is we can help these companies. We can help them be more successful. We can help them migrate to things that are more modern and agile. We can help them get their product off the ground faster or more reliably. And so that's kind of what excites me. But you know what? We do a lot of demos, you know, sales demos and things like that. And, really, we don't have PowerPoints. We're just like, cool, this is the app, and this is how you use it. And it is so simplistic to use, even though Kubernetes is quite complicated, that the demo goes pretty quick. We're talking five, six minutes if there are not a lot of questions. And we always get exactly the same response, whether somebody is not super familiar with Kubernetes or they are familiar with Kubernetes, and they've set up their own cluster. It's almost always, "Wow," and then a pause, and then "But how do I know it works?" [laughs] So there's going be a lot of work for us in educating people out there that there is an easier way to do DevOps now, that you can do drag and drop DevOps and dynamically generate all of your scripts and configuration, and open up networks, and deploy load balancers, and all the other things that you would need to do with Kubernetes, literally in a few minutes just dragging and dropping things. So there's going to be a lot of education that just goes into saying, "Hey, there's a new market, and this is what it is. And this is how it compares to the manual processes people are using out there. Here's how it compares to some of the other tools that are more incremental in nature." And trust, you know, over time, people are going to have to use the platform and see that it works and talk to other people and be like, yeah, I deployed my software on harpoon, and nothing terrible happened. Demons didn't come out of the walls, and my software kept running, and no meteors crashed in my house. So it's just going to take some time for us to really grow and build the education around that market to show that it's possible and that it exists, and it can be an option for you. VICTORIA: Right. I used to do a lot of intro to DevOps talks with Women Who Code and DevOps DC. And I would describe Kubernetes as a way to keep your kubes neat, and your kube is where your software lives. It's a little house that keeps the doors locked and things like that. Do you have another way to kind of explain what is Kubernetes? Like, how do you kind of even just get people started on what DevOps is? DOMINIC: I like to usually use the cattle story. [laughs] So, in DevOps, they have these concepts of immutable infrastructure or immutable architecture. And so when you have virtual machines, which is what people have been running on for quite a while, certainly some people still run on bare metal servers, but pretty much everybody's got on board with virtualization at this point, and so most software these days is at least running on virtual machines. And so the difficulty with virtual machines is, I mean, there's nothing wrong with them, but they're kind of like pets. They exist for long periods of time. They have what we call state drift, and that's just the changing of the data or the state of the virtual machine over time. And even if I were to kill off that virtual machine and start another one, it wouldn't be exactly the same one. It wouldn't be, you know, fluffy. It would be a clone of fluffy. And maybe it wouldn't have the same personality, and it wouldn't do exactly the same things. And sometimes that might be good; maybe fluffy was a terrible dog. But in other cases, you're like, oh crap, I needed that snowflake feature that Bob built three years ago. And Bob has been hit by a train, so people can't ask Bob anymore. And so what then really happens at these organizations is when the virtual machines start acting up, they don't kill them. They take them to the vet. They take care of them. They pet them. They tell them they're a good boy. And you have entire enterprises that are super dependent on these virtual machines staying alive. And so that's no way to run your business. And so that's one of the reasons why people started switching over to containers because the best practices in containers is to build software that's immutable. So if you destroy or kill one of your containers, you can start another one. And it should work exactly the same as before, and that's because when you build your containers, you can't change them unless you rebuild them. I mean, there are ways to do it, but people will wave their finger angrily at you if you try to do that because it's not a best practice. So, at the end of the day, virtual machines are pets, and the containers are cattle. And when containers start acting up, you kill them. And you take them to the meat factory, and you go get another one. And so this provides a ton of value from a software development and an ops perspective because anytime you have a problem, you just kill your containers, start new ones, and you're off to the races again. And it significantly reduces the troubleshooting time when you're having problems. Obviously, you probably want to log things and check into things; why did that happen? So that maybe you can go make a fix in your software. But at the end of the day, you want to keep your ops running. Containers are a great way to do that without having to be up at midnight figuring out why the virtual machine is acting up. And so the difficulty with cattle is they like to graze and wander and break through fences and things like that. And mostly, when you have an enterprise software application or even just a startup with an MVP, you probably have multiple containers that you need to run and build this application. And so you need somebody to orchestrate. You need somebody to wrangle your containers. And so Kubernetes, I like to say, is like cowboys. Like, they're the ones that wrangle your cattle and make sure they're all going in the right direction and doing the right things. And so it just makes natural sense. Like, if you have a bunch of cattle, you need somebody to take care of them, so that's what Kubernetes does. JOE: Yeah, just to add to that, one of the things I really like about Kubernetes is that it's declarative versus prescriptive. So if you look at a lot of the older DevOps tools like Chef, things like that, you're effectively telling the machine what you want it to do to end up with a particular deployment. With containers, you'd say, start this number of containers on this node. Start this number of containers on this node. Add a virtual machine with these. Whereas with Kubernetes, you state the way you would like the world to be, and then Kubernetes' job is to make the world like that. So from a developer's perspective, when they're deploying things, they don't actually usually want to think in terms of the steps involved between I push this code, and somebody can use it. What they want us to say is I want this code running in containers, and I would like it to have this configuration. I would like it to have these ports exposed. And I love that Kubernetes, to a pretty good extent, abstracts away all of those steps and just lets you say what you want. DOMINIC: Yeah, that's a lot of the power in Kubernetes. You just say, "This is what I want, and then make it so." And Kubernetes goes out and figures out where it's going to schedule your container on what node or server if it dies. Kubernetes is like; I'm pretty sure you wanted one of those running, so I'm going to run it again. It just handles a lot of those things for you that previously you would need somebody with a pager to call to fix. And Kubernetes is automating a lot of that deployment and maintenance for you. VICTORIA: Right. And it seems like there's the movement to really coalesce around Kubernetes. I wonder if either of you can speak to the healthiness of the ecosystem for Kubernetes, which is open source, and why you chose to build on it. DOMINIC: So there was sort of a bit of a container orchestration war for a while. There was a bunch of different options. And I'm not saying that a lot of them weren't good options. Like, Docker built a capability called Swarm, and it's fairly simple to use and pretty powerful. But there was just a lot of backing from the open-source community behind Kubernetes when Google made it an open-source project. There were other things sort of like Kubernetes but not really like Mesos. And they all had like this huge bloodbath to see who was going to be the winner. And I just feel like Kubernetes kind of pulled ahead. It was a really smart move from Google to make it open-source and get the open-source community's buy-in to use. And it just became a very powerful but complex tool for running your software in production. Google had been using some form of that called Google Borg for a number of years prior. And I'm guessing they're still quite a bit different. But that's how it kind of came about. Do you have anything to add, Joe? JOE: I'd say that I judge the winner or the health of an ecosystem by the health of the off-the-shelf and open-source software that can run on that system. So Kubernetes is a thing that you use yourself. You build things to run on it. But also, you can pick and choose many things from the community that people have already built. And there is a huge open-source community for components that run on Kubernetes, everything from CI/CD to managing databases to doing interesting deployment styles like canary deployments. That's really healthy. It just didn't happen with the other systems like Swarm or Nomad was another one. And most of the other companies that I saw doing container orchestration eventually just changed to doing their flavor of Kubernetes, like Rancher. I forget what their original platform was called. But their whole thing was based on that cattle metaphor. [chuckles] And they took a pretty similar approach to containers. And now, if you ask somebody what Rancher is, they'll tell you it's a managed Kubernetes platform. DOMINIC: Yeah, I think it's called Longhorn, so they very much have the cattle theme in there. I mean, they're literally called Rancher, so there you go. But yeah, at the end of the day, something is going to come after Kubernetes as well. And I like to think that it's not so much a matter of what's going to be next? Is there going to be something beyond containers or container orchestrators like Kubernetes? I just think there are going to be more and more layers of abstraction because, at the end of the day, look at the advent of things like ChatGPT and generative AI. People just want to get their jobs done more efficiently and faster. And in software, there's just a lot of time and money that goes into getting software running and keeping it running, and that's why Kubernetes makes sense. But then there's also a lot of time that goes into Kubernetes. And so we think that harpoon is just sort of the natural next layer of abstraction that's going to live on as the next thing. So if 15 years ago I told you I was going to build a web application and I was going to go run it in the cloud, maybe you would have said, "You're crazy, Dom. Like, how could you trust this guy, Jeff, with all your software? What if he is going to steal it? And what if he can't run a data center? What then?" And now, if I told you I was going to go build a data center because I want to build a web application, you would look at me like I was a pariah and that I was not fit to run a company and that I should just use the cloud. So I think it's the same process. We're going to go with containers and Kubernetes. And software deployment, in general, is going to be an abstraction layer that lives on top of all that because software developers and companies just want to push out good software to end users. And any sort of way to make that more efficient or more fun is going to be embraced eventually. JOE: Yeah, I agree with that. I hear people ask, "What are you going to do when Kubernetes is obsolete?" pretty often. And I think it's achieved enough momentum that it won't be. I think it'll be what else is built on top of Kubernetes? Like, people talk about servers like they're obsolete, but they're not; there are still servers. People are just running virtual machines on them. And virtual machines are not obsolete. We'll just run containers on them. So once we get beyond the layer of worrying about containers, you'll still need a container platform. And based on the momentum it's achieved, I think that platform is going to be Kubernetes. VICTORIA: Technology never dies. You just get more different types of technology. [laughs] Usually, that's my philosophy on that. DOMINIC: Yeah, I mean, there's never been a better time to be a software developer, especially if you're an entrepreneur at the same time, because that's what happens over time. Like, what we're achieving with web applications today and what you can push out to the internet and kind of judge if there's a market for would have been unimaginable 20 years ago because, again, you would have had to build a data center. [laughs] And who has a bunch of tens of millions of dollars sitting around to do that? So now you can just use existing software from other people and glue it together. And you can use the cloud and deploy your software and get it out to the masses and scale it. And it's an amazing time to be alive and to be building things for people. VICTORIA: Right. And you mentioned a few things like artificial intelligence before, and there are a lot of people innovating in that space, which requires a lot of data, and networking, and security, and other types of things that you want to think about if you're trying to invent that kind of product. Which brings me to a question I have around, you know when you're adding that abstraction layer to these Kubernetes clusters, how does that factor into security compliance frameworks? And does that even come up with the customers who want to use your product? DOMINIC: Yeah. I mean, definitely, people are concerned about security. When we do infrastructure as code for your virtual infrastructure that's running your Kubernetes cluster that we deploy for you, certainly, we're using best practices from a security standpoint. We do all the same things. If we're building out custom scripts for some clients somewhere, we'd want it to be secure. And we want to lock down different aspects of components that we're building and not just expose all the ports on maybe a load balancer and things like that. So by default, we try to build in as much security as we can. It's pragmatic. I think ultimately we'll probably go down to the path of SOC 2 compliance, and then anything that goes on top of a harpoon cluster or that is deployed with harpoon will be SOC 2 compliant to a large degree. And so yeah, I mean, security is definitely a part of it. We're currently building in a lot of other security features, too, like role-based access control and zero trust, which we'll have pretty soon here. So, yeah, if you want to build your software and get it deployed, you want it to be scalable, and you also want it to be secure. There are so many ilities that come into deploying software. But to your point, even on the artificial intelligence side, people are looking for easier ways to abstract away the complexity. Like, if I told you to go write me a blog post with either ChatGPT or go build your own generative AI model and use that, then you're probably going to be like, yeah, I'll just go to the OpenAI website. I'll be back in a minute. And that's why also you see things like SageMaker from AWS. People want abstraction layers. They want easier ways to do things. And it's not just in DevOps; it's in artificial intelligence and machine learning. That's why drag-and-drop editors are becoming more popular in building web applications mobile applications. I think all of this software development stuff is going to be really accessible to a much larger community in the near future. VICTORIA: Yeah, wonderful. That's great. And so, Dominic, any final takeaways for our listeners today? DOMINIC: Definitely, if you have interest in how either harpoon or Kubernetes, in general, might be applicable to you and your company, we're a bunch of friendly people over here. Even if you're not quite sure how to get started or you need advice on stuff, definitely go hit us up on our website or hit up support at harpoon.io, and send us a message. We're very open to helping people because, again, what we're really trying to do is make this more accessible to more people and make more people successful with this technology. So if we have to get on a bunch of phone calls or come sit next to you or do whatever else, we're here to be a resource to the community, and harpoon is for you to get started. So don't feel like you need a bunch of money to get started deploying with Kubernetes and using the platform. VICTORIA: That's a great note to end on. So you can subscribe to the show and find notes along with a complete transcript for this episode at giantrobots.fm. If you have questions or comments, email us at hosts@giantrobots.fm. And you can find me on Twitter @victori_ousg. This podcast is brought to you by thoughtbot and produced and edited by Mandy Moore. Thank you for listening. See you next time. ANNOUNCER: This podcast is brought to you by thoughtbot, your expert strategy, design, development, and product management partner. We bring digital products from idea to success and teach you how because we care. Learn more at thoughtbot.com.Special Guest: Dominic Holt.Sponsored By:thoughtbot: Are your engineers spending too much time on DevOps and maintenance issues when you need them on new features? We know maintaining your own servers can be costly and that it’s easy for spending creep to sneak in when your team isn’t looking. 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Jennifer Goldsack is CEO of Digital Medicine Society (DiMe), the professional home for digital medicine. It is a global nonprofit with a mission to advance the ethical, effective, equitable, and safe use of digital technology to redefine healthcare and improve lives. Victoria talks to Jennifer about using new products and solutions to solve some of the most pressing and persistent challenges in healthcare, measuring success by how well they are caring for people every day and not by how good their products or how many they use on any given day, and how DiME can improve the way that we identify, manage, cure, and support people in a lifetime journey of health and disease. Digital Medicine Society (DiMe) Follow Digital Medicine Society (DiMe) on LinkedIn or Twitter. Follow Jennifer Goldsack on LinkedIn. Follow thoughtbot on Twitter or LinkedIn. Become a Sponsor of Giant Robots! Transcript: VICTORIA: This is the Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots Podcast, where we explore the design, development, and business of great products. I'm your host, Victoria Guido. And with me today is Jennifer Goldsack, CEO of Digital Medicine Society, the professional home for digital medicine. Jennifer, thank you for joining me. JENNIFER: Thank you so much for having me; excited for our conversation today. VICTORIA: Wonderful, me too. And we have our Program Manager for DEI Geronda with us today. Hello. GERONDA: Hey, how's it going? I'm super excited to be on here as well. VICTORIA: Yes, me too. It's going to be a great conversation. So, Jennifer, why don't you just tell me a little bit more about the Digital Medicine Society? JENNIFER: Happy to, one of my favorite topics, Victoria. So the Digital Medicine Society, or as we affectionately refer to it as DiMe, is a global nonprofit, and our mission is to advance the ethical, effective, equitable, and safe use of digital technology to redefine healthcare and improve lives. And I think one point I'd like to make right off the bat is while we are tech and digital enthusiasts here at DiMe, we are not tech determinists. What we think about is how can we harness the promise of these new digital tools in the toolbox, these new products, these new solutions, and how can we use them to solve some of the most pressing and persistent challenges in healthcare, an industry that exists to care for people? That's what we think about all day. That's our measure of success: how well are we caring for people every day, not how good are our products or how many products can we use on any given day. VICTORIA: Right. So what did you see in the digital health space that led you to believe that something like DiMe needed to exist in the world? JENNIFER: So it's interesting. When we take a step back and think about all the experts that need to be at the table to ensure that we build a field of digital health that is worthy of our trust, in our opinion here at DiMe, we think this is the most interdisciplinary field you can imagine, and that's a bold claim. But let me play it out for you. And maybe we can think about some other interdisciplinary fields during the course of our discussion. For digital medicine to work, we need citizen scientists and cyber security experts. We need physicists, engineers, product folks, data scientists, clinical scientists, clinical care providers, healthcare executives, regulators, payors, investors, funders all to sit at the table together, all to speak a common unifying language, all to have a shared idea of what our North Star is. What are we trying to do here as we digitize healthcare, and what does good look like and for whom as we do it? And so that's the gap that the Digital Medicine Society was introduced to fill. That water cooler, if you like, where the leaders in our field can share their expertise and where we can very intentionally build a much better future for healthcare using the new digital tools in our toolbox. VICTORIA: Interesting. And I like how you pointed out for whom. [laughs] And I see digital equity is a big topic that you're focused on with the organization. Can you tell me a little bit more about that? JENNIFER: I'm happy to, and in our opinion here at DiMe, equity has to be front and center of everything we do. I think too many times we look across and considerations around diversity, equity, and inclusion; they're part of a rubric. They're a vertical. That's not what we think here at DiMe. We have to think about diversity, equity, and inclusion in everything that we do as we work to digitize healthcare. We know that there are pressing, persistent, and absolutely inexcusable inequities that exist across the burden of disease, across access to care, across the quality of care you're able to access, the care that you can afford. We know that all of those things introduce a long-standing history of inequities in health and healthcare. As we digitize the healthcare industry, it's unacceptable for us just to be thinking about, hey, as long as we don't make things worse, that's not acceptable to us. We are thinking at every turn about how can we improve the way that we identify disease, the way that we manage disease, the way we cure disease, the way that we support people in a lifetime journey of health and disease? And how can we make sure that we do that for everyone in a way we've never been able to before? So while I could talk about some of the projects that we've done that exclusively focus on advancing health equity through the use of digital tools, it's actually something we keep front and center in everything we do, in everything we talk about here at DiMe and something that we try and compel every single person in the field to think about to make sure that we seize this opportunity. GERONDA: I think that's fantastic. And something that you hit on that it's really important for us at thoughtbot is continuous improvement. And that intentionality is incredibly important when it comes to DEI efforts. And so one thing that we do have at thoughtbot is we have trainings, and we try to work toward a shared language. But we do understand that everyone is at a different point in a different journey towards DEI to be able to build and design the best products and provide businesses to our clientele. So I'd love to hear more about how your organization does consider that continuous improvement for all employees across the organization in terms of ensuring that you're enforcing shared language across the organization to be able to continue to have really great care for your people. JENNIFER: Geronda, I love this. And I think that you've touched on something that's really important, which is while we can be collectively frustrated, perhaps even angry, about the health inequity that we see on a daily basis and that we frankly have not addressed as an industry for decades and decades...and quite frankly, I think we should be frustrated; we should be angry. Not taking the time to meet people where they are as they make a commitment to designing, developing, and thinking about the business incentives that they need in order to do this work well and to be intentional is actually incredibly counterproductive. So we always start with that shared language. When we talk about inclusion in digital health, we need to not just think about all of the different vectors of inclusion and domains of diversity that we've developed as a healthcare industry, but we need to think about those vectors and domains at the intersection between healthcare and digital. And if we do nothing else beyond educate the field on what those domains and vectors are so they can be intentional, is they think about, gosh, what's the healthcare problem I want to solve for, for whom? How do I need to consider the needs of our intended users as I do that? That in and of itself is going to take us so much further than we are today. But I'd also love to learn from you guys. I love the three-part way you describe your work, that you think about designing, and then developing, and then getting the business of great product development right. How do you guys think about it? I'd love to be able to learn from you too. VICTORIA: One thing I know, speaking specifically to the intentionality that you mentioned, so if you're building an AI product and you're not intentionally thinking about DEI, you can actually build bias and problems into the code itself. So for us, and, Geronda, I want to hear your perspective here too, consulting with experts in the field, especially in DEI early and making a culture where we do have a program manager of DEI. So I've really pinged Geronda several times already this year about, like, I have this question about this. And I think having access to an expert and having access to knowledge that you should go back and check yourself is part of it. But do you have anything you want to add there, Geronda? GERONDA: I definitely agree with everything that you had said, Victoria. And also what I'll add too is that it is really thinking about in everything that we do, how do we bring DEI at the forefront? And recognizing, as I mentioned before, that everyone's in a different place. So it's not to say that if you mess up or if you didn't consider something that, you can't continuously improve. And we have this culture where I'm not going to come in as the DEI police to say, "How come you didn't consider that?" Or "Why didn't you think of that earlier?" It's more to say, "Oh, okay, well, here's how we can approach this differently." And everyone's pretty open to the feedback and the learning. And so one example that I'll give is that our website, thoughtbot.com, we're right now working towards accessibility for our website so that we can offer it more to those with disabilities, or those that are visually impaired, or hard of hearing, and offer it to be more accessible for anyone who goes to our website. And it's a learning curve for quite a few of our folks. But the learning library that's offered in there to say, okay, I may not know everything about how things impact those that may be visually impaired, but let me educate and help to develop this website in a way that's going to support them. So to Victoria's point, it's infusing DEI in every way that we can. And what I love as well is that we do have a DEI Council, and we do have a shared platform to bring about issues or have those discussions and ask the questions so that you can continuously improve yourself to make sure that you're developing and infusing DEI across the work that you do. So great question and I really feel like it's, of course, a work in progress. But we're in a really good place where we can continue to have that continuous improvement through education, and learning, and feedback to correct ourselves. VICTORIA: Yeah, I love that. I think that having the culture at least puts you in a good starting place. [laughs] I'd love to hear more about what projects you've worked on in that space, specifically, Jennifer. JENNIFER: So, first of all, I love how you talk about this idea of you need to have a culture in place that allows us to assess opportunities, that allows us to identify the kind of work we need to do based on where we are today. And then once we've assessed those opportunities, once we've identified potential pathways, we actually then have the support and the right environment to be able to implement these best practices. And there are two things that I'd love to highlight. The first is actually education resources and specifically education resources on applied digital health ethics. I think creating this culture of ethics which is absolutely inextricable from a culture of equity, is critically important. You need to have those folks on staff just like you guys do. You need to be able to go to potential end users and communities and have line items in your budget to reimburse them for their time and their expertise. You need to be able to have goals and performance metrics that actually reflect the success you're having or where you're struggling when we think about building a more inclusive environment. So that's a lot of what we try and fuel through our applied digital health ethics education. That's something that's a direct-to-learner option for folks; we're very proud of. We've had fantastic reviews and testimonials. We had tremendous faculty help us with that curriculum, and it's been really well received. And we are confident in the change that that education resource is driving in the field. The second is actually a suite of resources that we launched more recently, and this is where I can start to get really tangible. So as an organization, we convened a broad and diverse group of experts to really tackle the issue of diversity, equity, and inclusion in digitized clinical trials. And I use action-oriented words like tackle very intentionally. Unfortunately, what we see an awful lot of the time is people admiring the problem, for want of a better expression, that we'll see endless panels at conferences and op-eds, and these sorts of things being written about the current state. But what we were determined to do is own the fact that there is nothing technically prohibiting us today from deploying these digital tools and resources in the service of advancing diversity, equity, and inclusion while simultaneously addressing some of the long-standing clinical issues, while simultaneously addressing some of the regulatory science issues, while promoting access, while making sure we generate better data for better clinical decision making. This is not an either-or. This is not a trade-off. We are not limited by the technology; we are powered by the technology. It requires our intent and our commitment to actually doing this work. So I'm going to pause there to see if Geronda or Victoria you have questions on any of that. And then I can certainly go into more detail about those tools if that's interesting. GERONDA: It's super interesting. And I do have a question. But I'll kind of recap and understand that by having those different broadened expertise, you're having multiple people come together with this expertise so that you can ensure you're providing the best data to help you make those equitable decisions. Does that sound about right? JENNIFER: That's exactly right. I think that as fantastic and expert as our team are, we are merely representative of a broader community that is doing this excellent work out every single day, trying to improve the way we care for people, representing different communities, building tools. And unless we bring not only those innovators from different backgrounds to the table but also representatives of the communities we're actually working hard to serve to the table, our efforts will be inadequate. And that's why we're so committed to this multidisciplinary, pre-competitive, and collaborative work as we build our tools and resources here at DiMe. GERONDA: Yeah, and that's amazing. The question that I have for you, the follow-up question to that, is we try to look across...our company is global. We do have employees in many different countries across the globe. So trying to ensure that we have an understanding of the needs on a global scale can sometimes be challenging. Can you speak more to this multidisciplinary broadened expertise and how they might bring in perspective that can help shape your technologies or even clinical trial project in a way that supports different ethnicities across the globe and how they identify and even intersectionality of folks as well, so not just race but also LGBTQ or other races as well like socioeconomic status? JENNIFER: It's such a good question, and it's so important. And I think one of the things that I have frankly learned an enormous amount and really taken to heart are these many different domains and these many different vectors of inclusion. Now, first of all, if we start saying, look, we have to consider these 50 (I'm being facetious, intentionally so.) different considerations, then we're going to become so overwhelmed so quickly that we become absolutely ineffectual as we try and think about serving all of these different individuals. But, Geronda, you gave fantastic examples around the hard work that you've been doing even in your own website environment to make sure people who are differently abled...they might have certain vision or hearing impairments or whatever that might look like, and they can access your resources. They can interact with your team just as easily as anyone else. So I'll give you an example of something that had never occurred to me until we actually started working with a member of a community who represented this particular part of the workforce. We were talking about actually how we can use a variety of different tools to monitor respiratory illnesses and diseases. You can think about things like asthma. You can think about things like cough was an important symptom of COVID, for example. How can we use the microphones that you might find in your smartwatch or your smartphone? How might we use these to be able to monitor, predict and track disease? We'd gone through how does different socioeconomic status, how does place, how does race, or ethnicity perhaps play into your access to these different tools, your tech literacy, your trust in these different tools and products? What had not occurred to me at all...and I'm so embarrassed to say this, but you think about you can have a tool where you do all of the work around inclusive design. You can think about all of the different needs to earn the trust of the communities that you're asking to use these tools. But we hadn't contemplated how you might use these tools if someone, for example, worked in a work environment where it was incredibly loud. If you're on a building site, if you're in a warehouse, if you're working on a checkout, it doesn't matter how good the sensor is in your smartwatch that you may have been provided with because that work environment is going to absolutely drown out any signal from that stream of data. And so we need to think about all of the different ways that someone's life, and career, and their background, and social determinants affect our ability to develop and deploy tools that really can help them manage their health, improve their health, have better health outcomes. GERONDA: That's amazing. VICTORIA: That's amazing. And I wonder if you've encountered too an issue with if you're designing these applications...like I know when I was living in Washington, D.C., there were 3,000 people who don't have internet at home, don't have a computer, don't have a phone. So how would your team approach that kind of problem? JENNIFER: [laughs] I think this is the theme of our conversation. VICTORIA: [laughs] JENNIFER: With intentionality, which is, is the goal here simply to provision tools and technologies, or is our goal here to be more thoughtful about the tools that exist, that we can use? Is our goal here to think about digital infrastructure and how we should be thinking about that not just to power healthcare but also perhaps access to education, access to safe and secure bank accounts, all of these different sorts of things? We cannot assume that every single person has top-of-the-range technology, unlimited data plans; we are foolish to do so. But the first thing we need to do is actually ask and understand what access to technology looks like and not just assume it's an affordability issue. Maybe it's a trust issue. You have to understand the root cause before you can work to solve something. I'd also offer up some other data that I always find compelling and important as we have these conversations. While we know there are large portions of the population who don't have access to what some of us, unfortunately, when we're moving quickly, just assume that everyone has, there are also horribly underrepresented populations, represented populations that do have access to these technologies. Some recent data actually showed that one-third of homeless individuals in California do have a smartphone. Let's actually just pause and think about that for a moment. You can't get access to benefits or brick-and-mortar healthcare because you have to go and fill in all of your information if you don't have a home. But if you have a smartphone, which presumably many of these folks have realized that even at some of the hardest times in their life, they actually need that to stay connected in today's digital economy, that this is actually a way and a vector for us to reach them, for us to capture information and data about what it is they need, not just to improve their healthcare but to get supported into a more safe and sustainable environment with more security where we can actually support their health in a much more holistic way. It also can connect them with care, whether that's mental healthcare or whatever their needs are in any given moment, that if we were relying on the traditional brick and mortar system, we'd be unable to capture. So this goes back to two things. First of all, don't assume. Don't assume that people do or don't have technology, and if they don't, don't assume you understand what the root cause actually is. The second point is don't think about these digital tools as limiting factors; think about the ways that we can use them to overcome so many of the challenges that we've faced in the way we care for people for decades and decades. VICTORIA: I love that you bring that point up. I volunteered for many years with an application called HopeOneSource, which is a mobile app for people who are experiencing homelessness to get access to services that they need. And I know it might have changed over time, but it was like 80% of people who are experiencing homelessness do have a cell phone. And partly in the United States, there is a subsidy. If you're under a certain income level, you can get a free cell phone. But it's very easy to have your cell phone stolen or to get lost. And the impermanency of the device is also an issue. So I think it's actually, like you said, you don't want to make assumptions about what people have and what they don't. And you do want to bring the intention and understand what it's really like because that will change how you build in things like security and two-factor authentication and things like that. So... JENNIFER: That's exactly right. And also, what are some of the infrastructure things we can do? You mentioned the subsidies for folks who are low-income. But then we want people to start transmitting confidential and private information about their health in order to access the highest quality care possible. Are we creating environments where there is access to secure connection environment? So they're not using public Wi-Fi where they actually might be more susceptible to harm due to sort of misuse of that data if it falls into the hands of the wrong folks. These are all of the different things we need to be thinking about. That's not to slow us down or to dampen our enthusiasm for the opportunities that digitization provides to improve the way we care for people. But again, it comes back to...I think what's emerging is almost a theme of our discussion, which is the need to be intentional. GERONDA: I love what you said about not making assumptions because I'm a DEI practitioner, but I always tell people I'm not perfect. [laughs] And so my bias comes in sometimes. I sometimes will assume that I might know the answer to something or what somebody may be experiencing because I may be incredibly passionate about the LGBTQ+ community, which I'm a part of. And it's reminding myself that I can't assume or let my own biases or own feelings towards certain things to steer my decision-making. I really have to be super open and objective to what the facts are telling and get those other experiences from other people. So I continuously check my bias, and I continuously try not to make those assumptions which can be hard at times. And while I know everyone at thoughtbot thinks I'm perfect, I'm the best, [laughter] it's just not true. VICTORIA: I think it is true. [laughter] GERONDA: There you go. JENNIFER: Geronda, I so appreciate you sharing that, and I think it probably is giving everyone listening the same experience that I am having right now, which is you owning that and being willing to share that. Immediately cascading through my mind...and now all of the assumptions that I come to the table with, and all of the ways that I think about things and those hot topics that are unique to me and my lived experience, and what I've been exposed to. And on the one hand, we should never dismiss that. On the other hand, the definition of being inclusive is to go out to folks with those different viewpoints. And one of the things I see increasingly featuring in these sorts of domains of diversity is political views. And you think, gosh, how has this even become a thing in the way that we consider caring for people? But it's so divisive. And I come to the table with all of my thoughts about these kinds of things. But what's serving us about our lived experience and about the passions that drive us all to try and create better products and a better and more inclusive future, and what's not? And how can we humbly acknowledge that and really listen and hear what others are telling us? GERONDA: Right. Exactly, exactly. Mid-Roll Ad: When starting a new project, we understand that you want to make the right choices in technology, features, and investment but that you don’t have all year to do extended research. In just a few weeks, thoughtbot’s Discovery Sprints deliver a user-centered product journey, a clickable prototype or Proof of Concept, and key market insights from focused user research. We’ll help you to identify the primary user flow, decide which framework should be used to bring it to life, and set a firm estimate on future development efforts. Maximize impact and minimize risk with a validated roadmap for your new product. Get started at: tbot.io/sprint. VICTORIA: If I'm a clinical researcher and I'm about to design an experiment, let's say, how can I use the resources at DiMe to help inform my opinion and help bring in that inclusivity, which I want? JENNIFER: So, Victoria, great question. [laughter] I'm teed up to answer this one. So I think the first thing is, and, Geronda, this is something that you mentioned earlier, which is you don't do a 45-minute brainstorm before you get going, check a box, and say you did it. It's a continual process, and it's a process of continual improvement. So when we describe this, we would discuss the entire clinical trials lifecycle. So, first of all, there are DEI considerations, even in the kind of question you want to answer. If you are doing clinical research because you want to develop a new molecule, a new pill, or something, for example, what community will you be serving? What's the problem we're trying to solve for? Are we trying to add a me-too drug to a population that's already well-served? Or are we actually thinking about, gosh, there's this underrepresented population? There's a disease state where we've struggled to break through. We believe that we can deploy these digital tools in order to really effect change here. So it starts as early as what is the problem you're trying to solve for? What is your research question? Then each stage as you think about, gosh, what are the tools that I might want to use in order to answer this question? Who are the people that we could possibly serve through the development of this new drug, for example? Great, then we take seriously our responsibility of making sure that every single individual who participates in our trial reflects and represents that broader population, that we are going to take inclusivity seriously so that when we have an answer to our research question, we know that what we know about the safety of a new drug and what we know about the effectiveness of a new drug applies equally well to every member of the population. At that point, we're asking ourselves questions about as we think about parts of the clinical protocol, so the different steps that we work through in order to safely administer a new therapy that's part of the trial, as we think about capturing the information we need in order to determine whether it's safe and effective, are we setting that up to be as safe as effective for everyone? Are we able to design the trial in such a way that the burden of participation isn't a barrier for certain members of the community? If we're picking digital tools to do things like remote patient monitoring...so imagine for anyone who has a smartwatch the green light on the back of your watch that's measuring your heart rate. Unfortunately, some of those products work differently across different skin tones. Have you done the work to make sure that you're selecting a tool that is going to give you equally trustworthy information for every single person? These are all of the things step by step that you should think about as you are developing a clinical trial. We have tool after resource after checklist to help you do this in a really accessible way. We organize them so you can find them really easily based on either what stage am I at and what can I do today to be more diverse, and more equitable, and more inclusive in the way that I'm developing new medicines? We also allow you to find these tools and resources based on a particular digital product. So if, for example, you think that you might be able to use, and we haven't said the words yet, so it's probably time, AI or machine learning to better identify a more diverse patient population that you could enroll into your trial, how are you thinking about catching potential bias that might take your good intentions and actually render them almost useless because you didn't identify bias in the algorithm, for example? So all of those tools and resources, and there are over 60 of them available, are open access. They're free to download, use them, interactive checklists, considerations documents, tools, and resources that help you act today as soon as you make a decision about doing clinical research that benefits all people. GERONDA: And it almost sounds like, in a way, that this resource could be helpful for many other industries as well because although it's tied to clinical trials, the considerations and process that you're taking to start to think through those DEI elements that checklist can be helpful across many different disciplines. Would you say that's correct? JENNIFER: I would. Now, Geronda, our superpower, is getting the digitization of healthcare right. And that's a big enough task that while there are other pressing areas, we will not stray into those. But I think you've hit the nail on the head. When we think about getting access to education, for example, or access to safe housing, or any other kinds of benefits, and we can think about how some of these digital tools can overcome many of the different barriers to access that different communities face. Absolutely, all of these different principles can apply. And in fact, we actually think that's really important. We talk a lot about harmonization in the work that we do. There are folks who have product portfolios that span different industries. When we think about really trying to hammer home the need to be intentional, to make sure that as we digitize the healthcare industry, we are bringing everyone with us, we should avoid, wherever possible, having unique or special considerations. Ultimately, these are all the same humans that we serve in other industries. We are trying more than ever to meet people where they are than insisting they come to us or come to the clinic, for example. All of these principles apply equally well. And if we do that harmonization well...and this comes back to the idea of culture that we were talking about. This just gets embedded into the culture of developing products for every single person, regardless of whether that's an educational product, or a healthcare product, or a financial product. We should be thinking about these things regardless of how we're striving to help and support people. GERONDA: I love that. VICTORIA: I love that. And I wonder, when you were developing these products for clinicians or for healthcare providers, was there anything surprising in your initial research and discovery when building these things? JENNIFER: Yes. And I would say that technology is no longer the barrier. There is nothing that we need a product to do, whether that's the way we account for, right? You're not always going to eliminate it. But the way that we account for, for example, bias in the way that we capture and process data, if you acknowledge it, you can do the necessary statistical interpretation. And then you can actually be well-informed in your decision-making. There's nothing either about the data, about the form factors, about battery life, about the performance of these tools that is stopping us from building and deploying solutions that work for everyone starting today, starting immediately. So then, what is the barrier? The barrier is a knowledge gap, a skills gap, an incentives gap. And that's really what we've been hammering to address. And if you do look at our DEI resources, especially for digitized clinical trials, we try and think about all of those gaps and support people, whether it's through, here, let us educate you on actually where some of the risks are, some of the new vectors of inclusion or domains of diversity, especially at the intersection of digital and health. Let us support you with tools and resources, and guides for how to do this. And then let us give you data and let us give you things like a market opportunity calculator, which is something else that we've created that will actually give you the business case to be more inclusive in the way that you develop digital products for use in clinical trials and the way you deploy them to support better research. That's really what we're focused on. And so the surprise almost is that the tech isn't limiting us in any way. The flip side of that being we are not going to tech our way out of this. It comes down to humans and our decisions and how we develop and deploy these tools in the service of better health. VICTORIA: That makes sense to me, and it makes me think about there's like a moral obligation or value that you can apply to DEI, but there's also a financial aspect. [laughs] And if you put a lot of effort into building an app, for example, and don't think about inclusivity, and you get to the end and think, oh, now I have to go back and make it accessible, that can be a lot of rework. It can be a lot of cost, if not even a legal liability and financial liability, I would imagine, in the healthtech sector. JENNIFER: That's exactly right. I couldn't have said any better, Victoria. [laughs] VICTORIA: [laughs] It's like, you are morally and legally obligated in many cases to include people. And it's better to just start from the beginning and start from the beginning and knowing what we're trying to do. JENNIFER: 100%. And I was trying not to pile on because I think the statement just stands alone. We are morally obligated. In some cases, we are legally obligated. There are emerging regulations certainly in the clinical trials environment about having more representative samples in order for you to get regulatory approval, for example. One of those regulations is moving slowly, which is always frustrating and disappointing. But given the moral imperative, given the emerging regulations, given that finally, this is more at the forefront of conversations, you've got to think about the gymnastics that are happening to continue to avoid doing this. And that's a little bit of the pressure that we want to apply. And so when we talk about the fact that there's no technological reason for not doing this, and when we have tried to provide the tools and resources to actually put these tools into practice, the only remaining question is, are you going to do it? And that's a big question. And as a field, we've not been terribly good at leaning into that previously. We'll talk about it all day. We'll admire the problem of inequity all day. We haven't been good enough at acting. And I'm hoping we're at a tipping point. VICTORIA: Great. And it sounds like now with DiMe, there's no excuse. All the information is there for you. [laughter] JENNIFER: That was exactly what we tried to do. That was the challenge that we gave ourselves and this extraordinary team. And the different individuals and organizations that came to the table to do this they set the standard high. And I'm so proud of their sort of possession, of their courage, and their tenacity in saying, "We are going to serve up absolutely everything that's needed. We're going to present it in a way that it's almost impossible not to find what you need for every person who's coming with this question." We set the standard high, and I'm incredibly proud of how well we delivered on that. VICTORIA: What does success look like for DiMe in the next six months or in the next five years? JENNIFER: What is it? Is it a Bill Gates quote? Is it...you sort of overestimate what you can do in 6 months and underestimate what you'll do in 10 years, something along those lines. And the intention is there, though. Anyone who knows me well will probably say I've never underestimated anything in my life. I'm always pushing for the next thing. Let's come back to this notion that the tech is not the limiting factor. And we're facing a really interesting moment in healthcare where the current environment is simply not sustainable. There are not enough clinicians to provide care or conduct research. We've had an expensive healthcare system for a long time. But the prices are not sustainable when you think about how much health insurance is going up relative to inflation, when you think about the out-of-pocket costs that people are facing when you think about the fact that there's not a single healthcare executive who's sleeping well at night because they can't staff their units, and their supply chain costs are incredibly high. And they're worried about the sustainability of their hospital, especially in rural and underserved areas. Business, as usual, is not an option. So in the next six months, I think we're going to keep pushing along. But in that five-year window, I think we are going to see a fundamentally different way that we care for people in the healthcare environment and that we conduct clinical trials. No longer is healthcare going to be built around the clinic. That's not to say they're going to go away. There are, of course, going to be times where you need to see a clinician in person, where you need to have a procedure, where you need to have some lab work or imaging done. But so much of this can be translated into the home, can use tools to extend the knowledge and expertise of clinicians so that we can better care for people, all people, by meeting them where they are. I think we're going to see a fundamentally different kind of healthcare, different kinds of clinical research built around the patient, not the clinic. And part of that is going to be redefining what good healthcare even is. Currently, good healthcare is once you turn up at the clinic already sick, sometimes really sick, facing a catastrophic and likely very expensive outcome, we do our best. That's good healthcare. I really think we're going to drive towards a future where these new flows of data and these new technologies are going to actually allow us to try and mitigate disease earlier, to intervene earlier, to catch all people who are at risk earlier in their health journey. And the great thing about that is it offers the opportunity to define healthcare differently. All of a sudden, good healthcare isn't; how good are we at intervening when you're sick? But how good are we at keeping you well and keeping you out of the healthcare system? I also feel strongly that it is no longer going to be enough to just raise the top end of healthcare and provide the best care to the people who are able to afford it, that we are going to start to embed metrics around equity into our evaluation of good healthcare. And the sooner we do that, the better because every time we look at those numbers now, they are astonishingly bad. VICTORIA: Yeah. And it's making me think about, you know, in five years, if we continue with the trend of global warming, they're also predicting more pandemics, more disease. And it seems like we are going to have to reimagine how we do healthcare because the current path isn't sustainable. JENNIFER: Exactly right. Exactly right. And the sad thing about all of this is that the burden of things like climate change, the burden of pandemics falls on those communities and those individuals who have been underrepresented and underserved in healthcare for the longest. It increases the burden of disease and health stress on folks who have consistently carried the highest burden of disease, been part of the highest risk categories. Not only do we have to get better at delivering care to all people reducing the burden of disease, we have to do it where actually those challenges through all of those external pressures, Victoria, are going to be becoming worse. VICTORIA: And it reminds me of another term I've heard for underrepresented, which is historically excluded, which I think really applies here. So that's fascinating. JENNIFER: Because it is what it is. VICTORIA: Yeah, right? Like, that's what it is. So I think it's wonderful that's what you're working on. And let's see if you could go back in time to when you first started DiMe Society; what advice would you give yourself now that it's been three years and you've come a long way? JENNIFER: [laughs] Sleep more. [laughter] I don't know, when I look in the mirror these days, there's an old lady that I'm sure wasn't there at the beginning of all this. But I think that's not the spirit of the question you were asking, Victoria. I wish we'd been bolder sooner. And we've never shied away from tackling the hardest problems. We started with this bold mission and vision. People would ask us when we launched DiMe, you know, "Gosh, are you really focused across individual health promotion, across healthcare delivery, across public health, and across clinical research?" And we said, "Absolutely," because if we don't tackle it all together, we're simply going to create new silos in the digital era. And we're never going to move towards this reimagined healthcare system, a new healthcare system, one that cares for everyone and where access to research is even harder than access to care. With these new flows of data in the digital era, we want to do it together. So it's not that we weren't bold, but the way now we make strong statements that we've always believed and that we've always been proud of around the imperative to be inclusive around the demand for high-quality evidence to drive trust around the fact that none of this is a tech issue. It's a human issue. I wish we had gone there sooner. I think it is serving us well. I think that the professionals that we work with across industry respond to it. They want to be part of this journey. They want to build a better healthcare system. And so, while we've always been, I think, bold and courageous in the vision that we've held and the work we've done, giving voice to it in a way that really reflects our vision and our passion has been so well received by our community. And they have stepped up to do this work incredibly well. I just wish we'd gone there sooner. That's the only thing I would have done differently. VICTORIA: I think that's great advice, especially for founders who are starting out in a space like this, to really stand by their convictions and be bold about it. [chuckles] Like, this is what you believe in, and other people will connect to it if it's right, so I love that. And we're getting towards the end of our time here too. So I want to make sure I can pass it to Geronda if you have any other final questions for our guest here today. GERONDA: More a comment in that I think that learning more about your organization and perusing some of the tools that you offer and the checklist that you offer...and it's such great work. And in some ways...and I'm trying to get the best way to say this. But in some ways, it's so clear of, like, this is what you can consider. This is what you should do. Although the work is not easy to do, it's really a helpful guideline for how you can start to think differently. I really appreciate the thoughtfulness that was put into a lot of these resources that you're giving out and just where you are in your trajectory as well because DEI work is not easy work. And you sometimes...it can impact you emotionally. It can impact you mentally sometimes. But when you're continuing to go after what you know is needed and the intentionality of things, it really is super helpful. So although I said I didn't have a question, and I just had a comment, I lied. I do have a question. [laughter] My question to you is, in doing a lot of this work, ensuring that DEI is infused in healthtech, all the work that you do and that your team does, how do you just navigate and manage your well-being, your mental health, your emotional health as you continue to do all this work? JENNIFER: It's such a great question. And when you said, Geronda, that this can sometimes be really emotional, I heard a statistic actually from a colleague of mine, Ricki Fairley, who's the CEO of Touch, Breast Cancer, and she was telling me that cancer affecting women under 35, Black women under 35 are diagnosed with cancer at a rate twice that of White women and die at a rate three times higher than White women. And, I mean, you hear that statistic, and it just takes the wind out of you. And it would be really easy to hide from that because it's hard to hear, sometimes too hard. The way that we handle sort of all of this as a team is we square up to these data, and then we celebrate one another. We celebrate our community when we are able to make positive change, even if it's incremental change. Even if sometimes you have those moments where you really move the needle, you have those other days or those other initiatives where you feel like you're crawling on your hands and knees to gain inches. But to celebrate that every moment and to remind ourselves the work is returning value to those people that we all get up every morning to try and serve, that it might be hard, but we're making progress. And that is, I think, the way that, as a team, we stay positive, we stay productive, and that we're able to balance, frankly, the exposure to the reality of some of these issues. GERONDA: I think that's great, having a community even within the workplace. It's so crucial because you spend most of your time at work, as we all know. [laughs] And there's a lot that just goes on across the world all the time, and being able to just talk it out. We have employee resource groups for people to come together with common identities and just talk through things that are impacting them. And so I really think that's great that you're able to just be honest with how you're feeling but also celebrating those important positive moments because sometimes we can focus a lot on the negative. So I really love that you bring the positive aspects of that as well. VICTORIA: Yes, thank you for sharing, and it comes back to the intention. Like, we're all on the same page. We all have this intention of solving this problem. So we're in it together in a way. So, Jennifer, are there any final thoughts or takeaways you want to leave our listeners with today? JENNIFER: No, this was a fantastic conversation. I think we've drawn out this theme of intentionality that will serve all of us very well. Geronda, I love the final question about how do we keep our own sort of emotional state and mental health solid as we do this hard work? It's the perfect note to end on. So Victoria, Geronda, thank you so much for having me on. This has been just a wonderful conversation. I've really enjoyed it. VICTORIA: Wonderful. Thank you so much for joining and spending time with us today. JENNIFER: Yes, I very much appreciate it. This was an awesome conversation. VICTORIA: All right. And you can subscribe to the show and find notes along with a complete transcript for this episode at giantrobots.fm. If you have questions or comments, you can email us at hosts@giantrobots.fm. And you can find me on Twitter @victori_ousg. This podcast is brought to you by thoughtbot and produced and edited by Mandy Moore. Thank you for listening. See you next time. ANNOUNCER: This podcast is brought to you by thoughtbot, your expert strategy, design, development, and product management partner. We bring digital products from idea to success and teach you how because we care. Learn more at thoughtbot.com.Special Guest: Jennifer Goldsack.Sponsored By:thoughtbot: When starting a new project, we understand that you want to make the right choices in technology, features, and investment, but that you don’t have all year to do extended research. In just a few weeks, thoughtbot’s Discovery Sprints deliver a user-centered product journey, a clickable prototype or Proof of Concept, and key market insights from focused user research. We’ll help you to identify the primary user flow, decide which framework should be used to bring it to life, and set a firm estimate on future development efforts. Maximize impact and minimize risk with a validated roadmap for your new product. Get started at: tbot.io/sprintSupport Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots

Cavan Klinsky is Co-Founder and CTO of Healthie, a scheduling engagement and Electronic Medical Records (EMR) platform used by healthtech organizations who seek to build long-term relationships with their clients. Will talks to Cavan about providing an underlying infrastructure that other digital healthcare companies use to be able to focus on patient care and not reinventing the technology wheel by providing a scheduling platform, an electronic medical record, and a patient engagement solution–all available via API, via an API-first design as well as through fully branded interfaces. Healthie lets companies get to market faster, scale with less headaches, and provides effective patient care much cheaper than if they tried to build everything themselves. Healthie Follow Healthie on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn or Twitter. Follow Cavan Klinsky on LinkedIn or Twitter. Follow thoughtbot on Twitter or LinkedIn. Become a Sponsor of Giant Robots! Transcript: WILL: This is the Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots Podcast, where we explore the design, development, and business of great products. I'm your host, Will Larry. And with me today is Cavan Klinsky, who is a part of Healthie, a scheduling engagement and EMR platform used by healthtech organizations who seek to build long-term relationships with their clients. Cavan, thank you for joining me. CAVAN: Thanks for having me on. WILL: Yeah, I'm excited about this. Healthcare is always an exciting topic to talk about, so let's start there. For the people who may not know, tell us about Healthie and what's in store for 2023. CAVAN: Healthie, as you mentioned, provides underlying infrastructure that other digital healthcare companies use to be able to focus on patient care and not kind of reinventing the technology wheel. So we do that by providing a scheduling platform, an electronic medical record, and a patient engagement solution. That's all available via API, via an API-first design as well as through fully branded interfaces. So we let companies get to market faster, scale with less headaches, and provide really, really powerful patient care much more cheaply than if they tried to build everything themselves. WILL: Oh, sweet. Okay, so who is your main audience? Is it the patient, or is it the healthcare provider? CAVAN: Healthie is a B2B company. So we sell basically the software to the digital healthcare organizations that are looking to deliver care, but there's a patient side of the platform. So they're able to onboard their patients. It allows patients to video chat with their provider, message, track goals, view care plans, et cetera. But our customers are the businesses. So before Healthie, people would basically either try to cobble together like eight or nine different solutions to provide the experience they wanted, or they would spend millions and millions of dollars building in-house trying to piece together. But when you look at these different healthcare organizations, 90% of the functionality they're using ends up really being the same. But people were trapped in this build versus buy decision where they were really concerned that they wouldn't be able to have a platform flashy enough for them. But the downside of that was just the cost of building that in-house. So Healthie really changes it from a build versus buy decision to a build and buy. So our customers buy the platform. They are able to launch very quickly. But because we're API-first, they are able to extend the pieces that are most unique to them. WILL: That's really neat. Yeah, one of the most frustrating things I find, especially when it comes to visiting a doctor, is having to call in to schedule an appointment. And I'm like; I just need an appointment; just show me the available times. I want to select it and be a part of that. And so research shows your software takes care of that, correct? CAVAN: Yeah, that's exactly right. And patients really, really love self-scheduling capabilities. When you talk to healthcare providers, if you ask a doctor, hey, why have they not embraced it? It's because they really want this fine-grained control over their calendar. A lot of them are used to calling the receptionist who's worked there for a decade and understands their preferences and how they want things sequenced. And they want this type of appointment able to be scheduled back to back but not this other type. That's kind of really what we enable is we have this almost eye-wateringly long settings page where you can go in there checkboxes, configure things. And what you end up is just this really nice middle ground where patients are able to get that easy, self-schedule experience, not calling anybody, not waiting on hold. But doctors and other medical professionals aren't giving up control over their calendar. So it allows our customers to be able to do a lot of optimization, making sure their providers are fully booked but in a way where for patients, it's a really, really easy experience. And that's kind of a lot of the secret sauce that we offer. WILL: Wow, that's neat. So tell us this, tell us about your background. How did you get started into the healthcare world? CAVAN: So I got started in the healthcare world as I think a lot of people in this space which is I really got started as a patient. I had open-heart surgery after my freshman year of high school. I had eight weeks after that where basically I ended up kind of...I wasn't able to exercise, run around, kind of do most of the things I'd spend summers doing. So I ended up really stuck in a bedroom for most of it. But that whole experience, kind of from prepping for the surgery, having it, recovering, got me really interested in healthcare and also really frustrated at just having a bunch of poor healthcare experiences. And it also really gave me time to start learning a lot about the engineering side of things. So I built my first web application that summer with Rails. So I found a lot of great thoughtbot posts, and I have a ton of respect for thoughtbot as an organization. I've been using Rails ever since. WILL: Wow. That's really neat. I read an article about this. Tell us about your React Native experience because, at thoughtbot, we're trying to get that started. We actually are started, but we're trying to get that same momentum as we have with Rails. CAVAN: So I think with React Native, initially, we were just a web platform. We realized very quickly that to enable a really strong patient experience...patients wanted to be using their mobile device. They don't want to be using a mobile web browser. They want a native application. So we initially launched, and this is maybe six months after we started the company, we launched an iOS app. We realized a couple of months later that we were going to need an Android application. So we had a Swift and an Android application written in Java. We had a server-rendered Rails web application that we expose a very, very limited set of features via a REST API. And it worked out okay, but what we realized from doing that for about a year and a half, two years, was that we were duplicating a lot of work. The iOS app and the Android app were very similar to each other. But we had two separate developers who weren't able to really code review or help out the other. We weren't a large enough company where it made sense for us to have a bunch of iOS developers and a bunch of Android developers. And then we were also duplicating a lot of functionality with this REST API, basically copied the things that we were doing just with server-rendered HTML. So in 2018, we had basically a from-the-ground rewrite of the whole web application, which was kind of a crazy experience. We moved to a single-page application on the web. We switched over to using GraphQL for everything. And then we initially rebuilt our mobile application still using Swift and Java but now on top of GraphQL but really with an eye towards saying, hey, how do we end up getting off of these kinds of very siloed developer experiences and not to something where even if we don't have multiple developers who can do it, at least where developers can help each other out and understand? So a few months after that, we kicked off our React Native rebuild. We built our whole mobile applications in React Native. Ultimately, having gone through a few different React projects, I think it's the only one in my life that kind of went as expected in a positive way. We did the rewrite. It came in on time. The mobile developers, instead of having an iOS and an Android, it was just two mobile developers who were able to help out each other and collaborate. We can have web devs do code review for mobile, and they're able to provide feedback because we use React on the web. So it's definitely not write once, run anywhere, but I do think it's pretty close to at least understand everywhere. And that's been a really, really big thing for us. And then we're still able to bridge out to Swift or to Java for some more of the OS-specific features. WILL: Yeah, yeah, I totally agree. That's the beauty of React Native, especially for your SaaS company. It's a perfect scenario because, like you said, web developers can code review. Sometimes they can even help with the code because it's right along the same lines and everything. So that's really neat. CAVAN: Yeah, and we're able to share libraries, so, like, some of the NPM packages end up being the same. So it's just, yeah, it's been a lot of really, really nice experiences with that. WILL: That's neat. So as the Founder and the CTO, what keeps you up at night? CAVAN: I think what keeps me up at night is primarily for exciting things. We're in this position where we're seeing this huge sea change in how digital healthcare is delivered. Healthie is in this really nice balance where we're a mature company, you know, we're seven years old. We serve thousands and thousands of providers, millions of patients. But we're not like the Epics of the world, that are 35 years old and are just super resistant to change. So we ended up in this kind of nice, sweet spot where we're tech-forward enough and flexible where we can really support these high-end use cases but then also basically mature enough where we have the scalability and the resiliency as an organization to be able to do that. So, I mean, a lot of what I think about is we provide business-critical healthcare, critical infrastructure for a lot of people. And that number continues to grow every day. It needs to work. It needs to work quickly. It needs to work securely. And that's what, a lot of the time, I think about both from a technical perspective and then also as the organization as a whole grows, from a hiring and an organizational structure perspective. So I think you really go from hacking on the codebase day one seven years ago to kind of hacking on the organization as a whole. And that's really where I spend my time and what keeps me up. WILL: That's neat. Wow, that's really cool. So as a first-time founder, tell me this, you've been around seven years. That seems like a long time, so kudos to you for enduring that and sustaining that. That's amazing. What are some of the things that day one when you started the company...if you could look back, what are some advice that you would give yourself to say, hey, don't do this or do this? CAVAN: Yeah, the piece of advice I would give myself is advice we actually received pretty frequently and didn't believe, and then it ended up almost totally derailing the company. WILL: Oh wow. CAVAN: And that's that, you know, both my co-founder and I were first-time founders. I think we're really smart. We're definitely hard-working, you know, very motivated people. And we were really convinced that we'd be able to just do a full-out sprint and never stop sprinting. And we kept on getting told by advisors and investors, "Hey, it's a marathon. It's a marathon." We were like, you know, we're just going to sprint the marathon. That started out okay, and then a couple of years in, we started hitting walls and really realized that you can't sprint a marathon. Startups take way longer than I think founders hope they do or think that they're going to take to develop. Digital health and our healthcare system moves much, much more slower than kind of people think. So especially if you're a founder in digital health, you need to be building both a company and, I think, a personal lifestyle that's sustainable. You need to make sure that the company has money in the bank and can be around for years and years and years. And you need to make sure that your job, your day-to-day, is something that you can also continue to do for years and years and years. So that's ultimately, I think, the most important thing that we're able to tell our customers and something that we've now gotten the company in a position to be in, which is, hey, we're a sustainable business. We're a stable business. We'll be around in 10 years. And that ends up being a huge selling point for us. But definitely, if I would go back and do it again, I would have been smarter about that from day one. I would have avoided a lot of big pain points. WILL: Yeah. It reminds me of when I started in development. I tried that same sprint the marathon, and so many of my co-workers were like, "Slow down, you're going to burn out. You're going to burn out." And it reminds me of that when you say that. CAVAN: Yep. And everybody thinks they're invincible, and then you realize occasionally you're not. And then also you look at it from hindsight, and you're like, well, the code I was writing between 2:00 a.m. and 6:00 a.m. every night for three months was not the best code. WILL: [laughs] CAVAN: And once you get to a point when you get some breathing room, it's almost that you got to go slow to go fast type things where a lot of these best practices, having really good test cases, having good CI, having good work-life balance for employees I do think on a long-enough timeline actually allows you to go much, much, much faster versus just trying to crunch the whole time. WILL: Totally, totally. I can't tell you how many bugs that I fixed that I was sitting down for hours and hours. I go on a 15-minute walk, and I solve it in the first 5 minutes. CAVAN: Yeah, absolutely. I literally, I mean, if I get stuck on something, you know, I just end up doing too much coding. But if I ever really, really get hung up, whether it's coding, or design, or anything like that, I'm like, at this point, I'm a cognizant of the pain. I'm not making progress. I'm spinning my wheels. I'm getting more and more frustrated with everything happening on my laptop and, like, exactly as you mentioned, go walk around the block. Come back, and you have that eureka moment pretty frequently. WILL: Definitely, definitely. MID-ROLL AD: Are you an entrepreneur or start-up founder looking to gain confidence in the way forward for your idea? At thoughtbot, we know you’re tight on time and investment, which is why we’ve created targeted 1-hour remote workshops to help you develop a concrete plan for your product’s next steps. Over four interactive sessions, we work with you on research, product design sprint, critical path, and presentation prep so that you and your team are better equipped with the skills and knowledge for success. Find out how we can help you move the needle at: tbot.io/entrepreneurs. WILL: You kind of mentioned it, mental health. And I was listening somewhere where you said, "It's not about doing 100-hour weeks, every week, every week, every week." So for Healthie, what are some of those things that you have implemented to stay healthy, to be able to run the marathon and not burn out? CAVAN: I loved startups and entrepreneurship stories growing up. I would read TechCrunch and Hacker News and all this stuff and Twitter. It's gotten a little better, but there's still really this pervasive mentality of like, you know, I used to have my background computer screen was, you know, "Work like somebody's trying to take it away from you 24 hours a day," which is a Mark Cuban quote. And just all these things where if you're not doing the hustle porn, if you're not putting in the 100-hour weeks, you're not a real entrepreneur. You're not going to build a good business, like, you're going to lose out. I had really, really taken that to heart. And that kind of goes back to the sprinting a marathon piece where eventually, in 2018, it's like, well, this is not really a sustainable thing. And for us to build a sustainable, long-lasting business, for us to have the impact that my co-founder and I and the rest of the people in the company wanted to have, you need to build really a sustainable business and a sustainable lifestyle. So I think at Healthie, or what I generalize to other companies, is the number kind of day one thing is how was the company funded? Because that ultimately drives a ton of what is determined to be sustainable. We've been lucky enough where we've had this interesting fundraising story. We raised a million dollars to basically build a related but kind of more narrow in scope business. I realized pretty quickly that that was not going to be some huge venture-scale success that we would not be able to raise more money. We were profitable for years and years and years, kind of rebuilt the whole platform, and got into this much, much larger space. And we did last year raise another 16 and a half million dollars. But one of our most important questions, when we raised that money, was, hey, we need to find investors that are long-term aligned. We weren't looking for people looking to flip their equity in a year. We weren't looking for people who are going to push us to grow at all costs and not look at spending or how we were growing. We just wanted growth, growth, growth. So we found investors that were really, really aligned with our long-term vision for the company. We still look at cash very, very closely. The Slack message I'm going to look out for most every week is our VP of finances, like, our breakdown on our cash flows, so I keep a very close eye there. And then really build a business that people want to pay for and use. And, at this point, we have 80-something people. Payroll is getting more and more substantial, but that's all offset by our customers and their revenue, and that is really what's sustainable. And so that's more the finance side of things. And then, as far as the company as a whole, I mean, being super cognizant that having crunch time is not a good thing. It's not a feature; it's a huge bug. When we agree to projects, we're making sure that we're planning things out. We're leaving breathing room where we're not asking employees to work crazy hours. We're not burning employees out. We're not burning ourselves out. And it's not not working hard because it's still working hard, but it's working hard in a very smart and focused way that is less all-consuming. I think also as a boss, just being a decent person. If people have life events that pop up, if people have crises, and people have things they need to deal with, you know, work is incredibly important. I love what I do. I think about it all day. But there's a life outside of work, and making sure that we're allowing employees to have time for that, once again, is really important for long-term sustainability. WILL: Wow, that's really neat. That's really neat. And yeah, I totally agree with that. That sounds like a great company. And I think that's the building blocks of what it takes to start the company. So that's amazing. What are some of your accomplishments? I love for my guests to come on and brag about themselves. I know you said that you've been around seven years. You just raised $16 million. You have about 80 employees. That's amazing. What are some of the things that we don't know? Would you like to share anything with us? CAVAN: I mean, look, I started Healthie as a freshman in college. I dropped out to work on it full-time, so Healthie has been my whole career. And I think to go on a bit of a bragging rant; Healthie has had a lot of success so far. But my co-founder and I always like to joke we're halfway into being a 13-year overnight success. So when I like to brag, I like to brag partly about what Healthie is doing. But what Healthie does is enable other companies. So I really like to brag about what those other companies are doing. Companies using Healthie have raised over $2 billion in venture. We're supporting millions and millions of patient lives. We're supporting thousands and thousands of providers. We've seen people go from two founders in a venture studio up to these massive hundreds and hundreds of people organizations, and we do it not just in one space but in a big range of spaces. We're doing it in weight loss, behavioral health, addiction treatment, sleep, other kinds of mental health areas, chronic pain. And the type of care that we're enabling people to provide is proactive. So we're having people treat obesity, not a heart attack, diabetes, not an amputation, addiction, not an overdose. And ultimately, what I really, really think that does is that's enabling kind of this sea change in how healthcare works in this country where the more proactive we get, the less people end up in hospitals. The cheaper healthcare is, the more efficient healthcare is, the better patient experience patients receive, and ultimately, the better healthcare they receive. So that's really what I like to brag about because, ultimately, we are kind of that core infrastructure layer that's enabling a lot of that. WILL: Wow, that's really neat. I can't remember the name of the guy that said it, but he said there are usually three Ps, and most companies struggle with one. So it's people, products, and processes, and mostly people struggle with the processes. And it sounds like Healthie is able to help people, medical providers, with that process and to kind of say, hey, let me take that. That may not be your strong suit, so you can go and do your product and the people and stuff like that. CAVAN: Yeah, what I really say is when you think about what makes kind of these digital healthcare companies unique, a lot of time, it's a new insight or a new type of care model. They want to combine a newly approved FDA drug that's really effective with a series of coaching encounters in a different sequence than people have been doing with really great educational content, et cetera. We see all these different care plans in all these different areas, and they end up unique to the company and then even to patients within the company. But to be able to deliver that care plan, there are so many kinds of table stakes things you need that I really describe as boring, difficult, and non-differentiated and can only really negatively impact the company. If you have an appointment with your doctor and the video call works, you're not necessarily thinking more highly of the doctor, but if it doesn't work, if it's a shitty piece of software... WILL: [laughs] CAVAN: If you're not able to connect, then suddenly you think a lot worse of them. And these things are hard; getting reminders out in the right time zones, handling daylight savings time, running servers 24/7 with great uptime. These things are non-trivial, but you need to be able to do them just to be able to get to like the 5% that really makes the business unique, which is the unique care model. So that's kind of really what we enable. So yeah, I would say it's a lot of the process. It's a lot of those kinds of table stakes infrastructure but in a way that's flexible enough where they're not having to sacrifice those unique insights that they have. WILL: Yeah, that's really neat, really, really neat. I want to shift a little bit, and I read this in a blog, so companies have been getting in trouble for data sharing. That's been the big thing right now. And I think it was your CEO that said, "Data is our customers' data; it's not Healthie's data. And that is true day one, and it's true today." Tell me more about that. Tell me kind of the outlook of Healthie with customers' data. CAVAN: So ultimately, I think one of the things going back to sustainable long-term success is around aligned incentives. So we need to make sure that the business we're building, the way we make money, the way we succeed as a company is aligned with the way our customers succeed. And when you think about it from a data perspective, our customers are the businesses. We help them deliver care. We have, as I mentioned, millions and millions of patient lives kind of all these visits, outcomes, et cetera. And hypothetically, you could say, try to build a business where you don't really sell the software. You give it away very cheaply, but you retain rights to the data. And then you package that, anonymize it, and sell it to pharma, or whatever, and just kind of use it really as a data platform. And I think definitely there have been EHRs out there who have done similar approaches or at least thought they would. And ultimately, why it's so bad, or at least why we think it's so bad is because it's a fundamentally different incentive. At that point, your customers are no longer your customers. Your customers become the product, and your customers' data becomes the product. And there are some cases if you're running a free social media site, well, maybe that's the way you have to run it. What's really great about what we do is we're selling underlying software to really successful businesses that build great companies, make a lot of money, and are more than happy to pay subscription fees for that. And then, once you're in that really enviable position, it's not worth muddying the water with anything that misaligns those incentives. So we've been very, very clear from day one that we don't provide healthcare. We are not a data play. We are a software infrastructure company. That's what we do, that's what we're great at. That's what we focus on, and we don't mess with the other stuff. WILL: That's amazing. I love that. One of the other big things, especially in healthcare, digital healthcare, have been online threats and things like that. Tell me a little bit about that. How are you keeping your company safe from those online threats? CAVAN: Ultimately, one of those things where let's say all our customers try to build their own stuff, they don't have the resources. They don't have the know-how. They don't have the focus. And you end up even if they have the functionality, who knows how good that security is? So one of the benefits we offer companies is, going back to one of the things we have to be really, really good at, is security. So Healthie is a secure platform. We're HIPAA compliant. We're SOC 2 Type 2 compliant. We're audited by a third party on both of those. And it's something that we think a lot about ourselves, but it also becomes a big benefit to our customers. So if you're a brand new startup and you're trying to sell to a major hospital system, and we've seen this a lot, like, very often, they'll have myself or another security-focused person on Healthie on the call. And we enable them to have good answers to these questions because we're the ones running the servers. We're storing the data. We are already making these good decisions. We have best practices in place and have these accreditations and certifications. And that enables our customers, once again, to focus on delivering care and not in reinventing the security wheel. So it's a big thing we think about. We're talking about security constantly here at Healthie, you know, always running kind of 24/7 compliance tools, always making sure that we're improving our security posture. But ultimately, we do it so that our customers need to worry less about it. And it is one of the...going back to the things that, you know, we don't mess with data. We do worry a lot and think a lot and do a lot around security. WILL: That's amazing. Awesome. Love it. I want to close on this: what does Healthie have coming up, anything exciting coming up in the next year? CAVAN: I mean, I'm excited every day when I see our customers expanding when I see the new customers we're talking to. I mean, I think, really, we've been doing the same thing, just at a larger and larger scale, for the past seven years. And our goal for 2023 as a company, and we talk about this a lot internally, is to go from startup to scaleup. So at the end of 2023, if I look back ten months from now and say, hey, what did we set out to do? What did we accomplish? It's did we continue to build the best team? Did we continue to build the best product? Did we continue to provide the best customer experience? And are our customers seeing a lot of success on the platform? And it's not like there's a new product line to enable that. You're not going to have some silver bullet that's going to change the dynamics. But it's really we just want to take what we're doing that we're doing a really good job of and just do that on a higher scale. So that's really what we're thinking about for 2023. WILL: I love it. Sometimes just being consistent is the way to go, so I love that. CAVAN: Yeah, you got to show up. Look, I used to wrestle. The way you become a good wrestler is not by knowing 800 wrestling moves. It's by knowing five moves and practicing them every day over and over again for years, and that's true of a lot of sports. It's true with startups. It's just consistent focus and having an aligned mission at the company. Really, really focused on pushing the ball forward every day, day in, day out, is just so, so important. And that's really what we do here. WILL: I love it. Love it. Love it. Is there anything that we didn't cover that you would like to share with the audience? CAVAN: I think if you're a company building in the digital health space, if you care about having these strong relationships with your patients, definitely check us out; we're gethealthie.com. Healthie is with an I-E. And then love talking to startups, love talking digital health, and always happy to talk. WILL: You can subscribe to the show and find notes along with a complete transcript for this episode at giantrobots.fm. If you have questions or comments, email us at hosts@giantrobots.fm. You can find me on Twitter @will23larry. This podcast is brought to you by thoughtbot and produced and edited by Mandy Moore. Thanks for listening, See you next time. ANNOUNCER: This podcast is brought to you by thoughtbot, your expert strategy, design, development, and product management partner. We bring digital products from idea to success and teach you how because we care. Learn more at thoughtbot.com.Special Guest: Cavan Klinsky.Sponsored By:thoughtbot: Are you an entrepreneur or start-up founder looking to gain confidence in the way forward for your idea? At thoughtbot, we know you’re tight on time and investment, which is why we’ve created targeted 1-hour remote workshops to help you develop a concrete plan for your product’s next steps. Over four interactive sessions, we work with you on research, product design sprint, critical path, and presentation prep so that you and your team are better equipped with the skills and knowledge for success. Find out how we can help you move the needle at: tbot.io/entrepreneursSupport Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots

Dr. Stephanie Smith is Clinical Psychologist and Founder of the Finding Center app, the first intuitive eating classes app. Victoria, along with surprise co-host thoughtbot's Director of Product Strategy, Jordyn Bonds talks to Dr. Stephanie about creating the Finding Center app to give people who are struggling with their bodies and their relationship with food a way to follow a plan, understand a path forward, and be able to see themselves getting healthier. Finding Center app Intuitive Eating by RDN Evelyn Tribole, MS and RDN Elyse Resch, MS The Body Is Not an Apology, Second Edition: The Power of Radical Self-Love Follow Dr. Stephanie Smith on LinkedIn, Instagram, or Facebook. Follow thoughtbot on Twitter or LinkedIn. Become a Sponsor of Giant Robots! Transcript: VICTORIA: This is the Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots Podcast, where we explore the design, development, and business of great products. I'm your host, Victoria Guido. And with me today is Dr. Stephanie Smith, Clinical Psychologist and Founder of the Finding Center app, the first intuitive eating classes app. Thank you for joining me. DR. SMITH: Yeah, it's a pleasure to be here. It's nice to see you. VICTORIA: Nice to see you too. And we also have Jordyn, our Director of Product Strategy at thoughtbot. Hi, Jordyn. JORDYN: Hello. VICTORIA: So let's just kick this off. And Dr. Smith, tell me a little bit more about your Finding Center app. DR. SMITH: So I created the Finding Center app really a little bit selfishly because I wanted to create what didn't exist for me 10 or 15 years ago when I was really struggling with food and my body. And I'm very by the book, you know, tell me what to do, and I'll follow that. And there just wasn't something like that at that time of my life. And so I created the Finding Center app to give people who are struggling with their bodies and their relationship with food a way to follow a plan, a way to understand a path forward, and to be able to see themselves getting through this, you know, getting to a healthier tomorrow. And that's what I really wanted for myself, and that's what I hope to build here. VICTORIA: Well, I love that it came out of a personal issue you were having. And what was the gap between that type of content versus what already existed in the market? DR. SMITH: Back at that time, you know, this is probably dating all of us here a little bit. But at that time, [chuckles] apps were a little bit newer; technology was, of course, you know, things are growing so quickly. And there were things like books, so you could read something on your own. Or you might be able to go see a therapist or a counselor, but they may not specialize in this kind of thing. And so there really was sort of this DIY, like piece things together, figure it out, try a book, try a workbook, maybe they'll go together, maybe they won't. Or go see a provider, and they may or may not specialize. But there really wasn't something that was going to be a direct guide for these issues. And certainly, at that time, and still exists today, there's this huge lack of available things that are respectful to body diversity and size diversity. And so, really looking for something that wasn't going to be further stigmatizing, it was and still is an extremely huge challenge in this marketplace. VICTORIA: Great. And tell me more about, you know, you've mentioned intuitive eating. And how is that different from a diet or from your regular food tracking apps? DR. SMITH: That's such a great question. So intuitive eating is really the most old school [laughs] kind of style of eating because it's what we're all born doing. If you've spent any time around toddlers, you know that they'll have a couple of bites of a sandwich, a little bit of apple, half a cookie, and then they'll go run and play. Kids are natural intuitive eaters, and that starts to fade as we get older. And we start to have this morality around food and morality around body and this pressure to change and have things different. And we kind of lose that intuitive ability to have half a cookie and go play because I'm done right now, and maybe I'll come back to it, maybe I won't. Intuitive eating really is about this recognition that that's what you were born with. That's what your birthright is, and you still have that. And it's really kind of pulling away these kinds of stigmas and biases that culture puts on top of our relationships with food and our relationships with our bodies. And when we can pull that back, there's this beautiful natural ability to eat what we want and to find a balanced way of nourishing ourselves. And that's really what intuitive eating is about is getting back to that. VICTORIA: I love that. And how did you go about taking what seems like even though it's a basic, like, at its most [laughs] basic concept, but it's this very big, different way of conceptualizing food and boil that down into like an application? [laughs] DR. SMITH: I have to be very clear here. I did not do this on my own. [chuckles] So intuitive eating has been around for a long time. It was started by a couple of dieticians, Evelyn Tribole and Elyse Resch. They've recently been in The New York Times recently and in other places. So it's becoming a little bit of a hot thing, which is great. But I had those resources. So I've been following people who kind of are in this space. And they are one of those people who had a book and a workbook, so you weren't able to get that kind of personalized walk-through. But these resources have existed, and those are some of the resources that are the ones I mentioned, you know, that I started putting together when there wasn't something like this app that existed. So it's really borrowing from them and then tying intuitive eating into body acceptance, and body liberation, and radical self-love, you know, tying intuitive eating in with these things, with our bodies because body shame and how we treat our bodies in terms of nourishment these are really integrated concepts. And I wanted to bring them together in a very intentional and overt kind of way. VICTORIA: I think that's wonderful. And I'm curious, Jordyn, if you have any thoughts on if you were meeting with a founder who had just built this app, what would be your first questions you would ask? JORDYN: Frankly, a lot of what I would ask is what you've already asked. But the sort of next thing I would focus on are questions around who are your users? How did you figure out who to bring this to first? How did you make that decision? DR. SMITH: That's a great question. So when I was building this, you know, I think I mentioned that I was really building it from this place of what would I have needed at that time? And so I'm really looking for people who kind of think similarly, you know, who really want structure, who want multimedia kind of support. I wanted journaling activities, and I wanted education, and I wanted something to think about or some mindfulness. I really wanted a lot of things because I learn in a lot of different ways. So I'm looking for people who like to learn that way. And I'm also the type of person that when I do something, I really want to do it. I want to dive in. I want to figure it out, you know, I really want to show up for it, and this is that kind of thing. And so it was pretty natural to think about the type of, you know, maybe personality who would be a great fit for this. And then, in terms of who it's for, I really started with people I knew. So the first program that I ran through it was an intensive version of the app, which meant that there were weekend group meetings with everyone. And there was live Q&A and a place for us to ask questions and respond back to each other and share. And I really started with people that I knew and friends of friends because a lot of people, you know, I think if we all think about our networks, a lot of people struggle in their relationships with food and in their relationships with body. And so the first place I started was with the people I already knew and saying, "Do you know anyone else who would be a good fit for this?" And it has kind of blossomed from there. JORDYN: What's been one of the more unexpected things you've learned from your users as you've gotten more people into the app using it? DR. SMITH: I think one of the things that isn't necessarily unexpected at all but is really striking to me in terms of how impactful it is is how much medical stigma impacts everyone and especially those who are in larger bodies, or bodies who are marginalized for other reasons because of their health status, or racial status, or age, or other factors like that. As a health psychologist, I like to think of my work and my workplace as being somewhere that people can come and feel safe, and feel heard, and feel understood. And now I'm seeing, you know, I work in a doctor's office, yet my experience of being in a doctor's office is so different from other people's experiences and the stories that I heard from others about how they went in for some kind of pain and weren't even offered physical therapy, you know, were offered a diet instead of that. And those kinds of stories, how many of those I've heard, has been really striking and really surprising to me how impactful that has been and how much work we really need to do to improve the experience for patients. JORDYN: Given that finding of the importance of safety, how has that idea informed how you've gone about designing and building the app? DR. SMITH: Of course, with a project like this, you know, I think a lot of founders on here have shared kind of building the airplane while you fly it. [chuckles] And so I've gone and, of course, recorded a lesson or made a journal entry activity or something like that. And then I am going back, and I'm adding things to those. So I'm doing a re-recording or adding a piece, or adjusting the journal prompts or the mindfulness activity, really to make some very clear statements there around if you've heard this kind of thing, you're not alone. If you have experienced this type of being shamed, let's really bring that out of the darkness. Let's bring it into the light because shame is something that lives in the dark. And so really wanting to help people excavate the parts of that shame that they are willing and comfortable and wanting to bring out into the light and creating a space for that has become really important for me. It is making sure that we're able to talk about these things and say, "No, yeah, I think my provider is a great person. I do think they care about me. And at the same time, they're living in this weight bias and this stigma place too. And these are the recommendations they gave me. And that was a person that I thought would be safe." And so really trying to have those balanced discussions around why that might happen and giving people a place to talk about that. VICTORIA: And one example I've seen in, I think, in your marketing materials is a measurement like the BMI or the Body Mass Index. And that's one that even myself I've experienced being used on me in a way where it's like, "Well, the index is saying you're overweight." And I'm like, "Well, clearly, I'm not. [laughter] Something is wrong with this measurement." And I can't even...you probably have a greater understanding of the harm that causes in communities. DR. SMITH: Yeah, that's such a great point. I have looked at that myself. And I remember the very first time that someone said that, like, "Well, you're overweight. Have you considered losing weight?" And I was coming in...I think I was coming in to talk about something related to my period, something like that. And I thought, why are we talking about this? What is going on? [laughs] Where did this come from? I just wanted to talk about switching my birth control. And it just comes into every conversation. And I think even someone like me, even someone who's in this space where I'm going, well, this is a bunch of crap; I think we all know at this point BMI is a bunch of crap. But even knowing that there's still this part of me that...and maybe you relate to this too of just, well, I do live in this culture. And you're saying these words about me like overweight. And my immediate thought, even though the one coming after that is frustration, my immediate thought is, oh no, what's wrong with my body? It's to be afraid. How am I going to be treated? Or does this mean something bad about my health? And so even these metrics like BMI do a terrible job at acknowledging body diversity and actual health and all of those things. They're still scary still. And I think in a body acceptance space; it's really important for us to also acknowledge that even though we want to be body-accepting and be advocates for ourselves, it's still really normal when someone gives us that kind of information, especially someone in a position of power like a health care provider, that when someone is saying those kinds of things to us that it can still hurt. Even though we know, maybe intellectually, this is where that's coming from, that it doesn't need to hurt, it still does. VICTORIA: And it can have financial implications as well if they're indicating that you're not "healthy" quote, unquote, because of a statistic like that that is meaningless. [laughs] But yeah, that can affect your insurance and all other kinds of things, so... DR. SMITH: Yeah. And I think the financial piece that you're bringing up there is such a good point because there's so much power and control dynamics that can occur around finances. We really are limited by [laughs] what we can afford and not afford to do. And so people who are limited in terms of what they're able to pursue for their health will have to go along with lots of things that they may not believe in or may not want to follow up on because that's what their doctor is telling them is within their insurance to do. And that's a really hard thing. VICTORIA: Sounds like the app gives patients or people the tools to be able to push back in some of those scenarios and also furthering body acceptance and an understanding of eating habits. What is the kind of immediate goals for your app? What does success look like in the next six months? And then maybe what does success look like five years from now? DR. SMITH: When you started asking that question, I almost felt like a magician or a stage performer putting on 18 different hats all at once. [laughs] And I thought, from which of these should I respond to that question? [laughs] And so there's the health care provider inside of me going, well, as many people getting the support that they need, that's the benefit. So if one person gets it, that's great. I want anyone who can feel greater liberation to have that. And then that hat pops off, and the marketer hat that I've been wearing kind of pops on and is like, well, these are the metrics in terms of growth and collaboration with other people in this space that I want to do. I want to collaborate with more people who are working here, and there are metrics around that that I want to pursue. And then the person inside of me that has to make money goes, okay, well, this many sales. And so I think success is a really hard thing for me to pin down. But if I were to summarize, trying to kind of encapsulate all of those roles, it really just is having more people experience the app, having more people experience the education there, and being able to get that feedback to make it better. This is the first year of growth, and so there's going to be so much learning. I don't know yet what's going to be the next big thing that makes me go, oh my gosh, how did I not put that in there? And I'm just so excited to get to that point where I'm getting more of that feedback so that I can continue to make it better and better. VICTORIA: I love that. And I think that it's a great place to be, [laughs] and you have an app that has a meaning for people. And then you also have other ways to measure your success. And, Jordyn, I'm wondering if you have any thoughts on an initial strategy to kind of meet some of the goals that Stephanie is laying out. JORDYN: I was actually going to go backward in time first, if you don't mind, and ask, as a person with an application now out in the world who does not have a technical background, could you tell us the story of how you went from this idea to those first steps of making it happen in the world? What did you do? Where did you go? DR. SMITH: [laughs] Yeah, so this is, on my end anyway, kind of a wild story though it may be typical for those of you who have been in this space. But so for me, I had this idea that I wanted to do to take the classes that I already do...because I already teach classes and I teach them live, and I love to do it. It's so much fun for me. But I wanted to take those and make them accessible for more people. And I wanted to make them in such a way where people could go at their own pace, you know, kind of follow through. And so I've had this idea for, I want to say, something like five years, but I just wasn't finding the right platform. A lot of the online courses and things like that I do like them, but they didn't feel as flexible as I wanted them to be. For me, when I'm listening to an app and learning information, I want to be able to listen offline. I want to be able to watch it sometimes. I'm really looking for a lot of flexibility. And I didn't even have the thought of an app, but that's what an app gives you, you know, it gives you this ability to be flexible, to be on the go, to kind of make your learning what you want it to be. And so I didn't really know what I was looking for, but I knew that I hadn't found it. And then I saw this program that helps you build apps. I think I saw an ad for it on Instagram or on Facebook, you know, just one of those very random things. And I saw the ad, and I went, oh, that's kind of interesting. And I went on the platform, and they do this thing which I think makes a lot of sense. And they say, "Well, here's a 30-day free trial. Do our educational thing to learn how to build an app. And then, if it's not for you, cancel at the end of 30 days, no big deal." So I thought, all right, that sounds good. And what I didn't realize that they were doing...I don't know if you've heard this metaphor before, but maybe it's this concept that if you want to take the island, you have to burn the boats. Basically, it's this general kind of showing up on this island with the army and saying, "Okay, well, if we want to take the island, the best way to get my troops to be able to do that is to make it so that there's no way to go back basically." And that is what this program did. It wound up walking me through these steps that were actually slowly burning the boats because about halfway through that free trial month, they said, "Okay, now we're going to post something online about this. And we're actually going to post every day for a week." And I'm just following the steps and going, wait a second, now I have to do this because now I've said I'm going to. And so it finally kind of got me out of this hemming and hawing, and I don't know what to do and very much launched me into this, okay, well, now this is happening kind of place. And so it was really interesting to see that happen to myself. [laughs] I could kind of see it happening a little bit. And yeah, that's how it happened. JORDYN: That's great. I love how you made sense of the process as a person going through it. And burning the boats to take the island metaphor is one I've never heard before. But now I have to know what the platform was [laughter] because it sounds like they did a really good job of getting you to put something out there. DR. SMITH: Yeah, they really did. The platform is called Passion.io. And they are actually a platform that I think targets health and wellness influencers which, as you know from talking with me or if you follow my things, you know sometimes I have some beef with some of the things that they might share. We might not have the same idea about how to go about those things. But Passion.io was the platform, and they have a ton of learning tools. They've got a lot of different resources on there for walking you through the initial stages of creating something. And then they also walk you through a little bit more high-level things. And one of the pieces that I really like about it is that underneath all of this how-to is this bolstering. Because I think for a lot of people, certainly for myself, there's this thing, this imposter syndrome that we all have of, well, I'm not good enough, or no one's going to like it. Or what if I'm embarrassed? Just the many, many places of doubt that we have. And underneath all of the how-to is really this space of you've got this. You've got a good idea. If you don't try, you'll never know. And so that's really the undercurrent of all of that. And I found that combination of this is what to do, and here's why it's meaningful to you, and here's why you are in the best place to do it, and that was really helpful. JORDYN: Yeah, I really love that. That's a lot of my work with early-stage founders is that. It is constantly saying, "You've got this. This is your space. You know it better than most. Just because you don't know everything there is to know about starting a tech business doesn't mean you aren't qualified to engage with your customer. So like, "If not you, who? And if not now, when?" is always [laughs] kind of what I'm asking. And it sounds like this platform does a lot of that coaching. DR. SMITH: Yeah. And, Jordyn, I just want to comment, too; I'm sure for you, if you do this a lot, you may get to points where you go; gosh, do I still need to be giving the same kind of reassurance? And I just want to say on the end of someone receiving that reassurance, yes, [laughs] we still need it. And so that work that you're able to do of just providing that consistent I'm here for you, and you are here for you, and we're going to do this. It's amazing to me how much I have needed that, and I still need that. And I just appreciate anyone who is out there doing that because it is really, really, really hard to be that vulnerable. JORDYN: Oh, 100%. And this is hard-won for me. I've been a founder twice and a very early employee at other startups twice. And what's amazing about that particular journey is that just when you feel like you're getting your footing at one stage, the stage changes. DR. SMITH: [laughs] Yes. JORDYN: So, to your point, you never stop needing that bolstering and that sort of just the coaching and the cheering on because the situation you find yourself in is constantly shifting under your feet. So 100% agree. DR. SMITH: Yes. [laughs] It sounds like you absolutely have the experience to be the person [laughs] to shepherd people through this, which, thank goodness, somebody's got to do it. [laughs] MID-ROLL AD: Now that you have funding, it's time to design, build, and ship the most impactful MVP that wows customers now and can scale in the future. thoughtbot Liftoff brings you the most reliable cross-functional team of product experts to mitigate risk and set you up for long-term success. As your trusted, experienced technical partner, we'll help launch your new product and guide you into a future-forward business that takes advantage of today's new technologies and agile best practices. Make the right decisions for tomorrow today. Get in touch at thoughtbot.com/liftoff. JORDYN: I just feel like with a lot of things...and as a mental health professional, you're in a better place than many to understand this, but with any big undertaking like starting a business, really just anything, training for a marathon, you name it, some very significant percentage of the challenge is mental is yourself. It is getting yourself into the mindset where you can keep doing it. And I feel like a lot of folks just focus on the tactical stuff, here's how to do this, here's what to do, which is great. And you need those things. At least half the battle is inside of us. It is emotional. It is mental. And any amount of being able to acknowledge that and grapple with those feelings as they arise is going to just make everybody that much more effective, which I feel like it's great when folks are working on apps where that's built into the mission like yours is because it's like, you can't lose sight of that. It's actually your life's work. DR. SMITH: Yeah. And this is going to be such a psychologist comment, so forgive me for [laughs] it. But it's such an interesting thing that you're pointing out because what we're really talking about, from my perspective, is this place on the graph where vulnerability meets your highest ability to perform. And so I think for a lot of industries, not just mine, it's that crossroad where I'm at optimum vulnerability to really be able to connect. Because when we're not vulnerable, if I keep myself too safe, then I'm not going to be able to position myself in a place to reach the most people or produce something that's going to be the most meaningful. And so I have to be willing to say, "This is going to be [laughs] really scary. This is going to really suck for me sometimes, and I'm going to get it wrong. And it's still worth it to do that because of this meaning that I'm wanting to do." And I don't think all times in someone's life is the time [chuckles] to do that, you know, this happens to be the time for me, which is wonderful, and scary, and hard, and terrible, [laughs] and all of the rest. But it's, I think, just being conscious that there is a necessary amount of vulnerability to achieve the potential with something like this that you want to achieve and acknowledging I am just going to be sitting in a lot of hard, and that means I'm doing it right. JORDYN: Absolutely. Yeah. And it's sort of without meeting a challenge we don't achieve. But to your point, it's that right mix of challenge and vulnerability. You don't want either of those things getting too out of balance. That is kind of the art of this journey, but 100% agree. DR. SMITH: Yeah, I was thinking just earlier today about stress because this is stressful. It's so difficult to do. And I was talking to a friend the other day, and I was saying, "Yeah, you know, I've just been stressed with all of these things that I was doing." And this person said, "You know, well, if you tried blah, blah, blah thing, it will take the stress away." [laughs] A substance you could use to take the stress away. And I said, "You know, I haven't thought about that, and I guess I could." But I thought in my mind how quickly we went from talking about the particular things that I was dealing with that were causing stress to trying to fix for stress and how much that's a part of our culture. And I thought, you know, the level of stress that I'm having is appropriate to the situation. I don't actually want to dull that level of stress because I need it in the same way that a car might benefit from a backup camera. When it starts to beep louder, [chuckles] I want to hear that because that's letting me know I'm heading for a crash, and I want to be conscious of that. So certainly, as a mental health provider, I think that's one of the things that's helping me move through. It's just that sensitivity to there's a certain level of stress and a certain utility to stress. That's important when you're building something because you're also needing to maintain yourself as a person, and you've got to monitor that pretty closely. JORDYN: You're still in private practice. DR. SMITH: Yeah. Yeah. JORDYN: It sounds like you've got, and I think you alluded to this earlier, a lot of hats that you're wearing. DR. SMITH: [laughs] Yes. JORDYN: How has it gone balancing the launch of this app with the rest of the work that you're doing? DR. SMITH: [sighs] Well, it's been a lot. So I am a private practice psychologist. I also have a nine-to-five. I work in a hospital as a health psychologist, and, you know, building the app and doing all of those things. And I think the biggest thing that's been important for me to be able to remind myself again, and again, and again, and again is just if it stops being what I want to do, even just in a moment, don't do it; do the next thing. Because for me in this space, as much as I might say, you know, I've burned the boats...and that is motivating for me to get through particular things. I also have to recognize that just like my body will tell me what I need with food, my body is going to let me know when I've had too much for the day or when I've been doing too much of one thing. And I need to go for a walk, or I need to just go the heck to sleep, or I need to do whatever. I need to do a different project, toss the marketing down and take a look at some of the patient notes or whatever. For me, because I love all of what I do, everything is important to me. I think I get something from all of that, and that is important to me too. You know, not every day is roses. There are days where I just want to say, screw all of it. I'm moving to Tahiti or whatever, whatever the fantasy is. But honestly, when it comes down to it, I do it because I love it. These things are meaningful to me, and being able to share in the world in all of the myriad ways that I do that I get a lot of meaning from that. And I would start to become concerned about that for myself if I stopped getting something back. And I think this is basically how we feel in anything that we invest in, whether I'm investing time or love, or money, or whatever we invest because we also get back, and when that stops happening, that's the time when I reevaluate. And so far, that hasn't happened yet. So far, I've been able to pivot and stay conscious of where I'm at and switch from one thing that I love to something else that I love. And then I find when I do that; I do always want to go back. VICTORIA: That's the benefit of wearing multiple hats, right? You can pick one up and put on a different one if you're matching your energy levels. DR. SMITH: Yeah. They say...one of the quotes that I've always related to for better or for [laughs] worse is if you want something done, give it to someone who's busy, and I think that's true for me. I'm one of those people where I like a level of busy. I thrive on that; I enjoy it. And it's just staying conscious of the balance. VICTORIA: And I think that's great. And we talk to founders about that a lot, actually, about how to balance their time. And it's interesting to hear from a psychologist's perspective. DR. SMITH: Yeah, it's been an interesting thing going through this as a psychologist because when I do say things like, "Well, yeah, I've been stressed," People say, "What? But you're a psychologist. You're not supposed to feel stress." And I always think this is hilarious because I go, "What the heck do you think psychologists [laughs] are?" Stress is a normal part of life. I'm going to be stressed and ticked off, and irritable, and all of the things just like everyone else. I am very fortunate to have additional skills for how to manage it when those feelings come up, which I'm extremely, extremely grateful for. But being stressed, or upset, or sad, or any of the range of unpleasant but completely normal human emotions, we all feel those [laughs] too. Those are just as natural for us. VICTORIA: Like, I never thought the goal of psychology was to never be stressed. [laughter] DR. SMITH: Right. Yeah, it's just to become increasingly better able to manage it. VICTORIA: That makes sense. With your approach to your app, are there experiments that you're designing in the app to see what your clients relate to more, or how are you building that? DR. SMITH: Yeah, absolutely. So one of the things that I am kind of balancing right now is that there's this space with intuitive eating. It really covers nourishing yourself, and a lot of that is around food. But our relationships with how we nourish ourselves and how we relate to our bodies also impacts how we move our bodies or not, how we are intimate with our bodies or not, how we are in much, much broader spaces in the world. There's a quote that says something like, "It's not about food, but food is sort of the stage where we enact what we're going through," kind of where we enact the deeper things going on for us. And so for me, really, what I'm experimenting with and balancing is how much do we want to focus completely on foodstuff? And how much do we also want to recognize that food is going to also dovetail into movement, and also dovetail into mental health, and also dovetail into how you manage stress at the end of the day, and also dovetail into the intimacy that you have in relationships, and the pleasure that you allow yourself or not, or that you think that you deserve? So I think really what I'm doing now and probably what I'll be doing forever with it is finding the right balance of those things and making sure to be respectful of all that's impacted by someone when we talk about just their relationship with food and their bodies. We're talking about their whole lives and really wanting to be able to go deeply with that and not keep it just on the surface. VICTORIA: That makes sense and an interesting thing to try to measure and experiment out within an application, right? DR. SMITH: Mm-hmm. So one aspect of the app, and probably the most meaningful one, is the courses. And there's another aspect of the app, which is a subscription. And so that's weekly lessons that are similar to the courses in that they're journaling, and a lesson, and mindfulness, and different components to them. But rather than being step by step by step like the courses, they are kind of on different topics each week. And so that's really been a space for me to experiment with some of that and to see what people are into and what really resonates with folks. And also, of course, to use places like social media, I'll use Instagram, and I'll do a reel on this topic, and a reel on this topic, and see how that goes or a visual or whatever. And I think it's really been an interesting process within the app and also in the other places where I'm able to advertise for it, like on social media, just to see what's meaningful for people. So much of this process is finding your people and creating things that are meaningful for them, and I'm still learning how to do that. VICTORIA: I think that's great. And I love to hear you're experimenting on a weekly basis for what content really resonates with people. I'm wondering, Jordyn, if you have any advice or tips for how to find your market, how to find your people. JORDYN: Well, in this scenario, since you've got folks using the app already, it's great because you basically have leads, trails to follow, breadcrumbs to [laughs] chase down. So I don't know how many users you have already. And you don't have to tell us if you don't want to. DR. SMITH: [laughs] JORDYN: But I would basically look at the patterns of their usage and find those folks who are really using the app in the way you feel it is most useful and follow up with them. Who are they? Interview them if you can. But if you can find out things about them anyway, zero in on those folks as a specific niche and see if you can get as many people who look like them and can be defined in any way. It really depends on the characteristics of the folks themselves. And it could be geographic. It could be some component of their identity. It could be anything. But basically, those folks who are really getting the most out of your app in the ways that you are sort of locating value for them really double down on those folks. Can you find more people like that? Can you find out more about how they're using the app? Why it's resonating. That's what I would be doing right now, and it's possible that's what you're doing. [laughs] DR. SMITH: Well, I'm kind of curious about how to do that, you know, because anything you ask of people is one more thing. [laughs] And I think the truth for a lot of us is that we have a lot of things. And so I have a hesitancy in saying, "Well, do I send a survey that someone has to fill out? Do I try to take some of their time over the phone or ask for an email?" Because, of course, anything that takes time is something someone needs to put into their lives. And as willing, as I think people are to be helpful, and certainly I'm very fortunate to be around just incredible people, there's a limit to that. You don't want to be asking for too much. And so I would be curious from your perspective, Jordyn, if you think there's a right way to do that, if there's a way that you think is kind of the right way or a way [laughs] to try to strike that balance. JORDYN: Yeah, definitely. And that dynamic is something you've got to be sensitive to. People are busy, and you are asking them for something. But at this very early stage, that's kind of the beauty of this stage of the work is that it's an opportunity to really build with people, to invite them into the process so that they feel like they're co-creating something with you. And that's why focusing on those users who appear to be getting the most out of the app is the best place to go because they're going to be the most likely to want...if they're getting something out of it, they probably are pretty excited about that. They're probably going to be excited to talk to you about it, et cetera. But that said, you should do something to compensate, and I don't mean that necessarily with money but compensate them for their time and their effort. But in a mission-driven context like yours, it's really a great opportunity to kind of bring the community along with you. These folks are your first champions. You'll be surprised. In my experience, the people who are the most sort of impassioned about what you're doing and are benefiting from it the most are more than excited to help. And the channels how you make this ask just totally depends on the details of these folks and how they prefer to communicate. So with regard to the question around a survey versus getting people to talk on the phone, it's a little bit of trial and error. Send out a survey, see if people respond. Putting a survey in the app is great, especially if it's just one question or two questions right after some key interaction. So maybe they've done today's lesson, or this week's lesson, or this week's activity, and right afterward, asking them one question about how they're finding the app. And then, if they engage with that, then the follow-up can be, "Hey, thank you so much for giving me that feedback. If you're willing, I'd love to chat for 20 minutes with you about this. I really want to be creating this with my customers and my users. So no big deal if you don't have time; I get it. But it would be really valuable." And you'll be surprised, I think, [laughs] how many people are more than excited because they really do feel it's a signal to them that you care deeply about their experience and that you really are trying to make that experience the best thing for them. It's sort of unintuitive. It feels like you're asking them to give you something, but what you're giving them is you're leaning in to co-creating with them. DR. SMITH: Yeah. Jordyn, I love that. I think that's such a great idea. And from a mental health perspective, it's so authentic, too, because, of course, you want to offer people the opportunity to share about what they've learned and to be able to process it out loud. And you're right, that will be helpful to me, but it is also a service that's not dissimilar to what sometimes people come to therapy for, you know, is to just be able to process their experience out loud and be heard...and some of those things for themselves. So, Jordyn, I think that's such a great approach to that, and I really appreciate that. That's great. JORDYN: Absolutely. And I would only add that it's another signal...who ends up responding positively to that is another signal for you on who your best collaborators are in the app. I mean, you can look at how they're using it to answer that question. But it's another signal to you like, oh, these are the folks who are really finding this useful. They're finding it so useful if they want to talk to me about it. And that will then additionally help you double down on those folks. DR. SMITH: I'm curious for you, Jordyn, and I'm curious about how to reach a broader audience. So, certainly, I know people, and people who know me are much more comfortable reaching out to use the app or to be part of things because they know me and trust that it's going to be good. But expanding that to people that I don't know or that aren't, you know, through somebody, through a direct connection, that part is more challenging, of course. Because how would they know to trust me, especially when they've been around providers, as we were talking about, where sometimes that trust can be broken in some of these very vulnerable areas? I've been experimenting with some things like creating an Instagram and things like that because I wanted to create a space for people to see what is this person all about? What is this messaging? But I'm curious if there are other ways that you would recommend to reach people who don't know me who would be then willing to take a chance on something like a course, which is often a kind of a high-ticket high-investment type of thing. JORDYN: Well, there are myriad ways to do that, too, that come to mind, the kind that sort of define the ends of the spectrum. One of them is along the lines of what you're doing with Instagram, basically, advertise. Do a Google ad, do an ad on Instagram. You're going to capture a certain segment of people who are maybe not as focused on relationship-based referrals, who maybe are suffering in isolation, maybe they're not talking to anyone about this. So that's sort of one end. But the other, I would say, is reaching out to fellow clinicians who you have a good relationship with and saying, "Hey, is this something you'd be willing to recommend to your patients or the folks that you work with? If not, why not?" Basically, activate your professional network in terms of adding this as another resource that they recommend to folks because then you're kind of multiplying that people you know effect, and that can be very powerful. DR. SMITH: Yeah, it's such an interesting thing too because as you were talking, I started noticing, in my own mind, that little piece that we were talking about before of this kind of like, ah, well, I don't want to burden anyone. I don't want to give them one more thing to do. Then I thought, well, I love resources for my patients; that's only to the good. [laughs] I love having those things. And so it was so interesting just to kind of observe that kind of process happening in real-time in my mind of this little bit of doubt that makes me go, oh, that makes me nervous, and then having to dig down to what you're actually telling me [laughs] because this is value-added. JORDYN: 100%. And I'm glad that you noticed that and brought it up because I think this is especially for underrepresented founders, so women, people of color, so much self-doubt. And that hurdle is sometimes the biggest hurdle. And what I did, this is funny; this is fairly tactical. DR. SMITH: [laughs] JORDYN: When I was a founder, I made a document that was basically a reminder to myself. I would look at it before almost every call I had with anybody about what I was working on. But it was basically, hey, Jordyn, why are you doing this? [laughs] And it was like, why does this thing need to exist? Why am I the right person to be making it? Sort of a series of those things. And just to remind myself every time that what I was doing was valuable and that I'm not out there trying to get people to do something for me. I'm trying to get them to do something for themselves. I'm taking a problem they're already trying to solve for themselves and just giving them another tool. That's it. And if they don't want to pick it up right now, that's fine. It might not be the right time. But reaching out to other practitioners and saying, "Hey, I have this tool. And the tool was developed out of a lot of the same things I'm imagining all of you are experiencing in your practices." A significant number of them are going to be like, "Oh great," just what you said, "Great, another tool. I can add this one. And maybe it won't be right for every one of my patients, but it might be right for some of them." And just getting around that in your heart of, like, you're not asking them for something. You're giving them another resource. And in fact, not doing that sells yourself short, sells them short, frankly. You're not making this for you. This isn't merely about satisfying your own ego. I'm sure there's a little bit of that in there. DR. SMITH: [laughs] JORDYN: There always is. But for the most part, you're trying to help people, and by not telling them about what you're doing or offering it to them as a resource, it sort of defeats the purpose. DR. SMITH: Yeah, it's such an important reframe. And like we were talking about before, it's one of those things that I think just needs to be on loop, [laughs] in the heads for founders. And probably some version of this on loop for all of us, you know, just as we're going through life kind of reminding ourselves my presence is not a burden. [laughs] It reminds me a little bit of what Sonya Renee Taylor kind of started with, "The Body is Not An Apology." And I think this is basically kind of going off of that topic. You know, I'm not a burden. JORDYN: Absolutely. And I love that frame. You're doing this for a reason. You're not a burden. Your app that is out there helping people is not a burden; quite the opposite. DR. SMITH: Right. It's amazing how [laughs] important that reminder is. VICTORIA: Yeah, I love that. And, Jordyn, you also have our incubator program coming up soon for other founders. Do you want to mention that real quick? JORDYN: Of course, I would love to. thoughtbot has a new incubator program launching this year. We have our first run of it starting in mid-March. Who this is for is non-technical founding teams. So you might be a solo person. You might have a team, but you haven't found that technical co-founder or partner yet, but your business idea involves building an app or building software of some kind. And basically, you're at the early stages. You haven't launched anything. You've identified the opportunity, maybe you've talked to a bunch of your potential users or customers, but you're not sure if there's a there there and what to do about it. That's the ideal sort of stage and persona. And the program is really about helping those non-technical founding teams validate the market opportunity, do some experiments with product, basically build a couple of features, maybe a landing page that expresses the value proposition, et cetera, just to learn as much as they can about what the opportunity is and how they might need it with software. Get them used to working with a technical team and then help them with their planning for next steps, maybe that's raising capital, or maybe it is finding a technical co-founder. We can help with that. That's the idea. It's an eight-week program. Everybody who sees themselves in what I just said should apply. And the URL to apply is thoughtbot.com/incubator. VICTORIA: Great. Thank you so much, Jordyn. And thank you for all your advice and your questions that you brought to the episode today. And, Stephanie, is there any final takeaways you'd like to leave our listeners with? DR. SMITH: No, I just think this was such an excellent opportunity. I feel like I learned a lot from it. And I want to thank you both so much for taking the time. It's really been a pleasure. VICTORIA: Wonderful. All right. Yes, thank you both so much for joining me today. And for our listeners, you can subscribe to the show and find notes along with a complete transcript for this episode at giantrobots.fm. If you have questions or comments, email us at hosts@giantrobots.fm. And you can find me on Twitter @victori_ousg. This podcast is brought to you by thoughtbot and produced and edited by Mandy Moore. Thank you for listening. See you next time. ANNOUNCER: This podcast is brought to you by thoughtbot, your expert strategy, design, development, and product management partner. We bring digital products from idea to success and teach you how because we care. Learn more at thoughtbot.com.Special Guests: Dr. Stephanie Smith and Jordyn Bonds.Sponsored By:thoughtbot: Now that you have funding, it’s time to design, build and ship the most impactful MVP that wows customers now and can scale in the future. thoughtbot Lift Off brings you the most reliable cross-functional team of product experts to mitigate risk and set you up for long-term success. As your trusted, experienced technical partner, we’ll help launch your new product and guide you into a future-forward business that takes advantage of today’s new technologies and agile best practices. Make the right decisions for tomorrow, today. Get in touch at: thoughtbot.com/liftoffSupport Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots

Michele Veldsman is Director of Neuroscience R&D at Cambridge Cognition and Founder and CEO of Playroom, an invitation-only secure social network for families. Victoria talks to Michele about the premise of Playroom and its goal of giving parents a network, a safe social community where parents are able to know and easily communicate with people associated with their children and also provide specific options to maintain boundaries when it comes to their privacy and safety, the challenges families face in raising kids and maintaining a career, and new features she wants the app to include, such as finding nearby restrooms while out and about. Playroom Follow Playroom on LinkedIn or Twitter. Follow Michele Veldsman on LinkedIn. Follow thoughtbot on Twitter or LinkedIn. Become a Sponsor of Giant Robots! Transcript: VICTORIA: This is the Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots podcast, where we explore the design, development, and business of great products. I'm your host, Victoria Guido. And with me today is Michele Veldsman, Director of Neuroscience R&D at Cambridge Cognition and Founder and CEO of playroom, an invitation-only secure social network for your family. Michele, thank you for joining me. MICHELE: Thank you for having me. VICTORIA: Tell me a little bit about your journey. How did all of this get started? MICHELE: I had some kids, and I realized quite quickly that raising children is really difficult. I don't have family close by to support me. They are a couple of hours away. But trying to manage being a professional working in a fairly intense job, looking after my kids, making sure they have everything that they need and that they can socialize, and that I have a support network around me turned out to be really difficult. And so I wanted to find a way to solve that essentially. VICTORIA: Right. So you identified a problem from your own life in trying to manage your career, and you're raising your children without that close, immediate support. MICHELE: Yeah, exactly, yeah. And I realized this is a problem for a lot of people that increasingly, we don't live in these sort of small communities where we're surrounded by friends and family. Increasingly, people are moving to different cities, different countries. And that support network isn't there, but there are still all of the challenges of raising kids and trying to have a career at the same time. VICTORIA: Right. And like we were talking before we recorded, I just got back from visiting my family in Virginia, and I live in California now. So I'm familiar with some of the challenges my brother and sister-in-law are facing with childcare. Can you tell us some of the things that specifically you found really difficult in this situation? MICHELE: A lot of the time in my working life, I found there were loads and loads of tech to kind of try and make things easier to organize things. There's just a lot out there just for my working life but not much to support my family life, of which there are actually many, many more challenges because I'm kind of trying to juggle. I'm making sure that my kids their healthcare is all right, that they're getting their vaccinations on time, that I'm applying to school places on time, that I'm making sure that they're meeting other kids their age, and they're having play dates, and organizing birthday parties, all of those things. And then to try and fit that all into the wider day-to-day life, I found this really difficult. I spoke to other parents, and they also found it really difficult. In fact, I did some research with over 120 parents, and 70% of them found parenting really difficult or extremely difficult. VICTORIA: That's a lot of cognitive load on a person to manage all of these different things like school, and medical, and all the things you need to buy, [laughs] and what brands are the best. MICHELE: [laughs] Yeah, exactly. And actually, just trying to build this community around yourself is more difficult than you anticipate. So, for example, my kids went to nursery. And this is the time that they're starting to socialize and making these important connections that are really important to their development. And so as a parent, you're hearing from your three-year-old, oh, they've got this new best friend, but you have no idea how to connect to the parents of that child. And the nurseries daycare can't give out that information because, of course, there are privacy issues. So it's really difficult to make connections to other parents to be able to do these things like play dates. Organizing a birthday party, I found what you have to do is just take an invitation, give it to the nursery or the daycare center. Hopefully, they put it in the bags of the children that are friends with your kids, and then you kind of hope that they've got it and the right people are coming. You don't know who's coming to your kid's birthday party. And this just all seemed like there could be easy solutions to solve this to really build communities that center around your children. VICTORIA: And I love that the purpose of playroom is to really build that community of social support that you need for parents. You mentioned you started to do some research on what that would look like. And I'm wondering if there was anything that surprised you as a result of that research. MICHELE: Yes, I was quite surprised by...I suppose in some ways, it's reassuring actually as well that a lot of parents are going through similar struggles, struggling to connect to other families and not sort of in that way of, like, as you're...it's kind of a strange thing when you have kids because when they're very young, you can still socialize with your friends and people that you meet, maybe work colleagues. But as they get older, the focus becomes a little more around them and their friends, so making those connections are a little bit more difficult. So a lot of people struggle with that. A lot of people struggled with just keeping on top of everything. As you're saying, that cognitive load is very large; just trying to remember organizing dentist appointments, doctor's appointments, all of those things. It's a large cognitive load. And we've got enough tech now that we shouldn't have to...we should be able to put that load on to technology that can support us. VICTORIA: And so you feel like it was reassuring almost that this was a common problem [laughs], and it wasn't just you. MICHELE: Yeah, it's reassuring. It's always reassuring when you connect with other people to realize that they're going through similar things. It's not just you that's, you know, somehow not able to manage it all. But the other thing I found interesting is that there's a very large spectrum of how people feel about images and media associated with their children. So you've got a really wide spectrum of people who...some parents are very happy to share a lot about their children's lives, and their photos, and things that they're proud of on the major social media platforms. And other parents are a lot more guarded, and they don't want to share those pictures or have other people share them on platforms. So there's a massive spectrum of how people feel about the use of images and media associated with their children and also related to that of data associated with their children. VICTORIA: Yes, and I wanted to ask you about how privacy played into your planning on how you built the application. MICHELE: This was important to me because I had both that experience, and also, I started to become more aware of the darker sides of the major platforms where there's perhaps not as much protection for children and that, of course, children can't consent. So I found...having spoken to all of these parents, the spectrum was very wide on what people were willing to share, and how much they knew about how their data was used, and how much privacy they had on these platforms. I really wanted to ensure that that spectrum was reflected. In playroom, within the app, it's built so that you have control over how much privacy, how openly your images, for example, of your child, can be shared. So it can be from having any images to be shared with anybody. You know, maybe we're at a birthday party, and there are a lot of children there. So there are lots of pictures where your child is in there; some people are very happy for those to be shared. Others are not wanting that shared anywhere. So within the app, you have control over how far those sorts of pictures can be shared and with whom. But the premise of playroom is that you're essentially in a network, a community where you know everybody associated with your children. So it's not that sort of massively open network. It's very much closed and associated with just the people you know are surrounding your children. VICTORIA: That's great, and it's very relevant for me. I just got a new camera, and I offered to take pictures for my niece's birthday party last weekend. And now I have all these photos that, I'm not sure how to share them with the parents and in a way that would be secure and provide those options. So I can understand the value of what you've built here. MICHELE: Within playroom, there are bubbles. So if your child, for example, goes to nursery or daycare, they usually are in a room with children of a similar age, a playroom, that forms a bubble. So the nursery gives you a secure code that connects you to the other parents in that playroom. So that forms this bubble of parents associated with your children. So if you're taking photos at an event, so let's say you have a birthday party, you take photos. There are lots of other children in those photos. You can share those photos with the people in that bubble and in that bubble alone. And then, you can set your own personal media sharing settings so that you can make it clear to other parents that I don't want you to share this to wider social media. Watermark everything, very strongly watermarked or not downloadable. Or I'm happy for you to share it within playroom itself with other people that I know. So those settings are sort of adjustable depending on your preferences. VICTORIA: Were there any obstacles that you faced from maybe a technology or a process perspective with implementing or building the app? MICHELE: Yeah, so there are a couple of challenges. The biggest one is data and privacy. So, of course, security is a huge priority. That's going to be the center of priorities, really, so that everything is very, very secure. Parents, of course, are conscious of security surrounding their children. To be honest, as I was saying before, with sharing of media, it's quite on the spectrum, but either way, the priority is security and then privacy. So the use of data is an interesting one because a lot of traditional social networks, social media rely on the monetization of data. And again, this works on a spectrum where some parents flat out don't want any data associated with their children used or monetized in any way. Others are a lot more liberal about that. My personal view and from having spoken to a lot of parents, I think there's a good middle ground in which data is used in a responsible way for the purposes of actually benefiting parents in some way. So maybe it's the use of data rather than constant targeted ads, the use of data for the provision of services. Maybe within an area, you've got a high proportion of children there, and there needs to be better childcare provisions or play activity provisions. VICTORIA: That makes sense. So make the data more relevant in the way that it's used to provide better services to parents, right? MICHELE: Exactly, yeah, rather than that strict sort of targeted advertising. VICTORIA: That makes sense. And so you've had to adjust your plan for monetization based on the needs of your users regarding privacy and security, and we love to hear that founders really care about privacy and security at thoughtbot, so... MICHELE: Yes, exactly. Yeah, I think it's really, really important, and even more so now. There's really this acknowledgment of the very large open networks that they were never really built around children, of course. I mean, why would they be? But there's been a lot of controversy recently over parents having images and their children featured in videos and things online. The child accounts run by parents have millions of followers and videos, images, and things get saved thousands of times and commented in ways that are a little uncomfortable. So there is this sort of growing feeling that these large open networks...mostly parents just don't really know. And they do...when you become a parent, you're really excited, and you're proud, and you want to share these things with the world. And you perhaps don't think about those kinds of darker sides of things. That's really coming into the forefront now. So I think a sort of more closed community-based network is important. VICTORIA: I agree. I've spent some time volunteering for organizations that work with children and privacy and human trafficking situations. And when you start to understand really how dark it can get for children, maybe too dark for this podcast, but security and privacy becomes the penultimate goal. MID-ROLL AD: thoughtbot is thrilled to announce our own incubator launching this year. If you are a non-technical founding team with a business idea that involves a web or mobile app, we encourage you to apply for our eight-week program. We'll help you move forward with confidence in your team, your product vision, and a roadmap for getting you there. Learn more and apply at tbot.io/incubator. That's tbot.io/incubator. VICTORIA: You mentioned learning all of this as part of your journey on building the app. I'm curious what you brought from your background in neuroscience into the creation of the app and maybe how that played into how you built certain behaviors and things into the features. MICHELE: Yeah, it's kind of interesting. So my neuroscience background, I guess, has really informed how I think about child development and brain development and the importance of the developmental stages of socializing with children. It was always at the front of my mind, and one of the things that really spurred me on to create this is really knowing that as children are developing, they are learning these really important social skills, and I just wanted to foster that as much as possible. And I thought, you know, it's actually really difficult to foster that social side of things if you don't have a community naturally around you. So I guess that's the main way that it's fed into my thinking about playroom. Other than that, I'm not too sure, actually. I think it's early stages, but I think it will probably influence some of the UX decisions, which is a big part of what I do in my day job, not the UX itself but the kind of psychology and neuroscience behind certain behaviors and how we interact with technology. VICTORIA: I love to see founders and people who find their way into technology roles that usually come from a wide variety of backgrounds. And for me, neuroscience makes a lot of sense when you're doing these studies. Because you really are even, you know, from a scientific perspective, setting up a study and experiment to see how people will react to it. And you're proving your theory of is this how people will actually relate and connect inside the application? MICHELE: Yes, absolutely, yeah. A lot of my job is data science. So I'm really excited to just get data in that I can really make decisions based on. I'm very much a kind of evidence-based person from my science background definitely. VICTORIA: Yes, excellent. And maybe you could tell me more about a decision you had to make maybe early on in the development of the app that was challenging for you or you had to put a lot of time and thought into. MICHELE: One of the things I found tricky, I suppose, is kind of being a solo founder, actually. Early on, I spent a lot of time trying to find a co-founder, and I really wanted somebody like a technical co-founder that could kind of fill the gap that I have. I don't have any formal experience in app development or anything like that, although a lot of my job involves coding and the data science side of things. Yeah, I spent a lot of time trying to find a technical co-founder and just really struggled to find somebody that had interest, and passion, and vision that would work for playroom. And so, after a while and after speaking to a couple of mentors, I decided to save that energy of trying to find somebody and just go at it alone for now. So, you know, open to finding somebody who has a similar vision for it, but yeah, that was really a difficult thing; it always is being a solo founder. But I just am really passionate about it and kind of filled the gaps with mentors and with advisors who can help me along the way. VICTORIA: That's so interesting. I think deciding about who you're going to bring into your inner circle when you're passionate about an idea sounds like a very difficult decision. MICHELE: Yeah, it is, yeah, and it's a strange sort of space as well because by no means does it need somebody who has children or has an interest there. But I think it does help with the passion because it's a really specific problem. And yeah, I just haven't found anyone yet. VICTORIA: But you have found several mentors. That sounds like it's meeting your needs in that way for now. How did you go about finding the right people to give you advice in that way? MICHELE: A combination really of just kind of stalking through LinkedIn and connecting to people, and just chatting to people, and then also through networks of other founders, and going through accelerators, things like that where I'm kind of formally introduced to mentors. They've maybe given me warm introductions, amazing women's network where people have either given warm introductions or volunteered themselves to give advice. That's been really, really great. You sort of feel like you've got a community there already. VICTORIA: That's great. And did you focus on local groups in the UK, or did you go just online virtual groups? Which was easier for you? MICHELE: A combination. So I went through an accelerator that was based in London, and so that introduced me to a few people more locally and quite a wide network, actually. I also joined a women of color network called Founderland, and they're based in Berlin. And they are a really amazing support network that has quite a wide international reach but really gives you a lot of support and guidance and is completely free and just really feels like a nice, supportive community. VICTORIA: Sounds like building a community of founders is as important as building a community for people raising children, right? [laughs] MICHELE: Yeah, definitely. [laughs] Yeah, I think so. I think any aspect of your life that is difficult benefits from a community really because, in almost all areas, there are people who have gone through something before that want to make it easy for you or who are going through something at the same time and want somebody to talk to or to support each other. VICTORIA: The most important thing we can be doing is building community. You have your full-time position, and then you also have your children that you're raising, and you are founding this company. How do you make time for yourself and for your own peace of mind in the week? [laughter] MICHELE: With great difficulty, yeah, [laughter] and a very supportive partner. It's a real struggle, and things sometimes have to be slower than I would like. I've got an amazing team of app developers who are absolutely brilliant and are usually chasing me rather than me chasing them, which is always really great. Again, a fantastic support network, a big community of other parent founders who know how difficult it all is. And then it's just like a lot of working evenings, taking a day off to focus on things. VICTORIA: Yes, we're learning a technique at thoughtbot with energy coaching and coaching people on when to take breaks and how to make sure you have time for lunch and take vacations, and all of that, which I think is important for your long-term ability to maintain your momentum. MICHELE: Yes, definitely. VICTORIA: But I've heard from many founders, you know, the support network is one of the most important things to be able to balance everything. MICHELE: Yes, it really is, yeah. I am susceptible to burnout, and I know it now. And I should know better because I know the kind of neuroscience of it as well. And so I do have to be really careful. I don't push myself too much. One of the good things actually, you know, my kids are school age now. So they have these half-term breaks. They have regular breaks from school, and then summer holidays, of course, Christmas, all of that, and that sort of forces a time for you to break and then spend really quality time with the kids. So it's really, really good in that way. VICTORIA: I appreciate kind of enforced time off. [laughs] MICHELE: Yeah, I know. [laughs] VICTORIA: And really committing to it. It makes sense, yeah. [laughter] MICHELE: I just realized that. VICTORIA: UK people are better at that than I think in the U.S. generally, but it's certainly something I strive for. Sometimes even just going to a place where there's no internet access, [laughs] so good luck trying to reach me. MICHELE: Oh yes, yeah. VICTORIA: Well, tell me more about your interaction with your developers' team. And you mentioned how wonderful they are. What is your communication patterns with them? Do you have regular meetings set up, or what is that like? MICHELE: So it's a company that I met through YC summer school program, got sort of chatting to them. They're really, really great with communication. So we communicate on Slack every day, get updates, have little videos of updates, and work through any issues, and then kind of weekly meetings. And yeah, it's been a really, really positive experience. I also have recently...on top of working full-time, and doing this, and having two kids I recently had...my husband was very ill and in hospital for two months just over Christmas. And then he came out of hospital for three days over Christmas, but then I was ill and in hospital for a month. So it's been absolutely crazy just trying to look after the kids and get work going, all of this. And they've been really consistent throughout. They've just kept everything ticking away. So that's been really, really great to have that, knowing that that continues on when I've had lots of life things going on. VICTORIA: That ability for the team to manage themselves and be proactive in their communication is something I would always advise founders to look for in a development partner. You want to see that activity on a daily basis and see the product fairly often as well. You don't want to be surprised three months later with what they built and have it not be correct, what you're looking for. MICHELE: Yeah, it's literally been back and forth of details that need ironing out. There's always a list that I can get to in my time, and there's the acknowledgment that I'm kind of working around a full-time job. VICTORIA: Well, what are you most excited about in your features roadmap that you could share with us? MICHELE: I'm so excited by all of it. I have two things that I'm really excited about. The first is the bubble, so that's just the ability to immediately connect to parents in different contexts. So I can immediately connect to all the parents in my child's nursery. It makes it really easy to organize birthday parties, play dates in other contexts as well. Say, for example, my daughter started a gymnastics course. We pay for the whole gymnastics course. She then didn't really want to do it because she didn't know anybody there. And so I think we managed about two lessons before she just really didn't want to do it anymore. And, again, I had this sort of feeling that if we were able to talk to the other parents and encourage some friendships and things, that would be really helpful for her. And just as things go along, the kids do become friends, and it's nice to be able to connect to the other parents in those contexts as well. Same thing for summer camps, any kind of setting where your kids are making new friends. And you want to get to know the parents of those friends and be able to connect to other families. And then the other feature that I'm really excited about is just being able to with one click find things nearby, toilets, cafes, supermarkets really easily. Usually, you have, one, holding a baby, pushing a pram, toddler has to suddenly use the toilet, no idea where to find one. So just being able to one click of a button find that really near me, I think, will be really, really useful. So I'm really excited about that feature and just seeing it working nicely. VICTORIA: Great. And then you'll get to use it in real life. [laughs] MICHELE: Yeah, exactly. VICTORIA: Build the change you want to see in the world. I love it. And then, if you could go back in time and give yourself some advice when this all started now that you have this hindsight, what would you tell yourself? MICHELE: I probably would tell myself to just keep at it. Maybe don't waste time trying to fill perceived gaps in your own abilities because I can learn stuff, and I can find support, and advisors, and mentors. So probably, that's what I would focus on. I spent a lot of time and energy trying to find a co-founder that would fill these gaps that I felt like I had. I'd come from an academic and a neuroscience background, less commercial experience, so I worried about needing somebody who would have that business side, needing somebody to have that technical side. But, in fact, I've got a lot of those skills from my career and from my jobs anyway. I can learn a lot. I managed to get myself a Ph.D. in neuroscience from Cambridge University, so I can probably pick things up. [laughs] And I also can fill in any gaps with really great mentors and advisors. VICTORIA: I love that. And I love that this problem that you had drove you to find the solution and to push forward even if you didn't know all the answers. MICHELE: Yeah. Exactly, yeah. VICTORIA: Wonderful. What does success look like for playroom in the next six months or five years? MICHELE: Six months is having the app in some of the nurseries that we've been working with so out with parents and making those communities. In five years, it's having hundreds of thousands of parents in communities and having them supported, connected to other parents, feeling like they have a safe space for themselves and their kids. VICTORIA: I love it. And maybe you can mention even more about what the impact that can have on a parent who might be struggling to keep it all together. MICHELE: Oh, a huge impact. So I know this personally because my husband was ill, and then I was ill. So we had three months, you know, a five-year-old and a two-year-old, each of us solo parenting and each of us with quite serious illnesses. And it was incredibly difficult. I was lucky enough that my next-door neighbor her kids are the same age and go to the same school. And actually, that's when I met them. So even though we were neighbors, we hadn't even met. But when she found out that my husband was unwell and I was looking after the kids on my own, really stepped up and helped look after my daughter, take some of the burden off of doing all the parenting on my own, plus visiting my husband in the hospital. And then reached out to a wider community within the area, like her friends that she knows from the school, and these parents really stepped up and helped me so much, like bringing food around and being that community that everybody wants and needs. And I feel like a lot of it came about sort of accidentally because I was in this really difficult situation, but it helped me so much. I can't even describe how much. And I just think if I can do that for lots of other parents, it will make a huge impact because it is really difficult for some people, for a lot of people. VICTORIA: I think the impact can't be underestimated enough. I know recently I signed up for Big Sisters and Big Brothers San Diego, so it's mentorship for children in the local county. And taking some of the training courses, they say in the U.S. alone, there are 3 million children who are just neglected or abused every year. Neglect could come from not having that social support network and not being able to look after your kids or not having other ways to connect with parents to get the support you need. So I think it's a really amazing product that you're building. MICHELE: Oh, thank you. Yeah, I completely agree that there are so many ways that it can help and actually in just bringing together communities just, sort of locally centered around your children. And yeah, as you're saying, that neglect when there are situations where people actually...parents can't cope or need help and won't reach out. It's a sort of more natural way to have a community around you. VICTORIA: Are there any other final takeaways you'd like to leave for listeners? MICHELE: Well, I guess for the parents, parenting is hard, and it can be lonely, and that's okay. Just try and reach out to people as much as you can and go join playroom. VICTORIA: Wonderful. Thank you so much, Michele. You can subscribe to the show and find notes along with a complete transcript for this episode at giantrobots.fm. If you have questions or comments, email us at hosts@giantrobots.fm. And you can find me on Twitter @victori_ousg. This podcast is brought to you by thoughtbot and produced and edited by Mandy Moore. Thank you for listening. See you next time. ANNOUNCER: This podcast is brought to you by thoughtbot, your expert strategy, design, development, and product management partner. We bring digital products from idea to success and teach you how because we care. Learn more at thoughtbot.com.Special Guest: Michele Veldsman.Sponsored By:thoughtbot Incubator: thoughtbot is thrilled to announce our own incubator launching this year. If you are a non-technical founding team with a business idea that involves a web or mobile app, we encourage you to apply for our eight-week program. We'll help you move forward with confidence in your team, your product vision, and a roadmap for getting you there. Learn more and apply at tbot.io/incubator.Support Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots

Eric Liaw and Zack Willis are part of IVP, a leading venture firm with a 43-year history of partnering with entrepreneurs who are undaunted on the path to innovation. Will talks to Eric and Zack about what has made IVP so long-lasting in the Venture Capital industry, how they help companies' portfolios, and the accomplishments they are most proud of. Follow Eric on LinkedIn or Twitter. Follow Zack on LinkedIn or Twitter. IVP Follow IVP on LinkedIn, Twitter, or Facebook. Follow Aarish Shah on LinkedIn or Twitter. Follow thoughtbot on Twitter or LinkedIn. Become a Sponsor of Giant Robots! Transcript: WILL: This is the Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots Podcast, where we explore the design, development, and business of great products. I'm your host, Will Larry. And with me today is Eric Liaw and Zack Willis, who are part of IVP, a leading venture firm with a 43-year history of partnering with entrepreneurs who are undaunted on the path to innovation. Zack, Eric, thank you for joining me. ERIC: Thanks, Will. It's great to be here, really appreciate it. And I got to say, as the Giant Robot Podcast, as a kid growing up, Transformers were my favorite toys. So this may be the closest I ever get to being a Transformer by being part of Giant Robots, so thank you for the opportunity. [laughter] WILL: Love it. We love robots here, so it's perfect. All right, let's start here. For folks who may not know, tell us about IVP and what's on deck for 2023. ERIC: Well, you gave a great intro, so let me just add to that a little bit. You know, we're really proud of our history and our firm. We've been around since 1980. So we're one of the sort of original Silicon Valley venture firms. But when I speak about the firm in that context, I don't think it does justice to how the firm has expanded over the years and how our investment activity now encompasses not only the Bay Area but major U.S. markets like New York and LA. We have investments in Canada, Australia, and a number in Western and Central Europe as well. And the common theme for us is that we're focused on working with entrepreneurs who, as you pointed out, are undaunted as they innovate and are pursuing dreams to create companies that will become recognizable in households and companies across the world, not just today but tomorrow as well. So that's really what IVP is all about. And it's what we're looking forward to in 2023 despite obviously the fact that the world is a little more challenging these days, a little bit more uncertain in, particular in the venture category. But we're really excited about the things that we're working on. We invested a lot in our team over a number of years. And, believe it or not, despite what you might read in headlines around venture activity, we are very much open for business in 2023 because we think that great entrepreneurs and great ideas come together at all times, regardless of whether the stock market is up or down. And our job is to find them, work with them, and become partners for three, four, or five, six, seven years, sometimes longer than that. So really, there's no bad time to start a company and get to know venture investors like us. WILL: Yeah, definitely. Your company has been around for 43 years. Can you kind of tell me what has made you last that long, for 43 years? That's a long time to be in the venture capitalist world, especially before it was popular and fun. ERIC: You know, it's a great question. I've been at the firm for 11 years now. So a lot of the credit goes to people that...our founder, Reid Dennis, who started the firm. He's in his 90s now, so he has since retired, but a lot of credit goes to people that came before me and before Zack. And I think that's a common theme for any kind of organization or institution, no pun intended, because that's what the I in IVP stands for. But it goes to that sort of common thread. You have to evolve, especially in technology. The technology markets that were successful for IVP in the early '80s that's not really cutting-edge venture anymore. As an example, Seagate was one of our first investments ever when people weren't sure that personal hard drive technology would actually work or whether or not they're getting market demand. I mean, who would actually want storage themselves carried around with them at all times? And now, think about how much storage you have in your pocket. It's pretty gnarly to think about how much technology has advanced. But if you kept only thinking about, okay, I'm going to invest in the next hard drive, you would have really gotten stuck after that. And obviously, the things that have come since out of the minds of technology entrepreneurs have far exceeded what people at the time of the founding of IVP would have thought was possible. So I think that evolution is really important, staying fresh; technology trends evolve. In the early days of IVP and in Silicon Valley, there was a saying among venture capitalists that if you couldn't drive to the board meeting within 30 minutes, you didn't make the investment. That's just not true anymore. There's no way. WILL: [laughs] ERIC: And I think COVID has certainly proved that because investments are being made around the world. Now, maybe in hindsight, that was too fast. There was too much capital flowing around just to resume dating if you will. But the underlying theme is evolution, and I think it's teamwork. Because our founder, Reid, wanted the organization and firm to thrive well beyond his days as an active investor, and you can only do that with building a team that's multigenerational. And I'm proud and lucky to be part of an organization that's done that. WILL: Awesome, awesome. Well, tell me about you. Tell me more about your background. How did you get started in the VC world? ERIC: You know, child of immigrants who came to the United States in the '70s from Taiwan. They met in New York City. Like many other people, moved to the burbs and they started a family. So I was born in New Jersey. My brother and I were both born there. I moved to LA when I was 12. I lived in Southern California until I went to college. Had the miraculous fortune to somehow get into Stanford and went to school sort of in the late '90s into the early 2000s, as good fortune would have it, in the middle of the internet bubble. So I had kind of a front-row seat to that era of technology, innovation not knowing anything about tech when I showed up in Palo Alto in the fall of '96. I got exposed to venture capital while I was in school. There was a pretty memorable, at least for me, speech that I went to. John Doerr, now retired from Kleiner Perkins, was on stage in the engineering auditorium and gave a speech about how Amazon was going to change the world. And this was probably in the fall of '98. And he was right. I just think maybe the timeframe was slightly off, but he was right. I mean, at the time, it was books and CDs, and to some of our listeners, CDs was actually how you used to listen to music. WILL: [laughs] ERIC: But you sort of had this really expansive vision. And it was a really exciting way to understand that there are ways to be involved in the technology ecosystem without necessarily being a software engineer. Because I tried my hand at that, and I wasn't anywhere close to being top of the class, let's put it that way. And so, I wanted to be involved in the industry but also kind of think about how I could play to whatever strengths I had. And then the sort of window into venture capital sort of started to open in terms of my awareness of it. I ended up working at Morgan Stanley for a couple of years out of college, where I got to learn more about technology from a business lens. But I always knew I had an angle or a desire to become a venture capitalist. So got into the industry; it'll be 20 years ago this summer. And I've been fortunate enough to keep doing it for that period of time. So that's kind of the medium-length answer to how I got started [laughs] in the business. ZACK: I don't have quite the story that Eric does there. [laughs] But venture capital was never on my radar. I went to college to be a programmer, and that's where I started out. My first real job was at Anheuser-Busch in Los Angeles, and go Lakers. WILL: [laughs] ZACK: Me and Eric have some LA routes [laughter], so that was a great job. I had a ton of fun. And I just got a call from a recruiter one day that a VC firm was looking for a job as an IT manager. I was very unqualified for the position, went through the interview process. It took like six months. I think I met everybody at the firm, got the job. And that was, like Eric, that was about 20 years ago now. And I have just been in the industry ever since. So it's a great place to be, and I have no plans on leaving. WILL: Oh, that's amazing. I love it. So tell me this, beyond dollars invested...because honestly, when I think of venture capitalists, it is mostly about the money. Hey, how much money have you done? How much money have you sent in? What does that look like? But I don't think we ever cover the next step. What else is there? So beyond dollars, what does IVP do to help companies' portfolio? ERIC: Capital is definitely part of it. It's venture capital, so let's be real. You can't ignore that part of it. But I do think that it is only a part of it because what I think sometimes people don't really think through...because the media in particular likes to write about the day a company goes public or if there's a big acquisition like it all just happened at that one moment, but that is so far from the truth. I mean, the amount of work that entrepreneurs and people at startups put in to drive to those outcomes that sort of culminate in that moment is really one of the things I respect most and enjoy most to be part of as a venture capitalist. And so what our role in that can often be is actually quite varied because no two companies are the same. I mean, there are some common themes, but no two companies are the same. And so how we try and get involved is tailored to what a given company needs at a given point in time. Now, some of the common threads might be working with companies to help build out their teams. We do a lot of that because, ultimately, the team is who's at a company every day. I mean, investors aren't there every day and frankly, if we are, probably something's gone wrong. WILL: [laughs] ERIC: That team is important. And we like to think about getting involved in high-leverage moments. And there are a number of different ones, and Zack is part of this too. So a high-leverage hire is probably someone at the C-level or VP-level because that person then recruits and builds out a team. It's different...not to say that individual contributors aren't also important, but we're trying to think about those key players, moments where we can help, I guess, in a biblical turn, teach people how to fish instead of fish for them. That's our mentality, and recruiting is part of it. Sometimes these are partnerships that can drive significant revenue lines. Sometimes it's debating what a business model should be in a given company. A great example on some of these is at both Coinbase and Discord; there was debate around what the business models ought to look like. Coinbase is very transactional. We pushed them to sort of think through a recurring revenue component, some other services that they could have so that their revenue could be a little smoother and not just dependent on transaction volumes. At Discord, they were thinking through raising money to start an in-house gaming studio. We kind of said, "You know, that's a really competitive industry, and the content creation costs just keep going up. How about a different model? Maybe we can think about a subscription service." And that became what drives the revenue today around buying advanced features for your private servers and things like that. There are a lot of moments...unfortunately, sometimes our companies become targets of bad actors, which brings Zack back to the forefront. Part of the benefit of having a portfolio is we see a lot of these different incidents. And Zack is someone that we sort of unleash with our companies when they face some of these challenges, you know, I got a hack, or I have this going on, and Zack jumps in. You should talk about some of the situations that you've had to deal with. And the bat phone rings when those things happen, and we send them straight to Zack. WILL: [laughs] ZACK: Yeah, I mean, we definitely do everything we can. There definitely have been times where it's, all right; this happened to us; what do we do? How can we help this company? And I've really been deeply involved in security most of my career, and it's kind of where I wanted to go. And I pride myself on that. And we have great security here, and we try to instill the same in our portfolio companies. And recently, we developed these jump guides, which is another way we're helping portfolio companies. So they're kind of like how-to lists. So there would be how to hire your first CFO, how to go IPO, that sort of stuff, and I just authored a couple, actually, that are about how to keep your company safe and how to keep your employees safe. And it's all just tips. It's nothing revolutionary, mind-blowing, but it's just stuff that every company should be doing to keep themselves safe. And so that's really the message that we try to give to our portfolio companies. We definitely internalize it as well. I think really the key to good security is there's a partnership. There has to be a partnership between you with, the security team, and all the employees. You can have all the layers of defense you want. You can have your firewalls, your antivirus, et cetera, but if your employees don't understand the value of security and why they shouldn't click on that link or they shouldn't download that file, it's meaningless. It's very important to instill that, just have open communication. And what I tell everybody at IVP is that security is in your hands. We're doing what we can, but it's in your hands. So, ultimately, it falls on them. And it's a scary time, you know, new stuff coming out all the time. But, yeah, we do our best to keep on top of it and our portfolio companies as well. ERIC: Zack is being very modest. But if you take a step back, if you think about, you know, in any of our own lives, which there's a parallel, I think for companies, there are certain moments when you're facing a tough spot, and people that were there for you and helped you are the ones that are most memorable. And when there are good days, things are pretty easy. And those hard days are where we want to make sure that we're there for our companies. And some of those hard days are in times like these where companies have to make some tough decisions around their cost structure because the environment has changed; some of these are, as Zack points out when they're facing a hack or a breach of some sort. And so, ideally, some of those you're preventing before they happen. But in the moment, Zack is a great ally and asset for a lot of our companies. And some of these also happen on a day-to-day basis. It works great to have someone like Zack on our team. He can kick around and be a source for feedback for some product testing, which he does with a lot of companies that are in the portfolio. And actually, he does that when we're evaluating companies too, and sometimes they don't score so well on the Zack Willis meter. [laughter] And then we have productive feedback to give them to think about things as they refine what they're working on. So it's one of those things where there are high-leverage moments, but we really focus on trying to be involved but also available. And again, this is repetitive to what I said earlier; no two companies are the same. And these are long-term partnerships. We want to make sure that we help them succeed, and that's what it's about. ZACK: I agree, and availability for sure. It can be around the clock. You don't know when these things are going to happen. And definitely, we pride ourselves on that, on being available for our companies when they need us. WILL: That's amazing. It sounds like maybe the secret sauce is your long-term relationship with the company. It's not just drop millions of dollars into the company and see you later. Hopefully, you sell out; whatever, you make money. We'll get it back. It's not the day-to-day, but when it gets hard when we can help you when we can support you. And we kind of have that same mindset with thoughtbot. We don't just try to build software and say, "Hey, you're on your way." But, no, hey, can we help you hire developers, anyone to help you with this and make sure that it's not going to fall off as soon as we leave? But that long-term thing. So sometimes, when you're in a long-term game, it can get kind of messy. So, professionally speaking, what keeps you up at night? ERIC: One of the challenges of being an investor is that you can never be too happy or too sad, particularly when we have a portfolio. So if you think about it, to your point about being involved, it's not just writing a check or investing and then say, "Here's the money; call me later." We're active partners. We take board seats in two-thirds of the companies that we invest in. And that's not a stat I throw out there to say it's a contest to see how many boards you're on. No, it's actually a reflection that when you're on a board, you have a responsibility to be helpful and involved and help steward the entire company on behalf of all shareholders. And so that's part of being involved in a portfolio of 80 or 100 companies that are active right now. There are going to be some that are having good quarters and some that are having tougher quarters. And so, collectively, we try and be even-keeled as long as we're making forward progress. And Zack is a guy who runs sub three-hour marathons, but some miles are harder than others. And he can talk more about that. But there are going to be some periods in a company's journey that are harder than others. And so we just try and make sure we're sort of focused in the right direction and ultimately that the right goal is in mind. And right now, probably what's topical is it's harder for companies to raise money at any scale. You see, this sort of capital markets have really reversed course, and this is by design with the Fed raising rates and trying to intentionally slow the economy down for a whole host of reasons we probably don't have to get into on this podcast, but it's working. And what does that mean for our companies? It's harder to generate revenue. People are watching their budgets, whether they're consumers or enterprises, which then means that they need to watch their operating budgets. And that's why you've seen a lot of the layoffs that have happened across the technology sector, in particular over the last nine months. And it's not just startups, you know, it's Google announcing one of the biggest cuts that they've ever had in their history. Microsoft did that yesterday. So it is a more challenging time, and it's something a lot of people in the industry hadn't been through because we've had the benefit of such a long bull market run. But for better or for worse, at this point in my career, I've seen it more than a few times. And so this is, I think, an area where we can be a guide partner, sometimes just a sounding board because it's not easy to make these decisions. ZACK: First of all, I'll give thoughtbot a quick plug since you guys really helped us out. I guess this was about seven years ago now. We worked with you guys a couple years to get the first iteration of this system that we have that helps us...kind of part of our secret sauce that helps us find companies to invest in. So I'm very thankful for that. And as far as what keeps me up at night, I mean, aside from my cat, and my dog, and my anxiety, [laughs] it's going back to what we talked about before; it's really security. Did we do everything? Are we staying on top of the latest threats? Are we helping out our companies enough? There was an interesting article that just came out a few days ago that talked about how PE companies and some VCs, private equity and venture capital, are requiring security audits of their firms before they invest in them. And so before they'll make the acquisition, they'll run into an audit, and they'll say, "Okay, well, you're missing these things. We're not going to invest in you until you do these things, until you have two-factor authentication until you have this, until you have that." I think that's an interesting trend. For PE, it's a little bit of a bigger deal since they acquire the company. It's still a way that I believe that we can protect ourselves and our portfolio companies. It helps protect our reputation, helps protect their reputation, and it really gives us the chance to get in there at the beginning and say, "Hey, these things are missing. This is what you should focus on security-wise. WILL: That's amazing, amazing. MID-ROLL AD: thoughtbot is thrilled to announce our own incubator launching this year. If you are a non-technical founding team with a business idea that involves a web or mobile app, we encourage you to apply for our eight-week program. We'll help you move forward with confidence in your team, your product vision, and a roadmap for getting you there. Learn more and apply at tbot.io/incubator. WILL: I wanted to take a step back; when you mentioned Coinbase and Discord, and you said that you helped them set the direction going forward. Honestly, we may not even know those companies if their original plan would have gone forward. How much has your 43 years of experience helped guide that direction with Coinbase and Discord? ERIC: You know, there's a saying that history doesn't repeat itself, but it often rhymes. And so I think that's probably the mentality that we try and take from our collective experience as a team that we try to bring to each company. And we meet as a team on Mondays and Thursdays, and it's a very broad meeting compared to most of the investment world in terms of who attends that meeting internally. And so we talk about companies that we're considering and contemplating. We talk about companies we've already invested in. And I think one of our core cultural attributes that is a great strength is putting our best thinking against some of these problems. Again, when things are going well, those are short conversations. But when someone says, "Hey, you know, I'm working with this company, and we're kind of facing this issue. What do people think? What have we seen that's kind of analogous?" And that's where we get some of these ideas from. So, for example, on the Coinbase example, we've been involved in a lot of marketplace businesses and exchange businesses. Those are great business models. And Coinbase has a fantastic management team. But thinking about this, this is pre-IPO and pre-direct listing, and when they want to be public one day, you know, there is a benefit to having a recurring revenue stream, a little more visibility. And so, how could we layer that on and make that, hopefully, over time, a bigger and bigger part of the business? I think in Discord; we had some perspective that led us to invest in the company. In the first place, we've had a lot of success in gaming companies like Zynga, and Supercell, and Niantic, amongst others. We could see how passionate gamers are and, how they come in all different shapes, sizes, flavors, geographies, and how having a communication tool like Discord is really a benefit. However, we also saw that the cost of producing games continues to go up. And if it's not kind of your full-time job, the likelihood you're going to nail something that a very competitive and discerning universe of gamers wants to play is probably not that high. So how do we think about harnessing that energy, and the talent, and the platform you build in a different way? So I'd say those are kind of some examples where we could think about things we've seen in our perspective but apply it to what's relevant for a specific company. WILL: That's amazing. I love it. Yeah, I've heard the gaming business can be brutal. What IVP accomplishments are you most proud of? ERIC: Well, maybe I'll break that into two parts. I think inside and outside the firm; I'm really proud of the team that we've built. And when I joined the firm 11 years ago, we were probably 20 people, 25 people in total. Now we're 65 people. And that doesn't seem like a lot in comparison to big tech companies or hyper-growth startups. But in a business-like venture capital, really what we're doing in addition to providing capital, internally, it's a lot of discussion, decision-making, ideas, thinking. That is hard to do the way that we do it if we get too big. And that goes back to the size of our Monday meetings, which is rather large and includes a wide representation of the firm. But I'm really proud of the team that we've built. I'm really proud of the capabilities that we've enhanced on the technology side. Really, Zack drove a lot of this in the time that he's been with the firm, and we're leaps and bounds ahead of where we were with your help as well. I think Zack was alluding to what we think is one of our secret weapons, our early detection system, so we're really proud of that. And then I'd say externally, or with our companies, we've had 131 of them go public. We had 15 of them do that in 2021, none did in '22. So the market's changed quite a bit. Those are accomplishments that, like I pointed to previously, they're milestone events. The pride comes in knowing that these companies that we've worked with have put in the work over years, at minimum, years, to get to that point. And that gives, I think, all of us a collective sense of accomplishment. WILL: That's amazing. ZACK: Yeah, I definitely agree with that. In my, I guess, almost eight years here now, we've grown a ton in our hiring. Our team is amazing. It's really the reason why I'm still here, why our turnover is basically nothing. We hire great people. And during that time, we've raised some great funds. We've invested in amazing companies. We've helped out a lot of entrepreneurs. It's just across the board. I've been in this industry a while. I feel like IVP is definitely a unique VC firm, and I'm proud of what we do. WILL: That's amazing. One of my favorite questions that I like to ask on the podcast is, if you could go back in time at the very beginning and give yourself advice, what would it be? ZACK: For me, it's stay relevant, I think. And to me, it just means being more involved in everything. Put yourself out there. Be bold. Learn about different areas in the company. Try to attend different meetings. Talk to different departments, and really just make yourself visible. When you do that, I think the rest just kind of falls into place. And it took me quite a while in my career to really realize that. And it's still tough now, but it's something that I'm always trying to do. Historically, I'm a very shy person, but just putting myself out there and doing the best I can in any situation that I find myself in. ERIC: I think a couple of things, balance, and patience are probably two things, not trying to force it. So I think there's a lot of Yoda Jedi wisdom that probably would be useful. So if you're sort of...when I was first starting out, you're younger and impetuous at times and want to make things happen because you have such a strong desire to try and do something the right way and make a positive impact. But the hardest thing to learn is sometimes the right thing to do is actually to do nothing in the investment world. That is a hard thing for a lot of motivated, energetic Type A people to do, and yet it's sometimes the exact right thing you should be doing. So I think it's hard to hear that when you're starting out in your 20s. And now that I'm a little older than that, [laughs] I think I can look back and appreciate it. But that's probably, as I think through that question, maybe the best piece of advice. And yet, like a lot of things, we were all taught while we were younger from people who had more experience, or age, or wisdom, or whatever, there are just some things you hear, and it's not real until you've kind of lived it. And sometimes, in some of those dimensions, you have to make your mistakes before you appreciate them. You guys probably had this experience writing code. Like, there's got to be...I could just do it this way, and it'd be fast. And then you realize it wasn't really that sound or forward-compatible or something. You had to go back and rewrite your architecture, and that's a pain. So I think it's that same approach, thinking with balance. ZACK: Just to add to what I was saying before, too, I think one of the things also would have been, you know, find something you're passionate about and do it every day. That wasn't the case early on in my career, and I turned to running, and I turned to working out. And I do something every morning, and that really, really grounds me. It helps me focus helps me plan out the day. And it's really just my time that's crucial. And whether it's running, whether it's meditating but just taking some time for yourself, you know, energize yourself, take care of yourself. And that goes a long way in the workplace as well. WILL: I love it, yeah. That's why it was one of my favorite questions, just learning from your mistakes, learning from what you did in the past. It's amazing. So I love that. ERIC: Yeah, I mean, since Zack brought up the Lakers, [laughter] and this isn't the Lakers, but it's basketball-related, you guys might remember this old Michael Jordan commercial. He talks about I've missed this many free throws and this many shots and something like, my team has trusted me 80 times to win the game in the fourth quarter, and I've missed. The tagline is something like, I have failed over and over and over and over again, and that is why I succeed. There's definitely some of that in the venture business and the advice I think we could all give to our younger selves. WILL: Oh, yeah, getting back up. Keep going, yeah. ERIC: The same thing with Dwyane Wade commercial, you know, get knocked down eight times, get up nine, kind of the same thing. WILL: Love it. What's something you would love the audience to know about IVP? ZACK: I think our team and just the way we hire. We hire amazing people. They're smart. They're kind. They're low ego. They're thoughtful. I'm not going to say it's completely different from others, but it is, in my experience, a different culture. And we all get along great. We mesh really well, and we continue to hire great. We hired almost 20 People in the last year and a half. That's a lot, but we still manage to maintain the same level of talent. We help our portfolio companies do hires as well. I think that's one of our benefits. We know talent, and we know it internally, and we know it externally. And it's just a great culture to be a part of. WILL: Amazing. ERIC: The thing to think about with us is if you're an entrepreneur building a company, it's tough. Sometimes it's really lonely. We aspire to be partners with entrepreneurs in good times and in bad. We're not the flashiest ones out there. We're not trying to see who has the most Twitter followers. But when you need something, we're there. I think that is something people lost sight of or didn't care as much about in the last couple of years when things were easy. They're not so easy now. And we take pride in these long-term partnerships, which is why we're highly selective in the number of companies we invest in every year. We're never going to be the most active, but we put a lot of our work, time, effort, energy, mental capacity alongside the capital that we bring to our companies. And I think that's been a great formula for us over our history, and it'll continue to be. WILL: That's amazing. To summarize, I know each VC firm has their own DNA. What makes IVP different from its competitors? ERIC: I'd say a couple of things. And again, I've only worked at two firms, and so there are a lot of firms I haven't worked at, so I don't want to attempt to speak too much into the intricacies of how they work. But I'd say inside our four walls, our culture of teamwork and collective outcome and benefit and effort is really special. Every investment we approach has access to the entire firm's resources and capabilities. And I think it's really different. I mean, we're very happy to partner with one another internally, help each other out, help companies that we might not be mostly directly involved with for the benefit of our firm, and our investors, and the companies that we work with. And I think that is something that a lot of firms talk about. I don't think it's always true at a lot of firms. And so, for us, it's really special and something that we've worked really hard to build as a culture, and keep as a culture, and preserve every day. Because I think it's easy to feel like you're on an island in this business at times, but we want to make sure that we feel that connectivity as a team. For our entrepreneurs, we are here to work with you and support you, probably not daily because I think, again, that goes back to having the right people, but weekly, monthly, quarterly, over years, that's our approach. We believe great things take time to build. WILL: That's amazing. Zack, I want to summarize this portion with you. How do you keep your firm and your employees safe from online threats? Do you share that with your portfolio companies? Because I know especially in the tech world and in the news, you're hearing about those scammers, those threats, summarize it for me, like, how do you do that? ZACK: There are a lot of pieces, of course. And as I was talking about before, I think the most important thing is really just getting buy-in from the whole firm. Me and my team we definitely try out the latest products, get the top-of-the-line security stuff, and really make sure that that stack is solid and that we're monitoring everything and getting the buy-in. So it's a lot of training. It's keeping them up to date. It's instilling the messages. Like, when I first started here, I did a security training. The firm had never done a security training. We were pretty light on security at the time. And so, I tried to make the presentation fun and a little scary. So I brought in the FBI. WILL: Wow. ZACK: The FBI scared everybody a little bit. And then I came on and just talked about what to do and not to do. And I actually had a song composed [laughs] about security and what employees should be doing. It was just a funny jingle that people still sing today. [laughter] But yeah, I think just making it memorable. And we have a Slack channel called Tech Talks. I'm always updating the latest information on there on different breaches and different attacks we're seeing, and what we can do to prevent that, and what our employers should be doing. And absolutely, that extends to our portfolio companies. And those jump guides, I believe they're out now with all my technical recommendations. We use those internally. I definitely gave those to the firm but also to our portfolio companies. And there's some interesting stuff in there that you may not think of, like removing your information from the internet. Like, get a company, Optery, something like that, which we pay for for all our employees, and it scrubs the internet of your information, and that's great. It cuts back on phishing, spam calls, you know, just going beyond too. We also have this product that we use that monitors employees' personal email addresses for breaches. So we're not just caring about IVP. We're also caring about what someone's doing in their personal life because that can also lead to a breach of IVP. So yeah, so someone's Gmail account gets exposed, and we're going to know about it, and we can let them know. And then, really, it's just staying on top of things. One of the things we just did, you know, passwords are the worst, everyone knows that, and so we just rolled out this product called Beyond Identity. And it's a password list provider. The difference between them and other password list providers is they offer a layer of security on top of the password list. So it's not just convenient; it's also added security, which was always my worry about going password list; it's just more convenient and less secure. But this company does it right. And it's things like that, just staying ahead of it. All right, passwords are a problem? Let's get rid of passwords. Following those trends and keeping up to date. ERIC: I mean, Zack is a very tough critic. So he's given a couple of shout-outs which means he really likes those products, and I'm glad that we have them. And I very much remember that training session that he did for us or organized. And we did a refresh of it a couple of years ago. I think we've done at least two of them now. It sounds really boring [laughs], and maybe I'm just kind of a geek in that way, but that was one of the most memorable training sessions that I've ever been part of in my time at IVP. And we had Zack's buddy from the FBI come in and give kind of an overview of all the vulnerabilities that they see, and that's obviously very, very cutting edge. And they had some footage of people sort of passing off USB sticks here and there in subways in New York City. So you can kind of see them go in in one entrance. They got a different shot of the camera while they're on the tracks, and they go their separate ways. I mean, this is straight out of some spy stuff, and it's happening. It makes you think...that's an extreme; we know we're talking about sort of most likely state-sponsored bad guys, but the ones that are commercially oriented, I think maybe they're not as frequent...they're more frequent, and so we have to be on guard all the time, especially as a firm that does have access to and move around a lot of money. I'm geeking out because I learned a lot from it. And Zack also likes to keep all of us on our toes with a lot of sort of...it's like the security equivalent of pop quizzes. He's always planting fake links and stuff to see who clicks on them. [laughter] And then he's pretty kind because he doesn't out you by name when we talk about them on Mondays. [laughter] But he says something like, "Hey, you know, there are 65 people who got this test, and the good news is that 50 of you passed. The bad news is that 15 people didn't, which means that could have resulted in a lot of different intrusions. So try and be better," so stuff like that. And it is actually kind of fun and reminds us that while we're a venture capital firm, we are people that comprise the firm just like everybody else, and we got to be vigilant. ZACK: That's a good point, too, just about the FBI and them showing us all the crazy stuff. I mean, one of the things that they really tried to drill in, and I still talk to my friend in the FBI today, is VCs are a target. VCs are absolutely a target. And it's not necessarily what you have; it's what you're perceived to have. And so, okay, they probably think we have a lot of IP and a lot of things like that that we don't necessarily have, but they're still going to try to get in. They're still going to try to hack their way in. And I think that's important, too, just instilling that message like, yeah, we're a VC firm. We're a target; you need to understand that; here's why. And that's true for most firms. We're not special. But it's definitely something you need to instill. ERIC: Oh, Zack's probably going to cringe if he hears me say this, but I definitely take the point that you know, you don't have to be faster than the bear; you just got to be faster than the next guy. So you just have [laughter] to be more secure and more of a pain to try and penetrate, and they'll move on to somebody else. ZACK: I mean, that's totally true. That's a big part of security. If they come knocking on your door, and you have that deadbolt, and the next house doesn't, then yeah, they're going to go the easier path. So that's absolutely true, Eric. WILL: Well, you're doing something right because he remembered the training, and he enjoys it. [laughter] You're doing something right. ERIC: I guess I'm just weird in that way, but it was actually kind of fun. WILL: Well, thank you, Eric and Zack, for being on here. It was amazing. Where can the audience find more information about you, connect with you? ERIC: www.ivp.com is probably the best place. It sounds so old school, but it's the most relevant. Follow us on Twitter, LinkedIn. But I've had a great time talking with you. This has been a lot of fun. Hopefully, you got some nuggets for your audience, too. ZACK: Yeah, I agree. Thank you very much for having us. This was a lot of fun. WILL: Yeah, I've really enjoyed it, so thank you. You can subscribe to the show and find notes along with a complete transcript for this episode at giantrobots.fm. If you have questions or comments, email us at hosts@giantrobots.fm. You can find me on Twitter @will23larry. This podcast is brought to you by thoughtbot and produced and edited by Mandy Moore. Thanks for listening. See you next time. ANNOUNCER: This podcast is brought to you by thoughtbot, your expert strategy, design, development, and product management partner. We bring digital products from idea to success and teach you how because we care. Learn more at thoughtbot.com.Special Guests: Eric Liaw and Zack Willis.Support Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots

Aarish Shah is the Founder of EmergeOne and Projected.ai and host of Off Balance and Nothing Ventured Podcast. Will talks to Aarish about having the venture capitalist money idea and having that "aha!" moment that it could work, what drives him and having a purpose of helping others, and using his podcast to teach lessons that he's learned along the way. EmergeOne Projected.ai Off Balance and Nothing Ventured Podcast Follow EmergeOne on LinkedIn, Facebook, YouTube, or Twitter. Follow Aarish Shah on LinkedIn or Twitter. Follow thoughtbot on Twitter or LinkedIn. Become a Sponsor of Giant Robots! Transcript: WILL: This is The Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots podcast, where we explore the design, development, and business of great products. I'm your host, Will Larry. And with me today is Aarish Shah, Founder of EmergeOne and Projected.ai and host of Off Balance and Nothing Ventured Podcast. Aarish, thank you for joining me. AARISH: It's great to be here, Will. Really happy to be talking to you today. WILL: Yeah, I'm excited. I can't wait to dive in and learn more about you. Tell me about your journey, how it all started. AARISH: Wow, it's a bit of a long run. I'll try and condense it. But I am 44 years old at the moment. About 20 years ago, I came out of uni with a degree in languages which I found was sort of useful but not essential. So I ended up for a few years doing kind of the normal corporate thing. I worked with PriceWaterhouseCoopers, Nortel Networks, and then Deutsche Bank. And I qualified as an accountant along the way, so I'm effectively what you guys would consider a CPA over in the U.S. I then kind of up sticks, and I spent the next ten years of my life running a group of manufacturing and trading businesses alongside a property portfolio out in Papua New Guinea, which is a very, very interesting place to be, definitely one of the hardest environments to be building and running businesses for many reasons. I've had everything from people coming into one of my offices with guns. I had one of my factories burned to the ground and everything in between. So really, really great learning experience and certainly amazing to learn about physical products, you know, the manufacturing and distribution and sales and so on of actual physical products. And then, in 2015, I came back to the UK. I didn't really know what I wanted to do. And so I had a bunch of coffees with people and ended up as founding CFO in an EdTech venture, which was a joint venture between Eton College, which is one of the premier schools here in the UK where famously all of our Prime Ministers seem to come from, and Founders Factory which is an accelerator that was founded by Brent Hoberman of lastminute.com fame. So that was really exciting. I was straight off the boat from Papua New Guinea, sitting 10 feet away from Brent Hoberman, learning everything that there was to learn about the tech sector here in the UK and beyond. And had a really great couple of years working in that business and learning really everything there was to know about the VCA ecosystem, the early stage ecosystem, how to build products, how to finance them, how to sell into new territories (We were operating in China at the time.) and all sorts of other things. And then, in 2017, I decided it was time to move on. And I became what you guys would probably call a fractional CFO. So I worked across C through Series C businesses, everything from EdTech to FinTech, D2C, B2B marketplaces, beauty tech, you name it, kind of been there, seen it, and done it. And in 2019 and 2020, started getting approached by FDs and CFOs that wanted to work with me. And I really doubled down at that stage and decided to build EmergeOne into what it is today, which is a consultancy providing CFO services to venture-backed tech startups and scaleups. So we work with a huge bunch of businesses here in the UK that are backed by VCs, some of the big names here like Hoxton Ventures, Stride, Octopus, Outlier, Founders Factory, and others. And I'm really, really passionate about helping founders build their businesses in a scalable and sensible way, I guess, especially in the current environment. And so we're really lucky that we're trusted by these VCs and the founders that we work with to deliver really great services to them. And then, a couple of years ago, because I've been working kind of in the tech sector for so long, I started noodling around with a couple of ideas of projects that I wanted to move forward with. I raised a really small kind of pre-seed back in 2021 and started building a product, which is today Projected.ai, which we have just launched. We're in the process of launching at the moment. And what that is is effectively an email newsletter, if you can believe it, providing internal and external data to our client businesses. So effectively, it's like a flash report of your financials alongside some really sort of personalized news about what's going on in your industry, alongside some other sort of bits and bobs that we're currently building in. On top of that, a couple of years ago, again, I realized that I had a really good network of people that I had relationships with, and I decided to launch the Nothing Ventured Podcast to start speaking with people that operated in the VC ecosystem here in the UK and beyond. So I've been really fortunate to have guests like Hussein Kanji from Hoxton Ventures, Mac Conwell from RareBreed ventures in the U.S., and various others. And I really got to talk to them about why they got into venture, what they see is happening in the market, what are they excited about. And all those sorts of things. Because, to be honest, I'm really passionate about learning and understanding about where people are coming from, why they do what they do, what drives them, what they're passionate about, but equally, the sort of challenges they've also faced. And that's been going now for 60-odd episodes. We're launching Season 4 shortly. And I'm really lucky and fortunate to have been able to do that. And then finally, at the back end of 2022, so in December, actually, just as I was jumping on a plane, I sort of released something on LinkedIn, which was like 100 lessons that I've learned as a CEO and CFO over the last 20 years of operating. And unexpectedly, the thing went viral. I've had close to a million views on it, thousands of likes, hundreds of comments, and reshares. And I decided to turn what was effectively just a list into a short-form podcast, which has turned into Off Balance. So we're releasing that daily and kind of expanding on each and every one of those topics that I went through in that list. So, yeah, look, I mean, I'm someone with a finger in a lot of pies. I'm a massive generalist, so I love getting involved in different projects at different times. But I'm really fortunate to be able to do what I love doing. It's just been a wild journey for the last seven years, certainly, but the whole 20 years of my life. WILL: I love it. I love it. I love every idea that you had weaves into that venture capitalist money idea. So let's start at EmergeOne. When did you have that aha moment that this could work? AARISH: So I work a lot in strategy, so there are two forms of strategies, emergent and there's defined. So most people know about a strategy that is written down; it's a playbook. They go out, and they pursue it. For me, it was really emergent. Firstly, I realized that there were not that many great CFOs operating in tech, certainly here in the UK, because it's, to an extent, a nascent industry. And whilst there are great accountants, and there are great finance leaders in larger businesses, actually doing that in a startup or a scaleup is very, very different. Now, don't get me wrong, there are some great CFOs out there. It's just that I think there are far fewer than many people [laughs] assume there to be. So that was kind of the first thing that twigged with me. And I was seeing a lot of businesses picking up people and calling them a CFO when I knew for a fact there was no way that they really had the experience to be able to call themselves a CFO or to operate as one. So I guess that was the first aha moment. And the second aha moment was as I started talking to more and more VCs via the podcast, and just generally because I was out in the ecosystem talking to them, I realized that actually, the work that I was doing was not being driven necessarily by the client companies but actually by the VCs themselves because they wanted to make sure that having invested 1,2,5, 10 million pounds or dollars that those companies were in good hands and safe hands and that capital was being managed effectively and efficiently. And obviously, we're sitting in January of 2023 now. Never has that been more appropriate. More and more businesses are struggling. They're struggling to raise. They're having to extend their runways and figure out how to manage their cash in a much, much more significant way than maybe they had to two or three years ago. And so, for us, that's like a massively important thing. And having a great CFO in your business is going to help you do that. And therefore, we are getting approached more and more both by VCs as well as by companies that are just on the lookout for someone to help them. It was sort of a series of aha moments. But as I said earlier, it was an emergent strategy. It was something that kind of developed over time. But also, I'm someone that learned quite early on in my life to back myself. I think I took the punt on building this agency, if you like because it felt right. And it felt like something that I would enjoy doing, and it felt like something that I could actually make a difference in. And I think all of those things kind of culminated in really making EmergeOne what it is today, and I'm really proud of what we've been able to achieve. WILL: Yeah, I love that idea because I feel like, especially in startups, like you said, that excellent CFO is really hard to find. It's really hard to find. But if you don't have the numbers, you don't have a business. Let's be honest, the numbers you just don't have it. AARISH: Yeah, it's crazy to me that over the last decade or so, we've had, obviously, this period of super cheap money, super cheap capital. People have been raising at very inflated valuations. But we're seeing all of that come home to roost. We're seeing that in the public markets. A lot of these companies that IPOed over the last several years, obviously, have had their valuations drop significantly, you know, companies like Peloton, I guess, and others. People are starting to realize that actually cash is king. They need to understand how the cash is flowing through their business and to know that they need to have an intimate knowledge of their numbers. And, in fact, a lot of our role as a CFO in a business is to kind of coach the founder to make sure that they do understand those numbers and how they need to present them to internal stakeholders, external stakeholders, whether that's your board, whether that's investors, or whether that's your employees to make sure that people have a good idea of not only how they're tracking but where they're heading and where the end goal is. And I think it's massively important. I've always been a massive advocate for people getting to grips with their numbers, even if you're not a numbers person. Because especially if you're a founder or you're the leader in the business, the CEO, ultimately, the buck stops with you. You've got to know those numbers. It's not good enough to say, "Well, my CFO, my accountant has a handle on them." Like, if you're sitting in an investor meeting trying to pitch them to raise 5 to 10 million bucks, you're going to need to know those numbers inside out. And it's astonishing how many people actually ignore those. And what I would say is, you know, ignore them at your peril. WILL: Yeah, that just blows my mind because if I put myself in an investor seat if I'm giving you money, I want the head person, the CEO, to know exactly how to handle that money. So yeah, I love that idea, and I love what you're doing. Let's go on Projected.ai. And if I understand this correctly, this is more of a kind of [inaudible 10:51] the words. AARISH: So it's like a newsletter on steroids. WILL: Yeah, but it's to be honest about your numbers to board members and investors, correct? AARISH: Yeah. So Projected.ai was born out of this understanding that I guess I have, which is that CFOs and finance professionals working in startups and scaleups and SMEs they have dashboard fatigue. We interviewed CFOs, and they're operating off like 20 different dashboards, each of them giving them different numbers, each of them telling them something different. And they don't even have time to look at those dashboards, let alone make decisions based on the numbers that are coming out of them. So what we wanted to do with Projected was provide a touch point for that CFO where they could check in with their numbers in a really easy way on a consistent, regular basis. When I thought about this really clearly, I don't live in dashboards; where I live is in the tools I communicate in, so that's my emails, that may be my Slack channel, that may be WhatsApp or iMessage, or whatever it is that you use. But certainly, for business, it's going to be email and Slack for the most part. So I thought, what is the easiest way to communicate with someone in their business? It is via one of those channels. And what are the things that they want to know? Well, they want to know what's happening in their business, what's changed in their numbers over the last week, or two weeks, or month, but also what's happening outside their business. Because often, in startups, we get so kind of tunnel-visioned into what's happening inside the business. We don't take the time to look outside and figure out what others are doing or what may be happening in the macro environment that may have an impact on our business. And an obvious case of that at the moment is interest rates having moved up quite significantly over the last several months and still going to, as well as sort of inflation numbers also on their way up, and central banks everywhere trying to rein those in. All of that is going to have an impact on your business, especially if you're a consumer business, for example. And if you don't factor in all of those things or if you don't look at all of the things that could impact your business, you're going to make decisions with imperfect information, and, therefore, you'll make imperfect decisions. Now, you're never going to have perfect information. But the more information, the more pertinent information you have, the more transparent you can be, exactly as you said, to your board, to your shareholders. Tell them exactly what's happening, and get their advice to help you through those rough patches. Ultimately, we've got some tricks up our sleeves in terms of what we're going to be doing with those numbers, and how we're going to be presenting them, and how we're going to be manipulating them when we do show them to our users. But I kind of felt like we've moved past that time where CFOs were only about the numbers looking backwards. A really great CFO today is all about communication, information. It's about turning data into information, turning numbers into a narrative. Yeah, that's what we wanted to build, a tool that could support them and help them really be the best CFO they can be. WILL: Yeah, that's amazing. Transparency is the word I was looking for. So you nailed it, yeah. So I love that idea, the transparency of the numbers of the business just using AI. So that's amazing. It makes it a lot easier to send it out and to make it happen. So I love that idea. AARISH: Yeah. I mean, the interesting thing is; obviously, we've all been hearing a lot about generative AI and large language models at the moment. And we've definitely got plans to incorporate that into what we're doing. But the other side of that is you got to be really, really careful, obviously, because, as we all know, there are biases that can creep into any of those sort of AI-driven models. But equally, there are inaccuracies. And, in fact, a lot of those models tend to be great with words, not great with numbers. So one has to be really, really careful about bringing those tools into play. And because we know what we're doing, we can assess for that and make sure that the information that we're putting out there is the right sort of information, but actually, what we can do in terms of modeling our cash flows and revenue and effectively forecasting out a business. Because bearing in mind a lot of startups, most startups, most scaleups, most SMEs don't have the balance sheet. They don't have the money to go out there and build an AI tool themselves. They just simply don't. And they may not have the wherewithal in-house, but they almost certainly don't have the cash. So what we're doing is hopefully providing a bridge for them to get better information in terms of what's happening today but also maybe an inkling of what might happen tomorrow, which helps them, again, to plan better. And, again, it comes back to this whole thing around decision making, transparency, and making sure that they're able to look at their numbers with confidence and communicate those to others with confidence, and really understand what's driving those numbers as they keep building their businesses. But everything we do at Projected, everything I do definitely as a founder and as someone that operates in this ecosystem, is all driven by how do we make the ecosystem better? How do we help founders? How do we help their companies? How do we make sure we can drive that number down from 90% of startups failing within the first three or five years? How do we turn that number into 70%, 60%, or less? So that's all about information. It's all about giving those hard-won lessons, hard-learned lessons back to founders and guiding them, I guess, in the best way we can. WILL: Yeah, I love that. I love that. MID-ROLL AD: thoughtbot is thrilled to announce our own incubator launching this year. If you are a non-technical founding team with a business idea that involves a web or mobile app, we encourage you to apply for our eight-week program. We'll help you move forward with confidence in your team, your product vision, and a roadmap for getting you there. Learn more and apply at tbot.io/incubator. WILL: Let's transition to talking a little bit about you. I love to just ask questions to the founders because, honestly, what founders go through just amazes me that you continue to go. You wake up, and you do it over and over again. So it's amazing, so kudos to you. So let's talk about that; why? Why do you wake up every morning and do EmergeOne, do Projected.ai, do the podcasts? What's your why? AARISH: I'm in therapy trying to figure that answer out myself. WILL: [laughs] AARISH: No, look, I mean, I think what drives me, again, it's that sense of purpose of helping others. It's also scratching the itch. I think a lot of founders, it's about scratching that itch. There is something that you can see that is wrong in the universe, and you want to fix it. And if I think about those various sorts of businesses or podcasts, each of them attracts me in different ways. So EmergeOne, we get to help lots of businesses, providing them really, really significant support. And we're working with great VCs, with great clients, great startups, and scaleups. At Projected, we get to expand that range because you're no longer reliant on one person providing a CFO service or a bench of 20 people or whatever. We can now do that across hundreds, thousands of startups if need be. With the podcasts, it's a combination of learning and hopefully also providing some learning to others, helping them understand a bit more. So the Off Balance podcast these are like two-minute short episodes, which go into the detail of those 100 lessons that I've learned. And some of them are very, very personal to me, but they're probably applicable across most businesses. And all I'm doing is exploring those in a bit more detail and hopefully passing that on so that some other founder somewhere doesn't have to go through the same pain of learning that lesson. They can look out for the signals and figure out how to deal with it in advance. And Nothing Ventured scratches my itch to learn more about the VC ecosystem. If you imagine I'd spent ten years out in New Guinea, I had no idea what venture capital was out there. I really didn't understand what the tech ecosystem was. When I arrived there, we were still on dial-up. There were no mobile telephones. It wasn't until 2008, 2009, that mobile telephony really kind of picked up over there. So when I came back to the UK, I was just surrounded by all of this stuff which I was massively curious about. And so everything I've done since then is about scratching that curiosity and learning. And I think that that drives pretty much everything that I do in life in general, which is this huge passion to learn and understand the world a bit better and to hopefully pass on whatever I can to others because I think life's too short to hold it all for yourself. The more you can give, the better the world is. WILL: Yeah, definitely, definitely. Let's give a sneak peek into Off Balance. You said that you use that to teach lessons that you've learned along the way. What have been some of the big obstacles that you've come across? AARISH: Oh wow. I mean, there are 100 lessons in there, [laughs] so I'm going to have to pick a couple of my favorites. Okay, so one which actually I posted about today on LinkedIn it was like the episode we dropped today, which is "Hire Slow, Fire Fast." And I got a lot of flak about this actually talking about it on LinkedIn when I first posted it. And the reason I think that I got a lot of flak was all people read were those four words: hire slow, fire fast. And they just assumed what I was saying was you should fire in the vein of a lot of the larger tech businesses over the last couple of years where maybe they've sent a mass text message or email and just sacked a bunch of people. And that's absolutely not what I'm advocating for. I think you should always be human when you are dealing with people all the time. But the things that I've really learned is if you don't have a process to hire people well, you end up hiring the wrong people. And you end up hiring people that either don't have a fit in the business or are just not the right people in terms of their ability to do what you need them to do. And we're all probably aware of this fact by now, but it bears repeating, right? All of us when we are talking to other people, we look for reflections of ourselves. So when we are hiring people, we look for people that emulate how we see ourselves, whether that's in the way they talk, in the way they dress, whether they look like us, or whether they come from a similar background. And I think those are all obviously negative biases that we all need to remove. And the way you can remove those is in a couple of ways, so, one, use data wherever possible and use data points. Secondly, have a process that makes sure that you have a really strong top-of-the-funnel, bringing in candidates from across all sectors, all experiences. I make sure that there are several people involved in that process so that you're all giving your feedback on an individual so that you can make sure that, actually, I thought this person was going to be great in this role, but maybe my CTO thinks they're not; they're going to be mediocre. We can have that conversation and understand where those challenges have come up, and hopefully get to a place where we either decide actually, yeah, you know what? We shouldn't hire this person. Or, actually, yeah, you know what? I think you're right. I'm convinced that this is the right person. We should go for them. But I think the point is companies can lose hundreds of thousands of dollars hiring the wrong person, that's in recruitment fees, in training fees, and lost time, et cetera, et cetera. So it makes sense to do it right, right from the beginning. And the flip side of that is if you have hired someone and they turn out to be a toxic person or not fit for purpose in terms of the role that they're doing; the point is not to then just send them an SMS and say, you know, "You're fired." The point is, you know, Donald Trump style, no. WILL: [laughs] AARISH: The point is actually to take the decision really quickly. So if you realize that that person is not working out, then make the decision and execute on that decision as quickly as possible because I've seen it too often and have done it myself to the business' detriment. I've seen too often people sitting on a decision to move someone on. And that's ended up leading to problems in the business because other employees, other members of the team will recognize that toxicity or that person isn't pulling their weight, or they aren't able to do the job even. And that will just lead to negative impact on the rest of the business as well. So that's definitely one I would always come back to is, like, hire slow, fire fast. I think I'm happy to take more flak on it because I strongly believe it is something that more founders and more businesses should take heed of. And the other one, I think it was number one on my list for a reason, and that's cash trumps everything and today, even more so than anything else. I think businesses over the last, certainly in the venture ecosystem, over the last sort of five years, growth at all costs has been the mantra, and that's throwing dollars at marketing and just building new customers, or buying new customers, I should say, to supercharge growth when actually that isn't sustainable. And it doesn't necessarily lead to good outcomes in the future. My preference is twofold, one, spend as much time and money as you can in cultivating your existing customers, make sure you're really giving them delight in whatever product or service you're providing them because that means that they're going to stay with you longer. They're going to pay themselves back in terms of how much it costs to acquire, and hopefully, they're going to be advocates for your business. And all of that basically leads to a better cash bottom line. And today, always, but today over and above any other period, I think over the last 5, 10 years cash trumps everything because you are only as good as your runway. And when you run out of money in this market, it is very hard to go out and try and raise additional capital, and raising capital at the sort of valuations that people have also been used to over the last several years is getting harder and harder, if not impossible. So those are probably the two that I would always come back to; it's the hire slow, fire fast, cash trumps everything. And it's better to spend money retaining and loving your customers than trying to constantly acquire new ones. WILL: Yeah, I love that. I love that. Let's flip it to the other side, what have been some of your biggest wins in life? AARISH: I mean, I'm going to say the obvious one. My biggest wins are my family, you know, my wife, my kids. I've got two beautiful daughters, one's 21, one's 15. I hope we've raised them to be well-adjusted children. We've given them, I think, the ability to go out and do what they want in life. And that's really important to me. My wife, her, and I have been together for 20 years. We've had our ups and downs, but today I think we make an amazing team. And I'm really fortunate to have her in my life. If I think about wins and success in business, it's really hard for me and, again, because I think success is a state of mind. It's not something that you can chase. And I think too many people get caught up in this sort of idea of I'll be successful when. And what I mean is I'll be successful when I've raised that big series A, or I'll be successful when I've exited my business, or I'll be successful when I've made that huge sale, or when I've hired that rockstar employee or made it to founder, or whatever it is. If you approach success with the attitude of you are already a success, whatever you're doing, you are alive today, living in one of the most exciting times on the planet. You are a successful human being; whatever anyone else says, that's a major win in itself. And understanding that state of mind that you have to be in is something that it takes a really long time to understand and really internalize. And I think the way that I've managed to get to that place is I've realized that in the past, either I was chasing success or I was waiting for someone else to tell me that I've been successful. When in reality, if I judge success based on my own benchmarks, then it's impossible for me to look at what I've done and say I haven't been successful. I've got two businesses, two podcasts. Who knows? One of those businesses may fall over, one of those podcasts may not get a single listener or whatever. But the mere fact that I've shown up and broken ground on all of that stuff for me is, I think, an indication of success. It's something I'm really proud of. And as I move forward in life, I'm always going to try to do better. But I already know that whatever successes or failures I may have in the future, I've already been successful. And I think that's the thing that all of us should hold on to in life. WILL: Yeah, I totally agree with that, and I really, really like that. So I'm going to close it out with this: what advice would you go back and give yourself when you first started at the very beginning knowing what you know now? AARISH: I would say from the age of like 15 to the age of getting on 37, 38, I was a product of what other people wanted, what I did at school, what I studied...well, what I studied at university was what I wanted to do, but it was almost in retaliation for what others wanted me to do. Where I worked, the sort of path that I trode was very much based on culturally, familiarly what was expected of me kind of growing up in a very middle-class and privileged background. It wasn't until I came back to the UK from Papua New Guinea, where I basically came back with nothing to my name and no idea what I was going to do, and I started doing things that I wanted to do and started backing myself in spite of what other people were saying. So even when I left that first job working at the EdTech business, one of my cousins turned around and said, "Why are you leaving that job? It is paying you a really good salary. Like, why would you leave that to do this thing?" And I had someone else, an angel investor who's one of my closest friends; she turned around and said, "Well, if one of my portfolio companies came and said, oh, they're looking to bring in a CFO, I'd tell them they're stupid and spend their money elsewhere." And I was like, "No, I can see that there is something to be done in this space. I'm going to go and do it." And, lo and behold, again, it's paid off. And so I think the one piece of advice I would have given to myself, and I would give to everyone, is back yourself early on. You may not have the experience to do everything. You may not have the network. You may not have the cash. You may not have the friends and family that can invest in you or whatever it might be. But take that first step, back yourself because ultimately, if you can't back yourself, no one else is going to. WILL: Wow, that's really good, really good. Wow, I really like that. Yeah. Yeah, I really liked that because it's kind of the initial stage of that self-care, especially as a founder. Like, if you don't believe in yourself, how can you even ask someone else for it? Because they can see, like, well, is this a good investment? Are you going to see it through, or are you going to quit? AARISH: Yeah, and in fact, I'd add to that one of the other things I've said is, but I came to this late in life, is if my mind and my body aren't healthy, then my business can't be either. I realized quite late in life, as I say, probably mid-30s, again, that I'd probably done more damage to my body than I needed to through my diet, through whatever proclivities I may have had. The most amazing I've ever felt is today, where I'm exercising daily, where I'm taking care of myself mentally, taking the time to think about what is important to me, and to show gratitude for a lot of stuff as well. And exactly as you say, if you're not looking after yourself, it's really, really hard to look after a business, to look after team members. And certainly, when other people are looking at you, they're going to kind of sit there and say, "Well, how safe is my money in this guy's hands? Or do I think that this person is going to be able to see it through?" So 100% the two things are back yourself and look after yourself. I think those are two really important things. WILL: All right, to close out the podcast, is there anything that you would like to share with the audience? AARISH: I mean, I think it's been awesome speaking to you. I would love for everyone to come and check out Nothing Ventured and the Off Balance Podcast. And please connect with me on LinkedIn, follow me, follow me on Twitter. My handle is @adsinuk, so that's @A-D-S-I-N-U-K, both on LinkedIn and on Twitter. You can find me at Aarish Shah on LinkedIn, obviously, as well. I'm always keen to hear from people, learn from people, talk to them. All I would ask is be gentle with each other. Come find me. Come have a chat. And, yeah, it's been awesome speaking to you today. WILL: Yeah, it's been great talking to you too. And I'm going to lead by leadership. And I'm going to look you up on LinkedIn, Twitter; check out the podcast. I'm excited about that. So I'm looking forward to it. AARISH: Amazing. Thanks, man. WILL: Yeah, thank you. You can subscribe to the show and find notes along with a complete transcript for this episode at giantrobots.fm. If you have any questions or comments, email us at hosts@giantrobots.fm. You can find me on Twitter @will23larry. This podcast is brought to you by thoughtbot and produced and edited by Mandy Moore. Thanks for listening. See you next time. ANNOUNCER: This podcast is brought to you by thoughtbot, your expert strategy, design, development, and product management partner. We bring digital products from idea to success and teach you how because we care. Learn more at thoughtbot.com.Special Guest: Aarish Shah.Sponsored By:thoughtbot Incubator: thoughtbot is thrilled to announce our own incubator launching this year. If you are a non-technical founding team with a business idea that involves a web or mobile app, we encourage you to apply for our eight-week program. We'll help you move forward with confidence in your team, your product vision, and a roadmap for getting you there. Learn more and apply at tbot.io/incubator.Support Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots

Nadia Odunayo is the Founder and CEO of The StoryGraph, a new website and app for avid book readers because life's too short for a book you're not in the mood for. The StoryGraph helps you track your reading and choose your next book based on your mood, favorite topics, and themes. Victoria talks to Nadia about coming up with a product based on the concept of mood, what you're in the mood for to read, i.e., this book made me feel this way. How do I find a book that makes me feel similar? They also talk about keeping yourself open to feedback, the ability to flow and change direction, and developing a reviewing system that keeps biases in check. StoryGraph Follow StoryGraph on LinkedIn, Instagram, or Twitter. Follow Nadia Odunayo on LinkedIn or Twitter. Follow thoughtbot on Twitter or LinkedIn. Become a Sponsor of Giant Robots! Transcript: VICTORIA: This is The Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots Podcast, where we explore the design, development, and business of great products. I'm your host, Victoria Guido. And with me today is Nadia Odunayo, Founder and CEO of StoryGraph, a new website and app for avid book readers because life's too short for a book you're not in the mood for. StoryGraph helps you track your reading and choose your next book based on your mood and your favorite topics and themes. Nadia, thank you for joining me. NADIA: Thank you for having me. VICTORIA: And you are a repeat guest at Giant Robots. But for those who missed that episode, tell me a little bit about your journey. And how did this all get started? NADIA: Okay. Yeah, so that first time was in 2015, and that was not too long after I had just got into tech. I did a bootcamp in London in 2014, Makers Academy, and that's where I learned to code. My degree was in philosophy, politics, and economics, so rather different. I worked at Pivotal for about a year and a half after I graduated from Makers Academy. And during my time at Pivotal, I got into conference speaking, and my first talk was around game theory. So I took my favorite topic in economics, game theory, and I combined that with distributed systems because that's what I was working on at the time in Pivotal on their Cloud Foundry PaaS. I think I gave it at RailsConf, and I think someone there recommended me to Giant Robots. And so Ben Orenstein interviewed me, and it was all about different types of conference talks and that kind of thing. So after Pivotal, I left and started a hybrid kind of consultancy/product company with a colleague, did that for about a year, left that, worked for about a year with my friend, Saron Yitbarek, on her company CodeNewbie. And then, when that partnership ended, I essentially had five years of runway from money that I got from the company that I started after Pivotal because we did some consulting with a bank. I'd always been entrepreneurial. I'd been doing various entrepreneurial things since secondary school, actually, high school. It was time for me to just have time on my side projects. And so I started hacking away on one of my side projects at the beginning of 2019 in January, and I haven't stopped since. That's what the StoryGraph has developed into. VICTORIA: Wonderful. And yes, I saw that the very early stages of StoryGraph started as a creative writing e-publication. Is that right? NADIA: So what happened was when I was at university, I started a creative writing e-publication, came up with the name The StoryGraph. Because we had won or we were going for some grant funding or something like that, I set up a corporate entity. And when I stopped working on that e-publication, I remember my mom saying to me, "Don't shut down the entity. I really like the name. I feel like you'll use it for something," that was in 2012. And so fast forward to 2019, and the side project that I was working on was called Read Lists. And it was very specifically focused on tracking and sharing progress through reading lists on a dashboard. But when I was doing customer research, and the scope of the project grew, Read Lists didn't fit anymore. And that's when I realized, oh, I can use The StoryGraph thing again. And so it's basically had two different lives or two different forms, the StoryGraph company. VICTORIA: That's wonderful. And I'm reading about StoryGraph and how it's an Amazon-free alternative to Goodreads. Can you talk a little bit more about the product and why people would want to use it? NADIA: So, as I said, it started life as a very specific focused side project. And I just had so much fun working on it and working in the book space. I'd always been a reader since I was a kid such that I said to myself, I need to find a way to make me building a books product a full-time thing. And so that's when customer research came in because the only way that you're going to make sure that you don't build something that people don't want is by talking to people. As I was doing customer research and figuring out, are there pain points amongst readers, people who track their reading? What would happen was the pain points that came up drove me towards building a more fully fledged reading, tracking, and recommendations product. It actually started as a very focused recommendations product. And then, we got to the point where we needed to build more around it for it to be a compelling product. And as it was growing, we never advertised ourselves as a Goodreads alternative or as an Amazon-free alternative to what was out there. But that was clearly a pain point in the market. There were tweets about us saying, "Finally a Goodreads alternative. It's small; it's independent; it's Amazon-free. And so thousands and thousands, hundreds of thousands of people have come to us because of that. VICTORIA: Wow. NADIA: And so it got to the point...mainly when we launched our payment plan, and we were trying to figure out the reasons why people were pre-ordering the plan, it was at that point where we decided to lean into the Amazon-free Goodreads alternative because that was what the market wanted. VICTORIA: Was that surprising for you? Or were there other things that came out of your research on your marketplace that kind of were different than what you thought it would be going in? NADIA: I think the most interesting thing about the product development journey was that I at least originally felt like I was building a product that wasn't for me. So what I mean by that is in my earliest rounds of research, what I was finding was that people still didn't think that they had one place to get consistently good book recommendations. And so then I started to explore, well, how do you even give somebody consistently good book recommendations? And one of the factors that kept on coming up was this concept of mood, what you're in the mood for. This book made me feel this way. How do I find a book that makes me feel similar? And so it got to the point where I said to myself, oh wow, I'm building a product for mood readers right now; that seems to be the gap, that seems to be the thing that nothing out there yet had properly attacked. And I had never considered myself a mood reader. I just thought I'm a planner. I'm an organized person. I typically decide what book I want to read, and then I read it. And so there was a point where I was concerned, and I thought, wait, am I now building something that is not for me? But then, as I started to work and do more research and talk to more and more people and thinking about my reading experiences, I developed the hypothesis or the viewpoint rather that I think everybody's a mood reader; it's just the scale. Because there are probably some books that I may have rated lowly in the past that if I had read it in a different frame of mind, or at a different time in my life, different circumstance, it probably would have resonated with me a lot more. Now, that's not to say that's true for every single book. There are some books that are just not going to work for you, no matter what. But I do think we're all on the scale of mood reading. And sometimes we say a book is a bad book, but we just read it at not the right time. And so I think the most surprising thing for me is going on that journey of realizing that, oh, I am a mood reader too. VICTORIA: [laughs] NADIA: And I ended up building an app that's a lot less focused on just the pure ratings. I was someone who, on Goodreads, if it had less than four stars, I'm not interested. And the ethos of the product is more about, well, hang on; these ratings are very subjective. And someone else's two, three-star could be your next five-star. What are the factors that really matter? Do you want something dark, adventurous? Are you looking for something funny, light? And then what kind of topics do you want to discover? And then it doesn't matter if the five people before you thought it was average; you might think it's excellent. VICTORIA: Yeah, it reminds me thinking about how bias can come in with authors and writing as well. So a simple five-star system might be more susceptible to bias against different genders or different types of names. Whereas if you have more complex numbers or complex rating systems, it might be easier to have different types of authors stand out in a different way. NADIA: That actually relates to what was going through my mind when I was developing the reviewing system on StoryGraph. You can just, if you want, leave your star rating and say no more, but the star rating is lower down on the page. And up front, we say this book would be great for someone who's in the mood for something...and then you've got checkboxes. And how would you rate the pace of the book? And if it's a fiction book, we ask you, "Are the characters lovable?" Is there a flawed narrator? Is it plot-driven or character-driven?" Questions like that because the thinking is it doesn't matter whether you are going to give the book two stars in your own personal star rating. You can still help someone else find a book that's good for them because they will be looking at the summary on the StoryGraph book page, and they'll go, "Oh wow, 80% of people said it's lovable. There's a diverse range of characters, and it's funny. So the topics fit things I'm interested in, so I care less about the average rating being like 3.5 because everything else seems perfect. Let me see for myself." And actually, we've also had a lot of feedback from people saying that "Oh, normally, I never know how to review a book or what to say. And this system has really helped me, almost give me prompts to get started about explaining the book, reviewing it for other people to help them decide if it's for them. So that's great." VICTORIA: That makes sense to me because I read a lot of books, maybe not as much as I would like to recently. But not all books that I love I can easily recommend to friends, but it's hard for me to say why. [laughs] You know, like, "This is a very complicated book." So I love it. I'll have to check it out later. It's been four years since you've been full-time or since 2019, almost five then. NADIA: Yes. VICTORIA: If you could travel back in time to when you first started to make this a full-time role, what advice would you give yourself now, having all of this foresight? NADIA: Have patience, trust the process because I can sometimes be impatient with, ah, I want this to happen now. I want this to pick up now. I want these features done now. I'm a solo dev on the project. I started it solo. I have a co-founder now, but I'm still the solo dev. And there were so many things, especially now that we've got a much larger user base, that people complained about or say is not quite right. And that can be really tough to just have to keep hearing when you're like, I know, but I don't have the resource to fix it right now or to improve it. But I think one of the things is, yeah, having faith in the process. Keep going through the cycles of listening to the customers, prioritizing the work, getting the work done, getting the feedback, and just keep going through that loop. And the product will keep getting better. Because sometimes it can feel, particularly in the first year when I was so low, you sometimes have moments of doubt. Or if a customer research round doesn't go super well, you start to wonder, is this only a nice-to-have? And is this going to go anywhere? And so that's one piece of advice. And I think the other one is knowing that there are several right paths because I think sometimes I would agonize over I want to do the right thing. I want to make sure I make the right choice right now. And, I mean, there are some things that are not good to do. You want to make sure that you're setting up your customer interviews in a non-leading way. You want to make sure that there are certain standards in the product in terms of the technical side and all that kind of stuff, so there's that. But I think it's understanding that you kind of just have to make a decision. And if you set yourself up to be able to be adaptive and responsive to change, then you'll be fine. Because you can always change course if the response you're getting back or the data you're getting back is going in the wrong direction. VICTORIA: I love that. And I want to pull on that thread about being open to changing your mind. I think that many founders start the company because they're so excited about this idea and this problem that they found. But how do you keep yourself open to feedback and keeping that ability to flow and to change direction? NADIA: I mean, I didn't set out to build a Goodreads alternative, and here I am. VICTORIA: [laughs] NADIA: I just wanted to build this specific side project or this specific...it was a companion app, in fact. Like, the first version of the thing I built, the first thing you had to do was sign in and connect your Goodreads account so that we could pull in your shelves and start creating the dashboards. So as a solo bootstrapping founder, building a Goodreads alternative was not something that I thought was going to lead to success. But through years of experience, and just hearing other people's stories, and research, I just learned that it's such a hard space just running a startup in general, and 90% of startups fail. And I just said to myself that, okay, the only way I can kind of survive for longer is if I am open to feedback, I'm open to change course, I'm patient, and I trust the process. These are the things I can do to just increase my chances of success. And so that's why I kind of feel it's imperative if you want to go down this route and you want to be successful, it's vital that you're open to completely changing the product, completely changing your direction, completely going back on a decision. You'll either lose customers or you'll run out of money, whatever it is. And so yeah, you've got to just basically be quite ruthless in the things that are just going to minimize your chances of failing. VICTORIA: That makes sense. And now, I have a two-part question for you. What's the wind in your sails? Like, the thing that keeps you going and keeps you motivated to keep working on this? And then, conversely, what's kind of holding you back? What are the obstacles and challenges that you're facing? NADIA: I think this kind of role...so I'm like founder, CEO, and developer. In general, I think I thrive under pressure and pushing myself, and trying to always be better and improve. So I'm always trying to be like, how can I improve my productivity? Or how can I run the company better? All these kinds of things. So I feel like I'm getting to explore maximizing my full potential as someone in the world of work through doing this. So that just intrinsically is motivating to me. I love books, and I love reading. I think it's such an amazing hobby. And the fact that I get to make other readers happy is awesome. So even just as the product has grown, the messages that we get about if someone got a perfect recommendation from StoryGraph, or they hadn't read for years, and now an easy form of, you know, what are you in the mood for? Check a few boxes, and we'll show you some books that fit, whatever it is. That's just so...it's so awesome just to be able to enhance readers' lives that way in terms of the things they're reading and getting them excited about reading again or keeping them excited. So those are the things that keep me going, both the personal nature of enjoying my work and enjoying trying to be the best founder and CEO that I can and building a great product. It's always great when you build something, and people just enjoy using it and like using it. So I'm always incentivized to keep making the product better, the experience better. I'm currently mid a redesign. And I'm just so excited to get it out because it's going to touch on a lot of repeated pain points that we've been having for years. And I just can't wait for everyone to see it and see that we've listened to them. And we're making progress still like three and a bit years on since we launched out of beta. What's tough? Previously, what's been tough is navigating, remaining independent, and bootstrapped with just personally trying to make money to just live my life. So I had five years of runway. And it was this tricky situation about when I had a couple of years left, I'm thinking, wow, I really like doing this, but I'm going to need to start earning money soon. But I also don't want to get investment. I don't want to stop doing this. I can't stop doing this. We've got hundreds of thousands of customers. And so kind of trying to balance my personal needs and life situations with the work I've been doing because I've been working so hard on it for so long that in the last couple of years, it's gotten to a point where it's like, how do I craft the life I want out of a product that is very not set up to be an indie bootstrapped product? [laughs] Typically, you want to do a B2B. You want to start earning money from your product as early as possible. And I feel like I've landed in a product that's typically funded, VC-backed, that kind of thing. So kind of navigating that has been a fun challenge. There's not been anything that's kind of demoralized me or held me back, or made me think I shouldn't do it. And it's just kind of been a fun challenge trying to...yeah, just navigate that. And we've been doing things like we're currently in the process of transitioning our...we have a Plus Plan. And when we launched it, it was essentially a grab bag of features. We're completely changing the feature set. And we right now have six and a half thousand people who are on that plan. But we don't have product market fit on that plan, and I can tell from when I do certain surveys the responses I get back. And so we're completely transitioning that to focus in on our most popular feature, which is the stats that we offer. And so that's kind of scary, but it's part of making that Plus Plan more sticky and easier to sell because it's going to be for your power users who love data. So they want all the data when they are reading. And then the other thing is, okay, what kind of business avenue can we start which fits in with the ethos of the product but brings in more revenue for StoryGraph? And so, we launched a giveaway segment in our app where publishers and authors can pay to list competitions for users to win copies of their books. And it's essentially a win-win-win because publishers and authors get another channel to market their books. Users get to win free books, and readers love winning free books. And StoryGraph has another revenue source that helps us stay independent and profitable, and sustainable in the long run. VICTORIA: That's wonderful. And there are two tracks I want to follow up on there; one is your decision not to seek funding; if you could just tell me a little more about the reasoning and your thought process behind that. And you've already touched on a little bit of the other ways you're looking at monetizing the app. NADIA: Since I was a teenager, I've always been interested in business, economics, entrepreneurship. I've always felt very entrepreneurial. I've read so many founder stories and startup stories over the years. And you hear about venture capitalists who come in, and even if it's fine for the first year or two, ultimately, they want a return. And at some point, that could come at odds with your mission or your goals for your company. And when I think about two things, the kind of life I want and also the nature of the product I'm building as well, VC just doesn't fit. And I know there are so many different funding programs and styles right now, a lot more friendlier [laughs] than VC. But I'm just focusing on VC because when I was younger, I used to think that was a marker of success. VC funding that was the track I thought I was going to go down, and that was what I kind of idolized as, oh my gosh, yes, getting a funding round of millions and millions and then building this huge company. That was how I used to be, so it's so interesting how I've completely gone to the other side. That idea that you could have mismatched goals and how it's ruined companies, once you take the first round of funding and you grow and expand, then you've got to keep taking more to just stay alive until some liquidation event. That just doesn't appeal to me. And I just think there's something ultimately very powerful and valuable about building a product without giving up any ownership to anybody else and being able to make it into something that people love, and that's profitable, and can give the people who run it great lifestyles. I just think that's a mark of an excellent product, and I just want to build one of those. And then I think also the nature of the product itself being a book tracking app. I think the product has done well because it is run and built so closely by myself and Rob. And so it's like, people talk about how, oh, you can tell it's built for readers by readers by people who care. And I run the company's Instagram, and it's not just me talking about the product. I'm talking with a bunch of our users about books and what we're reading. And it really feels like it's just got such a great community feel. And I worry that that can get lost with certain types of investment that I've previously thought that I wanted in my life. And so, yeah, that's the reason why I've kind of strayed away from the investment world. And then it's gotten to the point, like, now we're at the point where we don't need funding because we've been able to get to profitability by ourselves. So we don't need any type of funding. And we're just going to try and keep doing things to keep making the product better, to convert more people to the Plus Plan. And, hopefully, our giveaways platform grows in the way we want such that our goal is to just stay profitable and independent forever for as long as possible. And we think that way, we're going to have the most fun running the company, and the product is going to be the best it can be because there's not going to be competing incentives or goals for the product. VICTORIA: That makes sense. And it sounds like, in reality, in the real case, you had a team, and you had the skills yourself to be able to move the product forward without having to take on funding or take on additional support, which is awesome. And I actually really like your background. I also have a degree in economics. So I'm curious if the economics and philosophy, all of that, really lends itself to your skills as a founder. Is that accurate? NADIA: I don't think so. VICTORIA: [laughs] NADIA: I love my degree. I get sad when I meet econ grads or econ majors, and they're like, "Oh, I hated it. Oh, it was so boring," or whatever. I'm like, "No, it was so great." I'm a big microeconomics fan, so I was all about...I didn't like macro that much. I was all about the game theory and the microeconomic theory, that kind of stuff. I don't think there's anything that really ties into my skills as a founder. I feel like that's more to do with my upbringing and personality than what I studied. But, I mean, one of the reasons I did love my degree is because there are elements that do crop up. It's such a widely applicable...the subjects I did are so widely applicable, philosophy, different ways of seeing the world and thinking and approaching different people. And then, obviously, economics that's essentially behavior, and how markets work, and incentives, and all that kind of stuff. And when you get to pricing and all those sorts of things, and business, and then politics as well, I mean, everything is politics, right? People interacting. So there are definitely things and conversations I had at university, which I see things crop up day to day that I can tie back to it. But yeah, I think it doesn't really...my specific degree, I don't think it's made me a better founder than I would have been if I'd studied, I don't know, English or Math or something. VICTORIA: Right, yeah. I think economics is one of those where it's kind of so broadly applicable. You're kind of using it, but you don't even realize it sometimes. [laughs] NADIA: Yeah. MID-ROLL AD: thoughtbot is thrilled to announce our own incubator launching this year. If you are a non-technical founding team with a business idea that involves a web or mobile app, we encourage you to apply for our eight-week program. We'll help you move forward with confidence in your team, your product vision, and a roadmap for getting you there. Learn more and apply at tbot.io/incubator. VICTORIA: So what made you decide to go to a bootcamp right after finishing school? NADIA: So I'd always been entrepreneurial. I remember...I don't know where exactly it started from, whether I got it from my mom. I know she's always been very entrepreneurial and into business. The earliest memory I have of doing something that was very specifically business-oriented was in what we call sixth form in the UK, which is essentially the last two years of high school before you go to university or college; we had this scheme called Young Enterprise. And essentially, you got into teams of people, small teams, or they could be quite big, actually. It could be up to 20 people. And you started a business, and there were trade shows, and pitch meetings, and all that kind of stuff, so I remember getting involved in all that sort of stuff at school. But I'd always been on the investment banking track because when I was young...so my parents...we come from a poor background. And so my parents were very much like, you know, try and find high-paying careers to go into so that you can pay for whatever you want and you have a much better lifestyle. So I had gotten onto the investment banking track from the age of 14 when I went with a friend...at the school, I went to, there was a Take Your Daughter to Work Day. My dad said, "Oh, you want to go to try and find someone whose parent works in an investment bank or something like that. That's like a great career to go into." And so I went with a friend's dad to UBS. And I remember being blown away, like, wow, this is so fascinating. Because I think everything seems so impressive when you're 14, and you're walking into a space like that, and everything seems very lively. And everyone's walking around dressed sharp. They've got their BlackBerries. So from the age of 14 until 20, it would have been, I was very much I am going to work in an investment bank. And I did all the things that you would do, like all the schemes, the spring programs. And it got to my final internship. And I just remember at the internship being rather disillusioned and disappointed by the experience. I remember thinking, is this it? I was studying at Oxford, and I put so much into my studies. And I remember thinking; I'm working so hard. And this is what I come to? Is this it? And so around the time as well, I was also meeting a lot of people in the entrepreneurship space, social enterprises, people doing their own ventures. And I just remember thinking, oh, I feel like I've got to go down that track. And I ended up winning a place on a coding course. It was set up specifically to help more women get into tech. And it was called Code First Girls. I won a place that started...it was just part-time. What I did was I actually...I got the banking job from Deutsche Bank, it was, but I decided to turn it down. It was a very risky decision. I turned it down, and I stayed in Oxford after graduating and worked in the academic office for a while. And then, twice a week, I would go to London and do this coding course. And during it, on Twitter, I remember seeing a competition for a full-paid place at this bootcamp called Makers Academy. And I just thought to myself, having tech skills, I'd heard the feedback that it's a very powerful thing to have. And I remember thinking I should go for this competition. And I went for the competition, and I won a free place at the bootcamp. If I didn't win a free place at the bootcamp, I'm not sure what would have happened because I'm not sure whether at that point I would have thought, oh, paying £8,000 to go to a software bootcamp is what I should do. I'm not sure I would have got there. So that's how I got there, essentially. I won a competition for a bootcamp after having a taste of what coding was like and seeing how freeing it was to just be able to have a computer and an internet connection and build something. VICTORIA: Oh, that's wonderful. I love that story. And I've spent a lot of time with Women Who Code and trying to get women excited about coding. And that's exactly the story is that once you have it, it's a tool in your toolset. And if you want to build something, you can make it happen. And that's why it's important to continue the education and get access for people who might not normally have it. And you continue to do some of that work as well, right? You're involved in organizations like this? NADIA: Like Code First Girls? No. I did some years ago. I would go and attend Rails Girls workshops and be a mentor at them, at those. And while I was at Pivotal, I helped with events like codebar, which were essentially evenings where people who were learning to code or more junior could come and pair with someone more senior on whatever project they wanted to. So I did a bunch of that stuff in the years after leaving Makers Academy. And I was even a TA for a short time for a couple of weeks at Makers Academy as well after I graduated. But in more recent years, I haven't done much in that space, but I would love to do more at some point. I don't have the bandwidth to right now. [laughs] VICTORIA: And you're still a major speaker going and keynoting events all around the world. Have you done any recently, or have any coming up that you're excited about? NADIA: So before the pandemic, my last talk, I keynoted RubyWorld in Japan. That was in November 2019. And then the pandemic hit, and 2020 June, July was when StoryGraph had some viral tweets, and so we kicked off. And amongst all of that, I was being invited to speak at remote events, but it just didn't make sense for me. Not only was I so busy with work, but I put a lot of hours into my talks. And part of the fun is being there, hallway track, meeting people, being on stage. And so it just didn't appeal to me to spend so much time developing the talk to just deliver it at home. And so, I just spent all the time on StoryGraph. And I remember when events started happening again; I wondered whether I would even be invited to speak because I felt more detached from the Ruby community. Most of the conferences that I did were in the Ruby community. StoryGraph is built on Rails. Yeah, I just thought maybe I'll get back to that later. But all of a sudden, I had a series of amazing invitations. Andrew Culver started up The Rails SaaS Conference in LA in October, and I was invited to speak at that. And then, I was invited to keynote RubyConf, that was recently held in Houston, Texas, and also invited to keynote the satellite conference, RubyConf Mini in Providence, that happened a couple of weeks earlier. And so I had a very busy October and November, a lot of travel. I developed two new talks, a Ruby talk and a StoryGraph talk. It was my first ever time giving a talk on StoryGraph. It was a lot of work and amongst a lot of StoryGraph work that I needed to do. All of the talks went well, and it was so much fun to be back on the circuit again. And I'm looking forward to whatever speaking things crop up this year. VICTORIA: That's wonderful. I'm excited. I'll have to see if I can find a recording and get caught up myself. Going back to an earlier question, you mentioned quite a few times about market research and talking to the customers. And I'm just curious if you have a method or a set of tools that you use to run those experiments and collect that feedback and information. NADIA: Yes. So I remember one of the first things I did years ago was I read "The Mom Test" by Rob Fitzpatrick. And that's great for just getting the foundation of when you talk to customers; you don't want to lead them on in any shape or form. You just want to get the raw truth and go from there. So that's the underpinning of everything I do. And then, I learned from friends I made through Pivotal about how you put together a script for a customer research. You can't just have bullet points or whatever. You should have a script. And the foundation of that script is a hypothesis about what you're trying to find out in that round of research. And once you figure out your hypothesis, then you can put together the questions you want to ask and understand how you're going to measure the output. So the first ever thing I was trying to find out when I first started interviewing people was just very general. It was just like, are there any pain points? I was just trying to figure out are there any pain points among the avid reader group of people? And then I remember the results from that were, "No place for consistent, high-quality recommendations." And so then I said, okay, how are people finding recommendations now, or what are the factors that lead to people thinking a book was great for them? And that's how I ended up getting to the moods and pace. But when I do my interviews, I record them all. I watch them back. And I condense everything on sticky notes. And I use a virtual tool. And I try to take word for word. When I summarize, I still just try and use their specific words as much as possible. So I'm not adding my own editing over what they say. Every single interviewee has a different color. And I essentially group them into themes, and that's how I unlock whatever the answers are for that round. And then I use that...I might have been trying to find out what to build next or whether we should go down a certain product direction or not. And so, depending on the outcome, that helps me make up my mind about what to do. So that's the high-level process that I follow. VICTORIA: Well, that sounds very methodical, and interesting for me to hear your perspective on that. And you mentioned that you do have a redesign coming out soon for StoryGraph. Are there any other particular products or features that you're really excited to talk about coming up soon? NADIA: Yeah, I'm so excited about the redesign because we're bringing out...it's not just a UI improvement; it's a user experience improvement as well. So there are a lot of little features that have been asked for over the years. And actually, it was trying to deliver one of them that sparked the whole redesign. So people really want a marked as finished button. There's no way to mark as finished. You just toggle a book back to read. And some people find this quite counterintuitive, or it doesn't quite explain what they're doing. And so when I came to deliver the mark as finished button, this was months and months ago now, I realized that the book pane was just becoming so cluttered, and I was trying to fight with it to squeeze in this link. And I remember thinking; this is not the only thing people want to see on the book pane. They also want to see when they read the book without having to go into the book page. They also want to be able to add it to their next queue. And I just said, you know what? I need to redesign this whole thing. And so I was able to luckily work with Saron Yitbarek, who is married to my co-founder, Rob. There's a funny story about all of that. And she helped me do this redesign based on all my customer research. And so I'm just so excited to get it out because the other thing that we're bringing with it is dark mode, which is our most requested feature in history. And it's funny because I've always felt like, ah, that's a nice-to-have. But obviously, for some people, it's not a nice-to-have; it's an accessibility issue. And even me, I'm quite strict with my bedtime. I try and be offline an hour before bed. In bed by 11, up at 6, and even me if I want to track my pages, I'm like, ooh, this is a bit bright. And my phone itself is set on adaptive, so it's light mode during the day and dark mode during the night. And even me, I can see why people really want this and why it would just improve their experience, especially if everything else on your phone is dark. So I'm really excited to get that out, mainly for the UX improvements. And the other thing I'm really excited to do is transition the Plus Plan to being the advanced stats package rather than the random selection of features right now. Because not only will the people who pay us get more complex stats functionalities such that they feel like, wow, the subscription fee that I pay not only does it still make me feel like I'm supporting an alternative to Goodreads, an independent alternative to Goodreads I also get such value from these extra features. But the other thing is what I found from my customer research is that if you're a Plus customer, there's often one or two of the Plus features that you love and that you don't really use the others. But they're all really great features. And so what I'm really excited about is that we're going to make all the non-stats features free for everybody. And so I'm so excited for, like, we have a feature where if you put in a group of usernames, we look at all of your to-read lists and suggest great books for you to buddy-read together. Now, there's a bunch of Plus users who aren't social and don't care about it. But there's going to be a bunch of our free users who are so excited about that feature, probably will use it with their book clubs, things like that. We have up-next suggestions where we suggest what you should pick up next from your to-read pile based on a range of factors. It could be, oh, you're behind on your reading goal; here's a fast-paced book. Or this book is very similar to the one that you just finished, so if you want something the same, pick up this one. And, again, that's behind a paywall right now, and I'm just so excited for everybody to be able to use that. When I remember starting out with StoryGraph, I remember thinking, wow, the way this is going, wouldn't it be so cool if we could just suggest books that would be the next perfect read for you? Because a lot of people have a pile of books by their bedside table or on their shelves, and they're just like, well, which one should I start with? And this tool literally helps you to do that. And so I can't wait for everyone to be able to try it. And so that's why I'm excited about that transition because the Plus Plan will be better, and the free product will be better. VICTORIA: That sounds amazing. And I'm thinking in my head like, oh, I should start a book club with thoughtbot. Because there are some engineering management and other types of books we want to read, so maybe we could use StoryGraph to manage that and keep ourselves motivated to actually finish them. [laughs] NADIA: Cool. VICTORIA: No, this is wonderful. And what books are on your reading list coming up? NADIA: Yes. I am excited to read...I'm not sure...I'm blanking on the series' name. But the first book is called "The Poppy War." I don't know whether it's called "The Burning God" or if that's the third book in the series. But it's this very popular trilogy, and I'm excited to read that soon. I'm doing a slow chronological read of Toni Morrison's fiction. I recently read "Song of Solomon," which was great, really, really good. And so I'm excited to read more of her novels this year. I'm also on a kind of narrative nonfiction kick right now. I love narrative nonfiction. So I just finished reading "American Kingpin," which is about Silk Road. And I've picked up "Black Edge," which is about SAC Capital and Steve Cohen and that whole hedge fund insider trading situation. So I'm probably going to look for more of the same afterwards. VICTORIA: Well, that's very exciting. And it's inspiring that as a founder, you also still have time to read [laughs] and probably because StoryGraph makes it easy and motivating for you to do so. NADIA: Yeah, everyone thought that my reading would tank once I started the company, but, in fact, it's multiplied severalfold. And a couple of reasons; one is it's very important in general for me to make time for me because I'm in a situation that could easily become very stressful and could lead to burnout. So I make sure that I make time for me to read and to go to dance class regularly, which is my other main hobby. But then, secondly, I feel like I can justify it as work. Because I say, wow, me being a reader and being able to communicate with people on Instagram and on Twitter about books, not just the product, adds legitimacy to me as the founder and developer of this product. And so it's important that I keep reading. And it also helps the product be better because I understand what features are needed. So, for example, I never used to listen to audiobooks. I'm a big podcast person; I love music. So between those two, when does audio fit in? And also, I didn't like the idea that I could just be absent-minded sometimes with some podcasts, but with a book, you don't want spoilers. It could get confusing. But I started listening to audiobooks because we had a large audiobook user base. And they would ask for certain features, and it was really hard for me to relate and to understand their needs. And now that I have started listening to audiobooks as well, we made some great audiobook listeners-focused additions to the app last year, including you can track your minutes. So you can literally get you read this many pages in a day, but you also listened to this many minutes. You can set an hours goal for the year, so not just a reading goal or a pages goal. You can set an hours goal. Or maybe you're someone like me, where audiobooks are the smaller proportion of your reading, and you just want it all calculated as pages. And so I've got it on the setting where it's like, even when I track an audiobook in StoryGraph, convert it to pages for me, and I just have my nice, all-round page number at the end of the year. VICTORIA: That's so cool. Really interesting. And I've had such a nice time chatting with you today. Is there anything else that you'd like to share as a final takeaway for our listeners? NADIA: If you are someone who wants to start a company, maybe you want to bootstrap, you've got a product idea, I think it's honestly just trust the process. It will take time. But if you trust the process, you listen to customers and really listen to them...research ways to talk to customers, and don't cut corners with the process. There have been so many times when I've done a whole round of research, and then I say, oh, do I have to go through all these now and actually do a synthesis? I think anecdotally; I can figure out what the gist was; no, do the research. You don't know what insights you're going to find. And I think if you just trust that process...and I think the other thing is before you get to that stage, start building up a runway. Having a runway is so powerful. And so whether it's saving a bit more or diverting funds from something else if you have a runway and you can give yourself a couple of years, a few years without worrying about your next paycheck, that is incredibly valuable to getting started on your bootstrapping journey. VICTORIA: Thank you. That's so wonderful. And I appreciate you coming on today to be with us. You can subscribe to the show and find notes along with a complete transcript for this episode at giantrobots.fm. If you have questions or comments, email us at hosts@giantrobots.fm. And you can find me on Mastodon at Victoria Guido. This podcast is brought to by thoughtbot and produced and edited by Mandy Moore. Thank you for listening. See you next time. ANNOUNCER: This podcast is brought to you by thoughtbot, your expert strategy, design, development, and product management partner. We bring digital products from idea to success and teach you how because we care. Learn more at thoughtbot.com.Special Guest: Nadia Odunayo.Sponsored By:thoughtbot Incubator: thoughtbot is thrilled to announce our own incubator launching this year. If you are a non-technical founding team with a business idea that involves a web or mobile app, we encourage you to apply for our eight-week program. We'll help you move forward with confidence in your team, your product vision, and a roadmap for getting you there. Learn more and apply at tbot.io/incubator.Support Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots

Dr. Aadeel Akhtar is the Founder and CEO of PSYONIC, a company whose mission is to develop advanced prostheses that are affordable for everyone. Victoria talks to Dr. Akhtar about the gaps in the market he saw in current prosthetic ability, advancements PSYONIC has been able to make since commercialization, and essential principles and values that were important to him when building out the PSYONIC team. PSYONIC Follow PSYONIC on LinkedIn or Twitter. Follow Dr. Aadeel Akhtar on LinkedIn. Follow thoughtbot on Twitter or LinkedIn. Become a Sponsor of Giant Robots! Transcript: VICTORIA: This is The Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots Podcast, where we explore the design, development, and business of great products. I'm your host Victoria Guido. And with me today is Dr. Aadeel Akhtar, Founder and CEO of PSYONIC, a company whose mission is to develop advanced prostheses that are affordable for everyone. Aadeel, thank you for joining me. DR. AADEEL: Thank you for having me, Victoria. This is fun. VICTORIA: Yes, I'm excited to meet you. So I actually ran into you earlier this week at a San Diego tech meetup. And I'm curious just to hear more about your company PSYONIC. DR. AADEEL: So, as you mentioned, we develop advanced bionic limbs that are affordable and accessible. And this is actually something I've wanted to do my whole life ever since I was seven years old. My parents are from Pakistan. I was born in the Chicago suburbs. But I was visiting, and that was the first time I met someone missing a limb; and she was my age missing her right leg, using a tree branch as a crutch, living in poverty. And that's kind of what inspired me to go into this field. VICTORIA: Wonderful. And maybe you can start with what gaps in the market did you see in current prosthetic ability? DR. AADEEL: When we first started making these prosthetic devices, we were 3D printing them. And we thought that the biggest issue with prosthetic devices was that they were way too expensive and saw that with 3D printing, we'd be able to reduce the prices on them. And that's true; it was actually one of the biggest issues, but it wasn't the biggest issue. After talking with hundreds of patients and clinicians, the number one thing that we found that patients and clinicians would raise issue with was that their super expensive bionic hands were breaking all the time. And these were made with injection molded plastics and custom-machined steel. And they weren't doing anything crazy with it. They would accidentally hit the hand against the side of a table, but because they were made out of rigid components, they would end up snapping up those joints. And a natural hand, for example, if you bang a natural hand against a table or a rigid object, then it flexes out of the way. It has compliance in it, and that's why it's able to survive those types of hits and impacts a little bit more. It forced us to think outside the box of how can we still leverage the low-cost manufacturing of 3D printing but make this hand more robust than anything out there? And that's when I started looking into soft robotics. And with soft robotics, instead of making rigid links in your robot, so instead of having rigid joints and components, you'd use soft materials like silicone that are more akin to your skin and your own biological tissues that are more flexible and compliant. So we started making the fingers out of rubber and silicone. And now we've been able to do things like punch through flaming boards, and I dropped it from the roof of my house 30 feet up in the air, and it survived. We put it in a dryer for 10 minutes, and it survived tumbling around in a dryer. I've arm wrestled against the para-triathlete national champion and lost. So this thing was built to survive a lot more than just hitting your hand against the side of a table. VICTORIA: Wow, that sounds incredible. And I love that you started with a premise, and then you got feedback from your users and found a completely different problem, even though that same problem still existed [laughs] about the low cost. DR. AADEEL: Absolutely. VICTORIA: Wow. So taking it back a little bit more to the beginning, so you knew you always wanted to do prosthetics since you grew up in Pakistan and saw people without their limbs. Take me a little bit more from the beginning of the journey. When did you decide to start the company officially? DR. AADEEL: And just to clarify, I was just visiting Pakistan for the summer, but I grew up and was raised here in the U.S. So I went to Loyola University Chicago for undergrad, and I got a bachelor's degree in biology there, followed by a master's in computer science. And the original plan was to actually become an MD working with patients with amputations and developing prosthetics for them. But while I was an undergraduate student at Loyola, I took my first computer science class, and I absolutely loved it. I loved everything about coding, and programming, and engineering. And I realized that if I became a straight-up MD, I wouldn't get to do any of the cool things that I was learning in my computer science classes. And I wanted to figure out a way to combine my passions in engineering and computer science with clinical medicine and prosthetics. And right down the street at a hospital formerly known as The Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago...it's now the Shirley Ryan AbilityLab. It's the number-one rehabilitation hospital in the U.S. for the last 31 years. They made these huge breakthroughs in mind control bionic limbs where they were doing a surgery where they would reroute your nerves to other muscles that you already have on your body. And then, when you try to imagine bending your phantom elbow or making a phantom fist, your chest muscles would contract. And then you could use those signals to then control this robotic limb that was designed by Dean Kamen that was sponsored by DARPA and cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. That was just absolutely incredible. And it was this perfect mixture of engineering and clinical medicine, and it was exactly what I wanted to get into. But, as you'd mentioned, we're all about accessibility, and a $100,000 cost hand would not cut it. And so I ended up finishing a master's in computer science. I taught at Loyola for a couple of years and then went to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where I got another master's in electrical and computer engineering, a Ph.D. in neuroscience. And then I finished the first year of medical school before I left to run PSYONIC because it is a lot more fun building bionic limbs [laughs] than finishing medical school. And while I was a graduate student, we started 3D printing our own prosthetic hands, and we got the chance in 2014 to go down to Quito, Ecuador, where we were working with a nonprofit organization called The Range of Motion Project. And their whole mission is to provide prosthetics to those who can't afford them in the U.S., Guatemala, and Ecuador. And we went down there, and we were working with a patient who had lost his left hand 35 years prior due to machine gunfire from a helicopter; he was in the Ecuadorian Army. And there was a border war between Ecuador and Peru. And Juan, our patient, in front of international news stations, said that he felt as though a part of him had come back. And that was because he actually made a pinch with his left hand for the first time in 35 years. And you have to imagine the hand at that time was three times the size of an average natural hand, adult human hand. Had wires going everywhere, breadboards, power supplies, the walls, you name it. And despite that, he said that a part of him had come back. And he actually forgot how to make a pinch with his left hand, and we had to retrain his brain by placing a mirror in front of his left side reflecting his right hand, tricking his brain into thinking that his left hand was actually there. And he would make a pinch with both sides, and it would reactivate the muscles in his forearm on his left side. And when he said that, that's when I realized that if I stay in academia, then this just ends up as a journal paper. And if we want everyone to feel the same way that Juan did, we had to commercialize the technology. And so that's when PSYONIC was born. VICTORIA: I love that you're working on that as someone who's from Washington, D.C., and has done a lot of work in veterans and homeless organizations and seen how life-changing getting access to limbs and regaining capability can be for people. DR. AADEEL: Absolutely. In fact, our first user in the U.S. is a U.S. Army sergeant who lost his hand in Iraq in 2005 due to roadside bombs, Sergeant Garrett Anderson. He used a hook on a daily basis, and with our hand, he's actually able to feel his daughter's hand, which is something that he wasn't able to do with any other prosthesis. And for him to tell us that that is why we do what we do. VICTORIA: Right. And I saw on your website that you have several patents and have talked about the advances you've been able to make in what I'm going to call the sensorimotor bionic limbs. Can you tell me a little bit more about some of the advancements you've been able to make since you decided to commercialize this? DR. AADEEL: The first thing that usually users notice is that, and clinicians notice as well, is that the hand is the fastest bionic hand in the world. So the fingers close in about 200 milliseconds. And to put that into context, we can wink our eyes in about 300 milliseconds. So it's technically faster than the blink of an eye, which is kind of a cool statistic there. So it's super fast. And the fingers are super resistant to impact, so they're very durable. And so we've got a couple of patents on both of those items in particular. And then there's the touch feedback aspect. So this is the only hand on the market that gives users touch feedback. And so the methods that we have to mold the fingers to enable that sensory feedback that is what our third patent is on for the hand, and it just looks really cool. It's got like this black carbon fiber on it that just looks really futuristic and bionic. And it just gives users the confidence that this isn't something to be pitied; this is something that's really cool. And especially for our war heroes, that's something to be celebrated that I lost my hand for our country, and now I've got this really cool one that can do all of the things that my hand used to do. VICTORIA: And I also saw that it's reimbursable by Medicare in the U.S. And I was curious if you had any lessons learned from that process for getting eligible for that. DR. AADEEL: Yeah. And that was part of the goal from the very beginning. After we did our customer discovery process, where we figured out what the pain points are and found out that durability was one of the biggest issues, obviously, one of the other issues was the really expensive price of the other hands, and typically what we call a multi-articulated hand, so that's one where each one of the fingers move individually. Those are only covered by the VA, so if you're in the military or workman's comp so if you had a workplace accident. And that only accounted for about 10% of the U.S. market. And what the clinicians kept telling us over and over again was that if you can get the hand covered by Medicare, then usually all the other insurance companies will follow suit, like your Blue Cross Blue Shield, your Aetna, your Kaiser, et cetera. So that was our design goal from the beginning. So how can we hit a price point that Medicare would cover but also make this fully featured that no other hand can do any of these other things? What it primarily came down to was hitting that price point. And as long as we hit that price point, then Medicare was going to be fine with it. So we invented a lot of the manufacturing methods that we use in-house to make the hand in particular. So we do all the silicone molding. We do all the carbon fiber work. We do all the fabric work. We do all the assembly of it in-house in our warehouse here in San Diego. And by being so vertically integrated, we're able to then iterate very quickly and make these innovations happen at a much more rapid scale so that we can get them out there faster and then help more people who need it. VICTORIA: So you've really grown tremendously from when you first had the project, and now you have a team here in San Diego. Do you have any lessons learned for enabling your team to drive faster in that innovation? DR. AADEEL: Yeah, the biggest thing that I feel like a lot of things come down to is just having grit. So especially with a startup, it's always going to be a roller coaster ride. And for us, I think one of the big motivating factors for us is the patients themselves when they get to do these things that they weren't able to do before. So another one of our first patients, Tina, had just become a grandmother, and she was able to feed her granddaughter for the first time because she was able to hold the bottle with her bionic hand, The Ability Hand, and then hold her granddaughter with her natural hand and then feed her using The Ability Hand. It's, like I said, moments like that is why we do what we're doing. It gives us that motivation to work those long hours, make those deadlines so that we can help as many people as possible. VICTORIA: Right. So you have that motivating power behind your idea, which makes a lot of sense. What else in your customer discovery sprint was surprising to you as you moved through that process? DR. AADEEL: So there was definitely the robustness that was surprising. There was the cost that wasn't necessarily the highest priority thing, which we thought would be the highest priority. And the speed and just having to rely on visual feedback, you have to kind of look at the hand as you're doing the task that you're doing, but you have to look at it very intently. So that takes a lot of cognitive load. You have to pay attention very specifically to am I doing the right movement with my hand? In ways that you wouldn't necessarily have to do with a natural hand. And by making the hand move so responsive as it is and move so quickly, in addition to having that touch feedback, that reduces, or at least we believe it'll reduce a lot of that cognitive load for our patients so that they don't have to be constantly monitoring exactly what the hand is doing in order to do a lot of the tasks or the activities of daily living that they're doing on a day to day basis. The whole customer discovery process drove what features we were going to focus on in actually making this hand a reality. VICTORIA: Yeah, that makes sense. And I love hearing about what came up that surprised people. And I appreciate your commitment to that process to really drive your business idea and to solve this problem that happens to so many people in the United States. Well, how widespread is this issue? And, of course, I'm sure you're targeting more than just the United States with rollout, but... DR. AADEEL: So, globally, there are over 10 million people with hand amputations, and 80% of them actually live in developing nations, and less than 3% have access to affordable rehabilitative care. So it's a huge need worldwide, and we want to make sure that everyone has access to the best available prosthetic devices. VICTORIA: That makes sense. So I guess commercializing this product leads to more room, more availability across for everyone. DR. AADEEL: Absolutely. And interesting thing about that, too, is that as we were developing these, the hand in particular, we've optimized it for humans to do human tasks. And we have a programming interface that we put on it that allows researchers to control each one of the fingers like you control the speed, the position, and the force from each one of those fingers as well as you can stream all of the touch sensors like over Bluetooth or over a USB connection, and then also the location of each one of those fingers as well. A lot of robotics researchers who are building humanoid robots and robot arms to do other tasks like manufacturing and robotic surgery and things like that have been purchasing our hand too. So notably, for example, NASA and Meta, so Facebook Meta, have purchased our hands, and NASA is putting it on a humanoid astronaut robot, which hopefully will eventually go into space. And then, on Earth, they'd be able to control it and then manipulate objects in space. And it's opened up an entirely new market, but the critical thing here is that it's the exact same hand that the humans are getting that the robots are getting. And what this allows us to do is just expand our volume of production and our sales so that we can actually further drive down the costs and the pricing for the human side of things as well. So if we're talking about places like India, or Pakistan, or Guatemala, or Ecuador where there are no government incentives in place to reimburse at a rate that they might in the U.S., then we can actually get the price point to one that's actually affordable in those areas as well. And I'm really excited about those prospects. VICTORIA: That's so cool that future robot astronauts will be financing people who have no ability [laughs] to go into space or anything like that. That's a cool business idea. I wonder, when did that happen for you, or what was that like when you realized that there was this other potential untapped market for robotic limbs? DR. AADEEL: It's interesting. It was always in the back of our minds because, as I was a Ph.D. student, I was in the Ph.D. group that focused on robotics, in particular more so than prosthetics. And I was the first one in the group to actually kind of have the prosthetic spin on things. And so I had an idea of where the market was for the robotic side of things. And I had some connections as well. And so I was actually giving a talk at Georgia Tech early last year. The Director of the Georgia Tech Robotics Institute, Dr. Seth Hutchinson, he was telling me that...he was like, "You should go to the big robotics conference, ICRA, because people are going to be like...absolutely love this product for their robots." And we were just like, huh, we never considered that. And so we decided to go, and it was just absolutely nuts. We've had researchers from all over the world being like, "How can I get this hand?" And compared to a lot of the robotic hands that are out there, even on the robotic side, this is a much lower price point than what they've been dealing with. And by solving a lot of the problems on the human side, like durability, and sensory feedback, and dexterity, and the pricing, it actually solved a lot of the problems on the robotic side as well. So I was just like...after we had gone to that conference, we realized that, yeah, we can actually make this work as well. VICTORIA: That's really cool. And it sounds like tapping into this robotics market and networking really worked for you. What else about your market research or strategy seem to be effective in your business growth? DR. AADEEL: This is interesting as well. So half of our sales actually come from social media, which for a medical device company is usually unheard of. [laughs] Because usually the model is, for medical devices, where you have a group of sales reps located across the regions that you're selling and so across the U.S. And they would visit each one of the clinics, and then they would work with the clinicians directly in getting these on the patients. That usually accounts for like 99% of sales. And so for us, for half of them to come from social media, it was a goal that we had set out to, but it was also surprising that that accounted for so much of our volumes and our revenue. The way we set it up was that we wanted to make videos of our hand that highlighted things that our hand could do that were novel and unique. And so, for example, we wanted to highlight the durability of the hand as well as the dexterity and the touch feedback. And so some of the first videos that we made were like arm wrestling against a bionic hand. And what's cool about that is that the general public just found that very interesting in general. But also, when a clinician and a patient sees that, wow, this hand can actually withstand the forces of an actual arm wrestling match, then they're also just as impressed. And the same thing with punching through three wooden boards that we set on fire; if it can handle that, then it can handle activities of daily living. General public seizes, and they're just like, "Whoa, that's so cool." But then clinicians and the patients they see that, and they were like, "My prosthetic hand couldn't do this before." And so then they contact us, and we're like, "How can we get your hand?" And then we'll either put them in contact with a clinician, or we'll work with one of the clinicians that they are already working with then go through their insurance that way. And so it's just been a really exciting and fun way to generate, like, expand our market and generate sales that we didn't necessarily think was going to be a viable way from the start. VICTORIA: Right. I totally get it. I mean, I want one, and both my hands still work. MID-ROLL AD: thoughtbot is thrilled to announce our own incubator launching this year. If you are a non-technical founding team with a business idea that involves a web or mobile app, we encourage you to apply for our eight-week program. We'll help you move forward with confidence in your team, your product vision, and a roadmap for getting you there. Learn more and apply at tbot.io/incubator, that's tbot.io/incubator. VICTORIA: Have you ever seen someone rock climb with the prosthetic hand? DR. AADEEL: Not yet, but that is something that is definitely on our docket. VICTORIA: Okay, well, we need to do it. Since we're both in San Diego, I can help you. [laughs] DR. AADEEL: Sweet. I love it. [laughs] VICTORIA: Yeah, we can figure that out because there are, especially in the climbing gyms, there are usually groups that come in and climb with prosthetic limbs on a regular basis since it's a kind of a surprisingly accessible sport. [laughs] DR. AADEEL: So one of the great things about being here in San Diego is that there's like a ton of incredible resources for building prosthetics and then for users of them as well. So the Challenged Athletes Foundation is located 10 minutes from us. So we're located in Scripps Ranch. And the Challenged Athletes Foundation they're like over in the Sorrento Valley area. They hold the para-triathlon every year. And so we just went to their event a couple of months ago, and it was absolutely incredible. And so we've got like a five-year goal of making an ability leg. So we have The Ability Hand right now. So the ability leg, we want to actually be able to perform a triathlon, so run, bike, and swim with the leg. And I think that would be a phenomenal goal. And all the pieces are here in San Diego. We got the military hospital, and so we've got the veteran population. We've got the Challenged Athletes Foundation. We've got UCSD, and they're incredible at engineering. We've got two prosthetic schools right around LA, so Loma Linda University in California State University, Dominguez Hills. And there are only 11 in the entire nation, and two of them just happen to be right around here. It's a med tech hub. There's like a bunch of med tech companies and both startups and huge ones like NuVasive that are in the area. And it's a huge engineering place, too, with Qualcomm. And so we want to bring all of those resources together. And it's my goal to turn San Diego into the bionics capital of the world, where people from all over the world are coming here to have the most advanced devices ever created. VICTORIA: Oh, I love that idea. And you just moved to San Diego a few years ago. Is that right? DR. AADEEL: Actually, six months ago, so it's very new for us. VICTORIA: Six months? [laughter] Well, you sound like me when I moved to San Diego. I was like; it's great here. [laughter] DR. AADEEL: Well, I hope you still find it to be great. [laughs] VICTORIA: Yeah, I love it. I've been here for two years now. And, yes, there's more to it than just the weather being good all the time. [laughter] There's a lot here. DR. AADEEL: [laughs] It doesn't hurt, though, right? VICTORIA: Yeah. And, I mean, I love that I can still do my networking events outdoors all year long, so going on hikes and stuff versus being indoors in the winter. But I find it fascinating that San Diego has just so much biotech all around, and I will happily support how I can [laughs] turning it into a bionic limb capital. I think that's a great idea. Well, so I wanted to get back...we're talking about the future right now. I wanted to ask about building your team. So you started the company almost seven years ago, and you've grown the team a lot since then. Did you have any essential principles or values that you started with when you were building out your team? DR. AADEEL: Yeah. So when we were first hiring, I was still a Ph.D. student when I started the company. Our first employee was actually my undergraduate student. He's currently our Director of Engineering, Jesse Cornman. And we specifically were recruiting people that did stuff outside of the lab, so the electrical engineers and the mechanical engineers that we initially hired. We wanted to make sure that it wasn't just like the university projects that they were working on. And we would find a lot of our early people from like car team so like this was like building like a solar car, so Illini Solar Car was one of our places where we'd get a lot of our early employees as well as the electrical vehicle concept team and design, build, fly, and these student organizations where they had like competitions, and they had to build real, tangible things to compete in with. And the thing is that those are the people who do this stuff for fun, and you learn the most when you're having fun doing this stuff. And so we would always look for that stuff in particular. And there were some litmus tests that we'd have to be able to weed out very quickly what people know what. And so for electrical engineers, we would always ask if they know surface mount soldering because it's not like your typical soldering on a perf board or even like using a breadboard. It's like you have a circuit board, and you have to solder these very small components on there. And if you know how to solder those small components, you typically know how to code them as well. So they have some embedded systems background as well and some PCB design experience as well. And so that was like a quick litmus test that we use for the electrical engineers. For the mechanical engineers, it was typically if they knew how to do surface modeling. And so we would ask them, "How would you make the palm of a hand where you got these complex structures and these complex surfaces that have different geometries and different curvature?" And if they were able to do a surface modeling, then we knew that they'd be able to CAD that up pretty quickly. They probably have some sort of 3D printing experience from that as well, and that they can just rapidly iterate and prototype on the devices. And so that worked really, really well. And so we were able to get a lot of bright engineers who early on in the company...and many who were student interns at the time that eventually even went on to Microsoft and Google or some of the students went to MIT and places like that. And we were very fortunate to be in the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign's ecosystem, where it was just one of the best engineering schools in the world to develop this kind of stuff. VICTORIA: That's great. So you had really specific skills that you needed. [laughs] And you kind of knew the type of work or an experience that led to that. As you've expanded your team and you're building a culture of collaboration, how do you set expectations with how you all work together? DR. AADEEL: As a startup, we all wear many, many hats. So my job, I feel like, is to fill in all the gaps. And so some days, I might be doing marketing; some days, I might be visiting a clinic and doing sales. Other times I'm working with the engineering team to make sure that we're on track over there. And it's like all this stuff in between. And so being able to work cohesively like that and put on those many hats so that you know every part of the process from the marketing and sales sides but also the engineering and operations side, I think that's really allowed us to get to the point where we have by doing all these different functions together. VICTORIA: That makes sense. So you are all located in San Diego now, so you have to be in person to work on robot hands? DR. AADEEL: Yeah, we found that it was much easier to build a physical object in person than it was to do things remotely. At the beginning of COVID, we actually did try to, like, you know, we moved 3D printers out into people's houses and the manufacturing equipment. And then I remember just to put together a power switch that usually took like one hour to do in the lab. It took us a day and a half because one person had the circuit board, the other person had the enclosure, the other person had the thing to program it. And then each thing depended on each other. So you had to keep carting that small piece back and forth between houses, and it was just a nightmare to do that. And so after a couple of months, we ended up moving back into the offices and manufacturing there with staggered work hours or whatever. And at that point, we were just like, okay, this is much more efficient when we're all in person. And honestly, a lot of our best ideas have come from just me sitting here and then just walking over to one of the engineers and being like, "Hey, what do you think of this idea?" And it's a lot harder to do when you're all remote, right? VICTORIA: That makes sense. Yeah, just the need to physically put pieces together [laughs] as a group makes it hard to be fully remote. And you get a lot of those ideas flowing when you're in person. What is on the horizon for you? What are you most excited about in your upcoming feature set? DR. AADEEL: Like I said, one of the reasons why we moved here was to work with the military hospital, and so some of the work that we're doing with them is particularly exciting. The way you typically wear these prosthetic devices...so you'll have muscle sensors that are embedded in a...it's like a shell that goes around your residual limb. We call it the socket. Think about it as like a shoe for your residual limb. And the thing is, as you're wearing this throughout the day, it starts to get sweaty. It starts to get uncomfortable. Things shift around. Your signals don't control the hand as well because of all these changes and everything. And with the military hospital, we're working on something called osseointegration. So instead of having this socket that's molded to your residual limb that you shove your arm into, you have a titanium implant that goes inside your bones and then comes out of your body, and then you directly attach the hand to your bones like a limb naturally should be. And then, on top of that, instead of using these muscles sensors on the outside of your body, we're actually working on implanted electrodes with some of our collaborators. For example, at University of Chicago, they're doing brain implants to control prosthetic limbs. And a company in Dallas called Nerves Incorporated that's working with the University of Minnesota and UT Southwestern; they're doing nerve implants in your forearm and in your upper arm to control prosthetic limbs. And with those, you get much more fine control, so it's not like you're just controlling different grips, like preset grips in the hand, but you're actually doing individual finger control. And then, when you touch the finger, it's actually stimulating your nerves to make it feel like it's coming from your hand that you no longer have anymore. And this is where we're heading with all of this stuff in the future. And so we built The Ability Hand to work with clinically available systems now, like sockets, and muscle sensors, and vibration motors that are all outside of the body. But then also, when these future technologies come up that are more invasive that are directly implanted on your nerves as well as into your bones as well, we're really excited about those prospects coming out in the horizon. VICTORIA: That's really cool. [laughs] I mean, that would be really life-changing for a lot of people, I'm sure, to have that ability to really control your fingers and get that extra comfort as well. How do you manage quality into your process, especially when you're getting invasive and putting in nerve implants? What kind of testing and other types of things do you all do? DR. AADEEL: With The Ability Hand itself, there was actually an FDA Class I exempt device, meaning that we didn't have to go through the formal approval process that you typically do. And that was primarily because it's attached to your residual limb as opposed to going invasive. But with going invasive, with our clinical partners they're actually doing FDA clinical trials right now. And so they've gone through a lot of those processes. We're starting to enroll some of our patients who are using The Ability Hand to get these implanted electrodes. We're kind of navigating that whole process ourselves right now too. So I think that was one of the reasons why we moved to San Diego, to work with and leverage a lot of the expertise from people who've done it already, from the med tech device companies that are big that have gone through those processes and can guide us through that process as well. So we're excited to be able to leverage those resources in order to streamline these clinical trial processes so that we can get these devices out there more quickly. VICTORIA: That's very cool. I'm super excited to hear about that and to learn more about PSYONIC. Is there anything else you want to share with our audience today as a final takeaway? DR. AADEEL: Absolutely. So in order to make all this stuff happen, we're actually in the middle of raising a round right now. Our biggest issue right now is actually that we've got more demand than we can produce, so we're working on scaling our manufacturing here in San Diego. So we're in the middle of an equity crowdfunding round. And we're all about accessibility, so about making our hand accessible to as many people as possible. So we were like, why don't we make the company accessible as well? And one of the most beautiful things about doing this as an equity crowdfunding round is our patients actually have invested in the company as well. And so it's like, we're making these devices for them, and then they get to be a part of it as well. And it's just this beautiful synergy that I couldn't have asked for anything more out of a crowdfunding campaign. And so we've raised over 750k already on StartEngine. And you can find out more and invest for as little as $250 at psyonic.io, so that's psyonic.io/invest. And the other thing I was going to mention, especially Victoria since you're in San Diego as well, is that I happily give tours to anyone who is in the area. So if anyone wants to see how we build all these bionic hands and just a cool robotics startup in general, we'd be happy to have you come visit us. VICTORIA: That's very cool. I'll have to connect with you later and schedule a tour myself. [laughs] That's wonderful. I'm excited to hear all the things you're working on and hope to see you more in the San Diego community coming up. And we'll share links to the funding page and other information about PSYONIC in our show notes. You can subscribe to the show and find notes along with a complete transcript for this episode at giantrobots.fm. If you have questions or comments, email us at hosts@giantrobots.fm. And you can find me on Mastodon at Victoria Guido. And this podcast is brought to by thoughtbot and produced and edited by Mandy Moore. Thank you for listening. See you next time. ANNOUNCER: This podcast is brought to you by thoughtbot, your expert strategy, design, development, and product management partner. We bring digital products from idea to success and teach you how because we care. Learn more at thoughtbot.com.Special Guest: Aadeel Akhtar.Sponsored By:thoughtbot Incubator: thoughtbot is thrilled to announce our own incubator launching this year. If you are a non-technical founding team with a business idea that involves a web or mobile app, we encourage you to apply for our eight-week program. We'll help you move forward with confidence in your team, your product vision, and a roadmap for getting you there. Learn more and apply at tbot.io/incubator.Support Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots

Irfan Alam is the CEO of Frontrow Health, a startup with a mission to finally put Americans in the front row of their own healthcare. Will and Victoria talk to Irfan about his background in business strategy and development for healthcare companies, how he went about searching for and building the perfect team, and how he started the culture of Frontrow Health on a level where there is balance and people want to join because it has a good culture. Frontrow Health Follow Frontrow Health LinkedIn. Follow Irfan Alam on LinkedIn. Follow thoughtbot on Twitter or LinkedIn. Become a Sponsor of Giant Robots! Transcript: WILL: This is the Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots Podcast, where we explore the design, development, and business of great products. I'm your host, Will Larry. VICTORIA: And I'm your other host, Victoria Guido. And with us today is Irfan Alam, Founder, and CEO at Frontrow Health, a startup with a mission to finally put Americans in the front row of their own healthcare. WILL: Hi, Irfan. Thank you for joining us. IRFAN: Thanks for having me; super excited to chat more about the whole process of building and launching Frontrow Health. VICTORIA: Yes, we're super excited. Of course, I know you as a client of thoughtbot, and I'm excited to hear your story. And you have this background in business strategy and development for healthcare companies. But what led you to decide to start your own platform? IRFAN: I think it was a combination of two things; one was a lived experience being inspired by the power of entrepreneurship with my family and then working at Everlywell. And then two, it was discovering and being reminded of a critical problem that I saw in the industry that I then became excited about solving. So growing up, I was raised by my two parents and my grandparents. My grandfather was an entrepreneur himself and also an immigrant and kind of brought our whole legacy of my family into the U.S. from Southeast Asia. He has always motivated me to take risks and to build something great for the world, and that's what he's always wanted for me. And so I joined Everlywell, a small digital health startup, back in 2019 because I was excited to get my feet wet in the world of startups. It was just within a number of months after that I had joined where COVID-19 hit, and Everlywell, a home lab testing company based out of Austin, got swept up into the storm of COVID and, in a lot of ways, threw ourselves into the center of the storm when we ended up launching the first home COVID-19 test. And it was that summer of 2020 when I probably had the most profound personal and professional growing experience of my life, just trying to handle this chaos and confusing world that we were all living in. But then also simultaneously watching how a small team could make an outsized impact in the world during a time of need. And that really led me to want to pursue my own startup ambitions. So I started thinking about business school. The founder and CEO, Julia Cheek, went to Harvard Business School in 2009 and publicly talks about it being sort of this magical moment in time where people were flooding in from the downturn economy, excited about solving new problems. And her class of graduates is sort of like a famous class of entrepreneurs. And so I brought it up with her, and she was super supportive. And I went through the process and got super lucky. And I decided to take the summer off in 2021 before coming to HBS and moving back to Boston. And it was during that summer where I started thinking about the problems that companies like Everlywell and direct-to-consumer health brands faced that I realized was not just at the fault of their own but because the industry didn't have the right digital tools necessary to succeed. That's sort of the origin of how Frontrow Health came to be. WILL: Sweet. So perfect segue; tell us more about the mission of Frontrow Health. IRFAN: We're on a mission to put people on the front row of their own healthcare. And we really just want to reimagine how people shop for their healthcare online. What I learned at Everlywell was that this boom of consumer health which means people who are taking charge of their own health and are able to do that directly through these digital health companies was a form of healthcare that could create a tremendous amount of value in people's lives. But that was only really accessible to a small niche audience. And it didn't feel like it was equitably accessible to the average American. And so some of those barriers that I realized as a part of my work at Everlywell for why the average American wasn't engaging with consumer health, this otherwise really powerful form of taking charge of your own health and wellness, was because of these three blockers that we're trying to address at Frontrow Health. The first being that people just don't know about what kinds of solutions are out there that can address their health issues beyond just taking a prescription medication given to them by the doctor that they visit in their office. The second is if they do know, they don't know what to trust. They don't know whether this spam of healthcare companies that they're getting advertisements on from Instagram are the right companies, whether these products are safe and effective for them uniquely because of their unique health issues their unique health history. And then finally, even if they are aware and they do trust the health product, at the end of the day, a lot of Americans just can't afford to spend money out of pocket to pay for these consumer health and wellness products like consumables, devices, virtual services, et cetera. And so Frontrow Health is all about trying to break down those barriers in order to unleash consumer health to the average American. VICTORIA: And were you always drawn to that healthcare industry from the beginning? IRFAN: Yeah. So I grew up very privileged with two parents who are physicians. My mom is a psychiatrist, which is quite rare for women of color, specifically of South Asian descent, to be a psychiatrist. And then my dad was a gastroenterologist. They were always the gut-brain connection between the two. And so, growing up, I somewhat classically assumed that I was going to be a doctor. Got to college, thought that that was going to be my path. I realized quickly that there is a whole world outside of being a physician yourself that I could still be a part of in healthcare without being a doctor. My parents actually, interestingly enough, began to encourage me to think beyond just being a doctor, with them both feeling like the amount of scale of impact that they could have would never be the same as someone who could do that through business or policy or these other facets that are important to healthcare. And so I got to undergrad, started studying policy economics. I started doing internships at different healthcare consulting firms. And I ended up first working at a life science business strategy consulting firm out of college. And it was great, but it ended up not being what I was most excited about because it was really focused on the biopharmaceutical and medical device industry. And what I realized when I got there was I just had this growing passion for digital health and technology, as I saw that it was kind of the future of how people were going to be able to take more preventative charge and improve their health over the long term. And so I was working on this digital health white paper with a partner at the consulting firm I was at, and I was doing research and stumbled upon Everlywell. And then, they had a job opening for this business strategy role. So that's why I ended up taking the leap into the startup world, into the digital health world, and just loved it and kept wanting to continue to grow my experience in that space. WILL: That's amazing. Your parents encouraged you to step outside of just the doctor-physician role and to think higher. So, as a founder, you know, it was amazing that your parents, as physicians, encouraged you to think higher and think into different roles. And as a founder, what were some of the decisions you had to make? What were some of the easier ones? What were some that were surprisingly difficult? IRFAN: I think the biggest misnomer of the founding experience is that founding a company is extremely linear. Sometimes you go one direction forward, and then you take a direction diagonally back, and then you go horizontally straight, and that was my story. When I do my pitch about Frontrow, I try to make it feel a little bit more linear, so it makes sense to people. But the truth is the quote, unquote, "hardest decisions" were about every time there was a direction changing point, and it required a decision about is this the right idea? Do I want to spend more time on another idea? Have I validated this enough? Should I validate it differently? Should I pursue this one further? What does that pursuit look like? Who should I pursue it with? Is it time to raise money? Do I drop out of school? Like, those direction-changing points that then create this much more complex map of the founder experience versus a linear line up into the right is, I think, the more challenging parts of being a founder. VICTORIA: That makes a lot of sense that you have to really go through this iterative process to figure out where are you spending your time, is it in the right place? A lot of hard decisions to make. And while you were founding Frontrow Health, you were also a part-time investor at Rock Health and reviewing other healthcare startup proposals. So did you see any trends or patterns that influenced how you progressed as a founder? IRFAN: Totally, yeah. That was actually instrumental to Frontrow Health. So the story is when I took the summer off before business school, I started thinking about different problems in the world, healthcare, and non-healthcare. Or actually, to be clear, I started thinking about lots of different solutions and ideas and then quickly began to realize that that was not the right approach to founding. I think the first step is to think about problems, problems you've seen, problems you've experienced, that you know others are experiencing, and then work to a solution from there by starting with what the user is experiencing. And so as I was going through that hacky journey over the summer, just randomly, a number of small healthcare companies started reaching out to me asking me for my opinion and advice about how or whether they should go direct-to-consumer, whether they should sell healthcare products direct to the consumer, which is what I did a lot of work on at Everlywell as one of the pioneering consumer health brands in the space. And I started to notice this trend of me telling these companies, "No, don't do it. It's really expensive. It's really ineffective and unprofitable to acquire customers through traditional paid media avenues like Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat, Facebook, et cetera." And, unsurprisingly, you could imagine Everlywell was trying to sell a home diabetes test for people who are type 2 diabetics but were only able to target people based on their interest in yoga and running, which is not really a substitute for a severe chronic condition. And as a result, thousands of people would see our ads every day that had no clinical relevance to our solution. And that was one of the deep problems of why consumer health companies weren't able to reach out to the audiences that actually really needed their solutions. And so when I got to Rock Health at the first semester in business school, doing this sort of part-time investor gig, on the first day, the partners basically told me, "Oh, we don't invest in consumer health." And I was like, "Oh, whoa, okay, that's my jam. That's a bummer. That's like [laughs] the only thing that I know about." And as I started to see the data and the pipeline of companies that were looking for investments and understanding what their unit economics looked like, what their go-to-market approaches looked like, that's when I started to put the dots together that this was not just an Everlywell problem; this was an industry problem. Mark Zuckerberg didn't build Facebook so that direct-to-consumer healthcare companies can cost-effectively target clinically relevant patients online. That just happens to be what it's being used for today. And so that's when I started to realize that there had to be a quote-unquote, "better way." WILL: You bring up social media at Frontrow Health. Have you had to combat the medical advice of social media? IRFAN: Yeah. You mean like this concept of quote, unquote, "Instagram medicine?" WILL: Yes. Yes. IRFAN: It's a great question. So as the story continues, I began to think about what is the right solution to this problem? And instead of Everlywell, I started thinking about the right solution to this problem. What I realized was instead of Everlywell wasting away millions of dollars to big tech companies that wasn't going to improving the health of anybody, what if we gave that money back to the consumer in reward for sharing their health information which would allow us to target them with the right clinically relevant products? That was the first version of Frontrow Health. I called it Health Mart back then. And so I basically started to get people to fill out a Google Form with their health data. And then I worked with my parents to send weekly product recommendations over email based on their unique health needs; you know, I want to sleep better; I'm a diabetic, whatever it is. And then, I wanted to see if I was just going to Venmo them cashback upon purchase if they were going to be any more likely to buy these products for these health brands. And at first, people were incrementally more likely to buy. It wasn't mind-blowing. And so, as I started to talk to the participants of the study, I started saying, "You know, you said that you have high cholesterol. These supplements have active ingredients that have been shown to reduce LDL levels. It's pretty cheap. I'm giving you 25-30% cashback. Why haven't you bought it?" And what they started saying was, "Well, I don't know what these active ingredients are. And before I put that in my body, I want to check with my doctor first." And so that was the final aha moment that led us to Frontrow Health, which is, what if we could bring the doctor into the fold? And instead of consumers just experiencing this Instagram medicine where they're just being blasted with Instagram ads every day about different health products, and they don't know what to trust, that second barrier that I talked about earlier, what if the doctor could instead of just being a guide for what prescription medications you should be taking could also be a guide on what health and wellness products you can be using? And so I added my dad to the email thread, and I said, "Okay, you can talk to an independent medical provider and ask them questions about the products that you're being recommended." And that's when people started buying because then they were able to find the trust in the products that were being curated based on their unique information. WILL: Wow, that's really neat. So to help the audience understand your iteration today, so the first iteration was just giving products and then Venmoing them back cashback. And then the second was bringing in a provider. So what does the product look like today? IRFAN: We went through, like you mentioned, a lot of different iterations of this. There were even prior iterations to this that are more representative of that founder map versus the linear line that you've sort of just heard now. But in terms of where the story went from there, I began to think about how to validate this idea further. I came into winter break; the pilot went well. People were buying a lot of products. And so, I decided to sunset my part-time investor gig at Rock Health and decided to reallocate all my time to working on Health Mart at the time. What I started to think about was, well, what if the doctor was able to earn compensation for writing private product reviews regardless of their opinions? So that was the next iteration was like, how do you incentivize a doctor to take time out of their day to do this new behavior that doesn't exist? Doctors are not writing personalized private product reviews for their patients on supplements, home medical devices, apps, et cetera. And how could we get them to? And so, I started thinking about what are the different motivations of providers? Their time is extremely valuable. How do you incentivize them correctly without incentivizing them to give good or bad feedback but just honest feedback? Then I started basically having my dad recommend Health Mart to his patients every day to see would patients sign up. Like, if doctors were intrinsically motivated to get their patients on the platform so that they can help them get away from Instagram medicine and at the same time earn compensation for themselves as an additional revenue stream, could independent medical providers see that as valuable and a good use of their time? And the first piece of that about whether patients would sign up worked unsurprisingly very well. If your doctor is telling you to sign up for something, or it's free to sign up, and you only pay when you want to buy a product, and they're going to, for the user, be able to ask for feedback from the provider, they were pretty excited. But then the question of would doctors sign up, I started...basically, I had my mom. The next iteration was I had my mom make a couple of posts in these doctor Facebook groups. I put together a little website, a very ugly version of what we have today for a provider marketing page. And I had my mom drop the link in a couple of different doctor Facebook groups. And we actually started getting signups from the doctors. And then, as we started talking to them, what we realized was two things; it was like a win-win. The doctor was happy because they were getting compensated, and they were happy because their patients' health was improving. So when Obama was in administration, he passed a really fundamentally important piece of legislation called The Sunshine Act. And that basically ended this quote, unquote, "golden era" of pharma companies giving kickbacks to doctors. WILL: Oh wow. IRFAN: And so since then, doctors have been very eager to find additional revenue streams that they can leverage their decades of medical expertise to earn. They got medical bills to pay off loans to pay off. They spent 20 years training for this job. And so they were excited about an additional revenue stream that leveraged their medical expertise and also helped their patient. Because they also started saying things like, "Well, my patients are always asking me like, 'What about these supplements I saw for these ads online?'" And the doctor says, "I don't know what these supplements are. WILL: [laughs] IRFAN: I don't have the data in front of me. I don't know what the ingredients are. I don't know whether to trust the company or not." And we are building a platform where it's all streamlined for the provider. The provider is able to review the clinical information. They're able to review their patient information. They're able to really quickly write reviews. We give them templates. We give them suggestions. They're able to reapply recent reviews. And so that was sort of the next iteration. And that's actually when thoughtbot came in and when I started thinking about raising a small round, getting a dev shop to help me build the MVP. And that's kind of how the semester ended up closing out. VICTORIA: I love that your mom and dad were so supportive, it sounds like, of you going full-time on this startup. Was that scary for them for you to do that? IRFAN: It's so funny, yeah. So what happened next was I decided I wanted to start raising a small round because I had the conviction that there was a problem to be solved for consumers, for doctors, and for health brands. And we could build this one unique multi-sided marketplace to solve them. I ended up going back to Austin for spring break partially to visit my family and partially because I wanted to pitch to Julia, the founder of Everlywell, who I thought of all people on planet Earth would understand what I'm trying to do. She would get it because I am building a SaaS solution for health brands like Everlywell and her consumers. And she got it. She was jazzed. And so, she decided to angel invest. And that basically spurred a ton of interest from venture capital firms. I wasn't originally thinking about raising an institutional round but was very lucky with the timing. Just before the market crashed, it was a very hot market. And so we ended up closing a real seed round with the question on hand about whether I should pursue this full-time because the capital that I raised necessitated building a real team. Or should I just take a smaller amount of money and go back to school? And it's unsurprisingly, every different person in my life had some opinion about this, from my wife to my investors, to my parents, to my friends. What I wanted was somewhere nestled in between all of those things. And when I caught my dad up on the phone a couple of weeks after spring break and told him of all the crazy stuff that had been happening...and it was just happening and unfolding so quickly. I was like, "Okay, dad. I'm laying out all my cards here. You have full liberty to be mad at me for wanting to drop out of Harvard." And his first reaction was, "Well, you know, I don't really see the downside. Like, you could either start a company that you're really passionate about and it could go well, or you could be the worst entrepreneur of all time and then just come back to school during this leave of absence," or deferral thing that I'm on right now. And that was the first time where I was like, "Oh, you know what? I think you're right." And the truth was I decided to just continue to let the summer go by to think about the decision a little bit more before I formally submitted my deferral to HBS. As the markets turned, we realized that we needed to hire internally to save on cash burn a little bit. And so once I had built this really awesome team that I'm so lucky to be surrounded by, that's when I was, you know, without a doubt in my mind, I was like, I got to keep pushing for this because now we have this awesome team that just wants to keep driving this mission forward. And we were getting traction. We were talking to hundreds of doctors over the summer. We were talking to health brands. And it really felt like we were onto something. MID-ROLL AD: thoughtbot is thrilled to announce our own incubator launching this year. If you are a non-technical founding team with a business idea that involves a web or mobile app, we encourage you to apply for our eight-week program. We'll help you move forward with confidence in your team, your product vision, and a roadmap for getting you there. Learn more and apply at tbot.io/incubator. That's T-B-O-T.I-OVICTORIA: I-N-C-U-B-A-T-O-R. WILL: I hear you have an amazing product team. How did you go about searching and building the right team? IRFAN: We got lucky in a second way because of timing, where the first time was I raised the capital when the market was really hot in April. And then, I started hiring when the market crashed. And, unfortunately, as you all know, lots of people have been getting laid off since the summer, particularly in the tech world: designers, engineers, marketers, et cetera. Now, all of a sudden, there was a flood of really great talent on the market. And that was also what spurred me to start thinking about hiring sooner than I was originally planning to. My forecast was to hire people end of this year, maybe in a month or so from now, to start that process. Versus, we ended up making our first full-time hire, I guess in July, maybe. And it was...the best way I can describe it is like dominoes falling where once you get the first one in, then it builds trust and credibility, and then the next one comes, and the next one. And so the first couple of folks were these two brilliant engineers who were close friends of my interim CTO and classmate, Amit, who was helping us build the foundation of the product this past summer. He did an amazing job of basically recruiting one engineer, Anand, our first engineer who started his career as a PM at Microsoft and then turned into a software engineer at a number of different startups and studied comp sci and electrical engineering at Berkeley with Amit, where they first met. And then the second engineer was Nupur, who was a colleague of Amit, a machine learning engineer at Google Brain and the moonshot X team at Alphabet. And they were both, I think, just kind of tired of big tech and were ready to bet on the upside and their career. And the timing was right based on where the market conditions were. And so they decided to take the leap of faith with me. And then after that, or around that time, kind of in the middle, we were able to bring on our head of design, Jakub, who is like a unicorn human with so much rich experience in the product world. So he was a computer animator and then studied visual arts, but then started his career very early in the coupon website space as a product designer actually. And then led product design as a founding designer at a number of different startups. And then, most recently, was a senior product designer at Roman, which is a really large digital health company similar to Everlywell. And Ro, Everlywell, Truepill, all these companies had mass layoffs in the middle of the summer. And so when Jakub took my call...He talks about a really funny story where he wasn't taking me seriously at all. Convincing these excellent, talented people to come join my dinky startup at the time was not easy. WILL: [laughs] IRFAN: And so he just kind of took it because there was a mutual connection. Or he just said, okay, I'll explore what's going on given how crazy the market is. But once he heard what we were building, he was immediately on board, actually, because Roman has also struggled with the same customer acquisition problems. And it's a huge reason why a lot of these digital health companies continue to remain unprofitable. And so he understood the problem deeper than I think anyone because of the experience he had in the same space that we were in. And he realized that there was an opportunity to build a solution to solve these problems. So that was the first core team. And then from there, it kind of just snowballed, you know, there was more and more interest from other folks to join. And we brought in a great junior product designer. We just hired our platform engineer. But that was the original core team from the summer who took the big leap of faith and joined because of the market conditions, the belief in the space. And we actually just met up in San Diego for the first time for a company retreat in person. And it was just fun meeting everyone in person for the first time because now I get to know them as real people and see all their personalities. And we're really psyched about coming to product launch pretty soon here. VICTORIA: That's wonderful and, you know, that compelling vision and having those first initial people join and brought in everyone else. You know, I think part of the reason people are hesitant to join startups is because there is that reputation for kind of unhealthy work-life balance. So you're a healthcare startup. So how do you start the culture of your company on a level where there is that balance and people want to join because it has a good culture? IRFAN: It's a super interesting question that we spent a lot of time actually talking about in San Diego as a team. And it was brought up because I have a somewhat unhealthy relationship with work. And I am constantly working. And this is the most important thing right now in our life. And so Nupur, one of our engineers, had a phenomenal analogy that I think is the right framework to think about this from a company culture perspective. Because I've always tried to share with a team, like, I don't expect them to work nearly as much as I do, and I don't want them to either. I think the analogy was such a fun, helpful way to think about why that was the case. And so she kind of said, "I'm like the aunt, and you're like the single father. And the aunt doesn't have to take care of the baby at nighttime and on the weekends, but the single father does. And it's not that the aunt doesn't care about the company, but there's some space and boundary in that relationship." And so that's actually our motto right now is like, yeah, we all care about this product and this company, quote, unquote, "baby," but there's always biologically intrinsically going to be a deeper relationship between me and this company, for good reason. And so that is going to require me to work harder and longer than anyone else, probably for a long, long time. And I had to be ready for that. My wife and I had to be ready for that. And so far, honestly, I've never been busier. But I've also never been...or, like, I've never had this ratio between busyness and stress where I'm really busy but not that stressed. And I think it's just because I love what I'm doing every day. I haven't ever found this happy balance where I actually just enjoy what I do. And I'm constantly excited about continuing to build the right product to help people. WILL: Wow. VICTORIA: I'm actually babysitting my niece and nephew this weekend. [laughter] My brother would say, "You need to be here on the weekends with them." IRFAN: Maybe not the perfect analogy. But-- VICTORIA: I like it, though. It makes sense. [laughs] WILL: There's a difference. [laughter] VICTORIA: Oh yeah. Will knows; he's a dad. WILL: Yeah. I know company values can be so...we have them. Do we follow them? Or sometimes they get put on the shelf. I was reading your company values, "People first, bias for curiosity, and dream big." For Frontrow Health, how does that play a role in the day-to-day? IRFAN: When Jakub, Nupur, and Anand had all joined like that first core team, we actually spent time writing all this out and creating a document that discussed what the company culture and values were. And we looked at different examples of other companies. Amazon famously has, I don't know, these 16 principles. And we kind of said, okay, we want to pick just a couple because you can't always focus on everything at the same time. And we need some sort of guiding North Star if you will. And so these were the three that we came up with, the ones that you mentioned. So we are people first; we have a bias for curiosity, and we want to dream big. So people first to us means that our mission like we talked about, we want to increase access to healthcare at home for the average American. And so every decision that we make at the company has to pass that litmus test first. Whatever feature we're building, whatever business model approach we're taking, whatever go–to–market approach that we're taking, is what we're doing going to increase access to healthcare at home for the average American? Yes? Then we continue onwards, and then we continue deliberating and deciding; if not, we pass. And so that is how we determine whether we can continue to be people first because that is our mission. And as we're going down that thread, we want to push ourselves to constantly be bettering and asking questions about how we can be better. That is the bias for curiosity. That was one of Everlywell's company values and was the one that I resonated with the most. I find tremendous value in asking questions. Nupur on our team, one of our engineers, is a great example of bias for curiosity. She's constantly challenging and asking the right questions. And that helps us be better at being people first and increasing access even more than we can because we're never settled with what exists today. And then dreaming big is about finding answers to those questions and not settling for the tried and true paths. Some of the greatest companies that have ever been created are the ones that invent new behaviors that have never existed before. So Airbnb, now all of a sudden, people are comfortable with strangers living in their homes. Uber, now all of a sudden, people are comfortable driving in a stranger's car. At Frontrow Health, we're dreaming big in a world where doctors are not currently engaging with their patients related to their home health and wellness journeys when they leave the four walls of their clinic. How can we change the behavior where doctors are more involved in that relationship in a way that doesn't exist today? And so that's a part of what we're trying to do, and dreaming big to go and increase access, like I said, is our ultimate North Star. WILL: Wow. You said something I think that was...it seemed very small, but I think it said a lot about you and your company. You said that you encourage your engineer to ask the hard questions. I think so many times, people hate the hard questions. They are fearful of that. But I think in your field, you have to be able to ask the hard questions. So that's amazing that you brought that up, and you're talking about that. IRFAN: Yeah. And it doesn't...it's not just me, for sure. I think my team is...and it's kind of you to point that out. But yeah, my team does such a great job of holding true to these values on their own and pushing me to remind myself of these values. Nupur actually is Slacking me right now about some thought that she had coming out of a meeting. WILL: [laughs] IRFAN: And two points about different alternative ways to think about things. And yeah, I want to keep encouraging them and our future employees to do that. Because you look at the worst examples in healthcare, in particular, tech as well, the worst examples of companies are the ones where the employees were not able to or encouraged to ask questions; that's when things go south. So Theranos is the simplest example of this where they were hiding everything from their employees, and people had questions constantly but never asked them. And that's when more and more bad decisions were made. So I don't want that to be the case for Frontrow. And so it has to start with, yeah, this bias for curiosity. VICTORIA: That makes sense. And I wonder if that's part of your success, being someone who doesn't have a background in engineering or programming specifically and enabling your technical team to build what they need to get done. IRFAN: Yeah. I can't honestly explain to you guys how much I've learned over the past six months from my product and dev team. And you're right that I think one could see my lack of programming as a weakness which, in a lot of ways, it is. But what has also manifested as a result of that is I have naturally had to lean more heavily on my dev team to be owners of decisions that affect our business and to challenge them to think about are we being people first if we build and design solutions in the way that you're describing? I don't know the right approach about how to build this, or on what tech stack, or in what capacity we have the ability to. You guys have to take ownership of thinking through those, solving those problems, and coming up with the right decision. And as a founder, that's scary to do. You're giving up control of the decisions to others. But at the same time, by giving them that autonomy and encouraging them to take ownership of it, they feel I think more and more invested in what we're building. And that hopefully builds the habit of what you guys were talking about around wanting to constantly seek better solutions, challenge because they know that they have a voice in how things turn out. VICTORIA: Right. Maybe you've discovered this naturally or through your education and background. But studies that are done around high-performing technology organizations find that no matter what processes or tools you have if you have that high-trust environment, you'll have better security, more software development throughput, all of those things. So I think you're doing it right by setting your values and creating that kind of high-trust environment. IRFAN: Super interesting. I didn't know that, actually, but it makes sense. [laughs] We've been seeing it. I actually want to give some credit to thoughtbot because thoughtbot helped us set a lot of this important engineering culture at the very beginning, where I had to rely on my thoughtbot engineers, folks like Jesse, Dave, and others, to help me make the best decision for my company. They taught me a lot of these things at the earliest stage back in May around, okay, like, you guys are a consulting firm at the end of the day, technically speaking. But they pushed me to think of it more as how do we co-make these decisions? Like, how do we leverage each other's strengths to make the right decisions? The thoughtbot design team and engineering team...one of our designers through thoughtbot, Steven, is so funny because...and I gave him this feedback, which is great feedback, which is like, he constantly asked questions. And if he hears this, he'll laugh because he's constantly pushing, like, "Why are we designing it this way? Why do you think it should be this way? Where is the evidence that the user wants it to be this way?" And it was a great setup for when our internal team came on because I just kept up that momentum. And then they just kind of took with it and ran. VICTORIA: How did you find us, or how did you find the right technical partners in the very beginning to help you build your vision? IRFAN: It was not an immediately simple process. But when I found thoughtbot, it kind of unraveled quite quickly in a good way. So I was working with Amit like I mentioned, who'll become our interim CTO, one of my classmates at HBS. And he helped me put together an RFP where we outlined all the different feature requirements, all the different intentions for our solution or timeline, our costs, et cetera. And I just did a lot of Google research about different dev shops, and I started talking to dev shops in lots of different locations, U.S.-based, European-based, Asian-based, Latin America-based, started comparing prices. We had questions where we wanted to see their creativity in developing solutions. We started accepting proposals, reviewing those proposals. I somehow stumbled upon thoughtbot's website during this process. And I noticed that Everlywell was one of thoughtbot's clients, Everlywell, the home lab testing company that I used to work at before business school. I was like, oh wow. I knew that our engineering team and our engineering leadership had a really high bar for when we worked with outsourced talent. And so I thought that that spoke volumes about choosing thoughtbot. And so then we actually ended up asking Everlywell CTO an unprompted question of like, "If you had to pick any dev house that you've known or have worked with, et cetera, that was supposed to build you custom software from scratch, who would you pick?" And he said, "thoughtbot." It wasn't even like a question of, what do you think of thoughtbot? Or, what was your experience? It was just like, imagine you had to pick, and, unprompted, he said thoughtbot. So that was actually what did it for me. And I kind of threw aside all the other logistical hoopla that we were going through and said, you know, I got to trust the people who I know and trust, and having verbal confirmation of that was huge. And then, of course, I enjoyed speaking with Dawn at thoughtbot, who was helping broker the whole discussion, and it felt easy. And their proposal was also quite strong. And then, as I dug deeper into thoughtbot, it became clear that no pun intended, you guys are kind of the thought leaders in a lot of ways. WILL: [laughs] IRFAN: It's funny, our head of design, Jakub, when I mentioned that he's a unicorn, it's because he also taught himself coding and programming. WILL: Wow. IRFAN: So he's like a pseudo designer and programmer. He can do a little bit of everything. And he actually...when I told him that we were working with thoughtbot, he was like, "Oh, I learned Ruby on Rails back in the day from thoughtbot with whatever content they had published back in time." And then, as I spoke to other dev shops about going with thoughtbot, they started saying things like, "Oh, thoughtbot, yeah, they're kind of the OGs of Rails and a lot of the core tech stack that's been around for a while." And so it was just continued validation of the right approach. And then, we started working with the team in May, right after my second semester of business school ended. And it's been an incredible process. We have never missed any deadlines, and we're actually two months ahead of schedule. And it's not just because they're good at what they do, but it's also because of the culture and the teaching me about the best way to run retros, and sprint planning, and things to think about in terms of trust in your engineer and building that trust, and all the soft, intangible things. It wasn't just like thoughtbot came in and built code. It was thoughtbot came in and helped establish the company in a lot of ways. VICTORIA: That's great to hear. Thank you for saying all those wonderful things. I'm sure me and Will agree 100%. [laughter] IRFAN: Yeah, it's been an awesome process. And yeah, we've even ended up basically bringing on as a full-time independent contractor someone who worked through thoughtbot because we love them so much. And they were just so excellent at what they did. And just, yeah, I think that probably speaks the most volumes about the kind of organization that you guys are running. WILL: I appreciate you saying that. That means a lot. It really does. I want to take a second to kind of circle back and kind of talk about how you find the providers because I think, for me, one of the most influential classes I had in college was my professor said, "Hey, meet me at the pharmacy." So we went to the pharmacy, and he started asking us questions. And he was like, "What medicine do you think would be the most impactful?" And we would try to pull it out. He taught us how to compare the active ingredients. IRFAN: Wow. WILL: Like how some stuff is just marketing, and it's not really helpful and things like that. But I also saw the side, you know, the amazing providers like your parents. You talking about your parents just reminded me of my parents and how supportive they are. So it's just amazing. You had your parents as providers. How did you find providers beyond that that you have to extend that trust to them? IRFAN: I guess two reactions. The first is how do we talk to doctors to get feedback on our solution as we're building it? And then how do we get doctors to sign up and use our solution with their patients? Those are the two chronological steps. So for the first one, we very liberally use a platform called usertesting.com, which we used at Everlywell, where I first got introduced to it. And it's amazing. We have the unlimited package, and we run tons of user tests a day. So, over the summer, we were literally having unmoderated tests from medical professionals, about ten healthcare professionals a day who were coming to our website, coming to our product, giving their feedback through these unmoderated tests. We were quantitatively assessing qualitatively assessing their responses to specific questions that we were asking them. Like, was it easy enough to write a review? What were you expecting to see? How did that compare to what you did see? Like, all the traditional kind of user research. They really helped us build the product, and then we were able to follow up with them, get on the phone with them, ask them more questions about their experience, about their current experience in their clinic, whether patients are asking them about these things, about their interest in certain supplements, et cetera. And then we actually had one medical provider, a family practice nurse practitioner from Vermont, who was so excited about what we were building. She was sending me all this other information and content about how to reach out to other doctors and stuff. And then, at the end of the summer, when we were just about ready to start getting our beta off the ground, we were going to choose one provider to work with who was going to recommend it to their patients, and they were going to slowly kind of monitor the experience. This nurse practitioner actually just happened to reach back out, and we happened to connect again. And she's like, "Okay, what are you guys up to? Are you guys done with your product? I really want to use it." And I was like, "Oh, wow. Well, it's great timing because we're looking for our first medical provider." WILL: [laughs] IRFAN: And so that's where we ended up launching beta with, which was awesome. And since then, I've been spending a lot of time thinking about the go-to-market approach beyond just one medical provider. How do we scale to thousands of medical providers? And luckily, selling to doctors is a solved problem, like; the biopharma and medical device industry has been doing this for decades. And so it was really just a part of me brushing up on a lot of the work that I was doing in life science consulting about helping Big Pharma and whatnot go to market and just stealing a lot of notes out of their playbook. So, for example, there are companies that allow you to run ads online that just target physicians. So instead of my dad seeing a Lululemon ad while he's reading The Wall Street Journal, he'll see an ad for Frontrow Health. And so we actually run marketing tests over the summer, towards the end of the summer, with a newer provider landing page that we had built to see what percent were going to click on the ads, what percent were going to come to the website and sign up, and then how much cost would that be per acquisition of a provider. And the results were actually much better than we thought. It was half as expensive as what we originally predicted, which is awesome. WILL: Wow. IRFAN: And that was before Jakub, our new head of design, had even touched the website. We're actually just revamping it right now because he's been going through and revamping other aspects of our product and marketing experience. And now we're at the provider part. So we're actually going to be just about a week or so away from launching the marketing tests and actually getting every day more providers on the platform. The product is now done, so they can start getting their patients on the platform. We just signed our first health brand. So now people are getting real product recommendations and getting ability to earn cashback. And we can be revenue generating, which is also super exciting that we're, like I said, a couple of months ahead of schedule, actually. VICTORIA: That's really exciting, and that certainly sounds like enough on your plate. But is there anything else on the horizon for Frontrow Health that you're excited about? IRFAN: Yes. We are super excited that we're just coming out of stealth mode and launching our full product experience for consumers, medical providers, and DTC health brands. Going forward into 2023, we're really looking to try to find this quote, unquote, "product market fit." Are doctors excited about signing up and getting their patients on the platform? Are those patients excited about the products that we're selling on our marketplace? And are we delivering new lifetime customers for these health brands at a more cost-effective rate than they've ever seen before? And solving that original problem that came to me while I was at Everlywell. And by doing all three of those things, hopefully, we'll begin to increase access to healthcare at home where people who are not suburban high-income folks who can afford to pay out of pocket for preventative healthcare; we can now make that more equitable by bringing down the cost through the cashback, by introducing the element of trust, by engaging with a medical provider, and by opening up people's eyes to thousands of different consumer health and wellness companies that now exist in the world that we want to be able to connect the right products to the right people with. VICTORIA: That's so exciting. I'm really glad we got a chance to talk to you today and hear more about your story. Is there anything else that you want to add before we wrap up? IRFAN: This has been super fun being able to even just reflect and think about our whole story. For anyone else listening who's interested or excited about entrepreneurship, there's a really good book that I read last summer as I started thinking about entrepreneurship for the first time called "The Hard Thing About Hard Things" written by Ben Horowitz, who co-founded the VC fund, Andreessen Horowitz. He was an entrepreneur himself. And it's one of my favorite books because, as the title [laughs] explains, it just talks about the difficulty of the experience and the journey that's still ahead of me. But I think the overall takeaway of the book and my experience over the past year is that it's just the single greatest learning experience of my life. And that's actually really all I'm trying to optimize for personally is I want to keep growing and learning, and learning about the space, learning about myself, learning about how to work on a team, how to lead a team, how to grow a team. And if you're at all interested in any of those things, keep trying to think about all the right problems that are being experienced in the world. And we still live in a world wrought with problems and don't have nearly enough founders trying to go and solve all of them. VICTORIA: That's a really great perspective, I think, to bring to it about your own personal growth. And that's what it's really all about. [laughs] And hopefully, we're able to solve some big challenging problems along the way. IRFAN: Hope so. WILL: You can subscribe to this show and find notes along with a complete transcript for this episode at giantrobots.fm. VICTORIA: If you have questions or comments, email us at hosts@giantrobots.fm. WILL: You can find me on Twitter @will23larry. VICTORIA: And you can find me on Twitter @victori_ousg. This podcast is brought to you by thoughtbot and produced and edited by Mandy Moore. WILL: Thanks for listening. See you next time. ANNOUNCER: This podcast is brought to you by thoughtbot, your expert strategy, design, development, and product management partner. We bring digital products from idea to success and teach you how because we care. Learn more at thoughtbot.com.Special Guest: Irfan Alam.Sponsored By:thoughtbot Incubator: thoughtbot is thrilled to announce our own incubator launching this year. If you are a non-technical founding team with a business idea that involves a web or mobile app, we encourage you to apply for our eight-week program. We'll help you move forward with confidence in your team, your product vision, and a roadmap for getting you there. Learn more and apply at tbot.io/incubator.Support Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots