CEO December 06, 2022

Unexpected Learnings from Healthcare Leaders

The work we do to redesign health for everyone is made possible by the incredible leaders who are building and scaling innovative businesses to solve some of the most pressing healthcare challenges. The CEOs of our operating companies have unique backgrounds, but share an action-oriented mentality and track record of achieving results.

We’ve asked CEOs Tim Danison, Barry Saik, Jacob Shiff, and Jia Jia Ye to share insights and lessons learned while building businesses across the healthcare ecosystem.

Tim Danison, CEO, TempoPay

1. What's the most unexpected lesson you've learned through your journey as a founder?

"No matter what business you're attempting to start, customer acquisition and growth is always the hardest and most unpredictable thing. You can build a great product, you can hire a great team, you can be a rock-star fundraiser, you can have a terrific culture, but....if you take your eye off the ball on customer acquisition and growth for more than a moment, your chances of success drop very quickly.
Successful founders are always working at the intersection of amazing creativity, tremendous fun, endless effort, and sheer terror. If any of these are missing on a day-to-day basis, you're doing it wrong."
2. What does redesigning health mean to you?

"Designing for the result you want, not around the constraints of the existing system. Many of the challenges in the existing healthcare system exist because people have forgotten or never learned what all this complexity was trying to achieve in the first place.
Making the user experience simple, practical, and understandable to the average person. Healthcare is sometimes necessarily complex, but it doesn't mean that everyday Americans need or want to understand the complexity. If your service or application or product has a lot of "word salad" that sounds like it came straight from the mouth of a management consultant or a lawyer, you probably need to go back to the drawing board."

Barry Saik, CEO, Soundry

1. What’s the most unexpected lesson you’ve learned through your journey as a founder?

"I am continually surprised at how difficult things get for the team if you try to do more than one thing at a time. Prioritization is key."
2. What does redesigning health mean to you?

"To me, redesigning health means approaching health problems from a design perspective, just as we approach problems in experience and user interface design. Much of health care seems to be designed from the provider or payer’s point of view. We need to start with the customer or patient and design from there."

Jacob Shiff, Co-Founder and CEO, Anomaly

1. What's the most unexpected lesson you've learned through your journey as a founder?

"While the adage “nobody ever got fired for buying IBM” is valid, being a startup can also be viewed as an asset. Healthcare stakeholders, including payers and providers, recognize that disruptive change is unlikely to come from traditional incumbents, and are often excited to make a bet on an innovative startup with a bold vision."
2. What does redesigning health mean to you?

"Redesigning health means developing solutions that drive impact in today’s system—while enabling the transition to where the system is going. Ultimately, impact needs to be measured in terms of improved outcomes, reduced costs, and/or better experiences."

Jia Jia Ye, Co-Founder and CEO, Springtide

1. What’s the most unexpected lesson you’ve learned through your journey as a founder?

"When you're in any other role within a company, you're trying to figure out what's right and wrong. You may do a bit of that when you're a founder, but it's also very existential. Rather than asking what’s the right or wrong decision, you have to ask yourself questions like, what do I want for the world? How am I going to achieve that? A great learning experience for me in becoming a founder is realizing that a core part of the job is identifying what I want to become a reality. Decisions become deeply personal and not just intellectual."
2. What does redesigning health mean to you?

"A significant thread throughout my career has been working with consumer-oriented healthcare companies. I’ve been in healthcare for 20 years and started working in the startup space in 2010.
Something crucial to me is making healthcare something people want, creating positive experiences. Generally, people don’t like engaging with healthcare systems. They’re so tricky to navigate. I grew up in Salt Lake City, and there were no therapists in the entire state. I had a friend with autism, and her family had to fly in a therapist from Boston once a month. Fast forward 30 years, and while families are experiencing massive growth in the availability of quality treatments, navigating the healthcare system can still be a challenging experience. That is such a missed opportunity. Even though I’m not inventing any new cures, I’m creating an experience within healthcare that makes people happy."

Learn more about these leaders and their companies here.

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