I am a serial tech entrepreneur. I like starting things. Whether that's new companies, I'm starting here in my Silicon Valley garage, literally. Silicon Valley garage. Start up here a swell. A starting new products at larger companies have spent time at both Google and Facebook, building new products and building new product orders there. So the way that I got to where I am today was by starting out as a technologist. So I started programming at age five. I came out to the West Coast to get my CS degree at Stanford, and then I just found myself at home being around lots of other nerds who themselves like starting things and that, really, I think, kindled my entrepreneurial spirit. I was always kind of a technologist, but I didn't self identify as an entrepreneur until I was here for a bit and just had that kind of rub off on me. So I started building and, after working for a big company working for a small company, decided I want to start my own company because that's the sort of thing that you do here in Silicon Valley, worked on a bunch of different ideas, and then one of them started. Really taking off in this idea was to make a private wiki host so anyone any group could set up their own wiki host is easily is just what do you want to name it? What's your email address and you're done. Um, and that ended up being pretty popular. So I grew that to about four million people a month. Using that service built a team of 30 people raised about $10 million of financing. It's actually still running today, more than 15 years after I started that my bedroom eso I handed that off to a CEO and sold his last company for over 100 million and he still running it today. And then I did a brief gig is an entrepreneur in residence at Trinity Ventures just to see what the B C environment was like. I started my second company, and we sold that off to Facebook. It was an app called Ohana Thio help parents securely share pictures and videos of their kids with their extended family, and we sold that to Facebook and Facebook. I really transition more formally into product management, which finally put a name to the different things that I have been doing. So one thing that's very common is a trope is when a technologist starts a company and the company starts going someplace interesting, the technologist finds themselves focusing on what should we build rather than themselves on the mechanics of building it encoding it right? So at some point you're more directing than actually doing the building yourself. And that causes almost a little existential crisis, right, because often technical founders identify as someone who spends most of their time actually building with code. And it's weird and humbling to be in a position where that's not your day job. You've hired people at least a smart as you to go and build the products that that that your that your direct. And so it took me a while to understand that it's sort of inadvertently moved into this field called product Management, where you're making decisions about what you should build your not actually writing all of the day to day code in terms of, uh, instrument in that change yourself. So at at Facebook, I really enjoyed the transition of product management, helped launch internet dot org's built the world's first map of the disconnected kicked off the Facebook connectivity lab using drones, lasers and satellites. Get people online. And then I basically got poached by Google to come over and build a new commercial research and development team there. Toe. Look at new ways of getting people online. So I built that out is the rapid rollout lab, and I also got much more involved in teaching product management and teaching people how to make that transition into product management. I created a new course, Siri's. They're called the path to PM or the path of product management. Helping people figure out of product management was right for them. How to develop themselves, this product managers and that's been taught now to several 1000 Googlers Eso that's had a pretty big impact in terms of the product management culture at Google. Um, and then a Zai was at Facebook and Google. Uh, some family issues happened. My mom got lung cancer, and she passed pretty quickly. Shortly after that, my brother got a fairly severe, incurable form of brain cancer. And then, just a few years after that, my father got prostate cancer and 2.5 years ago. Hey past. So our family, unfortunately, got a pretty terrible experience with the medical system and complex care. I was over here on the West Coast. I grew up on the East Coast, and so my mom, dad and brother were all on the East Coast thousands of miles away, and I flew out there a lot, but I couldn't be there for every visit. So one of the things that we observed was that a lot of information was being shared by doctors orally during the concerts and sit down with your oncologist. They walk you through your test results. They walk you through a lot of the nuances of what your options are and patients get and after visit summary and they get access to their formal medical record notes. But none of the nuance around the literally life and death decision making was present there in those notes. So the only way to really capture that was either bring somebody with you was taking incredibly detailed notes about everything the doctor is telling you or to get permission to go on, record the audio of the conversation and then review that later, eh? So we ended up doing that with my dad. He got permission from his oncologist, uh, to record the audio of the consoles. He'd email me that audiophiles an attachment. I listened to the whole thing. I'd summarize that link out to terms I wasn't familiar with, and I email the family with that took a huge amount of work because it takes about three x four x the time of the console Thio Digest and summarize. So it's like 30 minute console. It's like about two hours of work to go on. Like listen to make sure you got everything, make sure that the medical terms spelled out appropriately. Look up the things that aren't obvious. Um, so that workflow was was a lot of work, but it's also super valuable for getting the family on the same page about what was going on with that, what the options were. And it also became clear that most patients and their families don't have a workflow like this. For most patients, their experience of medical care is they show up. The doctor says a lot of things. They understand very little of it. They try and remember what they can. They try and take some notes when they can, Um, they come home and their family asked them like, Hey, Mom, what did the doctor tell you? They said some things right, Um and so the family doesn't get the full data from the doctor about what's going on. The full nuance there. This gets compounded in a case where you've got a metastatic disease or disease, that condition that's affecting multiple parts of the body because you often go to different specialists for different parts of the body. So you might hear one thing from one specialist that you meet with. You might hear a different thing from a different specialist and maybe your primary care provider saying a different thing. They might be prescribing different drugs, and they don't have a holistic view of who said what to the patient, right about prognosis, about options, about medication on DSO. It's really left up to the patient themselves to organize this information, but they can't unless they're capturing everything, not just the formal visit notes, and that means getting permission to record. So I've become a really passionate advocate for allowing patients to go on record the audio of their consoles and I also wanted to help empower patients to go on record. Their consoles transcribe their consoles, share them with family members. So I started designing Medc order when I was still working at Google. And I got permission from Google to do this on the side unrelated to any of my day job stuff. And I built a engineering prototype and launched it. And, like 23 weeks after I launched, my Aunt Terry got multiple myeloma and she started using the APP. Even It's incredibly early, uh, buggy state and found it really useful for understanding what was going on and for keeping up to date with her treatment and sharing that with her family. So I was like, Okay, I got to take this seriously. So I quit my job at Google. I gave them, like, four months notice or something like that. I really wanted to put a nice bow on everything. And then early last year early, 2019 I left Google and went full time on mid quarter short for medical recorder. So I built a team around that built a native IOS F built a native android app built a Web experience. We've now partnered with UCSF's patient support core to make sure that cancer patients that are receiving treatment there are able to fully understand what's going on. And we actually just last week kicked off our clinical trial at UCSF to help prostate cancer patients. They're better understand what they're being told by their oncologist. So that's how I ended up working on this startup idea. I never thought I'd end up in health care. I don't have a background in health. I don't have a biology degree or anything like that, my background strictly and consumer software and product management trying to find new, useful solutions for people. But I ended up coming into it kind of the hard way. And what's surprising to me is, as I got into this space, I ended up finding there was 40 plus years of clinical research showing how important it is to give a patient a recording of the console. Patients listen to tapes of the console when they're giving it. They do review them with family. They review the quality of care that they've received much more highly. They love it, getting getting these tapes, they find it useful, they're able to remember more, and I think we're gonna be able to show better medication adherence, ultimately better outcomes for patients that have recordings and where that's amazing is, I think we're going to be able to demonstrate that patients with recordings are better patients, that healthier patients. And this doesn't require any new medical intervention. It doesn't require the doctor to do something different or prescribe a drug or anything like that. They just can continue meeting with patients the same way there meeting with patients today and their patients will do better. But we think we're ultimately going to be able to demonstrate that. And there's very few of us who are out there really advocating for patients and their families to understand what's going on. We're literally the Onley app in the APP store that is designed for recording, transcribing and discussing medical encounters all in one app. Eso it's it's pretty interesting that this is, uh, this is a very early space

that we I went full time on mid quarter. There were a couple different facets. So one was looking at Hey for this to move beyond an engineering prototype to a serious production application. One of the things that are going to need to change about the back end. What are the things that we're going to need to change about the client experiences? What's the level of polish that we need in the design and the U X experience there? How do I sequence it? So I'm not boiling the ocean? You think that's a really critical aspect of product management? Is that you have to have dual vision. You have to be able to see what am I doing this week to move the product forward? And you also have to have the vision of like, where we going in the next two years? That makes sense here, right? So you can't just be a visionary and like seeing what it's gonna look like in two years and have no idea what you're doing next week. You can't just be iterative and looking at what you're doing next week and have no idea where you're going. So you sort of need tohave both those time horizons in mind. And so once I went full time is a matter of mapping out. Where do we think this could go? Let's do the vision and on then let's map it back. So get there kind of bite sized chunks and break it down into sprints. So we ended up settling on a two week sprint cadence, sort of classic scrum, agile programming. Um, as a real world project, I'll be honest. Those sprints often ended up taking a lot more than two weeks. Um, you know, So it was It was kind of variables. We didn't want to ship something that was low quality. And so we bite off what we could bite off. We test it, and sometimes we needed a bunch of generations. Sometimes we only need a handful of generations before we go and shit the next thing. So we went and sequenced it all out and built up a team. One of my first things to do was to hire a very high quality product designer who I had worked with previously at Facebook. Been very impressed by because I knew that given our go to market of going directly to patients. The patient experience was gonna need to be fantastic. And that was gonna be a big differentiator for us because a lot of the apse in the medical space are created by people who are highly medically qualified. They're coming in, is licensed doctors, licensed nurses and the like, But they have no background whatsoever and consumer. And so the user experience for a lot of these APS is pretty terrible because they only get around hiring designer taking design seriously, very, very late in the game. Right? And we knew we would need to be designed lead. And so that's why that very first higher than I made what was for my my chief design officer because I knew that that was gonna be such a such a critical part of what we were building. And she's just been amazing, right? And so I feel very good about having made that decision. Um, and then the next part was just like map again mapping the back end architecture of figuring out what we needed to improve and fix. Figure out what we could just leave alone would be fine. A lot of product management to figure out what not to build. Um, you know, everything is important, but how you stack rank sequence things with very limited team is really important. Um, there's actually one thing that big companies don't necessarily do really well, because when you have a lot of assets, when you have a lot of high quality engineers and the like that are able to go and work on a project, there's less rigorous focus on what must we absolutely get done this week on Ben? What sort of what's plausibly important but falls below the line of existential criticality, right, because you don't have any existential criticality at at a larger company s. So I think that's one of the reasons why startups are able Thio really focus and iterating at a really fast pace. That's the fun of being a starting. It's fun being in big companies, too, you know. Ah, lot of people, just as a quick aside, I think a lot of people have this very broken mental map that you got to choose what you are in life. Are you an A or a B? Are you a startup person or are you a big company person, right? And that's just it's a really flawed mentality, because start ups are a certain kind of vehicle forgetting certain kinds of missions done really well. And big companies are different kind of vehicle for getting other kinds of missions done. And if you match your vehicle to your mission, you're gonna have a good time. And if your vehicle isn't very well matched to your mission, you're gonna have a really bad time. So I feel like there's been this, uh, litany of complaints of people who go into a place like a like a Google or Facebook, expecting it to operate like a startup. And that air bitterly surprised. Hey, it's hard to do a startup inside a big companies like, uh, the kind of things that you should be doing. A Google and Facebook are things you could Onley do at Google and Facebook, right? So, like at Facebook, like I said, we made the world's first map of the disconnect because we had all the data, eh? So we could actually find all of the people who were not online and put them on a map and and then go and see like well, where do we need to focus and then send in teams to those areas to understand what the barriers to connectivity work? That at Google? One of the projects that we did was to identify where all the utility poles in North America are, because that's really helpful data when planning fiber networks, right? So it's not a task that you give you a startup, make me a database of all the utility poles in North America. Where do I start? But a Google? It's like, Okay, let me talk to the street view team over here. Let me talk to the aerial imagery team over here, and a couple of weeks later, you've got a data pipeline that's starting to run, right? That's a problem. You could really Onley solve it. Google, Um, and and so I think I enjoy startups for working on startup type missions on. I enjoy big companies for working on big company type missions, and I would just encourage people to be neutral about Do you have to do a startup because startups are not to be all end all. Nor is it all about, do you find have to find some path to get into a place like Google or Facebook because ultimately that's success. That's victory. If that's your mental model, you'll get there and you'll be like, Oh, things has got lots of problems navigating here and getting things done here too, right? So you just you see the pros and the content each and you learn from each environment. So quick story here. Former roommate of mine Bret Taylor was associate product manager at Google. Worked on the Google maps JavaScript AP, which was like, Brilliant, Right. Um, that was one of the first really clever embedded JavaScript AP eyes on the Web. So that did really, really well. He left Google. He started a company called Friend Feed. Facebook acquired friend Feed. He became the chief technology officer of Facebook. Right? Um left Facebook to go and start. A company called Quip built that up so that the Salesforce and he's now the chief product officer in Salesforce, right? And so it's like, Well, is Brett a startup guy or is he a big company guy? And it's like it's a dumb question, unasked the question right? It's like he he was able to very cleverly navigate between things he could only learn in a big company and things he could only learn at his own startups, right? Sort of bounce ping pong and back and forth between them a couple times now. Very, very, very successful. So I think that that that takes me to, like, what is what is it? You're guidestar and I think optimizing for learning. You can never go wrong, right? And so what I look for is I look for optimizing, for learning and optimizing for impact on day, and I can't get 100% on both. In everything that I do so often, it's a little bit of an oscillation between optimizing for impact, optimizing for learning, right, and and it averages out over time, which is fine.

So that part's always interesting in the Bay Area because you've got more ferocious competition for technical talent than pretty much anywhere in the world. Uh, so I would say glibly the Bay Area is a terrible place to build a tech company because the Bay Area is a wonderful place to build a tech company, right? And so there there's the mystery. There's the cone right there. Because if you come here expecting that, they're just brilliant programmers. You just pick up off the street for pennies on the dollar is like, Oh, you're gonna have a really bad time here because you're gonna find out that your kids fresh out of college are earning $220,000 a year Total compensation, you know, getting offers at Netflix and Apple, Google, Facebook, Andi, and you have to compete with that like you can't just say like, I've got to start up. So I'm gonna give you the startup experience because for most of the people for whom that would be exciting, they'd be just like, OK, cool. I'll do my own startup, right? Why should I work for your startup? Right, So you can't just show up and expect that people are gonna be very happy toe high quality people are just gonna come out of the woodwork to do work for you, for pennies on the dollar. So it's like you have to figure out for each person what motivates them. What's exciting to them. How are you going to help them learn? So if they're optimizing for learning, how do you give them a good experience in a real learning experience? How do you help them optimize for impact so that you can show what you're doing is going to make a big difference in the lives of the people who are using your product and those those those ultimately end up being the currency that you use is a start up to get high quality people onboard, right? It's the story of what they're working on. It's the opportunity to have a big impact in shaping what what a product is becoming because they're they're joining a small team and you have to thread the needle on come, which is really hard. So I think you got to go into those conversations just blunt, like three offer I'm gonna give you is not gonna be cash on cash competitive with Google or Facebook or any of those. So if what you need right now short term is to maximize your comp, let's just stop this conversation here and then I won't have my feelings hurt. I'll introduce you to my friends and Google and my friends in Facebook. My friends at Apple, like go get a great job there, earn a whole bunch of money because, like, if that's your focus, I don't want to waste your time. It's it's not gonna be in my startup, right s. So you have to be optimizing for other things. So I think, like, that's Ah, that's an interesting thing to navigate here in the Bay Area. You sort of have to navigate that everywhere. But it's unusually intense in the Bay Area because the assumption is that if you're knowledgeable technologists, you have enormous number of options both to start your own company as well as to get paid a lot of money working on some of the big companies. And a lot of people outside the Bay Area are not particularly calibrated on how much like senior folks can get paid. Um, and I have friends who are getting paid well north of a million dollars a year, working not at like chief executive officer of a publicly traded company, but just like as senior technical talent with, like 5 to 10 years of experience, um, earning north of a million dollars a year. So again coming in from other environments like Utah, where you know people are paid well and have amazingly high quality of life. If they were just parachuting into the Bay Area expecting that, well, I can hire a junior person for $50,000 a year and a senior person for $150,000 a year, they're gonna be in for really rude surprise. So I think that's just that's one particular challenges. So part of what we do is we We've operated from The gecko is a hybrid team where we've got a Bay Area component. We've got Bay Area team that's here that's been largely worked from home pre pandemic. You know, it's sort of not going to say I saw that coming, but we ended up getting very lucky on timing, and that was one of the ways that we were able to be competitive and hiring against some of the big folks who are expecting people to come into the office four or five days a week. It's like, No, no, no. We're gonna get together in person at a central location on Thursdays Thursday afternoon for a couple hours. But other than that, we're all gonna be work from home. So let's invest in work from home centers. And this was true, like a year and a half ago. So when the pandemic hit, it was kind of a no opt for us from a day to day perspective. We just stopped getting together on Thursdays, but everyone was already all set up for working home. We all had distributed collaboration tools and workflow all set up on that's half of our team, the other half of our teams contractors who are all around the world. And so it's sort of this mix of employees in the area and contractors around the world already working a synchronously and remotely, and that that gave us a lot of resilience when things like the pandemic it because we didn't have the cost burden of in office and people were already in this mode of of working from home and the flexibility that that gives in terms of accommodating raising Children in terms of hobbies, etcetera. If you get your worked on that you worked from nine AM to five PM it's mostly immaterial. You need to be around for discussions like and be able to respond to people inter actively when that's needed. But if you turbo charge between 10 p.m. And 2 a.m. like great, let's do that if you need to take a nap between one. PM and four PM because you, you know, worked in the middle of the night. Cool. That's fine, right? Just communicate about. It s so I think that that mode of what we care about is appropriate communication and net productivity and that those air and personal happiness, um, that that optimizing for those things is is ultimately what's gonna produce a winning team