I've always described my career as orchestrated serendipity. And what I mean by that is I didn't I? My career never really followed, like, a long term plan, but I kind of had a sense of what I was looking for, what I wanted on then opportunities that were related to that would present themselves. Uh, it actually might be interesting for your students. I actually co founded my very first start up while I was a second year student at at M I t slow and my favorite professor Tom alone kept me after class one day and said, I want to talk to you about something He said, There's a guy. He's the number two person that Lotus. He's starting this company based on my research, and I think you would be a great co founder. And the joke I was tell us. It took me about three days before I could leave Professor Malone's office because my head was something I couldn't get out the door. Uh, what? So that's what I did. I co founded a company called Beyond. We were female company. Um, e. I started as ah Assad on engineer, and that ended up in the VP of product management we had acquired. I ended up being the only executive at the company that acquired this cap. They were a publicly traded company called and it systems. Then I got recruited out to the West Coast by Cisco to be VP of marketing for the new small to medium business group. There I stayed at Cisco for 6.5 years. Uh, and towards the end of my time there, one of my, uh, one of my teammates said, Coming out of the meetings that did you really need to stop saying that. I said, Stop saying what? Because you keep calling Cisco's products boxes with holes in them And I said, Well, they are. The magic is the software, and that's what kind of is suddenly all the scales came off my eyes, and I realized I was a software guy and a hardware company that really being in software. So I got recruited over to Adobe to run enterprise marketing at Adobe, during which time we acquired Macromedia. Uh, and I was there for 3.5 years, but then I realized, you know what? I really, really miss the small company experience. I had spent, you know, 11 years at large companies. Um And so I got the critic of Gobi CEO at social text. And, yeah, literally 11 months in the, uh, were nine months in the Lehman Brothers crashed. And you know the what I used to call the real recession, which now looks like a practice recession for the pandemic it and But I was really proud of fact that we were able to get it out and get to cash flow positive and have a decent exit as a result of that. So I took about a year off. After that, I was exhausted and I spent. And then I went to a venture capital firm as an entrepreneur in residence. And that's where I met David Lawrence. Stuff. David Lawrence is the former CEO of Kaiser Permanente, and he I had never worked in health care before, but he infected me with a passion about the 9000 ways at U. S. Healthcare is broken. And I got really passionate about things that weaken do combining science, psychology and technology to help people prevent and improve their chronic conditions, chronic diseases, things like type two diabetes, obesity, hypertension, things like that. So that was really the the long answer to your trajectory question. But it really was meeting date Lawrence that inspired me to create motivated

There were a couple of things that there were two rabbit holes that I fell into the first rabbit hole. Waas, while exploring sort of the issues of chronic disease prevention. All roads lead to the topic of behavior change something like 40 to 50% of our health outcomes are determined by our behavior, and the rest is genetics and environment. Uh, and there's there's a new and exploding science of behavior change research that's happening. They're producing, on average, over 200 papers per day on this topic. Interestingly, the majority of these papers do not come from the U. S. They come from single payer countries, which kind of makes sense. You have a payer. Reggie actually cares about prevention. Um, anyway, I started reading a bunch of the research in this area and the front right hole waas a paper, uh, with the most interesting title of the behavior change technique taxonomy. Version one point. Oh ah, hierarchically cluster taxonomy of 93 validated BC cheese, and my first reaction is what won a title in My second reaction is 93. I didn't over there that many. That's so then I actually read the the publications of the each of the techniques that were included in the sex on A Me and they were producing, you know, stunning results in my mind, you know, like a 20% increase in physical activity or 1% point reduction of hemoglobin, a one C, which is the market for tech to, or a 7 kg median weight loss. And after a couple of weeks of reading newspapers, I thought, Wait, something's wrong because if any of these things work for all of us, we'd all be doing it. We would not have on epidemic of obesity and chronic diseases. So, um, I bet many of her students can relate to this. Statistics was never my favorite class. Oh, and so I went back and reread that middle section of the paper that almost everybody skips, which is, you know, the data analysis section, right? And I realized that almost all of these interventions have small to modest effect. Sizes okay. Thes air, mostly psychological interventions. The classic metric of the fact sizes kolinsky. Just how much of a meeting? What's the difference in the medians divided by the standard deviation? The reason why we have fact sizes were small to modest. It's not because the median difference with small I just told you they have 7 kg of weight loss. It's pretty significant, right? It's because the standard deviation is really why? Because we're all different. And so that was sort of ah ha number one. Well, it's nothing works for everyone, right? And then the other rabbit hole waas And at the same time I was I was while I was exploring, I met a bunch of companies that are doing incredibly exciting work in the field of precision medicine, mostly for oncology. And, um, you know, we have all of these molecular or chemical or biological therapeutics, right? Drunks, Um and you know, they they work. But no doctor can tell you that it's gonna work on you. But the good news is that there may be some other drugs we can try if this drug doesn't work for you. But the the methodology of precision medicine is to use DNA sequencing. So look at your Gino And if you have cancer at the at the genome of your of your tumor and then he was very complex machine learning and data science techniques to find out who had what biomarkers that didn't respond to this drug. And if you share enough of the right biomarkers than this drug is more likely to work for you. So by looking at the combinations of what makes us unique and analyzing the patterns of who responded and who didn't respond to that drug, in some cases they're up to three times tripling people, survival rates and certain cancers just pretty amazing on. So by taking that methodology and applying it to the field of psychology driven behavior change techniques, we think that we can dramatically increase the effectiveness of these already validated approaches to helping people change their behaviour. But by finding the right intervention for an individual based on what makes them unique, and in our case it's not biometrics, it's not gonna be your genes. Double tennis, more likely to be your cycle graphics because these your psychological markers. So that's that's really how how we think we kick things off. And then we spent all of last year doing our first Irby controlled study where we implemented a nap with three different approaches to changing behavior. We assigned people randomly and balance across the three arms. Um, this was all about getting you to Roberto. Increase your physical activity as measured by step counts, and I am actually deep in the throes of finalizing the reports of the all of that because I'm presenting the results of this field test through a video presentation on Monday. So I can't tell you the answer yet cause I'll have to save it for the for the Monday recording, but that's what we're doing.

This is, uh, that amazingly eclectic scent of skill sets that we need. Right? So I recruited one of the a behavior change scientific researcher named Martin Marquez suits who lives in Europe. Um, and she she helped select which behavior change approaches. She actually laid out the psychological specifications for how they how this app? Because we had to build a nap called hibachi would work. Then I had a higher UX designer, uh, who would translate this scientific language into the flow of what a user would experience in an app. And then I had to find and recruit a team of iPhone developers as well as full stack engineers to build the APP. And then iterating test. And I had to also have a data scientist on my team to lay out the infrastructure and guidance around what dated how to collect what data to collect, how to collect it. Given that what we were given the data analysis that we were going to do with the back end. So I recruited a team of developers in Korea. American born Korean, um, by ux designer was Korean, So it helped that she spoke Korean. I don't speak Korean eso and my data scientists is, um is, ah, his Indian from, uh, he's Indian, but he lives in California so that I had a full sec engineer up in Portland. So my days were, you know, I would meet early in the morning with Marta, you know, because she's in Europe. Sometimes I would have my designer on the call with her, but then we'd have to wait until end of day, our time in orderto like meet with the Korean team. And so But I have gotten very history, this distributed team thing when I was running social text. So we just used all the tools that I mean, this is long before what everybody is doing during the pandemic. Uh, so we were on, you know, slacking zoom and Google docks and Dropbox and a bunch of collaborative design tools and blah blah blah. So I think leveraging technology is helpful, but creating a culture that and work streams that are designed to support asynchronous collaboration Well, the eclectic mix of the disciplines, you know, a psychologist, a designer, iPhone, developers back, and developers, data scientists, they all speak, they literally speak different languages, and they think differently. And so that was a really challenge. But it was actually probably the most fun. Part of my job was hot glue. All these experience that's together.