Ron Gutman: Impact Will Keep You Motivated [Entire Talk]

It's so good to be back this time on this side of the auditorium. I love being back on campus. I see some great familiar faces and it's amazing to be back. And today I thought about what would have been most valuable to me, you know, if I sat in your seats. And then I said to myself, why would I need to think about it? I just need to go back, you know, and think about it. When I sat and watched ETL talks when I was in your seats. And that was not too long ago. Well, I'm chairing our 10th year reunion in a couple of weeks from now, so maybe it passed faster than I thought it would. So enjoy your time here. Enjoy every minute of it. Because when you go to the real world and you do what you want to do, you're going to take a lot of the lessons that you learn here when you're sitting in these seats and make them happen in the real world. And I thought to myself, when I was in your seat, what are the things that I wanted to learn? What would have been most valuable to me? And the talk today, I'll try to share with you some of these insight that I've learned over the years and hopefully that will be valuable to you in your lives when you graduate from here and go and change the world for the better, a lot of you will in a very, very profound way. So let me start by with something that has been very, very important for me from the time that I was here at Stanford, throughout the past 10 years of my journey. And it was all about the mission. If you look at the story of HealthTap, the company that I founded, we started about four and a half years ago. It all started with a very important mission. A mission to measurably prolong the life expectancy of humankind and help everyone around the world feel good by giving them access to the best health information and doctors anytime, anywhere. Being mission driven is awesome. Doesn't matter what you do. When you wake up in the morning and you know that you do something that is meaningful, it gives you amazing amount of energy. And if you decide to be an entrepreneur, how many people around the room want to be an entrepreneur at one point in their career or participate. I'm back home. That's great. And so if you want to be an entrepreneur, you're going to take on yourself journeys that will be challenging because if it was easy to do the thing that you want to do, probably many other people are already doing it. It's probably solved and there's not Much to do there. So you're going to take on yourself a challenge, a really hard and important challenge. And when you do that, and you do it day after day after day, you're inevitably going to wake up some mornings and ask yourself, why am I doing this? Right? This is really challenging. I wanted to go from here to here. I had this great idea. It was fantastic. I told it to some people. It was amazing. I thought it's going to just take a few weeks or a few months, and it's just going to work exactly the way I wanted it to work. But then you go there and things are not working exactly the way you wanted them to work. And it happens again and again and again and again. One thing that is really typical to all the most successful entrepreneurs that I met in my career was they would tell you that they got way more nos than yeses at any given point in time. You get no's when you go and try to raise money. You get no's when you try to hire the best people. You get no's when you try to partner with, like, these big partners. But your idea is so great. Why wouldn't everyone invest in it? Why wouldn't anyone partner with it? Anyone would join you? Anyone? It's like, it's just such an amazing idea. It will change the world like this. But then you start doing it, and you realize that, you know, there are the hurdles there. And when they happen, the one thing that never gets old is a mission. Is really believing in what you do and wanting to accomplish something that is actually very, very meaningful. Very meaningful to you, but even better, very, very meaningful for the world. Because when you do something that matters to a lot of people, and you know that what you will do will actually make a huge impact in the world, it will keep you going every single day. And it never gets old when you are there to measurably prolong the life expectancy of humankind, and you believe that you will do it eventually. Even when it's hard, you just know that it's going to be hard. It's okay. You just acknowledge it. And the most successful people that I met in my life were the ones that understood and acknowledged the journey and embraced it. When I hire people, I tell them that we are here to conquer Everest. And it's very. It's great to say, right? Like, I mean, how cool is that? I mean, we are conquering this amazing challenge, and we're going to make it happen. And it's so romantic and everything. And what people tend to forget when they say, okay, I'm going to go climb Everest, is that when you get to the middle of the mountain, it becomes kind of cold and kind of steep and kind of slippery, right? I mean, it's like it's Everest. And when I talk with people and I explain to them that I tell them that what I'm looking for is not for people that will endure the journey. I'm looking for people that will enjoy the journey, that love the challenges, that embrace the challenges, that have a mission, that they know that they want to get to the summit, right? Because we want to get there, we want to make it happen, but most importantly, enjoy the journey to getting there. So if you have a mission, it will keep you going on the way to the summit. But if you understand the journey, you will enjoy the journey particularly. Particularly. And that's the second thing that I want to talk about. If you're surrounded by the right people, so have a mission. Pick yourself a mission, and then surround yourself with the right people. Nobody goes to climb Everest themselves. Well, I mean, most people don't. I think you shouldn't, if you think about it, right? Take a team with you. Take the right kind of people that not only the people that share the same vision and mission that you have, because it's important. It's important to figure out that they really want to conquer the same summit that you want to conquer, that they have a similar vision than what you have. And it's important for you to actually talk a lot with them about it. Because sometimes it's like the cursory mission that you have or something where you want to get to the summit is there, and everyone's like, yeah, we'll get to the summit. But then you start talking about it. Maybe some people think about this part of the summit or that part, or how to get there, et cetera, et cetera. It's important that you have really the same mission, the same vision, but even more importantly, so it's extremely important that you get along with them well beyond the fact that you live only once, right? I think, at least I think I will. It's important to enjoy the journey as you go there. And you only enjoy the journey if you surround yourself with people that you're having fun with. When I sat in your seats not so many years ago, I want to convince myself. I listened to Vinod Khosla, who is an entrepreneur and now an investor, and he talked about really how to bring the right people around you. Someone in the audience asked him a question so how do you choose the right people? How do you choose the people to bring with you to the journey? And the way he answered it was, I tried to bring with me the people that I wouldn't mind getting in trouble with, which I thought of as an interesting insight. Right, so not only people that you enjoy partying with, which is important, you want to have fun with people because when you go on a journey, you really want to enjoy the way, but you're going to conquer challenges together. You're going to tackle things that you've never tackled before. And certain people behave in a certain way when things are going really well, when they party and, and everything's fine and you're enjoying yourself. And then when the challenges happen, maybe they behave a little bit differently. And you mean to make sure that you're compatible with these people when things go great and you celebrate and everything's awesome. And that's important because you want to have fun all the time. Well, most of the time. But you also want to make sure that the people that you're with are compatible with you when things are not going that great. And how do you check that? I mean, you can do stuff with people, go out with them, go in nature. When I interview people, when I talk with people, I don't just do particularly people in important positions in the company. I don't just sit down in an office and do a frontal interview. I'll take them out. Let's go for a hike. Let's change the environment a little bit. Some people are really great in interviewing. I'm sure that nobody here ever prepares interviews because. But elsewhere around the world, people prepare interviews. So some people become really, really good in interviewing and they try to convince you that they're the best in the world and they're the best match, which is great. I mean, I think all of us are trying to prove that what we're doing is great and good. But if you want to figure out if the fit is great, take them out of the comfort zone, take them out of the office and start spending some time with them. The best thing in my mind is spending some time with them in nature. Go for a hike, go outside, talk, walk, have a conversation, Try to talk about scenarios. And don't just ask questions that are interview questions, try to talk about scenarios. Tell me about a time that you do this and that and let's have a conversation about how did it unpack, what did you think about that and that when you did that. Not just give me a set of actions of what you did. But, hey, try to unpack for me how you think a little bit, right? Particularly if you're thinking about co founders or people that you are in the core team that you want to spend many, many years with. You want to take the time, you want to surround yourself by a bunch of people that you will enjoy working with, but we can also conquer challenges with, especially if you have a very important, very lofty mission that you want to accomplish, because that's not going to happen in, like, two months. It's not going to happen in two years either. There's a long journey that you're gonna go with together and to make sure that you enjoy it and make sure that you actually conquer it together, make sure that it's a good fit, right? So a lot of you will spend a lot more time with your co founders or with people in your core team than you spend with your spouses, right? So think about it, right? So it's an important decision, and it's an important decision to keep on an ongoing basis. So we have a hairy and audacious. You have a mission that is very important. We have the people around us, right? And we need to make sure that once we have the mission and we have the people around us, we need to make sure that we continue talking about the mission and make sure that all of us are sharing it together. And that's an extremely important point. It's not that just at the very beginning of the company, you define yourself, what is the, you know, the mission and the vision of the company, but how you keep it going all the time and keep it fresh and make it something that is meaningful. At HealthTap, when we started the beginning, before we wrote the first line of code and actually, in fact, before we wrote the first sketch on a napkin or any balsamic sketch on an iPad, we actually spent almost two weeks defining a vision and credo for the company and writing to ourselves in detail, what are the values that are very, very important for us? What are the things that we stand by? What things do we stand for? What are the things that are important for us to make what we want to make happen? And we thought about these values and, you know, this. There's a whole paradigm there that says, oh, you need to have maybe like six to eight or, you know, different people think about it differently or, like, how many values you need to have. And we said to ourselves, let's just outline all of the values that we believe in and then try to figure out which are the ones that are most important for us. And then we ended up with a list that was longer than the typical 6, 8, 10, whatever the number is. We started eliminating a few of them and putting some of them together, but ended up with a list that we're very, very passionate about. When we did it with the entire team, it was a small team back then, but we did it with the entire team together. And that was very, very cool process, but that was just one point in time. And then we started writing code, we started doing design, we started doing product and iterations. What was very important for us from that point on was to make sure that this remains fresh, that the vision and the credo and these values are things that we actually uphold, that we actually live by. So how do you do it? Because you're so busy, you work around the clock, you don't sleep at night, you don't have enough people to do what you need to do, and you need to do it quickly because you have very little resources, and you need to prove a lot. So who has time for values and vision? And I mean, like, seriously, I mean, come on, give me a break. And that's the most important thing. This is the glue that keeps it all together. If you lose the mission or you lose the values and the kind of people that you want to surround yourself with, you're not going to accomplish what you're trying to accomplish. So the way we tackled this one was we have a team meeting every week, and we have a town hall meeting every weekend. And then we come, all of us come together, and every team meeting, we actually choose one of the values in our vision in credo and have a discussion about it, keep it fresh, talk about it. Do people still believe in it? Do people think it's still applicable? Maybe we need to change certain things. So people talk about the value. Just one value. Every week, we choose one value and talk about it. We decided to name the conference rooms in our office with the values. So we don't just put a plaque on the wall that nobody ever looks at. Some companies, you just see this. Oh, there's this plaque that nobody ever looks at. And it has all the values and whatever we actually. People talk about. Conference room, let's meet at Passion and positive energy, sense of adventure, data and analysis. These are the names of the rooms in our office. So they meet there. And teamwork and collaboration is a big room in our office, and they talk about it. So it becomes part of the routine of how we're thinking about the company. And we live by It. And then we have a retreat every single year. We have a yearly retreat that we take the entire company together. And the retreat starts with the question, why? Why are we here? Why are we doing what we're doing? So the same thing that we started the company, every yearly retreat starts with the question of why. And going back to the vision and credo and allowing anyone and everyone in the company to. To say, hey, we think that this value is just not applicable anymore, or, hey, we want to add something here, or I'm not sure that we're living by these things. Is this still something that belongs in a company that has now 70 people rather than a company that had five at the beginning? Or when we want to go to 200 and 300, would that still be applicable? Do we have too many? We don't have enough. The discussion goes on and on, and it's really important. So keeping the values, not just writing them, is something that will help you keep it all together. So mission and vision and the people and keep the discussion going on all the time about what matters to you makes the journey much better and makes the whole thing matter every single day. The third thing that I want to talk about is hairy and audacious goals, right? So I think that each and every one of you, if you came here to this school, and each and every one of you all over the globe that takes the time to watch this talk has some hairy, audacious goal in mind of what they want to accomplish in life, right? You are ready to put more energy, you are ready to put more soul and heart into doing something that is meaningful. Remember, we have a vision. We have a mission. We're surrounded by great people. But how big the vision is, right? Is the vision as big as, oh, let's make $100 million or a billion dollars, is that the vision? Is that really hairy, audacious goal? Maybe. I mean, you know, there are some professions that it's all about making money and it's fine, but is there something more to life than that? Is there something more to what you want to accomplish in life than that and how big the thing is and how do you measure how big it is? So choosing a vision, choosing a mission that is very, very meaningful to you is something that is very important. And I can tell you after 10 years of doing this, it's been 10 years sitting in your seat, that choosing something that is really big is super motivating for a very, very long period of time. And it's possible to do. My philosophy has always Been. If it's humanly possible to do, if I put my mind into it, I'll bring the right people with me. Together, we will be able to do it. And each and every one of you that sits in this room actually can. So when you choose what you want to do in life, when you think about what you want to do with yourself, whether as an entrepreneur or if you want to work for a company that does certain things, I really highly recommend to you to think about a goal and a mission that is very, very lofty, that is actually going to help a lot of people do something that is very, very meaningful in their lives. I chose health and well being. I think health is something that underlies all of our lives. It's something that empowers us to do everything else. It touches 100% of people. I can't tell you how motivating it is to go to work every day or to meet people now all over the world and around the country and tell them what I'm doing. It doesn't matter if it's in a cocktail party or when I meet family members or when I go to a meeting, or I just travel and people ask me what I do. I'm very, very proud of what I'm doing because I can say that I'm saving lives every day. We get millions and millions of thank you notes from people all over the world thanking our doctors. We have more than 68,000 doctors in our network today and we're getting notes from people every single day thanking our doctors for the impact. And we got millions of them. And among them, more than 20,000 people send notes for us thanking us for saving their lives. And that's amazing. I mean, I cannot tell you. I mean like every single day, every single day, I still go back to my notes and when I need a moment to just feel good myself, I just read these notes. And you will be surprised how this never gets old. It never gets old to read a note from someone that say, thank you for saving my life, and here's how you saved my life, my husband's life, my child's life. It never gets old. If you look at the hierarchy of needs and where Maslow's hierarchy of needs, which I'm sure that all of you encountered around your time here at school, you'll see that at the top of the pyramid, there's self actualization and helping others feels better than anything else. Sure, you need to do the basics. Everyone needs to eat and everyone needs to have the basics. But at the end of the day, if you find yourself a mission and a vision of doing something that is very, very meaningful. In my case, it was like helping people improve their health and well being, saving lives every day. It does not get old ever. And if you can combine the two together and create a livelihood around something that actually makes such a big impact on humanity, it will keep you extremely motivated throughout your entire journey. And that's a lot of fun. So we had mission, vision, we had people. That's very important. Now we have a very, very hairy and audacious goal that we want to accomplish in life and it's very important to us to think about how can we bring it to, let's land it for a second. How do we make it happen? So what's the most important thing now that we have the vision, the mission, the people, the big goal? Now we need to make it happen? So what kind of advice? Yeah, someone said it here. What kind of advice can I give you about that? And then I'm going to go back to the product. At the end of the day, maybe as a product guy, sometimes for a hammer, the entire world looks like a nail a little bit, but it's, it's ok. So I think it's all about the product. I think it's all about the people that you're serving. If you decide to change the world in a certain way and just have a big strategy, we love thinking strategy without thinking big things, without thinking about, oh, if we do this and how it impacts that and the markets and we can think big. We learn at Stanford to think big. So think strategy and I will tell you, think about the use case, boil it down to the need, think about what's there. If you look at the big picture of what you're trying to solve, trying to boil it down to the essence, what really matters, where is the need and where it lies. And once you understand the need and it's very, very granular, how can you build from this particular need to the big thing that you want to build? When I started HealthTap, at the beginning, I wanted to change healthcare. I really wanted to change healthcare. I thought that healthcare is broken. I thought that there's so much to solve in it, it's impossible. If you look at how people manage their health, if you look at health care costs, it's a huge global challenge to solve. But we had five people when we were on University Avenue trying to think in a tiny little office of how can we change the world and how can we change health care as a Product guy. I had to think about the basics, the most granular thing and the way I did it was very, very simple. I went all the way back to caveman time and this is how I think about the product at the beginning. It's been very, very good for me throughout my entire career to really take the experience all the way back to caveman time. Because if you think about it for a second, any successful and extremely useful digital experience that you are using extensively in your life, if you boil it down to the essence, it was extremely similar to the way things were done in caveman time. If you boil it down, by the way, I'm a huge believer that as human beings we have not changed a lot since then. I'm very serious about that. Think about at the essence of what really matters and particularly if you want to build something that scales that needs to be applicable to all people, you need to go to the granular essence of it. You need to understand what are the underlying human factors that will impact everyone. Think how simple and granular they need to be. So I went back all the way to caveman time and asked myself, how was healthcare practice in caveman time? That's a good question, right? So there was, you know, there was a person that didn't feel well. They had something in their hand maybe, and they went to a healer, which was how humanity was passing the health knowledge from generation to generation. So they're the wise people that had the health knowledge and they were the healers. And a person went to the healer and told them, I have a pain in my hand. It's been going on for four or five days and it's kind of like blue, what should I do? And the healer gave them a spell and a potion and sent them back home. And 33% of the time they felt better because of the placebo effect. And it worked, right? But interestingly enough, when you think about it, healthcare hasn't changed much since then. The healthcare experience is exactly the same, but you're not feeling well. You go to weighd in or to a doctor and you tell them this is this and what's going on. And they give you maybe more than a portion in a spell, but maybe there's a little bit more science there, right? But the experience, the health care experience remained the same. So I said to myself, okay, so what's the granular experience? Well, it's a question and answer. You have a doctor, you have a healer, you have a doctor on the one hand and you have a patient or a person on the other hand, and first interaction is question and answer. So we took that, put it in digital channels. We started with pregnant women and moms, with pediatrician and obstetrician and magic. Everyone understood it very quickly. It was very easy to communicate to the moms and the pregnant women. It was very easy to communicate to the doctors that they're going to do exactly what they always did. They're just going to do it using mobile devices or web interfaces. And everyone's like, oh great, now I can, instead of going reading on a website some articles, I can go and ask doctors questions. That's awesome. I understand the value proposition. Dr. Understood it really well because they answer questions all day long. Now they did it just in digital channel. That's how it all started with a handful of pediatricians and obstetricians and a bunch of pregnant women and moms. Fast forward 68,000 physicians, more than 4,000 cities and towns across the country. Doctors in 137 specialties today, impacting hundreds of millions of people all over the world. It's pretty amazing. And I always like saying that if I got a dime for every person that told me that doctors will never answer people's questions for free online, I would never need to raise money for this company ever. 2.8 billion doctors answers later that we serve to people. And it's still happening every second. Now. I can tell you that we had something amazing that happened there because we started with something extremely simple, something extremely granular. So we started with these questions and answers. That was very easy to do. And today doctors are answering questions. You can access doctors from any mobile device or web connection and by the way, now from wearables as well. So we just announced our first app on the Apple Watch. So it was the first ever healthcare app on the Apple Watch. You can push a button on the watch, swipe the phone and you see a doctor here in seconds. So that's the generation what you can do today. So you have a button on the watch and see a doctor here in seconds, but started with questions and answers. Doctors are answering questions on HealthTap. They're creating tips, they're curating news all over the web. They're rating apps, health apps. There are more than 100,000 health apps in the app store. So doctors are helping by rating them. And as of lately, a few weeks ago, doctors started rating medications. So you can go to HealthTap today because we have such a big army of piece of doctors that are available to interact with patients, but they're also available to interact with one another. And what they started doing is rating medications. So you can come to HealthTap, and just like you go on Amazon or on Yelp, you can actually go to a condition page and see all the medications that are used to treat this condition. And you can actually see how they're rated against each other for efficacy, how effective they are, one to five stars, just like you would do with any products or service that you used to anywhere else. And that was not possible before. And someone calculated to us what would. And we have more than 5,000 medication indication pairs now in HealthTap. Right. And if you think about it, clinical studies for drugs, when they're approved, are done as a drug versus placebo, one drug versus placebo, very rarely when they're compared to one another. Why? Because it's very, very expensive. To run. The experiment that we are running right now with thousands of drugs and thousands of indications would cost billions of dollars even if you did it in one point in time. And we're doing it on an ongoing basis in just one engagement that the doctors are doing right now. It's amazing because for the first time ever, you can actually compare efficacy of drugs for particular indication, because we have 68,000 doctors and they're engaged. But it all started with a very simple interaction. Questions and answers, easy to explain to the user, very easy to explain to the doctor. And start bringing more and more doctors, start bringing more and more users. And now we can create magic. Now we can actually give you the ability to see what doctors are thinking about certain things. We can give you immediate access to doctors, like I just explained that. We basically give you access on text, on video, on voice, to doctors 24, 7 from any mobile device or personal computer, and now from wearables as well. And that's pretty amazing. But we started very simply and very granularly. So when you think about what you want to start, when you think about what you want to do, think simple, think about the need, think about the use case, and go all the way back to the granular experience of the user. And from there, you can build to amazing things. So we had a mission, we had the vision, we brought the right people, we chose a hairy and audacious goals, and then we spent a tremendous amount of time thinking about the product and how granular it is. But that's not enough, because we need to hone it. We need to continue honing it all the time to the point that we understand the users really well and we continue evolving it at all. The Time and don't forget to use a lot of data. I'm sure that you're doing it now that you're in school. But in order to make better products, you need to keep iterating on them all the time. Start simple and then iterate and iterate. Listen to users, listen to what they say, and just don't be afraid to launch products very quickly. Not everything that we launched or I launched in my career worked. A lot of things didn't work. Don't be afraid, just go out. And the best way to testing is with people. Test small, don't test big, don't wait for a long time. Wait for many, many months and years to build the perfect things. You are going to be too late. Because if it's an amazing thing, someone would have launched it before you, right? And if it's not so great, you just wasted a lot of time. Create a proof of concept, go simple, get it into the market and iterate very, very rapidly with users and it's okay. A lot of them will tell you that's not working well. One thing that I really liked at the beginning with the early adopting physicians and people are asking me all the time, why does physician do that? Like how did you start the whole thing? Right. I'm sure that someone will ask it here. And the reason that physicians at the beginning got really engaged in what we were doing is we got them really involved in the process of giving us feedback and they felt that they actually have a huge impact on the product itself. And the doctors that helped us most were the ones that were most vocal. And trust me, you start getting these snarky emails about how useless what we're doing is. And like this long four pages email, the whole email is like, this is terrible and this is wrong. And it's like when I see these emails, the first thing that they do is pick up the phone and talk with the person and make best friends with them. Why? Because they just spent three hours qa' ing my product. It doesn't matter how snarky the email is, they care about my product. They're the best thing that can ever happen to you. They love it enough to just maybe use a few curse words or whatever it is, but it's okay, you can filter through that because they will give you feedback. And they were the best people for us when we didn't have money to hire QA people, they were the best QA people and they got very excited because we listened to them. They participated, they felt it's their own. And now the doctor community owns what we're doing. They love it. Doctors invite one another. The best way for us to bring more doctors on board is doctor inviting one another. Why? Because it's their own and we still do that. So product matters a lot. Iterations matter a lot. Simplicity matters a lot. If you think about these things, you're going to have an amazing experience for people. Last but not least, something that I'm very passionate about is positivity. So we have this mission and vision. We have a great group of people. We have a hairy and audacious goal. We're focusing on products, we're iterating, we're moving forward. We need to stay positive. As I said at the very beginning, especially if you have a hairy and audacious goal and you have a very lofty mission and vision, you will encounter challenges along the way, and you're going to have great, great people around you that will help you encounter these challenges. But you need to stay positive all the time, almost to a fault. And that's really something that is acquired. I mean, you can actually work on this because there are some amazing techniques that can help you stay positive all the time. So I had this huge opportunity to travel around the world and volunteer in a bunch of places. And I like running. And these two things together brought me to an amazing realization at one point in my career that smiling, which is an extremely easy thing to do, has amazing powers. So traveling around the world and meeting a lot of people for the first time, and many of them, I couldn't speak the language. I didn't know the culture. I traveled in more than 70 countries. And when you volunteer in a place, you want to communicate with people, it's not that easy when you don't speak their language. But the one thing that instantaneously creates connection among people is just smile. It's universal. It doesn't matter where you are. It really connects with people really well. And that was a big aha moment for me. But I think it prompted for me the wish to go and try to learn about smiling deeper and research smiling was because I discovered kind of randomly when I run, and I used to, I still run every day, and I used to run longer distances and I discovered that when you run a long distance run, and after an hour, an hour and a half, it kind of becoming a little bit more tired. When I smiled, I kind of felt kind of a sensation of elevation, which kind of like, I thought it was maybe random or like I'm making it up or whatever. It is. And I kind of tried to. It came to me naturally. And then I tried to kind of induce it and it still felt better. And I said, oh, ok, I'm just going to go and start doing research to see if it's just something weird that I'm experiencing or is there something in it. And I spent a great amount of time really doing research into smiling. And it's amazing. I'm not going to repeat the entire thing right now. There's a whole TED Talk that I gave about that and I wrote a book about it. But I think that what I discovered in my own life, my own life is that it's very. It's possible for each and every one of you to actually build positivity into your life by just being conscious of it. Right? Live the moment, right? And yes, you have this hairy and audacious goal that you want to accomplish, which can easily put you in a position easily put you in a position that you're going to be frustrated all the time, right? Because if you climb Everest and you keep thinking about the summit all the time, you are going to be frustrated most of the time because you're not on the summit yet, right? So if you keep thinking about the challenges and why you are not where you really want to be, you're going to spend your life being frustrated. On the other hand, there are a lot of great things that happen to us every single day that are a lot of fun. And if you live in the moment, and that's the biggest learning point that I can tell you about, my research on smiling is that if you live the moment and you surround yourself by things that remind you that life is great, you live in a place that has amazing weather. It's spring outside. The flowers are unbelievably amazing. Look at them. I mean, they're gorgeous. It's sunny here every single day. You're surrounded by amazing people. You're doing something that you're really passionate about every single day. So life is awesome even when it's challenging. And if you pause to remind yourself that every single day. And even better if you surround yourself with people that help remind you that every single day, the journey becomes so much better. And positivity is a set of mind. It's something that you can just decide to become positive. And being aware of it in the moment is something that will bring you back to it. And I use anchors, right? I call it my dandelion list. There are certain things in my environment that I kind of tag them as smile. Inducing. I just decided. Have a list that I decided that whenever I see one of these things, it will just remind me to smile. And I make sure that these are things that I encounter in my environment every now and then. And they're kind of like. They're reminders for me, like, oh, I see this. Like, oh, that's fine. There's some people that make me smile and other things. So this is by little technique, but you can do it however you want to do it. But deciding to remain positive is extremely important when you're conquering these kind of challenges. So let me start again, and then I'll pass it back to you. Mission and vision. Having the right people around you, making sure that it's a big thing that you want to conquer that will make a big impact on people's lives. Focus on the product, focus on the detail. Keep it simple, but create something great. Create something amazing. Create something that inspires you. Think about the details that make it amazing. And last but definitely not least, probably the most important thing, Stay positive. Thank you. Questions? No questions. Great. Yeah.

So I guess one question to start us off would be, when you look back on your personal journey, and that could be your childhood, that could be your journey after leaving home, what would you say have been those pivotal moments that really kind of emphasized that positivity was something important, or at least that really put you on your path to understanding what was important to you and why?

Yeah, it was people at volunteering, I think, more than anything else. Right. So when I traveled around the world and I try to stay off the beaten track, so I try to go to places that are more developing countries, where there's more help needed, and spending time with people that are not as fortunate as us and seeing. I mean, we live in a bubble, obviously, so what we think is difficult and challenging and all these things are obviously, they're very luxurious challenges. A lot of people in this world live in conditions that are extremely basic conditions at best. And we spend the time trying to help these people and connect with them. But I level with them. So when I travel in these places, when I volunteer, I always use local transportation. I always try to go and spend time with the people where they are. And when you start seeing where they are versus where we are, I think for me, it adds a lot of positivity because it makes me feel very fortunate for what we have here, and it makes me want to help even more. So I think that this is basically like working with people and helping them, I think, creates their realization. But Also creates a lot of gratification, personal gratification. When you can help, we can provide value. Yes. Can you talk a little about your philosophy on competition and how that changes your strategy or tactics and how that influences the company? Yeah, I think that we are very focused on looking forward. I mean, I think that my philosophy is wear the yellow jersey. Right. So be innovative, do the new things, push the envelope. Right. Try to do the new things. And then you have. Obviously you have followers if you go in the right direction. I mean, we started with our philosophy and what we're doing right now with virtual care about five years ago. Before, it was very cool to do digital health and all these kind of things, and now it's became very cool. But we started way before that. Now we have a lot of people trying to do what we're doing, which is great. I mean, it's validation to what we're doing. But I don't spend a ton of time looking at what other people are doing. I'm really focused on the user. I'm really focused on the experience. I really focus about what problems we're trying to solve and really figure out how to provide most value in this environment. I think that the interesting thing about the stage of where we are as a company right now is that we're trying to think about, rather than think about other players in the industry as competition, trying to think about them as potential partners. And how can we empower them with what we have to do what they're doing better? Because even if we can't solve all the use cases, we have a lot of underlying assets that we can provide to partners to help them do what they're doing better so they can focus on use cases that we're not focusing and make the entire ecosystem better when everyone benefits from it. Right. So this is the kind of thing that we're thinking about right now. Yeah.

I work for a big corporation, and I think maybe the most important takeaway after your speech is because maybe in the corporate side, we think too much about the product and in fact, we try to do it as unique. And it's very difficult today. Try to do something. In fact, in your case, what you did before, at the beginning, maybe, was not unique at all.

Right.

So a lot of things were trying to do the same thing. So answer and a response from the doctors and people. So maybe the difference in your case was all the rest. So you keep the vision, you keep the energy, you keep the credo, and you work positive. So maybe in our own experience, we Try to focus too much in the product or make it unique and maybe you don't have the right people and even in fact you are not sure about your vision, but it is your care audience about the products and that is happening very much today.

Yeah, I think at the essence is really about what is the problem that we're trying to solve at the end of the day, is there a big need out there and do we have the right kind of skills and the right kind of experience and expertise to go and tackle it and provide value at a very large scale and bring the right team? I think that when you think about the people that surround you, really think about how to hire the best person in the world for the job that you have at hand. Really Seriously. I mean, challenge yourself to think about, if I could choose any person in the world to do this particular job, how can I find the best person in the world? One of the main reasons that we are still on University Avenue here in Palo Alto and we haven't moved anywhere else is because we're doing a lot of work at Stanford. And the reason is that even in the engineering level or in product level or in design or in data, we're looking for the best, smartest people, even in entry level because they will tackle challenges that are pretty immense. So bringing the right talent, the smartest people, the best people in the world to tackle each and every one of the challenges in the entry level, which we are hiring from Stanford and other great institutions, or just now in the executive level, as we are ramping up the company, we want to bring these executives to come and join us. So now we're thinking about we just hired a senior executive from a Fortune 500 company that just left a very cushy job to come and work with us at the startup because he's the best person in the world to do that. So think about it. When you surround yourself with people, how do you choose the best person in the world for every particular job you're hiring for? Let's go in the back.

Yes, you founded you all at Stanford and that experience itself sounds very entrepreneurial itself as well. So I'm wondering if you could compare your experience in the Bwell and experience at Healthtown from an entrepreneur's perspective, how are they similar or different? How did the experience from Bol contribute.

To your later interest? Yeah, I mean, entrepreneurs always look for opportunities to make an impact. Right. Real entrepreneurs always look for broken stuff. Right. Like where I always look for what's not exactly the way it should be. And how can I go and build something, right? I always want to build something. I always want to fix things, right? So if you are at Stanford right now and you are surrounded by, you know, amazing people, but there are also a bunch of challenges around and there's nothing better than starting to hone your skills of tackling challenges by just going and doing it. Particularly in an environment, a great environment like that, when you have unbelievable access to talent for free, right? Like you can just put, like I put a multidisciplinary group of graduate students and faculty that if I had to hire them in the real world, it would cost me a tremendous amount of money. But when I was at Stanford, it was just like a study group. We just got together a couple of times a week. We spent hours together on whiteboards, thinking about stuff, doing research. But the university gave us a lot of opportunities to do research, primary, secondary, right? Spend a lot of time with them together and learn a tremendous amount in the process. We made it applicable. So it's not just academic research, but we actually tried to apply it to actually a real world problem. But you can actually bring some of these most amazing people around you and experiment, experiment rapidly with things that are good ideas and see how they work in an environment that is a great environment like Stanford and with visionary people like John Etchemendi, the provost at Stanford, and several other people here, they will give you the amazing opportunity to do certain things that are very big if you are committed to it and if you want to take the challenge on yourself. So I think that you should try it every single day. Just find the right people, find the right challenges, go and practice, go and train for what the world is waiting for afterwards. Yes.

You mentioned being an entrepreneur has a lot of challenges. Could you share with us what was the biggest challenge you've had being an entrepreneur?

Yeah, absolutely. I think that the, the most important challenge as an entrepreneur is what I said a couple of sentences ago is really finding the most amazing person for every position in the company. It's the number one most important thing. And it's very easy to compromise. It's very easy to say, this is good enough, you need to run very fast and you have deliverables and you don't have enough resources and you need to just run, run, run and accomplish really big things. So, and people are coming and it's like, well, you know, he's a great person or she's a great person and think that's very skillful, but, you know, maybe cultural fit, not that great. Right. So. But we really need someone to do this job because if we're not going to do this job, we're not going to meet the deadline. If we're not going to meet the deadline, oh my God, who knows what will happen? Right. And I think this is short term thinking. I made these mistakes in the past. Right. I made these mistakes in the past. You take great people, but maybe not great cultural fitness or not exactly. Right. For the job that you're bringing. They're not the best person in the world to do the thing that you need to do. And it's not just about skills, it's also about fit. Right. And one piece of advice to all of you, don't compromise on that ever. It doesn't matter what the next deadline is. It doesn't matter what you're trying to accomplish. People are the most important things. Right. So from a challenge perspective, thinking to yourself, how do I pace myself in what I want to build so I can bring the best people in the world for every stage? The company, we didn't need to hire a Fortune 500 executive into the company in the first six months of the company. It would be a waste of everyone's time. We need to do it now because we need to scale up the team. Right. So who's the right. Best person in the world for now? Right. And don't compromise. Never compromise. Yes.

So we hear a lot from entrepreneurs like you that failure is important, that not being a afraid of failure is an important road to success. You run a company for which failure is actually not that acceptable. Right. So what happens if it like what happens if a doctor gives bad advice specifically? And how do you deal with this idea that people are putting a lot of trust in you, but you don't really control the information flow?

Yeah. So at HealthTap, we have only two modes, success and learning. Thank you. And I think it's a very important state of mind right. At the end of the day. I mean, we are human, we're fallible, we'll make mistakes. That always happens. Right. And if you want to create an environment of innovation, if you want to create an environment where people take calculated risk. Calculated risks. Right. You need to create an environment by which failing doesn't exist. Learning does. If you can do it very quickly, if you can do it with a limited amount of resources, you know, I don't encourage, you know, learning and, you know, spending a tremendous amount of resources, but quick iteration with limited amount of resources that creates learning is actually the best way to get to where you want to go. It's a very iterative process. So I don't look at learning as failure. Right. As long as you don't repeat mistakes again and again and again. Right. So you can make new mistakes. As long as you make new mistakes every day, it's fine. It's all good. Now the question that you're asking me about doctors and how they manage patients and we really want to believe that medicine is 100% science. And I think that we will give medicine a huge kudos for making a huge progress in the past decades and century, for making more progress, to making it more science based. But medicine is a combination of some science and some art. Right. So there are opinions of people of how to deal with things. We're trying to bring as much data as we can and put opinions of many doctors rather than one doctor. Like we did with raterx, when doctors are rating medications and providing data to you to make choices. But different doctors have different opinions. When you look at raterx and how doctors are rating medications, you see that there's a difference there. So they have an opinion. So it's not about right or wrong. It's about trying to bring enough data from multiple sources to help doctors make better decisions. In context. I think the fact that we are building digital channels and everything that's done on HealthTap is recorded. Everything that is done on HealthTap creates this huge repository that is not only transactional and a lot of businesses in marketplaces, a transaction just finishes the time the transaction finishes, so it reconciles and then it just moves ahead. On healthtub, the knowledge is captured. Right. And we're learning. When we get from people information and we get more data, the healthtub itself learns a lot. And the learning that we bring together, actually we can provide doctors to make better decisions. Right. When they provide information to patients. So we are empowering doctors to make their own decisions. We are making it easy for them to access data, to access information, to access other doctors knowledge right. At any given point in time and provide better answers and better information to people as they're doing it. This side? Yes. Could you go a little bit deeper in the concept of the B similar, the caveman and the nautilus cable a little bit deeper. Why do you find it so similar nowadays? Oh, sure. I mean, I think that the simplicity of it was like people had a trusted entity, like a person, a healer that they went to that had the knowledge and they find it very desirable to come and ask questions. Right. And they went to the healer or they go to the doctor. Today, healthcare has actually two components to it. One of them is the knowledge itself and a lot of it. The other part is care. So healthcare has two parts to it, health and care. The knowledge and the caring. I think what's important for us to emphasize, and when I made the analogy, is that sometimes we go to doctors to get their knowledge and sometimes we go to them to get the support and the caring. Right. So we need to remember that because we are all scientists, we are really, really excited about the data, we're really excited about information and about learning and about the science behind it. But we need to remember that in healthcare, it's also about caring. It's also about compassion. So accessing not just knowledge in an article, but access a physician that actually cares about you, that actually answers the question that you ask rather than the generic question, is really, really valuable. You have a conversation with a human being rather than interacting with an article. It was very, very valuable there as well. So there's more than just the basic experience. The basic experience unpacked for us. A combination of the knowledge and the caring. Yes.

You mentioned when you're building your team, how important it is to have shared values amongst you and your team members. I'm curious about how you went about recruiting doctors to provide service on your platform. Whether or not you went after people and really pushed the vision of what you were trying to do or more focused on the financial benefit or otherwise for the doctor and how you communicated.

Yeah, it's a great question. I think that we very, very strongly emphasized at the beginning, the several initial years of Health tap, that there was no financial reward at all. So we really were looking for the physicians that are mission driven and want to actually make a difference in the world and help people. So there was no financial reward whatsoever. Not money, no T shirts, no Amazon gift cards. There was no money exchanged whatsoever. We didn't charge money either and we didn't put ads on the service either to monetize it. So we provided a service for free, but doctors provided the knowledge for free and built this amazing knowledge base that is available all over the world today to everyone for free. They built it together. 68,000 doctors worked really hard to build this unbelievable knowledge base. But from the very beginning, we made them partners in building it. It wasn't ours, it was theirs. When I started HealthTap, I actually flew around the country to meet opinion leaders in pediatrics and obstetrics with a set of balsamic sketches on an iPad to show them what is it that we're thinking to do. What I really promised them at that point is nothing more than come iterate with us we will listen to you. I was surprised by how many doctors told me that no software provider ever asked them for their opinion. They sent consultant to show them which buttons to push on the interface like lots of consultants but never asked them what they really want, what they really need. And what we did from the very beginning is iterated with them together and listened to them. We made sure that when they gave us advice we actually acted on the advice and until this very day we sent surveys to doctors every other week and we have thousands of doctors that are involved in every generation of healthtub that we launch to the world so they are real participants in the process of creating this unbelievable global assets that we have created at healthtub.

Awesome. So with that let's thank Ron so much for his time and thank you all for coming.