SmartSense Disruption in Healthcare & Simple Hacks to Become a CEO (ft. Guy Yehiav)

Thanks for tuning to Digital Voices podcast, where we chat digital transformation challenges and opportunities across healthcare and life sciences. And now, your host, Ed Marx.

Hey, it's Ed here. Welcome to another edition of Digital Voices. Thanks for listening. You know, because of your listenership, we are in the top 3% globally in terms of downloads. And I think part of the reason is because we have great guests like Guy. Guy, welcome to Digital Voices.

Hey, great to be here. Thanks for having me.

So Guy is the CEO of SmartSense. And we're going to talk all about SmartSense, Guy. But also, I want to pick your brain on leadership and different things like that. Because you're a serial CEO, and you've launched lots of companies or exited lots of companies, and you've got a lot of great experience. So a few, but Guy, before we get there, the main question everyone wants to know the answer to is what songs are on your playlist?

Well, I'm pretty unique. I have my, I tell everyone it's my kids' playlist song, but that's the song for the gym. So that's anything current that just gets you running, pop. But the old rock, '80s, '90s rocks, I have country. It's another passion. Israeli song, European song. I even have on the, on the gym some, uh, stupid '80s songs from Europe, like the Milli Vanilli that they don't really sing even.

All right, not to put you on the spot, but we do have a playlist for digital voices. I don't know that we have any Israeli songs. Is there a particular artist and song that you might recommend?

There's a few. There's just now some recent one that I'll send you. I'll send you a few.

Okay.

Meir Ghi is another friend of a friend of mine. He's an amazing Israeli singer. He just moved to LA and he just released his first American English list of songs. So that's Mergi.

All right. We will add that. And yeah, because I'm witness to your interest in music, especially the old rock music, because we know each other through SmartSense. Again, we're your CEO and I'm on the board of advisors. And at the last conference, you played. You have a band and you played a lot of the type of music you just described. So how long— was that band an impromptu band, or have you been playing in bands for a while?

So I, you know, if you would ask me what you would ask a guy when he was 18 or 13, I would say, hey, ask him to learn how to play the guitar. Because I just started learning.

I love it.

I have a lot of passion for it. I can play, but not that well. And so when you're in the band, you don't have to be that well because everyone else is just accompanying you. What we did is at our user conference, one of the customers Actually, Hartford Health's CIO, Joel, said, how about we'll put a customer band together? Because he is an amazing guitar player.

Yeah.

And so we put a mix of SmartSense employees and customer players the guitar. We are looking for an amazing customer who knows how to play the keyboard. So if you know anyone, we'll do the right partnership with them, and then we'll add the keyboard player. We had 12 songs at the last user conference, and it was amazing.

Yeah, I loved it. I really enjoyed it. I thought that was very unique too, yeah, bringing together the customers. Talk about true partnership, right, between a vendor and a client is doing songs together because it really requires a lot of coordination and collaboration. What about words to live by, Guy? Are there specific quotes or slogans that you sort of run your life by? Yeah.

As you said, I'm a serial entrepreneur, entrepreneur by heart, and I learned over the years that it's truly all about the people. And so that's, that's something I truly believe. It's all about the people, not just with your employees, but mainly with your customers. And I'm looking and tracing my end users from, you know, 1998 when I initiated Dmantra, and I'm tracking and tracing their career path. And I see how they grow. And I'm in, you know, in touch with most of them through platforms like LinkedIn.

Yeah.

And, uh, that's, that's great because I believe that if you take care of your employees, they will take care the same way to their customers, to our customers. And it's all about the people. If someone subscribed to my services, I would like to make sure that she will be so amazing that she'll be promoted, right? And promoted and promoted and promoted. And so I'm helping my end user and my customers and my buyers to, you know, promote themselves in their careers.

Yeah, no, I love that. That's awesome. Tell us a little bit about yourself. Obviously, you have a slight accent. You've already mentioned Israeli music. Tell us about your life growing up.

Yeah, I have, as I call it, a South Boston accent. So yeah, I grew up in Israel, in Belgium, and in the UK. Probably about kind of 10 years, 5 years, 4 years, something around those lines. Learn computer science, first major, industrial manager, another good passion about process improvement, total quality management of the '80s. And then build up my first company through an MBA process at Babson in Wellesley, Massachusetts. I did the long MBA for 8 years. And every time I learned with a professor, how can I improve my company? And I, I learned, I learned a lot through that. So it was not a regular MBA, it was more, you know, a professional kind of executive MBA, uh, process. And, uh, you know, been in the Army for 4 years, built up my first company in 1998, as I mentioned. It was all about demand-driven supply network. It was a supply chain planning company that looks at, uh, first at demand, unconstrained demand, and then build up you know, the nodes of supply chain in the background. Worked with a lot of different verticals, including healthcare, Baxter Healthcare and Johnson& Johnson Medical Devices, Johnson& Johnson also on the pharmacy side, all the way from Sony Entertainment and Wendy's Food. You know, we did all— if you think about Wendy's, they have 150 menu items and we helped them plan down to 15-minute increment what people will order from the menu.

Wow.

So it was labor, it was meat, it was everything. And we built that in 2001. I think we delivered that one across all of their stores. That was fantastic implementation. So that was my first company.

No, that's pretty cool. I really like that. And the time in the Army, was it after you got your MBA? So you were here, you got your MBA, and then you went back, or before?

It was before. In Israel, you have the mandatory Mandatory army. I did four years. I learned electronics, learned electronic warfare. It was a fantastic professional experience, if you will. And then, and then after that, I joined Cytex. Not sure if all of your listeners remember Cytex. Cytex was a print-on-demand system. And so in the old days, when you wanted to print something, you went to a print shop. And you would give them, you know, a template and then the template, they would make the template and the template would actually then print itself. Later on when I joined, my group was in charge of using the PS/2 machine, IBM, in order to rip a digital print and do on-demand digital printing in colors. The idea was to use a Xerox machine like Agfa, Xerox, and others and be able to print. At the time it was Imaginary, 60 pages per minute, full color and full book. So you actually, you print it and then you, you, you combine it into a, into a, right?

Yeah.

And we couldn't do it over the internet. We actually build a hardware cartridge within the machine so you can actually rip the, the image fast enough to print it.

Yeah. Yeah, I remember those days. Tell us a little bit about SmartSense then. So what does SmartSense do?

So I joined SmartSense a little bit less than 3 years ago. SmartSense is well known for sensing as a service. We're an IoT company, but really, if you ask me, we are a data company, data-driven company or data company. As you know, sensors are amazing. They're becoming smaller. They're becoming with longer longevity. But what sensors do is they generate data, right? And so when you have a lot of data, what do you do with it? Well, you need machine learning algorithms, you need mathematical algorithm, you need AI, and then you need to understand with all of this data what's going right, what's going wrong. Whatever's going wrong, funnel it to someone, human, robot, cobots, whatever you need in order to go and fix it, right? So it could be as simple as, hey, the gasket needs to be replaced in a refrigerator so the temperature is excluded. There's an exclusion of, of, of on, on a specific asset. It could be power outages that, hey, there, there was a storm in Florida, power is out and the generator didn't kick in. You need to, someone needs to go and kick it in. Actually, someone needs to connect it all the way to AI tracking. a plasma shipment to a clinic, and it's going to arrive 3 hours early, but it's pretty warm outside, and we need to call the receptionist making sure, hey, it's coming in 20 minutes, 10 minutes, it's there, go outside, pick it up, put it in the fridge. So we don't need to delay shipments because, as you know, we're all about saving lives.

Yeah.

And if client come to get a treatment, it's better be ready with a full efficacy and, uh, uh, to, to be, you know, to, to treat the, the client.

Yeah, no, I love that. And Guy, what, what led you to that company? I mean, you know, you had all sorts of choices, you've done all sorts of exits. Obviously, you know, there was something about SmartSense that made you say, yeah, I'd like to be the CEO.

Yeah. So, uh, so yeah, so just, just before that, I was, uh, I built up in 2010, I built another company called Profitec that was all around prescriptive analytics, which means taking a lot of data and looking at what's working, what's not. And when something is not working, how about you just tell me what's not working instead of sending me another Excel, right? We are drowning, we were before drowning in different reports. Today we have machine learning and AI that tells you things about the data. Data. But in 2010, we didn't have all of that. And so we built that specifically catered for retail and CPG at the time. I sold the company to Zebra Technologies, which is— Zebra Technologies, people don't know, great company, run by a friend of mine, Bill Burns. And they acquired Motorola about 10 years ago. And so all the Motorola Enterprise, all the handheld devices, Scanners, printers, and what I learned there is about IoT. And so I learned about hardware and software and combine how they work in harmony together, and what's the hardware cost structure profit, and then what's the software profit and some costs that you have in software that you don't have in hardware. And all of that complexity was amazing. After when I left, I left to join a few boards as a board of directors, and I met with Ron. Who was the CEO of Digi International. And when we spoke about it, he, he was selling me on SmartSense. So SmartSense was actually a combined 5 companies that being acquired together in order to dominate the IoT market for business to business, right? Temperature monitoring, CO2, pressure differential, et cetera. So what, what I did is in order to find, is that, is that really what I want to do? I did 3 things. Number one, I reached to some executive customers of Smartson. And the executive told me, hey guys, you know, this is a technology that does just work. And by the way, the team that they have is unbelievable. But there's some miscommunication. That's the position that they took. That's kind of the aggregate of all the messages. So, you know, if you have the technology and you have the people and all you need is fine-tuning, that's easy. Then I looked at analysts and with the analysts, I spoke about the IoT market and the IoT market is very— was, now it's even more, but it's fragmented. What do I mean by that? If you build a new house, let's say today, at the time, 3 years ago, I actually finished my house. And when I built it, I had my shades, one application. I had my lights, another application.

Yeah.

I had the Ring, it's Amazon Ring, is another application. I had Sonos music.

Right?

Another application, right? So in order to just get in the house, I had to open up like 3, 4, 5 applications and run it through it. And I said, you know, what is it in the business world? And then I found out in the business world, it's even worse.

Yeah.

You have a lot of IoT. For every little thing, you need another application. They don't mesh, they don't work together. You have a lot of antennas, you have a lot of small things, large things. And so what I saw is that there's no dominant one player. It's very fragmented. And the customers are asking for someone to come and make it all make sense. Take all the data, run it in one system, and create kind of an ERP for IoT. Get all the data in and then streamline it. And then third, I went to the board. And I said, you know what? I'm willing to take the position. This is what I need from you besides small investment to make the culture better. I would like to expand sensorability. What does that mean? You know, we are amazing at temperature, at humidity, but, you know, we don't have pH sensors. I don't want to build pH sensors. I want to partner with anybody. They have great sensors. I want to be able to have, you know, we have a We have here, I have a food probe.

Yeah.

It's amazing. But you know, there's other food probes. I would like to be able to integrate with any Bluetooth food probe. And so they said, are you crazy? You're going to sign up agreement with your competitors? I said, yeah, that's what's being called competition.

Right. Yep.

My Thermoworks today, they're great partners of ours, right? Well, they make those as well. They make maybe even better than those food probes, but they don't make an IoT backbone, right?

Right.

So if you buy their food probe and they are great, they will have an app that only does that.

Right.

Right? What if our app can connect to their sensors, connect to other competitors' sensors, connect also to our sensors, And certain sensors, we have the best. And so we'll recommend only us. But if a customer already bought a sensor, why do I care?

Yeah.

I'll help them and add value from a backbone perspective. And the board said, you know, it sounds interesting. By the way, COVID just ended. You guys doubled up the company through COVID before you joined. COVID is over, Guy. I need you to double up the company in 3 years. If you're up to that, whatever you need, we're here. And I said, let's do it. And so, you know, 3 years later, here we are, doubled up.

Yeah, that's awesome. No, that's great. And it shares a lot more about SmartSense and what it does, sort of this platform. So let's talk about healthcare in SmartSense. So SmartSense was in other industries like retail, grocery, pharma, and you've moved into healthcare. Can you talk a little bit about Some examples how you help in healthcare?

Yeah, absolutely. You know, we we dominate the retail pharmaceutical market before. So any retail pharmacy that you can imagine, anything from CVS, Walmart, Walgreens, you know, Kroger, who else? Wegmans, anyone besides one large one. Everyone else is using using SmartSense. And and why? It's because of the ease of use, the implementation, a lot of things, right? But when I looked at all of the capabilities that we have and I looked at the challenges in healthcare, it's very, very similar, which is I have a critical supply chain, right? Which means I cannot have anything but 100% connectivity. Because if I am running a plasma between different hospitals, or from a hospital to a clinic, and I, to create that plasma will take me a year if I lose it, I need 100% truth positive to know where it is, what's the temperature, what's the humidity, and making sure that it gets all the way to the pump. So when the cancer treatment or anyone else try to use it, it's at full capacity. That's one option, one area. You know, besides hospital pharmaceutical, we also have other areas that are critical. Example would be pressure differential in operating room, right? Well, guess what? In pharmaceutical, you need to have clean rooms, and the clean rooms have 5 doors that you need to go through in order to get to the clean room. Very similar to operating room.

Right.

You need to be able to have the pressure outside at all time, look at it. And if anything fails, you need an immediate 1 alert, 2 alert, 3 alert, right? Because if there's an operation going on now, someone needs to know and act about it right now immediately because it's about life. And so other things was even the temperature of the bed. Well, if you have a patient there, you want to make sure that they're comfortable. The whole time, and so the temperature of the bed, temperature of the of the the room, the humidity. What about CO2 and oxygen? What about incubation? We have you know Minnesota Children is a great customer of ours. They actually I I have a quote from the CIO there that talks about the fact that we we save lives. What we do is we help those poor kids that were born. Early, too early. So, for example, we save lives. When you have the infant being born and not all of their organs are fully deployed yet, fully ready, they're in the incubator and you need to make sure that the CO2, the temperature, everything is there at the right time. But we make sure that they don't get yet a third strike by Making sure that the milk that was pumped for them is also in the right temperature. So when we need to feed them, we have it and we have it again with the right status and it will not get them harmed. Right?

Right.

So think about it. If you step back and you think about everything that is going on in the hospital, we can help in a lot of different areas.

Yeah.

And then Yeah, and then there's new areas as well that we're expanding with.

Yeah, and Guy, and to your earlier point, you know, a lot of times in hospitals it's been best of breed and you use all these different vendors and sensors and all kind of stuff. And it's like the house example you were giving earlier, it's just too hard to manage, it's too costly. And the nice thing again about SmartSense is sort of enables a platform approach and you don't have to reinvest if you already have something that works. You just put it on the same platform. So, that's really cool. Yeah, how do you work with your customers for innovation? Whether it's healthcare or outside of healthcare, you were talking about some things that are forthcoming. So, how does that process work?

Yeah, so we have a few areas of innovation. We don't want to innovate in a shell. We want to innovate with customers. So, we have our board of advisors. We have some amazing innovative people. I'm just like you. And we're running ideas for 6 months, 12 months, 18 months, and 2 years out. What are we planning and getting feedback? That makes sense. That doesn't make sense. Hey, you're going to compete with that. You're going to compete with this. There's maybe easier solution out there that you were not aware of. Oh, maybe we can partner with someone and do it earlier. So you get some ideas of what is the, what, you know, what are the needs in the market? And then when we have something coming out, for example, we have something called SmartSense T1, which is part of our new Voyage platform. It's a credit card size, temperature monitoring, humidity, light, and real-time location services. It actually uses cellular technology, not RFID, not Apple Tag, but cellular technology to tell you where it is and The fact that it's moving or standing or you know or getting a shock or got into an accident or anything like that. And so now you can put that and help with anything that is care at home. For example, if the nurse goes to a care at home and she has the most expensive pump, a good wheelchair, you know whatever equipment she needs on those equipments, you put the Voyage T1. And then in a central location, you know where your assets are. You know, what is the distribution of care at home compared to in the hospital? And you can see, you know, hey, you know, the nurse came back and she forgot the pump. And where is the pump? Oh, the pump is in that address. Let's call the guy, John Smith, and get the pump back, right? So you lose less, you know where it is. And also you can then analyze on a KPI perspective efficiency and effectiveness of the use of all of those equipments, right? Because a lot of times people are saying, hey, we have a lot of pumps. You always say that it's missing. What's the usage like, right? What's the percentile usage? Because if the nurse hide it somewhere on third floor in, in a closet, no one can use it besides, besides him or her, right? And so you can look at it from an equipment, from a usage perspective, where it is, you lose less. And obviously, as I mentioned before, if it's including any medicine, you can monitor also the efficacy of it through the temperature that it's being held at.

Yeah, that's really intriguing and great examples and real-world use cases. I want to pivot in our last couple of minutes towards leadership. What would you share with younger leaders who are earlier in their career, Guy? who want to be a CEO someday like yourself, are there one or two things that you would say to them to help them?

Yeah, yeah, a few things. Number one, again, I will repeat, it's all about the people, right? Take care of your people, take care of your customers, and it will— that's where I fulfill myself. My passion is the career of our customers. Another thing is that perfection And I think I heard it also in one of your old, uh, podcasts, but perfection is the enemy of innovation. When you innovate stuff, innovate, fail fast, and improve. I also heard another podcast that talked about fail fast. That, that's bullshit. Don't, don't fail at all. Well, of course, don't fail at all, but if you fail, learn. And it's better to fail fast than not fail, you know, than fail later.

Yeah.

Because then the cost in So it's better when you innovate to try and try and repeat. When you lose, even when you lose a sale, do a loss analysis, learn. You can learn more about a loss than about a win, right?

Yeah.

When you win, also do a win analysis for sure, but it's much easier because everyone's singing the Kumbaya and are excited. But when you lose, you should actually harvest it more and learn about what do you need to do Better next. Another thing I would say, I think I enjoyed from my MBA a lot. I enjoyed it a lot. And when I'm speaking with other students of MBA, they are lacking the professionalism. They are lacking the, you know, the theory to practice. So if you do an MBA, do it around a certain practice. Do executive MBA, do an MBA on a practice so you can actually anything that you being taught. You can execute and then learn. In my first company, I actually hired the CEO. I hired my boss, if you will, Bill Siebel. I learned so much from him, right? He was, he was a true leader. He was one of my mentors. I learned a lot. Another thing is find your mentors and you can have multiple, right? You can have a mentor for how to work with different people. You can have a mentor about a financial mentor. You can have a mentor. For innovation, you can have multiple mentors, uh, but find those that gives you real advice, real feedback, constructive feedback, right? Uh, someone that is not afraid to tell you the truth because a lot of time when you're asking your employees, how, how am I doing? Uh, they may not tell you, uh, the real deal and you want them, you want to hear the real deal. Otherwise you cannot improve.

Yeah, no, I, I love it. What's one thing that you learned the hard way?

A lot of things. By the way, I was just telling, I do, I do something that I call Breakfast with Guy here at SmartSense. And so randomly every Thursday morning at 8 o'clock, we have up to 8 people, no VPs, just me and them talking about any topic that they want besides politics, right? It's pretty hard nowadays, but besides any topic. And so one of the questions was, Give me a fluctuation point, something that you learn in your career. Yeah. And I mentioned that Bill and I, my, the CEO that I hired, we went to, uh, see Mattel and we went to Mattel CEO and we were competing against Minogistics, who was another supply chain, uh, company at the time. Um, and, uh, the CEO asked us, uh, you know, what is unique about your people that will make me partner with you and not with a competitor? And me coming out of, from a command and control environment, being in the Army, I was starting to say, you know, we are going through rigorous interviews and tests and everyone is perfect. And Bill immediately shut me, and I saw his face, immediately shut me down. And he says, listen, when you walk in our office, you can feel the passion for supply chain.

Hmm.

You can feel the passion for demand management. You can feel the passion for our customers. And that's what we care about is our customers' success. And through that, and I will not forget that meeting. That was a meeting that changed my way of how I'm looking at other people and how I'm looking at my company for sure. But that was just one. I have many more.

Yeah. Exactly. That's a good one. That's a really important one. We talked about so many different things, including some Israeli music, which we're going to add to our playlist. But we also talked about sort of your formation and sort of the multicultural that you came out of. And then we talked a lot about SmartSense, and you gave some great examples about SmartSense in healthcare and how it's utilized and can be utilized further. And we talked about the whole concept of the platform that SmartSense enables. And then we spent a lot of time on leadership. You dropped a lot of golden nuggets on us in terms of Some things that we can do as aspiring, not just aspiring leaders, actually, as I look at my notes, but tenured leaders as well that we should be doing. And then finally, I want to give you the last words. Is there something we missed or anything that you want to double down on?

Maybe 2 things. On the one thing that you, when you mentioned on another kind of nuggets for another leader is that leadership is not a role. Leadership is not a title. You know, you can be a leader by, from the side, impacting others. When I built my first company, I was not the CEO. I was not even a VP when I started. I just started as, hey, I'm going to implement it with customers. I want to see how to implement things. And I hired the CEO as a part of the committee. I was co-founder number 5. And it was a lot of learnings, right? A lot of learnings. And the leadership was from the side. I can tell you there were days I was frustrated that people didn't listen to me, That's okay. That's part of the leadership, right? That's part of the role. If you're not being listened to, maybe you did it the wrong way. Try to impact it differently.

Yeah.

And I learn and I change. The other thing was about IoT, when we talked about the fragmentation that we see in the market, we want to have one IoT backbone. I would call it, I would like to commercialize the business IoT, right? I want to make it as easy for people to use it in the hospital As it is to just use it at home. When you want to take the shades down and at home, you click shades, the level, and it's done.

Right?

So why in hospitals we're behind? Why do we we don't you know we don't use the same type of advanced technology? And I call it it needs to be no cables, no wires, no batteries, no power. It needs to be very simple longevity. Simple to use, easy to train, right? No one reads manuals anymore as well. So easy to train and then easy to scale. I think that's what I would say. Whatever you innovate around, make it kind of consumables, commercial type, ease of use, and make it ready for scale. That would be it. Yeah.

No, Guy, this is, as I said, extremely, extremely formative. Thank you so much for being a guest on Digital Voices.

Thanks for having me. Thank you for listening to Digital Voices Podcast with Ed Marx. If you enjoyed this episode, subscribe on your preferred streaming service and leave a rating and review. And most importantly, thanks again for listening.