Centralizing Healthcare Data with Ardy Arianpour

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You want tech and tacos, Tacos and tech you know we got tacos and tech is on smash border green guacamole keeper countins counting beans Contador quentan frijoles found us trying to raise some queso la vida San Diego school of rappy rapping fire tortillas round jalapenos in these modern times a crappy beer and coffee My coding yoga posse fold the body origami we be surfing coronado eating tacos El gordo, the taco stand in pesto lucha libre and sombrero got a shout out to cost angels by the ocean Watch the sunset la Hoya shores Entrepreneurs trying to get funded When San Diego Startup Week is popping in the summer Oceanside, the Tijuana esti be full of hustlers from couch surfing to penthouses right on the beach Tech leaders who who believe stars are within reach we interview and founders who be shooting for the Moon SDTechOS with your host, Neil Bloom.

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Welcome to the Tacos and Tech podcast where we discover cutting edge San Diego technologies and the builders making it happen. I'm your host, Neil Blum, San Diego's tech ambassador. And together you're going to put a face to the name of today's tech leaders with our own blend of local lifestyle.

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And welcome back to the Tacos and Tech Podcast. I'm your host, Neal Bloom and I'm really excited to have this conversation here. We're going to talk about managing your health data, making sure that we actually have access to it. And I think 2020 really put that in a big spotlight where we started seeing our doctors virtually and everything was all over the place. But one company in particular, Seekster, is taking this to a whole new level and so really excited to interview the co founder and CEO of Seekster, a local company, Ardi Aryanpour. Welcome to the show.

It's a pleasure to be here, Neil. Thanks for being an ambassador for the tech community in San Diego. As a San Diegan, we're so proud to see everything that you've been doing.

No, we're all proud together to be working on this together, that's for sure. So thank you for that. And we love to spotlight great companies. So want to give us a quick overview of what Seekster is?

Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, seeks. Your story is really special because I think it's a complication of all my careers that I've had that started from San Diego early days to founding Seekstir in 2016. We're a healthcare technology company that has pioneered patient centric interoperability. And I think you touched up on it at the beginning here, where, you know, health data being siloed and the pandemic accelerating digital health in ways that we never imagined before. Seekster was definitely timing, but what people forget is we spent five years breaking down those very hard data silos, whether they were, you know, episodic EHR data silos, baseline genetic DNA silos, or, you know, wearable medical device IoT silos, and put it all into one platform. A lot of people think of US as the Mint.com of health data with the Salesforce.com business model. So we're not direct to consumer, but our business model is B2B2C.

Got it. Okay, that's exciting. So even more than the data that you and I are seeing in our Apple health app every day, there's a lot more behind the scenes, and we're going to dive into that a little bit, but we want to get to know you a little bit. You know, how did you find yourself going down the biological sciences and genomic data route? Where'd you grow up and what'd you study in school?

Yeah, I was really lucky. I was very fortunate to have landed in san Diego in 1986. I'm of Persian descent. I was born in Tehran, Iran, came straight to San Diego in 1986 when most people were moving to San Francisco, New York or L. A. But my family was very entrepreneurial and they wanted to go as far down south on the coast as possible. And, you know, San Diego is as far as you can go still, I guess. Right. The journey really started when I got my first job at the Salk Institute when I was 16 years old working for Dr. Ron Evans, who actually did his postdoc and inherited Joanna Salk's laboratory on the top, top floor. And that really allowed me at a very young age to not only get some gas money to go down to the beach and hit the surf when I was younger, but at the same time learn a little bit about science and I was just touched by the abundance of opportunity within science. But one thing I realized at an early age was that the business was totally missing. There was a lot of great science being done. But how do you actually churn great science or medical science or data science into business models? I remember vividly seeing reps coming in, selling to the labs and I was thinking, oh, I could do that. You know, what are, how are those guys doing that? And these were, you know, 25 to 30 year old, you know, sales reps from Fisher Scientific that would sell, you know, some sort of instrument, PCR instruments or, you know, microarray instruments from Affymetrics back in the day, even before, you know, Illumina was born.

Interesting. So did you go and do it? I feel like that's what you're about to tell us. You're like, I could do this. And so I did it.

Yeah, absolutely. That's a whole, you know, cocktail conversation. But from there went to get my undergraduate degree in biological sciences. I was pre med, realized quickly that you didn't have to be a scientist to change science. You didn't have to be a physician or doctor to change medicine and you didn't have to be a geneticist to change, you know, genetics, I guess you could say, was very interested in combining business with science. And so after graduating in 2002, I jumped right into getting my feet wet within sales and marketing and then became an executive within biotech in my late 20s. And then from there landed with a couple different startups that were just game changing for both patients and even for myself as an entrepreneur and couldn't be more thankful and grateful for those opportunities.

That's awesome. Specifically in Southern California, I think you've seen the rise of the science and biological institutes turn into businesses. I think like you just said, you've been a part of some of those, specifically in the genomic space. Right. What has it been like to see Southern California become this genomics powerhouse?

Yeah, it's been great. I think Southern California always gets a bad rap of not enough DC money down here. All the capital money is either in Boston or San Francisco and things like that. And again, folks like yourself that are bringing attention to the tech community, the health tech community, sciences, just overall opportunities is just great because that never existed. You know, I think my journey would have been a lot easier if folks like yourself even existed way before. But I'm glad that it's finally, you know, San Diego's making its mark because of companies like Seekster, because of people like yourself, that are telling these incredible stories. And the entrepreneurial journeys are so important from what we learn on what not to do versus what to do. And I think everyone thinks they know everything. It's the fact that we don't know anything and we discover new things every day, new opportunities. Genomics was really breaking point, I think because if you come from genomics background, you are forward thinking. I was fortunate to be one of the first 50 people to be clinically whole genome sequenced and taking next gen sequencing to the clinic. So while Illumina was making great instrumentation, the companies that I worked for and when I was running BD and creating genomic services divisions with certain companies that I did my stints with before starting Seekster, that was really important because it allowed us to understand the power of taking technology and applying it to both data science, bioinformatics and overall, you know, how do you get the patient and family members involved.

What's also interesting is the level of talent that came together that make those companies obviously right, which is a great pool of talent to have for working on your next company once those have success. Companies that you know that you've been involved with, like Ambri and Pathway are huge talent pools that everyone's passionate about this industry and they're ready to work on the next thing too. Once you've solved that, which is obviously something you've tapped into. I'm sure that kind of plays into the founding story of Seekster. Like how did it actually come to be? I'm sure you were working by day and ideating by night, but how did it, you know, what was the catalyst for it all?

Yeah, it's such a great segue too Neil, because Seekster wouldn't happen if it wasn't for San Diego. It wouldn't happen if it wasn't for that talent pool that you were talking about. And it wouldn't happen if it wasn't for those experiences that you have with those talents and you know, what you can actually trailblaze at your past companies. You know, our CTO and co founder Dr. Shawn Lee and I, you know, built Ambry and Pathway and we learned a lot about data being siloed. More particularly we were, you know, two or four people that was part of the SCOTUS decision in 2013, inferring gene patents that involved myriad genetics fight in federal court that we prevailed on as well as understanding where the essence of data is not just DNA data. DNA data doesn't tell the whole story. And so with Seekster, it was really after our stints there where we wanted to create a platform that could bring all data in a common form, not just genetic and genomic data. We were really tired of dealing with just lab data. And we wanted to create a system that you can actually connect all the labs together, connect all the wearables together, connect all of these tailwinds that were coming through. Right. And if we go back in time of Even, you know, 2016, wearables weren't that big of a deal back then. It was just coming around. I remember telling my team that we need to include wearables, and they were pushing back, saying, why do you want to include wearables, wearable data within this platform? And it's because we had the vision early on that everyone would have a wearable device. And now we all do, right? If it's not a Garmin or an Apple Watch or a Fitbit or whatever you carry, everyone is tied to some kind of wearable. And then, you know, if you want to go further down the road with even more innovation happening in San Diego with Dexcom, with the diabetes markets, continuous glucose monitoring devices, that's a whole nother segment on medical devices where data is being siloed, where data is just not talking together. The UCSD data is not talking to the Dexcom data, The UCSF data is not talking to the UCSD data. The Kaiser data is not talking to the Apple Watch data. So this big problem, you know, we discovered was interoperability, and that was a complete accident. Neil, I wish we could say we could take all the credit. Like we knew what we were doing and we knew what interoperability was, but that's not the case. We accidentally fell on the largest health care problem, and everyone knows about that now from 2020 and the pandemic because of the experiences within virtual care and just certain things that were forefront every day on CNN or Fox News or whatever channel MSNBC that you use and view within the pharma segments and within just data in general. And I think Seekster fits right on the cusp of healthcare and technology. And we couldn't be more proud to do it with a group of strong folks that have ties to San Diego. We've kept the company here. We just want to give back and make the biggest impact on patient lives. And that's our goal.

That's awesome.

I love that.

And you're totally right on the wearable piece. I can't tell you how many connected devices we're bringing into our home now between tracking our water drinking now with smart bottles, with Scales with everything else and they all need to talk to each other, otherwise what's the point of spending all this money on this, you know, quantified self tech. And I'm glad that it's having its moment now for more than just like biohackers. So awesome. Take us through then. You know, kind of what the product looks like today and what the latest has been because of the pandemic.

Yeah, absolutely. You know, 2020 was really our breakout year. In 2016, no one wanted to talk to us, no one believed what we are doing. 2017, being a couple of conferences and presenting, people are wondering, is this really real? And then in 2018 things really changed After I got a call from Bill Gates and Bill Gates wanted to meet. That's when we really knew we had something. And I owe all of the thanks to us taking it to enterprise because of Bill Gates. Bill Gates specifically spent three and a half hours with me and the platform and understood, you know, how this affects the Alzheimer's community. And both my grandparents actually passed away due to Alzheimer's disease. No reason to be sorry. It's all part of life. But my mom's mom, who was my number one fan, I guess you could say, lives within the matrix of Seedster because we filed patents early on on what I call a multigenerational health record. Imagine now I'm saying this, you understand that people understand it. The audience probably on the podcast, hopefully you won't understand it, but in 2016, 2017, people thought we were nuts. They're like, what? Multi generational health record, individualized health record? Why do you need that? For what purpose now there's, you know, so many distinct use cases and we're so proud to share. From little Seekster here to growing up in San Diego, we are one of the only top 10 pharma backed digital health startups. And Takeda made a investment in Seekster in 2020 and that changed everything. With them running through diligence on the marketplace, even with some pseudo, I guess, look alike competitors, even in San Diego that didn't make the cut because they didn't have real technology. How Seekster really differs from anything else out there is we built this foundational technology that saves lives. You know, it's been covered by newsgroups and we've had various different patient stories, random people where they've been able to bring together seven different providers into one place. Or if you use Dr. Eric Topol's example, the first patient, the first innovator, the first digital health futurist. And sighted person, you know, in the world that in 2018 shared his data and said, step in the right direction. You know, he was on a couple of competing boards when he did that, but he always put the patient first. The same way that we've kept our mission, putting the patient at the center of healthcare to disrupt all these data silos.

I love that. So does that mean that's a big focus is getting patients on or because you're a B2B2C, you really work on those partnerships first and your partners get the patients on. Like, what's your direction of getting to the end user patient piece?

Yeah, in 2016 and 2017, we brought on, you know, a couple thousand patients and they told us how to build a platform, how to modify the platform. User design and user experience was very important to me. And so instead of our wonderful engineers telling us how we should build this, we had patients telling us how we should build this. We kind of took a backwards approach to everything, to be honest with you. We learned a lot from that. Now that delayed our business models a little bit, but at the end of the day, we just have a killer app, killer product in health tech. And it is B2B2C. And so it gets deployed as a white label to enterprises. And that could be to a major payer, that could be to a major pharma company, that could be to a groundbreaking startup that just raised, you know, hundreds of millions of dollars, such as Medical, that's using it for screening patients. And so we can fit in so many different ways. Think of us as the intel inside. We're not selling the computers directly to the enterprises or to the users. But our intel chip, the little Seekster chip, is empowering. It's enabling the whole environment, the ecosystem. And that's what's so powerful about Seekster and how it scales. We can scale from one patient to 50 million lives. It doesn't matter. And that's how we built the platform. And we have now 100% coverage of the medical record information in the United States. Not just digital records, but even the manual curated records as well. And so we created kind of like an SDK of SDKs.

Awesome. Obviously, the pandemic you said brought the industry to light. What did it do to your business besides the investment? Like, what is now going into 2021 look like?

Yeah, you know, 2020, we grew, I don't know, by like 760 something percent. It was just like all of a sudden we went from like zero to, you know, a thousand miles per hour. And it was personally really hard for me not to be traveling because I'm such an extroverted person. I spent, you know, I don't know, 2 million miles traveling for Seedster in five years. And then right when you cut that off, needed to figure out, okay, what are we really going to do? So we spent 20 hours a day on these zooms, on the Google hangouts, on the Microsoft Teams like the rest of the world. But we really got the focus on our customers and we really got the focus on the pain points that seeks to really solve. And by bringing together real time data, hitting on real world data and real world evidence was our sweet spot for sure. And the pandemic accelerated, I think digital health by a minimum of five years. If the pandemic didn't happen, I'm not saying seekstra wouldn't be where it is today. We would be still struggling to try to find various different use cases and customers. But the pandemic accelerated that for us and our technology was a perfect product market fit.

So what is, what's the focus going into the rest of this year and now the next few years?

Yeah, in 2021, you know, we're going really hard into decentralized trials. That was something new that happened for us at the beginning of, you know, I would say at the end of December to the beginning of January here, just a couple months ago. So decentralized trials really need, you know, a tool that can aggregate and visualize all of that, this health data that we're talking about. And so we're really focused around that, but we also have lots of different opportunities beyond pharma. We're really focused within life sciences in the pharma sector. We're a data driven company, a health care technology company that is bringing innovation and innovative technology to enterprises so that they can do their jobs better. And whether that's advancing certain drugs faster to market, post market surveillance for drugs or just bringing together real time, real world Data, those are three big things that we're focused on for 2021.

That's awesome. That's huge. I see some good partnerships, collaborations with local, other companies who I know are involved doing that too. So good to see some San Diego interwovenness happening with I think, areas of focus for you.

Yeah, absolutely. Look, we're happy to talk to anyone that's interested in this space. If we can enable you and if we can help another patient, another life, we're all about that. So that's our mission. I love it.

Well, our mission here on The Tacos and tech podcast is to spotlight great tech builders and great tacos. And we got to know you've been here for a bit now you got a favorite taco spot.

It's so hard, Neil. So, yeah, I would say I would pick three. So here's how I would categorize it. Back in the 80s, my family and I would go to Casa de Bandini. Back in the day, it used to be located in the del Mundo, I think it was called area, the cultural area in Old Town. But it moved to Lecadia and it changed a little bit. But back in the day, if you wanted a really good taco or margarita, like, you know, a gallon worth of margarita to go wash down your amazing, you know, four pound carne asada burrito with, you know, all the melted cheese over it, it would be pasta de bandin. But if you're on the coast, ever since the 80s, my brother and I and family have been going to Roberto's in Del Mar. That's just, you know, a spot off of Carmel Valley Road right there, right in the heart of Del Mar, right before you get the Torrey Pines Beach. And it's great because we'll go for runs there and then, you know, you'll load up on a, on a, on a taco or burrito and then you'll feel really bad and then you'll go for a run tomorrow and hopefully you won't do it again. And then if you're inland, if you're inland, it's got to be sombreros. So I grew up with all of my, you know, high school friends in Scripps Ranch, families from Scripps Ranch and still live there. We grew up, you know, going to sombreros when, when I was 16, the first, you know, place that we stopped by and we loaded up because I turned 16 before all my other friends was sombreros. And we would get something called a 199 and that means $1.99. And to this day, I go and I order a 199. The difference is it's like $6.42. And what it is is side of beans, side of cheese, two rolled tortillas, some salsa and some carrots.

I love it. The $1.99. We'll look for it. Sombrero is the very first California burrito I ever had. So it holds a very special near and dear place to, to my heart. They obviously have gotten their shout out from Blink 182, right? But yeah, we know them, and we love them, and those were great picks. You and I have shared tacos at a few other spots I know near your Miramar Pyramid headquarters. So, you know you can't go wrong with good tacos around Sotos.

Yeah, that's right. Yeah, yeah, Sotos. Yep, that's right. I didn't. The only reason why I didn't mention that one is because I already knew you knew about it. But a lot of people don't know about Sotos too, and they just revamped it. I mean, you know, it's if. If you haven't gone there off Miramar Road. It's such a great spot. Amazing spot.

Yeah.

Now I'm getting hungry. When are we going to go to lunch again?

I know, right? We got to do that.

Well, Artie, this is great.

I'm really glad we got to tell the story now, you know, especially with the arc that you've had on it. But it feels also like you're also just getting started too, on this whole other whole new journey here, the next chapter. So we're really excited for you. Congrats on everything so far and thanks for being on the podcast.

Thank you so much, Neil. Thanks very much for having us. And you know, it's always day one and everyone is seeking health data, so, you know, that's why we started Seekster. Love it.

Thanks, Artie.

Thanks for joining us on the tacos and Tech podcast with Neil Blum. Thanks again to Cox Business for helping make this possible by expanding the reach of the San Diego tech ecosystem. Big shout out to School of Rap for our rad intro music. And thanks as well to Nest Podcast Network where we are recording live inside their studio at Nest Co Working in Bankers Hill. You can find Neil Bloom on Twitter eelbloom as well as fresh brewed tech and tacos and Tech Pod on Twitter too.

Startups get the party. Startups get the party started. Startups get the party. Startups get the party started. Startups get the party. Startups get the party started.

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