Venture Everywhere Podcast: Kate Lambridis with Scott Hartley
Kate Lambridis, co-founder of Human Health, chats with Scott Hartley, Managing Partner at Everywhere Ventures on episode 99: Human-Driven Health.
In episode 99 of Venture Everywhere, Scott Hartley, co-founder and managing partner at Everywhere Ventures, chats with Kate Lambridis, co-founder of Human Health, a Sydney-based health technology company making personalized healthcare accessible to everyone. Kate shares the deeply personal story behind Human Health, born from her children’s mysterious health challenges and navigating a broken healthcare system. She discusses how Human Health is building a consumer-first platform that empowers patients to own their health data, get contextual insights, and unlock solutions for chronic diseases through personalized care.
In this episode, you will hear:
Building a universal health app patients can use to navigate their health.
Empowering patients to own their health data and receive personalized insights.
Raising from investors who understand the long-term vision.
Capturing patient-reported data that other companies don’t have access to.
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TRANSCRIPT
00:00:04 VO: Everywhere Podcast Network.
00:00:14 Jenny Fielding: Hi, and welcome to the Everywhere podcast. We’re a global community of founders and operators who’ve come together to support the next generation of builders. So the premise of the podcast is just that, founders interviewing other founders about the trials and tribulations of building a company. Hope you enjoy the episode.
00:00:33 Scott: Hi, everybody. I’m Scott Hartley, co-founder and managing partner of Everywhere Ventures. I’m super excited to be here today with Kate Lambridis. Kate is the co-founder of Human Health based in Sydney, Australia.
00:00:44 Scott: Human Health is a health technology company that’s on the mission to really make personalized healthcare accessible to everyone. So really, the future of personalized medicine.
00:00:53 Scott: It was founded in 2022. What you’re really thinking about is how to reimagine health data, how it’s captured, how it’s used and how it’s applied to give people a more holistic look at their health.
00:01:05 Scott: Kate, you’ve had a full, amazing background. Originally from South Africa. Got your start in South Africa as somebody that spent a lot of time with Groupon, some of the Rocket Internet companies that were spinning up out of SA.
00:01:18 Scott: And then I want to hear all about making the move to Australia and what brought you there. Obviously rose through the ranks at Canva or on a crazy journey of a rocket ship there, rising through the growth of Canva to being a senior product manager and a group lead on all the ecosystem and product operations. So Kate, thank you so much for your time and welcome to the podcast.
00:01:40 Kate: Thanks so much, Scott. It’s so good to be here.
00:01:43 Scott: We were reminiscing. The last time that we got to meet in person was at an Indonesian restaurant in Venice Beach, California.
00:01:51 Kate: It’s so funny. I feel like we were so broad eyed and bushy tailed about being founders. But if I look back now, I feel like we knew nothing. We’ve learned so much over the last few years. It was such an early part of our journey, that first trip out to the US to meet people. The product was still very much a dream at that point. I think back very fondly on those times.
00:02:10 Scott: And you guys had a major announcement even back then with raising one of the largest pre-seed rounds in Australian history, you and Georgia, as two female founders. Incredible.
00:02:22 Kate: That’s right. We actually didn’t know that. It was interesting. We did the interview with the AFR and then they phoned us to say, “Hey, did you know that you guys raised the largest round?” And we were like, “No, we did not have a clue actually.”
00:02:37 Kate: It’s funny, we have such mixed emotions about that. I feel like on the one hand, obviously we’re really proud of that. But on the other hand, we feel sad that women get such a small amount of VC funding that that had to be considered the largest round.
00:02:49 Kate: If you compare that to the largest male round, it’s very different. Dwarfs in comparison. And so I think it was an interesting moment. We were really proud to be an example of how that can be done, but also just reminds you how much still needs to be done to really uplift women in this space.
00:03:05 Scott: The fact that there needed to even be a light shined on that. So taking a step back, walk us through your journey. This is something that many people aspire to do what you and Georgia are doing at the helm of an incredibly fast growing, successful technology startup. But how did you get to where you are today?
00:03:23 Kate: So interesting, because I think for me, I never really aspired to be a founder. I fell into startup. I lost my mom and my dad as a teenager. And so when I got to university, I studied psychology. But in South Africa, that’s a really long journey to becoming qualified to see patients.
00:03:40 Kate: And you have to go and be in these very rural, difficult environments. I worried I didn’t have the emotional support structure around me or the financial structure frankly to walk that path. So I decided to do a post-grad in marketing so that I would have some skills I could get a job with.
00:03:56 Kate: Most of the people I graduated with went into advertising agencies and I got introduced to somebody who had a startup called Twangoo. They were doing group buying in South Africa and it sounded really interesting and creative. And so I said, “Yeah, I’m in. I’m keen. Let’s give this a go.”
00:04:12 Kate: A week later, the business was bought by Rocket Internet on behalf of Groupon. And so I was thrown into the startup world overnight with suddenly getting opportunities to be trained by people in Germany and in the US that nobody else in South Africa was getting exposure to. So it was really an accident.
00:04:28 Kate: I just loved that I was really young and that my inexperience was almost a benefit. When you’re really naive, you’re willing to give anything a go because you don’t know any better. And so I think that bodes really well in startup and you can grow really fast. And so I just really loved that ability to be creative, but never really aspired to be a founder.
00:04:47 Kate: I always looked at the founders I worked for and thought, “My God, you’re crazy. You work on this one problem all the time. You’re so intense.” I can’t imagine caring about a problem enough to make my whole life about it. I loved working on it, but I didn’t want that level of ownership day-to-day.
00:05:03 Kate: Ended up working a lot in e-commerce in South Africa and working for the largest e-commerce group right before I left. It was an Aspas backed group company and was just really lucky and had amazing experiences. But after a while you start to feel a little bit like it doesn’t have a huge amount of purpose. There’s only so much you can convince yourself that the convenience of getting people products really easily is doing good in the world.
00:05:25 Kate: I started to really crave wanting to do something a little bit more purpose driven. I got introduced to the folks at Canva on a trip. I was here on holiday in Sydney and we had applied for visas for Australia. We’d been given scarce skill visas. So we were considering moving.
00:05:42 Kate: I was really just trying to put feelers out and met Georgia, who was running product at the time and just really hit it off. They had been looking for a woman to come and run ecosystems for about a year. It was just really perfect.
00:05:54 Kate: And I actually ended up waiting a couple of months to make a start because I needed to immigrate and I moved over during COVID. But really felt that, for me, Canva was such a vision driven business. I felt that there was more purpose behind it, what it was trying to do, because people could design things and really uplift their lives and their businesses using the product.
00:06:12 Kate: And so that was a foray for me into something that felt more purpose driven. But really the turning point that led to Human was my children. So in the background to my professional career, I’ve got two kids. They’re now 10 and 7. They’ve just had birthdays.
00:06:26 Kate: But when my daughter was 17 months old back in South Africa, she came up in a rash one day. She had really high temperatures. I was a first time mom. They said it’s probably something viral, nothing to worry about. But over the next two months, she effectively disintegrated.
00:06:42 Kate: She stopped sleeping. She wouldn’t eat. She stopped speaking. She stopped responding to her name and playing with her toys and it was a pretty terrifying experience. We had this experience where the doctors just threw us out. They just said, “Look, there’s something wrong with her. We don’t really understand it. She’ll probably never speak and spend her life in an institution. Try speech therapy.”
00:07:02 Kate: And initially we were obviously traumatized by that information and then decided that we should take that into our own hands and try to find a solution. We just weren’t going to accept that as her fate.
00:07:14 Kate: I started a spreadsheet. I started tracking all of her symptoms. I would spend hours on PubMed and ClinicalTrials.gov and chatting to researchers and in Reddit threads and Facebook groups. And I would come up with what are potential treatments that could help her. And then I would test them and I would track whether they were helping or not. I was running little mini clinical trials in my home on my own child.
00:07:36 Kate: Slowly but surely we started to be able to get her symptoms under control. Fast forward to today, she’s 10 years old. She’s in a mainstream school. She has friends. She does homework, and she doesn’t stop talking.
00:07:47 Kate: She’s actually a really amazing singer now, which is… I always say is the best “fuck you” she could have ever have given all the doctors who said she wouldn’t amount to anything. So I had this crazy journey with her.
00:07:57 Kate: When we moved to Australia in the middle of COVID, we felt like our daughter’s going to be okay. We don’t really understand what happened, but let’s put it behind us and move on with our lives. It felt like the crescendo at the end of a movie. I was like, “Okay, new country, new job, kids are okay.”
00:08:12 Kate: And then 10 months into that immigration, the same thing happened to our son. He came up in a rash one day. I took a selfie lying in bed with him, sent it to my husband and said, “Something’s wrong with Leo. I think the same thing’s happening.” And he was like, “Don’t be ridiculous. It can’t possibly be the same thing.”
00:08:25 Kate: And it was. Our son just went downhill really quickly. In the middle of all that, Georgia and I caught up for dinner and we were talking about what I was living through. It just occurred to us why isn’t there a product for this? Your health is arguably the most important thing in your life. And yet we do not have a universal product on everyone’s phone that patients can use to navigate their health.
00:08:46 Kate: And that was really the start of building Human. So ironically, now I totally understand how founders find a problem that they care enough about to make their whole life about it. For me, it was almost the other way around. My whole life was about this problem. And then I decided to start a business out of it. That’s really the backstory as to how this all happened.
00:09:05 Scott: It’s incredible to see sitting from the perch, at this point, evaluated about 12,000 businesses over eight years, invested in close to 300 companies and I’d say the vast majority of companies, they come out of an obsession around technology that’s changing a product that somebody wants to see in the world or this empath founder of a deep problem that somebody has experienced.
00:09:28 Scott: To your point, has almost wrapped around their life enough times that they’ve said, “I’m now motivated to build and solve for this problem that I’ve seen over and over again. Nobody else out there in the world is solving it.”
00:09:40 Scott: One thing I was going to say before you went into the personal story was just around, I think what startups and different roles that you can kind of take on in your life. But as a young person, one of the benefits of coming into a startup is what you talked about, this asymmetric ability to inject yourself in the world above where you feel like you should be or even deserve to be in some ways as a 20 year old, 21 year old.
00:10:03 Scott: And thinking about for folks that are listening that want to start companies or want to be involved in startups, it’s almost like a game of shoots and ladders. You get to climb a ladder or drop down a shoot and get injected into a part of the world that you get outsized responsibilities earlier in life than in other walks of life.
00:10:19 Scott: And so that move to Canva, talk a little bit about the backdrop of where was Canva at that point when you joined with Georgia and what was that journey and what were some of the things that you learned through that rocketship experience that you’re now bringing over to Human.
00:10:33 Kate: It was really interesting. It was such a different experience to what I had seen in South Africa. Rocket Internet was one of the first businesses that came into South Africa to grow these e-commerce companies. South Africa has a very different market. There’s a massive gap between the rich and the poor. And so there’s a lot of pressure.
00:10:50 Kate: A business either has to really take off or it just will not survive. There aren’t a lot of vision driven companies because there just isn’t the capital or the time to build really big dreams. The businesses have to hit the ground running and start making money on day one. That was almost like an Amazon style company. Very aggressive numbers driven, chasing revenue companies.
00:11:15 Kate: I think Canva was so different because it’s a very dream-based environment. Mel is very inspirational and really encourages people to think outside the box, come up with a big vision and then break it down into actionable steps. It’s encouraged to dream big. And so I think for me, that was a really exciting time to join Canva.
00:11:36 Kate: There was a couple hundred people when I first joined. When I left, there was a couple thousand. It scaled really, really quickly and it was really amazing to be part of that business, just taking off. Georgia was there in the really early days when it was five people around a table figuring out a screen.
00:11:52 Kate: I came in at the point that they were scaling and starting to really grow the teams. I started off in the ecosystems team, but ended up actually in product operations, helping scale the product team and hire and get all the people in that we needed to deliver on the vision.
00:12:04 Kate: But I think probably the biggest thing that I took from that experience was the evidence that you can have a crazy dream and you can make it happen. People always say it’s impossible until it’s done. And I think that was a very strong concept at Canva. And so I don’t think before that experience, I would have had the evidence to show me that I could go and try and build something like Human.
00:12:26 Kate: It is arguably a pretty insane mission. You wouldn’t try and build this. If you were just trying to be a founder who was going to turn some revenue and sell a company off through a private equity firm, this is not what you would do.
00:12:37 Kate: I could have made a lot more money doing something else. This is an incredibly difficult business to get right because there’s a lot of complexity in healthcare. It doesn’t have to be that way, but the incentives are all very misaligned. And so building the right product that’s needed isn’t supported by the economic system that exists in health right now.
00:12:57 Kate: You have to have pretty big balls to go and say, “I’m going to go build this product that should exist because I know in the future there’s going to be a leader in the space, even though it’s not going to slip straight into the system overnight.” That was a very big lesson that I took from Canva around how that can be done.
00:13:14 Kate: To touch on what you were saying before about young people being able to come into startups and grow really quickly, I think what’s amazing about startups is you get rewarded for doing. You don’t get rewarded for thinking. A lot of companies or jobs, you get rewarded for intellectual ideas and thinking. But in startups, it doesn’t matter if you have a great idea, it’s can you execute it or not?
00:13:34 Kate: And so I think that’s another lesson I took holistically from being in startups was ideas are dime a dozen. The idea that there should be one health app to rule them all isn’t particularly unique, but how we are thinking about putting that into action and what we think that looks like and the staging of that and actually being able to pull that off, that’s where the magic happens.
00:13:53 Kate: There’s this interesting tension that I’ve taken from my experience between having a really big vision and dream, but then also having the ability to break that down and actually deliver that over time.
00:14:05 Scott: One of the stories that I often tell, it’s the lead off story of the first chapter of the book that I wrote in 2017. But it’s actually about a theater arts major who went to Y Combinator, became a digital health founder and built a large-scale health company. One of the stories that she told was auditioning on Broadway. The fact that you walk into a room with 50 people, everyone’s given the same sheet of paper, everyone’s given the same lines for the script, yet only one person gets the part.
00:14:33 Scott: And it’s so relevant to the way the world works that everybody has the idea. All 50 people in the room have the same script. Only one person gets the part because they’re the one person who can really impute those words with the most emotional resonance, with the best storytelling. They can convince the world that they are the part and they’re the ones who end up on Broadway.
00:14:54 Scott: And it’s the same thing with founders. The number of people that say, I had the idea too. It’s not about the idea, it’s about the execution of the idea, about having the dream, but then about breaking down that dream into the actionable steps, like you mentioned.
00:15:06 Scott: I was listening to a conversation from Alfred Lin, who’s now running Sequoia. Alfred Lin was talking about how early revenue could sometimes be a red herring in the sense that it can be a distraction. If you don’t yet have product market fit, you can delude yourself into the early cycles of having pilot revenue and ACD. I think we’re seeing a lot of this with early AI pilots. What is actually repeatable and when does revenue signal that you’re on the right path?
00:15:36 Scott: In some sense, starting with the South African ethos and not to lump it down, but I think in a lot of markets like Latin America, in Africa, where you maybe have thinner capital markets, you have less access to venture capital so you have to be scrappier from the beginning to run a business that’s maybe revenue positive or even profitable to stay alive.
00:15:58 Scott: Versus the big dream vision that’s probably venture backed where you can think about category creation, inventing something into the world and backing it out, how do you sequence that or how do you think about the vision that Human has long-term and build the culture and build the team and think about those waypoints in the product?
00:16:17 Scott: Cause you’re always running on this treadmill of raising money and hitting the certain KPIs that are necessary to get the next juncture of capital infusion. But as a leader, at the company and given what you’ve learned, both in South Africa and in a more of a dreamer environment with Canva, how do you balance those two things?
00:16:36 Kate: It’s probably my biggest professional challenge on a day-to-day basis is navigating that tension. When we first raised capital, we only raised from angels and we were like, “We’re not going to raise from VC. VCs are evil. They’re going to put pressure on us to build all the wrong things.” That was our very naive initial reaction.
00:16:54 Kate: We realized there are some things that you can bootstrap. People love to talk about the concept of lean startup. I don’t think that works with really large category defining companies. You need to do a fair bit of R&D to figure out product market fit. If you’re building a booking app, there are patterns for that. There are plenty of other companies that you can look at that have proved best practice that you can follow. Those are not difficult businesses to get off the ground. Marketplaces, these are things that have patterns.
00:17:23 Kate: When you are building something that is completely novel, yes, you can take inspiration from different industries that you are building the product from scratch and figuring out how is this thing going to work, what are the standards of this. We realized pretty early on, we’re going to need to raise a decent amount of capital.
00:17:38 Kate: It’s funny because with Human, it’s a consumer product, but it’s also a deeply scientific product. The amount of money that’s considered a large amount of money, if you’re raising in consumer, looks very different to the larger amount of money if you’re raising for therapeutics.
00:17:52 Kate: And one of the things that has been particularly frustrating for us is a lot of investors think in those buckets. And because we came from a Canva background, we could really build relationships with consumer investors. But the pot of money you can raise looks very different.
00:18:07 Kate: Now, we got a lot of praise around raising the largest female round. I would love to have raised a lot more money than that. If we had, we would have been able to tackle this problem a lot faster. The fact that we are doing something at the intersection of consumer and science made that difficult. I also think the fact that we’re women made that really difficult. But we realized very early on we were gonna need venture to be able to have the space and time to do the R&D to build this product correctly.
00:18:32 Kate: We had seen at Canva, in the market that Canva existed, you could raise money off of really strong consumer growth. And so one of the core tenants at Canva was build an amazing free product and don’t block people from functionality and then give them additional value in a paid product.
00:18:51 Kate: We wanted to follow a very similar pathway. That was the vision. Raise money, build an amazing free product, get product market fit, and then build revenue. Three weeks after we raised in ‘22, the Ukrainian war started and the whole market shifted. Suddenly, you were sitting in a space where consumer growth wasn’t going to cut it. You needed revenue and it created this tension.
00:19:13 Kate: We have a subscription product out in the market now. Did I want to put that out at the time that we did? Absolutely not. Did we have to because we were existing in an environment, an economic environment that required different things? Yes.
00:19:25 Kate: That’s probably one of my biggest lessons as a founder is you have to navigate the tension between the product that you know you’re trying to build that has this potential to be a massive business in the future with the economic hurdles that you have in front of you.
00:19:42 Kate: I remember my mom when I was at school. I didn’t really like school. I didn’t really like being told what to do. Just the core model didn’t really make sense to me. And I remember her saying to me, close to when she passed away because she passed away in my final year of school. I was like, “Why do I have to learn all this rubbish to pass an exam? I mean, we’re not going to use any of this information. I just didn’t understand.”
00:19:59 Kate: And she was like, “You just have to do that to get the keys to open the door to the next set of options.” And that was the first time, in my final year of school, I got straight A’s because I finally clocked that.
00:20:11 Kate: As a founder, what’s hard is to hold the tension between the product you’re trying to build for the vision in the future and then the doors you have to open and the boxes you have to tick to do that. That is such a strong tension.
00:20:25 Kate: We had heaps of investors ask us this in the beginning, “Put advertising in the product.” If we had put advertising in the product, we would have made a lot of revenue by now, but we wouldn’t have built the right product.
00:20:35 Kate: People were like, “Why don’t you build a product for insurance companies? Get reimbursement through insurance.” But we would have had to build a fundamentally different product to do that. So yes, I could generate some revenue in the short term, but I would be basically shitting on my long-term vision.
00:20:48 Kate: Same thing when it comes to building your team. Tech companies don’t have a great reputation for how they treat people. You can hire a lot of really young people with no experience and you can treat them like crap and they’ll work in your company for a year and then they’ll leave.
00:21:00 Kate: Or you can invest in hiring people with really good experience and prioritize them as people and create a good culture. You probably won’t grow as fast. But in five years, those people will probably still be in your business and you’ll probably be able to scale a lot better. But there’s a cost to that. Those are the decisions we have to make on a daily basis.
00:21:20 Kate: You see this a lot with AI companies at the moment. Some of these companies, when you speak to investors, they’re like, “Oh, they’re amazing. They’re scaling revenue so fast.” Have you played with the product? And they’re like, “No.”
00:21:30 Kate: And you’re like, “It’s crap. It’s not that good.” There’s a lot of tension in creating these metrics to show traction enough to give people confidence to keep investing in you without compromising on your mission.
00:21:43 Scott: If there’s one word, not only for this podcast, but just in general about being a leader of anything, it’s navigating these tensions.
00:21:52 Scott: It’s almost like an emulsification of inputs into the business where you’ve got your core set of values and your core beliefs of what you want to build and instantiate into the world mixed with geopolitical factors that are coming in, which has an effect on capital markets, which has an effect on your ability to fundraise, which has an effect on the demands for KPIs and proof points, to your point of getting ease to prove things out to the right stakeholders on the other side of the table.
00:22:20 Scott: You’re constantly, as a leader, this tug of war between where you want to go and what you need to prove to get those inputs to be able to get there.
00:22:29 Scott: From a tactical standpoint, for you and Georgia running a company, what do you guys do on a weekly, monthly, quarterly, annual basis? How do you think about long-term strategy and short-term tactics where you’re both listening to feedback and you’re taking input. But how do you evaluate and both hold true to your vision, but not be too stubborn in listening to market feedback, listening to good ideas from investors?
00:22:54 Kate: In the beginning, we started chatting to investors. It was incredibly overwhelming because every conversation you’d feel like you were getting pulled in that very different direction.
00:23:02 Kate: The core characteristic that Georgia and I share is that we are inherently curious. And so sometimes you hear something and you know something about that space so you can decipher for yourself if you agree with it or not. And sometimes you hear something, you’re like, “That’s a really interesting thread. I think I’m going to pull on that. I want to understand that.”
00:23:16 Kate: Insurance is a really good example of this. In the US, investors tend to be really ambitious in general, but not so much in health. It’s like our healthcare system is fucked, but don’t try to change it. You’ll fail. And so everybody was like, “You’ve got to have an insurance code.”
00:23:29 Kate: And so, we went and looked at that. We’re like, “Okay, who can we talk to?” And Georgia’s superpowers is just… she’ll message or email anyone. She’ll get hold of people we have no place getting hold of. Let’s get on the phone with five people in this space, get different perspectives and assess for ourselves. Get enough information to decide if we think this makes sense.
00:23:46 Kate: And so we looked at the insurance angle. We looked at what would be reimbursable. For example, one of the things that’s reimbursable is you can have a service as part of your business.
00:23:56 Kate: So you could connect patients with someone who is recovering from their condition. This has done a lot in addiction, for example, and you can pair them up for coaching and you can get that reimbursed. But it would make your product more expensive, which means it would make it less accessible to the average day person, which is not what we’re trying to do.
00:24:14 Kate: And you become a human services business, which has a whole bunch of quality issues that we just didn’t want. We don’t believe in that model. I don’t believe that’s the best way to get patients good care. And so you have lots of companies in that space that have made a lot of money. But when you go read the reviews from users, you’re like, “Oh.” Depending on which person you get paid with, you get a very different experience.
00:24:35 Kate: We looked at that from a lot of different angles. We looked at employer-buyer angles. There’s also a lot of things around privacy in that space. Patients don’t want their employer to have their data. And inherently this product is about empowering patients and helping them create a comprehensive medical record that they own and giving them insights off of that. And so you would be undermining that core reason for building this business at all.
00:24:57 Kate: My thinking is you can’t put blinkers on. You need to expose yourself to ideas and smart people. And then when someone says something you don’t understand, get curious and go and learn about that space. So if it’s a road you decide not to walk down, you know why. You can go like, “Okay, we’re not doing this because of X, Y, and Z.”
00:25:15 Kate: That’s something that Georgia and I’ve just done really well. And we just talk a lot and we aren’t afraid to reassess a decision and go like, “Okay, we decided not to do that, but ooh, maybe we could.”
00:25:26 Kate: As founders, I think this is one of the biggest things that irks me on LinkedIn, is people will post 10 tips to blah, blah, blah. It just doesn’t work that way, man. Sometimes what happens is there might be an economic incentive that you could link in with. So say you could go like, “Okay, we’re going to partner with insurance companies.” But do you know how many startups are trying to do that?
00:25:46 Kate: It might actually come down to who are your investors and who do they know at said insurance company and what table can you get around to actually make that happen. Sometimes people get caught up in evaluating whether an idea has merit and not evaluating whether an idea is actually something you can execute.
00:26:05 Kate: That’s something we spend a lot of time on is does this idea have merit versus our vision? And then can we actually execute on this? Is this something that’s actually we have the skills, the people, the connections to make this thing happen? Because the avenue might exist and we just may not have access to that.
00:26:21 Kate: One of things that’s been really interesting stepping into the healthcare space is understanding incentives. One of the really sad bits is they’re the people that should be most incentivized to have a product like Human, probably government.
00:26:35 Kate: When I was in London recently, I spent some time at round table with people from different innovators, a session run by the NHS. I went to a similar one in Australia in Canberra last week at parliament. And what’s crazy is governments will be going, “Oh my God. We have all these sick people. We need to figure out better ways to help them.”
00:26:50 Kate: And then they’ll go and drop a billion dollars on building a tech product through some agency that’s being managed by people in government who don’t have any technology experience. The product will eventually fall over. There aren’t incentives to partner with people in technology.
00:27:07 Kate: What we could do with that kind of money is ridiculous, but the avenue available to us is venture. There are so many barriers to working with government. That’s something that has been really interesting to learn about, which is the people who are incentivized to have your product just may not have the ability or the ways to actually link in with you and what you’re doing.
00:27:28 Kate: That’s one of the saddest things as a founder to learn is that there are a lot of amazing products in the world that should exist if only we could connect people who have the incentive for that thing to exist with the people who can do it. But because people are different, they’re scared of each other.
00:27:41 Kate: Tech people are scared of working with government because they’re like, “They’re going to slow us down and put a whole bunch of rules in our face and not let us do what we want to do.” And government people are scared of tech companies because they think tech companies are just trying to make money and they don’t trust them.
00:27:53 Kate: For Georgia and I, just to go back to your question on how do we evaluate these things, we just talk a lot. I could lay it out like we have all these perfect meetings and once a month we do this, once a week we do that. Sure, we do. We’ve learned lessons around that, but it’s mostly just a constant conversation between Georgia and I and our team to never be afraid to look at an idea, get curious. And if we decide not to do something, make sure we’re really clear on why we’re not doing that thing.
00:28:17 Scott: I think there’s a characteristic in founders that often something that it’s hard to test for, hard to ask questions around when you hire them, when you build a team and build culture. But this idea of wanting to be right or wanting to win.
00:28:29 Scott: And in the sense of having low ego, to be able to be maximally truth-seeking in the sense of listening to all feedback, all ideas, not being too stubborn and beholden to your own core set of what you think is true or what you think is right, and actually evaluating holistically and being able to pivot. Not wayward, not spineless, but really be able to listen to feedback.
00:28:51 Scott: I know you guys just raised a large round. You could talk a little bit about that and how you were able to bring in international investors like LocalGlobe from London and folks that don’t typically invest in Australia.
00:29:03 Scott: But as you move forward and continue to scale this business, one, how you were able to attract that capital, but two, where you guys are heading around precision medicine, what you see the future of that looking like.
00:29:15 Kate: It’s interesting you talk about that, sometimes you get founders who can be so stubborn and there are ideas that they’re not willing to pivot or to go in a different direction. Georgia and I use the term God complex. Sometimes founders can have a bit of a God complex. They think they know everything.
00:29:28 Kate: One of the things we did do really early on was we wrote our mission statement. We wrote our principles around the product we wanted to build and we wrote our company values. A lot of people do these things and then they forget about them. But we wrote those before we designed a single screen of the product.
00:29:43 Kate: Those are things we come back to all the time to evaluate against whether we would do something. Part of the reason Georgia and I did that was we wanted the whole team to have that from when they interview to when they join the company so that when they’re bringing forward an idea, they can use that framework to decide if this is something we would even do.
00:29:58 Kate: It almost becomes like a bit of a filter. And so that is something that we use quite a lot internally in terms of we’re not willing to change those three things. We’ll change how we get there, but we won’t change those three things.
00:30:09 Kate: That’s what’s been really helpful from a co-founder perspective to set those things up upfront, because then you don’t end up fighting about the baseline of the directions you would go in because you have set that up upfront.
00:30:20 Kate: And then to answer your second question, to speak to how we found investors or how we brought people along for the ride. In the beginning, we really only spoke to Australian investors or investors that we knew, small market. So it was pretty easy to get through everybody, have a conversation.
00:30:36 Kate: It was pretty funny because in the beginning we thought it was going to be really hard to decide on which investors to work with. We wrote criteria. We were like, “We’re going to measure investors on these five criteria.” What we realized was there are a lot of investors and I would put them in two camps and the one camp is much smaller than the other, unfortunately.
00:30:57 Kate: And I think that what I’ve learned is you can waste a lot of time talking to a lot of different people. But if you go through your own network, they will help you find other people like them. We’ve certainly learned that lesson because of the Canva Connection, we had a lot of investors reaching out to us and wanting to connect, but not necessarily for the right reasons.
00:31:15 Kate: For us, we talk about this analogy of investors who want to play poker and investors who want to play chess. So investors who want to play poker, I want to place a bunch of bets, hoping that it’d be relatively hands off and hope one of these things pays off.
00:31:28 Kate: And chess is like, I’m an investor that really wants to see the next big business happen. And I know that those businesses are probably inherently more complicated and that those businesses need to make very specific moves in a very specific order to bring a business into being and that excites them, that doesn’t scare them.
00:31:47 Kate: Those are the investors that we tried to find because you need those people. An investor who will just give you money is fine. Sometimes that’s maybe what a business has to do to get off the ground. I find one of the most useful questions to ask an investor when we meet them is who are the five people you could introduce us to that you think can make this mission happen? A lot of times they cannot answer that question.
00:32:07 Kate: And it’s like, well, you’re going to give us capital, which is maybe good and obviously if it’s a good brand name, fine. But are they actually going to help you? It also tells you how much they know about your space. Because if they can’t think of five people that they would introduce you to, they probably don’t understand what you’re doing to be able to pair with people in their network or they don’t have the network. That’s something that’s really valuable.
00:32:24 Kate: And so, we got introduced to LocalGlobe. Airtree was one of our early investors. When we did our latest round, they communicated with their LPs to see if there were any LPs who wanted to make a direct angel investment. We brought some people in through that.
00:32:40 Kate: One of those people was Eric Salama, who was the CEO of the Kantar Group in the UK. He is awesome. We were in the US. We caught up with him on a call. He was in the back of a London cab and just totally grok what we were doing straight away.
00:32:53 Kate: I feel like as well, the right investors, it’s an easy pitch. They’re in from the beginning. You know. There’s not seven calls and then suddenly they’re in. They’re in in the beginning. And anyway, he came in. He was connected to the LocalGlobe team, introduced us to Julia and Yvonne.
00:33:07 Kate: Julia Hawkins has a daughter who’s had a really complicated health journey. And when we got on the call with her and I told my story, she was like, “I know what you’re talking about. I get it.” There was a very immediate level of trust that Julia understood what I was trying to build. She understood that I have a child at home who is still navigating a health journey. That as a founder, I’m not going to be incentivized to build a different kind of company.
00:33:30 Kate: And so I felt like we had a really strong level of trust that we could build on. That’s something I’ve definitely learned is go through the people you already trust to find other people that they trust. And also look for people that have personal connection to the problem because you can’t spend your whole life as a founder explaining the problem you’re trying to solve to your investors. They have to get it. And that’s a really strong signal of whether they’re the right people for you, if they understand what you’re trying to do.
00:39:56 Scott: I love that analogy of playing poker versus playing chess. That resonates not just as a founder, but on the venture side as well. When we think about fundraising for our next fund, we think about you could maybe have the first third of the fund is inside folks that come back in, that you already have a relationship with. The second third are adjacencies to that first third. And then the third third is getting it done, however, blocking and going to the ends of the earth to get that last third.
00:34:25 Scott: But I think that that’s true in life of finding people that can help you move the chess pieces forward and help you build the business. So I love that metaphor. I think all founders listening or all folks listening, thinking about when you bring partners on board, how you really optimize for involving more people that want to play chess than want to play poker and can really help you advance those pieces. I really empathize with that.
00:34:48 Scott: In the last few minutes that we have here on the podcast, when you think about the next 10 years of the journey and now that you’ve got more and more chess players around the board with you, what is the vision? Where does success take you in the next 5 or 10 years?
00:35:01 Kate: Hopefully in the next 10 years, every person will own their own health data and they will have the ability and the tools to put it to work for them. They’ll be able to get really deeply contextual insights and recommendations of what to do to improve their health so that they can work more effectively with practitioners and researchers. We all really have fixed that system. It’s really siloed at the moment.
00:35:22 Kate: At scale, I guess, what I’m hoping we achieve is having a proven standard of care for diseases that we just don’t know what to do with. I think there is a very big misconception in the world generally that we understand a lot more about chronic disease in particular than we do.
00:35:40 Kate: Most of the time we don’t understand what causes these diseases or what to do about them. And so hopefully I would love to be able to say, we’ve helped this many patients take control of their health journey and advocate for themselves and we’ve unlocked solutions for diseases that didn’t exist through the data that we’re capturing in Human.
00:35:59 Kate: What we’ve tried to do is put the trust with patients at the center of our business. It’s why we’ve built a direct to consumer company. It’s why we haven’t partnered with insurance companies and we’re willing to play that chess game to not just hook into an incentive that would get us revenue really quickly, but stay laser focused on building the right product. I would love to feel that we were able to succeed in doing that.
00:36:25 Kate: We saw the opportunity to create a truly consumer centric healthcare company. We were able to bring the right people on board to help us make that happen, even in an economy and a system that is deeply broken and fraught.
00:36:38 Kate: And one of the books that I love at the moment is Brene Brown’s most recent book when she talks about living in uncertain times, and the types of leadership that we need. We need people who are willing to say, “I’m a smart person with skills and privilege, and I’m going to put that to work to solve hard problems. I’m not going to put that to work just to make as much money as I can as an individual.” And so hopefully in 10 years, I can look back and go, I’ve done something valuable with the difficult circumstances that I was handed.
00:37:08 Kate: One of my favorite quotes is a Viktor Frankl quote where he talks about being worthy of your suffering. And I think success to me is everybody suffers. Every human being is going to be given some God awful challenge at some point. But if you can turn that pain into something really purposeful, I think that is the challenge of being a human being. And that’s something I’d be really proud of.
00:37:29 Kate: On a personal and then on a global level, hopefully those are some of the things I can say in 10 years time.
00:37:34 Scott: I love that. So to be worthy of your own suffering. That’s a quote that we should all write down.
00:37:41 Scott: If I have time to indulge you in one final question, as you think about this ingesting data and bringing in all this information on patients, thinking about either the diagnostic side or matchmaking with the therapeutic side, I imagine with the new AI tools that are developing as you guys ingest more and more more patient data, are you starting to see abilities to more quickly identify or more quickly match on the diagnostic side and on the therapeutic side with solutions for folks?
00:38:11 Kate: Yeah. At the moment, we don’t play in diagnostics. We play more in helping patients who have a condition or symptoms that they want to work on, help them test out things that could potentially help them. But yes, and we knew this was coming. This was part of why Georgia and I started the business, was we knew that AI models were gonna get a lot smarter and a lot faster at dealing with really large sets of data.
00:38:33 Kate: The thing that we really believe in is, models are only as smart as the data you train them on. And in healthcare, we’re missing data, and we can get that data directly from patients. If you do that, the other data, EHR data, blood work, biometrics, those are things that you have context to make more sense of that data. That’s something that’s difficult to compete on.
00:38:53 Kate: Everybody, every startup can go and pull in data from Apple healthcare, it’s not hard, but can you make sense of it? And so I think AI is a great enabling tool that helps you comprehend a large set of data really quickly, but you still need to get the right data.
00:39:08 Kate: When we started this business, the R&D was all about, can we get the right data set that nobody else has? That’s really hard. Everybody’s scared to try to do that, but let’s try to do that.
00:39:17 Kate: Because then later, if you start stacking all this other data, you’re in a totally different position where you’re uniquely able to give value from that data in a way that other companies can’t. And so that’s really been how we thought about AI. It’s an enabling technology. But it doesn’t get away from the problem that you need the data to train it on.
00:39:35 Scott: Reliant on the inputs, for sure. Final speed round. If you live in two of the world’s nicest places, Cape Town and Sydney, where would you choose to live anywhere in the world?
00:39:45 Kate: Greece. Easy question. My husband’s Greek. I’ve spent a lot of time in Greece. It’s my happy place. It’s paradise, the most beautiful place in the world.
00:39:53 Scott: I’m sold on that answer. So you already mentioned the Brene Brown book that you’re reading. Any podcasts that you’re currently enjoying?
00:40:00 Kate: This is not an original answer, but Diary of a CEO. I really like the variance of the things that he talks about. He asks really interesting, compelling questions. And so I really enjoyed that as a podcast. A lot of podcasts you might find one interesting episode, but I think that’s a very reliable source of interesting, varied topics. Love that one.
00:40:21 Scott: As the mother of two and as a startup founder, what’s your go-to productivity hack other than probably waking up at 5am?
00:40:29 Kate: It’s honestly a tool that I started using recently. It’s funny because I was talking about how some of these AI products are not that good, but one of them I think is very good is Granola. I’ve been using that heaps and a lot of our teammates have started using that as well.
00:40:41 Kate: I think I really am a talker and I like to be present in conversations, but I also would say I don’t have the world’s best memory. Especially as a mom, you’re holding so much context at once. And I’ve tried so many note taking tools. They all suck. They’re all really annoying. They don’t make sense of your notes.
00:40:57 Kate: But I think the UX is very simple and it works really well. You can overlay how you want the meeting notes structured, which is really powerful. And so I’ve really been loving that. I think that’s made a huge difference in my life.
00:41:08 Kate: It just means I don’t have to hold this random information and context in my head at all times because I can go back and have this secondary brain that I can reach into. I think they’ve done an excellent job of building a really usable product.
00:41:20 Scott: Finally, where can customers find you online?
00:41:24 Kate: So I think as a brand we have TikTok and Instagram. But me, personally, on LinkedIn. I think if anybody would like to reach out and connect with what we’re doing, that’s probably the easiest way to get hold of me.
00:41:35 Scott: Wonderful. Okay. Thank you so much for joining us today. Pleasure to see you as always. Next time we’re going to go back to the Indonesian restaurant in Venice Beach, California.
00:41:43 Kate: I’m keen. Thanks, Scott. Thanks so much.
00:41:48 Scott Hartley: Thanks for joining us and hope you enjoyed today’s episode. For those of you listening, you might also be interested to learn more about Everywhere. We’re a first-check pre-seed fund that does exactly that, invests everywhere. We’re a community of 500 founders and operators, and we’ve invested in over 250 companies around the globe. Find us at our website, everywhere.vc, on LinkedIn, and through our regular Founder Spotlights on Substack. Be sure to subscribe, and we’ll catch you on the next episode.