S13E32: Taking Silicon Valley thinking to healthcare, Anjali Kataria (CEO, Mytonomy)

An episode of The Impact Multiplier CEO Podcast

S13E32: Taking Silicon Valley thinking to healthcare, Anjali Kataria (CEO, Mytonomy)

We're continuing our season on "business as a force for good", Richard speaks with Anjali Kataria, CEO and Co-founder of Mytonomy. Mytonomy has quickly become the market leader in patient education and engagement, and Inc. Magazine has named Mytonomy as one of the fastest-growing software companies in the US, four consecutive years. Before Mytonomy, Anjali served as EIR and Senior Technology Advisor in the Obama Administration.

In this conversation, you’ll learn:

  • Why Anjali went all-in on Mytonomy and fundamentally changed its direction
  • How taking a sauna can be an essential leadership tool(!)
  • What's even better than taking time to reflect after a failure
  • How Mytonomy has become a market leader despite longstanding incumbents

"If you don't create core values, someone else in organisation will be doing that anyway."

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Transcript

Richard Medcalf
What was it that made you decide that was the place to go, health care was the place to go?

Anjali Kataria
We’re always on 247, and so the great people that work in government are keeping the lights on 247. There there’s so many things that happen around the world that impact the United States. I mean, we’re a behemoth in the world. And so when you experience that scale and then you come back in as a tech entrepreneur, the tech space looks very tiny, right, when you when you’ve been in government. And what I realized is health care, you have the ability to affect every single person in the world because health is wealth.

Richard Medcalf
Welcome to the Impact Multiplier CEO podcast. I’m Richard Metcalfe, founder of Xquadrant, and my mission is to help the world’s top CEOs and entrepreneurs Shift from incremental to exponential progress and create a huge positive impact on our world. Now that requires you to reinvent yourself and transform your business. So if you’re ready to play a bigger game than The ever before, I invite you to join us and become an Impact Multiplier CEO. Today, I speak with Anjali Khataria, who is the CEO and cofounder of Mytonomy, which has quickly become the market leader in patient education engagement and reported by Inc Magazine as one of the fastest growing software companies in the US. Now before that, She served in the Obama administration. She’s a really fascinating person. She’s bringing Silicon Valley thinking into the health care sector And really shaking things up.

In our discussion today, we learn why and Johnny went all in on my autonomy And actually changes direction very early on in that process. She’s also a really interesting thinker. She’s realized that it’s Great to think about reflecting after a failure, but it’s actually even better to think before a failure to look at success And what the clues are that success is leaving. She talks about how taking a sauna is one of her favorite leadership tools, And we look at how Mytonomy has become a market leader despite the fact that there are really major incumbent players in the market. So this is a great example of bringing purpose and passion into a complex, heavily regulated sector. Enjoy this conversation with Anjali Kataria. Hi, Anjali, and welcome to the show.

Anjali Kataria
Hi, Richard. Thanks for having me.

Richard Medcalf
You’re welcome. So what I know about you is that you’re the, CEO of Mytonomy, which is, I think, since you joined in 2016, has quickly become The leader in patient education and engagement. And I know that you Inc Magazine has named you as one of the fastest growing software companies in the US for 4 consecutive years. I know that you’ve become a market leader punching way above your weight potentially against some long standing incumbents. But before we get into all that, Take me back. I know you’ve had a varied career. You’ve been in the you’ve been a founder of different companies in the past. You’ve been in adviser of the Obama administration, various things.

So Tell me The takes about that moment where you left the path behind and went in for my autonomy full in, and why did you do that?

Anjali Kataria
Yeah, that’s a great question. So I was, writing scripts, you know, film, movie scripts, and and TV show pilots after the Obama administration and my husband who had started Mytami when he left people in the EdTech space said, what are you doing? And I said, I’m I’m writing, I’m having a blast. I’m I’m I’m writing things that I think will change people’s hearts and minds. And he said, why don’t you think about helping me expand into healthcare? And, you know, you’re a tech entrepreneur, you, you love film, you know, think about creating content for health care and maybe like he had created an online video publishing system. And so we were thinking about, you know, what content and platform, really moved the needle. So I I gave it some thought. I’d never thought about working together with my husband at work. So we have a great personal relationship, but I didn’t wanna I didn’t wanna mess that up.

But health care has always been my industry. All my work has been in healthcare and policy, as well as in, in the tech space. And I was touched by the healthcare system in a way that never left me. You know, when, my mother was a pediatrician and when I joined The Obama The fell sick very, very, she got very sick and very, very quickly, she had an undiagnosed condition and my father was a lung specialist, both my parents were doctors, and I come from a family of medical people. So everyone’s a doctor, a nurse, an engineering, or a scientist. And I remember taking her into the hospital for a second opinion with a liter of oxygen and she walked in and two and a half weeks later, she came home in hospice and it was an it was just a, it’s a very sad journey and it was filled with so much inconsistency in healthcare delivery because I got dropped in, I became a caregiver overnight and I had small kids. I was in Washington, DC. I was starting my dream job and my mother was, was very, very ill and my father loved her deeply and, and he was exhausted, you know, because the care had progressed over many weeks.

And so he needed help and just getting home health workers in on a consistent basis, hourly workers, night shifts, being with her in the hospital and understanding the medications to keep her comfortable and, you know, just all the possibilities too, that we had to make decisions around very, very quickly in case we were going to go for treatment or surgery or, you know, some other option. And I’m Harvard and Duke educated, I couldn’t figure it out. I was like, this is terrible. There has to be a better consumer oriented experience for patients and families The understand how to care for themselves and their loved ones. And so that is what we are doing at Mytonomy. We, so long story, I became CEO of the company, my husband left and, did some other things and I took over both the education and the health care of business we had started. And another story for another time, I ended up deciding to shut the education business down, which is always a hard decision. But at an early stage in a company, you have to be focused.

And I felt like healthcare was so big and so encompassing. I wanted to give it our full attention. It was growing much faster than the ed tech space at that time, of course, post COVID, timing is everything, so post COVID it will be totally different. And so that’s what we’re trying to do at my autonomy really help, you know, reach people, engage them through their hearts and minds with, were the largest producer now of clinical education, content, filmed in HD, 4 ks, 6 ks, ready for the big screen with animation, with doctors teaching you what to do, nurses guiding you step by step, almost like having a nurse in your home, taking you through everything you need to know and in ways that you would normally watch on Netflix or, you know, about prime or Hulu or something, and so in super engaging ways and helping people understand what they have to do, the behavior they need to make the shifts in their life to create space and the behaviors they have to take on to become healthier and to lead a happier life and, and for caregivers to know how to care for their loved ones. So we’ve got 3,000 episodes, clinical episodes now, created a new network that’s private and delivered through hospitals, but it was designed to really, start and end at home because that’s where healthcare has shifted. Right? I mean, 90% of a person’s lifetime will be spent The caring for themselves at home, not in a hospital or a clinic. Right?

Richard Medcalf
What was it that you may that made you decide that was the place to go, healthcare was the place to go because it wasn’t a pure business decision, like, you just saw that there was traction there, or was it just a conviction that this was gonna help more people?

Anjali Kataria
Totally the impact. I mean, The gut my gut told me it’s a big market, and I did hire, you know, a team of students from a business school and they, the Ross School of Business at Michigan, they’ve been great. They’ve done a bunch of projects for us. And, you know, I brought in some consultants. We looked at a number of spaces to go into in terms of within healthcare and what is that market size and, but in the end, it’s really about your gut. And, you know, I felt like the market was big enough where we could get institutional funding, we could grow. In healthcare, there’s no MVP. There’s no minimally viable product.

You’ve gotta have the whole product. It’s gotta be integrated. It’s gotta be seamless. I mean, so you need, in order to build an enterprise solution in healthcare, here, you can’t do it incrementally. You gotta go all in, get the product built, and then you can incrementally grow. So and that was our strategy. You know, 85% of our series b on the what’s in R&D, right, heavy software development, heavy content creation, because that’s how we were able to rise above all these tiny point solutions. So, I think for me, it was a gut decision that we could impact millions and, you know, hundreds of millions of people.

I think when you work in the administration, I, you know, worked in, in the Obama administration and you don’t realize The our country never shuts down. Right. We’re always on 247. And so the great people that work in government are, are keeping the lights on 20 fourseven. The, there, there’s so many things that happen around the world that impact the United States, I mean, we’re a behemoth in the The. And so when you experience that scale and then you come back in as a tech entrepreneur, the tech space looks very tiny, right, when you when you’ve been in government. And what I realized is health care, you have the ability to affect every single person in the world because health is wealth.

Richard Medcalf
Really interesting. 85% of your spend, of series b goes on r and d. So again, this is really a question of Huge investment up front. Right? Like, you have to build this.

Anjali Kataria
I’m sure my investors are not happy about that. That’s what we did. Yeah. We wanna do that do that. Yeah.

Richard Medcalf
Yeah. You had to really back this idea, produce all this content, build this solution yes. In advance of some kind of hardcore market proof by the sound of it or at least at scale, what was that like? I mean, that kind of The courage, perhaps, or the, you know, the, plus the uncertainty that you were dealing with in that phase of with spending a lot of time, a lot of effort Building something, and we don’t yet know whether it’s all gonna, the curve’s gonna turn.

Anjali Kataria
You know, you get that 1st customer and you just glom on and you learn everything you can. And it’s like you’re in healthcare, it’s a little different because it’s not like you go from customer to customer to customer. You go you go fairly deep in your 1st couple of customers and then you get 1 more customer, it’s like a snowball and you go super, super deep because you’ve got to integrate everywhere. So, you know, we picked up Hackensack Meridian Health as one of our first customers. We went super deep in cardiovascular care, Columbia, super deep, and then we started expanding in those accounts. And then we we picked up Krilliant Clinic in St. Luke’s and then UCLA, UCSF, UC San Diego, UC Irvine, UC Davis, like the whole UC system, we got them off of their incumbent onto Mytonomy and we delivered. But the delivery isn’t just the front end of a solution.

It’s the unsexy back end plumbing. Right? We invested a lot in playing nice with other systems, being able to get in and out of implementations quickly. So all the things that you don’t really ever see is not only did we spend 85% of our funding on r and d, we spent a lot of it on the back end that you’ll never even see on the front end, right, because the front end, we had built a really nice, easy to use platform right from the beginning, which you have to do in in healthcare or in enterprise software, but when you verticalize, you have to be able to work with the electronic health record, their CRM, and there’s only a handful of these, right? So it’s not like there’s a 100 different systems you have to integrate with. There are a handful and you have to able to go really deep so that you’re flexible. That is how we were gonna differentiate ourselves is by being able to be super responsive, to have the best integrations, to be able to play nicely with other systems and then to be able to get to scale, that’s the key is that once you can get to scale and healthcare, you’re gonna be around. It’s a very sticky industry. People don’t like a lot of change, so it’s really hard to disrupt, but at the same time, there’s so much opportunity here.

Richard Medcalf
So how how how did you pierce through? How did you break through in so that you as you say, you now give some very big Incumbents, you know, run for their money, right? And how are you doing that? Like, what was the

Anjali Kataria
I don’t really know. How are we doing that? You know, first of all, I think this is an age old problem where people go to the doctor’s office and they leave with a handout. Right, and they don’t remember where they put The hand out by the time they get home, and they really wanna understand their diagnosis or their condition, but The didn’t go for school, they’re not going to go to medical school or nursing school. And so the way we communicate with them is really backwards. Right, we we give them a ton of medical information and we expect them to absorb all of it, but we’ve just told them they have a serious condition and that it could be something they have to manage for their entire life. They’re not able to hear you in that moment. And yet The is where our doctors and nurses spend a lot of their time really trying because they don’t know when they’re going to see that patient again and they want to make sure they give them all the impression because they come from such a good place. And that’s where I think technology can have a huge impact, but the right approach to technology, right? So I think we came in thinking, you know, it’s post iPhone.

Most of the solutions we had we were up against had been built pre iPhone and they were publishers. They weren’t, are tech companies. And so I think we came at it from, you know, a tech company perspective. I mean, I’m ex Oracle. I sold my 2nd company to them. I’m a serial entrepreneur from Silicon Valley, my partner in business, my husband was ex Google. We brought on people from Silicon Valley that were from other kind of big tech companies had a mindset of, you know, how can we get people to use our system? So we all our north star was usage. How do we build something that will be used? And when that’s your north star, you know, then you’re thinking very differently.

You’re thinking about measuring usage. You’re thinking about creating a product at every step, every capability is driving usage and, helping someone change the way they do their work. That’s a tech company mentality. That’s not a publisher mentality. Right? Or it’s like I think our our competitors have been very focused on, you know, the clinical content and so are we, but our orientation has been around really creating lasting, a tech forward, digital forward platform.

Richard Medcalf
Got it. Yeah. So, yeah, this this thinking yeah. This this tech approach, taking Silicon Valley thinking into the healthcare sector As it has been a different yeah. A different start different starting point fundamentally from these other players. I wanna go back to the theme of this Series on Businesses of Force of Good. So has that been a principle That you’ve always been working with, or have you did in your previous businesses, you know, the world of Oracle or whatever, were you was The not quite as much on the radar? And now, Yeah. Has that changed in your evolution as a as an entrepreneur?

Anjali Kataria
You know, for me, it it has. I have always been very mission oriented. I, you know, worked, in the nonprofit sector, my 1st startup was in the nonprofit sector. I was an Echoing Green Fellow. And prior to that, even when I was in college, I started nonprofit programs and ran them Partnership for Literacy. I was one of the co founders. I just love the impact that we can have on people. It’s, you know, as we started out this conversation, really being able to touch the hearts and minds of people and help transform their lives so they have a slightly better life, that to to me, has always been a guiding principle.

And one of the reasons I went into government and wanted to serve our country and just be a part of changing the way we do things so that people can lead a better, easier, higher quality life. And I think that kind of mission orientation has just always been there for me. I saw it at Oracle in spades. Maybe somebody else at Oracle would see something very different, but Oracle was incredibly entrepreneurial. I was VP of product strategy, so I had a really interesting vantage point in the PLM space, product life cycle management, and I saw a ton of mission orientation there, right, where service of helping pharmaceutical companies and their teams, collaborate and innovate because if they can collaborate better through software, they can bring new innovations, new medical devices, new treatments, new drugs to market faster, which leads to healthier, happier lives and longer lives for people, right? So I think when you’re in the software space, you’re trying to impact the work of thousands and thousands of people at the same time, and and so software can be a force multiplier for doing good.

Richard Medcalf
Well, So software is The part, but what I’ve heard as well in your story is the video component, right, which is obviously big in the current business. And I know you confessed to me before, that perhaps, you know, you have The Bollywood thing going on in your background or fan of Volley, you know, and But was that was CEO something which you kinda stumbled across in Mytonomy because that’s what your husband had built as the original platform and you realized it was powerful? Or Has that always that kind of video as a way of winning hearts and minds, has that always been a part of what you’ve been about?

Anjali Kataria
Yeah, I think that has really evolved for me over my lifetime to realize that my passion in script writing in film is very deep. You know, I’ve always been a writer, never really understood that that’s really how I make sense of the world. And I think screenwriting and bringing a script into actual film and telling that story and being able to use that in healthcare has certainly been a win for me, an alignment of purpose and mission and fun. I mean, I just love it. I love The I started our studio and that we now are the largest producer of clinical evidence based content produced in HD, 4 k, 6 k, you know, 2 minutes or less, we we produce the most, largest volume of that kind of content. But that’s something The, you know, I did grow up in a Bollywood house. I’m South Asian. My parents love these Indian movies from, you know, years ago, it’s such a big industry, and I just grew up with that and just loved it and didn’t realize the impact it would have in my professional life and the ability for us to really connect with our healthcare through short clinical episodes through film and through storytelling.

And I think it’s in our DNA. I mean, I think we are, like the belly as humans, were storytellers. And so I think it’s a very natural fit for healthcare. It dawned on me, you know, I mean, Vinay had certainly built a really great platform for publishing, but it dawned on me that a 113,000,000 households are streaming content weekly. Why do we not leverage that in healthcare? Right? And so that’s where I think a lot of my different parts of my life came together and why I thought I was compelled to kinda to join him and ultimately to become, you know, founder of our healthcare practice and then founder of the company, co founder and then CEO. And, you know, so and then that was just the beginning of the journey. I I still feel like we’re in the early stages even though, you know, we’ve achieved a lot.

Richard Medcalf
I hope you’re enjoying this conversation. This is just a quick interlude to introduce you to 2 transformative programs that we run. The first is Rivendell, my exclusive group of top CEOs who are committed to transforming themselves, The businesses and the world. It’s an incredible peer group and a deep coaching experience that will push you to new heights no matter how successful you’ve already been. The second is Impact Accelerator, a coaching program for executives who are ready to make a big leap forward in their own leadership. It’s regularly described as life changing, and no other program provides such Personal strategic clarity, a measurable shift in stakeholder perceptions, and a world class leadership development environment. Find out about both of these programs at xquadrant.com/services. Now back to the conversation.

Yeah. It’s beautiful. Firstly funny, isn’t it, how we find these things that are in our past, like love a video or whatever. And then we we start to integrate them Into our mission, in different ways. And we’ve because we realize these are the things that move our move our heart and stir us, you know, and when we actually on a mission, you need to dig into that toolbox of what says is I I’ve said to you before my Freddie Mercury post that I have here, I’m always easing it because actually being all in with your message and communicating to the very back of the room, the very back of the stadium, right, to Gradually connecting on an emotional level is a really essential leadership skill if we’re gonna create a movement.

Anjali Kataria
Yes, yes, it is. And, you know, I think that is, it’s so powerful. You know, I, I mean, our studio has won a ton of awards. We went over 150 teles and, you know, digital health awards and health information. I don’t even know all the awards, our studio, our team is just fantastic in what they’ve been able to pull together, but it’s a team, right? It takes a team to make a single clinical episode takes an entire team. Takes a studio team and they’re writers, producers, medical professionals, doctors, and nurses, clinicians who are overseeing that clinical content and the review process, you know, bringing everybody together is not easy. And in a studio, it’s not easy. There’s a lot of personalities, a lot of strong personalities, which is what you want and real emotion and real passion for the art and craft of producing great story and film, and then you drop that into a software company, a SaaS platform, a vertical SaaS platform, and you’ve got, you know, a lot of great engineering talent and product talent, but boy, are they very different.

They’re wired very differently. So, to inspire that type of team and then Inspire Studio and bring those 2 together is exhausting. Like, that’s a lot of work, right, because they’re so different in how they communicate. And then you drop in sales and marketing and customer service and success and technical implementation or client facing, whole other group. Right. And so I think one of my biggest challenges has been bringing all of these differences together and, and having enough energy to really be authentic and inspire people. And when you get someone in the mix that isn’t willing, like you said earlier, to kind of be all in, it can be a poison or a cancer very quickly. And so for us, it’s really been about our values and having a real strong core sense of our values.

And I think that’s something as a, as a leader, I don’t think I appreciated in either of my past companies and this company has been essential. It has been a guiding light, a north star for us because when we bring people on, if they don’t fit our values, The don’t, I can’t keep them, they can’t stay, they don’t wanna stay, right, and so a natural selection process out because we’ve got something really special and really good here. And, I think every company has that. I think every company has those core values. And if you aren’t creating them as a leader, someone in your organization is creating them. So they’re there. There is an ethos. There’s a certain way that people, you know, interact and breathe in the air in your company, whether they’re in person or remote, and that is your those are your core values.

Richard Medcalf
Yeah. I I love that phrase. If you don’t create your own core values, somebody else will do them for you. I think that’s a great insight. Yeah. The specific here a little bit, Angelie. I want to talk about, reflection, your your reflection process, Your thinking process and learning process, as a leader, because for me, there’s performance and there’s learning, right? And We we are focused too much on performance and not enough often on learning because learning is what drives future performance. And I think you You said something along the lines of that you’re less a fan of reflecting after a failure, although that’s obviously useful, but you’re more of a fan of reflecting during success And during High Growth and looking at what makes us successful and what’s working.

Wanna say a bit more about The? And, like, how do you actually do that on a In a practical level, because I’m sure you’re extremely busy trying to grow this, this company at a high speed.

Anjali Kataria
Yeah. I mean, I have that, wonderful gift and curse at the same time of being super analytical and thinking about a lot of things. Like, why is that? I’m very curious. I’m a very curious person, always wanting to know, like, why did that not work? But more importantly, when something is working well, why is it working? And so I think I look to CEO, like, what can we glean in that moment where somebody gives us really good feedback? I go back and ask a lot more questions about that feedback. What made them think that? What else were they looking at? How did they evaluate us? What was it about our solution that made their life easier? What was it about that strategy that’s now working? What can we do to do more of that? And, you know, how do we kind of create a snowball out of that? So I do think, like, you miss big opportunities if you don’t take time to really analyze why things are succeeding.

Richard Medcalf
Yeah. Well, absolutely. Of course. One of the reasons I wrote my book, right, making time for strategy, because I see so many leaders don’t have enough time for that thinking, that quality of thinking. So first of all, when do you do that? Like, you know, in your week or in your month, do you have time set aside, or how how do you actually make time for that analysis?

Anjali Kataria
Yeah. You know, I, I’ve become a big fan of saunas. Like I have started using saunas and I will go to the sauna and just sit in the sauna and really think about what’s working and what’s not working. I do a daily reflection, very fast, short reflection every morning, every night. And it’s a meditation for me, like 5 minutes. I write in a journal, I write down, 3 things that I wanna have happen today, I write down, 3 things I feel grateful and initiative for, and that has been a real guiding light for me to kind of go back and look at, that it can be anything from like The air is clear and I can breathe easily to, I appreciate my husband or my kids or my dog or, you know, the house I live in or, my investors for giving us opportunity to build this company or my team I mean, it can be anything, right? What do you appreciate? And every day it changes, but it’s that first thing you wake up in the morning, and then at night I’ll reflect, just write down 3 things that happened, and, you know, what would I have done differently? Was there anything I would’ve done differently or do I wish would’ve happened differently? And so that’s a reflection. And then I have these longer sessions once a week where I’ll just go sit in the sauna and I’ll think about what’s really working, what worked this week, what did we learn from what worked, and what didn’t work. Where did we where do we have some rubs and how can we, you know, does it need a process around it? Does it need a different skill set, does it need better analysis? Does it need some structure? Like, what is it that it needs? Right?

Richard Medcalf
Yeah. I think that’s, it’s beautiful. It’s, I I love the idea of doing it in a sauna. I think that was such a great idea because

Anjali Kataria
Gooferr.

Richard Medcalf
Yeah. There’s not many distractions in a sauna, right? And it’s a free ritual and, you know, you’re in there, right? And I love that. Yeah. It’s so much better than doing it, like, at your desk, right? An email might pop up at any moment or, and so forth.

Anjali Kataria
And and sometimes and you can write, you know, you can write in The in something with a pen and and paper in Asana too. So, of course, you can’t take your phone in The. From experience, it will get too hot. So but you can you you really can kind of, like, jot some things down and then come back to it and then look at it and study it. I think as leaders, I’m learning for myself that I have to really carve out more time to make sure that I’m at my best thinking. Right? And I have my best thinking on every day, every week, and sometimes you need longer sessions. I often you know, couple times a year, I’ll get together with my my co founder and my husband, and we’ll just, you know, be in a conference room and we’ll be on a board, a whiteboard, I’ll bring in our head of people, I’ll bring in our CFO, and we’ll just think about who’s on the bus. Do we have the right people on the bus? You know, what’s needed? Let’s start with 0.

Like, if we had to build this company today, you know, how, what skill sets would we need? Where do we have some gaps? So, try to look at things from different angles. Right?

Richard Medcalf
I love it. Can you give me an example? Like what’s something where you’ve you’ve had a thought and you’ve gone, you know what? There’s a a success here. Something’s working well. Let’s double down on that. Let’s, let’s go big on that. You know, is is an example you think of where actually You did that reflection and you saw you saw an accelerator that perhaps you weren’t focusing on.

Anjali Kataria
You know, I think, like, when I look at, for example, our customer implementations, when we come to the table with a pre created series of text messages and emails for a particular condition line with The with the model of, like, what we think is The best practice based on, you know, our data from across the industry of how we’re going to engage that patient, that that is very successful. And so why not do that across 300 patient journeys instead of just as a one off for 1 client who asked for it. So that’s an example that’s put into motion now a new strategy for our don’t have Patriot Plus Journeys out of the box. You know, our our content is being used to educate a patient in a journey, right, from the discovery of their condition to the rehabilitation and recovery, right, that entire journey. And so what I realized is, like, when we’re coming to the table with just this one little area, we’re gonna text you 24 hours after you go home, 3 days after your home, 7 days after your home in The little area, that actually worked really well. Why not do that across all 300 journeys? Right. So that’s an example.

Richard Medcalf
Yeah. That’s great. Perfect. Thank you. Let’s start to shift gears again as as time starts to catch up with us here. The of my favorite questions is, what’s it gonna look like for Biotonomy to multiply its impact over the coming years? Like, If we’re talking in a couple of years’ time, when you think, wow, we’re just at a completely different level, what’s that gonna look like?

Anjali Kataria
Yeah. I mean, there’s a couple dimensions. Right? So today, we’ve been selling to health care systems and providers. Why? Well, because I think The, as a patient, the number 1 person you trust when you have a health condition and you’re getting health care guidance or advice is your doctor or your nurse. Right? That is the person you go to. So that’s why we started in the provider business of selling to healthcare systems. And we have very quickly amassed, you know, millions of patients under contract that are getting access to Mytonomy. And we’re seeing now thousands and thousands of users every week that are watching our content and are engaging with our surveys and we believe, are getting healthier and having a much better experience.

And so when you multiply that impact because health care systems have hundreds of thousands, if not millions of patients per system, right, then you’re getting into real volume, real scale. And when you’re integrated with the electronic health record like we are, and you are able to deliver this with automation so that it doesn’t require a doctor or nurse to click on anything. It’s just based on your condition, your specifics, you’re getting the right educational content across your journey. You’re getting were nudging and hovering over you based on your condition and your needs. That is real automation at scale where we can impact, you know, hundreds of thousands, if not millions and millions of patients. And so, and people, right? And I think we’re just gonna keep I think that impact of helping to make that many people healthier is worthy and and it’s essential.

Richard Medcalf
Yeah. Beautiful. And so is that something which the business is is that your next project? Is that kind of automation at scale, or is that something that’s already happened?

Anjali Kataria
That’s already happened. Yeah. I mean, our current automation is now bringing in our our Gen AI platform, which is incredible. I mean, the amount of time we are able to save just in our beta, right, our beta models is incredible. I mean, like for example, bringing our content into multiple languages has been a mission of ours. So we created our entire library in English and then we recreated it in Spanish. We refilmed it with native Spanish speakers. And my hope was like, is there a way to do this for every language? And it’s too expensive, right? It’s just not feasible, are not at our stage.

And so, we’ve had to pick and choose which videos get into which language when language is such an important part of access in healthcare and learning about your own health, if it’s in your language, but with Jet AI, man, oh man, we are able to save so much time in language creation. So what used to take us a year to maybe create a module in 5 languages, we can do in weeks. Right? I mean, it’s incredible. And the good that will come from the scale, being able to reach so many people in their own language and culture.

Richard Medcalf
So if we go back to this question about how you’re gonna multiply or how the business basically the business going from here, What I’m hearing is you’re doing all of these things already, the automation scale, the different languages. So what what do you think is gonna be the The growth edge for the business, is is it really scaling up its people? Is it the systems? Is it just more of the same?

Anjali Kataria
Yeah. I think we’ve got the problem now, yeah, I think we have the product. We have the capabilities. We have the future road map. We we’re just now we’re at that perfect inflection point of sales and marketing. Right? Like, we’re at that stage as a company now where sales and marketing is our next frontier. And, you know, it’s just really about having the right strategies there. And so and and I think we’ve tried a lot of things.

We’ve done a lot of AB testing. I think we know what we wanna do there, and and I’m excited about that. I’m excited about that next frontier.

Richard Medcalf
Yeah. And then my my my kind of final question perhaps is My favorite question, which is how, how do you need, you know, what’s your edge? How do you wanna multiply your impact As this business CEO keeps scaling, you know, what’s gonna be the kind of the challenge personal challenge enough for you as a CEO?

Anjali Kataria
You know, I’m a hard charging person, and I’m I’m extremely, extraordinarily direct for a woman The can be a challenge, especially in a in a fairly male dominated world. Although I have to say, like, I’ve had the luxury of working with a lot of very progressive men, my investors, my business partners, my husband, I mean, just I’ve had an incredible journey as a woman, entrepreneur in enterprise software. I think for me, it’s I see bringing more of my feminine side into my next phase. Right. I really value, you know, the maternal side of myself, the The that I think business is often missing. And I think kindness gets you very far in life. And, you know, I think there’s a way to lead a very ethical approach to be very kind and to be very strong and to be, very much heard and and to be appreciated. And so I think that’s gonna be my next journey is kind of bringing these different parts of myself together as a leader in a world where there really are very few women.

I don’t have a lot of women role models that are in enterprise software tech, that are at a series B PE stage backed company, I there just aren’t. And so kind of finding that right approach, that right identity, I’ve not thought a lot about it, and I think it’s something I’m kind of exploring now more. I’ve been so focused on building the best product, and I’m a product strategy person at heart, so that’s been my orientation. But I think now, like stepping more into that leadership role, I think is going to be exciting.

Richard Medcalf
Yeah. As people on the podcast probably know by now, I talk a lot about being strategic and being magnetic. And And that’s The video that you were just talking to The, actually, which is obviously you’re already, you know, creating a great business and everything else. And Yeah. My story is strategy consultant, right, like strategy can come easy in The level. But what’s, but The there’s another level, which is Even in the strategy, how do I dial up who I am? Who do I dial up? What I stand for, and the mission I’m on So The every single conversation then becomes more impactful as a result. Not that they weren’t impactful before, but I think when you turn both of those up, it’s it’s electric. So, I look forward to seeing, yeah, that evolution.

I mean, no matter where we are, there’s always next level. That’s what I love to explore, so thank you.

Anjali Kataria
There’s always The next level. There’s always the next level. That’s right. Yeah.

Richard Medcalf
But, Angelie, this has been a great conversation. I’ve so enjoyed it. I’ve loved, kind of looking at, you know, all these different things from the journey from your, your past in, you know, in the tech sector, in Oracle to really getting serious about scaling, this business that your husband has started to build or changing its direction, thinking in a very different way from the existing players, seeing the potential of video to actually change patient outcomes. This practice you have of really thinking about success and how we can double down on it and scale that, and then we’ve just been talking about right around, where the business goes, but also where you wanna go and and where, you know, where your next evolution lies. So it’s been great to explore these different angles with you. If people want to find out about you or about the business, you know, where should they go for that?

Anjali Kataria
Go to our website, info at mytonomy.com, and you’ll be able to see some examples of our of our content, you’ll see our platform, the the the rich, robust capabilities around the platform. Yeah, take studies from our customers. Yeah. So

Richard Medcalf
Perfect, Angie. That’s great. Thanks so much, and looking forward to

Anjali Kataria
Hey there, you know, just info at MyTonomy. It’ll get to you know, someone will send it to me as well, and I look forward

Richard Medcalf
Okay. Info at myTonomy.com. Okay. Perfect. We’ll put that in the show notes. Ajay, thanks a lot. It’s been great to speak to you, and look forward to following along on the journey as you modify your impact.

Anjali Kataria
Thanks so much. It was great to be here today, and I love the work you’re doing. Yeah. So

Richard Medcalf
You’re welcome. Bye bye.

Anjali Kataria
Awesome. Bye.

Richard Medcalf
Well, that’s a wrap. If you received value from this conversation, please do Leave us a review on your favorite podcast platform. We The appreciate it. And if you’d like to check out the show notes from this episode, Head to expodrent.com/podcast Podcast you’ll find all the details. Now finally, When you’re in top leadership, who supports and challenges you at a deep level to help you multiply Impact Discover more about the different ways we can support you at Xquadrant.

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