Rachel Chalmers:

Today, I am thrilled to welcome Adam Odessky to the show as a corporate innovator who is now also a startup founder and whose startup is a graduate of the AlchemistX accelerator. Adam Odessky is the founder and CEO of Sensely, a virtual assistant platform with commercial usage across the insurance, pharmaceutical and healthcare industries. Before Sensely, he spent three years at Orange Silicon Valley, the innovation and strategy arm of France Telecom. Adam came to Orange from a leading product management role at Microsoft's Tell Me Networks and Oracle. He has an MBA from the University of San Francisco and a computer science degree from Urbana-Champaign, home of the Mosaic browser. Adam, thank you so much for taking the time with us today.

Adam Odessky:

Yeah, absolutely. Thanks very much for having us, Rachel.

Rachel Chalmers:

Can you describe the journey through Orange, where you focused on telemedicine to the founding of Sensely? How is the culture shock of moving from an incubator to starting your own startup?

Adam Odessky:

Well it's interesting. When I worked at Orange Silicon Valley, they were an outpost of the large Orange Telecom Group that's based in France and has offices and operations in many places in the world. In the Orange Innovation Lab, we primarily worked on scouting new technologies, developing prototypes and trying to understand the way the tech industry was moving and where it was moving. Obviously, being in Silicon Valley, having that ear to the ground and being able to meet with people in the industry is very important to that. It was a corporate office type of environment where we would be close to innovation, close to startups, close to Silicon Valley. But still, there was this process based on large corporate infrastructure around that we filtered stuff through based on our own understandings of how the market was moving. Orange Silicon Valley a great, innovative place to be in and being very close connected, but still things needed to be properly parsed through.

That gave me the opportunity working there to just meet a lot of fascinating people from all parts of the industry and in all walks of life. I got to know startups really well and founders and CEOs and investors, VCs, supporting staff and how these structures basically operate. Going back to that culture shock question that you posed, when you are inside a big company, you're under the safety umbrella where a lot of the things that make you comfortable being at work are automatically provided to you, your salary, your office where you work, your benefits, your health care, legal support, business support. When you're moving to a startup environment, becoming a founder or just even working for a startup, that safety shelter slowly dissipates. 

Basically, you begin to think here's how the ecosystem really works and it's up to me, and I am now responsible for making sure that all these different parts of the ecosystem that make a company function, operate properly. I have a lot of control and a lot of decisions to make about how to tune those things.I didn't need that control in a bigger company because everything was provided for you but now you have to start consciously thinking about all these things. How are you going to handle finance? How are you going to handle legal? What lawyers should you hire? How many years of experience does that lawyer need to have? You need to pay your company taxes, you need to establish a corporation, perhaps subsidiaries in different countries. So all those little things start to bubble up to the surface. That's a culture shock in itself because you all of a sudden you're in a completely different environment.

Rachel Chalmers:

That's such a great way of putting it, and it really articulates the pain and the friction so well. There must have been something really strong pushing you out of the nest out of the comforts of Orange Silicon Valley. What was that impetus? What made it so irresistible?

Adam Odessky:

What was interesting is that the project that I was doing at Orange started taking off. When I first came to Orange, one of the benefits of working there was they gave me the freedom to think on my own to create and build prototypes based on what I thought was a good idea or a good business case. In this particular case, when I started working in Orange, I was thinking a lot about health care, and the reason I was thinking a lot about health care is that I worked in an environment at Oracle, at Microsoft, where I was building these voice applications for large companies. 

These customer service lines that you call that automatically talk to you, these types of customer service engagement processes, started taking off in other industries really fast, like travel, transportation, financial services, hospitality, et cetera. But health care is always a bit behind. I couldn't understand why at that point in time. So that's where I started. That was the big question for me. The problem for me, that formed at Orange where I started pursuing this goal, what I built there with my team was basically a prototype of a new type of digital assistant that you can interact with that was health care focused. We move from being completely voice based to being more avatar based. Also focusing on health care and trying to solve the health care tasks like booking appointments, checking somebody for their symptoms, providing wellness information.

I tried to combine all those things together. That ended up being a really interesting combination because what Orange allowed me to do is to take this prototype and promote it publicly at various conferences. I remember a conference, Health 2.0, where I presented in front of a few thousand people. It was really cool because a bunch of tweets came out saying, this is the best thing I've ever seen since Facebook for health. 

This is what seems like a really key demarcation line between this corporate innovation and startups at that event where you basically took this internal corporate innovation internal prototype, that we were noodling on working on and you got external validation. People in some communities, in this case, Health 2.0 basically saw it and saw this is really cool. This is something that really fits and can actually have a life of its own.

That initial inflection point is what drove this in orange. We called it an excavation where you have an incubation, where you build something internally. But this was an excavation. This was an internal project that actually it sounded like this is a U.S. audience, by the way, in Orange is the French company. We're like, OK, maybe this has the ability to take off in the U.S. And so from that point on, we started working at Orange to basically spin this off into a separate company. 

Rachel Chalmers:

How do you frame those conversations about ownership? How much stake does France Telecom retain? How much do you get as the entrepreneur? What kinds of questions did you kick around at that point?

Adam Odessky:

The business case was built on the principle of France Telecom or Orange incubated the solution internally. They invested in the labor costs, talent and infrastructure to support the building of this initial product. Then there is the consideration of, how do you make a startup entrepreneur successful? Give them a good runway to make sure that they don't have too much friction or encumbrances to prevent it from scaling really fast and becoming a real business which benefits everybody. It was a mix of different deals. It's a mix of cash and equity that gets exchanged like an investment almost where Orange in this case is making this initial seed investment into the market of this solution, retaining a stake and then seeing how it grows. That's how the consideration for that deal came about. 

Rachel Chalmers:

Did that have an effect on downstream fundraising? Did future investors look at that stake held by the original incubator and have questions?

Adam Odessky:

It was a very nonissue for us. I would say it actually helped us in many ways where I think investors felt like they were getting something that was already pre-baked a little bit, that already was de-risked. They already have a couple of years of experience presenting this to the market, with the price being reasonable, the valuations being sometimes what they are. They actually thought it was a big benefit to have this level of de-risking involved.

Rachel Chalmers:

That's great to hear because oftentimes when I work with internal entrepreneurs, that's one of their big hesitations about pursuing a spin out is that it won't be judged on equal terms with start ups that purely evolved outside of a corporate ecosystem. So it's nice to have some counter evidence there.

Adam Odessky:

Also it's obvious there could be issues if the spin company wants any level of control, or maybe it has too high of a stake. There are some red flags that this could cause for investors, but there's also a smoother, much more benefit aligned way to negotiate and position this for the broader market.

Rachel Chalmers:

How was it for you personally? Because you'd always worked for big companies before that and suddenly you were responsible for everything? Were there moments where you just wanted to go back to arrange or oracle?

Adam Odessky:

It's definitely a wild ride. I actually read a nice quote in an article recently that being an entrepreneur is like riding a lion. It's like you don't really know where it's going to next, and you don't really know how you got on it in the first place. You have no idea how to get off. Going to that analogy of leaving your parents house, you have much more risk that you've taken on in your personal life. That's first and foremost. Your salary isn't necessarily as guaranteed as it was before. You have to worry about all the different parts of the business that you may not have the skillset for. Your level of responsibilities are just much broader and affect real things and real laws.

Obviously, that affects you psychologically. There are more ups and downs, there’re more extremes, and you have to consciously manage that. Entrepreneurs have to be prepared for that and understand this is a thing happening in this corporate narrative that I've created for myself or startup narrative that I've created for myself. It's still a narrative in my head. It's not that to the level of, I'm having a heart attack or something. It's still this machine in your head that you're trying to tune, and so having that level of distance is also very important for understanding what you're trying to do.

Rachel Chalmers:

That's a great way to put it. A lot of the work I do on the start up coaching side is burnout prevention. 

Adam Odessky:

Yeah, having a healthy level of distance is always important. I believe.

Rachel Chalmers:

When you look back on your work in innovation, what are you proudest of?

Adam Odessky:

This may serve as a lesson to your audience. When I was in college, my friend and I built a car MP3 player. This was a while back. This was about a time when MP3’s were first being presented via computers as a way to listen to music. The first innovative idea that came to mind in my friend and my head was, this just formally got released and people really like it. What's the next step? What do you think will happen next? What's the next incremental trend that not a lot of people are thinking about yet that will really take off? The idea that came was this can be in cars because you can have a computer now in cars and you can have a very large hard drive means you can store a ton of music. It's the idea that's brought the iPod, its prominence in the personal world. Our idea was more targeted towards cars because, you know, we have car CDs. We all like driving cars, living in the Midwest, and so we built it.

That was the thing that we focused on. We actually built a computer like a laptop that you could plug in your car. It is like a cigarette adapter that would have a little keypad where you can have a little bit of a user interface where you can advance through songs or type in the number of the song that you wanted. You would obviously have the integration with the car stereo. One of the things that you can do now that not a lot of people know about and get in first and block it for everybody else, basically. There was a set of APIs being released for computers that would be able to basically allow you to play the sound not just via Napster or other types of pre-built applications, but building the application yourself. They would provide a bunch of drivers for you to build a navigation build to playback. We can build our own car focused application with the car user interface to be able to play this music and that's the thing that we jumped on. We built it and it worked in my car, we had a little display that was semi functional.

This was the learning from the failure. It failed miserably. We never even took it to market. It was a complete disaster. But what we learned, and even if you're jumping in and you find that little unfair advantage, you can implement an API faster. You can take one format and pivot it to another in a different type of user interface very quickly. You still need a very strong team of people around you that know the basics. The basics here were how are you going to mount a display in the car that is usable? How were you going to create a keyboard user interface that people will understand how to use? How were you going to take this very large computer and make it fit, so it's installable and you can distribute it? Where was this whole host of business problems that we encountered, and there were tons of solutions for these business problems already. But in order to solve this one hundred different business problems or whatever it was, you needed to have funding. You need to have more people, you need to have the people with the right experience that understand what you do. That ability to scale up the backup support and think product soup to nuts, both in its distribution and how it's delivered and how it looks. All those things are still important, even if you have that hook that nobody else has at the moment. 

Rachel Chalmers:

I don't know if you've seen the show Halt and Catch Fire, but it captures that 80s version of that experience. You've seen NSF net, you've seen how the future's going to pan out for the next eight months, and no one else has figured out what it means yet and how you monetize that. It's such a fantastic experience. I love that you bring that up as what you're proudest of because I think those failures are what make us when we hug those failures close and keep those lessons that can drive us for the rest of our career. I have a failure like that that I cherish.

Adam Odessky:

Yeah, absolutely. It's those very early formative experiences as well. Without those formative experiences, you probably wouldn't have gotten to that same place on your life journey. If you look at where you are now versus when that formative experience actually came, that's the piece that comes to mind.

Rachel Chalmers:

It's one of the real gifts of getting older is that when something bad happens, there are lessons here that are absolutely golden. So you become sort of zen about, Oh, well, that failed. Okay, let's package up everything we learned and take it to the next thing, which is a great lead into the next question.

If you had one do over, what would you do differently? 

Adam Odessky:

That's a great question. Because you have, we talked about, this bag of formative experiences and failures and life lessons that you bring into your world. Eventually, in my case, it ends up where I end up being an entrepreneur. I guess an area that I would definitely want to do or that I think would definitely accelerate my own journey into entrepreneurship is to be able to hire the best salespeople possible early on. I think a lot of entrepreneurs in the B2B space have had issues with this, especially technologists coming into the business world, coming into the enterprise sales world, coming into understanding corporate innovation. Understanding how digital transformation happens in various organizations. There's a very specific skill set required, and this is something that we learned also in AlchemistX. AlchemistX definitely accelerated that part of our thinking. I actually wish it would have doubled or tripled it. One of the most important pieces, how you actually sell large deals to the enterprise.

There are people that are just so amazing at it, but there's also a wide pool of people that are not. It's very similar to engineering as well, where you have just a few people that are considered the best engineers that can figure out everything and do things very quickly. It's finding that needle in the haystack. That's the part that when I came in, it was more, how do we make this product succeed vs. how do we make the business succeed. To make the business succeed, how do we sell a customer efficiently? How do we reduce a sales cycle? How do we price effectively? How do we negotiate effectively? How do we scale hiring and scale recruitment?

Those things became tremendously important. We learned along the way and I adjusted as well. But that's the piece that I thought if I had a do over, I'd put much more of my own time, my own emphasis much earlier on building the set of cadres, if you will, to really effectively promote and sell the product.

Rachel Chalmers:

There's a really subtle timing aspect to that as well, though, because founder sales are so important at the beginning and you have to know all of the objections to your product. 

So how do you know when it's time to bring in those planetary scale sales folks? 

Adam Odessky:

That's a great question as well, because you definitely have time between when you start and you have a product market fit. You have a channel market fit that perhaps goes even deeper and really understands who you're selling it to. How do you sell to them properly and what they're ready and not ready for. There's a lot to be developed very early on in the product and actually creating the process or the workflow for that channel market fit. A lot of founders, this happened to me as well, they hire people too early. They think they're going to solve this problem for you. They're going to find out who to sell to, how to sell to them, how to do lead gen and how to do all those things. That may not be the case at all if your product is not mature enough.

You probably know more about your product and who the right customer is than anybody else. You just need to do your research, you need to get deeper in that level. You either need to focus a lot of time developing that process, that flow for doing successful promotion and selling strategies and be confident in that and have a couple of references that already have been able to go through that process and have succeeded. So you can take that template or that pattern and educate a new salesperson about it, or you need to have somebody that actually will do that work for you. But that might not be a salesperson. It can be a go to market person to go to commercial operations, take a person that both can do selling. But as well as really the job is figuring out, OK, how do we do the right product and channel fit so that we can? We can sell quicker together and that's a different, different skill set as well than a regular salesperson.

Rachel Chalmers:

Yeah, I mean, what drew me to AlchemistX is I love enterprise sales because enterprises are where the money is, but enterprises also take a ton of care and feeding. You need account reps, you need relationship sales, and that's a black art to a lot of founders. It takes a lot of learning and shout out to our amazing mentors, people like Ash Rust and Pete Giordano, who can teach that it's a really rare and precious thing.

Adam Odessky:

Yeah, that's one of the best experiences that we had while we were at AlchemistX, is actually meeting these folks and getting to learn from them about the jungle, as we used to call it.

Rachel Chalmers:

So we've talked about it a lot, but let's dig into it a little bit more. What makes innovation so difficult?

Adam Odessky:

A few combinations. Number one, you need to have multiple disciplines come together. That's always a challenge because different disciplines have their own tracks in education, career and commercial experience. You need to figure out how to combine those tracks together. You need to find the right people to combine those tracks together because really innovation happens at the edges. As we all know, when two different ideas that are doing their own thing collide together and form something new that is really beneficial to the whole being greater than the sum of the parts. And figuring out that whole being greater than the sum of the parts equation is really difficult because there's several factors involved.

You have to understand the market really well and the trends in the market. You need to understand the limitations of technology and where they can get you, where they cannot get you. You need to understand are the right talent or the right people around to be able to put these things together? Can you actually build a culture from an organization from the kind of people that are either in industry or in academia or a particular location like the Bay Area. We’re very lucky, obviously, to be based in the Bay Area that has one of the most diverse sets of talent anywhere in the world. 

You have a really cool product or cool prototype that you intuitively believe makes a lot of sense from a market, from all the experiences that you have and everything you've seen. Can you actually scale it so it's a delivery machine? Initially, you believe the product or the technology is the most important thing, especially if you're coming from that world where you're building something new using these new APIs that just got released, new technology format, going back to the MP3 just got released.

So you build a product around that. I'm the smartest person in the world now. I combine these two things together. Nobody else has done it. Everybody else is dumb. Here it is. Bow to me and give me your money. That's very much the beginning of the journey. And in my experience now actually taking it to the next level is by far much harder than that initial technology journey. Figuring out building an organization to be able to deliver this at scale to large enterprises that could be sold to with this particular narrative and being able to reach this level of scalability, that's been the journey for us. By far it has been the hardest part of innovation that I've experienced.

Rachel Chalmers:

I love that phrase of yours, a delivery machine, because I've often talked about the commonality between Amazon's two businesses being fulfillment, that the fact that it's a river, it's designed to get things from one place to another. And that is really the challenge of building an enterprise organization is all of the fit and finish around taking the product and putting it into the hands of somebody who can use it.

How would you distill your experience into, say, two or three lessons for our listeners? 

Adam Odessky:

So my first lesson would be focus, focus, focus, especially when you're trying to create a startup or create an innovation. It's really threading a needle or several needles, if you will, all in succession. We all have a different size of their eyes that you're threading through and having that focus about that whole system and how it's flowing through is very, very important. The second is to have patience. This stuff takes a long time. It's not a get rich quick scheme by any means a stretch of the imagination. I think you have to be comfortable with spending several years patiently doing this and be used to a lot of rejection and a lot of disappointment. You need to be able to psychologically accept that knowing that the larger goal is to continue threading that needle and achieving success. That patience is extremely important. 

Third, is to continuously look for the best people that help you along the vision. You're only one brain. We know that if you combine brains together, we get a much better result. You also have to thread the needle of finding really, really great people that are super complementary in various fields to what you do, both personally, educationally, et cetera. That piece as well is just continuing that hunt because there's amazing people all around the world. Now that we're all working from home, you could imagine there are going to be a lot more remote-only startups that are going to form with some of the best people all around the world. They'll just be closer connected. That’s the next piece that will happen, is innovation and human collaboration. 

Rachel Chalmers:

I also think that's one of the best things about Silicon Valley, at least in my experience, is you made all of these amazing people and you're like, I bookmark you. One day I would like to work with you in some capacity. And then something like the pandemic comes along and you can actually reach out to people and say, Hey, do you want to try doing something? It's been a really fruitful time from that point of view, which is a great lead into the next question. How do you think the pandemic might affect innovation long term? 

Adam Odessky:

I think it definitely gave tailwind to a lot of trends. There's one on the work collaboration side that everybody talks about. Everybody is working from home. More people are working from home with the latest technology and tools like Zoom and others. People are more and more comfortable about collaborating from home and feeling connected. It's not perfect. It's never going to be perfect, but it's an option that you can be very creative with. On the health care side, obviously, we definitely want to avoid this next pandemic for as long as possible. We were not prepared for this one in general, although the vaccine got done in an amazing record time. So that's been a bit of a savior.

The whole world just got a big slap on the face and everybody is surprised this can actually happen in our day and age. It accelerates technology and technology adoption first and foremost in our world that essentially we just saw a huge spike of people using our health care services rise up. We are available on mobile apps and websites with various insurance companies and health systems all over the world. We have a virtual assistant that basically listens to patients complaints and then navigates them to appropriate care, whether it's the emergency room, telemedicine or self care.

We just saw an amazing spike of usage and we saw more and more customers and clients come tell us they want to deploy your technology. For us, it's been a big accelerator of what we do. The reason is that people are at home, they're isolated. They don't want to go to the clinical facility, they don't want to go to the hospital, that's for sure. So more people are understanding they had this technology or they had this app on my phone before they thought it was cool to have their doctor on call or to have a telemedicine app, but they didn't think much. But now during the pandemic, they need to use it, and oh, by the way, it works great. That's really the trend that we're seeing in terms of pandemic really accelerated this digital transformation in health care and made people realize which was the big friction barrier. The technology is great. It works well. There's a lot of big support systems behind it. How do we get more people to start using it? How do we get a critical mass to convince the critical mass that this is actually better than before? The pandemic was a great conveyancer for that, that message that we were sending.

Rachel Chalmers:

It's a classic example of where automation can actually compress the time you spend on the routine stuff and expand the amount of time you spend on the human stuff. My experience of telemedicine has been, you know, we get the vital statistics out of the way and we spend more time talking to the doctor.

Adam Odessky:

Yeah, it's great for doctors as well because they can see more patients per day, they can get reimbursed more. We talk about having conversations at the top of their license or having clinical appointments at the top of their license, where they focus on the more complex stuff rather than just the very routine stuff. 

Rachel Chalmers:

The stuff that humans are good at. The nuance and the complexity.

Adam Odessky:

Exactly, exactly. In that sense, the pandemic has helped health care quite a bit. Some VCs say it's accelerated by five to 10 years. Jury's still out, but definitely we saw the usage trend. The usage shift happened significantly, and I think that usage shift is here to stay for the most part, and I think that's happened with a lot of other industries as well. More and more people are using unique types of technologies to collaborate and communicate more than ever.

There's bad side effects as well. Isolation being on Zoom all day is no fun. So I think there's going to be some hybrid model that takes place where you have some office work, some work from home work and you're mixing and matching and that level of hybrid collaboration is going to make the world even more global and make work more global. I think a lot of not just small companies like Sensely are going to benefit from this hybrid work from home model, but I think a lot of large corporations, multinationals in particular will find ways to build these hybrid remote teams that maximizes the talent and skills, focus specifically on the projects that they're running, and they're going to make themselves much more fluid in how they operate. I think drastically increased productivity, I would say, just because of these new types of matching and work models that can be developed. I look forward to that as well.

Rachel Chalmers:

It feels like trust was always a major obstacle in implementing true remote work. Companies just didn't believe people would work hard if they weren't in an office with a manager standing behind them. But we've amply demonstrated that people can work from home and be as or more productive than they were in an office environment. I think that's helping even the largest multinationals allow that trust to the teams and having faith that productivity will continue and improve.

How do you avoid burnout? 

Adam Odessky:

That's a tough one. There's days where you definitely feel burned out. Some days you're on a roller coaster, you're responsible for taking it forward and you're working a lot. You have a lot of people to deal with. You have a lot of business problems to solve and you have to see optimism and everything. Having a clear sort of north star, having a clear purpose that you're trying to achieve long term is really important and reminding yourself of why you're doing all these things. Some days are really fun, some days are really not. Talking to other people about it, talking to other entrepreneurs, talking to your own team, talking to your family, being open. Some people I know do a lot of podcasts. I'm not there yet, but maybe it's a nice public, clinical visit, if you will.

It's being open. It's understanding where you are. There's a lot of entrepreneurship of faking it before you're making it right. There's some good stories, there's some really terrible stories. There's a spectrum of stories, but also there's a psychological story that if you fake it too much, that's actually going to affect you quite personally as well. Knowing where you stand and where you're trying to be and being more clear about it, I think helps you emotionally, psychologically knowing that you're on this path, you're on this journey. The burnout feels when you're veering off path a bit, when you feel this is going into a different direction. That creates a lot of pain and grind, and it's OK to replan it. It's OK to constantly change course.

As an entrepreneur, you have to be very aware of that every quarter to try to consciously have a long term plan that adjusts based on the new realities that you’ve experienced during the last quarter and constantly understanding that both financially product relationship or customer relationships wise. Product architecture wise is very important to understand, here's where we are now. Here's where we wanted to be, but maybe we're not quite there, maybe even better than where we were, but here's where we should be and having that clarity and also communicating the clarity to the rest of your team. People being very transparent about that clarity and being very conscious of where you sit and then being aligned with where you sit is very important to to keep moving forward.

Rachel Chalmers:

We've talked a lot on the podcast about how that seems to be a big gendered component in this as well, in that female founders for all of the challenges they face have been socialized to make those connections with their peers and to share those stresses. Male founders often isolate themselves and are in a silo of faking it til you make it. And those divergences when they start to feel themselves being pushed away from their core values are therefore much more difficult to deal with because they don't have that network of peer support to realign themselves. 

Adam Odessky:

I mean, without commenting on the topic too much, I definitely feel it inside of myself. There's definitely things, as a founder in general, you want to keep inside yourself. You don't want to reveal your anxieties too much to your team because you don't want them to feel the same anxiety. Sometimes you want to protect them from those anxieties. 

Rachel Chalmers:

Yeah, and the team is not the appropriate place to have those vulnerability sessions, for sure.

Adam Odessky:

I think I've been really lucky, actually, I have a female founder, my co-founder, Dr. Ivana Schnur, who is a clinical psychologist and also a medical doctor. I found Ivana actually very early on while I was still at Orange. I presented this as I mentioned and presented the prototype at various conferences, and Ivana also presented her company in various companies, and her company did something very interesting because they were having psychotherapy visits with patients in VR. So inside a virtual world, the patient and the clinician are both avatars and they have these conversations.

The research that ended up coming up from there is that people were much more open and honest about revealing their anxieties at the time, treating patients with PTSD coming back from the Iraq War. People would open up because they didn't feel as much that they were being judged. It wasn't this sensory experience from I'm looking at you as a human and I'm judging you. It was the avatar on the other side that just the robot, you can reveal things. That was one of the seeds of Sensley, use of this avatar as a non-judgmental but very friendly and empathetic character that can communicate with the patients, particularly with patients with high anxiety. 

If you're feeling sick now, you're worried, especially if your kids or your parents are sick, making them feel at ease, allowing them to disclose and emote all the things that they're feeling and thinking about so that you can provide it with a better service and a higher quality service. So that was one of the seeds of my collaboration with Dr. Ivana. 

Rachel Chalmers:

I love that. I love the idea of a friendly robot as being a more welcoming presence than the human because of the implied blame listeners, the lack of judgment, and I love the importance of the co-founder sale in your story. I'm always telling entrepreneurs that winning your co-founder is your first major sale and it's the most critical to the whole experience.

Adam Odessky:

I think that's one of the key inflection points in your journey as well. Is finding that right partner because it's basically like a marriage. You are committing yourself to a long term relationship with somebody that you're going to be seeing almost every day or every day and collaborating with every day. And so it's in a very important relationship in your life that's going to affect you in all sorts of ways.

Rachel Chalmers:

A work marriage.

Adam Odessky:

Yeah, exactly.

Rachel Chalmers:

What is the best way for our listeners to connect or follow your work?

Adam Odessky:

Yeah, you can go to our website and get our latest news. You can try out our virtual assistant demo, our symptom checker or our wellness services. You can see all the latest information about our products and what we're up to. You can click, contact us or follow us on Twitter. We're also on LinkedIn, so you can always Google and search for our company.

Rachel Chalmers:

As a qualified Google hypochondriac, I can't wait to get on there and diagnose myself with rare tropical illnesses.

Adam Odessky:

There you go. That's actually one of the things that we communicate as part of our sales process to deposition Google. It's not where your members need to go because they're just going to get more anxiety and feel fear. You need to point them to a credible source of clinical information. That's where Sensley comes in.

Rachel Chalmers:

Sounds great.

What does the future look like for you personally? 

Adam Odessky:

I'm continuing to build this company. Having a lot of fun doing it now that I figure it out all the enterprise sales processes. Traveling pretty much all over the world. Hopefully now we'll start post-pandemic. I'm really committed again to taking this company to the next level. The market for this is huge. The pandemic has accelerated it. Everybody in the world wants it. We have a unique differentiator that we actually have voice conversations with members and patients in thirty five different languages. We're really scaling our product outside the US as well as in the U.S. but internationally, all over the world, that's been a big personal passion for me is to be able to have a health care platform that's global in nature that lots of people benefit from, that's friendly and empathetic. 

We're continuing to build that, and hopefully the company is going to continue growing the way it's been growing. It's been growing quite well over the last few years, over one hundred percent growth. Maybe one day we'll ring the bell at some IPO or some other type of exit event. 

Rachel Chalmers:

Sounds great.

So the next five years of our industry go however you want them to go. They pan out exactly as you hope. What will things look like in 2026?

Adam Odessky:

For health care in particular, 2021 about 25% digital adoption that we've seen across the board of people using these automated health care services in a simplified way to book appointments, to get answers to their health care questions, et cetera. 2026, we'll probably see up to 90% or more digital adoption. Right now, we're seeing primary care in the healthcare space being automated, being made more scalable and global and less expensive and easier to access. In 2026, we'll see a big shift into secondary care, into hospital care, into other kinds of more complicated health care areas where technology and these types of user experiences can improve the health for many, particularly around chronic conditions. We'll see a big shift in the reduction of costs for chronic conditions.

Right now, in the U.S., chronic condition management consumes about 50%, and the chronic care population is about 5% of the population, but it's 50% of our health care costs. We'll see a massive shift in that, maybe it's twice as expensive as primary care and taking care of other people, but it doesn't have this sort of massive outlay. We'll see that shift happen very, very fast now because of this increased digital adoption and the trust that is built with these kinds of interfaces. 

Rachel Chalmers:

It's much easier to detect those subtle patterns and correlations over a large population than a small one. It's a lot easier for a system to identify rare illnesses and commonalities than it is for a single practitioner, and that's a great moment to end. Adam, this has been so great. Thank you so much for coming on the show.

Adam Odessky: 

Yeah, thanks for having me, Rachel. It's been a pleasure.