This week we hear from Amy Brown, the co-founder and CEO of Authenticx, a Midwestern startup that helps insurance companies and medical organizations extract data from their call centers using AI. Amy told Becca and Dom about how her background working in the same call centers inspired her to foray into entrepreneurship. She also talked about the sacrifices and very human side of being an entrepreneur and how they were very intentional when building their AI model.
This week we hear from Amy Brown, the co-founder and CEO of Authenticx, a Midwestern startup that helps insurance companies and medical organizations extract data from their call centers using AI. Amy told Becca and Dom about how her background working in the same call centers inspired her to foray into entrepreneurship. She also talked about the sacrifices and very human side of being an entrepreneur and how they were very intentional when building their AI model.
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Becca Szkutak 0:02
Hello, and welcome to found the TechCrunch podcast where we bring you the stories behind the startups from the entrepreneurs that build them. And I am your host, Beck askew tech, and I am joined as always by the lovely, the fabulous, the kind of mysterious sometimes. Dominic
Dom Davis 0:17
Midori Davis.
Becca Szkutak 0:18
Hey, Tom, how's it going?
Dom Davis 0:20
I'm good. How are you?
Becca Szkutak 0:21
I'm good hanging in there. We're recording this on a Thursday. So almost the
Dom Davis 0:26
weekend, almost the weekend. It's almost Oh, I was gonna bring up the fact that the weekend changed his name, and we can no longer use the it's the weekend ladies and gentlemen from SNL. But oh,
Becca Szkutak 0:36
that's such a bummer. I do love that meme. I know. Well, in advance of the weekend. Today, we're talking to Amy Brown from authentics, which is a startup that analyzes millions of conversations to discover trends that can help healthcare organizations make informed and strategic decisions about what their customers are actually thinking and feeling. So here's our conversation with Amy.
Hey, Amy, how's it going?
Amy Brown 1:08
It's going great. How are you? Oh, yes,
Becca Szkutak 1:10
it is Friday, dear listeners, you will be listening to this early in the week, Tuesday. But no, the light is at the end of the tunnel every single week. So great to have you on today. First question before we get into it be honest. Are you analyzing this car right now?
Amy Brown 1:27
I love that. That's a great question. Not yet.
Becca Szkutak 1:31
Oh, well, that that puts a little more pressure on us. Not a bad thing. But for dear listeners, if you don't understand why we ask that it might be a good way to dive into the conversation today. Amy, why don't you tell us a little bit about your company authentics.
Amy Brown 1:45
Yes. So authentics was founded to help healthcare enterprises listen at scale. And what that really means is, you know, all the recorded conversations that companies facilitate or host through their call center, their contact center, we take in that data source into our platform, and we analyze those conversations, for all the things that customers might be saying about the company, they're doing business with, what they like, what they hate what they wish the company would do better or differently, what the competition is doing. And then we serve those insights back to our clients so that they can understand their true voice of their customer.
Becca Szkutak 2:28
And that's such an interesting concept, because in theory, everything that you guys are pulling from these conversations are already from conversations with the companies that in theory, like they already have this information. But clearly, they weren't using it correctly, or didn't know how to utilize it in an effective way. So I'm curious how you came up with this idea to begin with, and sort of what got you started down this path?
Amy Brown 2:49
Yes. So I started the company with a little bit of a chip on my shoulder. And the reason for that is I spent 20 years working as a call center leader in the health insurance industry. And as a call center leader, you're often kind of thought of by your colleagues as kind of the cost center of the organization. And I found that when I was engaging throughout my employer and the organization that they really thought of these conversations we were having every day as very transactional and administrative in nature. But what I knew from listening to them, and for being a part of a team that was having these conversations by the millions every year, I knew that there were all these like human moments in these conversations that could actually inform our entire enterprise, if we could just aggregate them and organize them in a way that were useful and meaningful to all of the different functional areas within our business. So I set out to do that when I left my corporate gig. So yeah, I just I got the idea from doing the work and realizing that these conversations had immense value that was completely being missed by healthcare organizations. And frankly, it doesn't matter who the industry is. Most industries have recorded conversations, and they're not using them to their fullest potential.
Dom Davis 4:11
How does kind of the behind the scenes of it work in terms of getting the data and stuff? Is there like a human writing stuff down? You're using AI models? Like, how are you getting all of the data? And how are you ensuring that it's accurate, and that it was transcribed properly?
Amy Brown 4:24
Yes. So today, we take in large volumes of data every day, millions of customer interactions, they might be audio files, or chat files, text files, and we use AI that we have built to interpret, understand and start to structure that data into themes, topics that are relevant to the industries we serve. But then we have a capability that allows sampling from that vast array of data. So if I'm a user, and I work for an insurance come Buddy. And I really want to understand the percentage of customers who are complaining about our benefits that we sell, I can go into the authentix platform and look for that subset of calls where there are topics being discussed where the customer is complaining about that particular topic. And when I sample those interactions, I can then apply my own human eyes and ears and additional analysis around what AI has already told us about the interaction. And so it's this harmonizing experience between AI and human that helped tell a really comprehensive story about what the customer experience really is with the business.
Dom Davis 5:40
Yeah. And that's really interesting, because like, I've been reporting a little bit on AI. And so I'm just really intrigued to see what does the conversation of ethics look like when having this AI model? And how do you kind of make all of this ethical?
Amy Brown 5:55
Sure. Well, the first thing is, what the use case of this data is, the use case is really, we don't use conversational data to help companies go market to those individuals, we use this data to help inform business strategy, what we're doing is we're taking vast arrays of data that already existed within these companies. And we are helping tell the story of what customer perception is about their brand. And what companies do with this information is they improve their processes, their policies, their messaging, their training of their agents, so that they can deliver a better customer experience, which of course, drives business outcomes, like customer retention, and revenue and those types of things, how we address ethics. Also, besides the use case of this data, and not using it to market consumers, some of the kind of ethical considerations are around how did you train the AI models to begin with? And how do you address the inherent bias that can exist. And one of the most important commitments that I made as a founder was if we're going to build our own AI models, we want to do so with the highest standards and integrity. So we did not outsource data labeling, which essentially looks like you know, humans listening to conversations, and creating tags and labels to structure those, we didn't outsource that. And instead of just hiring like data scientists, we hired nurses, and social workers and counselors, and people who had actually spent their career working inside the business of health care, who not only understood the spoken word that they were listening to, but also understood the context of the situation. And so we could rely upon their tags and labels to be much more useful, meaningful and correct. And we also have a calibration process that includes a diverse group of human beings sitting together, comparing notes and making sure that when they're tagging and labeling, they're inclusive of all the perspectives around the table, and they're trying to be as consistent as possible. So those, you know, we can never eliminate all bias. But those are the types of checks and balances we have put in place at our organization.
Becca Szkutak 8:11
Definitely seems like you're putting a lot of thought into it, of course, which sounds like such like, Oh, my God, the bars on the floor to be like, Wow, you thought about how this would play out. But I mean, man, I mean, Don can probably attest covering the recent wave of AI, it's like, you're not seeing that across the board. So it is always good to kind of hear of that intentionality or like front loading the issues. And that sounds like a pretty good workaround, at least in my opinion of how to avoid some of that having that high human touch. Well, thank
Amy Brown 8:38
you. I mean, in healthcare, the stakes are high, right. So these conversations, people are, you know, trying to get their medications refilled, or they're calling because their child is very sick and needs help, or they're talking about an upcoming surgery and are super worried. And so getting it right, and trying to represent that customers voice and their intentions is serious business. So we we take that part really seriously.
Becca Szkutak 9:05
And I'm curious what it's been like selling this to the customers that you do work with thinking it through the healthcare industry, maybe like providers, and pharmacists would be like more, in my mind, like wanting to sort of improve this experience. But I always just have a hard time believing insurance companies really care about their customers at scale, just based on my experiences with insurance companies. But yeah, so I'm curious kind of if this was just like, oh, the process was bad. They know they want a better solution. I am curious what it was like selling to these big organizations.
Amy Brown 9:35
Sure. And Becca, that hurts my soul just a little bit because I spent 20 years in insurance. Well, I'm
Becca Szkutak 9:40
sure we didn't talk to each other. Otherwise, there would have been great.
Amy Brown 9:44
No, but you're right. I mean, you know, all of the verticals in healthcare. There's something to be skeptical about in terms of their business model and certainly insurance. It's understandable why as a consumer you would feel that way. Yeah, selling into these industries. What are the biggest challenge Just that we faced as a startup and an innovator was first just convincing our potential buyers that these conversations were worth listening to, and that there was really something of value for them to hear, you know, most of well, really all of the companies we have sold into, have already had an existing survey program where they're soliciting feedback from customers. And you know, they have a Northstar metric around Net Promoter Score. And they've got lots of incentive programs built into their NPS. And what we're saying is, hey, that's the wrong metric to be using as your Northstar, because it's very skewed, it's only including a fraction of the customers input that you do business with. And typically, people who are responding to a survey are either very happy or very angry, and you're missing the totality of it. So trying to convince the market that this was a valuable data source to start leveraging for authentic, unsolicited feedback has been challenging. That said, when we can demonstrate usually with just a handful of interactions, how our platform works, and how it actually creates not only visualize data that kind of helps a leader quantify problems that they should go tackle, but we couple those visualizations with the literal voice of their customer. And, you know, they can listen, boardrooms and C suites can listen to dozens of their customers in a three minute call montage who are complimenting them or criticizing them. And this is not because they were asked, it's because they were organically sharing this information with our call center downstairs, right? And we're just piecing it together in an efficient way. And what we found through that coupling of data visualizations, plus the actual voice of the customer is it it hits people not only in their cognitive brain, but it hits them in their gut. And once they hear it, they can't unhear it, and it spurs them to action. And so we've seen a wonderful response, which is why our company is growing so well. I think it's just a really powerful data source.
Dom Davis 12:05
Speaking of company growth, you're based in Indiana, and I'm really interested to know what is it like kind of running a startup out of Indiana and also pitching investors and being a part of that tech ecosystem?
Amy Brown 12:17
Yes. So starting a business in Indianapolis has been a really good experience for me. Indy has done a lot of work around Association support, founder support, we have a strong track record with Salesforce being headquartered here. And that came to fruition through an acquisition of an indie based company. So we have a really rich tech scene. In terms of fundraising, I would say that has been by far the biggest learning curve for me, when I started authentics. I had no immediate plans to raise capital, I first wanted to test the idea and make sure it could sell and so I bootstrapped for the first 18 months. And then I kind of hit a fork in the road moment, and I decided to raise my first round of capital. And so today, I've been through three rounds just close to Series B, and, you know, fundraising is hard from the Midwest, I think it's getting better. I think more and more venture capital firms are seeing the value of non coastal businesses, but there's definitely reputations, or guests, stereotypes that, you know, I face as a Indiana based company that, you know, has been a part of the story of my fundraising journey.
Becca Szkutak 13:29
Yeah, cuz I was gonna ask about that leading off of Dom's question, because I know a lot of VC funds, especially in 2020 2021, when they got comfortable sort of taking all of these meetings on Zoom. They were like, Oh, we're investing everywhere now. And then come 2022 Like checking in with certain companies and investors outside of Silicon Valley and New York. I was like, Is that still true? And they're like, the depends who you ask. So I am definitely curious if it seems you mentioned it's getting better. And raise couple rounds of funding. Do you think that will continue? Are you nervous about as the world opens up, VCs sort of retreating to where they were? Do you think you've got a hold on them? Now? It shouldn't be as hard going forward?
Amy Brown 14:09
Yes, I think it's getting better because of what happened during COVID. I think that more companies have had a chance to prove themselves from the middle of the country. And I think whether the trend continues of having access to capital coast to coast will depend upon the performance of the companies that they've invested in in the middle of the country. But I think there's a lot of value here. We intend to be a big company and continue to prove that investing outside of coasts is a really good thing. That said, what you shared Becca, we raised our Series A in 2021, where everybody was on Zoom and definitely experienced this flavor of Yeah, we invest anywhere. Fast forward to December of 2022. And we are raising our series B I definitely heard from coastal firms a bit more about some hesitancy that we weren't Not based, you know, in California or whatnot. So I can see a little bit about what you're talking about. I experienced that a bit.
Becca Szkutak 15:07
Yeah, that stuff drives me nuts. Like if the company's showing the numbers like, why would it matter where they're located? That's just like, I don't know, the hill, I will continue to die on I guess.
Amy Brown 15:17
It's a good one. It's a worthy one.
Dom Davis 15:19
Oh, my gosh. And I was curious
Becca Szkutak 15:21
about you mentioned Amy raising money after bootstrapping. And it sounds like you said you kind of came to a fork in the road and decided to raise capital. We don't generally have a ton of bootstrapped founders on here. So I'm super curious to learn more about what fork Did you hit and sort of like walk us through why the decision to start raising venture capital made sense at that time?
Amy Brown 15:43
Yes, well, a little context on who I am, at the time that I left my corporate gig, I had passed the 4040 years of age, I was a mom of four kids, and I was the only income earner for our home. And I had an operator background, right, I worked 20 years in industry. So to me, the most important thing was to demonstrate to myself that this idea could sell. And it made no sense to me to start raising capital, until I could convince myself that this thing had legs that I could get some buying customers, and that I had some sense of just a beginning of product market fit. And so what I did was I spent my savings on, you know, hiring a developer on contract to build out on a low code platform, the idea of a prototype, and I sold that and we didn't have aI at the beginning, we were using humans to listen tag and label interactions. And that became the foundation of our AI models. But it was only after a few months that we had some paying customers. And I could start to see the growth and expansion and customers asking for more and learning what they were attracted to and our offering. And all of that helped inform my thinking on how big this company could get. And whether or not I should try to grow slower and self fund or whether I should, you know, grow faster. And that's really the fork moment. And I saw that the market timing was great that AI could truly massively scale our business, and that we needed capital to do so.
Dom Davis 17:19
And coming from the background that you have, you're kind of like a little bit of an outsider within the tech and venture ecosystem. So I was wondering, how have you been able to kind of integrate those skills that you had, from your previous professions into navigating this venture? You know, healthcare tech space?
Amy Brown 17:34
Yes, great question. There's so much I've had to learn that because I don't have a tech background. And because I never raised venture capital before. And certainly the learning curve was steep. But what I lacked in that experience I made up for in my understanding of leading large teams of people, of growing a business of years of experience having highs and lows with successes and failures, having 20 years of career history to help these in me and helped me know my skill sets and where I'm weak and where I need to surround myself with people who are stronger than me, the leadership skills required the self confidence skills that are required to pull yourself through those hard times in startup. And so I'm so grateful for that experience. Also, like I created a product based on my 20 years of experience. And like if you start a company, a tech company, without like this experiential knowledge and conviction, it must be so much harder, right. But my conviction came from a deep internal place because I had lived it. And it's because of that, that I feel that I've been able to be successful, even while lacking some of the experience that maybe other tech founders have.
Becca Szkutak 18:52
And sort of a follow on to that, obviously, coming from the background that you did. Did you ever think you would be an entrepreneur at some point? And what has that journey been like for you personally, knowing obviously, it's such a different career path than the one you were currently on?
Amy Brown 19:08
Well, I never thought I'd start a tech company 20 years ago, 10 years ago, if you asked me, I would have laughed. But I've always had kind of a mission oriented part of my being and this belief that if I feel strongly enough about something that I can go do something about it, you know, I did when I was a young mom, I created a baby product that I it was kind of like a side hustle for me. But I ended up getting it manufactured and landing it into a big box retailer. And I was proud of that. But it was never something that I was so passionate about that I want to delete my career. So it really took it took an idea that I couldn't forget that I couldn't just push away to the side of my brain. And I remember the day going home to talk To my husband and saying, I just can't die happy if I don't try to build this company. So the experience of, of leaving your corporate safety net and starting a business has been a thrill ride, it's been a joy. It's also been, I mean, the LinkedIn reels, don't tell the full story for sure. There are plenty of moments where I'm in the fetal position on my floor. But it's, I wouldn't have it any other way. It's been such a rich experience.
Dom Davis 20:27
And we're going to take a super quick break, stick with us, because when we come back, we're going to be talking about how Amy thinks about balancing being an entrepreneur, and a very present mother of four, her process of building an authentically caring workplace culture, and what she would do differently if she got to do this all over again. What is it been like integrating kind of your personal life and balancing motherhood with also running a company like this?
Amy Brown 20:54
Yes, it's fully integrated. And what I mean by that is, we had to have a family conversation about how our lifestyle needed to change when mommy was leaving her job, right, we needed to be prepared to live because I was intending the Bootstrap, we needed to live for at least 12 months with no income, we needed to spend differently, we needed to do some different things financially. And so we made it a family conversation. And my kids had to make sacrifices. I mean, they were, you know, not getting anything they wanted off the shelves of target kind of sacrifices. But to them, it meant something right, that was four or five years ago. And today, my kids are so proud. Because when they come into this office, which we feel so fortunate to have that we opened post COVID. You know, they feel like this is a tangible, something tangible, they can see and walk into and say yeah, I helped to do that. I made sacrifices and compromises for mom to live her dream. And they're part of the fabric of this place. And they consider you know, this part of their company as well.
Becca Szkutak 22:00
And I think something I'm interested in with that being said, is the sacrifice part of this because I feel like that is such a deep part of so many founders stories. And yet, that's what we don't often hear, because you'll talk to so many founders who are like you said, LinkedIn reels, kind of like what people are choosing to put out there. They're like, I didn't pay myself for five years. And you're like, Okay, guy, like, I couldn't do that for two months. So it's so refreshing to kind of hear that part of it. Because I really do think that's more of a prominent part of the founder journey for a lot of people than we get to hear about everyone wants to just show the highlight reel.
Amy Brown 22:35
Yes, for sure. There are plenty of sacrifices and moments of fear and second guessing and doubting and also moments of like you're holding your breath, and you know that you're on the brink of either total, total trajectory northward, or, you know, things falling apart, right. And I've come even though hard times are hard, I've come to appreciate them as part of the journey. And you know, if everything were easy, and rainbows and unicorns, then it wouldn't be worth it at the end. And it's been a very satisfactory, I should say, satisfying. It's been a very satisfying process.
Becca Szkutak 23:15
Yeah, what's maybe walk us through one challenge that you have had built in the business that you think you've been really successful in overcoming or something that you look back on, and are just like, really proud to have made it past?
Amy Brown 23:27
Well, one of the things that, you know, I think a lot of companies aspire to is selling into the biggest brands, the biggest companies in the world. And I am so proud that we have been able to do that. And truly be a enterprise land and expand type model. I could say it's because our UI is the best I could say it's because our product is perfect. But I think why we've been able to land in some of the biggest companies in healthcare, and expand so rapidly and then is because we've somehow touched their soul. We've somehow helped people feel something again, who, you know, everybody gets out of bed wanting to help someone. But when do we get into our rat race and our back to back meetings, it's so hard to remember the customer that we get up to serve every day. And the higher you get in an organization, the more distance you have from your actual customer, which in this case is the entire US healthcare system, right? And all the health care consumers, which we can all relate to that group of people because we are part of that group. So we've been able to open up the eyes of leaders and boardrooms and C suites just by surfacing their own customer voices that they already had. And there's something really human about that. There's something really beautiful about it. And my ultimate dream aim is to change the whole concept of what it means to listen in corporate America and to make it so much more effective and something that executives have easy access to, from this
Becca Szkutak 25:13
point forward. Yeah, their plans to expand out of health care and like down the line, or are you getting inbound from outside of healthcare too?
Amy Brown 25:20
Yes, we are. That said, one of the reasons why we think we're growing effectively and so rapidly right now is because of our dedication to the healthcare space. It's not just a go to market strategy. It's also like, why are AI is better is because we've trained our AI with healthcare specific conversations. And so it's a part of our moat right now, do I think that our product can and should live in other verticals? Someday? Yes, if and when we do that, we will approach those verticals in the same way we approach to healthcare, which is to go deep, and understand the context of that particular industry. So that the AI that is serving them is specific to their use cases, which is going to make it that much more effective and truly drive meaningful change within those industries.
Dom Davis 26:13
And this is kind of a random question. But a moment ago, you spoke about the office space you have, which is amazing and lovely, and brought back memories of I guess, going into the office. And so I'm just really It looks great. It does it looks really good. I'm wondering like, so do your employees go into the office? Or is there like kind of a hybrid working policy? What is like, what does that like?
Amy Brown 26:32
Yes, so we are hybrid, we have a space big enough to house at any point in time about 50% of our workforce, we also have about 25% of our workforce that's distributed outside of the indie area, like in other states, and so we haven't mandated anything in terms of coming into the office, we just provide really good coffee, we provide food for free for anybody who comes in. And we have a lot of really awesome amenities like a lake and people just, it's a coffee shop vibe here. And I think people have gotten into a rhythm of just, you know, having kind of a schedule that they come in, and it's worked out well for us what you said there's a lake, yes, well, yes, it's a manmade lake. But yes, we have a lake right, right outside our door, you should come visit them. Yes, I
Dom Davis 27:19
want to see this lake.
Becca Szkutak 27:22
I love that. I'm sort of thinking, of course, obviously, the office is not the only part of company culture that matters by any means. But I am curious thinking about how you guys were intentional about setting up your company culture and what decisions you have made in that process to sort of ensure that you're building a culture that people want to work in. And that will last as the company scales.
Amy Brown 27:42
Yes, I mean, the most rapid phase of our growth was right during COVID. And so we had to do that completely, virtually. So thinking about building culture, virtually, you know, takes a lot of intention. And I would say that when I think about how we've built our culture, it really is driven by our values of authenticity and courage. We tried to be very intentional around making time and space for people to know themselves, and to discover who they really are, and to have conversations with their colleagues around that, you know, a big part of the name of our company really comes from my 20 years of working in different cultures and realizing that I adopted some behaviors to survive and compete and win in corporate America that no longer suited me. And so when I started this company, I wanted it to be a place where people could kind of remove their baggage that they had picked up over the years and really figure out who they really are. And so we have things in place here. Like for example, every employee is invited to select a word for the year that represents their calling their beacon, their inspiration, and we share those openly those words, and we are able to hold each other accountable to those words, have conversations on a quarterly basis about those words. And that's just one practice that we've incorporated to try to live out this value of authenticity and just being real with one another.
Becca Szkutak 29:13
And taking a step back thinking about all the progress you guys have made so far, and what you've built. Is there anything you would do differently? If you had just had this idea now, and we're starting the company over from scratch?
Amy Brown 29:26
Gosh, there's probably 100 things that I would do differently. You're like the whole thing, which I mean, tons of lessons learned, but we do a lot of experimentation and trying things out and figuring out what works and dropping what didn't work. And I I really think that's that's a really important part of our success is not trying to invest so much and go all in on something before testing it out. I think one of the things that is really hard that I would probably think differently about is when you Sell into really large companies, they're going to ask you to do things that weren't necessarily on your roadmap. So really discerning that and learning when and how to say no to things that don't fit the vision is something that I've had to learn more than once in this journey. And I'm still learning because you want to please your customers. But you also want to stay true to your, you know, your vision of your product. And I am pretty sure there are a lot of founders out there that can relate to that challenge.
Becca Szkutak 30:31
That's so interesting. i There's a tweet I used to work in, like customer service retail forever the tweet that's like, why do we say the customer's always right, they're the least knowledgeable person here. And I just think that's so interesting, because that, again, is something that we just don't hear about very often. But of course, big corporations are like, well, if I'm gonna plug this thing in, it's got to be exact based on these 20 Other things that like, you're like, we've never thought about those. Why is that relevant? That is so interesting to think about having to like, do you have to like negotiate with companies sometimes because of that? Or how does that work?
Amy Brown 31:02
Yes, negotiate, as well as like, try to help them see why the business problem they have is legitimate. But there are multiple ways to address the business problem. And we, we believe that our approach is one that is an innovative way to address it. So to your point, yeah, big companies oftentimes will say, well, here's how we want it done and want to prescribe it, right. And it's a dance. And it's a bit of give and take. And it's a bit of making sure that we have really solid product leaders and solutions engineers who can make sure we're doing great discovery, but also being consultative during the sales process.
Dom Davis 31:42
So I guess, to start slowly, wrapping things up what is next for you as an entrepreneur and also for your company.
Amy Brown 31:50
Next for me, as an entrepreneur is just continuing to learn what it means to be a CEO of a company of this size and scale, every three months, we we look different than we did the prior three months because of our rapid growth. And so I've never been the CEO of a tech company that's post Series B before, just like I had never been a CEO of a startup with, you know, just me, myself and I and so I'm always introspectively asking myself, What is my company the need of me today. And I think right now, what it really needs of me is to be building in capacity and to others to lead and grow. And it's really about not being the hub from which all the spokes stick into but spreading that responsibility that ownership across a greater sea of individuals. And if I can do that successfully, and build a whole team, then I'm doing my job as the CEO today. As far as the company goes, we intend to double again this year, and are so excited about the use cases that are coming up with conversational data. Like we've kind of tackled low hanging fruit, like how do you find problems in your organization that are in your agent call center or with customer friction. But now we're starting to hear signs hearing in this conversational data, issues around health equity, issues around social determinants of health, that all exists in this data source as well. And so super excited about kind of working our way up the tree to the higher fruit in this conversational data source and really having an impact on the healthcare system.
Becca Szkutak 33:32
Anything that's going to make that healthcare system more consumer friendly, I mean, cheers, cheers. But I think that's a perfect place to wrap. So thank you so much, Amy, this has been a total pleasure.
Amy Brown 33:43
Thank you so much for the opportunity, Becca. And it's been great.
Becca Szkutak 33:52
So that was our conversation with Amy. And I don't know about you. But I just couldn't get over it that whole time. Just how thought through everything she was saying was how intentional every single decision this company made seems to be, which I mean, boy, do we not come across that usually.
Dom Davis 34:09
I know, she was amazing. She was amazing. I even love how even making the family and sitting down with the kids and saying like, this is the timeline. This is how we're going to do it and really talk about I guess the sacrifices that a lot of people don't openly talk about, I guess when it comes to running a business. And I think that you also brought that up where you're just like someone's like, yeah, you know, I'm just gonna, I don't know, not pay myself as I run this company. And it's like, dude, how are you eating? You know, it's
Becca Szkutak 34:33
like, no, no,
Dom Davis 34:34
it's like, no one wants to talk about that. So I really liked a peek into I guess how that conversation goes.
Becca Szkutak 34:40
No, I totally agree. Because not even just like within entrepreneurship, but there's so many things like that, that disrupt family life that I feel like people don't talk about that much. Like I know both my parents went to grad school when I was in elementary school, and while I wouldn't say there were like particular big sacrifices from that. I mean, they weren't home for dinner three nights a week. There was like they were these changes and like that was just a temporary thing. So like, much more temporary than starting a company, that's going to sort of be the career path till whenever it's not like it's the end goal and, and the current path. So it was really good to hear her talk about that, especially from being a woman being a mother, you kind of assume some male entrepreneurs probably don't even have that conversation with their family, because they're like, Well, I wasn't doing this already. Or oh, I'm not doing XYZ or Oh, and I'm obviously generalizing there. Of course, a lot of male founders were totally family oriented and stuff like that. But it just feels like this is probably a bigger part of the founder journey than we realize.
Dom Davis 35:38
Yeah, I know, I really liked it. I liked hearing her. I mean, because she was kind of an outsider in the industry, which, you know, a lot of people are, but kind of learning how to navigate being an outsider coming in with this business idea. I don't know. I mean, it's just it's working. It's really amazing to see,
Becca Szkutak 35:56
no, I know, and it's something that seems easy, especially for someone coming into entrepreneurship, for the first time, it's a pretty tough challenge. And a pretty tough situation. I mean, it's a company that's using healthcare data, it's like latching on to that, obviously, huge regulatory issues, privacy, the whole nine yards, and then she's building outside of one of the hubs. So automatically, fundraising is gonna be a little bit more difficult. And I know a lot of those cities outside of the valley in New York, obviously have great startup resources, but it just isn't the same, which isn't always a bad thing. But if you're newer, I could see it just it's just a bigger hurdle to kind of like get things going get things off the ground, and sort of like attract the attention that you need. So hearing about how they just approached it so thoughtfully, and just were like, Yep, this is the situation, this is how we're going to build and just built it piece by piece. From there, it's kind of amazing to see how that was able to work out like definitely a story that kind of inspires some of the other women or maybe just people in general, who are in some of these types of areas who have these ideas, who maybe think, oh, it might just be too much of a stretch for me, but it's not.
Dom Davis 37:01
Yeah, I hope also, people take away how thoughtful she was about company culture, oh no, and kind of putting together a company that employees want to work at and be at and kind of that makes them feel like humans. A lot of the times, especially when you have a startup employees are, you know, you treat them as I don't know, property, things that just help you grow, grow, grow and build. But I mean, it's important to also see them as humans. And so the thoughtfulness there was also really cool to talk about
Becca Szkutak 37:28
it, it was also just interesting to care about the building of the AI component here, because they obviously have been doing this since before everyone. And I mean, we all end the listeners knows to a lot of the current AI companies always were using AI just no one was talking about it. But it's so interesting to hear of someone being like, oh, yeah, we've been using AI to do this the whole time. And like we built it by hiring a human team to train the AI, we didn't just pull stuff off of this website or pull stuff from this database, like they were so intentional about hiring a diverse team to sort of try to get rid of the biases from the beginning to home grow in AI model, like, again, from someone so far outside of the industry, like there are a lot of people in the industry who are not taking those kinds of steps.
Dom Davis 38:11
I'm wondering if like from an outside perspective, it has to just make total sense, because like, within the tech bubble, people are like, Oh, my gosh, AI is going to overtake everything. And you know, there's not going to be humans left. But like, obviously, it makes total sense that you need the humans to build and train the models and that humans have to be here. Even when it comes to having AI write stories, you have to have an editor there. Otherwise, they're just going to plagiarize from other people and things and especially when you're I guess when you're working with something like in this business, and healthcare, AI and healthcare, like you need a person behind the scenes there, making sure everything is running smoothly. And so I loved that. I was trying to like imagine in my head how the business works like this is your I guess you're on the phone with whoever healthcare someone, and is there like a notice where it's like this call is being recorded. And then it just takes all of that call and then puts it in a data center? And kind of just, I don't know, that's so fascinating to me. It's really fascinating. Yeah,
Becca Szkutak 39:08
cuz at first, I was thinking about that, too, like, oh, would people want their data to be kind of subject to a database like this, but then I thought about it. And maybe that's just because whoever used to have my corporate phone, their insurance company is really trying to get in touch with them the last two weeks. So I've picked up about 20 Insurance calls over the last week that are not for me, and they all start the same way. This call is being recorded. And so like I guess you get used to that like maybe to the point where like, I wasn't even thinking that of course like every call you do at those kinds of institutions are recorded anyway.
Dom Davis 39:41
I will just see like, how does it break up information? What does that even look like? I can't even fathom or imagine breaking up so much data and just information looks like but it must be amazing, I guess.
Becca Szkutak 39:53
I know. Especially with the tagging because think about like why people call their insurance company I'm sure I It seems like because people have so many different conditions and treatments and medications and XYZ you feel like it'd be pretty hard to tag if it's like there's so much specifics but I guess maybe that's not really maybe that's not what I'm looking for. Like maybe it's looking for like, oh, everyone has bad experiences with x or like everyone has bad experiences with y or good experiences. Well, I don't know anyone who would call their insurance but a good experience, but maybe they track that too.
Dom Davis 40:23
The AI knows so much drama The AI knows the T oh my god how I need the story. What is the AI No,
Becca Szkutak 40:32
no one let this AI lose. Found is hosted by myself. TechCrunch Senior Reporter Becca Szkutak alongside Senior Reporter Dominic Midori Davis. Found is produced by Maggie Stamets with editing by Kell. Our Illustrator is Bryce Durbin. Found's audience development and social media is managed by Morgan Little, Alyssa Stringer and Natalie Christman. TechCrunch's audio products are managed by Henry Pickavet. Thanks for listening, and we'll be back next week.
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