Jani Tuomi | imaware
JANI TUOMI
Co-Founder of imaware™, the revolutionary at-home testing platform for chronic illness including celiac disease and rheumatoid arthritis. imaware™ also supports numerous Fortune 500 companies to provide their employees with safe Covid-19 testing solutions.
What Is Imaware? Tell Us About What You Do And What The Company’s Mission Is.
imaware™ is a digital health platform that enables patients to screen from home to confirm symptoms and engage in telemedicine physician support.
Our mission is to help people live healthier lives by helping them identify, and even reverse, chronic conditions.
What Is Your Background? What Led You To Starting Your Own Company? And How Did You Choose This Space?
Disclaimer - I’m not a doctor, but have first hand lived through family members failing to be screened for preventable conditions, and ending up in the ICU. I’ve spent 20 years building technology products, and felt there had to be a better way, and so I surrounded myself with the best doctors and scientists to build home-based screening and healthcare products.
When an infamous scientists/researcher named Dr. DIamandis demonstrated that we could test for health data from several drops of blood, l quit my job the next day to focus all my efforts on bringing this to consumers directly.
What Was The Inspiration Behind The Company Name?
I had spent a lot of time trying to come up with the perfect name for our platform, but in the end it was an early beta customer that told us our name. I was talking to them about our mission to build health awareness, and to make people aware, and the person, who had just taken our test, said “yep, I’m aware all right” - and that’s how I’m aware = imaware.
Tell Us A Little Bit About Your Cofounders And The Imaware Team.
Being a more experienced founder, I now know my own strengths and weaknesses better than when I was young and thought I could tackle the world. I’ve surrounded myself and work closely with people who bring all types of skills that I don’t have to the table, including my cofounder(s) who has a PhD, and also my leadership team, who have such a diversity of experiences and backgrounds, and their experiences in marketing, product, technology and operations plus their unique skill sets provide for an environment that produces so many incredible ways to solve problems, which allows me to simply prioritize and triage the items we go after.
What Have Been The Most Challenging And Most Exciting Moments For You And The Company?
Fave- I’ve absolutely loved the ability to talk to so many people about healthcare, but to hear first-hand the struggles people have around cost, access, and information, is my least favorite at the same time because I want to help everyone but we aren’t there yet in terms of our costing and scale. It’s hard to tell someone we can’t give this test away for $19.
The most challenging part has been to drive innovation, while respecting the healthcare industry and the fact that it’s been doing things a certain way now for so long, and so you can’t just come in with a “let’s break down everything and start over approach”. The challenge is to work alongside the existing doctors, platforms, and regulatory systems, while moving them cautiously into better directions and showing improvements along the way. Healthcare won’t be “disrupted” as much as it will be improved iteratively over the coming years.
The most exciting moment was when we launched our COVID platform and immediately had the City of Houston, RigUp, and APH join on as partners to help us expand our reach to help more high risk and essential workers stay healthy.
What Was The Fundraising Process Like For You? Tell Us About Your Investors And What You Use The Money You’ve Raised For.
imaware is backed by a Houston-based private investment company. Fundraising was fun - in late 2017 when we started, everyone thought we would be the next Theranos, so we worked hard to design a business model that was in fact the “Anti-Theranos”. ie: use of physician consultants who remained independent, third party CLIA certified labs, and publication of data and methods in peer-review, would mitigate the risks raised by Theranos.
How Was Imaware Able To Roll Out COVID Test Kits In Such A Fast Amount Of Time, And What Kind Of Demand Increases Are You Seeing For Your Kits In General As People Opt Into Telemedicine And Homecare?
When we launched almost 3 years ago, our pitch deck talked about the benefits of digital health, but we certainly didn’t expect or predict a global pandemic to be the driver for mass adoption of our platform. Having this functioning platform in place, it was easy to add another test to the system, which we actually did in a record 8 days once our lab partner received the FDA EUA. COVID has more than 20x our business YoY, and as a result I’ve had to hire in roles across every team, with almost 20 people joining in the past 6 months alone.
How Has Growth Been In General Over The Last Two Years? Do You Have Anything Exciting That Will Be Launching Soon?
Growth- We were funded in early 2018, launched at the end of 2018, and started generating revenue in early 2019 and have since grown over 20x this year.
Launching Soon- Did you know 50% of people who have heart attacks have normal cholesterol and over 600,000 people die every year of heart diseases? We’re launching an exciting combined testing / telemedicine platform to tackle these two stats and help people stop, and even reverse, heart disease conditions!
How Do You Think Your Industry (And Maybe The World In General) In Change Post-COVID?
I believe that people will come out of COVID-19 and prioritize life and experiences more than ever before, and so you’ll see that manifest in healthcare with “always on” healthcare services. We’ll see more devices, more monitoring, and more data points to inform who we are and how our relative health is going. People will want to know more frequently if their Vitamin D, immune function, and heart are doing well. This will drive innovation in screening and testing which will ultimately lower prices, and increase accessibility. And this is exactly what imaware™ is doing each day as we expand testing services.
Can You Walk Us Through A Typical Work Day? Tell Us About Your Morning And Evening Routines And Some Products You Use That Make Your Day More Enjoyable.
Each and every day starts and ends with my kids - one is 3.5 and the other is 11 months old. Starting my day stretching and running around with Sami, gets me loosened up and sets perspective to the rest of my busy day.
My top products are my espresso machine - it’s a Saeco, and it literally grinds the beans, and makes my coffee in 15 seconds throughout the day, and having a coffee and airpods in tow lets me power through a morning of meetings and customer calls.
I also have a second screen setup at home that cycles through images of family and vacation, and where I want to go still, which as a background keeps me grounded so that the daily grind doesn’t pull me in and increase stress. And of course, using my Levels Health CGM alongside imaware™ tests, I have a complete grasp of my trending health data.
What Are The Top Three Most Important Skills A Modern Day Entrepreneur Needs In Order To Be Successful? And What Advice Do You Have For Entrepreneurs Who Are Just Starting Out?
I strongly believe the three most important skills you have to have are:
Listening - there is a strange narrative that founders/entrepreneurs need to have all the answers and need to be thought leaders, etc. I firmly believe that we actually need to do a lot more listening at first.
Hiring - a lot of people get this wrong, they try to hire unicorn after unicorn, and ultimately hire a lot of the same type of person. The best teams are built around a concept of “team unicorn, not individual unicorn” and so you should be aiming to hire a multifaceted team with various experiences and skill sets. For example our development team has a radical set of experiences and backgrounds, including hacking and the military.
Accepting and Promoting “Failure” - for startups to succeed against the competition, they have to experiment more frequently, which means trying things more frequently, failing sooner, learning, and improving. So being okay with knowing that the first product launch may not be great, and driving a culture of constant improvement. But also demanding great efforts from the team. Learning from failure doesn’t mean doing a half-baked job.
Tell Us A Story Of Something That Happened To You That Either Made You Laugh Or Taught You An Important Lesson.
The best tweet I read on Twitter said “The average CEO reads 26 books a month” and a reply below said “yes, that’s why they’re average”.
This tweet has an important lesson especially for entrepreneurs, and that is that there’s no playbook, there’s no secret recipe, and while reading about other people’s learnings is great, there’s no better way to do something than to do it for yourself. Spend less time reading about how to be a founder and just be one.
If You Can Have A One-Hour Meeting With Someone Famous Of The Past, Who Would It Be And Why?
I’d love to have an hour meeting with Leonardo Da Vinci - an individual who was both an artist and engineer. I am always trying to expand my creative thinking to try and match my more default way of thinking analytically, and he seemed to have been a master in both. I’m also confident he also was a master chef on top of everything else!
Who Is Your Role Model?
My grandfather was a role model for me - especially hearing the stories about him before I was born. He fought in world war 2 for Finland, was a father to 7 children, and worked as a mechanic at a shop he owned with another mechanic. He also played piano and always had time to fix my bike for me and did everything with a smile. He seemed to be grounded and happier with less.
What Are Your Top Three Favorite Books?
The Hard Thing About Hard Things - while I said there is no secret recipe to startups, it’s great to read about all the things that can/do go wrong, so that you can feel better when you get into these situations. Thanks Ben for writing this, I’m literally going through some of the same stories.
Lord of the Rings - I’ve read this 2x fully, and even after watching the movies, this book really opens up my imagination and pulls me away from the real world. The sheer magic and fantasy makes you dream of all kinds of stuff.
Tuesdays with Morrie - I read this book a long time ago and it was a real eye-opener to me, in a strange way it actually helped ground me when I was younger and trying to find my place in the world. I recommend it to anyone who feels they are searching for things, and it helps remind you what’s important.
What Is Your Favorite Quote And Why Does It Resonate With You?
“Slow down to speed up.”
Often when you’re “really busy” you make more mistakes, and so you spend more time to think through those items and fix the issues, and so, slowing down, stepping away, taking a breath and break, ironically means you can actually get more accomplished.
Is There A Parable That You Often Think About?
If you give a man a fish you feed him for a day, if you teach a man to fish, you feed him for life…
This reminds me that while it may always seem easier in the moment to just do someone’s work for them, or to skip giving feedback, you don’t help anyone that way. Also, it reminds me to seek teachers for myself so that I can continue to learn new things as well.
What Do You Do In Your Free Time?
I spend a lot of time with my family and kids, especially my 3 year old, he’s looking up to me and all the things I do, and so I want to make sure he has an engaged father figure in his life as he forms his own personality.
I also love to travel, and with COVID-19, travel means more local travel, like hiking, and hitting the food markets to find new foods - instead of being able to travel to places, I now cook the foods at home of where we want to go like Morocco and Thailand, etc.
What Does Success Mean To You?
Success to me is measured quite simply by lasting impact to patient health. The more people we help, the more successful we’ll become.
