Champion Story 29 | Jane Wang
Recorded on January 14, 2019
Biography: Jane Wang is the Co-Founder & CEO of Optimity, a mission-driven technology company that uses evidence-based behavioural science and gamification to improve population health. The company’s health and wellness solutions for enterprise and consumer markets are developed by leading health experts and backed by more than 30 years of behavioural science research.
Prior to Optimity, Jane led teams in phase 2 & 3 global clinical trials developing technologies for programs to maximizing adherence and performing dynamic risk scoring in North America, Asia and the EU. She is passionate about proactive health programs: improving morbidity & mortality using gamification and behaviour economics.
I'm always so fascinated by founder stories and the human story of what you've gone through. How did you get here?
It started from a place of loss. I knew that I was a people person that wanted to help people. I ended up working at the hospital doing clinical research. In clinical research I've always been kind of an ambitious person, so I've always started tackling the biggest problems and my first projects were in HIV and then I did ovarian cancer and then multiple sclerosis, Alzheimer's after.
I was a specialist and quite successful. By 2010, I really felt that I had grown into this young professional, I got my first condo, and was living in Montreal. Then I got a phone call from the hospital. It was new years eve in 2010 and it was the emergency department telling me that my mom was there and I was really scared because I thought she had a car accident over the holidays.
They're like, "No, no, she's fine. But we need to admit her today because she has le stage cancer." I was in denial and I went through all the different stages. I laughed on the phone and I said, "No way. I just had her in for an MRI scan a few months ago. There's nothing wrong with her. We took a look at her body. She's fine. You don't know what you're talking about." They said, "I'm going to get the hematologists on the phone. I know you're a researcher. You actually worked with some of the hematologists we work with. We're going to send over her blood work. Your mom has leukemia."
I had never dealt with leukemia and I realized, "Oh my God, all the things that I screened her for, it's actually not what she has, and I don't know what the symptoms look like or any of those things. I visit my mom on a monthly basis and I may have missed this."
She did get admitted that day and I drove home to Ottawa directly from Montreal. I spent Christmas Day with her in the hospital. She got admitted at Canadian Care and I really tried to get her into clinical trials and get the best treatments and stuff like that, but we really didn't need to do much because she did get the best care. It was a little too late.
She went through three rounds of chemo and she passed away six months later. She wasn’t even 52, so she was young, and we never prepared for it. I didn't prepare for it. It shattered the whole construct of my life because at that point I never had anyone in my life pass away. I come from a really healthy family, all my grandparents were alive. We have nothing in the family that's genetic and my mom, the closest person to me, was probably the worst person to lose because she was a core part of my emotional support system.
I was completely wiped out. Why bother helping thousands of people not die every day by deploying the right resources when the person closest to you, you cannot help. I took the maximum amount of time that I could off work. I went to an MBA school and ended up going to Ivey for my MBA, which was an excellent school. It was quite tumultuous for me having to deal with the passing of a very important person in my life. That's when I had the most self-growth in terms of who I truly am as a person.
I learned a lot about myself that year and I tested a lot of my own boundaries. I did some traveling alone. I tried to over socialize as well and somewhere in the middle is where I found myself. The thing that I found that I was the most drawn to was I was still a data-driven person, but I'm drawn to authenticity and to people that look at the world more holistically.
There was an opportunity for me to join one of my mentors who started his own private equity funds. When I was working alongside him, I felt that I actually had a lot of skills that I was crucial to that team. I was like, "I'm very crucial. I'm pretty much running the ship here, like super interesting."
I didn't realize I had that capacity to do that. I had been obsessed with proactive risk calculation and finding symptoms early so that people like my mother will not pass away within six months. If we could find it earlier, we could take a proactive approach to it. I was like, "What if I could actually build a company that could help millions and perhaps billions of people take a proactive approach and have a chance at longevity and early detection?"
That's when you met me. We were thinking about, "How do we create this sphere of health and take a holistic approach?” Not just looking at physical symptoms because one of the things that was happening with my mom is that with leukemia, she was noticing a lot of fatigue. I thought she was going through depression to be honest. I thought she had empty nest syndrome and stuff like that and she was tired a lot. She had bruising and there were all these classic symptoms of leukemia, if we would have fully known but we had no idea.I'm trying to find those seemingly random but classic symptoms and it's not a very hard mathematical problem.
I naturally am quite open. At first, when I was sharing this story, I always cried and that didn't help. I remember there's a lawyer that told me that nobody cares about my story. I literally remember coming down from that building and I called my Co-Founder for support; I was so angry because the work we were doing is obviously very important to me. I don't work with that lawyer and three years later he saw me at a different event and was like, "Oh, I really love what you're doing." I was still traumatized by his previous comments and didn’t engage.
I think with that energy of personal pain and appreciation and being open about that pain, you actually attract good people and they're there for their own reasons too.
Thank you for sharing your whole story. I remember when I was going through my grief and it was such a shock. There's not only the legal and financial stuff about death, but then you're going through all those emotions like the denial and the anger and all these things.
It can be hard to share.
Then the guilt.
I'm sure you felt guilt and all these things. There's a specific turning point when you've dealt with that and then you draw a lot of strength from it after. That guilt turns into insight and then also you forgive yourself, but forgiving yourself doesn't mean that you forget it. It becomes weaved into the fabric of your values, who you are and what you talk about. How you talk about it and how you live your life and that's what makes it relevant and meaningful when it becomes fuel.
I can tell that you have a lot of resilience. You have such a capacity for it. For stuff like grief or trauma, people can go through a multitude of things while still building their company. How do you transmute the pain in those times? Those times where it's like, "Oh man, it's a lot of work. I feel overwhelmed. I feel really sad today."
It's actually a process. It's kind of like a tree, and the tree falls over yet it's just a piece of rotten wood. At some point it goes into the ground and then it gets compressed and it becomes fuel. It teaches me a mechanism of resilience and it's an agile process. I would start with, "How am I feeling? Why am I feeling?" It's kind of almost unpacking what's going on and it's really hard to unpack it yourself. Most people are smart but when they come to their own stuff, they're super biased.
They can't see the forest from the tree, so you need a good friend and they can be the person to help you see the different colors of what's actually going on. Think of that as a microorganism basket taking apart the rotten tree because part of you, you're kind of tangled in there. I got a unique opportunity to do this bloodletting thing because when I was first pitching my company, people would ask me, "Why?"
I would tell them the story, "I saw a market opportunity and I took after it." They would be like, "Okay, cool, don't care." I remember having this conversation and it was the first time someone asked me truly why and I made a connection with this person and I told them why. It's a long process of telling them why, because the story isn't that simple. It's not like, "Oh yeah, I walked down the street and I saw that people needed Starbucks and therefore I made Starbucks." It wasn't one of those stories.
It's one of the stories where all these data points led me on a three year journey where I then on the fourth year pulled the trigger. It was pretty long winded but they didn't lose patience.It was actually the first time where they're like, "Actually, that's an amazing reason and I will help you." I cried at that session, but I cried and that person wrote me a cheque for my first 25K and I know this person, he's a close friend now. At the time, it was taking a risk to tell someone something that's not perfect about your life and the vulnerability it showed.
I remember when I was seriously pitching for money, people who are already judging me as a female founder and sometimes as a first-time founder, even though I have a lot of industry experience. When they look at the technology or at my vision, they still are like, "You're too emotional." They would offer their sympathies but not their checkbook and I realized, "I don't want that. I need money to pay my people, so that I can continue doing this because whatever I'm making, it doesn't pay for my very expensive engineering team."
I learned to go back into my shell. Moving to the valley was good too because I've found there are a lot of people that are interesting to talk to that are not in healthcare because I find that in health care people get jaded.
This is all to say that I had help from other people. Take me apart, give me observations and there’s many people asking me why. If you actually look on our website, most people go to our stories versus just going to the solutions hub, and I find that fascinating because I think nowadays people are more connected to why.
For anyone that asks me why, I always tell them, but my general rule is that I don't volunteer it because I don't want to cheapen the memory of my mother. I don't think of it as a marketing story. I think of it as fuel, something that's the drum beat of my existence.
Thank you for trusting me and trusting the platform with your story. I know there are moments where we have an awareness and we are like, "Okay, you know what, I feel like I should share because I'm actually going through something right now."
Additionally, there's times out there where people will be open to receiving the story. They will actually go to the depths with you and say, "I want to champion you, I support you. I totally get this because I had the same thing."
That's why I relate to your story. I see that more often now with founders, where we are going through so much stress and the closing off. It's tempting to stay in that place from the head and disconnect. People in our society are seeking deep connections. How do you build those deep connections with the people?
The way that I build deep connections comes from me listening to other people. The deepest connections that I have are with people that I spent with them triggered something within them and then they started talking about things and I could help them be a mirror. It's more helping them navigate their own thing and reflect back on them. Like you're really tensed up when you're talking about this, do you think that's actually right? Just giving them another perspective. That's when people take a step back, realize this is not small talk anymore and this is something where someone is investing in them.
I think the feeling of loneliness comes from people in their head by themselves. They're just projecting themselves onto you. We live in a world where so many people are so busy projecting.
It's listening without judgment. That sometimes happens if you are strategizing about a particular baby-like approach for sales. When you talk about people's feelings, you need them to unravel their own thing and point out where there are knots. To help them see it and find a different way to untangle that knot.
Once they untangle that knot, they'll go forth and do stuff. That's what I love about entrepreneurs because they tend to already be excellent people. They're action oriented and they'll take steps once you unknot them.
I had a chat with another female entrepreneur. She has a medical device company and we were having sushi with her family. She was trying to get pregnant or whatever and I was just listening to her. We were talking about this and I'm like, "It sounds to me that you should really have a kid or whatever. You should do that. It's important to invest in yourself. Don't worry about what people are going to think but you need to do this because it's a knot that you have, right?"
We unpacked it and she said, "Well, that's awesome." I was like, "Okay, great." The next thing I know, I see her at this investor dinner thing and she was like, "I just had a kid." I'm like, “Oh my God, I love you so much. I'm so glad."
When you speak about listening, your presence is very grounding. So much of the time because we're not present, we live up in our head. And from the neck downwards, we're not feeling. When we live in a really heady place, people could feel that.
It's like what you were saying earlier about knowing when that person's being authentic. I just know when that person's being present.
Yeah. I like it. At the same time, someone else is on their phone swiping the reserve.
We talked about this concept of depth and you are adding depth to who you are and you know how dark things could get. That's one of the things that I learned. I was at a low point of my life during 2012-2013, from my mom being gone. I'm in this new city, doing my MBA with people and not knowing many people in the city, , and I was floating like this rudderless thing and I was depressed.
I didn't have all my girlfriends or guy friends and I was lonely. I was kind to the people that I was with. I was still doing the work that I'm supposed to. There was that depth and when people were telling me, it's like you told your five-year-old kid about like that, it didn’t have that depth. They've never experienced that.
I love the movie Inside Out. It teaches kids interesting concepts of harmony and emotional balance. That's really important because people talk about work-life balance. It's almost like a time schedule. I spent this much time sleeping, this much time working, this much time with the people, but they don't talk about quality of time. I think harmony should be a science because then you know life is a sinusoidal wave. You're going to go through times where you're on a higher, on the low, you need to be able to understand where you fit on that spectrum and then as long as you have harmony it’s all good.
There's something that's oddly peaceful and resilient to finding harmony. This past year's pain, it's changed the way I impact people. I was coaching founders before my brother had passed away. It's different after you've lost somebody. Sadness feels different, love feels different. I will remember the memories that we have with my brother and why I'm doing this movement.
I really care for founders like yourself and my late brother. You're somebody who's devoted their life to helping the community and I want to see you flourish. I don't want to see you be alone, feel like you have to suffer or feel like you have to hide who you are while you're doing this.
It's that circular concept of renewal. It's a full circle and people are afraid of death. I was afraid of death before and when my mom passed away I told my dad, "Dad, my family is not perfect anymore. I have a broken family." He's like, "No, it's okay." He's sad. They were best friends and he's like, "No, no, no. It's just harmony. People are not dead. People they're just in another world like you believe in rivers and you believe in privacy.
I don't know the science but I could not tell you how lucky I am. Since my mom passed away, the screen of strange coincidences that happened in my life, the more open I am, the more core coincidence has happened and I'm sure people talk about the secret, they talk about all these things. I don't give a fuck, whatever it is, it's working and it's so nice and I don't want it to stop.
It's now reinforced this pattern of behavior for me, "Be good to people, be present, be yourself and good things will happen to you and good people will come to you." The amount of people that have extended help and given me things that allowed me to build this legacy, stemming from this tragedy. I can't even tell you how lucky I am.
One thing that surprised me is that when I asked 50 founders, "Hey, when you look back at the failures as a founder, what do you think was the number one reason?” The number one reason was avoidance; 35 of the 50 said that.
I love that you brought that relationship piece. It's not always about the revenue and scaling and all those things, but there's a lot of emotional intelligence and care that has to be in the relationships we build in our circles.
Have you unpacked? I don't know if you have ever had this exercise before, but have you ever unpack the psychology behind like procrastination?
On an individual basis, I've coached people on that before and often times, it comes from emotional blocks.
I was unpacking a lot of that because I found that talking to my girlfriends about their relationship or whatever it was, it was putting things off like avoidance or procrastination, do that later and the reason they do that is because they don't have a perfect answer for it. It's kind of like when you were younger, when you have a school assignment and write that essay. hard to write but maybe you don't know what to write about. That's actually what's causing the procrastination. Or for me, "Oh yeah, you have to send that email." But the reason I don't send it is because I'm scared. I don't have enough awareness to be, like I'm actually scared.
I found one of the really useful things is an accountability framework. We do daily stand-ups even with this business team, we do one on ones, and we do a lot of programmatic things that big companies do. But I think they're really important for the small company because it teaches you that trigger of measurement and gives you a platform to talk about certain things for other people to point things out. What it helps me do is really find out items with procrastination.
I would find that across almost all the teams that I work with when they procrastinate something. It comes with their unsolved problems within them, either emotional or tactical or they don't know how to approach it, they don't have enough tools.
In our one-on-ones, we have three classic questions. One is, "What is your farm for the last two weeks?" The other one is, "If there's something you could stop doing, what would it be or start doing, what would it be?" The third one is, "If I could give you anything to unblock you, what would that be?" If you look at the two of those three questions, they're all about trying to figure out where those knots are and systematically removing them.
Often we don't present those smiles because people judge, but not that many people are judgmental. Once you get to a place of trust, I can tell you almost every single person, they're not actually judgmental. They're judgemental because they don't have enough data points and they're trying to form an opinion about something or someone based on two data points. But once they have more, they can model it up properly.
There's something powerful about that reminder too. When we feel like other people are judging, it’s often our inner voice.
That's the worst judge.
Yeah. Especially for founders because we're so into wanting to do better. I know there are times where we're in that low place or wanting support. What can people do for themselves to help take care of their mental health and move it forward?
Yeah. I think mental health itself is just something that's always there. The first thing is acknowledging the fact that it's there. Number two is you need to have problems first, admit the fact that if you are having a good day or a bad day or whatever it is, there is part of your life that you have not looked at. It's almost good to be open. Try it with somebody that you trust and kind of talk about. You can experimentally say, "Hey, I've been having trouble dealing ... I've been avoiding it."
I think avoidance is actually a really safe place to start because you're not doing anything about it anyway. It's all offside and if you don't solve it, you're still at the same place that you were just yesterday. Think of it as an interview, you're screening for people that are not giving you solutions but are observing you and already assuming that you have the ability to solve it yourself. You're not looking for a hero because then you build a dependency of them solving all your problems. You're looking for a mirror, and that type of people are the best people currently in your circle to help you build that first layer, that first defense of resilience.
Then it starts your lovely journey upwards because you'll find quickly you'll solve your first avoidance issue and it will unlock something. When you tackle problems, you feel lighter and then your mental health systematically improves. That's kind of how you move the world forward by being yourself first. The part that you can contribute to society is the next time you're with a friend, make an observation about them and be a mirror.
I love that and I think it's something so precious because there's so much noise nowadays. My friend once said so many people now are seeking just to feel seen and be heard for who they truly are.
If you think back to the last week about how many conversations you had. The other person was not comparing themselves to you. They're not trying to get information from you. I think if we have more of those, the whole community would feel a lot better because all we want to do is belong and not be judged and be better versions of ourselves. That's really what we want to be.
When you look back at just your journey, your experience, if you were to give a parting lesson or a parting message to founders who are reading this, what would you say?
I would invite them to connect if they wanted to chat about anything. I always make time for other founders. I would say you probably already have all the answers inside you, and now you have to find ways to unpack that. Other people may have tools and you have to be open and ask for those tools and be clear about your problems and then things will work out. Things will always work out. I actually really believe that things will work out and as long as you consistently put effort towards it and that you're coming from a place of authenticity.
Thank you so much for your time today. Appreciate your openness and your courage in sharing all of this.
Everyone will benefit and it'll make my quality of life better, and it'll make your quality of life better. We can help the world, at least Canada. If people just took a systematic approach to changing how they avoid problems or solving health issues or mental health issues. I think access to trust is scarce in the first world. This is really important for the first world. These are first world problems.