Health Tech: Garick Hismatullin On How Kyla’s Technology Can Make An Important Impact On Our Overall Wellness
You need to identify a real need — if you explain it to people closest to you and they don’t really get it, most likely it is your idea. But make sure they are the target market.
Inrecent years, Big Tech has gotten a bad rep. But of course many tech companies are doing important work making monumental positive changes to society, health, and the environment. To highlight these, we started a new interview series about “Technology Making An Important Positive Social Impact”. We are interviewing leaders of tech companies who are creating or have created a tech product that is helping to make a positive change in people’s lives or the environment. As a part of this series, I had the pleasure of interviewing Garick Hismatullin.
Garick founded Action Health in 2013, a network of primary care and urgent care clinics in California. The company has been providing telemedicine and in-person medical care for seven years before Covid-19 hit. Providing medical care to the workforce and having employers as customers, Garick saw a demand for bulk testing in the workplaces as the pandemic took over the US. His new company, Kyla, was launched in 2018 as a primary care company. In March 2020, the business was re-shaped to provide Covid-covered solutions for employers.
www.actionurgenthealth.comwww.kyla.com
Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series. Before we dive in, our readers would love to learn a bit more about you. Can you tell us a bit about your childhood backstory and how you grew up?
Igrew up in a middle class family in Tver, Russia. Russia in the 90s was a tough place and the middle class lived in borderline poverty. In 1999 I migrated with my family to Silicon Valley where I was first exposed to the world of entrepreneurship which drastically changed how I viewed life and opportunities.
Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you began your career?
I was part of a silicon valley incubator in 2013. The program was very aggressive and forced your startup to make huge leaps every couple of days. I had been thinking about launching a telemedicine program for a long time but never took any steps, kept procrastinating actually launching by doing more research. I was forced to put up a website which I built by myself in about a half an hour. Within the first 24hrs we had 5 paying customers. Right then and there I learned that the best way to learn is to launch. Over time I learned that you will never be 100% “comfortable” with any launch. My rule of thumb is if you are over 40% confident, it is better to launch ASAP.
None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful towards who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story about that?
I’m most grateful to my sister and my brother-in-law. They have been my partners in virtually every venture I have ever launched. I think they generally think I am crazy but that never stopped them from encouraging me to try the next crazy thing.
Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?
“There is never a lack of resources, only a lack of resourcefulness.” This is 100% true in business. You don’t need $1M to launch your startup. If you are resourceful, you will be able to solicit advice, attract talent, and create a roadmap of how you are going to get from where you are to the place you want to be. We are closing in on $100M in sales and have never taken a single dollar of private equity or venture funding.
You are a successful business leader. Which three character traits do you think were most instrumental to your success? Can you please share a story or example for each?
Ability to Tolerate failure — you will fail, over and over. Expect 7 to 10 years of daily failure in one way or another going in. It will hurt but you need to have very short emotional memory. Key people will quit, volumes will dip, events like COVID can spring up.
Creativity — you can’t solve problems the same way they are being solved. Telemed was in its adolescence in 2013 but we knew that the landscape of care was shifting. People wanted more access to care than was being provided. We glued together 3 or 4 platforms, instead of spending millions building our own, and were able to deploy a solution that within 12 months was utilized by 100,000 patients.
Resourcefulness — you have to know how to play the game. Don’t think about pie in the sky but think about what you can do today. Example above in #4.
Ok super. Let’s now shift to the main part of our discussion about the tech tools that you are helping to create that can make a positive impact on our wellness. To begin, which particular problems are you aiming to solve?
The goal of Kyla is to create a global primary care program that tackles human longevity. When we think about primary care, we think about going to an office where an old doctor takes our blood pressure and does blood work. These doctors don’t have access to all of your data and are not thinking about extending your life 20 to 30 years beyond natural human lifespan and beyond.
How do you think your technology can address this?
Here at Kyla we believe two healthcare trends are critical. A personal healthcare AI which constantly ingests and analyses data about you. Everything from basic family history, to nutrition, to your genome. Secondly, we believe remote diagnostics, such as mail in blood work or smart watch data, will be the future of healthcare. If you combine those two, you have an AI in your pocket that is constantly working with your medical team on monitoring and improving your biomarkers through medications, supplements, personalized nutrition plans, and eventually prescribing anti-aging therapies. Something that even the best concierge doctor is not capable of doing.
Can you tell us the backstory about what inspired you to originally feel passionate about this cause?
I always found it interesting that in a universe that is projected to exist some quadrillion years, human beings are content to be born, have the planet circle around the sun 70 or 80 times and then die. I have always been fascinated by Ray Kurzweil and subsequently Peter Diamandis. If you haven’t explored their work, I highly recommend it.
How do you think this might change the world?
We hope to democratize healthcare access and add decades to peoples lives.
Read the rest of this interview here: https://medium.com/authority-magazine/health-tech-garick-hismatullin-on-how-kylas-technology-can-make-an-important-impact-on-our-47d95a40988e
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