Health Tech: Arna Ionescu Stoll On How Wavely Diagnostics’ Technology Can Make An Important Impact On Our Overall Wellness

An Interview With Luke Kervin

Start by listening and never stop: It’s critically important to listen on many levels. You have to listen to your future and current customers and be prepared to respond to things you don’t expect. You have to listen to your team and make sure you’re doing all you can to support them. You have to listen to the industry to understand trends and identify both potential partners and competitors. And you have to listen to your advisors, who have seen patterns across many companies and can help you craft the most direct path to your goal.

In recent 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 Arna Ionescu Stoll.

Arna Ionescu Stoll is CEO of Wavely Diagnostics, a digital diagnostics company developing smartphone-based apps to bring accurate, data-driven virtual pediatric care into every U.S. household.

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?

I’ve grown to understand that I have two unique characteristics about my childhood. First, my family emigrated from Eastern Europe when I was young, and second I have highly entrepreneurial parents who both started businesses (my dad in architecture and my mom in enterprise software) when we settled in Silicon Valley. So as a child I grew up in multiple cultures simultaneously and experienced a firsthand view of building businesses from scratch.

Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you began your career?

I’m going to share how I came to lead our startup Wavely Diagnostics. I was running a very successful consulting practice that was both flexible and lucrative, and I wasn’t looking for a change. I started advising the academic team that developed the proof of concept for Wavely’s first technology, and I loved the impact the technology could have on the massive need to enable better access to healthcare for millions of kids. Slowly, organically, I got roped in until the next thing I knew, I was shutting down my flexible and lucrative consulting practice for a stressful, inflexible CEO role with no pay until I raised money. Not exactly logical, but I guess the entrepreneurial spirit runs in the family.

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 have been extremely fortunate to have many mentors to support me and help me grow throughout my career, so it’s hard to pick ‘The One’. So instead I’m going to talk about how grateful I am to my husband. Remember that shift from a lucrative, flexible job to an unpaid, inflexible one? I couldn’t have done that without his complete support and encouragement. A CEO role is ever-present, and it can be hard to stay in balance with the rest of your life. I am lucky to have a partner who is not only a sounding board for me when I need it, but also makes sure I never forget I’m a mom, wife, and human being.

Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?

“Great leaders are not defined by the absence of weakness, but rather by the presence of clear strengths.” — John Zenger.

I like this quote because it means you don’t have to be perfect. It’s okay to not be good at some things. It points to the importance of self-awareness, and knowing your blind spots so you can bring in the right people to cover them. For me this quote is a release; it gives me permission to triage and delegate, which is the only way to be an effective leader.

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?

Perseverance — The hardest thing I’ve done in my career is raise money as a new CEO for a new company during the height of the pandemic lockdown. At that time most investors were shirking away from the risk of new investments and putting follow-on money into prior investments. But I kept going, refused to concede because we have the potential to help so many kids, and eventually we broke through and raised capital.

Clear-headedness — It is critical to explain your opportunity in just a few words in order to inspire. This skill has been particularly important for recruiting and building excitement within the Wavely team.

Flexibility — You have to know when to listen and course correct, and also when to stay the course to avoid unnecessary whiplash. At Wavely, our early consumer market research came back with results that I didn’t expect, but we decided to listen to the input and, as a result, shifted our Market Entry strategy to target parents more directly so we can be on hand sooner to help their kids.

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?

Healthcare systems are struggling as we come out of the pandemic, and I believe that healthcare provider burn-out and decreased revenues will shift us towards a virtual-first care system. However, virtual care has its limitations, especially for physical ailments. For example, today we cannot conduct virtual physical exams at scale. This results in antibiotics being prescribed at a rate that is up to 21% higher in virtual care versus traditional, in-person office visits. This also leads to a whole slew of other issues, such as kids getting very sick and even dying from conditions such as some pneumonias that were fully treatable 10 years ago.

Wavely is addressing the need for highly accessible virtual physical exams by leveraging the smartphones we already have in our pockets. And we’re starting with a tool that helps a doctor virtually conduct the physical exam required to diagnose an ear infection over telehealth, which accounts for 30 million pediatric appointments each year.

How do you think your technology can address this?

Nearly everyone in the U.S. has a smartphone, especially parents of young kids, and our phones contain incredibly sophisticated sensors that are massively under-utilized (more creative social media posts only get us so far).

Wavely’s first app detects fluid in the middle ear — the key physical indicator of an ear infection — using just a paper funnel taped to the bottom of the phone and the sound of a bird chirping. We’ve been able to pair this diagnostic with a telehealth visit so families can access anytime, anywhere care for ear infections. No more rushing to urgent care at 2am. No more canceling half a day of work to get into a busy doctor’s office.

Can you tell us the backstory about what inspired you to originally feel passionate about this cause?

I feel like parenthood ricochets you between extreme joy and utter chaos. I have two young girls, and while I find parenthood largely fulfilling, it also throws a lot of wrenches, particularly when you have to deal with an unexpected illness. I think technology holds immense potential to help with the hassles of life — and massively increasing access to high quality ear infection care is one of those things that can help diminish the chaos so you can focus on the good stuff.

How do you think this might change the world?

More joy, less hassle, but at scale. After ear infections, Wavely is planning to tackle other common pediatric conditions. We’ll develop a platform of smartphone-based diagnostics to expand the reach of high quality, diagnostic-based virtual care to every child in the country, and then the world. Highly accessible tools to support anytime, anywhere care for kids is going to bring equality to healthcare and change the world.

Keeping “Black Mirror” and the “Law of Unintended Consequences” in mind, can you see any potential drawbacks about this technology that people should think more deeply about?

Our technology will help to increase the utilization of virtual care, and there may be concerns that virtual healthcare has drawbacks compared to in-person visits. However, as someone who has had many virtual appointments for both me and my kids during the pandemic, I think that with the right tools in our hands, the access benefits of virtual will quickly outweigh potential downsides.

Here is the main question for our discussion. Based on your experience and success, can you please share “Five things you need to know to successfully create technology that can make a positive social impact”? (Please share a story or an example, for each.)

1. Start by listening and never stop: It’s critically important to listen on many levels. You have to listen to your future and current customers and be prepared to respond to things you don’t expect. You have to listen to your team and make sure you’re doing all you can to support them. You have to listen to the industry to understand trends and identify both potential partners and competitors. And you have to listen to your advisors, who have seen patterns across many companies and can help you craft the most direct path to your goal.
2. Don’t forget to also listen to yourself: All the listening in (1) requires that you use your own intuition to guide what action to take and when, based on what you hear. Just because someone tells you to make it blue doesn’t mean you should. You have to understand WHY they said to make it blue, and then determine whether action is needed. Second, and highly important, it’s too easy to forget to listen to yourself. Having responsibility for a company and its team puts a lot of pressure on you as the CEO, it’s all too easy to forget what you need sometimes. There’s always more work to do, and you have to know when you need a break so you can be fully present when you’re needed.
3. Prioritize launch: It is critically important for a company to get real world data as quickly as possible (while, of course, maintaining integrity and making sure you satisfy all regulatory/oversight requirements). You need to learn what unexpected things happen when you put your technology in other people’s hands, you need to demonstrate your company can execute, and real world data unlocks potential partnerships you couldn’t pursue otherwise. And your first launch doesn’t have to be perfect. The goal is to learn so you can create impact faster.
4. Overshare: I am a fan of sharing our strategic plan frequently with the team so everyone stays aligned. Even with such a lean team, I’ve found that it’s easy to start diverging on priorities and timing, and even a small diversion can have a big impact. The more people stay aware of our goal posts, the more likely we are to be successful. In addition, it builds a great team culture: trust everyone in the company with the big picture and keep them involved in the process when a course correction inevitably happens.
5. Stay one step ahead: When you’re mired in everyday details and execution, it’s sometimes hard to see the peripheral opportunities that require lateral thinking. You might miss things like other approaches to problems you might be encountering, possible business partners outside your scope of focus, and creative opportunities to support your team. It’s really important to have outlets that force you to come up for air, and a team that’s structured in a way that lets you get away.

If you could tell other young people one thing about why they should consider making a positive impact on our environment or society, like you, what would you tell them?

I am so grateful that I spend each day working towards making healthcare more accessible to kids. Look deep and figure out what would make you excited to get up each day. Building a company is hard, and you need to find your passion if you’re going to make it happen.

Is there a person in the world, or in the US with whom you would like to have a private breakfast or lunch, and why? He or she might just see this, especially if we tag them. :-)

Janice and Nathan Chen’s parents. I am in awe of parents that raised not only a founder/executive at a revolutionary biotech company set to change the way we think about human biology, BUT ALSO one of the only U.S. men to win a figure skating gold, who is also studying at Yale. Fundamentally, our goal at Wavely is to support parents, and understanding the experience and perspective of exceptional parents would be an amazing opportunity.

How can our readers further follow your work online?

Website: https://wavelydx.com/

Wavely Twitter: https://twitter.com/wavelydx

Wavely LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/wavelydx/

Arna’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/arnaionescu/

Thank you so much for joining us. This was very inspirational, and we wish you continued success in your important work.