Health Tech: Jeffrey Kaditz On How Q Bio’s Technology Can Make An Important Impact On Our Overall Wellness
An Interview With Dave Philistin
To successfully create technology that can make a positive social impact you need to build something that aligns all the incentives of participants in an ecosystem towards change you want to see, while at the same time creating value for those participants. It also needs to be a positive-sum solution.
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 Jeffrey Kaditz.
Jeffrey Kaditz is an engineer and serial entrepreneur who has helped drive a wide range of innovative technologies and businesses. Ranging from rockets to consumer electronics. He founded fintech company Affirm to bring transparency to consumer lending, served as Chief Data & Analytics Officer at mobile gaming giant ngmoco, and in 2015 founded Q Bio, a healthcare startup dedicated to reinventing healthcare as an information science. Jeffrey has degrees in Quantum Physics and Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University, and resides, and skis, in Jackson, Wyoming.
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 was really into science fiction and astrophysics in high school. I read at least a book a week, everything from Carl Sagan, Isaac Asimov, and all of Frederik Pohl’s. At the same time, my Dad was a high school math teacher who eventually worked at Intel so I was somewhat aware of the tech scene. In high school I stumbled upon a book he was reading called, “The New New Thing.” The more I read about the history of Silicon Valley, the more I was fascinated by this unique area where crazy ideas were born, attracting people from all over the world trying to do hard things. I knew that that was ultimately where I wanted to be.
After high school, I attended Carnegie Mellon in Pittsburgh. I didn’t have any idea of how to become an entrepreneur, so I studied physics. I actually started in astrophysics because I thought it was cool and figured understanding physics was something that would apply to almost any problem I might be interested in in the future. CMU has a notoriously good CS program and while I was there I really developed a passion for discrete math and computer science which was a great complement to all the calculus I was doing in physics. My undergraduate degrees were a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science and a Bachelor of Science in Physics, with a focus on quantum physics. The way I think of it I got degrees in both the real world and the virtual one.
Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you began your career?
That’s tough, so many are interesting to me, but are probably uninteresting objectively. I think I have a good amount of stories of individual interactions that I’ve had with some pretty luminary people. But I think the most interesting thing about all of these stories is that at the end of the day no matter how much the media or other people build these people up, they are people too and have all the same flaws that everyone else does, maybe even more.
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?
When I was younger, I played a lot of basketball and got into triathlons, ultramarathons and riding my bike. As a result of that, I met a guy named Max. At the time, I really didn’t know who he was, I just knew he was kind of a nerd like me because on long rides we would geek out on stuff. A few months after I met him, we were biking on the Seven Sisters and he asked what I did for a living, and I told him I was an aspiring entrepreneur. He then asked me what companies I had started. I shared that I had only started small companies that were successful but were bootstrapped. Then, I asked Max what companies he had started, and, to my surprise, he revealed that he had started PayPal and told me if I ever wanted any introductions he could help. At the time, I had no context for knowing this guy and I didn’t want to leverage him to ask for favors, so I decided to keep our relationship as friends and just ride bikes together and ask him for the occasional career advice. A few years went by, and we continued to stay in touch and ride bikes together. We both had companies that were just acquired and were thinking about what was next. He asked me to help him evaluate companies for angel investments as part of a little incubator (lab) that he wanted to start called HVF. The first few times we met, we didn’t have office space yet. He would come over to my apartment and we would talk about the kinds of verticals that we were interested in, and we were pretty aligned. We were both very interested in how the explosion of data would upend major industries. But that’s the precursor to how Affirm and then Glow got started.
A couple months later I was introduced to Alex Rampell who had the original idea for the company that became Affirm. What started out as a weekend hack with my friend Manny Arias based on Alex’s idea became Affirm. Alex and Max decided to seed the project. Pretty soon after that, Nathan Gettings, and Brad Selby got involved and it started getting momentum. Alex, Max, and I would talk about who was going to be the CEO because I didn’t feel like I was ready. So for a while we looked for a CEO but after a while I told Max either I was going to be the CEO or he was and after a couple of years he agreed, not simply because I was nagging him but because of a number of converging factors.
It helps when you have somebody who has been there and done it to advise you. Max, Alex and Nathan all coached me and explained how things worked in the valley. My friendship and partnership with all of them all played a huge role in building my confidence and learning. There isn’t any magic to building very successful companies, it just takes a lot of work, and lucky for me that’s not something that ever dissuaded me.
But there have been a number of other people I’m very grateful for like Marc, Ben & Felicia, Vijay from a16z and Vinod at KV who have helped me get through some pretty tough stuff outside of the office, which ultimately has allowed me to continue to pursue projects like Q Bio that I’m passionate about.
Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?
My favorite life lesson quote is, “This is America, you can have both.” My takeaway from this quote is that lots of people are going to present you with false choices in life and you have to see through that and realize that our biggest enemies are often ourselves and the limits we place on ourselves based on other people’s perceptions of us.
Which three character traits do you think were most instrumental to your success? Can you please share a story or example for each?
Determination, a high threshold for pain, and resilience are the three character traits that have been most instrumental to my success.
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 key to preventive medicine and healthcare is understanding what is changing in our bodies. Understanding what is changing in an individual is the personalization we need in order to scale preventative care. We will never really understand the progression of disease and be able to identify early signs of it reliably until we understand how our bodies change at both microscopic and macroscopic scales as we age, get injured or become sick. This isn’t a new idea, this is just applying the scientific method to the human body.
There has been tremendous energy and resources focused on commoditizing how to measure biological change at molecular and cellular levels but very little effort to do the same at macroscopic level ~ 1mm. We have been focused on solving this problem and then developing the software platform that can combine all the kinds of change you can measure about a human body and understand which changes in an individual matter most based on their genetics, medical history and lifestyle. You can think of this as a sort of comprehensive “digital twin” that is kept up to date by your annual physical.
We believe the future of the physical is basically an analog to digital conversion process for your body that is fast, cheap, non-invasive, and is reproducible which is very important. When these quantitative snapshots of structured information are combined over time it becomes possible to automate the analysis of what is changed so that the most salient features can be summarized for doctors and even include recommendations regarding next steps for follow up. It is also possible to prioritize who needs care based on these changes. But it’s key that this process of taking a snapshot of our biology is fast. There is a common belief in medicine that you can measure a person’s state spread out over time. For example, I’ll scan them today, and take their blood next week. That’s very flawed. Scientists know that if you want to be able to correlate information about changes in the state of a system, the system-wide measurements have to be measured as close in time as possible. But if you can do this, we believe decoupling and automating the quantification of our body from where/when clinical decisions are made will dramatically improve accessibility and scalability of primary care and at the same time shift it to a more preventative model. This is similar to separating a physics experiment from analyzing the results of the experiment. Separating these things and storing these raw immutable measurements over time is critical to building a health care system that gets better and cheaper over time, because it allows us to learn from mistakes. The problem with almost all of the information we have in EHR’s today is that it is mostly opinions and observations, and contains very little objective/immutable measurements. But that shouldn’t be a surprise, these systems were designed for billing and administration of medical practices, not designed to be a tool to help clinicians understand and troubleshoot a person’s health.
Based on early clinical success we believe this is going to revolutionize the efficiency in which primary care doctors can get to the root of issues early, before people are symptomatic. It really dramatically reduces the search space a doctor has to explore if they have this information already in hand once a person begins experiencing health issues.
Ultimately, our mission at Q Bio is to make this platform part of the standard of care for everyone so that treatable disease no longer takes lives, and each generation is healthier than the last.
How do you think your technology can address this?
If we can comprehensively and reproducibly measure what is changing the human body in a non-invasive and commoditized way there is almost no part of healthcare that won’t be revolutionized. This capability is the foundation of the scientific method. We just want to begin to apply the scientific method to our bodies.
There are immediate clinical uses like stratifying risk in populations to route care most effectively, helping to aid the most effective intervention, measuring the effectiveness of an intervention, or even just optimizing human performance. But in the long run it will change our understanding of the progression of most diseases, aging, how to best recover from injuries and so much more.
The reason is that if we are capturing this data it optimizes the rate at which we learn how to predict the onset of issues. Right now we measure very little about the human body, and we throw away most of those measurements and only keep the subjective opinions of doctors. Go look at a medical record — it’s mostly opinions with very little data. This means it is very difficult for us to go back and learn from mistakes we made in the past.
The mediocre results of DeepMind, which has some of the best AI researchers in the world, to really do anything useful with the data we have in medical records is evidence of this. If the system is set up properly healthcare should get better and cheaper over time, like any information science. But we are seeing the opposite trends. Healthcare has a data problem, not an algorithm problem today.
Q Bio’s Gemini is the first platform that can cost-effectively, non-invasively, and quickly measure comprehensive change in the human body — a scientific revolution turning the study of the body, previously considered to be metascience or an “art,” into a commodity.
By correlating chemical and anatomical changes in an individual and weighing the significance of those changes based on their genetics, medical history, and lifestyle risks, doctors can prioritize healthcare resources and time for those at the highest risk first.
Can you tell us the backstory about what inspired you to originally feel passionate about this cause?
I’ve dealt with some tough personal health experiences, some major personal health issues, as well as losing people in my family and seeing how their care was handled. With a background in science, I wondered why there wasn’t a tool with which to comprehensively know how our biological state was changing on a regular basis, not just if sick or injured. To address this lack of data-driven proactive care, I started Q Bio. But this isn’t about me, my experience isn’t special, everyone reading this knows someone that would benefit from this tool and approach to healthcare.
How do you think this might change the world?
If we are successful Star Trek medbay isn’t far off. I actually think the difference between Star Trek Med Bay and where we are now is just mostly a software engineering problem which is why we are aggressively hiring exceptional software engineers. We have solved a lot of the key physics problems or at the very least have demonstrated we have techniques that work and can scale. The Q Exam and prototype Gemini Dashboard has already saved many people’s lives and helped improve countless more. We have caught early breast cancer, prostate cancer, leukemia, pancreatic cancer, ovarian cancer, metabolic disease, cardiovascular disease, helped professional athletes optimize their diet and training and helped others recover from illness and injury. In most cases clinicians have come back and told us that they were only able to make the right clinical decision because they had these multidimensional system-wide summaries of individuals along with what is changing and how fast in their patients, and presenting it in a way that was easy to navigate and digest. These are cases where there was no single measurement that pointed to a diagnosis or a concrete follow-up. The doctor had to correlate multi-data points to make the right call. And contrary to popular dogma in medicine, we have had no issues with false positives or incidentalomas. I attribute this to the fact we are gathering multi-dimensional longitudinal data which makes it much easier to disambiguate those cases because the SnR is so much higher. It’s important to remember that actionable data means having enough information to know when the best action is to do nothing. I think a lot of people think actionable healthcare data means you always do something, but that’s a misunderstanding of how any data-driven process works. Today when we decide to do nothing it’s out of ignorance, in the future when we decide to do nothing when it comes to someone’s health it will be a very informed decision.
But this is pretty great if you think about it. We aren’t using novel biomarkers or fancy AI diagnostics, we are harnessing the knowledge clinicians already have by simply presenting more information in a better way to them and patients and as a result they are making better, more informed decisions and our platform can easily integrate new biomarkers scalably for clinical use as they become available.
The world will be changed because we will develop vastly superior models of health and disease and our ability to detect diseases even diseases we haven’t identified yet will constantly be improving. It will also revolutionize drug discovery and interventional therapies both surgical and drug-based. From designing custom 3D implants to being able to run simulations of how an individual may respond to many different therapies in order to identify what will most likely work best for them. Furthermore, we will be able to track how specific interventions are affecting an individual quantitatively. People will have control over data about their body, it will be easy to get second or third opinions from specialists all over the world without having to do repeat testing because of difficulties moving data between providers. Most importantly, all of this data, the raw measurements, the clinical analysis and the outcomes will all be captured in a way that will allow us to learn from our past mistakes and continually optimize how we diagnose, treat and care for people in the future. This will be true value-based care. The result of this positive feedback loop will be that people will have the choice to live longer and healthier lives if they want and unnecessary human suffering will be reduced.
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?
I’m not aware of any technology or tool that humans have ever developed that can’t be used for both good and evil. The biggest danger, in this case, is if this information is used against someone, so I think it’s important that everyone owns information about their body and ultimately controls who has access to it and how it is used.
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”?
To successfully create technology that can make a positive social impact you need to build something that aligns all the incentives of participants in an ecosystem towards change you want to see, while at the same time creating value for those participants. It also needs to be a positive-sum solution.
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?
So I would just tell them to pick problems that they love so much that they would do it for free and really think about what the world would look like if they were massively successful and think about whether that’s a good thing or not. This is easier said than done.
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?
If I could pick one person to have a private breakfast or lunch with, I would choose Dave Chapelle. I think he sees the world in a unique way and I think it would be a fascinating and hilarious conversation.
How can our readers further follow your work online?
Please visit https://q.bio to learn more about our vision and breakthrough technology.
Thank you so much for joining us. This was very inspirational, and we wish you continued success in your important work.
