Health Tech: Shashank Dubey On How Tredence’s Technology Can Make An Important Impact On Our Overall Wellness

First is know the end user. With a lot of these technology implementations, we often lose sight of who the true end user is. The potential users of an AI product might include a care manager, a physician and a healthcare executive. These are three very different end users.

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 Shashank Dubey.

Shashank Dubey is Chief Revenue Officer and Co-founder of Tredence (https://www.tredence.com ), a data science solutions provider. One of the company’s visions is to put meaningful analytics into the hands of every decision-maker through the adoption of data science.

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 grew up in the northern part of India. My father was in the government police services, and such was the nature of his job that he wouldn’t stay in one place for too long and we would just keep moving from one area to another area. So, I ended up going to eight or so schools in my 12 years of education. That’s quite a record; I’ve met very few people who have attended more schools than that. But the interesting thing was that it kind of ingrained in me the fact that you need to be comfortable with change, that we don’t get stuck in places. You make new friends, and change becomes a part of your life. You continuously adjust to new places.

Another key thing is that I was deeply ingrained in the Indian value system, looking at building life perspectives and keeping the end in mind. That just keeps you very balanced. Very early in my life I was taught about the different stages that you go through, and what finally matters in terms of life happiness. And there was also this inherent middle-class value we learned that you need to leave the world a little better. All of those things were part of the learning and training process that I unconsciously was subjected to.

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

Sometime after I started Tredence along with my co-founders, I think it was around 2014, we were working out of a rented apartment in India. Around that same time one of our client checks, got a little bit delayed. We were a very small business, barely making $200K per year as a company. The founders were not drawing any salary. But we had seven or eight employees working at Tredence and we were supposed to pay them their salary, but of course we had to delay that for a couple of weeks because the check hadn’t arrived from the client. Everybody understood.

One of the guys came to me the next day and opened his laptop to show me his bank account. He had the equivalent of about $2, and said that’s all he had left, and he had to pay his credit card bill. He asked for some money from my account so he could at least pay the credit card bill. So, I transferred money from my account to his and he paid the bill. April this year we did an ESOP buyback because we had raised our series A funding, and we returned about 3 million dollars back to our employees through this stock option buyback. This person exercised a small fraction of his stock options, and one evening he sent me a screenshot of his bank account and texted me that this was the amount of money he had and said it will never go to zero thanks to what we have built together at Tredence. That gives me a deep sense of fulfillment, and just makes the whole thing worthwhile.

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?

My wife has had a big role to play throughout my career. We met each other in our first job, and we decided to live our life together. It’s been 16 years now, and there have been many times when she has helped guide me. In that first job I was a scientist in a defense organization in India, and very early on she told me that it was not the right place for me; that I was not a natural scientist. She pushed me to get out of my comfort zone, and that is when my journey into data science and analytics actually started.

I ended up joining a startup company in 2008, and around 2012 [prior to cofounding Tredence] I started getting a little disillusioned by the way that particular company was working. She said, if you have dreamed about a certain company or a certain future, it’s your responsibility to make it happen. That’s a very simple thing, but those simple things said at the right moment hits you really hard. Without her I wouldn’t be here.

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

I lost my father very early in my life. I was 14 years old when he met a very untimely death, and around that time somebody told me about the serenity prayer, and that prayer has stayed with me since then. It goes, “God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference.” It has stood with me for quite a long time and helped me become a better person, a better leader, and helped me build a better company.

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?

The first one is meaning — why you are doing something in particular. The second is a long-game mindset. Life is a long game, and your approach to life changes over time. And the third is what I call a force multiplier, which I think is an essential trait of a leader.

Meaning is having clarity about why you are doing what you are doing over the long term. When I enter the last days of my life and look back, I would like to remember that I built something that didn’t just change the word in some measure, but it also inspired other people to build other things which changed the world for better. When I started the company, I figured that you don’t start up a company just because you want to earn money or because you want to have fun. You start it because there is a deeper meaning that you want to achieve and that is important. Starting up a company is not like climbing Mount Everest. Building a company is not a one-year game.

Having a long-game mindset is about the concept of delayed gratification.

Life is not a casino where you play a game and if you win then maybe you play again and you lose. That’s not how it works. Life needs a long-game mindset, where you have to invest in yourself and let the power of compounding take over; you have to delay the gratification. That’s how you build things that are sustainable. Somebody told me a long time ago that masters have failed more times than beginners have even tried. Things get published about all the successes. But what people don’t realize is the uncountable hours of pain and misery that went into building those things. That’s why you need a long-game mindset.

Finally, this force multiplier effect is very dear to my heart. I think what one person can achieve is essentially nothing, but what a team can achieve can change the world. That’s why it is important that a leader conduct his or her team so that everyone’s strengths multiply and the team becomes greater than the sum of its parts. Fish can’t run and a gazelle can’t swim. A leader needs to be able to identify the inherent strengths of people and put them where they can shine the best. We as leaders have to make decisions based on our judgments. Judging is not a problem as long as you know that you are not judging the person, you’re judging the idea that the person has offered — and that’s a big difference. As long as you keep these things in mind, you can build great teams, which can do things far bigger than what you alone can accomplish.

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?

We are working on the value-based care construct in the healthcare industry here in America, and we’re looking specifically at three things: preventive care, predictive care and aftercare. There is potential for ensuring that people who need care get care that is higher in quality and lower in cost. We believe that this is absolutely possible. That is in fact the foundational pillar of value-based care, and we’re using the power of data science and artificial intelligence (AI) to compliment this vision.

With preventative care, let’s say you have data about the lifestyle, education, work history, and health checkups of an individual. You can use that information to give some contextual interventional advice, suggestions and recommendations to people and how they can adopt some lifestyle changes to ensure that their quality of life is maintained. This can help reduce the rate of admissions into hospitals. We can help people avoid serious medical interventions through lifestyle changes.

With predictive care, we use data science and AI technology to ensure that

we reduce the probability of hospital admittance. We can look at things such as adherence and compliance and how care is having an impact on the patient and giving advice. If someone can be cured from home then there’s no reason for them to be admitted in the hospital.

The third element is aftercare. There will be some patients who will get admitted to the hospital, but once the hospital discharge happens we want to use the power of data science and AI to ensure the hospital readmission does not happen. Once someone is in the hospital there generally should not be a need for them to go back, and we want to minimize the probability of that happening.

How do you think your technology can address this?

With the kind of data that we have today, the electronic medical records, claims, social determinant of health data, data from wearables such as smart watches, there is a lot of potential in bringing all of that data together and connecting the dots using the power of machine learning. We can create solutions which can improve the quality of care and quality of life, and there is a lot that we can still do. We’re just starting this journey; there’s a long road to a better life.

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

When my daughter was about five years old, she needed eyeglasses, and we were pretty distressed because we thought she was too young to have glasses. We met with a lot of interventional ophthalmologists, but nobody really had a good answer apart from eye surgery. Then somebody told me about Ayurveda, a branch of medicine which is quite popular in India. And we have a state down south called Kerala, which has a world-renowned eye hospital that uses the principles of Ayurveda to cure eye ailments. So, we spent some time there and after that my daughter no longer needs glasses.

On my last trip to that hospital, I talked to the chief physician and asked him what they did. How did this cure happen? His answer was very simple. He said our body has inherent restorative capabilities. It can cure itself if we provide the right conditions. If we take care of our body, it can take care of itself. That really stuck me, and I asked him for the medical evidence of what he was saying. His professional history of treating patients was not very well documented. All he had was a bunch of historical texts which were written 2000 years ago or so. That led me to believe that maybe there is a whole lot of unexploited potential in terms of looking at our health data and trying to see how we can use timely interventions to improve the quality of care. You don’t need the disease to happen to find the cure. You can actually be preventive in your approach to make sure that disease doesn’t happen in the first place. And if it does happen the body is strong enough to fight it.

How do you think this might change the world?

Quality of life has improved over the years because of all the great work that happened earlier. I think if we use the power of data, converge it with machine learning and AI, shift the medical paradigm from doing the point-in-time diagnosis to catching the abnormalities and deviations early on, I believe we can improve not just the span of life but also the quality of human life significantly. What better way to change the world if an average human can live longer and live better?

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?

Every technology has unintended consequence. Let’s say 10 years down the line we have enough technology and enough openness that we can get insight into a person’s genetic data. Now suddenly my algorithm knows about this person’s genes and lifestyle and can predict that this person seems to have a very high risk of a cardiac event before the person turns 35. This is a health risk that’s largely beyond his or her control. Imagine what kind of decisions will come out of that data. How would an insurance company aid that person? How would a potential employer treat that person? That is a scary area.

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.)

First is know the end user. With a lot of these technology implementations, we often lose sight of who the true end user is. The potential users of an AI product might include a care manager, a physician and a healthcare executive. These are three very different end users.

Second is know the needs of the end users. What’s important to the user should drive how the technology works, the types of data it gathers, how it is designed, etc.

This leads to the third factor, which is designing technology for humans. A lot of times when we build these AI and data science algorithms, we believe that they are going to interact with either a data scientist or with another algorithm. No, these algorithms are going to interact with humans, and we need to design the AI for human consumption.

The fourth thing is to co-create the technology with the end users. When creating a platform, you have to continuously create with the end user. The end users typically have no interest in your product or platform, so you need to convince them to enroll in your creation process.

Finally, aim to break through the barrier to get to the end beneficiary of the technology. You’re ultimately designing the product to actually make an impact on the patient. The end user might be the physician or care manager. But when you think a level beyond to the end beneficiary, you’ll start seeing that the end beneficiary has certain unique needs with regard to design of the product.

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 would tell them if you were born 5,000 years back your probability of living beyond 35 years would be less than 50%. Today your probability of living beyond 70 is almost 80% or 90%. That has happened because there were generations of great people who have worked hard to create technologies, societies and practices. In a way we are inheritors of all of that hard work that has changed the world. My appeal to a young person would be to understand that we also have the same responsibility and the same burden. We have to ensure that we work toward making this world a better place.

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. :-)

There are quite a few of them. But I would specifically mention Indra Nooyi, former CEO or PepsiCo, who is an inspiration to me on multiple grounds. She broke through the patriarchal society of India, came all the way here and crafted a career from the ground up. She led PepsiCo at a time when it had already become an institution, then she made that institution better and stronger. Her mission is not over. She’s building multiple platforms for the empowerment of women, the empowerment of different segments of society and the empowerment of entrepreneurship. In my mind she embodies the principle of American freedom and the American dream.

How can our readers further follow your work online?

We provide LinkedIn posts and videos that talk about our products and

leadership values. We will be posting more insights on social media in the coming months.

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