Meet The Disruptors: Loren Larsen Of Videra Health On The Five Things You Need To Shake Up Your Industry
Learn to work with early adopters within the industry that will take your new methods into practice. You have to find early adopters and innovators to try things and you have to make those people successful as they help make you successful.
As a part of our series about business leaders who are shaking things up in their industry, I had the pleasure of interviewing Loren Larsen.
Loren Larsen is the CEO and co-founder of Videra Health, the leading AI-driven mental health assessment platform. Videra Health is a pioneer in leveraging video and artificial intelligence to assess and measure mental health. He is skilled in developing technologies that can analyze human emotion and language with astonishing accuracy, which has positioned him as a vanguard in applying AI to empathetic healthcare solutions. Before Videra, Larsen was the CTO of HireVue, a trailblazing video job interviewing platform with advanced machine learning algorithms. He also co-founded Nomi Health, a direct healthcare company striving to innovate within the healthcare service and technology space.
Thank you for doing this with us! Before we dig in, our readers would like to get to know you a bit more. Can you tell us a bit about your “backstory”? What led you to this particular career path?
I fell in love with computer programming when I was about 11. Plus, I was always starting small companies or products. I sold one copy of a spelling tutor software for the Atari computer when I was 12, so I guess I’ve been a professional programmer since then. In high school, I became really interested in psychology and combining that with computer science led to an interest in artificial intelligence. AI didn’t captivate me at the time because neural networks were limited. You were just encoding endless rules into expert systems that felt tedious. So, I didn’t actively pursue AI for a while. Over time, I found myself drawn back to it. As the field evolved, AI became not just powerful, but incredibly exciting. Now, I see AI as a tool with limitless potential to solve real-world problems, and I’m thrilled to be working in a space that’s so dynamic and full of possibilities.
Can you tell our readers what it is about the work you’re doing that’s disruptive?
I spend most of my time on Videra Health where we’re fundamentally changing how people are seen in our healthcare system. Our current focus is on disrupting the mental health industry by providing easy, video-based mental health assessments.
Right now, you receive pretty good care when a provider has the time to see you, but there’s a significant imbalance between the number of times a person could benefit from being seen and the actual capacity to see them. Our video AI technology addresses this gap by automatically checking in with patients, essentially conducting a health checkup through video. It asks patients questions and uses AI to provide meaningful insights on how they’re doing, alerting providers to those who need help the most.
People shouldn’t be left alone or ignored in our system, but too often they are. Technology like ours has the power to transform how we care for people, ensuring they receive the best care at the right times. This is where AI truly shines — by bridging gaps in care and making sure no one falls through the cracks.
Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?
One story that comes to mind is from my time at HireVue, where we were revolutionizing the job interview process so that people could truly be seen as individuals, rather than just a resume. We enabled candidates to interview on video, allowing companies to see far more people in more places and at more times than ever before. At one point, we reached a stage where companies were receiving thousands of video interviews. While this was fantastic for getting to know candidates, it became incredibly time-consuming to evaluate them.
I asked a question — one that, in hindsight, was a bit naive: “Could we have the system watch the interviews for me and just tell me who I would like?” For about a week, this seemed like a great idea — until we realized it was actually a terrible one. The truth is, I’m not great at interviewing, and neither is anyone else. We’re all riddled with biases, ask poor questions and often evaluate responses based on irrelevant factors. Automating this process would have just sped up bad decision-making.
The lesson I learned was crucial: AI has the potential to make decision-making consistent and objective, something that’s difficult for humans to achieve on their own. Whether in job interviews or healthcare assessments, AI systems can learn from vast amounts of data, be rigorously tested for biases and accuracy, and improve over time as more data becomes available. I don’t know if that’s a funny story or not, but it was definitely an embarrassing moment in our thinking process.
We all need a little help along the journey. Who have been some of your mentors? Can you share a story about how they made an impact?
The list of people who have helped me along the way is really long, but two individuals stand out, especially from my early years. The first was a neighbor who took a genuine interest in me and nurtured my interest in technology. Given my family background, there is no reason in the world I should have ended up in engineering or computer science, yet his encouragement changed my trajectory. He would take me to computer user group meetings, help me enter a high school programming competition and we’d brainstorm ideas for companies and technologies together. He always had interesting ideas. Despite having his own career and family, he dedicated a lot of time to support me — something I think about often.
The second person that comes to mind is Dr. Mary Jean Harrold, my advisor during graduate school. She was an extraordinary combination of brilliant researcher, gifted teacher, the hardest worker I’ve ever known and one of the kindest people I’ve ever known. She embodied qualities that have significantly shaped my own approach to life and work. I recall many nights leaving my campus office at 1am or 2 am and looking up to see if her office light was still on. If it was, I’d go back and keep working, trying to outlast her — but she often won. This was an incredible example of having persistence and the tenacity to just keep going.
In today’s parlance, being disruptive is usually a positive adjective. But is disrupting always good? When do we say the converse, that a system or structure has ‘withstood the test of time’? Can you articulate to our readers when disrupting an industry is positive, and when disrupting an industry is ‘not so positive’? Can you share some examples of what you mean?
Disruption is essential for breaking up old ways of doing things and thinking. It’s easy to become superstitious about what works and cling to familiar methods, even as the world changes or new techniques and technologies offer better solutions. Disruption also sounds appealing and has become a bit of a buzzword, making it tempting to present it as a sign of change. However, not all disruptions lead to meaningful progress. For instance, Google Glass generated a lot of hype but had little impact on the world (maybe a technology like that will make sense someday, but it’s hard to imagine many people getting Lasik to get rid of glasses then putting them right back on). On the other hand, some disruptions, like single-use plastics or glyphosate fertilizers, were very effective and widely adopted and have had long term impacts on the environment.
Can you please share 5 ideas one needs to shake up their industry?
1 . Start with the idea that everything that is currently done in an industry is broken and look at it in a completely fresh way.
2 . Test all your crazy ideas that prove everything was broken and gradually learn that some of that actually made sense as you develop a healthy respect for what came before. Hopefully, by looking at it in a completely fresh way, you have seen through some commonly held assumptions.
3 . Put together teams of people who are deeply entrenched in how an industry works and pair them with people who have no interest in the status quo and think everything is easy. Reconcile those two worlds and find something that works, but works in a new way.
4 . Learn to work with early adopters within the industry that will take your new methods into practice. You have to find early adopters and innovators to try things and you have to make those people successful as they help make you successful.
5 . Don’t just enhance existing processes. Create entirely new value propositions that redefine industry standards. For example, in the healthcare industry, the advent of telemedicine platforms fundamentally changed how patients access medical care.
We are sure you aren’t done. How are you going to shake things up next?
There are so many ideas to pursue, but making a meaningful impact in an industry always takes time and focus. Right now, we’re deeply committed to transforming how people are seen in healthcare and how they gain access to the care they need, exactly when they need it. We’ve begun with mental health and are expanding into a broad range of health conditions.
Our vision is bold: We want to reach a point where it’s second nature for everyone to ask their doctor if they’ll follow up with Videra. Imagine a future where Videra is so integrated into the healthcare process that not using it for follow-up care is simply unthinkable. That’s the level of impact we’re aiming for, where Videra becomes synonymous with trusted, continuous care across all health conditions.
Do you have a book, podcast, or talk that’s had a deep impact on your thinking? Can you share a story with us? Can you explain why it was so resonant with you?
One of my favorite books is Maverick by Ricardo Semler, who took over his family’s company in Brazil, Semco. Semler systematically questioned everything the company did — how they prevented employee theft, their management and compensation structures, and even whether people should have to commute to the office. His overarching mantra as CEO was to decentralize his authority to the point where he didn’t need to make any decisions at all. They even threw a big party to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the last time he had made a decision.
It’s a wonderfully provocative book, and there’s a great TED talk that complements it. While not every decision he made is one to replicate, the attitude of creating a company where people feel empowered to contribute and questioning why things are done a certain way significantly shaped my thinking as I evolved from an individual contributor to a manager and leader
Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?
I’m not sure why but one of my favorite quotes from a movie is at the beginning of a David Mamet movie called Spartan. The movie opens up with a soldier played by Derek Luke on a training exercise and he’s struggling and he’s exhausted. He comes across the trainer in the woods, played by Val Kilmer, who casually asks him, “You’ve had your entire life to prepare for this moment, why aren’t you ready?” I think about this quote anytime I’m not sure how to keep going and it reminds me that I have a lifetime of preparation to apply to the current situation andto always be preparing because you don’t know when you’ll be tested.
You are a person of great influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. :-)
That’s a big responsibility. I’ve always had this idea that I’d love to find a way where people could combine entertainment with service. When people are wondering what to do on a Friday night, instead of looking for what movies are playing they could look for who in their community could use some help or could they go help clean up the neighborhood park. It’s actually sometimes hard to know how to help and I’d love to see us all find a way to know how to make our communities better and get to know our neighbors better. I wish there was an app for that — maybe there is.
How can our readers follow you online?
My Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/loren-larsen/
Videra Health’s Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/viderahealth/
Videra Health website: www.viderahealth.com
This was very inspiring. Thank you so much for joining us!
