Social Impact Tech: Fabio Gratton of inVibe Labs On How Their Technology Will Make An Important Positive Impact
An Interview With Jilea Hemmings
…By empowering healthcare consumers (e.g., patients and physicians) to record their candid voice responses to specific questions, then using a combination of machine learning and human expertise to analyze their responses, inVibe is able to extract cognitive, emotional, and behavioral insights with the depth, speed, and scale our healthcare clients have been dreaming about for years. In other words, they can easily gain both quantitative and deep qualitative insights in the time it would take to do one, and at a significantly reduced cost. More importantly, by being able to see the “why” behind the “what,” clients are able to bring the p-value to life in the research.
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 Fabio Gratton, Co-founder and CEO of inVibe Labs.
A former Hollywood screenwriter, Fabio has adapted his storytelling skills with an acute acumen for data, analytics, and tech innovation to revolutionize healthcare market research. By empowering patients and physicians to record candid voice responses through their own smartphones to specific queries, and then extracting key cognitive, emotional, and behavioral insights with a combination of sophisticated machine learning and expert human linguistic analytics, Fabio has successfully applied many of the proven tools of Big Tech to transform traditional market research.
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 born in Italy. My family immigrated to the United States when I was 6 when my father was offered a teaching position at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign in the Physics department. His father was a very accomplished astrophysicist in Italy, and my mother was a math teacher who went on to teach herself computer programming, and eventually landed a job at the University running the computer lab. I suppose you can safely say that my pedigree is one of science, technology, and education. For a while, I tried to deviate from that trajectory. I went to film school at UCLA and started my Hollywood career as a struggling screenwriter. But the jury is still out on whether nature or nurture brought me back to my family roots by combining my passion for storytelling and technology into a platform to effectively listen to human stories and translate them into meaningful insights to improve public health. You can say I somehow managed to bring the best of both worlds to healthcare market research — an area that needed new ideas and fresh perspectives.
Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you began your career?
The year is 2001 — I had just started my first company, and we got this tiny space in a small, eclectic retail shopping center underneath a Ruby’s Diner. One of my partners was “the account guy,” the other was “the creative guy,” so I was the de facto “tech guy.” At the time, that meant IT, and these were the days before cloud, AWS, etc. — when people were still getting online via ethernet cables. To be honest, I wasn’t really that savvy when it came to servers, hardware, and that sort of thing — but at the time, you needed to have a server if you were going to have files. We were just a startup. We still had no real clients, business, or revenue to speak of — so every dollar spent mattered. I remember getting into an argument with my partners because I wanted to buy a server rack to hold the one server we had — and they thought it was the stupidest idea. Who needs a rack? Just put the damn server on the floor. I won the argument, but they were pretty upset. About six months later, a sewage pipe burst above us, and all the sewage from Ruby’s essentially filled an inch of our floor. It was bad. People with hazmat suits were cleaning up the place — and we lost everything. Everything but the server, because, well, it was up on a rack. So, we had all of our files still and were able to remain in business. I don’t think they ever questioned anything technology-related I thought we needed after that day. It was both hilarious and disgusting, but also a very important early lesson for me about not cutting corners on the essentials.
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?
There are so many people that have helped me along the way — but probably no one that deserves more credit than my first real boss, Tim Riley. He was a born entrepreneur with a wicked sense of humor — he would always make everyone laugh. Clients loved him because he was not only witty, but super sharp. He ended up not only giving me my first job, but also ended up becoming one of my business partners at my first startup, a health-focused digital marketing agency. Beyond wit and intellect, he also had this great way with people — seeing their strengths and then giving them space to fulfil their potential. He would always say to me, “Fabio, you can have all the rope you want… just try not to hang yourself with it.” He wasn’t the most PC person, but his messages were clear and sincere. I remember he would always ask me for my opinion about things, and I used to share my stupid, whacky ideas with him — especially at the beginning, when all I had was stupid ideas. One of them was about creating a cartoon series based on one of our clients’ medical devices as a way to entertain and educate their customers, who were hospital administrators! One day, he brought me to a meeting with some of the most senior people at this organization, he said it was an opportunity for me to watch and learn. At one point one of the clients, who seemed relatively unimpressed with some of the concepts our agency had just presented, turned to Tim and said, “You got anything else?” Without blinking, he turned to me and said, “Tell him your idea.” Mind you, this was a multi-billion dollar, publicly traded company. After about five seconds of standing there like a deer-in-headlights, I sprang to life and pitched the cartoon idea. When I look back, I realize how crazy it was — but I had so much conviction in my vision for how to execute it, that they actually decided to do it. And before I knew it, we were all shaking hands over what turned out to be a fifty-thousand-dollar video project. That was a ridiculous amount of money to me, and I clearly remember thinking that it sure beat the hell out of sitting in a room all by myself writing a screenplay for six months that maybe five people would ever read. From that day on, Tim brought me to every meeting, and I always came prepared with a good backup idea. Eventually, I would be going without him.
Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?
“Let’s Make Better Mistakes Tomorrow.” This speaks to me because I think if you’re going to try to create something, whether it’s an innovation on something that already exists, or something completely new — you’re bound to make a lot of mistakes. And if you’re not prepared to do that, you’re never going to be able to move forward with anything. I tell this to the people I work with all the time when something goes wrong. Sometimes we just want to sit there, wallow in our self-pity and beat ourselves up, but it really serves no purpose. Mistakes are meant to teach us. The only real mistake we can make is to make the exact same mistake in the future. I believe that as long as we’re not making the exact same mistake twice, we are growing. And as long as we are growing, we are going somewhere. I think this sets realistic expectations about what it means to create and how to deal with the inevitable mistakes we will all make.
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?
Humility. Patience. Relentlessness.
Honestly, the words “successful business leader” make me cringe. It’s not like we’re running a race, where you finish first and get a trophy. There are thousands of others running laps around you all the time, and the journey never really ends. I feel it’s always important to remember that there are so many people far smarter than me, and every achievement I’ve ever had was because of the incredible work that others do. It’s been that way since day one, and I never forget it each and every day I come to work. I compulsively read biographies of some of the greatest figures in modern history (e.g., Goldywn, Jobs, Walton), and that’s all it takes to keep my feet firmly planted on the ground.
I would be lying if I said I am a patient person — but just because I’m an impatient person, doesn’t mean I haven’t learned to have patience. I guess I would call it a learned trait. I used to want everything done yesterday — and I expected the impossible from people. Then one day, my CTO finally got sick of me perpetually asking for everything to be delivered within impossible timelines, and after hours of arguing, I remember suddenly having that lightbulb moment where I realized that I had this really warped sense of peoples’ roles in an organization. I used to think, foolishly of course, that only “creative types” should have permission to get writer’s block, miss deadlines, etc., but thought that software engineers, analysts, or people in operational roles had no excuse for not delivering everything on-time and on-budget. That’s just plain wrong. I’ve learned that all roles have an element of creativity and that there needs to be room for idea exploration, mental ideation, and creative development in more than just what we perceive to be “creative jobs.” That was a lesson I learned pretty late, but at least now I have a much more balanced perspective and empathetic view of the world. That appreciation has also taught me to respect the craft of others, which is really important if you work in a collaborative environment — which most businesses are.
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 social impact on our society. To begin, what problems are you aiming to solve?
As we all know, market research is a proven way to get inside the hearts and minds of consumers. Brands spend billions of dollars to better understand their audiences so that they can ultimately design and develop products and services best suited to meet their exact needs and expectations.
Traditional ways to conduct market research fall into two distinct categories: quantitative market research, which typically uses broadly distributed surveys with a large sample size, whereby the input is typically in the way of multiple-choice, rank/rate questions, and the like — while qualitative market research typically involves a smaller sample size, and methodologies that go into greater depths, like interviews or focus groups, for example.
What I discovered with healthcare clients is that they often need a hybrid of both techniques: the agility and speed of quantitative research, but also the detail and nuance of qualitative approaches. However, due to a myriad of factors, including budgets, timelines, and just overall complexity, they tend to pick “the best” available methodology versus the ideal methodology.
That’s where an innovative application that leverages technology comes in. By empowering healthcare consumers (e.g., patients and physicians) to record their candid voice responses to specific questions, then using a combination of machine learning and human expertise to analyze their responses, inVibe is able to extract cognitive, emotional, and behavioral insights with the depth, speed, and scale our healthcare clients have been dreaming about for years. In other words, they can easily gain both quantitative and deep qualitative insights in the time it would take to do one, and at a significantly reduced cost. More importantly, by being able to see the “why” behind the “what,” clients are able to bring the p-value to life in the research.
How do you think your technology can address this?
Our technology addresses this client need for speed and depth in market research by using tech tools to listen more effectively and gain understanding more accurately.
The first challenge we needed to address was data collection. When we first launched, there was no Google Home or Alexa, but smartphones were already ubiquitous — and we thought to ourselves, “Wait, there are five billion recording devices already in everybody’s pockets — why are they not being used to capture opinions in the most natural possible way: talking!”
Voice can capture every nuance of a person’s cognitive, emotional, and behavioral state. Imagine the difference in sheer volume of data: a completed traditional survey with bubble questions and answers is, what, maybe a few kilobytes in digital requirements? Now think of a lengthy voice recording, which goes into the megabytes of data. And think of the agility a market research study is given with participants being recruited, vetted, managed, and recorded directly from and with their own smartphones. The tech tools haven’t merely made antiquated approaches easier, but they’ve transformed the very nature of the game.
The second challenge was analysis. This is especially challenging since human speech is messy, disorganized, and often chaotic. Shifting from syntactic to semantic analysis, from analyzing text to deciphering human speech, the leap was being able to understand WHY people say things, not merely how they say it. For that, we’ve utilized the latest in machine learning and natural language processing, combined that with human-powered linguistic expertise to ensure nothing is missed, and the insights remain accurately reflective of a participant’s innermost thoughts, feelings, and desires.
And the third challenge was reporting. Given the sheer volume of data, and the sophistication of our analytical approach, we knew it would be critical for us to be able to present the findings in a way that was not only easy-to-consume, but readily actionable. Too often, healthcare clients are given either too much data or too little, with the insight buried or difficult to assess, and actionable recommendations non-existent. Our goal is to ultimately provide our clients with not only a “report,” but a dynamic experience from which they are compelled to uncover secondary and tertiary questions, dive in as deeply as needed, and extract insights that are not only reflective of their audience’s present attitudes, but prescriptive enough to help advance treatments and improve public health.
Can you tell us the backstory about what inspired you to originally feel passionate about this cause?
The Holy Grail of healthcare marketing is understanding the patient, but the industry has had a hard time listening. For years, as the Founding Partner of a successful patient-focused digital health agency, I realized that one of our biggest recurring obstacles was gaining quick and accurate insight into what patients truly thought and felt about their disease burden, available treatment options, support programs, and similar concerns and questions.
Right before I left the agency to start something new (I had sold that agency), I was working on a sort of “lab experiment” that was trying to solve the problem of letting loved ones share their messages with patients undergoing chemotherapy. You see, oftentimes chemotherapy can take hours at an infusion center, and friends and family can’t really be there for all sorts of reasons. So we built this app in the early days of iPhone and Facebook that would allow a friend or family member to create a virtual “voicebox” (we called it carebox) and invite friends and family via Facebook to call into a dedicated phone number to share a thought, story, song, or whatever they wanted with the person they cared about. And at a specific time and date, the box would be delivered to that person — with all its audio goodies. Something about this idea stuck with me. How hard it’s become to connect with people we love in the real world, in real-time, and how much easier it’s becoming to connect with people virtually — in other words, asynchronously.
Eventually, this idea would be an inspiration that would lead to building inVibe — essentially a platform where companies can connect with different types of people, hear what they have to say, and then analyze what they capture. That was just the beginning.
How do you think this might change the world?
Arguably nothing is more important than our health. And there’s no better way to improve diagnosing, treating, managing, and even preventing disease than by gaining a better understanding of our healthcare audiences.
I strongly believe that using similar tech tools that Apple, Google, Facebook, and Amazon have already implemented to better understand and engage with their consumers will soon transform healthcare — and ultimately the world. We take for granted the ability to track, profile, and anticipate the needs of billions of shoppers across the planet. Now is the time to apply these capabilities (with additional respect for the privacy and security of healthcare audiences and their data) to better reach, engage, and support the public from a health and wellness perspective. And the key to that is fast, efficient, and effective market research that gets to the very heart of what healthcare brands need to do to better serve patients and their physicians.
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?
Sure, they are many of the same drawbacks that keep us up at night regarding the privacy concerns spawned by Big Tech. Who owns this data? How is it being shared and with whom? Where do we draw the line between privacy and convenience? At inVibe, we go to great lengths to keep individual identities and content safe and secure. Our data is anonymized, and our research is never violative. No data is shared with third parties, and the data we do share with clients is designed to protect participants.
Great science fiction takes current technology and extrapolates it into “What if…?” scenarios, with often dire consequences. One way to avoid future disaster is to imagine such abuses in the present and establish protocols and protective methods to keep individuals and their data safe. The challenge is consistent and comprehensive guidance and regulation that can be enforced. As the industry matures and governments catch up to these calls for additional privacy, one hopes that the scenarios in “Black Mirror” remain science fiction instead of inevitable science fact.
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, try not to get obsessed with the idea that in order to create something that has an impact, you need to invent something totally and radically new. Most innovations are nothing more than creative combinations or reframing of things that already exist. For example, when we were creating inVibe, we were mostly obsessed with the idea that billions of people were walking around with phones in their pockets that were being used for anything and everything, except talking. Once we had this picture in our head that every phone is essentially a very underutilized voice-capture instrument instead of a miniature computer, we could begin to think about how this could solve the problem of data collection for market research. We wanted to build something ridiculously simple, and requiring someone to download an app would introduce an unnecessary point of friction — so that led us to exploring ways to leverage the simplest components of even the most basic mobile devices: native text and telephony. What was “radical” was doing the exact opposite of what everyone else was doing — which was building slick apps with all these cool features. We wanted to build something that anyone could use, requiring no tech sophistication, no typing, nothing but answering questions by simply speaking, like you would to a friend. The experience needed to be easy — but of course, that’s what made it so hard to build it right. But we did, and frankly, the core user experience has changed very little to this day. That’s a testament to the fact that we got something right.
Second, stop thinking about technology. No matter what you end up doing, technology will play a role in helping you solve the problem — but it’s important not to get too caught up in the idea of technology itself, something startup founders tend to do because everywhere one looks, it seems like someone has built some cool little software service or gadget that is changing the world. But I guarantee you that most people didn’t set out with the product in mind — they were focused on the problem. You know the saying, “Love the problem, not the product.” I totally believe that. Technology is a potent and essential tool — but that’s all it is: a tool to help us solve a problem. Thinking about it this way might make it easier to find creative solutions that others might not think of. Start by asking yourself, “What’s the simplest possible way to solve this problem?” Then go from there.
Third, it’s important not to get ahead of ourselves when we’re developing solutions to solve significant problems. Sometimes we jump too fast to try and “productize” or “package,” or we get obsessed about scale, or raising capital — all of these other things that, yes, can be important, but there’s a time and place for them. Also, despite what we may have been led to believe, not everything that matters needs to scale, get big, and take over the world. Social impact can come from simple, small, day-to-day interactions. Technology can play a role in helping make those interactions repeatable or memorable or augment them in a way so that they’re more effective — but it doesn’t need to make things scale in order for it to have an impact. Again, we need to be cautious of the founder-to-fortunes narrative that the media has playing all around us. The unicorn cult has blinded many would-be founders with billionaire-bling obsession and led them to do things that perhaps don’t make sense for a perfectly good product that solves a small but important problem. They hear the investor words playing like a broken record in their head, “Total Addressable Market…” and then find themselves in a deep depression because the technology they have built will never yield returns to buy them a diamond-filled palace. We don’t need another Jobs or Musk. We just need another you.
Fourth, it rarely gets easier. Not because you don’t get smarter and continue to make your product better, but because you’re going to move your own goalpost without realizing it. If you’re a founder or anyone that prefers putting the time and energy into building technology solutions to make the world a better place instead of re-binging every episode of Schitt’s Creek — then you’re a rare breed of person that is not going to be satisfied. Let’s face it, the very fact that you feel the need to create something is an admission that the world isn’t perfect, and it needs something else in it — something you think you can bring. And if you’re wired that way, you will see everything that way — which means you will never be done, things will never be perfect, and therefore it may always feel like you’re struggling, swimming upstream, or failing to reach some ever-shifting destination you thought was right around the corner. Get used to that idea and that feeling, and life might stay bearable enough so that you can keep moving forward and complete the mission, or rather, blow right past the finish line without realizing it.
Last but certainly not least, cut yourself some slack. If you’re the type of person trying to figure out how to build a successful product or company that will impact the world, you’re already a pretty amazing human being, and you should pause and give yourself a big hug. Like I said before, most people aren’t like you. They’re not ready to do the hard work. Not because they’re lazy, but because it’s terrifying to actually find out that maybe they’re not as capable or creative or persistent to turn an idea into a sustainable, impactful thing. But here’s a little secret: you don’t have to make it, to make it. You don’t have to achieve some unrealistic pinnacle of achievement to be successful. The only thing you need to do, honestly, swear-to-God, is try. If you don’t at least try, then yes, you’re a total failure. But if you at least give yourself a chance to fail, and you succeed at failing — then you have achieved something that 99.9% of people will never achieve. And that alone is worth the shot. But here’s the really big secret: you won’t fail. Don’t believe me? Ok, then prove me wrong.
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?
Follow your heart! If you’re like me, you dream of a safe and healthy planet. So ask yourself what kind of unique skills do you have that can improve and extend human life? Think big, or think small; think global, or think local. The important thing is that you recognize your gifts and figure out how to apply them in a practical way that can make a real difference in people’s lives. Technology as we’ve discussed is a double-edged sword: it can be used for good or evil, the decision is yours. Choosing good, you apply it in ways that reflect your own strengths and unique vision for a better tomorrow. All these might sound like platitudes, but they aren’t the second you complete a project and release it to the world. It’ll either work or it won’t. Either way, never stop believing in a better future and seeing yourself as an integral part of it.
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. :-)
Tom Cruise. He was my first real ‘boss’ when I worked in Hollywood. I was the mostly invisible assistant helping connect calls and making coffee. When my mother died tragically in 1995, I remember Tom reaching out to me, expressing his condolences, and even making a personal donation to my little sister’s future college fund (she was only 10 at the time). I just remember feeling so grateful that he had taken the time out of his life to think about me and my family. I don’t why, but that act of kindness from one of the most famous people on earth has always stuck with me. I never really had the chance to thank him, because I had moved back home to Illinois at the time, and we were dealing with so much. If I could have lunch with him, I would just want to express my deepest gratitude, explain to him how much that little gesture meant to me, and how much it has affected the way I treat others when they’re going through their own tragedies.”
How can our readers further follow your work online?
Thank you so much for joining us. This was very inspirational, and we wish you continued success in your important work.
