Founder’s Lessons: Dr. Maryam Ziaei, CEO of iSono Health
Maryam shares insights on finding a passion, challenges, user experience, being a female founder, and finding co-founders
About
Welcome to the eighteenth installment of Tsingyuan Ventures’ Lessons from Founders series. Every week, we publish an in-depth founder interview, ranging from early-stage entrepreneurs to successful businesses. Our conversations cover their personal journeys, the lessons that shaped them, their visions for the future, and their failures. We also learn more about their companies and about the challenges they try to solve. These insights and lessons are applicable to any entrepreneur — current or future.
Read past interviews here.
iSono Health
iSono Health is developing AI platforms with breakthrough 3D automated ultrasound technology on a mission to make health monitoring more accessible, consistently accurate, and personalized. Our first product, ATUSA, is a patent-pending wearable and automated ultrasound that addresses the unmet needs of over 1.5 billion women for early detection and monitoring of breast cancer (over 50B market). ATUSA system captures the entire breast volume in 1 min, without the need for a trained operator, for repeatable, safe, and convenient breast imaging at POC and home. iSono Health’s leading cloud-based AI technology leverages quantitative 3D ultrasound data to detect, classify, and track abnormal lesions in breast tissue enabling early diagnosis and longitudinal risk-based monitoring of breast cancer. Learn more at isonohealth.com.
Dr. Maryam Ziaei is an engineer-turned-entrepreneur passionate about development of connected health solutions that empower consumers to both monitor and make smart decisions about their health. Maryam co-founded iSono Health with a vision to make personalized breast health monitoring accessible to all women to help with early detection of breast cancer. Maryam has over 15 years of research and industrial experience in design and manufacturing of microscale devices and systems for high volume consumer markets. She has a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Stanford and a degree in global entrepreneurship at Stanford Graduate School of Business.
Why we invested in iSono Health: The breast cancer screening market is large and growing — most countries are pushing for earlier and more frequent screening. The iSono device is orders of magnitude less expensive than current technologies to allow it to capture a broader market more rapidly. Furthermore, the application of AI has shown great improvement in detection of abnormalities. This technology has strong potential in both the US and China due to its technical advantages. We believe that iSono can establish an early lead, which will allow them to establish a “data moat” with their AI / deep learning algorithm on abnormality detection.
Meet Dr. Maryam Ziaei
Interview edited for clarity and length.
“Surround yourself with good mentors and advisors.”
Maryam introduces herself
I’m Dr. Maryam Ziaei, co-founder and CEO of iSono Health. We started iSono Health back in 2015. My co-founder and I both lost close friends to breast cancer that was not diagnosed in time. We thought that there had to be a better way to screen for breast cancer that was accessible to women everywhere, more personalized, more convenient, and more cost-effective.
We were both working in Silicon Valley and we’d known each other for many years. We both had PhDs in electrical engineering; I did my PhD at Stanford and she did her PhD at Carnegie Mellon. We had complementary skills and we came together over the mutual experience of having friends and family go through breast cancer. I’d just finished a program at Stanford Business School. We got together to explore the idea while we still had our jobs, and then we got into Y Combinator and started working on the startup full-time. We went through an angel round of financing, three years later Tsingyuan invested in us, and we hired a team. Now we’re pushing forward to get our product FDA-approved and launch it on a market.
Maryam shares her background
I was born in the U.S. while my dad was doing his PhD at Stanford. When I was a kid, they moved back to Iran so I spent my childhood in Tehran. Then when I was 17, I came back to the U.S. I did my undergrad at ASU, I went to Berkeley for master in EECS, and then I went to Stanford for my PhD in EE.
My dad was also an entrepreneur. He was a material scientist, and he also started a medical device company in the ’90s in orthopedic implants. Seeing him create something from scratch that had an impact on people’s lives had a big impression on me. I remember once he woke up in the middle of the night because there was a child who had an accident and needed spinal implants. He went to the office and put together a package to send to the surgeon’s office. After the surgery, the parents of the child said it had a huge impact on the child’s life because he wasn’t disabled. That was really powerful because it taught me that as an engineer you can have a positive impact on people’s lives and create meaningful technology.
I could see my dad’s passion as an entrepreneur in healthcare. I saw him work so hard so many nights and he would come home late. He was always reading and learning. Those are things that he instilled in me, not just an entrepreneur, but as a scientist and as a professor. You have to always keep learning and working hard, and be passionate about what you’re doing.
On competition and user experience
Medical devices and breast cancer are such competitive fields. What we focus on is user experience. We want to create really positive user experiences, both when the device is in the clinic and in a user’s hands. Often with medical devices, we focus so much on performance, which is obviously super important. But we don’t give as much emphasis to user experience: how do we make it really easy to use, easy to operate, fast, and improve the workflow. We try to create a holistic seamless experience for the clinician and the patient.
We also want to bring our devices closer to the consumer in a more accessible setting, like a primary clinic or pharmacy or eventually at home.
That’s very difficult to do with ultrasound handheld probes because you need a very experienced person to operate the probe and it’s also quite time consuming, leading to poor workflow for the clinicians. We automate the image acquisition to take the operator dependence out of the equation for consistent accuracy. That will enable our system to be used in a wider setting globally. There are many places in the world where don’t have access to any breast cancer screening, or where there are simply not enough physicians. With automated image acquisition, a nurse or medical assistant or even patient can do this task at home. Machine learning and AI allows for more accurate diagnosis and remote monitoring of patients. So we enable both the women and the physician to have better access to technology.
Those are some of the differentiators. We’re not like a lot of medical device companies because we look at ourselves as a service platform. Hardware, machine learning, and image viewing software are obviously major components. But we view these as a service for our users.
On choosing co-founders
You have to get along. But the most important thing is that you have to trust each other. We don’t always agree but we trust each other’s decisions. We don’t micromanage each other. My co-founder is very deep and technical and detail-oriented. I love networking and talking to people. So we have a complementary set of skills. We’re very different and have different interests in terms of how we approach a problem. We discuss everything and we make decisions together. If we disagree, we still trust each other’s opinions.
On hiring and building culture
The employees obviously have to be very technically solid. But they also need to be a good culture fit, have integrity, be respectful, and be trustworthy. If you have a bunch of great engineers but they’re not team players, it’s not going to work.
In a startup there are a lot of different things happening. So they should be willing to multitask, wear different hats, and roll up their sleeves to get things done no matter what. When you’re an early-stage startup with few resources, that’s especially important.
Main challenges
Right now, the challenge is working remotely and manufacturing devices and getting through testing. When COVID hit, everything slowed down: supply chain, manufacturing, and getting the tests on time. Our main next step is resuming clinical study with our clinical partners.
Challenges of being a female founder
The number of female founders is very small. Part of it is networking access and connections and being able to reach investors. And part of it is that there’s just more scrutiny. Women founders are given less benefit of the doubt, especially if you’re younger and don’t have 20–30 years of experience in your field. You have to be super prepared and know your numbers really well. I feel privileged coming from Stanford and being able to get in the door, but I’ve talked to women who can’t even get that first meeting.
There are also some expectations that you’ll have to balance family and children. Investors sometimes look at that as a negative, because they think you won’t be able to dedicate yourselves to the startup as much. Usually men aren’t asked questions if they have children. Those are some of the challenges, but I feel lucky being in Silicon Valley and having good connections to investors.
Her best advice
- Be flexible, but at the same time, take every piece of advice with a grain of salt. Especially when you’re new and you’re just starting your company, you get a lot of conflicting advice. It can be overwhelming or just distracting. So it’s important to think about taking all advice with a grain of salt.
- Surround yourself with good mentors and advisors.
Her book recommendations
- Sapiens and Homo Deus by Yuval Noah Harari
- The Hard Things about Hard Things by Ben Horowitz
- My all-time favorite childhood book was Robinson Crusoe. I also loved Jules Vernes books.
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Tsingyuan Ventures is a $100M seed-stage technology firm. We back technical founders across software, life sciences, and frontier technologies. Learn more about our origin story and our approach here.
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