The Opportunities Ahead in the Future of Work and Healthcare

Written by Asta Diabate

June Angelides @ Samos Investments and Maren Bannon @ January Ventures had a conversation with Lindsay Jurist-Rosner, the Co-Founder & CEO of Wellthy and Ingrid Ødegaard, Co-Founder & CPTO of Whereby about their businesses, how Covid has impacted them and what they see as the future of their industries.

Wellthy is a platform helping families manage care for their loved ones dealing with aging, chronic illness or disabilities. Whereby is a web-based video conferencing platform making it easier for people to use video.

Here’s an edited and shortened version of what they talked about.

June: How did you get started with Whereby? What regarding the infrastructure you wanted to change?

Ingrid: We started inside the biggest telco in Norway in 2013. We were struggling to have daily standups remotely. Back then the options available were Sky and Google Hangouts.

A group of interns built the first version of the product in the space of a few weeks. We launched it to the tech community on Hacker News, got feedback, went to management and got approval to carry this forward.

We spent the next 4 years as a product team within the telco. In 2017 we spun out and looked for a new owner or an investor. We ended up being acquired by a Norwegian video conferencing company focused on enterprise. In the last 3 years we’ve grown in this set-up.

June: Lindsay, How did you get started with Wellthy? Why did you decide to focus on caregiving?

Lindsay: Wellthy came to be because of a personal story. I was involved in the care of my mom for 28 years. She got diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis when I was young. After college I moved back home in order to help my mom. I wondered why the process of managing care is so difficult and time consuming.

June: When did you realise you had achieved product market fit?

Lindsay: We had total confidence in our problem statement, but we didn’t have a solution. I spent a year doing research, reading, speaking with experts and realised that social workers had a wealth of knowledge but they just didn’t have enough time to help families manage their care in medical settings.

We focused on customer experience and worked with a handfuls of families. A year into business, we got an email from a customer telling us about how we had changed their lives with our product, and how they were sure this could be useful to other colleagues of theirs. We understood that there was an opportunity to work with employers. We are now an employer benefit for 62 employers.

June: it’s amazing when your customer becomes your sales person!

Ingrid: We had the opposite situation. We had a solution but not really a problem. We had started by solving our own problems but there weren’t many companies doing remote work at the time. Last year was a breaking point — it became mainstream to have distributed teams or companies. This year is the biggest push in history for remote work.

We were lucky to have a patient angel and seed investor. Had we gone the traditional funding route, I don’t think it would have been as easy because the market wasn’t there yet.

We started with a free product and at some point had to start to make money. We went through a transition -that was really hard. It is harder to take something that was free away from people. So we had to really tighten our free product.

Maren: We’re seeing plenty of trends in work and healthcare. These are industries that have seen huge changes in the past few months. I’d love to hear what your perspectives are. Lindsay, what are the trends that you are seeing accelerating due to Covid?

We are focused on employers. We have seen a shift in the US — employers are now thinking beyond childcare and are talking about caregiving.

Because of Covid, we have seen an intense shift in how to care for loved ones. If before you might have an elderly parent who lives independently, how do you continue to get them the care they need?

We’ve realised plenty of families were struggling and decided to pivot to provide Covid support for families.

Covid will forever change how families think about care, and employers are stepping up! Our business has grown 50% in the last 2 months. It’s been a wild ride.

Maren: When you say you pivoted, do you mean you’ve shifted the whole business?

Lindsay: it wasn’t a massive shift for us because at the core we are helping families manage care. Our shift has been all about becoming smart on Covid — learning what insurance is covering, understanding if someone has cancer, for example, if they can still access care and how.

Everything we would normally do — help people in the transition with care — wasn’t happening. It was organic to shift to urgent and reactive and covid-related care.

Maren: Ingrid, what trends are you seeing in the world of work?

Ingrid: We started seeing the impact of Covid in February because we have users in Asia. Once it hit in Europe we saw a massive influx of users and an increased demand in our integrating videos product.

We’ve seen adoption among nursing homes — they are using Whereby to let families talk to their loved ones. And we’ve had some big deals with several hospitals. We’ve partnered with Accurx — they got in touch with us on a Friday and by Monday they started to roll out video to 6,000 GP practices.

We’ve made changes to our infrastructure to allow us to scale. Our server volume increased 10x in 2 weeks.

Video is being integrated in all kinds of industries. We’re seeing adoption in the education sector where teachers are not always tech savvy. We’ve seen social use of our product as well. In Japan, drinking culture is huge. A Japanese company has built a service that allows people to drink together that has integrated our video product. We see close to a million users a week coming only from Japan.

I think video will stick even after Covid. We’ve conducted a survey among business owners and employers. We found that both groups felt more productive when working from home. More than half of the employees wanted some flexibility to be able to work both in the office and remotely. More than 80% of business owners were considering changing their business practices to allow their workers to work remotely. Many are considering reducing their office space. If this plays out, the commercial real estate impact will see a huge impact.

Maren: Did you face any security issues just like Zoom?

Ingrid: Security has been our focus from day 1 just like simplicity. But given what’s happened, we changed our default to make sure all rooms are locked to ensure safety. So far we’ve had few bar none cases of random people coming in in rooms.

Maren: Care is so in-person. Covid is leading to a shift of the care model and business have had to adapt to this new paradigm. How are you dealing with that?

Lindsay: Our business is all virtual. Our care coordinators — social workers by training — don’t offer care in person.

Part of our team was distributed and remote to begin with. So we were able to get the rest of the team to work remotely as well. I don’t think we will all go back to the office on a full-time basis. We are basically a tele-health company.

Longer-term facilities have seen plenty of deaths, so families now will be resistant to send their loved ones in care homes. We now have a full virtual infrastructure that we can’t undo — it’s only going to grow and get stronger.

Maren: What has been the response from employers? What has helped you get sales over the line?

We sell into the benefits department — part of the HR team. There are many solutions in the space. It is a very crowded market and benefits teams are being inundated with vendors trying to sell them something.

The benefits industry is trends-driven. Caregiving is having its moment right now because of 3 main reasons:

1. Companies are seeing their employees taking a leave of absence to figure out how to care for their loved ones — but that leave might not be enough.
2. Companies especially those operating shifts, see family care-giving leading to mixed shifts, which are expensive.
3. Companies are realising that care is still largely a woman’s responsibility. Women are getting squeezed by having to care for kids, aging parents and in-laws. D&I teams, in particular, are hearing that care is one of the major reasons why women are thinking about leaving the workforce or are declining opportunities for advancement.

How do we sell? We have an ROI story and we deliver. Employers can start by offering this benefit to 1 employee who needs it or an office location, and then expand when they see results.

Maren: How have you both been managing your home teams? Do you have any tips?

Ingrid: it wasn’t a big shift because we already had a policy allowing people to choose where they wanted to work. That forces an organisaiton to adapt tools and processes to make that possible.

Now that the default is working from home, it has become even more important to check in regularly. At Whereby, we have a daily call or stand-up. Since March, we’ve added 12 people to our team so that has meant recruiting and onboarding people remotely. We have regular town halls where we give updates, and we have created a Slack appreciation channel.

Last week we had a virtual away day.

Lindsay: We’re still learning and figuring out day by day. We are putting a lot of emphasis on helping our team through the mental and emotional impact not only from working remotely, but from dealing with the anxiety and stress caused by Covid, and now Black Lives Matter. Our team is helping families with difficult and stressful situations and sometimes they take it out on who’s available.

How have we approached BLM? We have a diverse team and we’re making sure that they feel really supported. We’re doing everything we can internally to do the right thing but we’re also thinking about the role we can play in making the world a better place and how we can be deliberate about how we want to drive change.

We’ve given our team a mental health half day. Put down your phone, take the afternoon off. Take your time…and that’s been very helpful.

We’re figuring our day by day and we’re listening to our team.

June: How have you approached BLM internally?

Ingrid: It’s been very difficult. We’re Norwegian but we have some US employees. It’s been really heartbreaking. First and foremost, we are looking at what we can do. We hadn’t been hiring until recently so we’re looking at our processes. How can we build a more diverse team — where can we post jobs and how do we actively look for diverse candidates. We’re looking at other things as well — what images, what language and what info are we providing?

We’re focusing on doing rather than talking. We’re offering support to organisations working to advance the movement by offering them our services for free.

June: Fundraising. What have been the pros and cons of Whereby’s non-traditional fundraising route?

Ingrid: When we were part of the telco, we had to do some stakeholder management but not as much as we would with investors. It was also easier to get money but there were tons of distractions, e.g. being pulled in to work on other projects.

Since we’ve spun-out we’ve been on a tighter budget . We’ve had to manage investors and get them on board with our growth strategy.

The downside is that we don’t have investors who can add much additional value — we have to spend a lot of time explaining to them what we do and what are our plans. We’re also missing the help that investors can give you when it comes to recruiting and access to their networks.

June: What’s your fundraising journey been like Lindsay? VCs tend to see businesses with a social core as being lifestyle businesses — how did you navigate that?

Lindsay: We’ve started with smaller earlier rounds — we’ve raised from family and friends, Angels and convertible notes. Then we raised a Seed round, and a Series A round. We were planning to raise a Series B but then the market crashed. So we went back to our existing investors and raised a Series A+ rounds. In total we have raised $50m.

At the beginning we shied away from branding ourselves as a social enterprise for exactly the reason you cited. When we started people weren’t talking as much about social enterprises. Now that things have changed and investors are getting more excited about the space, we do talk about ourselves as a business with a social core.

Ingrid: You, Lindsay, and your business is exactly why we need more diversity in tech. If we’ve got everyone cut from the same cloth we would never have startups like yours.

Lindsay: Women can be CEOs, they can be founders, they can be anything. We just need more of them!