My Purpose
People constantly ask me: why did you start your own company? I chose this path for several reasons. My mom is a nurse and my dad is a businessman, and in choosing my major at UC Berkeley, I chose Bioengineering. It merges the two career paths with its medical underpinning and vast business opportunities in an emerging field. I chose the medical field because I want to improve the quality of people’s lives. I have chosen the startup life because my neuroscience research at UCSF was too slow and wouldn’t impact lives in my lifetime, while the biotech industry life working at Genentech left me feeling like a small cog in a large wheel.
So, why asthma? It all started as a class project as part of my Senior Design Capstone Course taught by Amy Herr, in which our team was assigned a UCSF clinician who presented us with the problem of predicting or monitoring asthma. I spoke with pulmonologists, allergists, respiratory therapists, nurses, my friends with asthma, and their parents who managed their health. During the process, I learned that my roommate at the time, Kim, greatly suffered from asthma as a child. Rather than having memories of going to Disneyland or playing with other kids, her childhood memories were filled with visits to the hospital. This made me remember my own childhood; I was a reckless child in the playground, jumping off of swings and the tops of slides. My dad brought me to the doctor to get stitches over and over again, but I had always recovered. I even broke my right ankle while roller blading when I was 9, and broke my left foot while climbing the side of a building a year ago, landing me into a wheelchair for a month. However, none of my injuries prevented me from doing the things I love after I had recovered each time. I can still go skiing down double blacks, dodge trees and people like a ninja in the mountains, bike from Palo Alto to San Francisco, and pick up heavy weights and put them back down at the gym.
I have complete freedom in my life. I have travelled for a month by myself in Europe while “working” (attending conferences and taking a break to run with the bulls in Pamplona) and can take a break in the middle of the day for a quick bouldering session at Dogpatch Boulders. I can chase powder when a storm hits in the beginning of the week and drive out there with Huyson on a Wednesday. I especially have control over my own company, KNOX. Therefore, it is my goal to let everyone live life to their fullest, and not let your health get in the way of that. I want you to be able to do all the things you want to do, and help build a world that allows you and your family to do just that.
