What Started As An Idea (To Provide Every Patient with a Guide in the Healthcare System) Led This Harvard Student To Start His Own Company.

If a high school Joe Kahn (’18) were asked what he’d be doing in five years, he would not have predicted that he’d be in the Bay Area taking off with his own startup.

Kahn was born and raised in South Africa in a very political household. Influenced by his parents, who were heavily involved in the anti-apartheid movement, Kahn said that he was hard wired to be passionate about social services, upward mobility, and development economics from a young age.

Then, during his senior year of high school, Kahn was diagnosed with a sudden illness. In addition to losing weight and energy, Kahn said that the experience also greatly changed his life perspective. He began to identify problems that he and others were facing with the healthcare process — complications in moving medical records around, communicating information with doctors, and more — and became became focused on solving those problems for himself and others.

Though Kahn originally planned on studying economic policy in college, Kahn recognized that learning how to code would better serve his commitment to making a direct impact and decided to pursue a concentration in computer science instead. Unlike many computer science students, he lacked any prior coding experience in high school. Undeterred, Kahn threw himself into the field…

“I was trying to go from 0 to 100 on programming and engineering as fast as I could, and dedicated 95% of my energy to becoming the best I possibly could at software engineering in the shortest time possible,” Kahn recalls.

About a year ago, Kahn co-founded Karuna with Yasyf Mohamedali, a close friend he had met during their time at Dorm Room Fund. Their goal was to give every patient a guide in the healthcare system, starting with the most vulnerable members of society.

“Recently diagnosed cancer, chronic conditions, Type I diabetes, or Alzheimer’s alter your identity and color most of the experiences that you’re thinking about every day. [They are also] associated with a high administrative, clinical, and emotional burden,” Kahn explained.

Within healthcare organizations, teams of “care managers” are often assigned to assist these patients. The work care managers do is inspiring and impactful, but can be expensive and difficult to scale. Karuna builds automation tools to help those teams manage a larger number of patients more effectively.

Karuna is a Sanskrit derived word that expresses compassion, and Kahn’s brainchild is centered around this very principle of human connection.

“That relationship [between patient and care team] is really at the core of the product,” Kahn said. “It’s not a tech business from the perspective of the customer — it’s a services business where you are connecting to a real person who cares about you, who understands your preferences and values, and fights for you within the system.”

Kahn’s story may not be conventional, but, like any other, it began as a person with a passion.

“Go figure out what it is excites you and start working on it,” Kahn said. “Don’t delude yourself into thinking you have to follow some predetermined set of requirements to get to the thing that you really care about.”

“Dive into it, don’t wait.”

This piece was written by Elizabeth Yang, a sophomore at Harvard, reproduced here with her permission.