CTO interview: Gareth Thomas, all your health questions answered through an API
This time we’ve got Gareth Thomas, CTO at Healthily. As the company name might indicate, Healthily is in the health tech industry providing a number of services to individuals and medical companies. In this interview, Gareth describes what sets Healthily apart, reminisces about his days as a software developer, discusses the role of outsourcing work in a startup company, and shares some vital tips for anyone just starting out as an engineer.
Health tech is very trendy these days, and becoming a crowded market. How does Healthily differentiate itself from its competitors?
It’s kind of interesting. We have a team of ten doctors reading and writing our content. We are a health information website, and we have our apps with health plans and symptom checkers. We’re building a platform linking all these things together. We were one of the first to have an AI for symptom checks, which allows people to manage their self-care from home for any condition. During the second half of this year, our goal is to connect all these pieces together.
How are you funding your company?
For monetization, we use ads and partnerships for the website, while the apps are premium/paid. We also now provide APIs to other companies who want to use the information such as symptom-checks.
For example, we’ve had a lot of interest from medicine companies in the US such as Walmart, driven by Covid. Doctors weren’t seeing people in person, so they wanted a process to do things remotely.
Another example is, in the Philippines, a health insurance company was being overwhelmed by requirements for medical care. They didn’t have enough doctors, so by adding our symptom checks on top of their triage system, doctors now don’t waste 5 minutes per patient asking basic questions. It’s a capacity extension for them. We have 760 conditions checked today.
You’ve held several CTO positions across your career. Was it a natural progression for you?
Yes, although it wasn’t a plan. I started as a software developer. I never had in my mind to be a CTO, although I wanted to build my own business, which I did in the US for a while. It kind of started happening naturally. One of the things I really enjoy managing teams is the people. It’s the hardest part of the job. Most of the tech we build isn’t actually that difficult; the hardest part is the people problem, which I enjoy.
What I do tell people is that it is a lonely role in the C-suite. Others in management don’t understand what we’re talking about most of the time. You sit in these meetings, and you can’t speak about your Kubernetes strategy or other technical jargon. The 16 very strong engineers we have here are what I find very helpful. I can have discussions with them, which is refreshing.
What do you miss from your days when you were programming full-time?
I probably started coding quite young. Kids today might start at four or five years old, but at my time, 11 was very young. I got into Assembly and got published in some magazines. I was the kid who was up until two or three in the morning debugging code. I wanted to go into the air force, but because of my eyesight, I couldn’t. I love building things and problem-solving, and, when it became a profession, I loved seeing customers use what I built.
I still do some personal stuff at home. I wish I still had that passion for coding, but it’s hard to focus on that anymore. I used to be able to do it for hours non-stop. We need people who are experts, who really know what they are doing technically.
What do you think of using agencies or contractors? When do you think it’s necessary to outsource?
We are doing that now to supplement roles. The first time I did this was a data science person to fill in on a temporary basis. We outsource when we suddenly need to scale or need a bit of expertise that we don’t have in-house. We try to be judicious with our outsourcing. I’ve always tried to keep teams slightly lean because, especially in startup scale-ups, you need to be conscious of funding.
For any engineer starting their career today, what would be your top three pieces of advice?
One of the things I started doing this year, prompted by the CEO as a serial entrepreneur, is to do mentoring for CTOs and aspiring CTOs. I actually like it. They ask me how to climb the ladder, so I have a lot I could share.
First, never stop learning, which is true for anyone in any role at any level. I still try to understand as much as I can. Like a shark, if you stop swimming, you die. You don’t graduate university and then you’re done. You’ve got to then really love it or you won’t do it.
A recent realization for me is how important it is to take an ethical hacking course. We have a real problem in this industry with how we treat security. On a weekly or monthly basis, we see ridiculous compromises and decisions. Too many people still don’t take security seriously. It can’t be just a penetration testing team every quarter; it has to be in the culture, when engineers start building the stuff. It is much easier than a lot of people think, and there are systems to experiment with. It makes you a better coder.
Finally, don’t just think it’s the product manager’s job to take care of the user’s experience; it’s ultimately being implemented by the engineer. Seeing SQL error messages, for example, is not acceptable. The engineer has to be thinking about the end-user in terms of unclear API documentation, obscure error messages, etc. Put yourself in the shoes of the end-user.
If you want to connect with Gareth, click here.
To learn more about Healthily, visit their website: livehealthily.com
If you’re a techie working on something exciting or you simply want to have a chat, get in touch with me. I’m currently CTO at Kolleno.com
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