Jessica Chao, Co-founder of LingoHealth
Jessica Chao is re-imagining the healthcare experience for underserved communities.
Jessica is the daughter of Taiwanese immigrants and is passionate about increasing health equity. Previously, she worked at TPG Global in healthcare investing and the Environmental, Social, and Governance groups. She also was on the incubation team for Folx Health, a queer and trans digital health platform. She also has worked in impact investing, digital health venture capital, and retail e-commerce. She earned an MBA from Stanford Business as an Arjay Miller Scholar, and graduated magna cum laude with a BA in Economics from Harvard University. She is originally from Texas and currently resides in the Bay Area.
Tell me a little bit about yourself.
I’m originally from the suburbs of Dallas and I’m the daughter of Taiwanese immigrants. I grew up in a household that was largely bilingual, and now I’m the co-founder and CEO of LingoHealth. Between growing up and today, I’ve moved around to the East and West coast a little bit, and now I currently live in San Francisco.
Could you tell us what you’re building at Visible Hands?
We started out with a question around language barriers in healthcare and the difficulty many folks within our communities have to navigate and trust the health care system. As we dove deeper into this problem, we saw again and again that younger, more English-fluent family members often helped their loved ones with care. This was also what we saw in our own lived experiences. So we decided to build a digital platform that connects the dots for family caregivers, usually younger family members, and their loved ones. As loved ones age, they have more healthcare needs, so this platform provides a better way for them to know what to do next, how to manage care, and just keep everyone healthy.
What has your experience been like in the VH Fellowship program so far?
It’s definitely been really helpful to be around other folks who are in a similar stage and on the journey alongside us. Being able to leverage the network of all the folks within the Visible Hands community, whether that’s on the Visible Hands side or the Fellows side, has been really great. Also, just to see all the overlap between everyone’s ideas and some of the problems we’re solving has been really interesting. We all have really unique perspectives and themes we’re passionate about, and to see them sort of overlap has been eye-opening.
What would you say is your favorite aspect of the program so far?
This might sound a little cheesy, but definitely the community and being able to ask a question and then have people immediately respond. That level of support and desire to help others is really special.
What are you looking forward to the most by the end of the fellowship?
We entered the fellowship with a goal that we would be launching a very early iteration of our product. We’ve started that in November and we’ve been onboarding folks as we speak. By the end of the fellowship, we’ll be excited to start getting some initial learnings as well as to continue serving and helping folks who are on our platform.
Entrepreneurship is not easy. What is your motivation for doing this day in and day out?
For both my co-founder and myself, the key thing is that we want to solve this problem. Looking around the overall market and just our society at large, there’s not a scalable solution to this problem yet. That’s why we embarked on this journey to become entrepreneurs: because we wanted to solve this problem. We are very much motivated by the idea that if we are able to solve this and make life easier and families healthier, it will have a significant impact on millions of folks within this country. That to us is really, really important, especially given some of the concerns with health equity and health disparities.
Where do you see yourself in 5–10 years?
I would love to continue to grow LingoHealth. I want us to build a solution so folks can advocate for their loved ones and understand how to stay healthy, especially as families age. I also want to increase awareness that the aging population in the US is incredibly diverse. The way that the 65+ population looked 10 years ago is not how it’s going to look in the next 10 years. It would be exciting to be at the forefront of building a scalable solution to meet these communities where they’re at and help make their lives easier.
Is there anything else you’d like to add?
As my cofounder and I researched the problem around language and cultural barriers in healthcare, there were all these stories that people had and we felt like these voices needed to be amplified. So we started a blog to share stories about families like ours .
You can follow LingoHealth’s blog, Bilingual-ish, here.
