[Voice Over]
Georgia Viddler and Kate Lambridis shared challenges navigating the healthcare system, which led them to co-found a start-up called Human.
[Adam]
And it seems like the problem that you're tackling is so resonant for a lot of people. In fact, you raised the largest pre-seed amount in Australian history, which is huge.
[Georgia]
Well for female founders.
[Adam]
Okay, sorry, for female founders.
[Georgia]
Which is an important point.
[Voice Over]
Their start-up, Human, Raised Australia's largest seed round, For an all-female founder team. $10.50 million Australian dollars in 2022.
[Adam]
But it shows that a lot of really brilliant people believed in you quite early on. And why did they believe in you two and Human?Why was this problem so resonant?
[Georgia]
Big question.
[Sachin]
Healthcare is fucked and we all know it. Everyone we speak to has personal stories of family members or friends that have suffered from misdiagnosis, a slow medical system, or just a lack of new technology and innovation.
[Adam]
So today we're telling the story of two incredible women that raised the largest pre-seed round for an all-female-led team in Australian history, as they try and unfuck the health industry.
[Kate]
Hi. We're Kate and Georgia. And we're the co-founders of Human Health.
[Georgia]
And we started Human Health right here at this cafe in Bondi Beach.
[Kate]
We were both working at Canva. And Georgia actually hired me. She was my boss. But she hates me bringing up, which makes me love bringing it up. And we became really good friends really fast at work. But more as colleagues, I guess. And we kind of got to know each other, really like working together.
[Adam]
How would you describe Kate?
[Georgia]
I would probably describe her as the strongest person I've ever met in my life. She's gone through a lot in her life. And everything she goes through, she seems to build more resilience.
And also kind of, I don't know, I think she seems hard when you first meet her. Like she has a hard exterior, but she actually has a soft interior. I call her like a burnt marshmallow.
Which I don't know if she loves that. But yeah, she hasn't turned bitter from all the stuff that she's gone through. She's actually turned that into beauty and positivity. And it's very inspiring for me.
[Kate]
They usually give her my coffee. Like always.
And I'm trying to still figure out what it is about me that looks like I drink an almond cap and she drinks a long black.
[Sachin]
How would you describe Georgia when she's not here?
[Kate]
Like I think from a work perspective, like incredibly creative.
She also is like an unbelievable multitasker. Like I always joke with her that like she has like so many tabs open in her brain.
I think on like a personal level, probably the thing that's been the most amazing to watch I think is Georgie's ability to like come back at something and like try it a different way. Like her resilience is pretty unmatched.
She shows so much grace. Like she wants to see the best in people. She is very forgiving. I feel like with Georgia, she can handle like the shadowy sides of you.
And like that's been a real gift for me that like she not just like tolerates like my weaknesses, but she like celebrates them in a weird way. Like she kind of likes me more for them.
[Georgia]
I don't know, when we first started Human, I think part of my like why was very much my dad.
So I lost my dad about two or three months before I joined Canva actually. And at that time, I think that was the first time I was like highlighted a lot of the issues in the like health system and the hospital system here in Australia.
And ideas started to tick away. That was the first time I think ideas in health started to tick away. But I was like, I'm never going to do that by myself.
No way in hell am I going to go and try and tackle something that I have no idea about by myself. But I think as I've built Human with Kate, part of my why has been revealed to me.
[Voice Over]
Mental illness among teens is rising.
Schizophrenia is one of the top leading, 15 leading causes of disability worldwide. Anxiety is on the rise with so many people.
Bipolar disorder is a chronic mental illness that causes mood disturbances.
[Georgia]
I grew up, as I said, in Newcastle, I've got a big family. A huge part of my family has struggled with mental illness. Pretty serious mental illnesses?
Like bipolar, schizophrenia, manic depression. That was just like a very common thing in my childhood.
[Voice Over]
Just realise you are not alone. 25% of the population at any given time is suffering from a mental health diagnosis.
[Kate]
Health has been kind of a backdrop to my whole life. My mum's side of the family has a lot of cancer. And I lost my mum when I was 16 to a very aggressive form of lung cancer.
And then a few years, three years later, I lost my father to Parkinson's. So I’ve had a lot of experiences with kind of chronic disease quite young in life. I guess the main experiences were really with my children.
So my daughter when she was almost two years old, maybe like 17, 18 months, started to just like not talk, not respond to her name. She stopped playing with her toys. She stopped sleeping at night.
She was crying all the time. She wouldn't eat food. Like we were really concerned about what was going on with her.
And so we took her to a doctor to try and see if there was something wrong with her ears. And that kind of led to a diagnosis of Autism. But we kind of waited months to get a diagnosis and then were effectively told there was nothing we could really do except for speech therapy.
And we didn't really want to accept that as an option for her. So we went on a really long journey of trying to educate ourselves and read research and come up with options for her. And yeah, today she's an 8-year-old little girl who will live a perfectly normal life in my opinion and goes to a mainstream school, has friends, doesn't stop talking. Actually her favorite pastime now is singing. She does singing and sings very beautifully, which is a bit of a fuck you to all the doctors who kind of told us that she would spend her life in an institution and probably never talk.
[Voice Over]
Autism Spectrum Disorder is pretty common. The World Health Organization estimates that at least 1 in 100 people today have that diagnosis. And some say it could be twice as many.
[Voice Over]
In the past 20 years, the number of autism cases in U.S. children has more than tripled. And new CDC numbers show that they're still going up.
[Kate]
We moved over to Australia and then during COVID my son started to exhibit a lot of the same things. So both of our kids had the first symptom we can remember was they had this crazy rash on their chest and it went on their face and their feet and their hands, really small little red dots. And I remember my son came up in these dots and I thought, oh my God, I know this rash.I think it's the same thing my daughter had. And I thought, no, you're being ridiculous. It's not going to happen again. And over the preceding two to three months, exactly the same thing played out with our son, but much worse. He was just really, really severely affected. And yeah, that was, for me, the motivation.
[Georgia]
Human came along at a time in my life where I'd had this grief of losing Dad. I'd had this past of growing up, you know, experiencing lots of different mental illnesses, experiencing my own and then having a moment, you know, having all those drives as well to do something of purpose and make art and do science. And it kind of felt like I met Kate and it was like, Human just could not happen.
[Kate]
The first time that like my work with human has like so visibly interacted with my kid's life. Like for me, the motivation was like I was going to leave my role at Canva to focus on Leo. And I realized that me being at home focusing on Leo wasn't going to necessarily help him because there weren't solutions. So like I almost needed to like go look for solutions. And that was kind of what human became.
[Sachin]
Hangout with Kate in Georgia profoundly fired us up and pulled at our heartstrings.
[Adam]
We believe that they have a genuine chance to change the future of health. And that's why we decided to tell their story.
[Georgia]
So fundraising for us, I think, was a really actually really helpful process. Like in the early days when we didn't actually want to raise from VCs, we were initially just wanted to raise from angels, like find people we trust in, find people we really liked that would back the vision. And, you know, we pitched and pitched and pitched and pitched and pitched.
And every time we pitched, we would learn something that we had to put in the pitch deck the next time around. We would learn like, you know, we have a very big vision. And we learned early that we couldn't always say the extent of the vision because it might scare some people.
So we've learned like who would back the big thing we're trying to do. Who did it scare? And we eventually ended up bringing on, you know, VCs.
And we found some amazing VCs in Airtree and Skip Capital.
[Adam]
And it seems like the problem that you're tackling is so resonant for a lot of people. In fact, you raised the largest pre-seed amount in Australian history, which is huge. And that's an indication.
[Georgia]
For female founders.
[Adam]
Okay, so for female founders.
[Georgia]
Which is an important point.
[Adam]
Yeah, it's an absolutely huge achievement. But it shows that a lot of really brilliant people believed in you quite early on.
And why did they believe in you two and human? Like, obviously, you're an exceptional team together. You're tackling this big problem.
But why was this problem so resonant?
[Georgia]
I think they hopefully saw that we had a big vision. Like, in some ways, stupidly large vision in those early days.
And it seems glaringly obvious to us. But actually, the further we've gone along, we're realising that the people that have supported us are actually incredible. Because there's a lot of people out there that don't see the huge gaping hole that we see in the ecosystem.
So, yeah, I would hope they saw the vision. Hopefully, the magic between us, the grit.
[Sachin]
Interviewing 100 of the world's best founders and investors, they all tell us that fundraising is one of the hardest parts of the startup journey.
[Adam]
But human did a killer job of it. And they made a lot of hype when they raised $10 million. They attracted big names like Airtree, Skip Capital and Dave Shein.
And we've actually got a message here from Dave and Alicia from Airtree.
[David Shein]
Having met Kate in Georgia, the infectious, absolutely infectious attitude and passion to the business and the domain expertise around the health application made it a no-brainer for me to invest in Human.
[Elicia]
I'd known Georgia for a while.And when Georgia and Kate first shared their vision for human with me, it was obvious they had very big ambitions. They were both driven by personal experience. And they shared with me that when they were brainstorming their vision for human, they got to the point where they felt like they just couldn't not do this.
And they were so cool to solve this problem. And that passion was infectious. And it inspired world-class talent and advisors to join them on their journey.
And that's such an important part of being an early-stage founder is inspiring others to join you, whether that's employees, customers or investors. Personally, I'm thrilled to be on the journey alongside Georgia and Kate as they scale human.
[Sachin]
So at this point of the journey, it seems like human success is inevitable. Kate and Georgia are a stellar founding team, They've got a product in market, But we wanted to understand, if you're changing the future of health, what could go wrong?
[Adam]
Building health tech startups is always tough.
So we wanted to hear from them in their own words. What are the key challenges here?
[Georgia]
I would say one of our most challenging moments starting human was probably first launching the product.
I think we'd be working very hard for like months and months and months on the design, building the initial kind of foundations of the product, and then probably getting it out the door when it was, it felt like a fraction of what we actually wanted to release. It was quite a vulnerable moment. And yeah, very scary.
But, you know, as we've been building on the product and getting lots of feedback from users, it's actually been a really heartening experience as well. So, yeah.
[Kate]
we were just saying before, I think that we really connected on the kind of culture we wanted to create. We really wanted to like challenge the stereotype that a tech company is somewhere where people work flat out all the time and they can't have work-life balance and like, really intense and competitive.
We really wanted to create like a more compassionate environment and like where people feel like they can bring their whole selves to work. But actually doing that, like it sounds like fluffy and soft and like that would be easy. But like actually doing that in practice is really difficult. And I think hiring people that like match that energy is hard. Like in order to have an environment where people can be themselves and can bring their whole selves to work and like can feel safe, like you need everyone to like buy into that spirit of being.
And that was challenging. Like I think to recruit for that, like you're looking for people who have exceptional skill, but also have the right aptitude for that kind of culture. And I think that was hard, hard, really, really hard.
[Georgia]
Actually sticking to that has been really, really challenging for us.
[Sachin]
So we're in Surry Hills at the Human office and we're excited to go check it out. Let's go inside and get a little tour.
[Georgia]
Hey, welcome.
So Human, now called Human Health actually, is a tool for patients and carers to track what's going on with their health. So track their symptoms and their treatments to learn what's working for them and then share that back with their providers to advocate for the care they deserve.
We are very much solving for people that already have chronic diagnoses, right? Not that kind of wellness end of the spectrum where you're like, you're well and you want to be more well. We're solving more for people who have a diagnosis of one or more. And we're actually seeing most people that are tracking Human have more than one condition.
Some have many, many, many conditions.
[Miles]
The hardest and most challenging part I think is taking really complicated medical sort of things and putting it in a way that users can really easily understand.
So there's heaps of color theory and like different colors that are associated with different things in the app. And so I think that's one of the funnest and most challenging parts is taking these quite complicated things and solving them in a way that makes it hopefully super easily understandable for new users so they can come in and sort of, yeah, really quickly figure out what's going on.
[Sachin]
What scares you the most about Human's mission?
[Georgia]
I think it's interesting, like, you know, we're talking about AI, like we want to tread really carefully in that space. I think one of our guiding principles is the same as the guiding principles you get when you first join medicine, which is first do know harm. I want our app to be helpful and guide people and hopefully give them information that they couldn't have learnt anywhere else that actually helps them on their journey. And I would hate the idea that we cause anybody any harm. So it's something we think about deeply and are always somewhat scared about.
[Alex]
One of the things that is deeply important to us is trust. So probably two main things there are security, like keeping control of your data, keeping it safe, secure. And privacy is super important. So we don't want to share your data with third parties. We don't want to sell your data. We don't want to show your ads.
We want you to have control over your data, so GDPR and HIPAA. So you can request that your data be deleted. We anonymise your data when using it for metrics and things like that.
So those are probably the two big ones.
[Georgia]
We are super excited about taking human to the world. We have started human from a little office in Surry Hills, Australia. We started building and kind of growing the product in the US, but we see huge potential for human to be used all over the world. So we're really excited for that.
[Georgia]
What have I learnt about myself in this journey?
I would say Kate has taught me a lot about myself, actually. And I think it's interesting co-founding something with someone. I think for a lot of my career I felt like I had to do it all and be good at everything.
And I think Kate has very much taught me that I don't have to be good at everything. I can kind of lean into the things that I'm good at and lean out of the things that I just don't like. I think I've learnt a lot of things that I don't like that I kind of think I pretended that I did like for a long time.
[Kate]
Yeah, I think it's an interesting one. When you start a company, I certainly never wanted to be a founder. I worked for founders my whole career in start-ups and I loved it, but I always thought they were crazy people. Why the fuck would you give up everything in your life to build this one thing?
I think because this came from such a personal motivation, you’re sort of suddenly chucked into the role of being co-CEO. And in the beginning I felt that pressure of you're going to need to be good at everything, you need to show up fully and nail every single thing you do.
I also think Georgie and I talk a lot about this concept of what are everybody’s aims for success, right? And they see success as a destination of where you're going. I think Georgie and I think a lot about the success of each day.
Your life is made up by the days that you live. So if you had 10 years trying to build a company and every day of that 10 years was terrible and then you win some award or you hit some crazy number, what a waste of a life. We try to think about it in small increments.
Instead of worrying about what's happening a year from now, it's like, how did we do today? What did we achieve today with the team? How did everyone feel? Was it a good, successful day? And if you do that enough times, we think that adds up to what will actually feel successful. I think a lot of people in life lead these lives where they chase an eventual point of success at the distraction of everything else, right? And then, is that success? I don't think so.
I don't think about, well, if human isn't a unicorn, a billion dollar business, I've failed. That's not my entire life. And I want to look back and see all the things we did along the way and be really fucking proud of that. And the fact that we're a successful business to be the cherry on top of the cake. That's not the entire fucking cake. I think we both had really similar life experiences growing up. Losing people we loved and experiencing illness that I think changes the way you look at life and what you actually value.
We don't value ourselves based on whether human becomes this huge company or not. We place way more value on how we operate within that. That's success to us.
I care about us helping people. I care about the fact that when Leo got his diagnosis, I remember sitting up late at night, that night, Googling and completely upsetting myself and blaming myself for every decision I ever made and thinking it was my fault and what have I done wrong? Like a deep moment of despair, like dark moment of the soul stuff. And if I can remove that feeling from one person, I'll feel good about myself. And that's the goal. So I think when you think about it in those terms, it's just far more motivating for us rather than how big the business can be and how many VCs we can make happy and rich in the process.
I hope everybody reaps rewards for backing something that should exist, but that's not the motivation.
[Sachin]
So this was an insight into the unfolding story of humans and I hope you loved watching this. We believe that no one's doing justice to the richness of stories in the Australian startup ecosystem, so we want to try give something new a go. We hope you enjoyed
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