#14 :: Building Relationships on the Founder Journey, with Anne Kim - Secure AI Labs

The pathways to fundraising and mentorship aren’t easy, especially in a pandemic. Our candid chat with founder, Anne Kim reveals the importance of relationships when growing a startup, the human side of management and why less is more. 

Secure AI Labs: secureailabs.com

Recorded on 01.12.21

TRANSCRIPT

Andrea Spirov: Hello, welcome back to the 100 CEO Project where we are interviewing 100 business leaders about their experiences during 2020. Today, I have Anne Kim at the microphone with me, she's the co- founder and CEO of Secure AI Labs, a company whose technology helps hospitals to control, manage and trace patient data through the research lifecycle, allowing them to maintain patient data privacy, while contributing to healthcare innovation, which is important for things like clinical trials. The foundations of her company began during her graduate work at MIT and she speaks on their technology internationally. Welcome to the show, Anne. 

Anne Kim: Thanks. Glad to be here.

AS: So I wanted to start off with the topic of fundraising. So despite a lot of disruption, deals still happened in 2020. And you were successful with raising money last year. So what elements were pivotal to the success of Secure AI Labs? And what can you share with us about the journey?

AK: Yeah, sure. So, um, I think one really key part about success and fundraising and something that I did a little bit during the process, but I wish I had done more of was certainly planning and worst case scenario preparation. You know, I wasn't preparing for a pandemic, but I was prepared for like long due diligence. And certainly that sort of buffer that I provided for myself was very, very helpful there. And then, that was like in terms of timing and planning. But I would say that planning with your like investor list, building those relationships early, even if you're not fundraising is definitely helpful, especially for my next round, which is going to be in a year.

2:05

AS: So when you say planning, and then putting together investor lists, I know last time we caught up, you were talking about mentors, for example, can you tell us how those things were sort of pivotal to your success in more detail for people who are maybe running into the same things? 

AK: Yeah, for sure. I mean, the idea of a mentor is something that's espoused by many different business podcasts or books where they'll be like, you know, find a champion, find a mentor. I feel like an entrepreneur, and as like a founder, it's really hard to find, like, obviously a champion with your organization, because you are the CEO, right? You're the founder. But what I would say more broadly, is that the, I guess, suggestion of having one mentor is kind of a myth in my experience, and in my peers’ experience, and I think what I would recommend is that you have many different mentors, mentors that sort of fit different facets of your life, whether that's, you know, mentors for work life balance, which might be a peer, you know, or advisors who have raised money before might be like mentors in fundraising, but not necessarily mentors in your business, whether it's like digital health or machine learning. So just by sort of distributing that kind of responsibility across your network is really helpful. And, you know, is a little more work I will admit, than having like one mentor, but I think it is like totally worth it in terms of ability to sort of build those types of relationships, and also kind of crowdsource that information that you need for fundraising. 

3:46

AS: Do you formalize those relationships with your mentors? Or is it - did you come to them and say, well, will you be my mentor? Or is it a little... I heard recently that it's, just don't ask them and to just seek the advice and then also maintain a relationship? How do you approach that? 

AK: Yes, I lost because I asked someone once, who is a founder that I really respect, I was like, hey, this was like a great conversation, you know, I'd love for you to be my mentor. And she was like, ah, and then pause, because it wasn't clear what that meant. Because it's like a really heavy word. And I was like, I just mean that, can I talk to you occasionally about, you know, difficulties and challenges about funding companies, you're like, Yeah, but that's totally fine. Just you don't have to call me a mentor. We don't have to make this anything formal. I also asked like a female vc once to be my mentor. And she was like, yeah, you don't have to ask formally. Like, I'm just here as a resource if you think that I'll be useful in some way. And so people, from my experience don't really like that formalization because I think it carries all like, heavy kind of expectation of like weekly check ins or like, you know, mutual OKRs or something, but it's actually just like, Okay, I'm gonna ask you about investment strategies or like comparing term sheets or something because you're a VC and you're female, and I talk to you about that sort of stuff. 

5:10

AS: And do you do anything to nurture those relationships? I also heard that mentors get a lot of benefit from when you come back and say, Hey, this worked, or this didn't. But if they give you advice, and they never hear from you, again, that that's kind of frowned upon. Do you have any tips for that? 

AK: Absolutely. Um, I think it's really hard to keep in mind, sort of, I guess, like a medium term kind of follow up. And I would just recommend immediate follow up like, after the conversation, pretty much like in the five minutes that you have before your next call, just try to shoot them an email, like, hey, it was great to talk to you about these three things. I'll try these like two things. And even if you like, forget to follow up, the next time you reach out to them, at least you have like an email that sort of gives you a summary of what you talked about last. And then you can be like, hey, it was great to talk to you like last spring about like term sheets. I'm actually planning another fundraise would love to get your thoughts on this, because this advice was like really helpful last time. 

6:13

AS: Great tips. Thanks for those tips. So I want to go to something that I was reading about your co-founder. Laurie actually sent this question to me. A major milestone within your company was actually getting into the MIT Delta V program to spin your company out of the labs of MIT into a commercial entity. And then from there, you all have been in the process of fundraising and acquiring your first early customers who really see the value in what you're building. So you all have been wearing some very distinct and full time, full on hats. Not only developing your technology, but taking it from research and an academic setting to the commercial sector. So what did you do to secure those early customers? And how do you translate the benefits and stakes to track them? Like what sort of things in your message were critical? 

AK: Yeah, sure. So I think honesty is pretty important for like building trust. And then I think, yeah, trust is a major part about those, like, initial kind of pilots, because they're taking a huge gamble on you. And I think if you don't have those types of relationships, whether they were established prior and like research kind of collaborations or through some amount of like communication and honesty, I think it's really hard to form those early pilot deals. 

AS: How do you cultivate that? I mean, everyone sort of when they're in sales mode, they always have good things to say. So how do you build that trust?

AK: Well, I would say it definitely takes a lot of time, especially in healthcare. And in that time, it's just about, you know, keeping them in the loop of like progress that you're making, whether that's on like product development, or even just things that you're learning about. For example, we're in the, like, cybersecurity slash machine learning space. And so anytime we have anything relevant to share, whether it's like a new innovation and like cybersecurity that we're integrating into our platform, or like new findings in machine learning that, you know, we see other universities applying and that could be helpful for this like academic medical center, then that's also really helpful and keeps the conversation warm. 

8:23

AS: And then in terms of fundraising, what challenges have you run into? For fundraising or customer acquisition, what's been sort of your hardest thing to deal with? 

AK: Yeah, with fundraising, I mean, COVID was a huge obstacle. But beyond that, I think, as like a company that's pre revenue, it was definitely like mission setting, and being able to sort of keep that kind of in line with every single conversation. And also to myself as like a founder. It's important that like, you know, I have a bunch of conversations, like for every Yes, I would say I would estimate I got like 15 no’s or something, somewhere between like 20 and 50 no’s is pretty typical. And so you have to just like make sure that you know that this is inherently valuable to yourself. And that's certainly something that like continues to motivate me because, for example, in our company, we do security for like bioinformatics, essentially, like encrypted machine learning. And I know personally that I would never have done this if this technology already existed, because if this technology already existed, I would have pursued a PhD in bioinformatics. However, without this type of technology, a lot of the innovation in that space is extremely stymied. And I think the reason why people don't necessarily recognize that it's stymied is because people are sort of used to Data Access taking you know, six to 18 months because you have to have like legal and compliance and IT involved in like coordinate logistics and make sure everything is automated. However, I think that with this type of technology, we can drastically accelerate those time cycles

9:57  

AS: Amazing. I am not in that world at all. That sounds really exciting and interesting. It sounds like you're doing some groundbreaking stuff. So I have another quote that we have from you as you're mission-driven and nerds who like working with hard problems. So beyond the technology you create what's the most difficult non techie problem that you faced in your business?

AK: Um, I think it's like the soft people problems like management of a small team during COVID, where we're all remote and trying to make sure that people are engaged. I think oftentimes, in the technology space, you often attract personalities who are a little more reserved, especially in like cybersecurity, and then machine learning. And so what we have found is that like to manage that we do company socials during our stand up. So, you know, our standup used to be pretty normal, where it would just be people reporting what they did and what the blockers are and what they've planned to do. However, I saw that there was an opportunity to integrate some amount of like social aspect, because you don't have to check in on what people are doing every single day. It's something that you could probably do like three times a week, and you wouldn't miss anything the two days that you don't. And so just today, we tried doing yoga as a team. The previous week, we played Among Us, and the week before that, we played Starcraft. And so it's like, those types of, I think creative solutions internally for like management of like team morale is helpful. On a more serious note, I think also like clear communication of what business development is doing, and what discoveries and progress we're making for our engineering team has also been really helpful as like a weekly kickoff.

11:41  

AS: So does that fit in with some certain core values that you've made for your company that drive your decisions around? Well, they could be also a range of scientific problem solving. But do you feel like you have core values set that kind of drive these decisions, whether it's to be to nurture your people in a social setting, or around the data? I know, you said that access to health care is one of your most important personal values. So can you talk about that a little bit. 

AK: So, um, I think I would have said last week that we have, like 12 values, and those values are, you know, being able to communicate and honestly, as well as like, being able to commit to different tasks and being able to communicate like expected timelines for that. However, recently, I've read Essentialism. And I feel like we had too many values, which is to say, we didn't have enough values. So I'm actually in the process of rethinking about how we sort of articulate and communicate those values in a succinct way, and pick just a couple that we can do really well. 

AS: I love that. And as a brand, impact brand messaging person. I also agree with that, that less is more is that idea that if you stand for too many things, you don't stand for anything. So I love that. Do you have any other tips from that book that you would like to share that jumped out at you from Essentialism. 

AK: Man that that was like a really good book. I think another thing that sort of stood out to me was like the recommendation to sort of test if you can do something, or before you even say yes, spend like 30 to 60 seconds, doing a minimal viable kind of version of that. And so, for example, this podcast, you know, if I had read Essentialism before, an exercise that I think I would have done was like, create sort of an example interview. And like what I wanted as, like a goal of like giving this interview. And that's what I did, like, just this morning for this interview, and based on like, some of the notes you sent me was like, What we want to talk about today, but for my own personal sort of goals of like, you know, I want to be able to make sure that in this podcast, I'm able to, you know, give any sort of answers for any founders out there that feel really lost when it comes to like fundraising, as well as, you know, some amount of humanity and honesty and like the processes that go on and like founding a company and like leading a team, and fundraising.

14:16  

AS: Well, those are great topics. So do you have advice for lost? Did you ever feel lost in the middle of the process? Because I know, I certainly have felt very lost before and it's for me, it's always been about just picking yourself up and pressing on and never, never giving up. But some people go to really, I don't wanna say dark places, but some people do go to dark places where they just give up or So do you have any advice there? Did you ever hit a snag? 

AK: Yeah, I mean, to sort of reiterate, on what I talked about before, was that like, you know, for every Yes, you're going to get like 20 to 50 no’s whether it's like fundraising or in like, customer sales, right? And so it's important for you to understand why you're doing this and why it's important, because the alternative for me is that you know, I close up shop and I like do a PhD in this space, because then the technology exists, right? Like, this is a real like, this is a big challenge. I don't mean like healthcare, but also is like a major blocker in my own personal career of like what I want to do in the space of bioinformatics. And so keeping that sort of, clearly in front of me, is a really nice North star to say like, okay, you don't need to get like down on yourself as this, like, entrepreneurship thing doesn't work because somebody else, like, hopefully, a competitor, like makes the solution or maybe, like, there's just some sort of like, improved standard operating procedure that makes it such that like getting access to data and like being compliant with like, regulation, research protocols, just works, right, because otherwise we wouldn't exist. And so that's really, like a good kind of guiding principle, for me, at least, at least, like missionally. But I think in terms of like, values, I'm still in the process of like, really whittling down what, like, very few things are important, like, you know, a handful of

it. 

AS: That's part of I think, the challenge and that's great advice. And just to know that you that 20 to 50 rejections, you know, I haven't found that in the process of finding suppliers or, you know, there's just, it's people are not always gonna say yes, and it's not personal and going on. So super advice. I love that. I'm going back to COVID real quick,a soundbite from the 2019 interview with MIT Startup Exchange, “the world needs our technology to overcome the standoff that exists between those that have data and those that want to use it.” So how did the rush to create a vaccine for COVID-19 help people either be aware of the standoff or close that gap?

AK: Yeah, really good question. And like a lot of our investors and advisors have asked us like, why we haven't done a COVID use case? And the answer is pretty, I think, hopeful, in a way, because what we see with COVID is that there is an immense effort towards solving the problems there. And so there's an incredible amount of enthusiasm around data sharing. So if people got this excited about curing cancer, I think we would also find cures accelerated, right, like the COVID vaccine was found in a year. And that's like four times faster than like, even the fastest expectations. And so that is definitely because people were kind of call to action to share data. And if we could have something similar in cancer or any other disease, I think we would see the same type of like innovations there.

17:29  

AS: It’s interesting, because there is a ton of money. I feel like cancer research has a ton of money poured into it all the time. And I know a lot of a lot of money was deployed very quickly to startups working on COVID solutions. I've heard philanthropic people who are managing foundations talk about that recently. So that's interesting. I mean, why? I guess because this is a global phenomenon. Why do you think cancer and things like that haven't been solved?

AK: I think this is really acute, right? Like, literally stopping me from going grocery shopping, is something that I acutely feel and that everyone acutely feels where I was like, cancer touches many lives. But I think the, I guess the fact that like, you don't have to face it, every single moment of your day, even if you have a family member who has cancer is something that doesn't nearly call you to action with the same amount of urgency as COVID. 

AS: Hmm, interesting. So we're gonna, I'm gonna stop here and ask if there's anything else that you would like to share that we haven't maybe touched on, that you wanted to come on and talk about today? Otherwise, I'll jump to our final question. We always have one sort of fun question that we do with everybody that's uniquely personalized to them. So let me know if there's something that you want to share. 

AK: One other goal that I had for being on this podcast was also to, you know, really take a moment to pause and say, like, this is an awesome project started by, like women, and I'm so excited to be here. And I hope that me being here is just another data point to be like, if you're a woman or any sort of other, like marginalized minority, like you can certainly found your own company or be even an entrepreneur and resident within your own organization, whether you're like a founder, C-level, or, you know, a junior engineer or something, I think leadership is something that you can cultivate at all parts of your career and you should not be afraid of and it's something that can only benefit you, as well as like your organization itself. Ah, yeah, it's very empowering to be a leader. 

AS: Thanks for saying that. I'm, I feel like I'm at the on the one hand, all these statistics that are coming out about female founders and how daunting it is, and everyone has a story about someone had today actually on the group where I met you about, oh, there was a man in a bar and he said he, you know, he was a friend and they were and he was drunk. And he said to her, that, he was an investor, I would never take a meeting with a woman. I just don't believe in women and everyone has those stories, and there are definitely men out there like that. But I also don't always want to hear those stories because it's just one person and I think I've interviewed personally a ton of female VCs and angels who are supporting women. I don't always like to hear those stories, because they do make me step back and say, oh, what am I doing? And as opposed to charging on, because I see so many great examples like yourself, of people doing really - of women, female minority founders doing really cutting edge things, and succeeding and being positive and being a leader, as you said. So thank you for saying that. So we have one more question. We always do a fun question. I really enjoyed your 2018 DEF CON talk about how genetic information can be determined from something as simple as a photograph. And I remember when 23 And Me came out, because you talked about genetic testing, personalized genetic testing, I was pretty hesitant to submit my DNA. And so I'm curious. It's been a few years since that talk. So how has your thinking about these privacy concerns at the personal level evolved? And what do you think people should be careful about now? 

AK: Yeah, good question. And I think there's a lot of really exciting stuff that are being pushed, like certain initiatives in Congress like 230, as well as an initiative like GINA, which is supposed to protect your like genomic data, obviously, it's like very imperfect and can be like loopholed in a lot of different ways. One example that I gave in that DEF CON talk was that life insurance was not necessarily under the purview of like GINA, which I think it should be. But I think I see like a lot of awakening, I guess, within Congress to these types of issues in like privacy and security. We saw that with like the past year of, you know, tech CEOs being interviewed by Congress, right? like Amazon, Twitter, no, maybe not Twitter, it was like Amazon, Facebook. And then I think a couple of other people, Microsoft and Google, were in those interviews. And so what I see is, this is definitely gaining traction. And it's not just like Ron Wyden sort of leading the charge. But it's like many different congressmen and women who are sort of saying that like Enough is enough. And we need to have regulations in place to sort of put guard rails on what type of intrusive things that like tech companies are able to do. So I'm like, really hopeful about the future of like privacy and security on like the regulation side. 

At the same time, I think it behooves everyone on a personal level to just be like cognizant of, you know, what you can do as an individual in order to like, protect yourself and to take away power from these types of companies. So one encouraging thing that I saw this week was a ton of my friends downloaded Signal in order to move away from WhatsApp, which is owned by Facebook, and which will be sharing data across the different platforms. And so that's like really encouraging that, you know, even my siblings who aren't super savvy about this stuff are being pushed towards Signal because their friends are, you know, insisting that like, we shouldn't be on WhatsApp, we should go to like Signal which is actually end to end encrypted.

AS: I hadn't heard of Signal I'm, I'm always like, for example, I never put my son's photo on Facebook, a lot of I have a lot of friends that they just share every little I just aside from the scary stranger issue exists also, that just I don't want to give him an identity online. before he chooses that, right. He's six, who knows what's gonna happen by that time, but I just thought your, your talk was so interesting too about selfies and how much you know, information you can get from someone's face. And I do feel like sometimes that we're moving into this 1984 territory, where there's just a lot of access to data, and you just don't know how people are using it. And there's cancel culture and all this stuff. And something that you could say could be completely misconstrued and screwed, and you just don't know where the data lives. So very interesting thought. 

AK: Yeah, for sure. But um, obviously, individuals who have like public personas, I think there's like a fine balance, right that like, this is not certainly something that is conducive to my personal privacy to like, be on a podcast where audio is being recorded. And like this could be something that's taken for like a deep fake or something. But I think you have to be brave about the way that you're intentionally sort of putting yourself out there and like, what kind of messages you're trying to sort of platform. 

AS: Absolutely deep fake. So we could talk about that too, because I learned about that last year. And I thought, Oh, my goodness is so very interesting. It was in a McKinsey paper about things that marketers need to watch out for. Anne Kim, this has been so interesting. Your - some of this stuff is way above my head and science wise, but I'm fascinated nonetheless. So thank you so much for sharing your insights. And can you tell everyone where they can find you? And how if there's any help anyone in the audience can provide what you're looking for? 

AK: Yeah, sure. So my company is Secure AI Labs and our website is secureailabs.com. My website is Anne.Kim because the top level domain Kim now exists, which is pretty cool. And you can also like find me on Twitter, and if you're in the digital health space and you're interested in also accelerating innovation in health care, please let me know because we work with like hospitals, pharmaceutical companies, even like consulting companies that are in this space.

AS: Awesome. Thanks so much, Anne. 

AK: All right, thank you. Have a great day.

Laurie Pillow: Hey, guys, we hope you've enjoyed today's episode. And if you did, please share it with your friends and colleagues who also have to navigate this leadership stuff. As you can see, this project is about to be a mini masterclass in every episode. Best part. It's free. So if you like it, please do us a favor and take a screenshot, share it on social with the hashtag #100CEO. That way we can say thanks and share it in our stories. And finally, if you've got some insights you'd like to share and you're a CEO, we'd love to hear from you. You can find us at 100CEOProject.com, or on LinkedIn at the 100 CEO Project. Until next time, keep leading by example.

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Hosted by: Andrea Spirov

Writing and research: Andrea Spirov, Laurie Pillow

Edited by: Laurie Pillow

Produced by: Andrea Spirov, Laurie Pillow