Brewing The Tea
By Jaja Liao
Brewing The TeaDec 14, 2020
EP 5: Cofounder & CEO of Pico, Nick Chen
Nick is the Cofounder and CEO of Pico, a platform that lets newsrooms and other content creators earn more revenue directly from their audience through payments, newsletter signups, user logins, and more. Previously, he was previously the Director of Design at Dots and a designer at Esper and Cloudphysics. Nick went to Stanford, where he studied product design. Today, we’ll chat about the core reasons why local newsrooms have suffered, how he doesn’t believe in subscription fatigue, the most challenging parts of Pico’s seed raise, and more.
EP 4: Cofounder of Cardiogram, Johnson Hsieh
Johnson is the Cofounder of Cardiogram, a consumer mobile app that allows consumers to use heart rate data from their wearables to predict and prevent heart conditions. Today, Cardiogram serves more than 1 million users, who generate over a terabyte of data each month, making it one of the largest medical data sets in history. Originally a software engineer, Johnson was a tech lead at Google where he worked on Google Voice Assistant as well as Machine Learning and infrastructure on Search, Personalizations, and recommendations. Previously he was also a software engineer at Microsoft. Johnson holds a bachelor’s degree in CS from the University of Waterloo and a Master’s in AI from Stanford. Today, we’ll chat about Cardiogram’s successful and unsuccessful growth hacks, their academic research partnerships with research institutions, what he’s excited about in the quantified self space, and more.
EP 3: Cofounder of Ferrum Health & Augmedix, Pelu Tran
Pelu is the Cofounder and CEO of Ferrum Health, a next generation AI company that is helping health systems and hospitals prevent costly medical errors across their patient populations. Pelu is also the co-founder of Augmedix, an AI platform that converts clinician-patient conversations into medical documentation for doctors, which has raised over $80M in venture funding from firms like DCM and Emergence. Pelu holds a degree in Biomedical Engineering from Stanford and also attended Stanford Medical School before leaving to start Augmedix. Today, we’ll chat about how a last-minute application to Stanford Med completely changed the course of Pelu’s career, the #1 thing that he thinks Taiwan should help entrepreneurs get better at, what other spaces in healthcare he’s excited about, and more.
EP 2: Cofounder & Chief Design Officer of Outer, Terry Lin
Terry is the Cofounder and Chief Design Officer of Outer, a next generation DTC outdoor furniture brand. Before starting Outer, Terry was VP of Product at Casper and Director of Customer Experience at Walmart eCommerce. Coming from a background in furniture design, he was also previously the VP of Product at Calvin Klein Furniture and the Head Furniture Designer at Pottery Barn. Terry started his career at IDEO and holds a BFA in Industrial Design from RISD. Today, we’ll chat about his design philosophy, his design pet peeves, the 8 year journey after college to getting his dream job, how a serendipitous LinkedIn message on his birthday led to the founding of Outer, and more.
EP 1: Cofounder of FiscalNote, Jonathan Chen
Jonathan is the cofounder of FiscalNote, a platform that collects and analyzes government data using cutting-edge ML and has raised over $300M in funding to date from firms like NEA and angels like Mark Cuban and Jerry Yang. Today, FiscalNote has over 5000 customers including Facebook, Nike, Uber, Lyft, and McdDonald's. Today, we’ll talk about how a cold email to Mark Cuban completely changed his life, his hot take on AWS, what he’s been working on today post-startups, and more.