Ron Gutman is a serial technology and healthcare entrepreneur, renowned inventor, investor, Stanford adjunct professor, and a Sapient leader. Ron Gutman is a visionary who continues to revolutionize the healthcare industry one technology company at a time.
Ron has built and invested in companies that have helped hundreds of millions of people worldwide and saved tens of thousands of lives. As an inventor with patents in healthcare technology and AI, Ron is dedicated to transforming healthcare by optimizing technology to make it more personal, accessible, and delightful.
He currently leads Intrivo, a global technology and healthcare company behind the FDA-authorized On/Go COVID-19 rapid at-home test that has helped hundreds of thousands of people. Previous endeavors include CEO of HealthTap, a world-leading virtual healthcare provider, and founder of Wellsphere, an online consumer health company that is now one of the largest online health websites serving more than a hundred million people.
Please tell us a little bit about your business – what is Intrivo all about?
Intrivo is the health tech startup behind the On/Go rapid at-home COVID-19 test. I’ve been an entrepreneur, investor, inventor, advisor and Stanford University adjunct professor. I’ve built and invested in health and technology companies that have served hundreds of millions of people worldwide and saved tens of thousands of lives.
Tell us a little bit about your background and how you started your company.
Since I was a child, I was very drawn to the computer – I played a lot of computer games, commercial and home-brewed, and loved science and technology. From birth, my mother always talked to me about Tikkun Olam – the idea that everyone has a responsibility to make the world a better place and help improve society at large. When I was thinking about potential careers, I wanted to incorporate the concept of Tikkun Olam into my chosen field and I decided to combine my passion for technology with my drive to make the world a better place. I realized the most effective way I could do that was by leveraging technology to help people live healthier and happier lives – so that’s our mission at Intrivo and other companies and not-for-profit organizations I’ve founded and grew.
What would you say are the top 3 skills needed to be a successful entrepreneur, and why?
- Caring about people and being addicted to helping them.
- Solving problems by getting into the details of what works.
- Being resilient when things don’t go according to plan.
First, let’s talk about caring about solving problems for people. If you don’t care about solving problems for others (or for yourself), then you won’t be able to find a solution that really works for everyone involved.
Second, get into the nitty-gritty details of what works—which means understanding the problem from multiple angles and come up with solutions that address those angles.
Third, have some resilience in your DNA! That means being ready for setbacks or challenges along the way—and being prepared to keep going when things get tough. And even better so – stay positive in the face of adversity.
What are your plans for the future, how do you plan to grow this company?
My plans for the future are to continue to invent new products and services and build and grow businesses around them that make a difference in the lives of billions of people (yes, with a “B”). But at this point in my life and my career, that’s not enough anymore. I do believe in capitalism, but I don’t believe it can solve everything. That’s why I’m dedicated to doing good while doing well—where business isn’t enough to solve a human need.
How do you separate yourself from your competitors?
When they zig, we zag. My grandmother told me it’s good to be a contrarian as long as I’m right 😉 For example, when we launched On/Go we focused on building an artisan colorful and delightful brand focusing on user experience and rejecting the sterile healthcare look and feel of other medical devices for a more friendly, approachable and inviting brand connection. It guided a relentless pursuit of establishing a delightful consumer experience when using our mobile application and physical devices. Going against the tide to bring accessible, affordable and truly delightful healthcare to consumers when they needed it most was a source of differentiation and deep competitive advantage.
What were the top three mistakes you made starting your business, and what did you learn from them?
- Not reading carefully and not asking enough questions to thoroughly understand the small print of the investment documents (which eventually allowed investors to take over the business just because they could.)
- Bringing on board people just because they had advanced academic degrees from reputable institutions, people who had fancy job titles in big companies, or people who had large following in social media. I learned to ask more questions that validate or disprove deep substantial knowledge, skills, and/or expertise related to the new business, strong motivation, and great fit for and genuine affinity to the mission and task on hand.
- Focusing too much on what people seem to need, or what they “should need” rather than what they really WANT.
Tell us a little bit about your marketing process, what has been the most successful form of marketing for you?
- Creating an authentic brand that speaks to what people want and that is congruent with the product or service we’re selling.
- Highly targeted, data-driven performance marketing based on an ongoing evolution of extensive experimentation, rapid iterations, and continuous refinement based on ever-changing circumstances.
What have been your biggest challenges and how did you overcome them?
Intrivo was built to tackle the COVID-19 pandemic, which is one of the largest – if not the largest – health tech challenges of our lifetimes. Due to my relationships at Stanford University, where I started the Live Long & Flourish Club (LL&F), I learned about COVID-19 in January of 2020 from Dr. Gary Schoolnik and his academic collaboration in Wuhan, China. I felt that this pandemic would cause profound challenges and changes around the world and I wanted to figure out how I could contribute, amid all the confusion and chaos that was brewing up.
As many organizations and companies were scrambling to set up point of care testing infrastructure and secure masks and other supplies in early 2020, I foresaw that at-home testing would be necessary to slow down the spread of the virus. I was also committed to my lifeline mission to move healthcare to the home and that’s how I met my partner Reeve who shared the same vision for the future of testing and healthcare. Together we decided to focus on developing and distributing rapid, easy, at-home tests in order to allow people to test for COVID-19 efficiently, conveniently, and cost-effectively, and receive results within minutes, without leaving their homes.
Our ability to invent, design, develop, and commercialize tests when most people were in lockdowns and most supply chains and distribution channels clogged, helped build a great business and make our vision come to life by helping many millions everywhere and saving lives.
If you started your business again, what things would you do differently?
My career has always been very mission-driven, and Intrivo and On/Go were one of the biggest and most complicated missions I’ve ever undertaken. Frankly, I’d likely double down on exactly what we did, and do it even faster. We put together an amazing team of engineers, product people, designers, and operators who worked around the clock to build the science, technology, and partnerships required to produce the best at-home, rapid antigen COVID-19 test (as ranked by all others.)
We had to work 24/7 for a couple of years to create and deliver the tests and technology infrastructure that Americans needed, and did our best to produce as many tests as we possibly could, which was a big risk at a time when it was very difficult to predict future demand. We designed the packaging of our On/Go tests with friendly, attractive branding with bright colors to differentiate our tests from others on the market and make them feel approachable and delightful.
Our user of data and advances analytics, which led to our foresight to manufacturing millions of additional tests proved right when new strains of COVID-19, like the delta variant, increased viral spread more than expected – so while other companies without our foresight ran out of tests, On/Go was still ready to serve.
What’s a productivity tip you swear by?
The best productivity tip I know is to be healthy. I swear by working out, eating healthy, sleeping (still work-in-progress for me ;), meditating—being with people I love. And all of those things are important for a balanced life. The most important thing that underlies everything in life is to be healthy!
Can you recommend one book, one podcast, and one online course for entrepreneurs?
Tiny Habits: The Small Changes That Change Everything by Dr. B.J. Fogg. Change is essential for entrepreneurs, yet it can be challenging at times. In this book, one of my collaborators at Stanford, and behavioral scientist Dr. B.J. Fogg presents a universal approach to help you understand all types of human behavior, and to design any behavioral change or habit. Let’s face it: most of us don’t have time to go around making big changes all the time.
We want to save the world, but we also have work and family commitments that make it hard to fit in our own self-care or hobbies at times. But what if there was a way to make small changes that add up over time? What if you could use these small changes as stepping stones toward larger ones? Amazing book that everyone should read!
If you only had $1000 dollars to start a new business, knowing everything you know now, how would you spend it?
I wouldn’t spend it. I would work hard to do everything I can with no money and keep the $1,000 to either mitigate a great existential risk to the business or capitalise on a very large immediate opportunity that requires money and can create a massive leverage for the business.
What helps you stay driven and motivated to keep going in your business?
I’m a big believer in having a meaningful mission and being able to measure it and when its big and meaningful it drives me to keep going when running businesses, even when it’s super challenging. When I started Intrivo, I had no idea how much solving the threat of the COVID-19 virus during the early days of the pandemic would help me stay driven and motivated.
We had to tackle numerous complicated challenges from product development, to technology, to regulatory, to supply chains, and complicated business transactions and hiring great talent rapidly – and do it all while the pandemic was raging and everyone was in lock-downs! But none of these mattered in the face of saving lives and tackling the most important and pressing challenge that humanity faced at that time. I’m grateful for the opportunity to be in that situation and to have helped solve that unprecedented challenge.
What is your favorite quote?
Less is more.
To me, it means that which is less complicated is often better understood, easier to use and relate to, and much more appreciated than what is more complicated. I also strongly believe that brevity in communication is the true soul of wit, so I will pause here 🙂
What valuable advice would you give new entrepreneurs starting out?
It’s not easy to start a business, but I would say that the most valuable advice I could give to new entrepreneurs is to do what you love! If you’re passionate about something, that passion will drive you to succeed. If you’re doing something that you don’t enjoy, it’s going to be harder—and more stressful—to get the results you want. If you’re trying to build a business and change the world for the better it’s a lot more fun when you’re doing what you love!
Who should we interview next and why?
We need to constantly evolve and understand the points of view of who comes next. We want to interview Generation Alpha (the one that comes AFTER Gen-Z’s!). This generation is the first truly digital native generation, meaning they were born into a world where technology was part of their everyday lives. They have never known life without it. Generation Alpha will have a huge impact on the world in many ways, from the way we work to how we communicate with each other, but most importantly, they will shape the way businesses are run in the future. Their ability to adapt quickly to an ever-changing world and their willingness to take risks are sure to be game-changers for companies who understand them well enough to create products and services that fit them best.
What is your definition of success?
I believe that a successful life is one in which you feel at home with yourself and with the world around you. Success for me is the fortunate feeling that I’ve made a meaningful positive impact on the lives of a large number of people in a sustainable way.
How do you personally overcome fear?
I’m not afraid of it. Fear is a healthy and valuable tool to help figure out what’s important to you, what you’re capable of, and what may be of a (healthy) concern for you. The phrase, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself” is one of the best I’ve learned – it means that we don’t need to be afraid of anything other than being afraid. It’s so important that we don’t ignore our fears, or we’ll never learn from them. But I also don’t think it’s not worth it to get caught up in fear either—it can be a distraction from figuring out your goals and taking calculated risks toward achieving them.
We can accomplish great things if we look at problems face-on rather than being held back by doubt and fear.
How can readers get in touch with you?
Feel free to visit my company website Intrivo www.intrivo.com
