Health technology and Silicon Valley
This time we are sending greetings from San Francisco. Learn more about Startup Grind Global Conference, Rock Health and our meeting with HopeLab.
I spent part of February in San Francisco with Risto. We scheduled a meeting with HopeLab to kick-off our trip. HopeLab designs science-based technologies to improve the health and well-being of teens, young adults and new moms. We were lucky enough to see the lovely people behind the digital health solutions from HopeLab and learn from their journey as the NGO was already established in 2001.
We learnt that partnership is the underlying basis for success. It means involving patients or other stakeholders to the development process which in turn provides good grounds for market entry. But on a more personal level, we saw how passionate, helpful and warm the people behind HopeLab solutions were. It showed us that empathy really is a superpower and a key to success - the company is as extraordinary as the people.
Startup Grind Global Conference took place in 12-14 February in Redwood City. For our startup, it was the first international startup conference to attend as previously we have been focusing on nearby events such as Upgraded Life Festival in Finland. It was nice to see that healthcare got a lot of attention during the event. For example FitBit these days claims to detect sleep apnea very accurately, which holds a great promise to the whole healthcare field. It might happen that wearables are soon able to accurately detect medical conditions which will disrupt the whole industry by completely changing diagnosing process. Headspace, an app for meditation, shows promising results in reducing anger and increasing compassion after 3 weeks of using the app. In general Headspace makes the relationship with our smartphones healthier as we are spending most of the time using apps in any case. Startup Grind Global Conference also had several exhibitors were from digital health field such as Neurological Rehabilitation VR and CureApp.
We drove around Silicon Valley for a day and saw the headquarters of big names such as Apple, Yahoo and Google. It was a great trip between all the Teslas on the road.
Huge thanks to everyone we met, we learned a lot. We hope to see you soon!
