Eric Paley, Managing Director of Founder Collective, extols the entrepreneurial spirit of Kinsa CEO Inder Singh.
Eric Paley: The world is terrorized by disease. And even those people who are lucky enough to live in countries where these diseases aren't nearly as terrifying, they're certainly very unpleasant and upsetting and they spread and every single year, even in the United States where we have a really good healthcare system, countless people die from flu.
And when I first met Inder he had this idea that there was nobody properly mapping the spread of illness, both in the United States but globally. And he came to me with a lot of credibility for that. So anyone tells you that story and you think to yourself well that's an interesting point but I'm not sure you're the person who will fix this. But Inder had actually work for Clinton Global Health Initiative and had actually played a huge role in bringing drugs to parts of the world that had no access to those, particularly AIDS medications. And when somebody like that tells you that they can play a significant role in limiting the spread of disease containing it and understanding it of the illness and has an insight on how to make that happen, you take it incredibly seriously. And I thought Inder's insight was special and unique and was very excited about it. And Inder's insight was we have this enormous proliferation of Internet of Things devices, many of which don't have really important use cases. But actually if we can connect the thermometer we can actually understand exactly how disease is spreading. We can understand whether when your kid has a temperature is it likely that it's the flu and they should stay home or maybe it's just some minor thing and they can go to school the next day. What's going to be the duration of that illness? When should the school start to worry and emphasize that kids need to stay at home when it might just seem like the cold and parents are sending children to school?
So Inder had incredible insights on this very simple thing that could change the way we look at a huge problem in our society and that's what got us very excited about what he was doing at Kinsa.