Everyone's Chasing AI But This Matters The Most | Ron Gutman, Intrivo | EO

Ron Gutman on Why Mission Matters Most in Health Tech

Ron Gutman treats mission as an operating principle for building a company. His path from a childhood computer geek to travelling and volunteering to Silicon Valley after the dot-com crash gave him a test for who stays when things get hard. Intrivo applies that test to health care, and Gutman's team-building rules are the practical form of it.

Takeaways

• Start with what you love. Gutman advises choosing work because you love it rather than because it is cool, lucrative, fashionable or what someone else told them to do. When work does not feel like work, he says, you end up more successful and happier, and money and fame follow.
• Intrivo pivoted to pandemic testing. The company's original vision was to bring health and care to people where they are. When the pandemic started, it built a technology platform to bring efficient testing to people and manage the entire supply chain.
• 25,000 thank-you notes mark his proudest moment. At a previous venture, Gutman received more than 25,000 notes from people thanking him for saving their lives. He calls it the most important accomplishment of his health-care career.
• Tikkun olam drives his daily work. His mother raised him with the Jewish philosophy of fixing the world. It taught him to act because the world needs fixing and he can make a positive influence, and to pay it forward without needing anything in return.
• Meeting people in person builds a richer toolkit. Meeting people where they live and volunteering around the world shaped Gutman as an entrepreneur. Internet research is not enough for global solutions, because humans share much but their nuances enrich your approach to solving problems.
• The dot-com crash filtered for passionate builders. After the crash, most people left Silicon Valley and a handful of passionate builders stayed. Gutman says some are now among the most successful entrepreneurs of our time, and they stayed because they cared about building things that make a difference.
• Embrace difficulty alongside pleasure. Gutman tries not to get too worked up when things are difficult or too excited when they are good. He sees beauty in challenge as well as in pleasure, and advises reaching that state of acceptance at least once a day.

Gutman's playbook for building a team

1. Start with people who have the right skills and level of experience for the work. That is the foundation.
2. Choose for energy and resilience. Gutman has picked smart, capable people with great resumes who lacked the character to survive entrepreneurship's inevitable ups and downs.