DGTL Voices with Ed Marx - SmartSense Disruption in Healthcare & Simple Hacks to Become a CEO (ft. Guy Yehiav)

Episode Date: January 1, 2025

On this episode of DGTL Voices, Ed sits down with Guy, the CEO of SmartSense, discussing his journey as a serial entrepreneur, the importance of leadership, and the innovative solutions SmartSense provides in the healthcare sector. Guy emphasizes the significance of people in business, shares insights on effective leadership, and highlights the role of technology in saving lives. The conversation also touches on the challenges and opportunities in the IoT landscape, particularly in healthcare, and the need for collaboration and innovation to drive success.  

Thanks for tuning to Digital Voices podcast, where we chat digital transformation challenges and opportunities across healthcare and life sciences. And now, your host, Ed Marks. Hey, it's Ed here. Welcome to another edition of Digital Voices. Thanks for listening. You know, because of your listenership, we are in the top 3% globally in terms of downloads. And I think part of the reason is because we have great guests like Guy. Guy, Guy, welcome to Digital Voices.

Hey, great to be here. Thanks for having me. So Guy is the CEO of SmartSense, and we're going to talk all about SmartSense, guy, but also I want to pick your brain on leadership and different things like that, because you're a serial CEO, and you've launched lots of companies or exited lots of companies, and you've got a lot of great experience. So, but Guy, Guy, before we get there, the main question everyone wants to know the answer to is, What songs are on your playlist? Well, I'm pretty unique.

I tell everyone it's my kids' playlist song, but that's the song for the gym. So that's anything current that just get you running for. But the old rock, 80s, 90s rocks, have country. It's another passion. Israeli song, European song. I even have on the gym some stupid 80s songs from Europe.

Yeah, like the military that they don't really sing even. Okay. Yes. All right, not to put you on the spot, but we do have a playlist for digital voices. I don't know that we have any Israeli songs. Is there a particular artist and song that you might recommend? There's a few. There's just now some recent one that I'll send you.

I'll send you a few. Mergi is another friend of a friend of mine. He's an amazing Israeli singer. He just moved to L.A., and he just released his first American English list of songs. So that's Mergi. all right we will add that and yeah because i'm witness to your interest in in music especially the old rock music because we know each other through smart sense again we're your CEO and i'm on the board of advisors and at the last conference you play you have a band and you played a lot of

type of music you just described so how long was that band an impromptu band or have you been playing in bands for a while so i you know if you would ask me what you you would ask a guy when he was 18 or 13, I would say, yeah, ask him to learn how to play the guitar. Because I just started learning. I love it. I had a lot of passion for it. I can play, but not that well.

And so when you're in the band, you don't have to be that well because everyone else is just accompanying you. What we did is at our user conference, one of the customer, actually Hartford Health CIO, Joel, said, how about, I will put a customer, customer band together, because he is an amazing guitar player. Yeah. And so it makes of SmartSense employees and customer players, the guitar.

We are looking for an amazing customer who knows how to play the keyboard. So if you know anyone, we'll do the right partnership with them, and then we'll add the keyboard player. But we had 12 songs at the last user conference, and it was amazing. Yeah, I loved it. I really enjoyed it. I thought that was very unique, too, yeah, bringing together the customers. Talk about true partnership, right, between a vendor and a client is doing a songs together because it really requires a lot of coordination and collaboration.

What about words to live by, Guy? Are there specific quotes or slogans that you sort of run your life by? Yeah, as you said, I'm a serial entrepreneur by heart. And I learned over the years that it's truly all about the people. And so that's something I truly believe. It's all about the people, not just with your employees, but mainly. with your customers. And I'm looking and tracing my end users from, you know, 998 when I initiated the mantra. And I'm tracking and tracing their career path. And I see how they grow. And I mean,

you know, in touch with most of them through platforms like Lincoln. Yeah. And that's great. Because I believe that if you take care of your employees, they will take care of the same way to their customers, to our customers. And it's all about the people. if someone subscribe to my services, I would like to make sure that she will be so amazing that she will be promoted, right, and promoted and promoted and promoted. And so I'm helping my end user and my customers

and my buyers to, you know, promote themselves in their careers. Yeah, no, I love that. That's awesome. Tell us a little bit about yourself. Obviously, you have a slight accent. You've already mentioned Israeli music. Tell us about your life growing up. Yeah, I have as I quote. call it a South Boston accent.

So, yeah, I grew up in Israel, in Belgium, and in the UK, probably about kind of 10 years, 5 years, 4 years, something around those lines. Learn computer science, first major, industrial manager, another good passion about process improvement, total quality management of the 80s. And then build up my first company through an MBA process at Debson in Wellesley, Massachusetts. I did the long MBA for eight years.

And every time I learned with a professor, how can I improve my company? And I learned a lot through that. So it was not a regular MBA. It was more a professional kind of executive MBA process. And I've been in the Army for four years. I built up my first company in 1998, as I mentioned. It was all about demand-driven supply network.

It was a supply chain. planning company that looks at first at demand, uncontrained demand, and then build up, you know, the nodes of supply chain in the background. Work with a lot of different verticals, including healthcare, Bexter Healthcare and Johnson and Johnson Medical Devices, Johnson & Johnson also on the pharmacy side, all the way from Sony Entertainment and Wendy's food. We did all, if you think about Wendy's, they have 150 menu items, and we help them play. plan down to 50-minute increment what people will order from the menu. Wow.

So it was labor, it was meat, it was everything. And we filled that in 2001, I think we delivered that one. I crossed all of their stores. That was fantastic implementation. That was my first company. No, that's pretty cool. I really like that. And the time in the Army, was it after you got your MBA?

So you were here, you got your MBA, and then you went back or before? It was before. In Israel, you have the mandatory mandatory army. I did it four years. Learn electronics, learn electronic warfare. It was a fantastic professional experience, if you will. And then after that, I joined SITX. Not sure if all of your listeners remember Sitex. Sidex was a print-on-demand system.

and so in the old days when you wanted to print something you went to a print shop and you would give them a template and then the template it would milk the template and the template would actually then print itself later on when I joined my group was in charge

of using the PS2 machine IBM in order to rip a digital print and do on-demand digital printing in colors the idea was to use a Xerox machine like Agfa Xerox and others and be able to print at the time it was

imaginary 60 page per minute full color and full book so you actually you print it and then you

combine it into a right yeah and we couldn't do it over the internet we actually build a hardware

outreach put in the machine so you can actually rip the end the minute fast enough to print it yeah

yeah I remember those days tell us a little bit SmartSense then? So what does SmartSense do? So I joined SmartSense a little bit less than three years ago. SmartSense is well known for sensing as a service. We're an IoT company, but really if you ask me, we are a data company, data-driven company or data company. As you know, sensors are amazing. They're becoming smaller. They're becoming with longer longevity. But what sensors do, they generate data, right? And so when you have a lot of data,

what do you do with it? Well, you need machine learning algorithms, you need medical algorithm, you need AI, and then you need to understand with all of this data, what's going right, what's going wrong. Whatever's going wrong, finally, to someone, human, robot, robots, whatever you need in order to go and fix it, right? So it could be as simple as, hey, the gasket needs to be replaced in a refrigerator, so the temperature is excrued. There's an excursion on a specific asset. could be a power out of it is, but hey, there was a storm in Florida. Power is out and the generator didn't kick in.

You need to, someone need to go and kick it in, actually. Someone needs to connect it. All the way to, hey, I'm tracking a plasma shipment to a clinic. And it's going to arrive three hours early, but it's pretty warm outside. And we need to call the receptionist making sure, hey, it's coming in 20 minutes. 10 minutes, it's there, go outside, pick it up, put it in the fridge. So we don't need to delay shipments because, as you know, we're all about saving lives. And if a plan come to get a treatment, it's better be ready with a full of accuracy and to be, you know, to treat the client.

Yeah, no, I love that. And, Guy, what led you to that company? I mean, you know, you had all sorts of choices. You've done all sorts of exits. obviously, you know, there was something about SmartSense that made you say, yeah, I'd like to be the CEO. Yeah. So, yeah, so just before that, I was, I built up in 2010, I built another company called Profitech. That was all around prescriptive analytics, which means taking a lot of data and looking at what's working, what's not, and when something is not working, how about you just tell me what's not working instead of sending me at another Excel, right?

We were drowning. We were before drowning in different reports. Today we have machine learning and AI that tells you things about the data. But in 2010, we didn't have all of that. And so we built that specifically catered for retail and CPG at the time. I sold the company to Zivora Technologies, which is Zivore Technologies, people don't know. Great company run by a friend of mine at Bill Burns. and they acquired Motorola about 10 years ago.

And so all the Motorola Enterprise, all the NL devices, scanners, printers, printers. And what I learned there is about IoT. And so I learned about hardware and software and combine how they work in harmony together and what's the hardware cost, structure, profit, and then what's the software profit and some costs that you have in software that you don't have in hardware.

And all of that complexity was amazing. After when I left, I left to join a few boards as a board of directors, and I met with Ron, who is the CEO of DG International. And when we spoke about it, he was selling me on SmartSense. So SmartSense was actually a combined five companies that being acquired together in order to dominate the IOTE market for business to business, right? Temperature monitoring, CO2, pressure differential, etc. So what I did is, in order to find, is that really what I want to do? I did three things. Number one, I reached to some executive customers of smarts.

And the executive told me, hey, guys, you know, this is the technology that just work. And by the way, the team that they have is unbelievable. But there's some miscommunication. That's the position that they took. That's kind of the aggregate of all the messages. So, you know, if you have the technology and you have the people and all you need is fine-tune it, That's easy. Then I looked at analysts. And with the analysts, I spoke about the IoT market. And the IoT market is very, was now it's even more, but it's fragmented. What do I mean by that?

If you build a new house, let's say, today at the time, three years ago, I actually finished my house. And when I, when I built it, I had my shades, one application. I had my lights, another application. I had the ring, it's Amazon ring, is another application. I had Sonos, music, right? another application. So in order to just get in the house, I had to open up like three, four, five application and run it through it. And I said, you know, what is it in the business world? And then I found out in the business world, it's even worse. You have a lot of IoT. For every little thing, you need another application. They don't mesh. They don't work together. You have a lot of antennas. You have a lot of small things, large things. And so what I saw is that there's no dominant

one player. It's very fragmented. And the customers are asking for someone to come and make it all make sense. Take all the data, run it in one system, and create kind of an ELP for IoT. Get all the data in and then streamline it. And then third, I went to the board and I said, you know what? I'm willing to take the position. This is what I need from you, besides small investment to make the culture better. I would like to expand sensorability. What does that mean?

You know, we are amazing at temperature, at humidity yet, but, you know, we don't have pH sensors. I don't want to build pH sensors. I want to be with that. They have great sensors. I want to be able to have, you know, we have a food probe. Yeah. It's amazing.

But, you know, there's other food probes. I would like to be able to, with any Bluetooth food probe. And so they said, are you crazy? You're going to sign up agreement with your competitors? I said, yeah. That's what's being called competition. Right.

Therm Awards. Today, they're great partners of ours. Well, they make those as well. They make maybe even better than those. Foodstrokes. But they don't make an IoT backbone. Right? Right. So if you buy their food, Pro and they are great, they will have an app that only does that. Right.

What if our app can connect to their sensors, connect to other competitor's sensors, connect also to our sensors, and certain sensors, we have the best. And so we'll recommend only apps. But if a customer already bought a sensor, why do I care? I hold that and add value for a backbone. And the board said, you know, it sounds interesting. By the way, COVID just ended. You guys doubled up the company through COVID before you join.

COVID is over. Guy, I need you to double up the company in three years. If you're up to that, whatever you need, we're here. And I said, let's do it. And so, you know, three years later, here we are, doubled up. Yeah, that's awesome. No, that's great. And it shares a lot more about smart sense of what it does, sort of this platform.

So let's talk about health care in smart. SmartSense. So SmartSense was in other industries like retail, grocery, pharma, and you've moved into healthcare. Can you talk a little bit about some examples, how you help in health care? Yeah, absolutely. You know, we, we dominant the retail pharmaceutical market before, so any retail pharmacy that you can imagine, you know, anything from Syllias, Walmart, Walgreens, you know, Kroger, who else, Wegmans. anyone besides one large one, everyone else is using smart sense. And why?

It's because of the ease of use, the implementation, a lot of things, right? But when I looked at all of the capabilities that we have, and I looked at the challenges in healthcare, it's very, very similar, which is I have a critical supply chain, right? which means I cannot have anything but 100% connectivity. Because if I am running a plasma between different hospitals or from a hospital to a clinic, and to create that plasma will take me a year if I lose it,

I need 100% truth positive to know where it is, what's the temperature, what's the humidity, and making sure that it gets all the way to the pump. So when the cancer treatment or anyone else try to use it, it's at full capacity. That's one option, one area. You know, besides hospital pharmaceutical, we also have other areas that are critical. Example would be pressure differential in operating room, right? Well, guess what?

In pharmaceutical, you need to have clean rooms. And the clean rooms have five doors that you need to go through in order to get to the clean room. very similar to operating room, right? You need to be able to have the pressure outside at all time, look at it, and if anything fails, you need an immediate, one alert, two alert, three alert, right? Because if there's an operation going on now,

someone needs to know and act about it right now immediately because it's about life. And so other things was, you know, even the temperature of the bed. Well, you know, if you have a patient there, you want to make sure that they are comfortable the whole time. And so the temperature of the bed,

temperature of the room, the humidity. What about CO2 and oxygen? What about incubation? We have, you know, Minnesota children is a great customer of ours. They actually, I have a quote from the CIA there that talks about the fact that

we save life. What we do is we help those poor kids that were born early, too early. So, for example, we save lives. When you have the infant being born and not all of their organs are fully deployed yet, fully are ready. They are in the incubator and you need to make sure that the CO2, the temperature. Everything is there at the right time. But we make sure that they don't get yet a third strike

by making sure that the milk that was for them is also in the right temperature. So when we need to feed them, We have it. And we have it again with the right status and it will not get them hard. Right. So think about this. If you step back and you think about everything that is going on in the hospital, we can help in a lot of different areas. Yeah. And then there's new areas as well that we're expending with.

Yeah. Guy, and to your earlier point, you know, a lot of times in hospitals it's been best of breed and you use all these different vendors and sensors and all kinds of stuff. And it's like the house example you were giving earlier. And so it's too hard to manage. It's too costly. And the nice thing, again, about SmartSense, this sort of enables a platform approach.

And you don't have to reinvest. If you already have something that works, you just put it on the same platform. So that's really cool. Yeah, how do you work with your customers for innovation? Whether it's health care or outside of healthcare, we're talking about some things that are forthcoming. So how does that process work?

Yeah. So we have a few areas of innovation. We don't want to innovate in a shell. We want to innovate with customers. So we have our board of advisors. We have some amazing innovative people just like you. And we're running ideas for six months, 12 month, 18 months, and two year out. What are we planning and getting feedback?

That makes sense. That doesn't make sense. Hey, you're going to compete with that. You're going to compete with this. there's maybe easier solution out there that you were not aware of oh maybe we can partner with someone and do it earlier so you get some ideas of what is the what you know what are the needs in the market and then when we have something coming out for example we have something called

smart sense t1 which is part of our new one voyage platform it's a credit card size temperature monitoring humidity light and real-time location services It actually used cellular technology, not RFAD, not AppleTag, but cellular technology to tell you where it is and the fact that it's moving or standing or getting a shock or got into an accident or anything like that. And so now you can put that and help with anything that is care at home. For example, if the nurse goes to a care at home and she has the most expensive pump, a good wheelchair, whatever equipment she needs. On those equipment, you put the wire T1, and then in a central location,

you know where your assets are. What is the distribution of care at home compared to in the hospital? And you can see, hey, you know, the nurse came back and she forgot the pump. And where is the pump? Oh, the pump is in that address. Let's call the guy, John Smith,

and get the pump. back, right? So you lose less, you know where it is, and also you can then analyze on a KPI perspective, efficiency, and effectiveness of the use of all of those equipment, right? Because a lot of times, people are saying, hey, we have a lot of pumps. You always say that it's missing. What's the uses like, right? What's the percentile usage? Because if the nurse hide it somewhere on third floor in a closet, no one can use it besides him or her, right? And so you can look at it from an equipment, from a usage perspective, where it is, you lose less. And obviously, as I mentioned before, if it's including any medicine, you can monitor also the efficacy of it through the temperature that it's being held at.

Yeah, that's really intriguing and great examples in real world use cases. I want to pivot in our last couple of minutes towards leadership. What would you share younger leaders who are earlier in their career guy who want to be a CEO someday like yourself? Are there one or two things that you would say to them to help them? Yeah, yeah, a few things. Number one, again, I will repeat, it's all about the people, right? Take care of your people, take care of your customers, and it will, that's where I fulfill myself.

My passion is career of our customer. Another thing is that perfection, and I think I heard it also in one of your old podcasts, but perfection is the enemy of innovation. When you innovate stuff, innovate, fail fast, and improve. I also heard another podcast that talked about fail fast. That's bullshit. Don't fail at all. Well, of course, don't fail at all.

But if you fail, learn, and it's better to fail past than not fail later because then the cost. So it's better when you innovate to try and try and repeat. When you lose, even when you lose a cell, do a loss analysis. learn. You can learn more about a loss than about a win. When you win, also do a win analysis for sure, but it's much easier because everyone's singing the kumbaya and are excited. But when you lose, you should actually harvest it more and learn about what you need to do better next. Another thing I would say, I think I enjoyed for my MBA a lot. I enjoyed it a lot. And when I'm speaking with other students of MBA, they're lacking the professionalism.

They're lacking the theory to practice. So if you do an MBA, do it around a certain practice, do executive MBA, do an MBA on a practice. So you can actually, anything that you're being taught, you can execute and then learn. In my first company, I actually hired the CEO. I hired my boss, if you will, Bill Seibel. I learned so much from him, right? He was a true leader. He was one of my mentors.

I learned a lot. Another thing is find your mentors And you can have multiple You can have a mentor for how to work with different people You can have a mentor about a financial mentor You can have a mentor for innovation You can have multiple mentors

But find those that gives you real advice Real feedback, constructive feedback Right Someone that is not afraid to tell you the truth Because a lot of time When you're asking your employees how am I doing? They may not tell you the real deal.

And you want to hear the real deal, otherwise you cannot improve. Yeah, I love it. What's one thing that you learned the hard way? A lot of things. By the way, I was just telling, I do something that I call Breakfast with Guy here at Smart Sense.

And so randomly, every Thursday morning at 8 o'clock, we have up to 8 people, no VPs, just me and them talking about any topic that they want besides politics, right? pretty hard nowadays, but besides any top of it. And so one of the question was, give me a fluctuation point, something that you learn in your career. And I mentioned that Bill and I, the CEO that I hired,

we went to see Mattel. And we went to Mattel CEO, and we were competing against my logistics, who was another supply chain company at the time. And the CEO asked us, you know, what is unique about your people that will make me partner with you or not with a competitor? And me coming out from a command and control environment

being in the army, I was starting to say, you know, we're going through rigorous interviews and tests, and everyone is perfect, and Bill immediately shut me. And I saw his face, immediately shut me down. And he says, listen, when you walk in our office, you can feel the passion for supply chain. You can feel the passion for demand management. You can feel the passion for our customers.

And that's what we care about is our customer's success. And through that, and I will not forget that meeting. That was a meeting that changed my way of how I'm looking at other people and I'm looking at my company for sure. But that was just one. I have many more. That's a good one. That's a really important one. We talked about so many different things, including some Israeli music, which we're going to add to our playlist.

But we also talked about sort of your formation and sort of the multicultural that you came out of. And then we talked a lot about SmartSense. And you gave some great examples about SmartSense and health care and how it's utilized and can be utilized further. We talked about the whole concept of the platform that SmartSense enables. And then we spent a lot of time on leadership. You dropped a lot of golden nuggets on us in terms of some things that we can. do as aspiring, not just aspiring leaders, actually as I look at my notes, but tenured leaders as well that we should be doing. And then finally, I want to give you the last words. Is there something

we missed or anything that you want to double down on? Maybe two things. On the one thing that you, when you mentioned, on another kind of nuggets for another leader is that leadership is not a role. Leadership is not a title. You know, be a leader by from the side impacting others. When I built my first company, I was not the CEO. I was not even a VP when I started. I just started as, hey, I'm going to implement it with customers. I want to see how to implement things. And I hired the CEO as a part of the committee.

I was co-founder number five. And it was a lot of learnings, right? A lot of learnings. And the leadership was from the side. I can tell you there were days. I was frustrated that people didn't listen to me. But that's okay. That's part of the leadership, right?

that's part of the role. If you're not being instant to, maybe you did it the wrong way. Try to impact it differently. And I learned and I change. The other thing was about IoT when we talked about the fragmentation that we see in the market, we want to have one IoT backbone. I would call it, I would like to commercialize the business IoT, right? I want to make it as easy for people to use it in the hospital as it is to just use it at home.

when you want to take the shades down and at home, you click, shades, the level, and it's done. Right. So why are in hospitals we're behind? Why do we,

we don't, you know, we don't use the same type of advanced technology. And I call it, it needs to be no cables, no wires, no batteries, no power.

It needs to be very simple, longevity, simple to use, easy to train. Right. No one reads manuals anymore as well. Right. Easy to train and then easy to scale.

I think that's what I would say. Whatever you innovate around, make it kind of consumables, commercial type ease of use and make it ready for scale. That will be it. Yeah. No, Guy, this is, as I said, extremely, extremely formative. Thank you so much for being a guest on Digital Voices. Thanks for having me.

Thank you for listening to Digital Voices Podcast with Ed Mart. If you enjoyed this episode, subscribe on your preferred streaming service and leave a rating and review. And most importantly, thanks again for listening.