Leap Academy with Ilana Golan - How Forbes 30 Under 30 Kira Radinsky Turns Every ‘No’ Into Opportunity

Episode Date: September 24, 2024

Fascinated with science as a young child, Kira Radinsky was driven to make a meaningful impact on the world through technology. She faced rejection after rejection while building her first startup, but her resilience paid off when eBay acquired the company. Kira didn’t stop there—she developed AI models that successfully predicted cholera outbreaks in Cuba and today, she continues to push the boundaries of AI and healthcare. As inspiring as her journey is, it’s been far from easy. In this episode, Kira shares the lessons she’s learned about resilience, pushing past rejection, and scaling startups. Kira Radinsky is the CEO and CTO of Diagnostic Robotics, known for her pioneering work in AI and predictive analytics. She gained global recognition for developing models that forecast major events, earning her recognition on Forbes’ 30 Under 30 and MIT Technology Review's 35 Innovators Under 35. In this episode, Ilana and Kira will discuss: - How Kira built her first company despite major challenges - How AI is transforming global healthcare - The mindset shifts that fuel entrepreneurial success - Turning failures into career-defining moments - How to push forward when no one believes in your vision - Making bold leaps in a male-dominated industry - Staying committed when the path gets tough - Lessons from selling a startup to eBay - The power of persistence in scaling a business - Finding opportunity in uncertainty - Leveraging data to predict and prevent crises - Navigating risk and uncertainty with confidence - And other topics…   Kira Radinsky is the CEO and CTO of Diagnostic Robotics, an AI-driven healthcare company. Known for her groundbreaking work in data mining and predictive analytics, she gained international recognition for developing predictive models that forecast global events like disease outbreaks and political unrest, including predicting a cholera outbreak in Cuba. Kira began her studies at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology at just 15 years old, later earning her PhD. She co-founded SalesPredict, an AI-driven company that was acquired by eBay in 2016, where she served as Chief Scientist and Director of Data Science. She has been honored in Forbes' 30 Under 30 and has been named one of MIT Technology Review's 35 Innovators Under 35. Connect with Kira: Kira’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kira-radinsky/  Resources Mentioned: Diagnostic Robotics Website: https://www.diagnosticrobotics.com

In less than two months, we raised $5 million. From nothing to everything. There are certain things you cannot teach. It's very hard to teach somebody that everything is possible. If you want to impact humanity, you have to build it, not just imagine it or write a short paper or a long paper about it. What keeps you going, Kira? I imagine how it's going to feel when it's successful.

And to be honest, there's no shame in failing. You have to jump off a cliff and then build your parachute as you fall. When you don't have a choice, you'll be surprised about how innovative you are. Having no plan B, that's the trick. Kira Radinsky. We actually met in TechCrunch Disrupt. We were both judges in a pitch competition with some amazing founders. But Kira is the CEO, CTO of Diagnostics Robotics. Previously, she co-founded SalesPredict and acquired by eBay in 2016. But really, Kira, you've been known

as a pioneer in the field of data mining, gaining international recognition when you actually predicted early warning signs of political riots, diseases, epidemics, etc. You've been Forbes 30 under 30, which is not easy to get. How did you get started at such a young age, Kira? So I think my story actually starts before I was born. So I grew up with a family of only women. I grew up with my mom, my aunt, and my grandma. They were all born in the USSR.

And I don't know how much people know about the USSR, but in general, being Jewish in the USSR was really hard. First of all, there's a cap to how many Jews can be accepted to each university. So it doesn't matter how high your grades are, there's still only one Jew that can get accepted every year to the University of Kiev, for example. Every time you go to the library, you have a library card that says they're Jewish, meaning limiting maybe some books that you can or cannot take. In general, communism is in general tough. All of the people are getting paid pretty much the same. So engineers would get paid the lowest and factory workers would get paid the highest. And what was very unique about USSR,

so unlike any other country that you needed a visa to come in, USSR was, I think, one of the first countries to start a visa to leave. In other words, people were not allowed to leave USSR, so they wouldn't be exposed to the evil West. And I think my family's dream was pretty much from the beginning with this, How can we build a free life? We take it so for granted today, but it's not. And all of my family are engineers, high degrees, and still they were very limited in what they could do just because the way they were born. And one day after working in their whatever computer science job, go outside and they see almost an infinite amount of army cars just driving in the streets.

This was a very unusual sight. They start listening to the radio and all of a sudden they hear from Norway that they're complaining that all of those Ukrainians are radiating them. What's going on in Ukraine? So my mom was pregnant with me when the nuclear reactor, not too far from Kiev, almost 80 kilometers, exploded. And of course, there was no official announcement. People just had to guess what was going on. Is it lethal? Is it not lethal? What do we need to do? And what the government pretty much started doing is going kilometer by

kilometer, asking women who are pregnant to start abortions. And it started first for 10 kilometers, 20 kilometers, 30 kilometers. My mom, she was giving some math lessons after work. She needed the extra cash. She was a big fan of teaching others. And one time, one of her math students, I think a 13-year-old, came to her and said, this will be the last time I'm coming to the lesson. She asked him why. And he says, my mom is a nurse, and she checked, and I'm already active. I have to leave. And my mom said, well, OK, this is a sign.

You don't wait for the last minute. So she stood in line for more than two days to buy literally one of the last tickets to the trains outside of Ukraine to the other places of U.S.R., specifically to Russia. After that, the Ukrainian government closed the train station so people would not run away. The way my mom described it, she laughed with another friend of hers. And again, I'm talking about the late 80s, beginning of 90s. I'm not talking about some story from the 40s. She was standing in the train and parents would come with their children and ask, would she mind taking their kids with her to somewhere in Russia? And my mom took random three kids with phone numbers for a few days ride on a train. We can discuss my mom's story for a long period of time, how she managed to get to Russia. And

in Russia, you cannot take hotels because hotels were only kept for ambassadors and politicians. So you couldn't actually do it without bribing people. And how she managed to go from one place to another, how she spent some time in a hospital. Then she went to a youth camp to actually manage the youth. And eventually she managed and she survived. And in 1989, when USSR started falling apart, a lot of pressure was coming in from the Jewish community in the United States and from Israel. They were asking, well, at least let the Jews go. You don't need them anyhow. And the USSR said that the only population that can leave are whoever is Jewish. And the official reason was there were never citizens to begin with.

They even made up a new term for it. It's not immigration. It's repatriation. They're coming back wherever they came from. Although our family spent more than, I think, a thousand years of generation in that area. Well, when you leave USSR, you're not allowed to take anything with you. No money, their unlimited amount of luggage, almost no diplomas. So you couldn't take official papers. So literally when my family came to Israel, they came with nothing but their education. That's it. And all my family, I'm talking about people who are like graduate degrees, master's, PhDs, and others.

They understood they have to survive. You have to start your life. And the problem is they were not alone. They were, Israel was at that time, 5 million citizens. And in less than a year, additional 2 million people came without nothing. And Israel is a half-socialist, half-capitalist country, so you need to support people who are coming in. There's no houses.

They couldn't build enough buildings for all of this immigration coming in. People are coming in with no language. People who are professors are working and cleaning up the garbage because this is the only water they can have. And this is how our family started. So when I'm usually being asked, what motivated you? I think the best way of building something is when you have no choice. And especially you don't build it on ego. It's like, I don't care for my PhD. I don't care that I was the best computer software engineer back then. I have a family. I have to start my life all over again. It's going to take a few years, but I have my education. I have my skills. I'm going to make it. So that's how we started our lives. But since I can remember myself,

that is very cute videos of myself when I was five and asked like, oh, what do you want to do when you grow up? And I always kept on saying, I want to be a scientist. That's what I wanted to do. I wanted to push the boundaries of knowledge of humanity just a little bit forward. Didn't talk about entrepreneurship, didn't talk about business, didn't talk about money. It's like, I even knew what type of science I want to do. I was talking about, well, I want to be somewhere between a doctor to an engineer. I didn't even know what the difference was. When I was 15, I started studying in the university towards my bachelor degree, specifically in computer science. And in one of those summer internships, I was working with a PhD student.

She was working in the biology department, specifically studying cancer. And a lot of my work was actually feeding the cancer cells. And one of our jobs was to actually count how much of those cancer cells are dying from different drugs. And I was very surprised about how rudimentary the methods are. Literally people looking at microscopes and counting thousands of cells. That's what you need to do every day. I was like, no way that's how science works. No way. No way that's how I'm spending my summer vacation. So my aunt, she did her master's in computer vision when it was still not cool. And I asked her, like, listen, what we do, we look at a microscope and we try to

count the cells. Can I use some of the techniques that you learned? She's like, yeah, sure. No problem. Let me teach you about open source, how you do all of those things. And I started building systems to start automating some of my scientific work. And this is where I knew. I knew that when I grow up, I'm not only going to be a scientist, I'm going to build systems that automate me as a scientist. Kira, how old are you at this time when you're talking about this? The summer internship was when I was 14,

and I started studying more officially at the TACNIA and the Israel Institute of Technology when I was 15. Incredible. I finished my bachelor's at this part of it. I joined the Israeli army, specifically in the intelligence forces. Another interesting example is everybody is actually building up their CV

in order to get accepted to elite units. So you wanted to be in the best place for computer software engineers. Almost like in the United States when you were trying to get to elite universities, pretty much the same thing happening in Israel, but with the army units they're going to get to. And I really wanted a very specific job of a computer software engineer. Unfortunately, they were looking for people with three years of experience.

You, of course, can ask yourself, who has three years of experience in software engineering at the age of 18? So this is very specific people whose parents were probably entrepreneurs and they work in their startups. And unfortunately, I was living in a very remote suburb and my parents had no entrepreneurship background. But I wanted it. So I called the recruiter for three months every day, at least twice a day. And I asked to be invited for an interview and a test. I was like, oh,

you don't have the background. I was like, maybe not today, but tomorrow you might have. Every day for three months. So it was easier to just give me an ability to do the test as opposed to just talking to me on the phone. So they invited me to the test. I did the test. The test was very similar to things I studied in the university, so it wasn't a big problem. I was invited to an interview. The interview starts. They asked me a couple of riddles in math. I've been doing those riddles since I can remember myself. But then they asked me a question. They gave me like a C++ code. I didn't study yet C++. A lot of my engineering degree at that time was a lot of math. And it was like, oh, what does this C++ code do? I'm like, I have no idea. I never studied C++. And I see on the face of the person who's

interviewing, it's like, I'm probably like the hundredth person he's talked to, and I'm yet another disappointment for his day. And I decided that, well, I have nothing to lose. I'm telling him, listen, I know I don't know it now, but if you give me a book in an hour, I will answer whatever question you want. He looks at me with the same shocked face that you looked at me right now and says, you know what? I have even three hours. I have three hours of interviews to do today. Here's the book. Good luck. I go outside to the interview room. There's like a hundred people waiting in line. And I was like, oh no, what did I get myself into? Now I actually need to do it. I called my boyfriend, today's my husband. And I was like, Sergei, any chance you know C++?

And he tells me, no, I don't. I was like, well, do you know object-oriented or something like that? Ask me a bunch of questions about that. And I have a book. You need to go online. And there was still like no internet on like phones. I was like, go online and try.

This is the questions I kind of remember them. Tell me what to read in the book. So that's what we've done for like two hours on the call, trying to manage ourselves. So I'm not going to tell you this romantic story where I get interviewed and I'm like the best, but I come in, I answer a couple of questions. Like, you know, if this is what you did in three hours, maybe something good will happen with you. Who knows? And he passed me. So in the first day, they give us a test. All of us were like 23 people.

And they wanted to show everybody, you're not as smart as you think. They publish the grades and they're all ranked by IDs. I'm looking for my ID. I'm going from top and looking for my ID. And then I see I'm literally at the bottom. And that hurt because I'm used to be the best, the best student, the best in making things happen. I proved myself numerous times in academia that I'm able to take something very hard and solve it. But here I'm

three years behind everybody. Everybody has three years of experience. And it's like, those are questions that you only learn from experience, not from a book. I came back home, talked to Sergei. I was like, Sergei, listen, this is like upsetting, you know. We have this three months, all of us, to prove ourselves. And based on our performance in this three months, they're going to decide what we're going to do for the next three years. And I'm literally the worst. I have no chance of catching up. And then he gave me a really good advice.

By the way, this advice, I keep on repeating to all of my PhD students, everybody works for me. The idea says, life is like a function. Everybody has different starting points, but what you should care about is the derivative. In other words, yes, you're starting from a worse place than everybody else, but you're talented. You're going to work harder. Your derivative're talented. You're going to work harder. Your derivative is better. You're going to catch up. And at that point, it helped me in a place

where I wasn't competing against anybody else. I was competing against myself. I put myself in this hat of saying, well, I'm so far behind that I'm going to learn and be my best. I don't need to compare myself to others. So as I mentioned, I'm not going to tell you romantic stories that never happened. So I'm not going to tell you this romantic story where at the end of this three months, I was the number one because I wasn't. But I passed the threshold to be called for an interview for one of those jobs that everybody wanted. They interviewed five people and eventually they selected me.

And I asked the person after I started already working a year in, I was like, listen, why did you take me? There's numerous ways that put me a little bit behind. So women serve less time. So I was like, listen, you selected a person who's going to serve less time. I had less knowledge, less experience from anybody. And he told me something very interesting that as a child, this is very hard to understand. He told me, listen, I look at all of you, you all look the same to me. I don't care if somebody gets a 93 or a 95 in the exam, it's all the same. But there are certain things you cannot teach. It's very hard to teach somebody that everything is possible. Once you know that, my job as a manager is to teach you that everything has a price, but that's my job. And I was looking for

somebody who has no fear because every day we have new challenges and you'll need to learn anyhow on the job. That is so brilliant, Kira. I want to stop here for a second because I think everything is possible. It's just such a beautiful way to look at life, which by the way, explains a lot of what you've done and what you accomplished. And for me, a lot of it is, it's never the challenges that are stopping us. It's our beliefs around these challenges that are stopping us. Are we going to take that challenge and decide to quit? Or are we going to decide to call every freaking day and make it a reality? And Kira, I think that is the big

difference that you're just right now talking about. And for me, that's such an important element to just stop for a second and embrace it. Because I think we are learning in life and in school that if we don't get a good grade, then things are not possible and we're going to close doors. And there's a lot of learning that is engraved in us to determine us to stop. And that realization, things are possible, just don't stop, right? Just keep on going. I think it's just such an important one, Kira. So continue with the story because it's fascinating, but I had to stop here. This is amazing. So after I finished my service, I decided to start my PhD. In my PhD, I was trying to tackle a problem that at that time seemed almost impossible, trying to predict future events. Why? My mom was trying to predict when to leave USSR to come to Israel, because the way you leave,

you have to quit your job and for six to nine months wait for a visa. At that time, you're unemployed. And it's also illegal to be unemployed in the USSR. So at any point, you can get arrested. And everybody knew the Gulf War will start in Israel. So she was trying to predict it in a way that will come after. She was pretty precise, but unfortunately for her, we came two weeks before the war instead of two weeks after. So I was trying to correct this historical mistake that she's done. But more seriously, there was a lot of development of getting a lot of search data, a lot of queries, a lot of social media activity like Twitter and others. And I was thinking for a long period of time, can we take everything humanity is writing, either in news or social media, identify patterns and predict future events. Today, or at least at that time, analysts were doing that a lot.

But there's a limit to what analysts can read and predict from. And instead of building an AI system using natural language processing to read all of this information, identify patterns, predict them. At that time, I was working in Microsoft Research, both in the States and in Israel. And we had a collaboration with the Gates Foundation, where they asked us to predict cholera outbreaks. And we found an amazing pattern in our data, where we're able to predict one of the first

cholera outbreaks in Cuba. To be honest, the first cholera outbreak in Cuba in 130 years. And what's unique about this disease is, if you know about this in time, you can send clean water in time and then reduce mortality rates from 50% to less than one. So since then, I started deploying the system in additional applications from predicting rides, we predicted the sedan rides in 2013, trying to predict economic events. And at some point, I started getting a lot of confidence in the fact that the system is working.

From an academic perspective, this was really rough because publishing those papers was really tough because it was not the common path for most academics, kind of half applied, half empirical. In my university, there was less experience in empirical studies as opposed to theoretical mathematical studies. And I had to find my own way. The way I found my own way is I just worked with the people. So I saw the people that are publishing where I want to be published, people that admire their work, and pretty much they talked about the recruiter and calling them for three months until they answered. So I emailed them so many times, nobody replied. So emails don't work, right? Bad media. And then I asked for other people in Microsoft who are pretty senior and work with me. Would you mind writing to them from your email?

I will write you a draft. Just tell them that I'm awesome and I'm really excited to come and work with them. And at some point they said, fine, you can come. But still, at some point when I started working with the right people, it was very minor changes. In other words, we had the results, we had the empirical results. It was like, you're not writing it correctly. You have to market it in a different way. And then all of a sudden in a single summer, I published more than 13 papers and finished my PhD. So literally for two years, couldn't publish for a long period of time, just because I didn't

know how to write it. I didn't know who to address. I didn't know the right conferences. And like all of a sudden with really small changes in my text, everything just fit together. I then said, well, I have two options right now. I can either become a professor. I had numerous offers here in the United States to join different academic institutions. I thought about coming back to Israel. My husband was an entrepreneur already. So Sergey became a husband husband and then he started a

couple of companies. And he said, well, you know what? You're not less talented than me. You can definitely be an amazing entrepreneur. I said, I don't know. My dream was to build real science. He says, well, the problem with just doing academic things, it's just like you playing with things and publishing them. You don't own them. You don't bring them to the end. If you want to impact humanity, you have to build it, not just imagine it or write a short paper or a long paper about it. So I said, all right, I'll build it. And I tried to leverage the system I wrote to this time predict economic events. I don't know.

I had this hypothesis of just predicting riots in Colorado, race, et cetera. Maybe it's not a vital business. One of the product people working with me in Microsoft, I said, let's leave and build a company together. He was a very experienced person, has been already in leadership roles, product roles. And we started a company, we called it Sales Predict. We were trying to predict both macroeconomic events and then microeconomic events and eventually work with B2B companies, helping them predict which leads are going to convert, who's going to churn, who's going to upsell.

Today it looks rudimentary, but in 2012, it was very new and novel at that time. So how did we raise money? We started fundraising and the usual answers of investors is no. And I got actually any type of feedback you can imagine. We don't believe in B2B companies. Well, if you're so good at predicting stuff, maybe you'll do algo trading. It looks like a feature that should be in Salesforce. Pretty much everything that you can imagine. And then we just raised from friends and family, built a small system, delivered to a couple of customers. And still, this was really hard to fundraise.

And as usual, there's always some war. There's always some economic crisis that prevents you from this specific year of fundraising, right? So Kira, let's stop here for a second. What keeps you going? Because it is hard. It is really, really, really hard. And I think nothing prepares you to the amount of no's that you're going to get. And that can take your confidence to pretty interesting low points. What keeps you going, Kira? My trick is imagining the end. In other words, I imagine how it's going to feel when it's successful. And that keeps me going.

It's almost like imagining the finish line of a very long marathon run. If you imagine, you imagine the feeling, you imagine what it means to cross the line, that's just worth it. And to be honest, as a researcher, I failed so many times in the past, and I've seen what success looks like. I've seen that you need to fail many times before you're successful. It's just a matter of time and perseverance. I think the easiest one is just to give up. I just seen that usually when you're just about to give up, this is where you succeed. So I already knew the feeling. It already sounded familiar. I have this trick with one of my PhD students. Many times they're afraid to take endeavors which are too risky. And I always tell them entrepreneurship and research is almost the

same, right? You have to jump off a cliff and then build your parachute as you fall. So this is very well-known phrase as well. And my job as a mentor or advisor is just to push them off the cliff. You won't notice it. And many times they don't know that I'm already pushed them off the cliff. And I was like, all right, you already jumped. You have no choice. You have to build it. I think this is the survival instinct. When you don't have a choice, you'll be surprised about how innovative you are and how many solutions you can find to your problem when you just don't have another choice. So having no plan B, that's the trick. But in my specific fundraising journey, it all came pretty suddenly. One day I'm getting an email from my university and they're telling me that there's some reporter.

They wanted to interview a couple of researchers that were successful in the university. I have a research that can be explained. Would I mind doing the interview on their behalf? I said, sure, why not? It's my alma mater. Of course, I'll help you. And I was on my way to New York. So I said, I can meet them in the airport. I met the reporter in the airport. And I started talking with her about all the stuff I'm doing, where AI is going, how is it being implemented, about our work in Microsoft, what worked, what didn't work. And when I land in New York, she texts me and says,

listen, my editor was so excited about this interview. We want to put you in the cover page. I was like, all right. So that was a cover page of me and Miley Cyrus. So I was as important for one minute as Miley Cyrus, right? People started contacting me. Then I started getting awards. Nothing changed. It's just the awareness of the type of work that we were doing. All of a sudden I'm getting the Forbes 30 under 30, and then I'm getting another award and then like red carpets award. Nothing

changed from a practical parameters. But the only thing was that other people knew about it. And I would say in less than two months, we raised $5 million from nothing to everything. Amazing. And this is where the journey started. We started building the product, building the team, getting to almost 100 customers. And then I can tell you, for every company, money runs out eventually, right? And we're already getting to a point where we need to fundraise our next round. And again, some world crisis, economic crisis, something happens. You have too little customers.

You have too many customers. Your valuation is too low or it's too high. And it doesn't matter. And then my husband, he was also in Tipanewa at the same time. He just fundraised, he had enough time. And one of his investors is an English lord. And this English lord had a birthday in London. And he invited him for a weekend to come to his birthday for, how do you call it, a breakfast party. And you have to dress up. And my husband tells me, listen, everybody's going to come with their significant others. I really need you to come with me. I can't do that. I'm fundraising right now. I have a lot of responsibility.

It's like, who's going to fundraise with you on the weekend? You're going to find so many more investors there than you're going to find here during a Saturday and a Sunday? I said, you know what? Maybe he's right. So we're flying into the birthday party. We're coming in, dressed up. We have to even buy a tuxedo. We didn't even know what a tuxedo is at that time. And the English Lord is coming in and says, wow, thank you so much for coming to my birthday. And he asked my husband, he asked him, well, what can I do to help you? And I think it was more of a polite question about where he can sit. But my husband, he doesn't lose a minute. He says, my wife is fundraising. Can you introduce her to investors? Nice move. Yeah, very slick. And he says, yes, sure. No problem. Let me introduce you to the queen.

And he leaves. I was like, what? He's going to introduce her to the queen of England? What's going on? And then all of a sudden, there's like a rush of reporters coming into us. Everybody's taking pictures, looking at us. I was like, what is going on? And then a lady comes in, and she's not the queen of England.

She looks very different. And we're like three or four entrepreneurs standing together. And she starts asking all of us, what are we all doing? And everybody's like, oh, I'm changing economy. I'm changing AI. I'm changing whatever, like marketing landscape. And she's like, oh, you're so also smart. Let me introduce you to my son, the prince. Anyhow, it turns out they're a very rich family. She was the wife of the Shah who ran away from Iran many years ago. And in all of those good stories, she introduced me to her son. He introduced me to somebody else. And in that day, I got the investment that I was looking for.

This investment helped us stay alive for an additional six months till we got acquired by eBay. What's the moral of the story? The moral of the story is say yes. People who are successful are people who keep on doing different stuff and saying yes. I see so many people trying to predict ROI

from different stuff. And I was like, in AI, there is a field called exploration versus exploitation. Sometimes you need to explore. And when you find gold, you start exploiting it. I think entrepreneurship is a lot about exploration. Say yes to more things, meet more people. You don't know where it's going to come from. I never expected from some breakfast that my husband needed my help with to have anything to do with the good things that happen to us. So first of all, I love it. The say yes, figure out the how later. I think that is such an

important mantra. And I also say that I think one of the important elements that you raise is how personal brand does matter in today's world. So as much as we want to do, do, do, you also need the recognition of others to what you're doing, because without that, it's really a hard push forward. And the personal brand does create a big momentum. So whether we like it or not, it's something that we want to embrace. It's something that we want to push. And again, in Leap Academy, we put a lot of focus on personal brand and building that reputation. But for me, suddenly you had this reporter, it came out of nowhere, and then the snowball

begins. And I'm sure you got even more with that son of. So these things do matter. So it is a lot about saying yes, but also realizing that working hard behind the scenes is going to be really, really a hard thing to take yourself to the next level. So I just love this, Kira, on so many levels. So you're selling to eBay,

which is an incredible thing on its own. And by the way, M&A has a lot of hard moments. Where did that catch you, Kira? Hmm, I wouldn't say it was a hard moment. Okay. We moved from just a few hundred businesses we work with to millions of interactions, right? So it's a very big move. It's like our dream, but in scale. I love the people. I love the fact that we're able to work with them closely. I would say there was a lot of understanding how to work in a corporate, but I used to work in a corporate before. So I knew a little bit about the etiquettes of working in such places.

There was a lot of changes that you just don't need to take to your heart. In other words, you know, we were a team, then they separated us to two teams. It was like, you know, we're moving forward, we're going forward. What's our meaning? What's our goal? And you almost like another startup and push it inside a big corporate. I wouldn't say it's easier. It's just very different.

It's moving things inside a corporate is different than moving things outside of corporate. But still this bug of building something from scratch remained inside me. And you decided to go as the hardest industry

on the planet, basically, Kira? I actually have two companies, I'll tell you, and both of them are like literally trying to take the hardest problems that I'm not sure that anything will come up. But I decided to myself that this time I want to try to take my childhood dream of making a real impact on humanity, like long lasting, and actually going deeper. And I wanted to go back into healthcare. I had no background, so I had to study it. I was studying it mostly in academic setting. Then I was joining boards of companies who are in healthcare. I joined off Data Science Institute of Maccabi, one of the largest HMOs in Israel. I joined the board, the tech board of HSBC, understanding a little bit about the economy

in a much deeper way. So I spent some time in understanding, understanding business, understanding healthcare. And I met another professor in my university, Professor Moshe Shom. He appealed a couple of companies in healthcare. And we started this company, Diagnostic Robotics. It was doing neither diagnostic nor robotics. The goal of the company, we have access to more than 60 billion claims, almost 100 million medical records, and we're building AI systems who

are enabling us to predict which patients are deteriorating and how to build best clinical next steps to treat them. We mostly work with organizations, with clinical organizations, who have a monetary incentive to make patients healthy. So not everybody has those incentives. It's called, in my field, value-based care. It's when physicians are being paid a fixed fee per patient. Again, I'm simplifying things. And if the patient's deteriorating, it's taking off from their fixed fee. So there's an alignment of incentive of both the patient, the physicians, and the insurance to make sure that the patient is healthy. In general, healthcare is a very tough field in the fact that I think as a tech entrepreneur, we've been taught that tech is first. You build a really good technology,

they will buy it. In healthcare, I think it's very different. It's first about the business and technology is very secondary. So for a lot of tech entrepreneurs going to healthcare, you almost don't use your moat with everybody else in the industry. Yet to be proven, because there might be some technological startup who's going to prove everybody wrong. But till today, it was mostly about workflow automation in all of this field. And when I went to this field, I didn't know about that. I didn't know it was all about the workflow, the streamline, automation of revenue cycle management. And I was pretty sure it's about how to make patients healthy, which is correct outside the United States, not inside the United States.

I think digital healthcare in general is still looking for its own way. And we've been seeing this in the public markets from larger POs of tens of billions of dollars who crashed to half a billion, right? So in general, this industry is still shaping. But we built a company, we raised almost $70 million, treated almost 28 million patients monthly. And then I still have my PhD students at the Technion. I'm still teaching them.

Well, when I say teaching, it's mostly leading research. And I started getting more and more interested in chem informatics. In other words, I met a chemistry professor just for coffee. I just said yes, my usual thing. And I told him, it's like, tell me everything you can about your work. Just tell me everything. He invited me to his lab. I've seen in my eyes how they work. And he told me the following problem. He said, well, everybody knows about mRNA. mRNA is such a big thing. And we saw this during COVID. The problem is, how do you get the mRNA to a specific cell?

Because there's many diseases that if you can just get this cell to produce this protein, some people don't have it because of genetic disorders, some because of other problems. You could solve a lot of rare and non-rare diseases. I said, OK, sounds very simple. So what's the problem? He says the only way of building this spaceship for mRNA, till today, people used viruses. The viruses had, I don't know, a few hundred millions of years to find a way of getting to the brain or finding a way to get into the lungs and putting their DNA in. So they used to take

viruses, take the inside of the virus out, put the mRNA in, and send it to its way. The problem is, the body doesn't like viruses. It tries to attack them, self-inflammation, etc. And he was studying something called lipid nanoparticles, which is a very big word for fat. He was trying to create fats as the spaceship component to put the mRNA in. His name is Avi Schroeder. I was like, Avi, this is a very nice story, but how can I help you with this? He says, I don't know what's the recipe.

I don't know how to build those LNPs, the lipid nanoparticles, in a way that will encapsulate the mRNA in a way that will deliver it to the correct location. I just don't know. We keep on trying different ways. We keep on guessing. It's like, can your magical AI help us with that? I was like, you know what? Interesting task. So we built a prototype where

we started using AI to attempt to give them the recipes. He built the recipe and it worked in mice. Wow. And it's like, okay, well, it worked for the liver. Can it work for other stuff? And then we were lucky enough to meet very successful two entrepreneurs who just were part of a very large appeal of Monday after selling their previous company to Twist. So they were in the field of engineering and biology. And they were looking for the next thing. And we got introduced through an investor. They were super excited about what we're doing.

Started a company, raised money from NFX and then Andreessen Hovis more recently, almost 20 million, and started building this idea into a real product. So building a system where they predict and generate spaceships for mRNA and they have amazing results of getting to the lungs, to the spleen, to the liver, cartilage. And I'm talking about months, not years.

So things that I think the previous recipe for fats to deliver mRNAs took 20 years to discover. Here I'm talking about AI accelerating it to months with positive results with monkeys as well. So for me, this is the impressive progress of all of this field. And why did I go into that field? It's just like, we're playing with stuff. It's low stakes. We're academically interested in making this thing happen. And when it happened, it's just finding the right people to execute it

and making sure, not everything you have to do yourself. So today I'm the CEO of Diagnostic Robotics, but I'm still wanting to build more things. I have more ideas. And part of the things I do, I meet for coffee, a lot of coffees. I have even a fixed time in my calendar for coffees to think and seeing how more things can be delivered to this

world to make a difference. So you're touching a lot of things and that will translate to a lot of lives. But tell us a little bit maybe about a challenge, because again, when somebody listens to you, it just sounds so easy, Kira. And entrepreneurship is never really easy. Tell us about a situation that threw you off a little bit and say, oh my God, this is challenging. Is there something? I think, as I mentioned, as a researcher, you fill 10,000 times before you're successful. And it's always about not giving up. Maybe I'll give you a specific example from my time in Salesforce.

During that time, one of the leading companies, Salesforce, they published a challenge and they said the company was going to win it. We're going to take them as our vendor of choice, especially in my field. In our opinion, we're the best data scientists, and this was our chance. So 10 companies were selected to go to this challenge. We ran. We're really excited to hear the results, and we literally got to the last place. We were shocked. How can that be? We took a couple of days, and we found the bug in our system. Our algorithm were the best. Our engineers were the best, our engineers were the best, but we didn't process the data correctly. We had a QA problem. Once we ran it, we saw that we could have won first place. We just didn't. I think this is very depressing, especially for an

engineering team that all of our beliefs about ourselves was we're going to win because we're the best. We're the best scientists. And understanding that quality is no less important. So engineering aspects are no less important. So what we've done, we understood that we need to grow from it. So we lost that battle, but we didn't lose the war. And we started building more and more in our QI process, understanding that you just cannot win if you're not the best engineer as well, not just the best scientist. But I can tell you about those challenges all the time. It just had such a huge impact on morale. And even more than this, when we recovered from that, it had another impact. We proved ourselves that we were able to do it. And I think as a CEO, it's also the muscle that

you need to build in order to create bigger things and a bigger company, because these things are inevitable. But the question is, what is the learning that you get out of it? So what I love about it is those are the muscle that you need to build. But tell me a little bit, because again, I think as an entrepreneur, sometimes some of the biggest challenges are around money belief or fear of what if I lose everything and now I need to start from scratch? How do you deal? And again, right now you raise a lot of capital, so that creates a little bit more of a maybe breathing room or maybe not. But how do you deal with anything related to money fears and things like this that usually kill a lot of entrepreneurship endeavors? I just ask myself, what's the worst that can happen?

Seriously, what's the worst that can happen? I think entrepreneurs that fail numerous times just increase the chances of being successful the next time. There is no shame in failing. One of the most successful entrepreneurs I know failed two to three times until they built their billion of dollars for business. Just takes time. It's going to be painful at first,

but again, prove yourself in so many different fields that you're able to be resilient and just recover. So I usually try to imagine the worst. And then I see that it's not so bad, that I will manage to recover and move on and rebuild. What would you say, first of all, to people that are listening that are not Forbes 30 under 30, they might listen to this and say, well, I'm not Akira. And we didn't even talk about your childhood because you were already like karate at age, you know, whatever, five and tennis and whatever, like you were always pushing your limits.

What would you say though, to people that right now, they still don't feel like, you know what, there's more out of my life. There's more that I can achieve. I'm a fraction of who I could be. And I want to go all in. We have one life to live. Let's be unstoppable. What would you say to them? Just do it, right? Push yourself off the cliff. You'll be amazed how much successful you are after you've already jumped. Put yourself to a place where you know you have no plan B. People with no plan B eventually will find a way. You don't have any cushions to help you. Nobody's going to help you. Quit your job. Don't rely on anybody's money about that.

Define that you're just going to make this happen. And then you'll see how much a fighter you are in those situations. That's incredible, Kira. And what would you say maybe to your younger self, knowing what you know today, is there something you wish you did different or you wish you knew at the level that you are right now? I wish I could predict the future, right? That's pretty much all my research. I would say specifically in healthcare, I wish I knew the insight I just gave that it's mostly about business and not about tech. I wish I knew it takes time, everything. I think we're pretty much using our lives for immediate rewards and knowing that you

don't get immediate rewards in long-term plays like specific entrepreneurship. I wish I said yes to more things. I wish I went to more events, met more people, dedicated time to talk to more people and actually listen. Knowing that eventually to be a successful entrepreneur is luck, but also it's about a lot of hard work. And it's not only about you, it's about the people you create around you. And I think people underestimate the value of not only your team, but the advisors and just random people you meet in a coffee place. It's like, oh, I have this idea.

Did you think about that? Sometimes those ideas, most of the time, they will not be correct, right? People didn't spend too much time. But some of them are going to be transformational to your business and eventually will connect you to the right place. So it's all about spending time, not on just pushing engineering for the product forward. It's just having this peace of mind of thinking clearly and objectively about what you're doing. So many times people don't have enough time to rest.

And I'm not talking about rest. It's like thinking about something else, just dedicating time in your calendar, but saying like, this time I'm thinking and I'm thinking about something else, just dedicating time in your calendar, but saying like, this time I'm thinking and I'm thinking about differently and having topics for what you want to spend in this time. That's, I think my best advice. And I wish I'd done it before. So for me, my thinking time is hiking. I don't know, somehow I built it into my rhythm. If I sit in front of emails and bombarded with different things, I can't think. It just

doesn't work. I need to almost detach myself, go hiking. And then suddenly all these things come up for me. This is where I create all my speaking out things and all the ideas. It's incredible to see it. What is it for you, Kira? I also do sports. As I mentioned, I have usually Friday mornings, which I just spend time with myself thinking. I can do it in a hike. I can do it while reading a paper. And I have topics that I'm trying to learn and think about them every week.

You have an incredible story, Kira. And I think you're trying to change a lot of millions of lives. And it's just incredible to watch. So first of all, I's just incredible to watch. So first of all, I can't wait to have this show with you in a year or two or three and see where that is going.

But apparently we're also neighbors, so we can also do that on a hike. But Kira, this was incredible to have you on the show. Thank you so, so, so much.