Saving Lives with Time to Market

Full Podcast Transcript:

Sloan Foster:
Hello everybody. Welcome to the first edition of Calavista Conversations. I'm Sloan Foster, CMO at Calavista and today we have a friend of mine, Jeanne Teshler in our studio, who has a young tech company focused on healthcare. We've known each other for quite a while and [I’m] excited to hear what her new adventure is today. So, Jeanne, welcome and why don't you tell me a little bit about yourself?

Jeanne Teshler:
Well, thanks, Sloan. It's good to see you again and be in the studio with you. I sure appreciate this time. My name is Jeanne Teshler, I’m the CEO of a young tech company called Wellsmith. Just for a little bit of a background before we get into what we're doing here. My husband and I are the founding partners of Wellsmith, and he and I have been in business together for as long as we've been married, so a good quarter of a century now. We have worked in a variety of different businesses, always entrepreneurial in how we do things. But we've run many companies, starting with, you know, production and catalog design, we've gone into creative services. We've done a lot of work in consulting. And over the course of the last 25 years or so, we've worked in a lot of fields including consumer product goods, technology, and healthcare.

Jeanne Teshler:
So our lifespan is working through the intersection of those and how to actually create great consumer experiences for all of our customers and all of our clients. And over time we've looked at problems and we've tried to figure out the most creative and the most consumer-centric way to solve them. So that's kind of the impetus for where we sit today. And what's interesting about what we're doing now is, Wellsith, sits at this interesting intersection of consumer behavior, technology and healthcare in such a way that it's bringing new light into how we solve what we see as personally as a problem in this country. And that is the growing amount of unhealthy people there are, if you look around, the statistics at the CDC saying that within the next 10 years, we're going to hit about a 50 percent obesity rate in the United States and we're going to see a lot more chronic conditions like diabetes, like heart failure and heart disease like COPD, which you know, is from smoking generally, but also has a lot of, a lot of basis in unhealthy behaviors in addition to smoking. So what we looked at is, as you know, personally, my family is full of, of bad health behaviors. There's nothing but heart disease and diabetes in my family, no matter how far I look.

Sloan Foster:
I think all of us probably have a little bit of that.

Jeanne Teshler:
That's true. And as we start looking at this, what fascinated me from a personal standpoint is having worked in all these different industries and the consumer product side, I'm in the technology side and in the healthcare side, we started to see over the last 10 years, in particular, all these little interesting bits and pieces of people trying to move the needle on health and what was missing is a way to bring all those pieces together. So that became a standing passion of ours is to figure out how to solve healthcare problems in new and interesting ways, and that’s where we came up with the idea of Wellsmith.

Sloan Foster:
The intersection of all those different elements and saw the intersection coming together at this point in time where it's needed and not any one company was solving the problem effectively, I'm sure.

Jeanne Teshler:
Correct. Correct.

Sloan Foster:
Well great, so where are you, what led you, I assume this is what led you to this idea is seen and what made you decide that now was the time to start a company? And time was of the essence?

Jea