The Heart of Business
"The Heart of Business" podcast, hosted by Mo Fathelbab, is an authentic and insightful exploration of the human side of leadership and professional growth. Through candid conversations with accomplished business leaders, thought leaders, and peer group facilitators, Mo will delve deep into the personal journeys, challenges, and triumphs that have shaped their careers. Mo Fathelbab's skillful and empathetic approach creates a safe space for guests to share their truths and vulnerabilities, revealing the emotional and often unseen dimensions of success in the corporate world. Each episode offers listeners a chance to glean practical wisdom, heartfelt advice, and a profound understanding of the intricate interplay between leadership, authenticity, and personal growth.
The "Heart of Business" is the official podcast of International Facilitators Organization, LLC and hosted by IFO's founder and CEO, Mo Fathelbab. To learn more, please visit www.internationalfacilitatorsorganization.com.
The Heart of Business
AI Ventures and Personal Growth with Rana El Kaliouby
Join us, as we explore the incredible journey of Rana El Kaliouby, PhD, a trailblazing Egyptian-American entrepreneur and co-founder of BlueTip Ventures. Discover how her time at MIT's Media Lab ignited her passion for entrepreneurship, leading to the creation of Affectiva, a leader in emotion AI technology. Rana shares her candid experiences, from humorous financial jargon misunderstandings to her transformative work in using emotion AI for autism support, mental health diagnostics, and enhancing automotive safety. Her story is a testament to the power of blending emotional intelligence with technology to create meaningful human-centered innovations.
Transitioning to leadership wasn't without its hurdles for Rana, and we delve into the internal struggles entrepreneurs often face, such as overcoming self-doubt. She provides insights into how mentorship and a shift in mindset helped her navigate these challenges, paving the way for the creation of a venture fund dedicated to human-centric AI. Our discussion highlights the dual nature of AI, emphasizing its potential to solve global issues and the responsibility of using it ethically. We stress the importance of raising AI literacy to ensure a safe and promising future.
We also shine a light on pioneering companies like Happy Pillar and SynthPop, which are redefining healthcare with AI innovations. Happy Pillar uses AI to support mental health for families, while SynthPop revolutionizes healthcare operations with automated insurance processes. As we look to the future, the potential of AI agents as collaborative partners comes into focus. I share personal anecdotes, including my mother's influence as a pioneering computer programmer, and offer advice to aspiring AI entrepreneurs on building a competitive edge and investing in self-care. Don't miss the chance to connect with Rana and tune into "Pioneers of AI" for more groundbreaking insights.
Please visit www.internationalfacilitatorsorganization.com to learn more about Mo Fathelbab and International Facilitators Organization (IFO), a leading provider of facilitators and related group facilitation services, providing training, certification, marketing services, education, and community for peer group facilitators at all stages of their career.
Welcome to the Heart of Business podcast sponsored by International Facilitators Organization. I'm your host, Mo Fatalbab. Today, our guest is Rana Iqal-Yubi, PhD and co-founder and general partner at BlueTip Ventures. Welcome, Rana.
Speaker 2:Thank you for having me Mo Good to see you again.
Speaker 1:Great to see you and great to have you with us. I've been wanting to tell your story from the day we met.
Speaker 2:I'm glad we're doing it. I'm excited.
Speaker 1:Thank you. So I'd love to start with your career journey. You're a serial entrepreneur. You've had some great successes. Maybe tell us a bit about that so the audience can get to know you professionally a little bit.
Speaker 2:Yeah, well, we share one thing we're both Egyptian-American. I grew up in Egypt and around the Middle East, studied computer science as an undergraduate, did my PhD at Cambridge University and I was really like taking the academic track that was the vision or the goal really Ended up at MIT as a postdoc and caught the entrepreneurial bug. So within a couple of years at MIT, I started my company, affectiva. We were on this mission to build artificial emotional intelligence like basically building emotion AI, getting our computers to recognize our emotional states and there's a whole range of applications, everything from helping autistic kids to making our cars safer. Anyway, I ended up selling the company three years ago now, which was just crazy. It feels in a way, it feels like yesterday, but it also feels like it's been a long time, and I've been spending my time investing in AI startups and helping founders on their journeys you know, building AI companies.
Speaker 1:Amazing, amazing. So what gave you the inspiration to be an entrepreneur in the first place?
Speaker 2:You know, honestly, it was not at all on my radar. I, you know, I grew up in a family where, you know, nobody in my family is an entrepreneur, so it wasn't really at all something I thought about when I got to MIT. I remember this one meeting in December of 2008. We were getting so much interest in the technology. Like, basically, I was at the MIT Media Lab and we had like a lot of the Fortune 500s were sponsors of the lab and twice a year they would come to this big event and we would show the technology. It was demo or die. You had to like show the actual technology in action. And after that they kind of wanted to use and buy the technology.
Speaker 2:And so this MIT professor I worked with Professor Rosalind Picard and myself we scheduled a meeting with the media lab director at the time at MIT and we were like we need some more PhD students because all these companies want our technology. And he sat back and he was like that is not a research challenge, that's a commercialization opportunity. You guys ought to start a company. And my knee-jerk reaction was wait a second, I'm about to apply to become faculty at MIT. What are you talking about? But then I thought about it and for me it was this amazing opportunity to bring something I care deeply about and scale it to the rest of the world. And yeah, that was the impetus for spinning out of MIT and kind of leaving my academic hat behind and becoming a CEO. And it wasn't easy, you know it was. It was not an easy journey, for sure.
Speaker 1:But you raised money or did you bootstrap it? Tell us how you actually got started.
Speaker 2:Yeah, roz and I put a little bit of our personal money in, but we basically were venture backed. At some point we had Kleiner Perkins and Mary Meeker was on our board. But can I share a story? Okay, so our very first, like very early on, we were being you know, my background is I'm a computer scientist, right, and so this was my first foray into business. And one of the investors who was courting us sent us an email like just a one-liner, and he said send me your BS. And I literally sat there and I was like I have no idea what he's talking about. The only BS I know you can't package in an email. And so we went to our board of advisors MIT is really good with that Like they assign you a board of, like, serial entrepreneurs and like really you know, domain experts. And I was like what the heck is a BS? And it's, of course, a balance sheet. But that was the, that was the learning curve I was on.
Speaker 1:Beautiful, beautiful. And then you said it was something you deeply cared about. So what you deeply cared about, was it the technology or was it the audiences that you helped? You named people with disabilities and something else.
Speaker 2:Yeah, the automotive industry. Well, this is still true today, which is kind of wild. When we first started in this space. A lot of the emphasis on technology, and AI in particular, is on what I call the IQ of the technology, the cognitive intelligence, like how smart it is, right, but nobody's really thinking about the emotional and social abilities of these technologies, which is so important because we're you know, we're using them as AI coaches and AI friends and you know we're deferring to a lot of decision-making to these tools, but we're not thinking about, we're not taking a human centered approach to think about it. So my vision is marrying IQ and EQ and AI, like bringing emotional intelligence to AI. So that's kind of one piece of it and I'm still very passionate about that.
Speaker 2:But the audiences to your point too, we did, we still. You know there's a company we're partnered with called Brainpower and they focus on bringing this technology to individuals on the autism spectrum. There's a lot of mental health use cases of this technology. I'm on a board of a company called Vedera Health and they have this video app and through an interview with a person, they can detect telltale signs of depression, anxiety, even suicidal intent, and then, of course, the automotive use case. So if you're driving a car and you're distracted while driving or you're kind of falling asleep because you're jet lagged, the car can detect that and intervene. So lots of applications.
Speaker 1:That is amazing. So you sold the first company and now you are invested in 50 different AI startups. Is that correct?
Speaker 2:That is correct. So when I exited Affectiva and it was hard, you know a lot of my personal identity was tied to the company. So, honestly, the first, I'd say, eight months were were kind of I was going through an identity crisis like who I if I'm not the CEO of Affectiva, but I'm very passionate about innovation in the AI space, and this was 20, you know, 2021, 2022. So it was right when ChatGPT launched and it sparked this. I've been doing AI for many, many years but obviously this was like a kind of a tipping point. So, yeah, I was investing in all these AI companies, supporting these AI founders on their journeys. A lot of them are first time founders. Many of them are spinning out of academia, like I did, and so bringing empathy yeah, empathy and shared it. I mean, we're both members of the YPO, like Young Presidents Organization, and you know you're taught never to give advice but to share your experience, which I found to be valuable.
Speaker 1:Yeah, well, let's talk about that for a minute. So clearly you have joined a forum that we also know is a peer group, and I'm wondering if you can just tell us a bit about how it has benefited you.
Speaker 2:Oh my God. Well, my first forum meeting was April of 2021. No, april of 2020. That was COVID year.
Speaker 2:Yeah, covid had just hit and we were about to lay off. We were about to do a layoff and I remember thinking I'm going to hop on a call with a virtual call because nobody was meeting in person with all these strangers and I'm going to talk about our layoff, like how's that possible? And, as you know, ypo scales trust like no other organization and within the first 30 minutes, we were all talking very intimately about challenges, professionally and personally, and I just got a lot of support through, you know, through these early days, but also through my exit, because some of my other forum members had gone through an exit themselves and they were able to share their experiences and help me honestly manage my mental state through it all. So that was really helpful. And then, finally, I launched a new YPO chapter last year.
Speaker 2:Ypo Boston very much focused on tech innovation in the Boston area and a lot of like VC backed entrepreneurs. And just this past week we had our. You know, we're a small chapter, we're about 30 people, so we have only a couple of forums in the chapter and I was sitting in our forum meeting and one of our members who's very new to IPO and just extremely stressed out and just maxed out in general and he just he had this sigh of relief and he was like this is the only space I can talk about any of this stuff and he kind of expressed his gratitude and I was like yes, this is why I started a new chapter.
Speaker 2:We need more people to be in YPO.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, I love that Wonderful. Go ahead please.
Speaker 2:I was going to ask you because you've been in YPO for a long, long time and you've brought this trust and vulnerability to a lot of spaces in YPO as well, right?
Speaker 1:Well, yeah, I mean, listen, I joined my forum in 1991. It was an EO forum and we're still together. That's amazing, oh my God. They've just been incredible people and it's been nothing short of life-changing. As you know, ypo has been a client since 1999. I've been doing forum work since 1999. It's been quite quite a journey and amazing people and lots of great places. It's just been, but it's been. You know, it's food for the soul more than anything. I mean it's just gratifying to meet people in this very intimate space. It's a gift.
Speaker 1:Yeah, absolutely so. Knowing the journey of an entrepreneur, I know that it's not just up and up and meteoric all the way through. There are lots of pitfalls and challenges, and so I'd be curious if you'd be able to share one or two of your difficult moments and how you overcame them.
Speaker 2:Oh yeah, well, I remember. Yeah, there's definitely a lot, but just to but. But. But just to highlight a few. Um, so when we started the company, one of our first investors said you know, you need to hire a seasoned CEO to, to, to run the company. And so my role was CTO and we hired, you know, this guy who ran the company for a number of years and then he decided to leave. So the board were like, okay, who's going to be the next CEO? We think it should be Rana. It's her technology.
Speaker 2:And I remember going back home and thinking I'm too scared. I've never been CEO before, I don't want to fail. So I came back the next day and told the board I can't do it Now. Our head of sales at the time, who had also never been CEO and he had only been at the company for just over a year, he was like I'll be the CEO. So he took the job and fast forward.
Speaker 2:You know, a couple of years I was giving a TED talk and flying back and on what plain Wi-Fi. I was like I wonder what is the actual role of a CEO? And I Googled it and I started building a bulleted list and as I was typing it out, I realized I was doing the job. So I went back to him and you know we had a conversation. We took it to the board.
Speaker 2:It was a unanimous vote to bring me in as CEO with me because in a way, I was my own biggest obstacle. And the minute I was able to change my mindset and believe that I can do it and actually with the help of a few of my mentors right, they helped me actually visualize the they were like, okay, imagine you're the CEO walking into the office, like what would you do or what would you say, right, and it and it, it made it, it made it more real, yeah. And so I always just remember this story that I can be my own biggest Debbie Downer. And founders can be not just founders really, but sometimes we can be really tough on ourselves and kind of unkind. So I try to remember that as I embark on new adventures.
Speaker 1:You know, I still relate to that. I think that you know, for me it's about am I doing my best, what else can I do, what else should I do, you know, and and so it's never enough in a sense. Yeah, yeah, west on yesterday's success. Well, what about the rest of my life?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think about that a lot because I'm starting a new venture fund and I'm so excited about it, like I really believe in the, in the, in the mission that we're on to bring, build these, basically make human centric AI the gold standard for building AI companies. But it's a new endeavor and you know I'm raising money for the fund and some investors say yes. And you know I'm raising money for the fund and some investors say yes and you know, like Reid Hoffman, but some say no. And man, it's tough, you know, the minute somebody says no, it just like this conversation in my head starts like oh yeah, of course, like you're never going to do this, you can't do this, you shouldn't do this.
Speaker 1:I think it's an important mission. Let's talk more about that. So, human-centric AI I think I know what it means, but I want to hear it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, well, so we're in this unprecedented time of AI innovation, and we all, I guess, recognize that AI is offering or presenting this massive economic opportunity.
Speaker 2:But what I also and it's an and right it's offering this massive economic opportunity and the potential to tackle some of humanity's biggest challenges. And so that's the intersection that I'm really focused on, like, how can we back AI startups that are building AI that's in service of humanity, that's helping augment our abilities, not replace us, not take over the world, right, and so for us, that means AI that's good for you, good for the planet, is ethical. We're very interested in how can we harness AI for increased health span, for health and wellness and democratizing access to health, for democratizing access to education as I said, I come from a part of the world where not everybody has access to the education I had, but I think AI can really change that and, of course, sustainable living how can we use AI to reimagine food systems, to mitigate climate events, to build AI governance and responsible AI? Yeah, so I believe you can. You know you can do good and do well, and that's what our fund is focused on.
Speaker 1:I love that. What do you say to the people that are afraid of AI, that are afraid AI is going to take over and is going to run our lives and take us into oblivion?
Speaker 2:You know I like to say that I am an optimistic pragmatist. So I do recognize I'm not one of these people who just doesn't see the downsides of AI. I do think it is dangerous and we've already seen, like you know, implications of AI hallucination and disinformation and deep fakes, even in this election cycle in the United States. There's definitely nefarious uses of AI and but we choose to build these AI tools don't just happen. There are humans, pioneers of AI, and we try to highlight some of the amazing use cases and potential. But also we talk very openly about the dangers of AI and how do you guard against them.
Speaker 2:As a consumer, what should you? Well, both as a consumer, but also maybe as a business owner who's bringing in these technologies, what questions should you be asking? If you're going to use a new tool, how do you poke holes at it to make sure that it's that it's safe for our kids? You know, as a parent, like, how do I make sure my kids are both ai literate but are do are using it safely? So there's there's so many, there's so many questions, yeah, to be asking.
Speaker 1:Yeah so let's talk about the companies, your portfolio companies. Of those companies, tell us a couple that you're super excited about, that are offering something that most of us maybe haven't heard of.
Speaker 2:Oh, let me see, it's hard to you know your portfolio companies are like your kids, so you don't have favorites, yeah. But I'll highlight a few. One is called Happy Pillar and they do mental. They use conversational AI for mental health support for families. So imagine it's basically a five minute play therapy session between a parent and a kid and your phone is sitting there listening into the conversation and then coaching the parent on how to praise their kids, how to be a better listener.
Speaker 2:Sometimes a lot of us parents are distracted when our kids are like. My son always calls me out on that. He's like mom, you're not even listening, yeah, you're texting or you're not paying attention, you're not present. And so the app will kind of give feedback to the parents so that they are, yeah, that they're more present and and and yeah, more health, like a more healthy relationship with their kids. So that's one.
Speaker 2:I love what they're doing. They're again democratizing access to mental healthcare, which not everybody has access to an amazing clinician or a play therapist and whatnot. So I love what they're doing. Another one is called SynthPop, also in the healthcare space, but they're like in the back office of healthcare operations, so they have voice AI agents and the agent is actually the CEO's voice. So they trained a clone that cloned his voice, basically, and this AI agent will call, like Blue Cross, blue Shield, to figure out what kind of insurance you're eligible for as a patient, and it's all automated. So they're kind of really increasing the efficiency of these healthcare practices and hospitals, so I'm excited about that too.
Speaker 1:I love it. What about looking ahead? What kinds of things do you think AI is going to help us do that we can't even imagine at this very moment. I see you as looking into the crystal ball that none of us have.
Speaker 2:I really do think of AI as an intelligence co-partner or a thought partner, and we've already seen that with a lot of the chatbots. But it's going to be more powerful when we move from chatbots to agents, so agents that can do stuff on your behalf, like imagine if I can delegate to my agent to, like, make a medical appointment for me and my family, or you know right right?
Speaker 1:Yes, go to the DMV for me, cause it's so slow.
Speaker 2:Exactly and I think we'll get to that fairly soon Like this idea of partnering with a number of AI agents. I don't think it's. I think it's going to be a team of AI agents that can act on your behalf, and I think that at the consumer level, that can be quite powerful, but also at the enterprise level, that's going to be powerful as well.
Speaker 1:Amazing, amazing, amazing. All right, so Rana favorite book.
Speaker 2:Oh, Atomic Habits.
Speaker 1:Atomic Habits is a good one. Yeah, do you do habit?
Speaker 2:stacking. Oh, atomic Habits, atomic Habits is a good one.
Speaker 1:Yeah, do you do habit stacking.
Speaker 2:We do. I say we because my son and I love this book. He's 15 and we've read it together. We've gifted it to many, many people. I think the biggest takeaway actually I have from this book is your environment really matters, right, Like if you, if we used to have cookies in our kitchen, kind of you know island just hanging there, and now we have like healthier, healthier fruits, you know, healthier snacks.
Speaker 2:So um, yeah, so anyway, I think a lot about what environment and what systems do you put in place that are conducive to building and keeping healthy habits?
Speaker 1:Love it. Um, who is one person who's had a big impact on you, and how?
Speaker 2:I think it's my mom. Honestly, she was one of the first computer programmers in the Middle East, in Cairo. Actually, that's how she met my dad, because he taught her COBOL, which is this obsolete programming language, and she was a working woman. You know most of her career and but I also. She always told us I have two younger sisters and she really prioritized our education and she always said you guys can, you know, you girls can do anything you want. And she really like solidified that message in our brains and with unconditional love and I try to always remember that as I parent my kids.
Speaker 1:Yeah, love it. What advice would you give to an AI entrepreneur starting up the first AI company? Ooh.
Speaker 2:There's like can I do two?
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:One is very pragmatic Make sure you have a competitive moat and think a few steps ahead. Right, you don't want to build something that ChatGPT or OpenAI is going to release, you know, next year. Like you want to. Like, look ahead and make sure you have this competitive mode. Often it's in your data, so really invest in having a unique data set that you can access and then just generally like as a founder, it's going to be an emotional roller coaster. So invest, invest in your self-care and and kind of believe in yourself. Like, don't listen to that Debbie Downer voice that that I have, that's in your head.
Speaker 1:I love it. I love it. And, lastly and most importantly, if somebody wants to find you to invest in your new venture, tell us how they should look for you.
Speaker 2:Oh, I love that. Well, email me at rana at blue tulip dot VC. But also I am available on social media. I try to get back to people on LinkedIn and other platforms and DMs, but also subscribe to my podcast, pioneers of AI, and let me know who you'd want me to interview. And also I'm very open to feedback.
Speaker 1:Love it, love it, love it. Rana, thank you so much for being with us. It was a pleasure speaking with you and I know that many people will learn much from this show. You can follow the Heart of Business podcast wherever you get your podcasts. Also, please remember that your reviews have a real impact on the podcast visibility, so if you enjoyed today's episode, please give us a review. Thank you for watching and have a wonderful day.
