AB: And I am excited to introduce our panelists. So first off, we have Cesar Herrera. He’s the CEO and co-founder of YUVO Health; and we also have Olivier Robinschlag. He is the founding partner of Chapter 3 Capital. So I would like to start off, could you both, starting with Olivier, could you give an introduction and background yourself, and then we’ll switch.

OR: Yeah, sure. Hi, Ansley. Hi, everyone. So yeah, my name is Olivier. I’m the founding partner of a VC firm called Chapter 3 Capital. Healthcare is a big focus area of mine. When it comes to my background, the first chapter of my career, I’ve spent in advertising, building brands from the ground up from a marketing perspective. So I did that for 14 years, followed by 11 years at Google, where I ran my own incubator, working with engineers on emerging new tech, and finding market fit and productizing those over time. And then as you can tell, Chapter 3 is my hopefully final chapter in my career, which is my own VC firm, where I roll up my sleeves and also take on more active roles in the companies that I support and partner with.

AB: And then how about you, Cesar?

CH: It’s a pleasure, pleasure to speak with everyone today. My name is Cesar Herrera, Co- Founder and CEO of YUVO. What YUVO is in a nutshell is we act as a risk-bearing entity for federally qualified health centers, community health centers across the US. Prior to that, and what led me to do this is I have 20 years of experience, all in healthcare, all in value-based care, actually, working, doing policy work for CMS, and then going into private sector, both on health plans and health systems. We’re really helping design integrated care delivery models, value-based care strategies to enable providers to essentially reap the value that they’re creating in the system and to align incentives appropriately. But really saw a need specifically for FQHCs to be able to participate meaningfully in that system. I myself was an FQHC patient, so I know firsthand the values associated with having access to primary care, which, quite honestly, every American, every human really deserves to have that access. So that’s really what’s driven us to do that work, and I’m really excited to speak about it.

AB: Yeah, and to kind of go off of that, so why is it so important to focus on health equity? And was that heavily in consideration when you started YUVO Health? CH: Yeah, it’s everything. So I am a strong believer that healthcare access, healthcare is an inalienable human right. It’s not only the right thing to do for humanity, it’s also the right thing to do from a productivity standpoint, from an economic standpoint, from a financial standpoint. One of the – the lack of access to care in the United States is one of the key drivers for the high cost of care in the United States, mainly because people should not be using the ER for primary care. And unfortunately, if there is a lack of access to primary care, then individuals have no choice but to either delay care or go to the ER, which is not the best care setting for primary care. So that’s really what drove a lot of the work, which was informed by many of our lived experiences on the founding team, including my own, to start YUVO mainly to uplift and scale the existing providers, which are predominantly federally qualified health centers or community health centers across the country who currently serve 33 million people, but know that there are another 20 million people across the US that need access to primary care that don’t have access to an FQ. And if you were to ask any federally qualified health center why that is, it’s not because they don’t want to serve more people, it’s because they don’t have enough capacity to do so. And that’s because they don’t have the access to the resources and the other revenue streams that private practice physicians, health systems have access to. That’s not equitable. So, our platform was built so that we give Fqs that equal access to that additional revenue that every other provider has access to, so that they can scale their services to close that gap.

AB: Yeah, absolutely. No, that’s – definitely, I can see where YUVO Health is literally rooted in health equity there. And then in terms of real world experiences and with health equity, Olivier, could you have any real world experiences that you could talk about within your career that is kind of directly related to health equity?

OR: Yeah, sure. So I think my first exposure to health equity was about probably 8 years ago when I was at Google and it was actually a partnership project with the International Rescue Committee, specifically centered around Somalia, and the lack of access that the population in Somalia has to very general medical and healthcare services, including access to the flu shot. As it turns out, back then, one out of five children under the age of three was dying because of a vaccine preventative disease. And in this case, the flu shot, they just can’t get the flu shot. And it turns out one of the major reasons beyond the lack of the internet and civil war was that people in Somalia or the majority of people don’t have a physical mailing address. And if you don’t have a physical mailing address, how is the IRC supposed to track who has gotten the vaccine, who doesn’t, the migration pattern, it’s very complicated. So with Google technology that eventually we ended up productizing called Pass Codes, we found a way to basically turn latitude, longitude coordinates into six digit zip codes. And we were managing to port those zip codes into the digital medical health records of the majority of the population in Somalia. And as it turns out, within a 6-week period, we gave about 10,000 kids a vaccine because of a piece of technology. So that’s the first time I realized like the importance of equity in the healthcare space. And that changed, to be honest, the perception of the rest of my career, to be honest. So yeah, that was the first time I had exposure to that.

AB: And so taking your perspective on health equity in regards to hiring and managing teams, how do you make sure that you keep that balance and focus on being equitable when building teams?

OR: Yeah, so I’ve been working with startups for many years now, even on the side, but now that I have my own company, I realized that over the years, I saw a lot of amazing engineers, amazing business people have amazing ideas, which to me represents the what that startup is doing. But what I came to conclusion as well, that’s at least as important as the what is the how. How do you do your business and how do you manage people and how do you hire? And to be honest, the majority of the companies that failed is because the how wasn’t very good. I’m a strong believer of building bridges between people, between departments, removing operational silos, feeling – being vulnerable, if you don’t know the answer to a problem, just being honest about it, modelling humility between people and with clients. And I think if all those right components fall into place, I think that’s the best foundation to deliver the impossible which in essence, everyone in the startup world is trying to do. So yeah, I believe in the how and the people skills as being just as important as the groundbreaking idea of technology that you’re in the process of building.

AB: Yeah, no, absolutely. And also, kind of turning that question to you, Cezar. So can you talk about the importance of increasing equity in the work build by hiring a diverse team with unique perspectives? Is there a way that you can make sure that everyone is heard during that process?

CH: Sure, I think there’s a couple of things there. First, it is baked into our ethos, right, where representation matters, our lived experience matters. And we believe wholeheartedly because we have that sentiment that you can’t build, it’s difficult to build if you don’t have an understanding of the communities that are served through your own lived experience and it’s just, and it creates so much more trust in the communities that we serve, that we look like them. 85% of our team is BIPOC and women, 80% of our leadership team is BIPOC and women, our entire founding team is BIPOC and women. It was baked into our ethos because – and quite frankly, it’s also – that’s the reason why we built what we built, because we recognize that so few people were actually wanting to serve these communities because they had all these incorrect preconceived notions of what it meant to serve low-income individuals and communities. So with that, then means understanding that it’s not simply just bringing people in with diverse backgrounds into an organization and then just letting them have at it without structure or support. It is also figuring out how do you create a system that enables psychological safety, enables collaboration and celebrates the differences and opinions and life experience across the team. And that’s really what we do as an organization, but I would say it’s because it’s incredibly intentional. Like, we put a lot of effort and thought into how do we make sure that folks with diverse opinions and diverse backgrounds can be celebrated and supported in that way. And that’s baked through, not just in terms of our HR policies and procedures, but also in how our teams communicate our values and it’s baked into essentially every single meeting that we operate.

AB: No, that’s really great statements there in terms of just being able to embrace and listen and what you founded YUVO Health on is inspiring and great. And thank you both so much for sharing your insights on health equity and kind of the what, the how and how we can help implement this more into the future practices and into the startup world especially. So, thank you both so much for your time and I really appreciate you coming on to speak with us.

OR: Okay, great.

CH: Thanks everyone.

OR: Bye