ScreamingBox Technology & Business Rundown

Interview of Benten Technologies - Guest: Tony Ma Co-Founder

Introduction:
Welcome to the ScreamingBox interview series with Iman Kaur and guest, Tony Ma.

Iman Kaur:
Welcome to ScreamingBox. My name is Iman. We are here discussing technology and business with Tony Ma. Hi Tony, how are you?

Tony Ma:
Good, thanks for having me on.

Iman Kaur:
Tony, tell us about yourself.

Tony Ma:
Okay, I am Tony Ma. I am a co-founder of Benton technologies. Benton technologies is what you might call a social impact company. We have a product that we're building a platform of digital therapeutic products. So, from that perspective, our mission is to democratize healthcare and address health disparities. We have what's called a big hairy audacious goal or BHAG or big, hairy audacious goal is to affect a billion lives and so from that perspective If you know the US Census, there isn't a billion people. So for us that means global health and affecting a billion people and so we do that based on three pillars. We believe that if we leverage three things, the three pillars that define us: time, technology and education. Then we can democratize healthcare and address health disparities. That's what drives us. I also am a recovering management consultant. The first half of my career, I basically did a lot of consulting. First in commercials, then federal then to state; that's why I say I'm recovering with a lot of background there. Now I'm in my second half of my career, I might look young as some agents do but getting really close to the big Five-O. It’s getting a little scary but I would say I feel like I'm forever 21 but my body's definitely breaking down. I’m possibly wearing reading glasses soon, but I'm excited to be part and share my experience or answer questions as part of this.

Iman Kaur:
Okay, so how did you transition? You were consulting and now you started this completely new thing with healthcare. How did you come up with this idea from consulting?

Tony Ma:
I have always been an entrepreneur ever since I was even a little kid. From mowing the lawn to you know, liberal, a bunch of different little side projects, little kids, I remember being in sixth grade and selling stealing packets of noodles from my parents and then going to school because kids liked those noodles and so I would resell them for “quote-unquote” a profit. But, I would sell them for like 50 cents. So I was always entrepreneurial minded. And so once I graduated from school, I went into management consulting and shortly after doing some stint in some other areas, including some startups, so prior to going into management consulting, I actually worked in the.com. So I started my career in the mid-1990s, which was when the.com era happened so I had a rocket ship trajectory and transitioned quickly from working for an internet company that helped form the backbone for the internet. I worked for a company called Unet and the new net basically built the backbone for the internet as it is today. A lot out of Ashburn, Virginia that was started there. I don't know if you know the history of Unet but basically it was acquired ultimately by WorldCom MCI and added the Bernie ever story and for those that are familiar, and crash and burn, so, I had a rocket ship career. The first four years of my career, my salary would double every year for the first four years, and I had a close to a million dollar stock portfolio thought I was going to retire at 40. A lot of different things and then continued that career in management consulting, where I traveled the globe, all the way to Singapore, Taiwan, California. So it was a jet setting life for a while doing a lot of management consulting to C suite, top-level executives, people, VIP CIOs at various companies, strategy projects that were like, anywhere from like $10 million to $250 million doing their strategy and some of their integration pieces. And then I guess, after a while, you know, making projects successful, but then feeling, I guess, jaded, and I guess not really fulfilled. At first, it was fun. I mean, the challenge of it, as always, this is novel and trying to be successful and executing had success in those areas where it was successful to help various VP CIOs deliver projects successfully, sometimes, changing this strategy because where they were going was going to be a dead end. So really supporting them. And so but after a while, what ended up happening is, you get jaded and you're like, what am I using my superpowers for and, and not being fulfilled? So probably about a decade ago, we pivoted 12 1012 years; I pivoted the company, really, around that time I met, my wife had my first child and said, I want to leave, do I guess the second act of my career is slightly different? And so that's kind of where that pivot hasn't happened.

Iman Kaur:
Great! You said that it's a social impact company? So, could you explain it to us? How do you save? What is it that made you come up with that? Do you know the social impact of it?

Tony Ma:
So I think throughout my career, and I guess, different parts of my life, I'm always affected by different things, even like, for example, I remember before even starting my career; I was I used to sell books at as my, my, I guess, freshman year in college, I went door to door to sell books for a company called Southwestern company. And so what ended up happening there is it was pretty interesting because they were selling books to low income neighborhoods. I was selling into a neighborhood near Van Nuys, which was really rundown. It was pretty bad, some neighborhoods that I would go into. I remember one neighborhood in which I went knocking on doors. There were little black spots on the houses and I thought, “what are those black spots in the houses?” Someone would tell me, “there was a drive-by shooting two weeks prior. So. So from there, the neighborhood really had that. And it was mostly Hispanic neighborhoods. I went door to door selling books. And I remember one time meeting a gentleman at one house. He saw what I was doing. Of course, you don't throw gang signs and stuff like that. So I went and talked to him. And I sat down and shared some books. He didn't let me in the house. So we sat on the sidewalk. So I said, I'm selling books and stuff like that. And he said, Oh, those are very interesting. I would love to buy it. Why don't you come back at the end of the summer? And I might buy them from you. I said, Sure. You know, of course, as a sales associate, you're out. You never really say no to any sales. But of course a little of his backstory is they had released him from prison two weeks prior. Right? From that perspective, I guess the imprint on me was that he still wanted something more for his kids. That's one of my pillars, like education. So I went back at the end of the summer, but of course he wasn't there. Again, that left an impression on me. Some people may be born with a silver spoon and others might not have the right circumstances, but they all want the best for their children. So from that perspective, that was one of those points. There were other indelible moments. This is just one example of that. I've always wanted to help people. Having traveled around the world where you see the have nots brings me to my origin story. I was born in a third world country in Vietnam during the Vietnam War. I know what it is to not have. When I came here, I had all this success, and realized it wasn't fulfilling. This made me want to find out how I can use my suit. So that was the genesis of the social impact. What does social impact mean? Social Impact means being able to leverage my superpowers in the business world to have a great impact. At the time that I was, I actually looked into starting a nonprofit. But I guess, weighing that out, one thing I realized is a lot of nonprofits and not that it is not important, but there are a lot of nonprofits doing a lot of monumental work. Okay, what does nonprofit mean? You create an organization, you run the organization, and then you're just putting your hand out to receive funds from people. That's always self sustaining, right? Sometimes, in those types of nonprofits, it exists. I'm not saying that it's their intention but, they exist to solve a problem. Sometimes it almost enables that problem. Whereas, from my perspective; a decade ago, I said, okay, what about creating a for profit company that is mission driven. Back then, before the term social impact existed, I wondered, can we create a sustainable company that makes enough money without greed? I think nowadays, you hear terms like conscious capitalism and social impact. So that's what a social impact company is. To me something a company that is for profit, has organizations such as public benefit corporations I believe that started out like California, and you have B Corp certified companies. We are actually getting our B Corp certification. We want to have an impact and want to be measured by the impact. So that's in your charter, that's in everything that you do. It's about conscious capitalism. You need money to sustain and you want to create a stable company. You also want to support the people and you have that mission. But it's not about the fundraising anymore. It's about creating a sustainable company that supports the economy; it's not about greed. Recently, there are so many stories about greed and overpowering. I have a son that has peanut allergies. I don't know if you remember this, but two years ago, the price of the Epipen doubled. Nothing changed in the formulation. Somebody bought them and then they increased the price by double. It's not okay to be greedy. Does that make sense?

Iman Kaur:
That makes sense. I was thinking, okay, I'm 28 right now. When you think about being an entrepreneur, you consider a lot of options, because healthcare itself has a lot of competition. There are a lot of things people are proposing. There’re established companies already there. You were selling, but you basically had experience with a lot of other companies and other categories. How did you decide to go with healthcare instead of considering something else?

Tony Ma:
I think little experiences leave an impression on you. So around 2004 - 2005, I shifted from management consulting for commercial entities to management consulting for the federal government. One contract we got was to help launch a portal. It was a health care portal. This is early days for the Veterans Administration called My Healthevet. We were successful in launching the platform, and I believe the entire team worked together to get from zero to 800,000 veteran users within one year of the start. There are different veterans that supported and tested it and it looked very positive. There was definitely a need. However, what you saw on the back end was how broken the system was. Shortly thereafter, there were a lot of scandals around the VA, and even to this day, every once in a while, you hear about scandals and other things. I know people are trying to do their best, but it's a broken system, right? That helped me say, working from the inside out doesn't always work. So how about the outside looking in or looking at an innovative solution? That was another Genesis, another turning point for why I focused on healthcare. Prior to that was internet telecommunications, billing, CRM, that was my focus. After seeing the brokenness in the system, how can I focus? I went back and did a little more management consulting overseas and had an opportunity in Taiwan. There was another thing that triggered the brokenness in the healthcare system. As a management consultant, I had one of the best health care plans. I remember this story; you're traveling, going to work in Taiwan. So you better get the hep B or Hep C vaccine. I had Blue Shield Blue Cross, one of the top premier insurers. I went to my primary care doctor and had to pay a $30 copay. They didn't have the vaccine there. My doctor said, get it from CVS; I’ll write the prescription, you pick it up. So I went over there, picked it up, and another $30 copay. Then I came back to him, I said, I’m back with the vaccine. The office says, since you left the office, it's considered a second visit and another copay. So, it was $90 to get one shot. Since there was an urgent need for me to be over in Taiwan, I had to get it, it's a three shot regimen, so I went over there and got my next shot. Then they follow up a month later. I was going to be there for a couple of months and really enjoyed traveling and exploring. Taiwan has their own healthcare system. My insurance was no good there. I had to have the remaining two shots. I had no insurance, but through their public healthcare, I didn't have to pay anything. So that left an indelible mark on me. I'm paying hundreds of dollars every month; there's something broken about our healthcare system. There's people who can point to several things. That's why this took me back to my pillar. How do you leverage time, technology and education to democratize healthcare? You want to lower the cost; you want to look at the bending of this curve that has happened over time, because right now, the cost continues to skyrocket. Even as a business owner, every year you're paying more and more into the health care system, and that's somebody that can afford that. Then you have people that can't, the people that are on Medicaid or Medicare. So there are a lot of unique challenges. We need a solution to help drive down the costs. I want to be part of that. That's why I say time, technology and education because I think you can drive down costs, you can drive down components if you do some automation once you code a robot that does AI and detects something, hopefully the cost goes down; if that company is not greedy, right? Therefore, I want to be part of that solution. My goal before I leave this world and die is to have had an impact.

Iman Kaur:
That makes much more sense of how you came into healthcare because that was I was wondering, how did he delve into healthcare? What technologies are you using? I understand the services you talk about. How do you want to make it better?

Tony Ma:
It's saving energy, so that's a good thing. I've always been a lifelong learner and always reinventing myself. I tell my co-founder, Katie; we get to pinch ourselves and wake up every day working with some of the top minds in not only the country, but in the world. The technology that we're looking at includes artificial intelligence and machine learning, which goes back to my roots, because a lot of it was telecommunication systems. So I want to leverage that, whether it's mobile devices, landlines or IVR systems; the list goes on. That's my background. I have a master's degree in telecommunications and computer networking. I got my master's degree in a local university here called GW. And from there, that's one thing that we focused on. Of course, with artificial intelligence, whether it's machine learning, Ai, natural language processing, or computer vision, those are the things that we're working with. We know enough to be dangerous, but I rely on the experts. A lot of times, we put together what's called multidisciplinary teams to work together to solve the solution. Also, we use an approach that is community based. Whether it's a user centered design, where we have a community advisory board or move more towards participatory research, we don't do something to the community; we do it with the community. So that's the different components. Back to technology, one thing we're working on is a smart speaker system. Jarvis for the home would be an example. Jarvis has some NLP components. We're getting ready to start a project in India for oral cancer screening. For oral cancer, we're looking at computer vision. Oral cancer is not a big problem over here, because most people go to the dentist. But in a third world country like India, it's a tremendous problem, because of the chewing tobacco and smoking. So again, we're looking for a solution, working with collaborators over there to address that problem.

Iman Kaur:
That's great. It's not enough for your company to make some profit, either. So I was wondering, if you compare yourself with other healthcare companies, what are the challenges you're facing?

Tony Ma:
So I think every company has great ideas. Finding that minimum viable product is always the question; how do you get something that really fits and can engage people? For us, another problem outside of that is, it being or not being evidence based. Are we doing something that really has an impact? To show the impact, I want to measure it. So that's also a challenge, especially in digital health. We're trying to be more of a digital therapeutic product company. Even digital therapeutic products go through what's called clinical trials. Products go through various clinical trials; the gold standard is what's called a randomized control trial, where you have a control group and an intervention group. There will be some statistically significant improvement in some area or some outcome. It can take a long time to do that and get that approval. This is ultimately the goal. Science, evidence and hypotheses that you have are its basis. Impact would be here. You could work with college students or moms that have depression. So there’s a challenge to keep them safe in random situations. What happens in an adverse event, like this vaccine that you hear going on, what are the possible adverse effects, those have to be reported. And so that's what you're trying to do. And ultimately, the goal is to develop something that has clinical outcomes. I developed something that shows how to improve or decrease something, whether it's death, depression, increased weight, lost weight or reduced weight retention. Lots of things have to factor in, which makes it slightly more complex and more challenging. That's what I like though, the challenge. So it's not just to be a digital health company, but to be moving more along the lines of being digitally therapeutic, making improvements in the human condition, healthcare, and that's how we can measure affecting a billion lives. You know, it's not just them downloading the device and using it. There’s an impact.

Iman Kaur:
Well, thank you so much Tony. We’re going to wrap up. Is there anything else you want to share with us about being an entrepreneur? Anything we can think about for the future? Could you give me a suggestion? Some last words you want to share with us?

Tony Ma:
Entrepreneurs also have to take care of themselves, our mental health and everything. During the COVID times; it's definitely challenging. We are already exploring this new model of how people work. I'll close with that, like remote work. Now, what's the new model going to look like as we go into this post COVID era hopefully soon, depending on what happens with the Delta variant, the boosters and everything. I have three little ones and hopefully we're at the end of this. There's going to be a new economy, even for startups or established companies. They call it the mass resignation, right? That’s happening with what Apple's doing. People are revolting. So I think that's something as an entrepreneur to think about, because it's about the people and the processes. What are we doing for the people? I'll close with that.

Iman Kaur:
Thank you so much for sharing all the information and your experience; they mean a lot.

Tony Ma:
Thank you for having me. Have a good evening.

Outro
Thank you for joining us in the first of our new interview series. Please follow and subscribe to the ScreamingBox podcast to hear our monthly interview series and our monthly podcast. Until next month, stay safe and healthy.