Today's entrepreneur: Grace Chen

Fundraising should be a tight process, it requires strategy and connections

Today's entrepreneur is Grace Chen, co-founder of LucidAct Health, an AI-Powered assistant for nurses and care managers. It uses machine learning to read and detect patient social-economic characteristic and behavior patterns, helping the care team to be champions and genius of their patients.

Chen was the first female data architect for Stanford Hospitals and clinics. Eight years ago building data warehouse for hospitals was new, and she led teams that built up an infrastructure that is still being used today where the entire organization can visualize the gaps in care when it happened and can react to them much faster than before. 

She graduated from Bentley University with an MS in Computer Science.

Chen will be participating in the startup showcase at Vator's Reinventing the Doctor event at UCSF on 9/12. Register here.

I am a(n):

Entrepreneur

Companies I've founded or co-founded:

LucidAct Health Inc.

Companies I work or worked for:

Stanford Healthcare, Sutter Health

Achievements (products built, personal awards won):

At Stanford Cancer Center, I designed and developed a suite of applications that helped reduced chemotherapy waiting room wait time, shorted breast cancer time to treatment from 3 weeks to 1 week, built a data-driven feedback loop between prostate cancer treatment and patients quality of life at home.

If you are an entrepreneur, why?

I want to invent something cool.

My favorite startups:

Amazon, Uber, airtable

Why did you start your current company?

Taking care of my father as a family caregiver gave me a different perspective than working inside the health system, I realized that there are no effective solutions to track and manage patients' care at home. While the rest of the world are using SLACK for team collaboration around the globe, healthcare teams are using phone calls and fax machines to coordinate care even in the same neighborhood.

What's most frustrating and rewarding about entrepreneurship/innovation?

The most frustrating part is the struggle between chicken and egg, entrepreneurs are often caught in between, this constraint forces us to be more creative. The rewarding part is to see customers using our solution the way we designed and dreamed about.

What's the No. 1 mistake entrepreneurs make?

Not doing enough customer discovery before spending resources in building out a product/solution, customer discovery is a numbers game, just like sales.

What are the top three lessons you've learned as an entrepreneur?

1. Finding a product-market fit includes identifying a repeatable pricing model, otherwise, it is still a problem-solution fit.
2. Fundraising should be a tight process, it requires strategy and connections.
3. Investor pitch and customer pitch are two different stories, being able to zoom in and out of different perspective is an essential skill.