Ida Tin, Clue

Thank you very much. Hello everybody. Such a pleasure to be here. You can definitely hear me, that's good. So, this was a really wonderful speech, Matt. And I hope that this will be an AMP story. I'm a big technology enthusiast, and I'm very hopeful that machine intelligence can help us figure out our lives. And that's what I'm working on. So let me start by asking you really, a couple of really basic questions in my field. Do you think that your daughter might be suffering from a bleeding and pain pattern that could be a sign that she's suffering from endometriosis or PCOS, two very common conditions? When did you have your last period? What's the date of your next period? Does your wife suffer from PMS? Does your colleague? Are you what is considered normal? Are you healthy? So, these are some of the questions that Clue can help you find answers for. Because though they might seem very simple, they actually do impact our lives in really great ways. So, Clue is a tracking app for female health. And what it does is that it helps you understand what's going on in your body. It's designed in a very gender-neutral language. It's not pink. It's not your secret diary. It's very direct and non-nonsense. It's scientific. And hopefully also very easy to use. So, women's bodies have this biology that gives us these fluctuations. We have four primary sex hormones that governs our body. This is men's hormones. So, women go through this amazing life journey of 40 years of constant change in our bodies. So, again, Clue tries to help you understand what the heck is going on in your body at any given time during this journey. Whatever it is that you're trying to do or not do. The thing is, it's not enough to just track data. You also need to make sense of the data. And you need to provide, we, as the ones helping you, need to provide enough context so that you can take action on what you learn about what's going on in your data or what's going on in your body. And that's why we have created a ton of very scientifically accurate information. And we have a lot of educational content which sits in the app. We also spend a lot of energy creating other educational content which goes to our blog and to social media. One of the key principles we have when we produce this content and as we build the app is to make sure that it's truly inclusive. You have to imagine my user base is made up of people who are from before the first period till after the first period. So from 11 years old to 6 years old. They are in Uganda, in Aarhus, in Silicon Valley, in China. They might try for a baby, they might try to not get a baby. They might have conditions, they might be transgender, they might not have access to birth control. It's an incredible diverse user group. So when we think about inclusivity, we have to be radical inclusive. We have users that are men that have periods, that are transgender people. So the thing about inclusivity sits really deep in how we approach whatever we build that goes out the door. It also means that we spend a lot of time on user research. We don't assume that we know what people need. We also don't necessarily think that they know it. It's really an exploration that we do together with our users. And we have thousands of people who test everything we build before it goes out the door. We have people coming into our office every week to test new features. And that's how we figure out to build something that people truly need. So our vision is to help every person on the planet with this biology to understand what's going on in her body. The people using the app locks a combined 200 million data points every month. So it's a lot of data. And we have been the number one app in health and fitness, which is a category in the app stores for all kinds of fitness tracking, running, diet, all these kinds of things. We've been the number one app in many markets, including Brazil and Mexico most of the last 12 months. And the US is our biggest market. The app is right now in 15 languages, including Korean, Chinese. Is Japanese, Polish and Danish. You go figure why. The thing is, there are still a lot of things that we, as the academic, we don't know about the female body. It turns out that the female cycle is also a health cycle because the body reacts differently in many different ways throughout the cycle. For instance, we react differently to infections or immune systems. affected, we build muscle tissue differently throughout the cycle, our brains are changing throughout the cycle, so our whole body is really influenced by this cycle in many profound ways and we don't truly understand all of these nuances yet. And one of the things we want to do at CLU is to move female health forward. So we have made collaborations with these four very good institutions and more coming so that we can make sure that this amazing data set that we have can benefit kind of a global good, of course with users' consent. Now it's a little hard to see anything in this picture, but I wanted to give you a little bit of a glimpse into CLU. As was mentioned, we are a startup in Berlin. We're 50 people. Right now we're growing very fast. We're from about 20 different nations and we have a PhD in astrophysics, we have mathematicians, data scientists, we have designers, product people, we have a gynecologist. I don't think we have two people with the same degree in the company. We are pre-revenue. We're making our first business. We're making our first money cessation experiments right now. We have raised 30 million euros from venture capital, funds in the US, Europe, and global funds and some family offices. We are all in Berlin except a few people that work remotely around the world. We are a very informal culture. We have babies in the office. We have dogs in the office. At some point there were so many dogs they had to make a calendar to like schedule which dog could be in the office at what times. We have two yearly off-sites for all employees where we talk about who we are, why we're doing what we're doing, trying to learn together. We do checkouts every week in our weekly meeting where people can describe their week in one word or a sentence just to get a sense of who are people, what's going on for them. What takes up their mind space. We have introduced something we call Body Tuesday which is an hour and a half every Tuesday where you are free to go out and use your body. You can go for a run. You can go swim. You can do exercise. We have a yoga teacher coming. You can go take a nap if that's what you really need, meditate. It's one and a half hours where you are not allowed to book meetings. The reason why we did this was because many of us said, oh, I'm not going to do this. Many of us said, I really would like to move more but it's so hard to get done and I feel a little guilty for doing the work time. Hell, if we all do it at the same time, we can help each other get some energy and it's really working quite well. So it's a very informal culture but it's also a high performance culture. As a startup, you can die any minute basically. So we know that we have to work very hard. We have to work very hard and do our very best work to survive. So we have given everybody a budget every year that they can spend on whatever can take them to the next level, whether it's a mentor, a trainer, a coach, go to a conference, read books, whatever it is. And that also comes with the expectation that people really do rise with the challenges. It also means that we have taken people off the team that we didn't feel were high performers. So it's the, you know, we really try to support people in every way we can but we also really do expect a lot back. And what we look for when we hire people is a lot of entrepreneurial spirit and a lot of energy. We absolutely do not micromanage at Clue. People have to kind of own a field and go out and try things and make mistakes. But we need people who are very self-starters. Okay. So I think if I were to say one thing that is like a common denominator at Clue for the people working there, it is that people work there because they really care about what we build. People work there because they really, truly believe that this can be a good thing to build. We, they're privileged that we have some of what I believe to be the best investors in the world for what we do on board. And they are people that have seen Twitter being built or whatever, amazing companies, and we really, truly are going to help or get, need all the help that we can get over the next years. And those are holders of a lot of very valuable information. So I include them here because sometimes people think of investors as kind of the evil parts, but I really think of them as my team members and amazing people that I've chosen to work with and that I trust. Because we have very big ambitions, right? We want to build the leading brand for female health in the world. It's a big task. So we're going to need help. Finally, I want to add that I started Clue because I wanted technology to solve this thing in my life around reproductive health. I wanted technology to help me manage my own health. And I realized that many other people have that need too, globally. I had the idea in 2009. I then met four amazing co-founders, all of them men, it happened to be, maybe surprisingly. One of them also was my friend. He still is. We have two kids together who are two years old and six years old. And so I'm very excited. I'm not leaving. in my life, I'll tell you that much. But I will say, if anyone here in this audience sits with an idea that you're really passionate about, go out and make it real. Here, in Aarhus, or come to Berlin, whatever, but really go and start stuff. Thank you so much. And now you know, that's our tagline. Thank you.