EARLY STAGE MEDICAL VENTURES ROUND OUT FINALISTS
“You really got the sense that all teams had that X-factor that all really good entrepreneurs have,” says CommonBond Co-Founder and CEO, David Klein. “That really is a combination of focus, commitment, grit, persistence, smarts.”
The other two ventures to compete were DocPronto, founded by current Wharton MBA, Jonathan Sockol and Project Pregnancy, which was started by current MD/MBA student at UCLA’s Anderson School of Management, Margaret Threadgill, and represented by their head of design, Angie Hayden.
DocPronto, which Klein described as the “Uber of house calls and Uber of emergency response,” is an app aimed to improve how physicians reach and care for patients. Sockol, who worked as an analyst at Merrill Lynch and a private equity investor for Lindsay Goldberg before attending Wharton used to watch emergency responders attempt to navigate New York City traffic with “oversized and clunky” vehicles on his way to work everyday.
“I wondered why in this day and age, no one had come up with an innovation to make the process faster,” Sockol says. “If you call 911 right now, it will take about 11 minutes on average for them to get to you. If you cardiac arrest, every minute it takes to receive medical attention reduces your chances at survival by 7 to 10%.”
Sockol started researching around the globe for solutions. The best solution he found was motorcycle emergency response. That idea was shot down from attempting to navigate the complex and often exhausting policies and regulations surrounding healthcare. So Sockol decided to attack the problem from a “cluster-base system.” The idea was to have a platform where EMTs, physicians, paramedics, and other emergency responders can sign up and respond.
After interviewing “hundreds” of medical workers, Sockol found the vast majority wanted to help save a life if an emergency was happening near them. The problem was funding. Sockol decided to expand the service to house calls. Akin to the other medical venture to compete for the money, Project Pregnancy, Sockol is still working through the backend software details, specifically on the physician side, to get the app up and running.
AN APP TO IMPROVE HEALTH LITERACY
Similarly, Project Pregnancy is an app designed to help health literacy and improve maternal health outcomes in underserved communities. Also a nonprofit, the app will provide interactive American Academy of Pediatrics-approved information at a third grade reading level in English and Spanish.
During her rotations in medical school, Threadgill got to view two very different worlds in medicine—how affluent people interacted with physicians and how low-income communities interacted. “It was completely different,” she says. “There was a lack of empowerment. When you are low health literacy and with a doctor who has little experience with low health literacy, you often feel shut down and like your questions are perceived as stupid and won’t ask them.”
So Threadgill set out to create a free app that anyone, regardless of socioeconomic status or literacy level can open and have a “safe space” to understand pregnancy. The app has already received seed funding from the Johnson & Johnson Health Care Institute and will be developing the native app by the end of this year and releasing in early spring of 2016.
The finalists and judges. Pictured from left to right are Sockol, Hayden, Klein, Sarikonda, Rachel Wald, social impact research manager at Gerson Lehrman Group, Adam Braun, founder of Pencils of Promise and Evan Walden, CEO and co-founder of ReWork. Photo courtesy of CommonBond
SOCIAL IMPACT RUNS DEEP IN COMMONBOND’S ROOTS
Of course, CommonBond was founded on a one-for-one model, inspired by Tom’s Shoes and fellow Wharton venture, Warby Parker. The student loan financing company partners with Pencils of Promise to fund education for students in developing countries.
“We wanted to set it up so the better we did as a company, the more social good we would do in the world,” Klein says, describing the initial social promise to fully fund a child’s education for every degree funded through CommonBond’s platform. “I had decided I wanted to have a company with a social mission even before I had the idea of CommonBond.”
In addition to the $10,000 prize, Sarikonda will receive a year of free mentorship from the CommonBond executive team. Project Pregnancy and DocPronto will receive five free branding sessions from interactive agency, Dom & Tom.
“The reason we have this Social Impact Award is, in addition to doing well by doing good internally within the four walls of CommonBond, there’s this notion that if we really believe business can and should be a positive force for good,” Klein explains,”and if we believe there really aren’t many examples for people to follow or programs to empower entrepreneurs to pursue that path, then we should do our part to actually enable and empower really talented people and aspiring social entrepreneurs to pursue this path of mission-based business.”
