What were you doing previously and what inspired you to launch your company? Story:

I hold years of healthcare technology experience, including many years at Tampa General Hospital and was part of the Cyber-Security team at PwC. I am a Tampa native, a UT Alumni and have a MBA with a focus in entrepreneurship.

During my years of healthcare technology experience, recurring patterns of inefficient operation occurred. First, no healthcare operation had an overall awareness of the daily flow of patients and this was hampering improvements. And second, we identified the necessity for removing low value workflows from high value assets like physician and nurses if we wanted to increase capacity and improve outcomes.

As a result, in 2016 my husband and I co-founded Edgility.

 

What pain point is your company solving? What gets you excited to go to work every day?

Edgility’s mission is to improve healthcare outcomes for patients, to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of providers and to improve administrator’s ability to manage large and complex ecosystems.

We achieve this by removing "non-value" work streams and technologies from "high-value" assets like physicians and nurses.”

At Edgility, we incorporate machine learning, process automation and artificial intelligence to create air-traffic control like situational awareness. We look for opportunities to remove inefficiencies and bottlenecks, to consolidate redundant workflows, or simply to improve adequate processes for greater efficiency.”

These eliminations and enhancements allow providers to Experience the Joy of Practicing MedicineÓ , which is to deliver high-quality patient care and experience. We get excited knowing we can help both physicians and patients have a truly better experience.

 

Name the biggest challenge you faced in the process of launching the company. How did you overcome it?

Edgility’s platform is designed to exploit data collected from existing technologies to create air-traffic-control-like situational awareness for care providers. This is a brand-new technology offering in the healthcare space that challenges conventional wisdom. We focus significant time on educating the market and defining the opportunities situational awareness provides.

 

Where do you see your company headed next?

We see Edgility becoming the category leader for situational awareness in healthcare and beyond.

 

Give us a tactical piece of advice that you'd share with another founder just starting out.

Take your idea and expose it to anyone and everyone. Once you’ve done that, do it again. You’ll soon notice the more people exposed to your ideas, the better the idea becomes. Never forget, what you do may have a profound impact.

You will be subject to highs and lows. Accept that. That is now your job. Never stop investing in yourself, in your mental and physical well-being. For a mind that has been stretched by a new experience cannot return to its old dimension.

I've also added a new piece to Medium in honor of Women's History Month. Read it here: https://link.medium.com/uAV8m8QvM4

 

Learn more about Edgility on Twitter, and LinkedIn.

 

What were you doing previously and what inspired you to launch your company?

Dating back to my Sophomore year at the University of Pittsburgh when I was first introduced to the world of energy through a Co-op, I was fascinated by the industry. It was amazing how so many roles were responsible for keeping the "lights on." I worked in the Distribution Department assisting with the design of new power lines. I recall being antsy the whole summer because I didn't have much interaction with the outside world. It was strictly a design position. Most engineers would have loved that role because it was perfect for the typical introvert. I'm an introvert all day and all night. However, I needed a role that would break the monotony. As a result, I ended up not returning to the Co-op the following semester. After graduation, I received an offer from my hometown utility company working in their Marketing & Sales Department. I was a Marketing Engineer responsible for marketing electric technologies to industrial and commercial customers to get them to switch from fossil fuels. I instantly loved the position because every customer had a different problem for me to solve. On a daily basis, I was met with new challenges that broke the monotony. Fast forward, I have spent over 25 years providing energy solutions to industrial and commercial customers. From promoting electric and gas technologies to smart grid solutions selling negawatt hours (negative kilowatt hours), I was able to assist small to medium businesses up to your largest industrial customer save energy, reduce their carbon footprint, and make money. In my lifetime, I was able to witness the evolution of energy from an old stodgy field to a more innovative industry. In 2006, I landed my first job with a startup in the smart grid space and found everything about it exciting. From being fast paced to having to wear several hats, it gave me a renewed energy (no pun intended) and passion like never before. I really do not know how to put words to how it made me feel. Many of my family and friends could not understand my excitement. They were like it is "just energy." Not until the day the company went public and I was standing in the front row with the founders as they rang the bell that they realized it was more than "just energy." I got the startup bug and from then on knew that this is where I belonged. I went on to work at three other startups before I launched COI Energy Services in 2016. I was inspired to start the company because I saw a gap in what customers were asking for and what providers were delivering.

 

What pain point is your company solving?

We are helping electric utilities engage with their business customers of all sizes to better manage the electric grid. In the U.S. alone, we waste over $30 billion a year on energy. That waste can power the entire United Kingdom. Just imagine if we used only what we needed and sold back any excess capacity to the grid or to our peers...Electric utilities would reduce the cost to serve their customers, they would have an alternative to building or delaying the need for power plants, they would have a cleaner source of energy, buildings would be more energy efficient, and businesses would get paid for being more efficient. In a nutshell, we are providing access to quality, reliable, clean and low-cost flexible energy resources as an alternative to generator power. In order to achieve this, electric utilities must engage more with their customers. For over 100 years, electric utilities had ratepayers and not customers so there wasn’t much of a need to engage. Now that customers have choices, they will no longer tolerate being treated like a ratepayer with no options. Hence, electric utilities must find innovative ways to engage their customers in order to solve the problems before them. Currently, the average energy user engages with their utility for eight minutes a year but engages on social media for 20 minutes a day. That's a huge gap! COI Energy helps close that gap to eight minutes a week by providing the best value any customer could ask for..."money in their pockets." Customers are motivated to engage because it will result in a positive impact to their bottom-line.

 

What gets you excited to go to work every day?

Knowing that the work we do is making a difference for our clients, the communities we serve, and the environment. We are not the coolest tech solution in the market, but we are truly making an impact that touches every aspect of life. I’m determined to make energy “sexy.”

 

Name the biggest challenge you faced as you’ve launched COI Energy.

I know this is what most founders probably say, but it is true to the core for me. My biggest challenge was raising capital to hire the resources required to scale the business. We all know the statistics for securing funding. Now take my background, it puts me in the toughest category for being funded. It is something like less than 1% of founders with my background get funded.

 

How did you overcome it?

I bootstrapped the business for two and a half years in order to prove our value to the industry and my personal commitment to making the business successful. I bootstrapped to my first million dollar contract.

 

Where do you see your company headed next?

We have been in discussions with some potential strategic partners that will help us grow at a phenomenal pace. Having Morgan Stanley invest in the company has definitely opened doors for us. I’m not one to say we have a blockchain solution because there are so many companies calling themselves blockchain and they are not. We can run our platform without blockchain. However, I believe as we scale, it is something to consider.

 

Give us a tactical piece of advice that you'd share with another founder just starting out.

Understand your company’s value and operate at that level of excellence. With your early hires, ensure they understand what sweat equity “is” and “is not.” The equity you give up isn’t charity. You’re not looking for volunteers. You’re looking for committed individuals that believe in your vision and willing to make sacrifices in order to help you achieve it. In the end, hopefully you build something valuable and reap the rewards together.

 

Learn more about COI Energy Services on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

 

What were you doing previously and what inspired you to launch your company?

I was working as an iOS developer at a small software shop in Sarasota. They were amazing people to work for, but I was only there for 6 months before I left to start Pocket. Before that job, I had met my cofounders at a previous startup in Sarasota working as an iOS developer for about a year. Luis, Pabel and Valeria did not have a car at the time and because we lived in the same apartment complex, the four of us drove together 25 minutes to and 25 minutes back from work every day. Pocket was born in those (sometimes hour long) car rides.

Bitcoin and Ethereum kept coming up until eventually, it dominated conversation the entire time driving to and from work. We started to get really excited about the possibilities and began out planning a project called TelCoin - A way to tokenize your cell phone data so you wouldn't have to buy a new phone or SIM card when traveling. We envisioned a market where you would fly to Paris using our MVNO service, and locals would sell you data as needed through the blockchain. We dug for several months and realized that the industry was far too immature for this kind of a project. Scalability and infrastructure was not there!

This research eventually led us to Pocket. Around the same time, we started reading about countries like China, Brazil, Egypt, UAE and Iran (info here and here) banning Whatsapp and Signal due to their encrypted messaging. Signal even tried this clever trick called domain fronting, where they hosted their servers on Google's cloud, and every Signal message looked like a Google search. Eventually, it got shut down. This led us to understand the importance of a decentralized network of people running full nodes, serving other decentralized application data as core infrastructure. Along the way, we've realized other important implications of a successful protocol like Pocket as well.

 

What pain point is your company solving? What gets you excited to go to work every day?

Pocket makes it easier for blockchain developers to create decentralized applications by saving them many dozens or hundreds of hours not having to run a full node for a blockchain. While more sophisticated blockchains like bitcoin and Ethereum have made the transition into the cloud, most don't have that infrastructure advantage. Every new blockchain has to figure out their infrastructure from scratch, and Pocket is the solution for that. Right now, developers have to run their own physical nodes to create their decentralized applications to test and launch them. Pocket Network provides an incentive for people to run it for these developers.

Knowing that I'm going to learn something new every day. We are in the bleeding edge of this industry. When I or one of the team has a new insight from something they read or some conversation we've had, nothing gets me more excited. If you're addicted to learning, being in blockchain is the most rewarding industry to be in. To build in this space you need a full spectrum of technical and non-technical skills that previously were isolated to specific verticals, this space combines them all!

 

Name the biggest challenge you faced as you’ve launched Pocket. How did you overcome it?

Though we knew that the issue of decentralized infrastructure was a problem, it wasn't completely clear how we were going to solve it in June 2017. Explaining the idea to people in the blockchain space, much less selling it was a challenge. We've built several versions of our product, while reaching out to potential customers seeing what worked, and what didn't. A year and a half of research and iterations later we're getting real partnerships and traction using our product along with incredibly smart people working on the core protocol.

I would attribute the traction we're getting now to quick iterations and being honest with ourselves as a team with what is working and what isn't. Not letting our egos get in the way of what we thought was a good idea, and not being afraid to experiment down a path of research that led to a dead end.

 

Give us a tactical piece of advice that you'd share with another founder just starting out.

Persistence. No one will care or understand the magnitude of what you're building at first. Keep talking about it, keep pitching it to everyone, and be humble about what's not working or when you're wrong. Double down on what is working and you'll start to notice when potential customer's eyes light up.

 

Learn more about Pocket Network on Twitter and LinkedIn.