GoKawiilA new residency-venture program helps to tackle one of the most pressing issues in the U.S. — healthcare.
Mary Minno, an investor and former product manager at Google, announced on Wednesday the launch of an early-stage startup accelerator program called Treehub and an early-stage venture firm called AI Health Fund, aimed at backing startups working at the intersection of healthcare and AI. The AI Health Fund is the venture arm of the Treehub residency, where founders apply to incubate their ideas.
The residency program lasts six months — the first 12 weeks are dedicated to helping founders find product-market fit, and the last 12 weeks are focused on company direction, Minno said. “It could be raising a large round, it could be joining a traditional accelerator, or perhaps deploying across a hospital system.”
She got the idea for launching a residency and a program late last year when she was six weeks postpartum with her second child, and when a family member was diagnosed with acute leukemia, going from “being very healthy to very sick virtually overnight,” she said. She didn’t like how hard it was to find a specialist for this family member, how long they had to wait before they could be treated after being diagnosed, and how policy and outdated technology often slowed down the treatment process.
“It’s only when people went outside of that system and broke the rules that things could happen,” she said. “I realized that we need more startups here because they’re going to challenge the status quo.”
So she turned to her longtime friend Esther Wojcicki (an educator and mother of the late former YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki and 23andMe founder Anne Wojcicki). Esther was once Minno’s high school journalism teacher, and the two have remained close ever since. The two spoke about how to increase innovation in the health sector and about how academics — often the ones with lots of research — struggle to get startup ideas off the ground.
The problem is that they don’t really know how to tell a good story, at least not in the way venture investors like to hear, and they also don’t know how to commercialize their research well, Minno said. She and Esther wanted to build a program that would team operators with academic-focused founders, “similar to the way a venture would in order to teach them the art of building a business.”
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