Latest / Low to Grow / AI and Healing-Centred Tech: Linda Hong Cheng Founder of Gossip Group on Digital Ageism

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AI and Healing-Centred Tech: Linda Hong Cheng Founder of Gossip Group on Digital Ageism · Low to Grow

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I moved to the United States to live with my mother and her
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husband, who were very abusive towards me.
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I nearly felt high school because of depression.
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I think my environment was deadly and would probably have
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completely crushed most people you know, through my PhD thesis
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at Oxford. Looking at digital gender gaps,
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which a lot of people don't actually know about it actually
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digital inequalities throughout the world and throughout the
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world, women are 19% less likely to be.
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Welcome to Low to Bro, the podcast transforming life's
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toughest moments into opportunity for growth.
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I'm Annie, a Folks Under 30 technology founder whose
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entrepreneurship journey ran parallel to a mental health
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awakening. In every episode, I sit down
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with inspiring individuals and delve into how they managed to
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turn their personal or professional challenges into
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opportunities for growth. If you're facing uncertainty in
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your life, feeling down, or simply need a kick of
0:57
inspiration to keep moving forward, this is your space for
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the honest and uplifting conversations that you will want
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to hear. Hit follow so you never miss an
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episode and let's dive in. With me today.
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Is Linda a BBC featured entrepreneur, Arts Of PhD
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researcher and also the founder of Infra Labs, where she's
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building AI native infrastructure that's actually
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Asian inclusive? And justice driven.
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Linda is also a founding partner of Gossip Group, which is a
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woman LED Angel syndicate investing into the future of
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health, happiness and humanity. Linda was phrased between
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Beijing and the US and she had to break herself free from a
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violent household before winning a full bride Karen and
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scholarship to do her detail in computational sociology at the
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University of Oxford. Her last startup Moon.
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Was recognized by the BBC for redefining digital ageism and
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she has been building technology to liberate people.
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Essence Linda's story is nothing short of powerful, and she is an
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example of the progress that can be made when technology has
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developed through the lens of. Healing centered leadership.
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I am generally so excited to learn from Linda today.
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Linda, it's a pleasure to have you.
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Thank you for having me, it's a pleasure to be here.
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So, Linda, before we start, who do you think will benefit the
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most from our conversation today?
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I think anyone who is starting their journey or who is sort of
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going through something difficult in their personal
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lives and in wondering how to sort of reconcile that with
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their own ambitions. Anyone who you know shares these
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identities of, of being not a man like a woman or non binary
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or a lesbian or gender marginalized Asian on white,
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immigrant, etcetera can benefit from I think learning from
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different stories like mine. I I don't want to say that I
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would be an inspiration, but I hope that my story can be
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encouraging and empowering for people.
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And Linda, where does your story start?
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Well, that's a big question. I guess it really starts.
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I mean, where does anyone's story start, right?
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I think it starts from that moment of sentience, right?
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With the human experience growing up, I was a really, I
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would say, precocious and curious, endlessly curious and
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also very rebellious child. And so it really starts from
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like my first memory of Beijing with my grandmother, which was,
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I think like my memories go back when I was 2 years old.
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And so I can remember everything that was like really resonant
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with me. Like with Beijing, I grew up
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next to the youthful Lake Park, just remembering sort of my
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memories with her and spending time with her and just being
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able to be a part of the world and really curious about how
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social structures worked from a really young age.
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I was born in the US, but I spent years to five, my
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grandmother in Beijing. So I think that left a really
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indelibly left a really deep cultural mark on me.
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I moved to the United States to live with my mother and her
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husband, who were very abusive towards me.
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But I sort of, I did excel. I, I was in the gifted kids
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program and I excelled quite, you know, quite quickly in
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school, but I just never found the motivation to apply myself.
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I nearly felt high school because of depression.
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And then I ended up having to go to a school that I didn't really
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want to go to for my undergrad because I had really bad grades
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because of depression for my school.
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And so I, I went to this school, it's part of the UNC system and
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I transferred to UNC Chapel Hill, which is like one of the
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best public university in the US during my third year.
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And that's essentially when I started to really study
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voraciously social systems and infrastructure and really
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looking at power and hegemony. So I double majored in history
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economics. I did my honors thesis on
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protest events in in China, really focusing on rebellion and
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power. I think these are really big
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things in my life that I was really, really concerned with.
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And I think that's when my academic journey really started.
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I ended up winning the best honors thesis award.
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I was the only woman of color to ever like the first one in the
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to have wanted in the history department.
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And then I got, you know, I was like top 5% of the class.
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I got a scholarship to Columbia to continue on in my master's
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majoring in computational sociology.
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And at the time, I thought that I would just continue into just
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China studies because at the time my dream was to become a
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presser in China studies. A lot of everything that I cared
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about, and I mean still do was had spin around liberation and
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decolonization. And yeah, so at the time I was
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just really fully believing that I would sort of dedicate my life
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to to decolonizing China. And I self-taught myself
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Mandarin Chinese like during my undergraduate and became fluent
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in like 2 years because I was just like I was so committed to
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that. And then I went to Colombia and
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obviously things never turn out the way you plan.
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I ended up pivoting into computational methods, so
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looking at AI and machine learning and I became really
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intrigued by that. And my supervisor at the time,
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Professor Yao Lu, she is in sociology at Columbia.
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She's done like a ton of stuff, cross cutting statistics and
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STEM fields as well as sociology and critical theory and China
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studies as well. So I first authored a paper on
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gender bias in government media attention to protest events in
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China using big data from Weibo, which is a micro blogging
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platform in China. It's very popular.
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It's probably the most popular social media at the time.
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That was really fun paper to do was also really difficult
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because I didn't have any kind of formalized training in
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quantitative methods or machine learning or any of that.
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So I just sort of taught myself on the on the fly.
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And I realized that that's actually how I excelled because
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I love being challenged in these environments or being pushed to
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learn and I love learning my brains like a sponge.
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So I just soak things up really fast.
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Through that. I realized actually because we
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were dealing with a lot of unstructured data from social
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media, I saw that methods that exist in machine learning and
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natural language processing, they're not made for non
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European, especially non Anglocentric context,
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non-english context. To make that really concrete.
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For instance, if you want to analyze like any kind of post,
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social media post in Chinese, in order to feed it through the NLP
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algorithm, you have to add spaces manually between words to
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make it seem more like English so that the algorithms can
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recognize what's going on. And so I was like, that's
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really, that's just not right. And so I ended up being inspired
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by that. I wrote.
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So I was the youngest invited contributor for the Oxford
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Handbook to write about declining computational methods
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and really pushing for this theory of Chinese computational
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sociology, centering Chinese and of course other non European
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languages as a standard for creating a framework for AI and
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for natural. Interesting.
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Before it was cool because it was like, it's like 4 to five
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years ago. It was a long time ago.
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I didn't realize it was really a big deal until people were
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telling me that it's a really big deal because I just really
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cared about the topic. And then later on, I took a gap
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year and I ended up coming to Oxford on the Clarendon
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Scholarship, looking at digital inclusion for for women and
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later on expanding into age inclusion as well because so
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many older folks are excluded in the age and gender are so
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intricately intertwined. And then building out Hmong and
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then now Infra Joy Labs, I think that's when I realized it's all
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come full circle because everything I've done has been
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really intellectually pet driven, empowered.
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I think being a PhD at these institutes that have really been
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dedicated to this kind of work and also Centers for, you know,
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violence and domination as well, sort of these tensions that
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exist. But being in in an institution
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like Oxford and then, you know, Columbia beforehand, everything
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that I've done has been really pushed with intellectual rigor.
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So I feel quite privileged to be in a space like that where what
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I'm building, the venture I'm building is not really like a
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lot of the retail startups that you'll see where it's just for
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the sake of making money, which there's nothing wrong with that.
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But I think being in the space of deep tech and, and creating
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the first global standard for age inclusion on a digital
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platform, it really is research heavy, R&D heavy and, and very
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much so intellectually rigorous. It's just sort of come full
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circle. That's and that's sort of my
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story in like a small nutshell. Wow, that's a very action-packed
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story for a very small, but congratulations on all that you
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have achieved. Linda, one question for you, if
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you think back to when you were 5 or say when you were, you
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know, 5 or 6, would you have expected to be doing what you
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are today? And also, would you have
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expected your mission and your journey to take you across to
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the different institutions that have really helped to shape your
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identity in academia since? I love that question.
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I, I don't think that I would have expected any of this when I
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was really young. And this is something that I've
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done a lot of research into as well is the idea of giftedness,
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which is a kind of neurodiversity that sort of alga
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mates a lot of like ADHD and autism spectrum, etcetera.
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When I was young, they have this like meter for symptoms of what
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giftedness entails. And one of them is like being
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really conscious of like you vis A vis the universe from a really
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young age. And so when I was like six or
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seven, I remember I would look out the window in the car at the
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at the clouds and I would think I'm, I would have this feeling
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like I'm here for greater, like a much greater purpose.
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And it's not something a child is really supposed to feel.
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I just had this feeling. I knew that it was meant to be
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doing something great it at a global stage, but I didn't know
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what it was. I was a piano prodigy growing
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up. So I studied piano from the age
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of five and I like master of box inventions by 7.
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I was scouted by local media because at the time we were
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living in Starkville, Ms. in the US, just like the Deep South.
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But I was so scouted by media for my piano playing recitals
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when I was like 6 or something. It was quite, I mean, a lot, a
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lot was happening always. But, but it was also, like I
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said, at the same time, it was a really, you know, violent
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environment that I grew up in. So I was like surveilled and and
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forced to practice a certain number of hours a day because I
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was, you know, my piano teachers all believed that I would go on
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to Juilliard and become like a world class pianist.
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But for me, it was a really strange experience because I was
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just a kid and I was just doing what I liked.
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But people, adulthood put all these sort of expectations on to
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me and tell me all these things that I didn't understand what it
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meant at the time. I thought that I would be a
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piano teacher when I was younger, when I was five, I
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think I would like, I want to be a piano teacher.
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But I also had knew that I was I was destined for something much
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bigger than me, like something global.
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Yeah. Something extremely meaningful.
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And that sense of purpose. And this might sort of cross
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them to another question you asked, but this sense of purpose
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carried me through everything that I did and everything that I
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had to. I ended up, you know, later
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would would survive like all the kinds of physical and and
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emotional abuse that I had to survive.
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That sense of purpose is what carried me through everything
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and also what got me into a full scholarship at UNC Chapel Hill
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and then a full scholarship into Columbia and then a full
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scholarship to Oxford. Because I just was never afraid
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to think extremely big no matter what people around me said.
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And I always ended up being right.
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So I was like, I don't, I don't care what people who have small
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minds think. But if you asked me like a few
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months ago, like a year ago, what do you think you would be
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doing something in aging and tech?
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I'd be like, what the hell? Those are things I've really
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ever considered. And when I came into Oxford, I
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was certain that I would become a hotshot professor.
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Like that was my dream. I wanted to become like this
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hotshot professor in China studies being cool like optical
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work and gender and protest in China.
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And you know, maybe later on I would end up getting a
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professorship at like an IV or I would end up going to China to
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like a 985, which is like one of the about which is one of the
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more prestigious universities in China.
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And that would be my bread and butter because I just love the
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intellectual environment so much.
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But then I came to Oxford and that would that also coincided
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with me escaping this really abusive environment for good.
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And then cutting myself off from that scholarship allowed me to
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liberate myself a lot of the self-imposed limitations or
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restrictions on who I was and what my identity was.
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Because at the time, I had always been told and also always
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thought that I can only do well in an academic environment
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because I don't like a corporate 9 to 5, right?
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I think I want to explore so much more.
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I want to be in touch with the world.
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I want to meet people like you, Annie, and you have done things
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in society who care about real world impact, whereas like you
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see in academia, a lot of people do and a lot of people also
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don't. And that really bothered me.
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And so I ended up going into entrepreneurship completely
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exceeding all of my expectations.
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I never expected myself to do anything that I did with Hmong
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or with girl pain gossip group infantry lats.
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I just never expected it from myself.
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I don't think I, the younger me would have imagined that I would
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go into this space, although, you know, I think it's, it is
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interesting. There was a chance for me to
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become a child star when I was younger because of my playing
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and also just like really extroverted quite as the bubbly
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personality that I could have gone on to like child acting and
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I didn't. Why not?
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One of them is like my hunger for knowledge and intellect is
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too strong for me to enter the entertainment industry.
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And also, and I, I think growing up like I had, I had really
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powerful instincts about what kind of space would be safe for
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me versus what kind of space would not be safe.
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And I think I was especially attuned because I grew up in
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such an abusive environment that I was extremely, extremely, and
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already more sensitive than I already was to power and
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hierarchy and hegemony and the effect that it would have on me.
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Obviously, it wasn't completely my choice because my my parents
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had ultimate authority over everything I did.
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But they're also like, they're Chinese, right?
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So they're not going to agree to entertainment.
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I think that actually ended up working out in my favor.
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Growing up in America, you see what entertainment industry does
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to people who go through it, right?
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They're assets. They're not people.
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And they're certainly not going to be the boss of themselves.
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They don't hold much power in the larger, you know, industry.
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And now I can say retroactively, I can say sort of quite, you
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know, with with more eloquence that, you know, I wouldn't
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choose the entertainment industry route or the creative
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route because it's not unfortunately an industry that
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allows for autonomy or sovereignty over yourself or
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your thoughts. And it's certainly not an
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intellectually driven space, whereas academia is low paid or
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whatever, but it is a space where your, your selfhood is
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relatively much more protected than if you're going on to
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become, you know, like a singer or performer.
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As a performer, you really are at the behest of the viewer.
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And the viewer tends to be a straight white male, especially
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if, you know, we're Chinese women or we're Asian women or
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women of color in these spaces, we're facing so much
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objectification and sexualization, dehumanization.
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And that's just not, I'm not going to tolerate it at all.
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I think from the way that you're talking yourself, awareness has
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always been quite strong, even as when you were a younger
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child. And as you said, it is lucky
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that when you had the opportunity to become a child
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entertainment worker, your parents actually made the right
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decision for you. You mentioned this household
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environment that you grew up in. How did that affect you when you
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were, you know, going through school or navigating that
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cultural change as well when you move from China with your
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grandma to the US? I think it affected absolutely
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everything. I ponder on this often.
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One thing I do is I think a lot like I overthink, but I, I think
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about this all the time. I also self-taught time as
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astrology at at one point. So I would think a lot about
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like fate and destiny and like also, you know, I'm, I'm quite
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like a Taoist slash Buddhist slash agnostic, quite spiritual.
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So I mean, but I also study sociologies and I come from a
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Marxist tradition. A lot of the frameworks to
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understand society and social systems tends to be oriented
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towards systems you don't really consider too much agency of an
16:48
individual. And I've been trained in that.
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There's a phrase in Chinese singles union which means a
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person's character determines their fate, right?
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And that's true to a huge degree.
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And how much of your personality is Santian versus Holtian, like
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comes from you versus it comes from the environment you're in.
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I think my environment was deadly and would probably have
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completely crushed most people, most kids growing up.
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And it's not like a brag or anything, it's just the truth.
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But then I think because of my particularly strong character, I
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was able to get myself through it so that I had the wherewithal
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to use that environment and make myself stronger from it.
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But I don't really like to credit the environment with with
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much because it was a hurdle on on everything in my life.
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It's been a hurdle in like intimacy, it's been a hurdle in
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relationships, been a hurdle in my academics.
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Because of that environment, I nearly felt high school.
17:45
I constantly got told by teachers that I went to after
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when I had to go to an undergraduate space I didn't
17:52
want to go to and ended up having to transfer later on.
17:54
Teachers constantly told me, you know, they were surprised that I
17:56
was at this place. They told me they thought I
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should be in a place like Harvard or Yale.
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And they just made me feel terrible about how I felt like
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I'd failed myself. When actually it's because of
18:04
that environment that it prevented me from being able to
18:07
fully engage in my studies. It prevented me from fully
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engaging intellectually and emotionally and creatively and
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artistically. And it, it stoppered me in a lot
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of ways, I think from like reaching my potential earlier.
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But I also think on the flip side, because I am a survivor.
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And as someone who is also queer and, and, and Chinese and, and a
18:29
woman and lesbian, I think the resilience that I've cultivated
18:34
in myself via those really traumatic and terrible
18:40
experiences give me a huge advantage compared to people who
18:44
grew up with a silver spoon, right?
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Because I very used to being denied my selfhood.
18:53
I grew up in an environment where my intelligence and my
18:56
worth was constantly put into question.
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I was constantly threatened and coerced.
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And you know, with financial coercion, it's a sink or slim
19:04
kind of environment. I had to develop really strong
19:08
abilities to persuade, really strong ability to sell, really
19:11
strong ability to believe in myself.
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These qualities are things I've cultivated in myself.
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I don't really find what the startup world or what the
19:21
investment world terms failure to be failure because it doesn't
19:23
feel like anything to me because I've already been through much,
19:26
much worse. What I mean by much worse is
19:28
where my life or my death is literally on the line as a kid,
19:31
right? The kinds of failures that
19:33
people talk about LinkedIn with like startups or whatever, It
19:35
just literally just nothing. It's not something that I I
19:38
would really ever wish on anybody.
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And I don't think anyone should ever really have to have it
19:42
because you pay a really steep price for this kind of strength
19:46
and for this kind of wisdom, right?
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And it's certainly not fair. It's just what I was dealt with
19:54
and I had no control over it. But it is it is what I have.
19:59
You're very eloquent in saying exactly what your experiences
20:02
have allowed you to do or have enabled you to learn about or
20:06
discover in yourself. Has that always been the case,
20:08
Linda, or is this something that has come to you in the more
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recent years? If you're referencing my ability
20:16
to sort of look at it in a more balanced way, I would say, yeah,
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I would say that I, you know, I was aided by some, I wouldn't
20:23
say amazing therapists, but they're like good enough that
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they're like, helpful. Sometimes you just need a space
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to just cry and talk about things.
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It's taken me like a year or two to reconcile with the
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experiences. For the longest time, I just
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felt like I didn't grow up in a normal home.
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I don't have a secure attachment style.
20:40
I find it difficult to allow people into my inner sanctum
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emotionally, and that makes me inferior as a person.
20:50
And I think this would just sort of add on to like all of the
20:52
other sort of divergences that I already have, which is like, I'm
20:55
extremely intelligent, extremely gifted.
20:58
I always felt like I couldn't relate to the kids around me
21:01
growing up and I always felt alien and, and whatever teachers
21:05
would compliment me, it always just made me feel more isolated.
21:08
And so that kind of isolation that comes with multiple layers
21:11
of exceptionality. You could call it in like the
21:14
most literal sense, the word being exceptional as being
21:16
outlier, right? Like I think that was the most
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painful part for me was like reconciling with the loneliness
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of acknowledging that, oh, I've been through this and most
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people haven't and most people wouldn't be able to survive it
21:26
and I did and most people wouldn't be able to heal from
21:28
it, but I did. And then what comes after is
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like, oh, actually, then there's am I just all alone?
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Am I just like inferior? Am I just weird?
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Or am I just like, there's something like, I'm just so
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different that I will never find a community through that lens
21:42
and through that sort of like emotional architecture.
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It took me like a year or two to really accept how different I am
21:49
from everyone around me. It's a journey for sure.
21:52
And a lot of my friends have told me that I should write a
21:54
memoir or like start now. And I was like.
21:56
If you ever do you write a memoir, sign me up to it.
21:58
It will come with your experiences, which is very
22:01
energetic. That's a word that I would use
22:03
just in terms of what you have been able to achieve with being
22:06
the piano and also your intellectual ability down the
22:08
sober countries that you have lived in.
22:10
But I think it's also the revelations that you have about
22:12
yourself. But then takes place 2 words
22:15
really popped out just now the themes that you have experienced
22:17
in your lives, isolation or loneliness.
22:20
I realized that these are also 2 themes that older people or more
22:23
elderly people in our society would also feel.
22:26
And I just wanted to ask you, with your work, with your first
22:29
startup month, what prompted that?
22:31
And also, what did you learn about the elderly people in our
22:34
society that surprised you? Yeah, yeah, I love the Segway.
22:39
There are multiple things that prompted me to start Mung.
22:41
And I'll start with something that's more concrete, like
22:43
intellectual development, you know, through my PhD thesis at
22:46
Oxford, looking at digital gender gaps, which it's actually
22:50
quite a topical area and a lot of people don't actually know
22:52
about it, Potentially digital inequalities throughout the
22:54
world. And my research draws from the
22:56
Digital Gender Gaps project, which is led by my supervisor
22:58
Ready Kashyap. She's a world leader in this
23:01
field. Throughout the world, women are
23:03
19% less likely to be able to access mobile Internet than men,
23:06
and so that's the digital gender gap, right?
23:09
Through looking at that work and establishing my own theory of
23:12
how online and offline gender inequalities interact, which I
23:15
term digital gender circularity, I became really cogently aware
23:19
of how age and gender are intimately intertwined.
23:23
And there's no way that you can really separate the two over the
23:26
course of a women's lifespan. And cisgender women will tend to
23:28
live longer than men. You experienced a double
23:31
marginalization across both gender and age.
23:33
That was the intellectual motivator for for among the
23:37
emotional sort of driver was that my grandmother, who I'm
23:40
extremely close to, during the pandemic, she had kidney
23:44
surgery, and she nearly didn't survive the recovery because she
23:46
didn't know how to use her phone to order groceries.
23:49
She couldn't find the grocery platform accessible for herself
23:52
and there was no one to really help her.
23:53
And we had to beg family connections to go and stay with
23:56
her to support her through the recovery.
23:58
It was really strict time as well because of the locked out
24:00
right. And that left a deep mark on me.
24:03
I think everything clicked into place, you know, as well as my
24:05
own experiences with digital access, growing up in in a
24:08
really abusive home where my computer and my phone could just
24:11
be taken away at a moment's notice and you lose that sense
24:14
of connectivity with the world. You cease to exist in the world.
24:17
And that feeling of just utter isolation I could relate to.
24:21
I can emphasize it really, really strongly.
24:24
And all those things put together is what drove me to
24:27
start among. I just wanted to do more with my
24:30
PhD than just do research or just talk about it.
24:33
I think Oxford is amazing. My college is amazing.
24:37
They're extremely supportive and so generous, but but I just got
24:40
really sick of this way of doing things in academia where all
24:45
you're doing is just pointing out problems and you're not
24:47
putting any kind of effort into changing what you're seeing.
24:51
It just ends up feeling like a circle of people just exchanging
24:56
papers, not actually doing anything concretely to affect
25:00
society and, and completely out of touch with the people they're
25:04
talking about in their studies. And I got really tired of that.
25:06
And so I ended up thinking, what if something was done about
25:09
this? I became interested in startups
25:11
because a couple of my friends I knew had their own nonprofits or
25:14
companies. Why not give it a try?
25:17
I ended up starting Mung and, and it was just unexpected that
25:22
we ended up getting covered by BBC as well because at the time,
25:25
like when we started it in the very beginning, everyone was
25:29
telling me this is an amazing problem.
25:31
It's really cool. But have you just considered
25:33
doing a nonprofit? Like it's not profitable.
25:35
But I just didn't really care what people said because I just
25:37
knew that it was what I cared about and it was important to
25:40
me. And it was also this huge gap,
25:42
not only in terms of digital inclusion not being well known,
25:44
but also the fact that older consumers are the fastest
25:47
growing segment in the world and also the most financially
25:50
powerful. What's interesting is that, you
25:52
know, see the same about semtech and women who are consumers.
25:55
We are extremely powerful financially as well.
25:57
And I think older consumers are just compounded in that.
26:00
But because of these cultural hegemonies that exist because of
26:03
ageism, companies are actively going against their, you know,
26:07
profit incentives to leave these users out.
26:10
You know, whether that's intentional or not, it's just
26:12
what's happening, right? Everything is being designed for
26:15
Gen. Z or Gen.
26:15
Alpha, either out of inertia or just this passivity towards
26:20
inclusion, this apathy towards inclusion.
26:23
I just find that unacceptable. I really love how you are taking
26:26
the time and initiative to do that.
26:28
And I love how you also taking a step away from academia, which
26:31
for so long has been about that you had seen yourself in, but
26:35
now you're actually taking scientific research and ISO
26:38
observations and turning them into solutions.
26:40
And I think that actually reflects the action orientated
26:43
personality that you have and I think that's quite a beautiful
26:45
thing to see. Question, you spoke about
26:48
healing centered leadership. What does that look like in a
26:51
real world and especially in a tech focused industry?
26:55
A lot of what we see in Silicon Valley and like tech Bros
26:58
etcetera, move fast, break things kind of model is
27:03
unsustainable. And obviously there's been
27:05
people who are much more articulate than me and much more
27:08
well learned than me to take this extremely eloquently.
27:11
But tech has this immense power to influence people's lives.
27:16
And people who are at the helm of these big tech corporations
27:21
don't really appreciate the role of technology in society and
27:27
marginalized communities. They treat tech and investments
27:32
and money like it's a game. And I understand, you know,
27:35
you're just playing the game or whatever, but they just don't
27:37
know what the fuck they're doing.
27:38
And they have just been standing on the shoulders of not giants,
27:44
but corpses that they've benefited from for, for so many
27:48
decades, centuries, right? The social injustice that allows
27:52
them to continue to be so frivolous in the way that they
27:57
are pushing society towards the direction that is catastrophic
28:02
for everybody. Healing Centered leadership is
28:04
that we're not going to sing Kumbaya around a fireplace and
28:07
we're not going to be a cliche and a new age or whatever, but
28:10
we are going to focus on what is actually healing for our
28:14
society, for our economy, for our markets.
28:18
Really focusing on purpose in what we're doing and being
28:23
really intentional about how we are creating our technology.
28:28
And also the kinds of stakeholders and the kinds of
28:30
people we allow into collaborations with us into
28:33
pilot partnerships into our cap table is really important
28:37
because I, I think just like being in the tech space and also
28:39
who's like really sensitive to power imbalances.
28:41
You just notice that people are just, they're just raising to
28:44
raise. It's just this hype cycle over
28:47
and over again. I don't think there's anything
28:48
wrong with with wanting to raise money.
28:49
I don't think there's anything wrong with moving fast as long
28:52
as you're not actively harming people.
28:54
It, it just, it feels like so much of the tech world is
28:58
oriented around this hype bubble and this hype bubble never
29:03
actually stays and it doesn't leave any kind of real legacy in
29:08
the world. Something that's huge for me is
29:10
legacy. It's creating something that
29:13
will outlive me and my Co founders and our shareholders.
29:16
And obviously I think profit and evaluation, etcetera.
29:21
I appreciate that these are important.
29:23
They're also important to me because I want to be paid for my
29:25
labor and I want investors who are coming in and bringing their
29:28
resources to also see, you know, increases in the valuation and,
29:32
and and their stock holdings. I'm also an Angel investor
29:35
myself. So I completely understand that
29:36
perspective, but I want to build something that's meaningful and
29:40
most importantly, in the process of building it, I want to feel
29:43
fulfilled and nurtured and healed by what I'm doing.
29:46
Like genuinely passionate, genuinely joyful.
29:50
And This is why we're called infra joy, you know, joyful
29:52
infrastructure, but genuinely joyful at the thought of, of
29:55
doing what we're doing and not doing it for anybody, but for
29:59
end users and ultimately our own mission and our own purpose.
30:03
I think that's what healing leadership means for me.
30:06
It, it, it's both internal and also external when you're sort
30:10
of healing yourself in the process.
30:11
And two, you're also healing the people that you're serving the,
30:15
the people around you. We are serving, you know,
30:17
development teams and supporting them and making their platforms,
30:21
their digital infrastructure truly older age inclusive.
30:25
It is a really healing and and really joyful experience to work
30:29
with these teams and they genuinely feel really powerfully
30:32
about what we're doing as well. We're helping them increase
30:34
revenues and they're also supporting us right as a as a
30:37
customer. That's a win win situation and
30:40
it's never a 0 sum game. We're also building legacy
30:45
because there is no global standard for older age
30:48
inclusion. You know, we're first in this
30:50
green space, and it is just deeply fulfilling to be able to
30:55
do this after we enshrine these standards into policy.
30:59
Every company that comes after us has to follow what we built.
31:02
And they are also going to make platforms that are better and
31:06
easier and usable for not just older consumers, but just
31:09
everyone. Love that because I think for
31:12
you it's the social impact and it's actually meaningful social
31:14
impact delivered through this mechanism, which could be your
31:18
current startup or it could be the movement that potentially
31:20
grows around it. For someone who might not be
31:23
familiar in the tech space like, what does it actually mean to
31:27
build infrastructure that is age inclusive?
31:30
Making infrastructure inclusive means that you're making
31:34
infrastructure from day one with these people in mind.
31:38
You're actually taking them into account when you're building
31:40
something. If you want to think, for
31:42
instance, about seating in public transportation, a lot of
31:46
it was built for white CIS males.
31:48
And so a lot of us will find it really uncomfortable because of
31:51
the way that it's sort of slanted or arched.
31:53
It's not really for someone of our height or it's not even just
31:56
built for a woman period. It's it's sort of a similar
32:00
concept with infrastructure. You go on a website today, the
32:03
text tends to be really small size.
32:05
And so anyone who's older that is already just like the most
32:08
basic kind of requirement needed to accessible to someone who's
32:13
not just older age, but it's just vision impaired in general.
32:15
Because I'm nearsighted, I work contacts and I found a lot of
32:18
websites really difficult to access because of this, right?
32:21
That's sort of one of the really basic principles of inclusive
32:24
design is that you're designing with the end user in mind, like
32:28
really in an intentional manner. By infrastructure, we were
32:31
talking about a lot of the basic foundations of of platform from
32:35
the code stack right behind a website.
32:38
There's a lot of code, there's a lot of templates that go into
32:41
creating what we see on the screen.
32:43
When you go on a website, is there just too much information
32:45
on there? It's really hard to sort through
32:47
the logical flow of a checkout for someone who is older, for
32:51
someone who is coddly impaired, which is highly correlated with
32:54
aging. Some of this has been covered by
32:57
existing accessibility policies like the EAA is coming into
32:59
effect on the 28th of June, but it's just not sufficient because
33:03
it it's made as a checklist rather than as something that's
33:05
really intentional and meant to be Co designed with end user in
33:09
mind. And so when we talk about
33:10
infrastructure, we're talking about really these foundational
33:13
aspects of, of not just the code itself, which is the technical
33:16
part, but the philosophy that goes into literally designing
33:19
the entire platform. The logical flow of, you know,
33:23
how to get end user from point A to point B, how to get them from
33:27
point B to check out. Or in the case of, you know, for
33:30
instance, health firms, which we've already started a few
33:32
pilots with. How do you support an older
33:35
patient in being able to navigate this labyrinth that is
33:40
the online world for them, being able to help them set
33:43
appointments for preventative checking, for seeing the doctor,
33:47
for being supported to healthily age, right?
33:49
These are extremely huge problems and just glaring gaps
33:54
for the health industry, for the government, you know, for the
33:56
entire world, because the world is rapidly aging.
33:59
By 2050, we're going to have billions of older people,
34:01
including you and me, right? The kinds of symptoms of of
34:04
aging are obviously not avoidable.
34:08
And I think it's really an amazing thing that we can age to
34:11
such a degree because that means that our standard of living has
34:13
been raised so much by societal progress in a lot of ways.
34:18
How do we create guardrails? How do we create platforms and
34:22
systems and infrastructure that is truly inclusive of us, that
34:27
we're future proofing for ourselves?
34:29
You know when we get older, we will live in a world that is
34:33
accessible to us when you are. Pitching this to potential
34:37
investors or potential pilot users or potential partners.
34:40
Do you get any resistance or is it something that comes across
34:44
and is accepted quite naturally? That's such an interesting
34:47
question. I would say that we, so the
34:50
issue that we're addressing it's, it feels like we're sort
34:54
of educating people as we're doing this, which is what I find
34:57
the most fulfilling part of this.
34:58
Every step that we take and every action that we take is
35:02
spreading awareness about a, a really big pain point that a lot
35:06
of people experience. The reaction that we get a lot
35:08
from partners, from anyone is, Oh my God, my grandma, my
35:12
grandpa really needs this. I really hope it works because
35:14
it's such a pain helping them with digital technology or it's,
35:17
it's, I don't have enough time. And I really hope that this can
35:19
become a reality so that platforms can be more usable for
35:22
my grandparents. I don't have to spend so much
35:24
time helping them use YouTube anymore with partners,
35:28
collaborators. I think different sectors will
35:30
have different reactions. Most people are extremely, you
35:34
know, aligned with our mission. And I find that really amazing
35:38
because obviously there are lots of founders who might be dealing
35:41
with with femtekers on the end and there's maybe less
35:44
resonance. But for us, we're also dealing
35:46
with an issue that is not necessarily gender specific.
35:48
So there's a lot more resonance across the board in the health
35:50
space. The pertinence of this is not
35:54
just in terms of revenue, it's not just in terms of social
35:56
impact, it's literally in terms of life or death.
35:58
Older patients being able to use digital platforms to create an
36:02
appointment for a preventative disease screening is literally
36:06
lowering death rates as literally contributing to their
36:09
longevity. We have quite a lot of, you
36:11
know, cross sector synergy and and engagements in place.
36:14
If you're going to like events, platforms or financial services,
36:17
their responses typically will be a little bit more cautious.
36:21
And it's not actually because of the mission, but because of the
36:24
fact that we're AI driven, right?
36:25
People are interesting, rightfully cautious about, I
36:29
think especially financial service abuse.
36:30
It's it's very strictly regulated.
36:33
And so that I think that tension is also there where they really
36:38
believe in the mission, but they also have just really slow,
36:42
really lots of bureaucratic and lots of blue tape.
36:46
And that's what I also find so intellectually stimulating about
36:48
this process. You just learned so much about
36:50
industries that you just, you can't really imagine a lot of
36:54
like how people respond when you talk to them about this.
36:56
And then you learn about every industry's different needs.
36:59
Event services companies, we never expected to be potential
37:03
clients. We didn't, we that just wasn't
37:05
on our mind. But actually a lot of event
37:07
services, they are also really focused on inclusion.
37:10
A lot of people are thinking about especially older age
37:12
inclusion more than we had actually expected.
37:15
And then I would say on the investor side, because I also
37:18
run Gossip Group, which is an Angel syndicate.
37:20
I'm an investor myself. I do understand where investors
37:23
come from a lot more. And we've gotten a lot of
37:25
really, really great enthusiasm and excitement for what we're
37:28
doing. That's really encouraging to
37:30
hear actually, Linda, and whilst we were talking that actually
37:33
brought to mind a speech that I heard and Bowden who found a
37:36
Sterling Bank give a while ago. I think she was saying one of
37:39
her core focuses of interesting areas of technology is actually
37:43
technology that can make our time on earth, which is going to
37:47
be longer and longer. It's how can we actually make
37:50
our years on earth be enjoyable and livable.
37:53
There's not just about living for longer amount of years.
37:55
There's actually how can we maximize the amount of in
37:57
control how people connected lives that we are able to live.
38:00
Let me then ask you, our podcast staple, what do you think is one
38:05
thing that we allow more people to have better mental health?
38:10
Wow, that's, that's a big question.
38:12
I guess just sticking with the theme of everything I said,
38:15
think being able to have true autonomy over your life is
38:22
really the foundation for health and Wellness.
38:26
And ever since the word and that true autonomy comes from feeling
38:29
included in the spaces that you're in and the tools that
38:32
you're, you know, able to access and use and the ability to build
38:37
a joyful life for yourself. And that means accessible.
38:41
You have access to green spaces, access to good food, access to
38:46
community that you need, access to great transport if you need
38:49
it. An amalgamation of everything we
38:50
talked about today, autonomy and and and freedom and support and
38:55
inclusion. These are really the basics of
38:58
any kind of happy and healthy life.
39:01
And really infantry labs and gossip group really feel like my
39:06
lifes work to making better mental health for everybody.
39:11
Better health and Wellness for everyone.
39:13
Just a true reality and not just saying it or but actually like
39:17
literally putting the work in to do it.
39:19
Going into tech and getting my hands dirty and really showing
39:23
people that profit and purpose are not contradictory to each
39:26
other. It it really is my life's work.
39:29
Linda, thank you so much for sharing that and also for
39:32
opening up about your personal experiences and how it LED you
39:36
to try out different things and finally into the work that
39:38
you're doing today, which is super important.
39:41
It's been a pleasure to have you on the Load to Grow podcast.
39:44
Thank you for having me, the pleasure's all mine.
39:47
That's a wrap for today's episode of the Load to Grow
39:50
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