David Rosenthal: evaluation

Transcript context

…Yeah, it is. One thing that I like to look at is just the historic kind of bifurcation of the market. We've seen so much data generation in these—it sounds like a derogatory term but—superficial metrics. This is your pulse count, your step counts, so much of our wearable data is oriented here. I think the reason that things are different now and going forward is that we've had a quiet microelectronics revolution, we've had software eating the world—all this stuff’s been happening, big data analytics are getting better and better. In the meantime, we've also had more individualization and personal ownership concepts bubbling up. All this is coming together into a moment where people want to know more about themselves specifically. They don't know about averages. There's enough awareness that just looking at 23andMe where we thought that a specific gene would tell you enough to know what to eat for lunch. That's just not the case. The uniqueness of the individual is so multivariate that you really need real-time continuous feedback to know whether things are improving for you. We're seeing a moment where all the pieces are in place where we can decentralize the solution. By building large enough data sets—obviously, anonymized in order to run research and sharpen insights—you can decentralize the actor down to the minimum viable one, which is the individual. Rather than trying to solve nutrition with legislation or policy, you can instead have each person solve for themselves, multiply that by enough people, and you fix the social scale problem without having to pass some complex administration back, do you know what I mean? Obviously, the food pyramid doesn't work. I mean, just look at the way things have been done historically. All well-intentioned, but the goal is just too broad. It's to try and solve for the average person. There is no such thing as the average person, there's the individual.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.