#093 Sensi.AI | The Best Thing I Learned Was to Trust My Intuition

Show Notes

The home care industry is more important than ever, but some would say it’s behind the times because it’s not harnessing the power of modern technology. But that’s starting to change thanks to Sensi.AI, which is utilizing artificial intelligence to help home care companies improve their service and take better care of seniors. Sensi is the first of its kind, creating a new category, while at the same time, trying to dominate the marketplace. With Sensi embarking upon new territory, co-founder and CEO Romi Gubes had a lot to talk about during her recent appearance on the Midstage Startup Momentum Podcast with Roland Siebelink.

• The advantages and disadvantages of an untapped market

• Hiring the right people at the right time.

• Learning to say no to a new opportunity

• Dispelling the myth that startup burnout is unavoidable

• What does it mean for a founder to follow their intuition.

Transcript

Romi Gubes: I decided I want to leverage my technological knowledge into helping people that cannot say what is the quality of care that is provided to them.

Intro/Outro: Welcome to the Midstage Startup Momentum podcast. Each week, we interview up-and-coming founders of some of the fastest-growing mid-stage startups across the world. Your host is Roland Siebelink, who will share some of his own experience helping startups scale from 10 to 1000 people in a few years. Here is Roland.

Roland Siebelink: Hello and welcome to the MidStage Startup Momentum podcast. This is Roland, and I'm dialing in from San Francisco today. I am your coach for growing startups that are a little bit beyond product-market fit but still far away from product-market momentum and domination. And we have a special guest today. We are here talking with the CEO and founder of Sensi AI. Hello, Romi. Where are you dialing in from?

Romi Gubes: Hello, Roland. I'm calling from Austin, Texas.

Roland Siebelink: Austin, Texas. Excellent. As always, let's dive in right away. Romi, what does Sensi do? What difference do you make in the world, and whom do you serve?

Romi Gubes: Sensi is focused on the senior care ecosystem. We were built with and for home care agencies to provide the best care possible to people who prefer to age in their own place. And by the power of our audio AI technology, we're able to detect more than 100 different types of insights into the changing needs of older adults, starting from anything you can think about in terms of emergencies, such as calls for help, for EMS activation, and all the way to more clinical and softer indicators like early signs of pneumonia, UTI, caregiver-client mismatch, and things of that nature.

Roland Siebelink: That's perfect. Tell me, Romi, how did you actually get into this business? Tell me the origin story.

Romi Gubes: Some background about myself. I’m a software engineer by training. I studied software engineering back in 2012 in one of the leading universities in Israel. Since then, I’ve worked mainly in Fortune 500 companies. I worked at Cisco, Dell EMC, and Vonage. But I always knew that one day I would establish my own startup company, which was a dream of mine.

I just wasn't sure what would be the right mission to be fighting for. Then, a few years ago, I had an unfortunate experience with my daughter at daycare. If you think about that, this is on the other side of the spectrum of people who are vulnerable, cannot speak for themselves, and cannot say what is the quality of care that is provided to them.

We found a really bad case of abuse in the daycare center, unfortunately, and this is where I decided I want to leverage my technological knowledge into helping people that cannot say what is the quality of care that is provided to them.

Roland Siebelink: And how did you then pivot from that unfortunate experience with your daughter, a little kid, to seeing the elder care market as your main target?

Romi Gubes: I guess the first thing we did when we thought about the concept behind Sensi, we tried to understand out of the entire spectrum of people who are under this umbrella term vulnerable - those are kids, people with disabilities, and then older adults - we started to learn the different segments and to understand where the problem is biggest and where the trends are at. 

I immediately fell in love with this market and in the big growing gap that we have between supply and demand in this population that I immediately understood that if technology won't evolve to solve this gap, soon you and me and our parents won't be able to get the proper amount of care that they need. This is why I decided that this is the problem I want to solve.

Roland Siebelink: Okay, very good. Tell me, how far are you? When did you get started? What has been happening in the meanwhile? What are you most proud of having achieved so far?

Romi Gubes: You spoke about the different stages of companies. The product-market fit and then growth and beyond. Sensi has had a very interesting journey in all regards to product-market fit. This was our first couple of years, I would say. We had a lot of learnings to do. This market is very much untapped, which is an advantage but also a disadvantage in your early stages when you're trying to figure out everything, and there are no past success stories in the field. 

We needed to learn everything on ourselves. But in the last two years, we're experiencing an amazing growth trajectory, growing 3X year over year since the moment we penetrated the market. We have raised, until today, $53 million from top-tier VCs. Our last round was led by Insight Partners and Zeev Ventures. We are 90 employees as of today. We have three main sites. One in Israel, in Tel Aviv, which is mainly our R&D and product. Then we have our two sites in the States, one in Austin, Texas, which is our headquarters, and then one in the Bay Area as well.

Roland Siebelink: Then I wanna know everything about how have you been growing that team because that's very different from the couple of founders that are sitting around the breakfast table. How do you actually grow that team so big? How is it split up also between the technical side - products and engineering - versus go-to-market and delivery?

Romi Gubes: There is a lot to say about the growth - journey of the startup company from early stages until growth. But I think that my main takeaway from this journey is that there are certain people that are thriving in the zero-to-one cadence where you're building something from scratch, very fast iterations, no processes, no real collaboration that is needed across the board. It's them moving as fast as possible and failing fast. 

And then as you grow, you want to, on the one side, maintain this fail fast approach because you're still a startup company. But on top of that, you need to build a solid infrastructure so you can really scale up. Processes and making everything across the board work in the same way, I would say. 

And then you want to hire people that are thriving better in the one-to-10 environment. Those are the people that enjoy taking something that is very rough, but working and stabilize that and create processes out of that. What we are doing in order to make sure we're hiring the right people at every stage of the company is making sure that those people, first of all, had some similar experience, so they know what they're getting into and they have the right experience to succeed at Sensi. 

And then also, we are really challenging them on how they think their day-to-day at Sensi will look like. And we try to find a win-win here. Not only will they be a good fit for Sensi, but also that Sensi will be a good fit for them. They'll know what to look for and how their environment will look like, how their professional challenges will look like, and they want that and aim to have those challenges.

Roland Siebelink: How do you actually hire one of those executives? Because the founders I've worked with at that stage, they say it's a long journey. It's almost like a one-year closing period from the moment you get to know them. How have you developed your skill set around that, Romi?

Romi Gubes: To hire the right people?

Roland Siebelink: Yeah, to hire the right people. From the moment you get introduced to somebody, how do you woo them? How do you get them involved? How do you get them interested? Because when you're that selective, usually you reach out the first time, that doesn't mean that the person is right away available for you.

Romi Gubes: First of all, I think that maintaining those relationships is a good thing. For example, our SVP of growth, we reached out to her a year and a half ago and she said, “Romi, your company sounds amazing. I believe in the mission. I want to be a part of that. But I just ended a very long and intensive journey. I want to take some time off. Let's talk again in the future.” 

Sometimes, when it's not the right timing for someone, you have nothing to do but take a step back and just maintain the relationship. And when it is the right time, things are being put together. And she reached out a year after saying, “I'm not stopping thinking about your company. I want to be a part of such a mission. Let's work together.” And it was also the right time for us. And then we collaborated. And it's one of our best tires so far.

Roland Siebelink: That's excellent. But what did you do in the meanwhile?

Romi Gubes: You know how it is. I think that her coming in at this specific stage of Sensi in terms of our growth was also the right thing for Sensi because before that, we had an executive that thrived in a different stage of the company. And then it was exactly the right time to shift gears to the next stage of Sensi. 

Roland Siebelink: I've heard some research was done in London a while ago where they said the best companies make one change to the executive team every quarter. How do you feel about that statement?

Romi Gubes: Wow. It's interesting. I need to look back to see if we fall under the same statistic or not. For us, we experienced a group of executives that ran with us for almost two years. Then, we slowly but surely went into replacing most of them because of the different stages of the company. There are very few people that can do from zero to a hundred. Usually, it's breaking down in the middle.

Roland Siebelink: Absolutely. A different skill set. Perhaps you also experienced that people, even if they're very good for two, three years, at some point in time, they just burn out a little bit and lose energy.

Romi Gubes: Yes. Although I think that there are ways to overcome that. It is true because startup companies, at the end of the day, it's a very intense journey, and you have to love that, really love that, in order to be happy and continue to be as engaged as possible with what you're doing. 

But if it comes to burnout, I think that you need to differentiate between some obstacle that is something you can overcome and it's just periodic to something that is long lasting. And then there is no other solution than letting go and moving to another company. I think that our job as managers is to see which type of burnout is it, and to have a very open conversation, very open dialogue with our employees and with our partners to hopefully overcome that together.

Roland Siebelink: Absolutely. Rami, how have you structured your leadership team functionally? What are the key functions that you have a leader for and are there certain functions that are a little bit more subsidiary to others? How do you see that?

Romi Gubes: The organization is still small. If you think about 90 people, that might sound big, but we do not believe in too many hierarchy levels at this point. First of all, it's still small. And second of all, we want to run as fast as possible at every level, add some complexity into the internal processes. Today, we have mainly the head of/VP level that all of them are reporting to me directly. And then we have very little mid-management level. Most of our executives are first-line leaders if you think about that.

Roland Siebelink: For your customers, how do you compete in that market? Is it mostly incumbents? Is it mostly people just improvising? Is it mostly other startups? Who do you consider your major competition?

Romi Gubes: We're very privileged today to not have any direct competitor yet. When we're looking at our market, the most significant competitor to Sensi would be doing nothing. Sensi is a category creating company. We're both creating a category and leading a category at the same time. 

The main struggle that we have or the main reason for us losing deals is agencies that prefer to stay in their own conventional way of doing things without taking the next step and becoming this AI-powered agency.

Roland Siebelink: Okay, so that explains; you’re serving agencies, care agencies, I understand, as your main customer, not end customers, is that correct?

Romi Gubes: Yeah. Sensi is a B2B company. We are serving a segment that is called non-medical home care. Those are small to medium businesses.

We decided to take the B2B approach. From the early days, we designed our solution with and for home care owners in mind. It creates a totally different mode for the company and totally different product. We saw many companies that tried to go directly to consumers and weren’t successful enough and then tried to pivot into home care but weren’t able at that point to make this shift because it's a huge shift from a product perspective, marketing perspective. It's like building a new company, I would say.

Roland Siebelink: Yeah, then your DNA is wrong. You have the wrong habits, the wrong way of thinking in your company. Very hard to pivot that way. 

Very good. I'm glad we mentioned that you're a B2B company, and now I understand how unique you are. Does that also mean in combination with not being exposed to much technological noise, does that mean they're easy to reach? It's just a matter of picking up the phone book and just calling them up?

Romi Gubes: It's crazy, but yes. We're still in the market where they're replying to cold emails. They are answering the phone when you're calling them. It's a different play, I would say, than pure enterprises that have all kinds of solutions being offered to them. And it's also a very offline, very much an offline market. We're finding ourselves meeting most of them in conferences, traveling to their market, and things like that.

Roland Siebelink: In the end, you probably had to build a sales force around some cold call outreach and then have people on the ground like a field force that is actually able to meet those folks where they are.

Romi Gubes: We started like that. Today, we have more sophisticated ways to get to them. We learned the market, we learned where to find them online as well. Also, the market evolved over time. The market as it is today wasn't the same six years ago when we started. Things have evolved, and also, some of our motion is word of mouth because we are already in a place where we have such a strong footprint in the market, and this industry is built out of franchisors. They have their own groups and there are communities. We are taking leverage of that.

Roland Siebelink: Interesting. As you understand those franchising networks, does that mean you're ultimately going to be targeting the franchisor? The big parent organization that is running multiple care homes in that sense?

Romi Gubes: Yes. Sometimes, what the franchisor will do is they will reach out to us asking for a partnership, a strategic partnership where they can get a volume discount and go and market Sensi to their agencies or get their agencies to use Sensi when they're backing Sensi up financially. Sometimes we will have this collaboration, sometimes we will prefer still going bottoms up or working directly with agencies. It depends on the commercial aspect.

Roland Siebelink: Yeah. When I've talked with other founders who've used this approach, there's usually a big frustration because it takes us an enormous amount of time to sell to the parent organization. Then when we finally have the deal, that doesn't mean you've actually sold anything. You still have to go to each of the affiliate organizations and still sell it to them as well. It's not like headquarters can decide in one go.

Romi Gubes: Yeah. It's that piece, definitely. But also, it's the fact that in the last five years, we cracked the code on what's working from a post-sale perspective. We know how to work with our clients in order to get them to success. And it's very important for us to be very hands-on with our clients, understanding their motivation, understanding their business and KPIs. And then we're working with them to make sure they're well-trained on Sensi and they are ready to scale with Sensi.

Roland Siebelink: The other question I had is that you've been in business for a few years now, and you've got a number of clients. With 90 people, there’s typically a lot of pressure for adding features, maybe even adding additional products. How have you been balancing the product development focus in more of an in-depth way or more broadening or a little bit of both? Has that been an issue at all at Sensi?

Romi Gubes: I don't know if I would call it an issue, but prioritizing is key. As any other startup company, I'm always saying in every board meeting, I think I'm saying the sentence: The one thing that will get Sensi to succeed or fail is our ability to say no to the right things at the right time, because there are so many opportunities and there are so many things to do with our product that it's basically endless.

We constantly need to focus our efforts on the right things. Until today, what we did is we focused on our core product, which is providing the right insights to the life of the older adult in the best performance possible. This was our only thought process. We wanted to make sure that we're broadening our insights to provide as holistic a picture as possible of the older adult in the best performance out there.

Now, when we feel like we're doing that in an extraordinary way, we are able to think about the next steps and how we're helping agencies to actually utilize our system for everything in their business. We're looking to build on top of this data, more and more offerings, and more and more automations for home-care agencies to take them to the next level. But it's just now that we're ready to take these steps.

Roland Siebelink: You said that it’s so important to learn to say no. What did you personally as a founder have to overcome or learn in order to get better at saying no? Or was this something that always came naturally to you?

Romi Gubes: I think that the best thing I learned that makes me 10 times better than what I was when I just started Sensi is to believe in my intuitions. It's something you learn over a long time. When you're seeing how many times you should have listened to your intuition and didn't, and the fact that you fall on your face.

Today, whenever I feel like something is wrong, even if I'm not able to articulate that or analyze that, I understand that my intuition is built out of so much data, so many different data points that I gathered along the years from the market, from different people, from my communities, from everything, that it's probably the best thing to do. And this is what usually drives me in very tough decisions. I give a lot of weight to my intuition. And I think this is what most founders should do. 

Roland Siebelink: As you grew, did you feel the need to write down your intuition or your vision in a way, have some artifacts, whether it's a vision or a one-page plan, or maybe just a framework for your OKRs? How have you guys built your execution system, if anything?

Romi Gubes: Yeah. It’s an interesting journey as well because as the company grows, you're also growing in that manner. In the beginning, it's just thinking about how we want to the quarter, being able to visualize or have a forecast for three months. Then, when you're growing, you can see up to one year. Then when you're growing another step, you can see suddenly three years ahead, and it's becoming crazy. 

They think that the power is always looking as far as you can see and trying to think about that backwards. Today, what we're doing is we are looking three years ahead, then putting milestones for every time for one year and taking this one-year forecast and thinking about that backward in terms of really pure KPIs for every one of the different divisions in the company.

Roland Siebelink: Romi, that’s an amazing story. I love the whole strategy inside and your openness in showing how everything is going at Sensi. The people who’ve been listening to this podcast so far, what can they help you with? What does Sensi need the most at this stage?

Romi Gubes: I think that the company is built on its people - as cliche as it may sound - we’re always looking for the best people possible to join our journey and to come and help us change the world of senior care for the better.

Roland Siebelink: That’s great. What does a great Sensi employee look or feel like? What does your intuition tell you?

Romi Gubes: The first thing would be to strongly believe in our mission and want to be a part of changing this ecosystem. This is one aspect. The second would be that we are running the DNA of people who are eager to help us make us a success story. At the end of the day, we are truly focused on team success. Team players, people who collaborate, and also people who love and thrive being in a rapidly evolving environment. Not people who are looking for a more structured environment.

Roland Siebelink: In terms of partnerships, in terms of other businesses that might reach out, what are you looking for on that level?

Romi Gubes: Our clients are home-care agencies. If you are a home-care agency or have friends in home-care agencies, spread the word. Come join our very good momentum. Get on our platform and provide better care to your clients.

Roland Siebelink: Okay. Perfect. Of course, if anyone is listening to this podcast and you know me but don’t know Romi yet, please feel free to reach out, and I’ll be happy to provide an introduction. The same goes for the investors who, I’m sure, will be lining up to invest in the next round. That would be good.

If people want more information about Sensi, where do they go, and what is something they should look at or download?

Romi Gubes: There are a lot of new things around Sensi - a simple Google search. And we have everything on our website as well; it’s Sensi.ai - it should be easy to find. You can read news articles and all of our case studies out there.

Roland Siebelink: Excellent. Last question, as always, Romi, if you were to advise a founder/entrepreneur who is a few years behind you, what would be your one advice not to be missed?

Romi Gubes: Don’t be afraid to fail. Again, it may sound like a cliche, but it takes a lot of guts to do this. It’s not easy to say “yes” before you have your first MVP deal. It’s not easy to go and sell something before you’re ready to scale. There are all kinds of things that might feel not intuitive because it’s not the way we’re used to doing things. But in a startup environment, you have to do things backward. 

Roland Siebelink: Exactly. Very good advice, much appreciated. Thank you so much, Romi Gubes, CEO and founder of Sensi. Loved having you on the podcast. Thank you again for all of your open sharing on what’s going on at the company. I love those the best. 

Romi Gubes: Thank you, Roland. Thank you very much for having me. I really appreciate that. Great convo!

Roland Siebelink: Okay, thank you. For the audience, next week we will have another episode with yet another amazing founder - not quite as amazing as Romi, of course. But still, a very high level, so thank you, and keep tuning in.

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