OnlyBoth CEO Talks Going From Academia To Business

For 12 years, Raul Valdes-Perez, PhD, CEO of OnlyBoth, put his automated reasoning technology on hold.

Valdes-Perez had developed the technology at Carnegie Mellon in 2000, but decided to create a company, Vivisimo, based off another technology he developed at the famed science and technology university. Over the course of the 2000s, Valdes-Perez oversaw the growth of Vivisimo, as CEO for nine years and executive chairman for 12. In 2012, IBM bought Vivisimo and Valdes-Perez was free to build up a new company using the automated reasoning technology he had left behind.

The automated reasoning technology, which he called niche-finding, proved to be the backbone of OnlyBoth. Valdes-Perez and co-founder Andre Lessa officially started the company in 2014. OnlyBoth uses the data analysis technology to automate benchmarking for the healthcare sector. The technology automates comparison data and spits out insights “in perfect English paragraphs,” according to Valdes-Perez, about various metrics, related to what the healthcare organization is looking for.

“Through its regulatory and powers, the government collects and publishes very rich performance data in different healthcare sectors ranging from hospitals to nursing homes, dialysis facilities and others. Anybody can download this data. Our mission right now is to bring performance transparency to those healthcare sectors. The data is out there, but what is needed is a good engine, a good analysis tool that would communicate standout behaviors to the user.”

Valdes-Perez sat down with Chief Executive to discuss challenges he’s faced in going from academia to the business world, two things he learned from Jack Welch and more. Here are excerpts from this conversation.

What are the challenges you face in your day-to-day operations as CEO of OnlyBoth?

The one challenge I have faced is that I went into the business world knowing absolutely nothing about business. I had been basically an academic for most of my life and we started as three people in our company. We didn’t start with the board of directors, or much in the way of external funding. So the number one challenge was that if you have a small number of people in the company and they’re all kind of technical, then you have a limited range of expertise. So what do you do about that? I mean, if you’re a rich company, you can just hire people in various sectors as employees or even as consultants. But if not, then you face kind of two decisions. You either do the best you can and make a lot of mistakes or you proactively go out and seek advice from people who know more than you.

So that was the number one challenge and perhaps by temperament and perhaps also by belief, I went out proactively and sought advice from many, many different people on many different decisions I had to make. So that was the number one challenge I’ve faced throughout my business career. How do you make decisions when you are a small company that is growing organically and you don’t have the expertise to cover all the bases?

At a startup, you always need access to more knowledge than is available within your company in order to make good decisions. So one has to get into the mental habit of asking oneself, “If I have a decision to make, do I have the knowledge needed to make this decision by myself or do I lack such knowledge so I should go out and get advice from people outside my company who actually are quite familiar with the subject?”

So you have to get in the mental habit of automatically asking oneself that question. It doesn’t mean you have to seek advice 100 times a day of course, but for major decisions, it helps to think of that.

Talk me about what you learned from Jack Welch.

I read this book by Jack Welch called “Winning.” I read it a few years ago and there are actually two chapters, two parts of the book that I liked very much. One is how to create a good corporate culture in a company. And he mentioned how it really starts from the top-down especially if the CEO is also a founder-CEO and wasn’t just hired in where there’s already a corporate culture. So it starts from the top-down and then what is a good way for that top-down CEO-leader to create or instill a good corporate culture. And he said, “Do what you say and say what you mean.” And I thought that was a great insight. Do what you say. A lot of people in business say they’re going to do something, “I will call you back by tomorrow,” and then they don’t, right? Or, “I will do this,” and then they don’t. So do what you say and say what you mean.

Another thing I learned from that book, which is something I shared with every new hire at my previous company, is advice on how to get promoted. And basically, there were two things that he pointed out. It was about a 15-page chapter, but it got boiled down to two things: “Do more than is expected of you and don’t be a pain in the neck. And if you do those two things, then you will do well, you will get promoted.”

How do you work with CEOs in healthcare to get them to overcome their hesitations about investing into technology?

Well, OnlyBoth is kind of in a unique situation. Healthcare is 19% of the economy and it’s very complex because there are so many stakeholders. But in healthcare there has been a long tradition of thought leaders who say that in order to improve the performance of healthcare, one needs transparency and public information about how different healthcare providers are performing. I’ve read a number of books on this topic. One that I really like is called “Unaccountable” by a professor, a surgeon at Johns Hopkins University, who talks about how the culture of non-transparency has been in medicine for so long and he gave lots of anecdotal examples of it. I was fascinated by that book. Anyway, many thought leaders have advocated for transparency. Data is collected by the federal government. Statisticians continually improve the data collection processes, and the measures that are used. So you have a nice situation where you have people advocating for transparency and you have data. The problem is of course, but how do you go from data into good insights?

I like to use the example of a window. A window is very transparent. You can see transparently what’s on the other side of the window, but sometimes you really need help in interpreting what’s going on the other side of the window, and obviously, the same does for data. And comparing the performance of providers, that benchmarking idea hasn’t really seen any advance in methodology for decades. So we’re kind of in a unique position where we have a brand new technology and we have the resources to try to achieve this mission of ours of bringing unprecedented transparency and doing it for free open access.

So our goal is to use this technology and public data to bring public performance insights on how our hospitals are doing, how our nursing homes could improve, etc. We want to change the way people think about benchmarking and then work with proprietary data sets to bring that value in other more limited less public sectors.

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