On the occasion of International Women’s Day, 2022, the host of the DevReady Podcast, Andrew Romeo talked to Yupin Robson, Director of OBSID Pty Ltd and Edify Medical Pty Ltd. Edify Medical is a company based in Australia that creates a digital ecosystem designed to break barriers of language, cost and access to information for health care providers across the globe. Listen in as the two discuss Yupin’s journey and how it impacts not just the health care professionals but countless individuals across the globe.
Born in Thailand, Yupin and her family moved to Australia when she was merely 9 years old. Yupin now holds two degrees, one in Business and another in Science and she surely is a force to be reckoned with. Trained as a microbiologist, she is an entrepreneur, a SheEO activator, and an investor with SheBacksMe. She has a 20+ years track record of medical sales and marketing experience within the Australian and international markets. Throughout her corporate career that spanned over two decades, she supported health care professionals and industries globally and this passion of hers became a purpose as she transitioned into being an entrepreneur.
Yupin wanted to do more than just earn money—she wanted to do something of value. Her extensive experience and her strong business acumen soon led her into realizing a unique problem in the health care sector—most of the information was in English when it was the first language of just about 5% of the world. This was a barrier when it came to easy and effective access to information for those across the globe. That is when she put together a team and embarked on an entrepreneurial journey with Edify Medical, a platform that embraces technology and accommodates different learning styles with informative videos and multi-lingual test transcripts from leading professionals and health care providers.
Not all was easy and even though Yupin was blessed to have a team that shared the end goal, she did have to overcome a few challenges along the way when transitioning from the corporate world to the world of startups. The primary challenge was financial management as everything in a startup stops at the entrepreneur—from the conceptualization to development to marketing and selling of the product or service. Along these lines, she emphasizes a woman entrepreneur’s need to have access to capital and how there needs to be information on alternate access routes other than raising funds from a Venture Capitalist or an Angel Investor.
The other challenge was understanding and setting up the structure of the business—especially in terms of one’s cofounder. She believes that being a solo founder is a lonely
journey and having the right crew is so much worth one’s mental, physical and financial health. She underlines that mutual respect and communication are the cornerstones of ensuring that a team works well to solve the problem at hand. In fact, she compares this to marriage—there can be ups and downs but that doesn’t mean one partner packs up and leaves after the first argument. Furthering on women’s need to have increased access to capital—she talks about SheEO and how it works towards its philosophy of radical generosity.
Talking more about her role as an activator, she explains how an existent problem is a need for entrepreneurs to be rushed into raising money. Here, she says that being involved with an accelerator and having an open mind to how capital can be raised could make a major difference. For her and her partners, they want to stick to the ethos of the company supporting Australians but she still advises upcoming entrepreneurs to communicate well with their accounts and understand international laws and provisions when seeking capital injection. Also, she highlights the need to have an exit strategy, no matter who one is working with.
As for the future, the company’s grand plan is to have Medical Ais with the ability to translate so that people can get access to the needed information with or without their ability to communicate in English.
Topics Covered
· Challenges Faced
· Need to Communicate
· Be Solution Oriented
· Equity Split and Exit Strategy
· Women Entrepreneurs and Access to Capital
· Radical Generosity
· Putting Together a Team
· Use of Data
· Owning the IP
Key Quotes (Time Stamps)
“Having joy in what you do has always been really important part of my work. And when you stop having kind-of fun and joy then you’re just working for money, aren’t you?” (6:38 – 6:49)
· “Being a solo founder is really lonely, I think, journey. And I guess, if you can find the right crew to go on this journey with you, it really is worth so much in your mental, physical, and financial health, really.” (9:13 – 9:34)
· “I think the most important thing is to continue to have a conversation with each other from a place of respect and understanding and going back to why we all started the
journey in the first place. And, be really solution focused about what’s next.” (10:24 – 10:44)
· “The idea is to eventually create a perpetual fund that grows and grows and grows because we’ve had almost one hundred per cent payback. So, that’s almost unheard of in the world of financial repayment.” (28:14 – 28:29)
· “Businesses make more businesses make more income make more jobs.” (31:20 – 31:24)
· “Because I was Thai, I saw the disconnect in, one, learning in English; and then, correctly understanding the information; and then, correctly reinterpreting that information into local language and teaching the next person.” (38:49: 39:03)
· “We just assume everyone speaks English but they don’t. So, when you look at the world and look at what language is the first language in all of the world, only 5% of the world has English as a first language.” (40:11 – 40:26)
· “We have a vision that we have to live our ethos of supporting Australians.” (46:43 – 46:49)
Social Media Clips (Time Stamps)
· Challenges Faced when Moving from Corporate to Startup (7:05 – 9:34)
· Communicate and Be Solution Oriented (10:18 – 11:09)
· Exploring Different Pathways to Capital (16:57 – 18:24)
· Women Entrepreneurs’ Access to Capital (31:38 – 32:51)
· Identifying a Unique Problem (37:44 – 39:16)
· Solving the Problem (41:41 – 43:40)
· Medical AIArtificial Intelligence (AI) is a very large and broad spectrum of technologies which most people would be familiar with through... (43:41 – 44:45)
· Owning the IP (49:49 – 52:59)
Useful Link
Download the app here: EdifyMed
