How AI is powering Olympic-level wellness

Note: Transcripts are automatically generated from episode audio, and are not fully corrected for spelling, grammar, and formatting.

JENNIFER HEIL: I do believe resiliency and risk taking is trained. And so you’re not born with it. Yeah. Maybe there’s an inclination or an ability. I think being an adrenaline junkie, probably you seek that out a little more.

RANA EL KALIOUBY: By all accounts, Jennifer Heil IS an adrenaline junkie. She’s an Olympic gold-winning freestyle skiier for Canada. You won’t find her going down the slopes this winter Olympics – she’s since retired … But as Chef de Mission of the Canadian team, she still draws a lot of inspiration from her experience as an athlete of an incredibly technical and dangerous sport.

HEIL: You know, I used to have to come into jump set for mogul’s a second where I couldn’t see my landing doing flips. And so it sounds ridiculous, but I controlled that risk and I built that resiliency and that risk taking. And I think entrepreneurship is the same thing. You know, you have to take risks, you have knowledge, you have feedback, but you don’t have the full picture. You’re gonna crash in skiing and you’re gonna have to mentally and emotionally get back up. And that happens over and over again. And that’s the same reality of being an entrepreneur.

EL KALIOUBY: Yes, Jenn is NOT ONLY an Olympian who’s trained and competed at the highest levels, she’s ALSO now an entrepreneur. Her company Revvel is an AI-powered health platform offering personalized, Olympic-quality care to everyone. What sets Revvel apart is the fact that they’re deploying digital twins of real health experts. It’s not replacing them – it’s amplifying their reach.

Plus, I love the way she brings together her Olympian mindset AND AI to optimize health and wellness. I had to get her on the show to dive into all of that. Let’s get to it.

I’m Rana el Kaliouby and this is Pioneers of AI – a podcast taking you behind-the-scenes of the AI revolution.

[THEME MUSIC]

Hi Jen. Welcome to Pioneers of AI. I am so excited for our conversation.

HEIL: Thanks for having me. I’m delighted to be here.

Copy LinkLeading athletes through Olympic pressure and preparation

EL KALIOUBY: Yeah. Okay. So in 2006 you won your first gold medal as a free skier at the 2006 Winter Olympics, and you were in Italy, and now 20 years later, you are back for the Winter Olympics in Milano, Corina. This time round you’re the Chef de Mission. Congratulations. This is amazing. But I would love for you to tell us a little bit more.

What is the role of a Chef de Mission? How did you get selected and how’s it going so far?

HEIL: Yeah, no, thank you. So I have to first compliment you on your amazing pronunciation because it is a French word. The ion.

EL KALIOUBY: It’s not, it’s not mission.

HEIL: Well, that’s the translation. But in Canada we have a team leader who is a former Olympian, usually Olympic champion, who has the experience and knows the pressure and the intensity of the games and leads the athletes and the mission staff.

So I have hundreds of people that I’m supporting, an amazing team behind me that has spent the last five years preparing the ground in Italy in terms of all the logistics to perform. But really my role is to support the athletes. I’ve been with them throughout the year reminding them to focus and basically do everything that they can to have no regrets and really audit their own personal performance systems ahead of the games. And now with being at the Olympics, it’s really just about supporting them in this high pressure environment because Olympians are not rational beings during the Olympics. It’s just too high stress. And that supporting compassion is a really big part of supporting the performance.

EL KALIOUBY: Yeah. So how do, or give us some of the things you do to bring that to life.

HEIL: Yeah, so I spent a number of days with all of our Olympic Hope fills back in July, where we spent multi days really getting into the specifics of performance. I have a very stereotypical background in terms of Olympic experience. So my first Olympics, I finished fourth by the smallest margin possible.

One hundredth of a point. Yeah, obviously heartbreaking, but it really pushed me to reevaluate how I trained in my whole performance environment, which — I moved across the country. I started raising almost a hundred thousand dollars as an 18-year-old every year to go out and find the best experts to put them around me, and that allowed me to actually redefine the preparation for my sport.

And so I went on to be one of the most consistent skiers, the one to win the first man or woman to win all titles. And then we built an organization that scaled that.

EL KALIOUBY: Gave me goosebumps, by the way. That was awesome.

HEIL: It’s a pretty fun thing to get to say, but it’s tapping into those experiences and also that knowledge of taking control of your own destiny.

Like as an athlete, I compete less than 30 seconds every four years, and so after finishing fourth, I was like, why am I not taking more control of my environment and just kind of accepting the resources that make their way to me, and they were insufficient at that time. So anyways, that’s a big part of my message.

And then obviously being a favorite. I was a favorite four years later to win. And being able to do that in a competition where you have one shot, less than 30 seconds to be perfect, that brings just this enormous pressure and anxiety. I was reigning Olympic champion competing at a home Olympics where Canada had never won a gold medal competing on day one.

And many of the journalists from around the world said that it was myself and the men’s hockey team that had the most pressure, but they got to face it as a team. So I know what anxiety and pressure and preparation looks like. And so it’s digging into those things. And then it’s just building a relationship with the athletes supporting them one-on-one, whether that’s through Instagram text messages, you’d be surprised how much just having someone believe in you in those really tough moments, someone that’s done it and knows how much of a difference that can make. But then I’ve been on the ground with hockey. I’ve been traveling the country for different team announcements and the celebration of these athletes becoming Olympians for the first time or multi-time Olympians.

So my main message is how do we create that performance environment for both the athletes and the mission staff. And so being a mission staff is a really interesting role because you need to be a problem solver, but at the same time you have to be so subtle and such a gentle touch because as I said, athletes are not rational in these moments and like, someone breaking into your bubble when you’re just trying to keep the world out, that can make a difference. And so just supporting the mission staff to know that most of their work has to be done behind the scenes and gently, and how important just a smile can be. It doesn’t need to be more than that when you’re interacting with an athlete.

Copy LinkWhy joy can be a performance advantage under extreme stress

EL KALIOUBY: Yeah. And you have to build trust right ahead of the event so that when the time comes and you need to intervene in whatever way, the trust is already there. Are there any core values that you kind of bring as the Chef de Mission to this role? Like, do you have a particular twist or flavor to how you are doing it?

HEIL: Great question. Well, I would say one thing I bring and I try and reinforce is the importance of joy in the way you show up. And so I think joy is not happiness, and joy is not looking at everything with rose colored glasses, but it’s actually accepting what is — the challenges, but also the opportunities.

And so for example, when I stood on top of the start line, I worked with my sports psychologist on the emotions I wanted to evoke, and joy was always my wild card. And it was like the ace up my sleeve because it was like, okay, I could stand here and feel the pressure. But instead, I know I’ve done everything in my power to apply the pressure and I’m grateful for this opportunity to go out and perform and test my limits.

And so that makes you show up very differently than if you’re standing there going, oh my God, I’m a favorite. Like a hundred million people are watching live.

EL KALIOUBY: Right. Oh my God. Yeah.

HEIL: You’re gonna be shaking in your boots either way. But one really sets you up for performance. And so trying to evoke that and 20 years later I have the perspective of how special this is and also how hard this is.

I think that was my biggest realization, reentering this environment was, wow, this was hard. Like, wow, this is a lot of pressure. And being able to celebrate what these athletes can do and this opportunity.

EL KALIOUBY: So everyone watching and or listening, I am literally getting goosebumps. It’s so inspiring to do this with so much intentionality and being so grounded. My son, who’s almost 17, is an athlete. He plays squash and he plays nationally and sometimes internationally, and it’s pretty rough.

Right. Especially for individual sports. So anyway, I feel like there’s a lot of these lessons that you are talking about. One of our mantras as a family is embarking on the journey without attaching to the outcome.

And I feel like that’s kind of the — he’s able to channel the joy, which he loves the sport. So there’s that.

HEIL: I wanna say I’m not surprised that your family motto is that because you’ve aced it, and that is actually the whole balance of performance, is like, yes, I was nine years old when I started dreaming of winning an Olympic gold medal. And so when I’m standing there, it’s everything to me.

But if you can’t release that, and if you can’t focus on the journey and the moment and the performance, you’re not gonna get there. And so I’m not surprised he’s got his mom leading the way with the perfect mantra.

EL KALIOUBY: It’s hard though. As a parent, we could have an entire conversation about what it’s like to be a parent of an athlete.

HEIL: I’ve got my own two boys now and it’s way harder than being the athlete.

EL KALIOUBY: I don’t know if it’s way harder than being the athlete, but I literally wear a whoop and it will track his matches. Like it will literally just be like 20 or 30 beats less than what he’s experiencing on court, but it’s like the same experience. It’s insane.

Copy LinkHow AI is already reshaping elite sports and competition

But anyway, we are an AI podcast, so I wanna ask you this. I know for Adam, for example, he’s been using agentic AI — like he’s uploaded all of his previous squash matches and it’s given him stats, like he’s 70% more likely to win the whole match if he wins the first game, and if he gets to the fifth game, guess what?

The likelihood is less than 20%. And there’s a lot of actionable things he can do based on this analysis. Where do you and your athletes use AI?

HEIL: Yeah, so there is such an opportunity that AI is opening up in sport and I think it’s the perfect use case. And so when I think of an athlete at the highest level looking to control performance, it basically helps on every dimension.

I think it can get us to a really great elite level because it’s getting generalizable information about every match, but if everybody is armed with that information, then there still needs to be creativity, right? So I think it’s going to bring up the entire — well, we’re seeing it already. It’s already been deployed in the NBA, in the Premier League, all of these places.

And when I’ve talked with pro hockey players, that’s what they say is every movement, every shot is so analyzed that there’s very little space left on the rink. And so it’s like everything is optimized and then you have to optimize within those smaller spaces. So we’re gonna see the level increase. When I think as like an individual athlete and my areas of control — mental, physical, emotional health — athletes have so much data being tracked on them. You mentioned your son — heart rate variability, breathing rate, all of those things are now accessible to the public.

But those are core metrics that athletes track, and how that correlates to training load. So this is a physiologist’s dream with AI because now they can interpret that data and go through decades of this data that have been stuck in spreadsheets to actually bring these insights.

So that’s super exciting. Another piece is just around officiating. So again, we’re seeing this in the Premier League. They are now using it to call offsides — like, what fan isn’t happy for better calls? I know I am. And then I come from a sport of judging. And so we always say in sport that if you’re in the pure physical performance space, you have to deal with doping.

And if you’re in the more artistic space, you have to deal with judging. And so personally I would always prefer judging because I think you have more control. And I knew what it would take to win and my goal was to be better than that so that there was no misinterpretation.

‘Cause that is painful and frustrating. But judging is starting to implement AI and I think this is a perfect use case where you can actually measure height, you can measure amplitude, you can measure landing. So whether that’s figure skating, free skiing, freestyle, all of these sports, it really will improve the ability to judge.

You still will need humans to evaluate the creativity and those pieces of it, but it really is going to remove so many of those biases around judges and which country you’re from and who won the last one, and on and on.

EL KALIOUBY: Jenn isn’t just thinking about AI in the sports world, she wants to bring this superpower to all of us. In a short minute, Jenn and I talk about how her startup Revvel aims to transform personal healthcare and why her primary focus is on women.

[AD BREAK]

Welcome back to Pioneers of AI. You can listen to this episode, and others, by heading over to our YouTube channel.

Copy LinkWhy entrepreneurship feels a lot like training for the Olympics

So you’re not just an incredible athlete, you are also an entrepreneur, which is how I met you. We met at the Masters of Scale summit a year ago. You had participated in the early stage founders program at the Masters of Scale Summit, and I mentored there last year. It was awesome. What was that experience like for you?

HEIL: Oh, well that was amazing. I mean, being an entrepreneur is very much like being an athlete. And I say you don’t choose entrepreneurship, it chooses you. Like no, again, no rational human would choose entrepreneurship. Just like no rational human would choose to go down four moguls per second and fly 30 meters off a jump. So.

EL KALIOUBY: You must be an adrenaline junkie to do that, right?

HEIL: Well, yes.

EL KALIOUBY: Like a real one.

HEIL: Entrepreneurship — and to me, to be surrounded at Masters of Scale with other early stage entrepreneurs facing the same challenges — it’s really about how do you organize resources, how do you stay disciplined? How do you move towards that end goal?

And then how do you stay flexible within that? So many of those overlapping skills. But yeah, it’s really helpful to be in those environments as you’re building, especially in the early days.

EL KALIOUBY: So, I should mention that I’m an investor in your company, Revvel. Proud investor, early investor too. We will get into the mission and your vision of the company. But before that, so you were an athlete and then at some point you decided to go to Stanford.

And I just would love to hear the story — like, why decide to go back to school, and then what was the impetus for starting Revvel? Did you go to Stanford because you wanted to start a company, or did that happen while you were there?

HEIL: Yeah, so first of all, amazing opportunity. Super grateful to have been able to go to an institution like Stanford. So it was pretty amazing. I loaded up the U-Haul and started driving down, moved my family into campus. To be someone at my stage of life and be able to bring their family and reinvest in education was a huge opportunity.

And so for me, my intent was to open the door to the valley because I did know that this elite group of experts that I built around me and then scaled for other athletes — we went and raised $35 million to bring these same experts to as many athletes as we could — I knew that there was an opportunity to bring that to everyone. And I knew that very clearly because when I retired, I went from, you know, 16 having a full medical elite staff around me to having noise and crickets, and I had real challenges — as a woman, as a young mother recovering from postpartum, all of these things. And I just could not find solutions. And I was like, this doesn’t make sense to me because everything I know about healthcare is proactive and support and having this team around you.

And so I just knew that that was an important problem. And it was one that every woman experiences at some level in their life, at different phases of life. And so for me, the only solution was technology. The only way to scale these experts was through technology. And so where else do you do that other than the valley?

So this was, yeah, I went there to explore this concept. But of course things do have to line up and you do have to get lucky on your journey. And fortunately, I met my co-founder in my program — he’s 34 today, but he started Stanford at 14.

EL KALIOUBY: I know. Pretty impressive.

HEIL: Yeah. Just a minor brag there. He spent his whole life building data platforms and in the valley. And so we started doing an entrepreneurship class together, and we started whiteboarding and all of a sudden, just like magic appeared in 20 minutes, we realized that we had this perfect overlap of vision and passion and complementary expertise.

And we didn’t necessarily know it at that point, but that was really the seed to this business.

Copy LinkBuilding an elite support system and turning it into a startup vision

EL KALIOUBY: That’s so cool. I wanna dig into Revvel. But before we do that, I would love for you to explain what your performance team — the humans, not the AI versions of it — looked like. How many experts did you have around you?

HEIL: Oh my gosh. I probably had eight core team members and then some that would come in and out of the environment based off of travel and the team. So yeah, it started by breaking down what needs to go into my performance. And when you have one opportunity, less than 30 seconds every four years, you can have all the technical skills.

But if you don’t have the physical resiliency to deal with that pressure and the mental tools, it’s not gonna happen. And so my first team member that I went out and saw was a sports psychologist. People always wanna know, okay, what does a sports psychologist do? I’m like, unfortunately, it’s not like getting hit by lightning.

Like there’s not just this amazing wisdom that’s imparted to you. It is like going to the gym. It is building the tools on how to manage emotion and your physiology through your brain and your thoughts. And then I was technically very good, but my body was already broken down as an 18-year-old because my sport is pretty brutal. So then I went and sought the very best strength and conditioning coach that I didn’t have access to. He was training the men’s hockey team, the Montreal Habs, and I was able to convince him to take me on as well. And so I rebuilt my body from the ground up with these experts. But then I had everything from regular osteopath, deep tissue masseuse, nutritionists, Pilates.

I had a technical coach. I actually had two technical coaches, so it goes on and on. But the interesting thing about my team, which I think truly differentiates it even from a lot of elite teams, is that it was truly athlete centered. And my performance was about finding this performance envelope where I was mentally healthy as well as physically healthy.

And we see that a lot of athletes get pushed to the brink where they’re not emotionally or mentally healthy, which reduces the length of their careers. But I was very lucky and my experts communicated. So everything was tapped into this one goal where they were in their own environment optimizing based off of what the other one was doing.

So if my physio found an imbalance, he’d call my sports psychologist or my strength and conditioning coach, and we would work on that. And vice versa — what my strength and conditioning coach saw, if I was super tired, he’d call my physiologist and we would maybe reduce training load. So it was this interconnected nature, which is the dream of everyone, right?

It’s holistic health that was us operating on all levels.

EL KALIOUBY: Which is your vision, and what is the definition of performance that is going to resonate with the average person?

HEIL: So our vision is very simple. It’s how do we take these elite experts and make them accessible to everyone using technology and AI. And in order to do that, we have to dig into the technical pieces to make this really shine. But that’s really that simple — especially on women’s health, there’s a lot of research that’s been lacking.

We can get into those statistics, but it’s not great. Women have not been treated based off of their own unique physiologies and are often dismissed for conditions because they’re not understood.

Copy LinkThe hidden gaps in women’s health and why better solutions are overdue

EL KALIOUBY: Let’s actually unpack that for a second. ‘Cause that is important.

HEIL: Yeah. So it’s frustrating when you start to unpack it. But there’s so many different ways we can look at this because women’s health does get dismissed. So we can look at it as a healthcare priority, we can look at it as economic impact. We could look at it as an argument of equity, but the reality is most research has not been done on female bodies because it was deemed too complex with our hormones. Well, turns out our hormones drive a lot of our health and support through the different phases of life, and they’re absolutely critical to understand. So we’re coming around to that. But the fact that women’s health conditions like menopause, PMS, and endometriosis account for 14% of the disease burden, but they’re less than 1% of the overall investment in research — there’s just this disproportionate gap that shows up in our lives. Like for example, a couple years ago I had this tremendous fatigue and that is not something that I’ve ever had to deal with in my life.

Fortunately, I have a lot of energy. And so I went to my doctor and I had gained weight, I had fatigue. And she looked at me and I was like, can we do some investigation? Like I’m feeling really crappy. And she looked at me and she said, welcome to your forties. And.

EL KALIOUBY: Okay. And then it was just like, nothing you can do.

HEIL: So I was like, oh my God. I thought the decline was more like 70. I was like, oh my God, this is the cliff. And so I had this reaction and of course there were some tears. I was like, wow. The beginning of the end. So then I was like, no, this isn’t right. So I went to — actually, I got a massage and my massage therapist was like, you have so much fluid retention in your body. And I was like, oh, this isn’t just like weight. This is like fluid. So I started to do some tests. Turns out I had the highest level of parasites in my body that caused fatigue, and all I needed was two weeks of antibiotics. So if I wasn’t stubborn and if I didn’t know how to advocate for my health, and if I didn’t know what my baseline was, I may have accepted that for a lot longer. But this is the reality that women are completely dismissed, when it was two weeks of antibiotics that changed everything. And this is a very common experience. Our company — I’ve been advocating for change in sports for women and now health.

And I’m kind of tired, like my contribution now is action. And so I don’t want to be spending a ton of time explaining to people that don’t wanna invest in women’s health or think that it’s charity. I just wanna provide solutions to women and that’s where I’m putting my effort and my time.

EL KALIOUBY: Yeah. Amazing. So OpenAI found that 40 million people ask ChatGPT a health related question every day. And I know I have for sure. And so just in the past few weeks, OpenAI launched its own health platform. So I think this goes to show how much potential there is in harnessing AI to address health. I’m curious, why do you think people are drawn to AI for health applications? And part two of this question is, are you worried that OpenAI has released a health platform?

HEIL: So let’s start with, am I worried?

EL KALIOUBY: You probably got this question a lot. Yeah.

HEIL: Yeah. So when it comes to OpenAI and their approach to health, this is a very important topic that is underserved for all people. So to me, this is the next frontier of AI and I am so excited to be in this space at this time, and we’re taking a completely different approach to how we’re solving this than OpenAI is.

OpenAI is really about a more generalized approach to health. So they train their model based off of doctors coming to the table and helping train this AI. We’re taking a very different approach where OpenAI has this breadth, but we’re going for depth — we’re going to the very best minds on very specific topics, and we are taking that and creating this digital twin of this individual where they’re also tuning in and collaborating. We’re going for hyper depth and then we’re letting people go from the best mind on one topic to the other, rather than this generalizable answer on your health. So I’m really excited because I think we have something very unique and very high end to contribute to this space. And then we have this multi-agent infrastructure where if you’re talking to the wrong expert, we’ll get you to the right expert. I just find that exciting and very validating of the problem.

Our healthcare systems unfortunately are broken and they’re not going in the right direction. So one in three have no access to a basic family physician. There are the insurance challenges in the US. In Canada you have the wait lines where you may be insured, but you can’t get to a doctor in a timely fashion. And so there’s this need for information. 90% of your doctor visit is actually explaining your symptoms and getting basic information back and this educational content. And so AI is very good at doing that front end load and then bringing in those experts for the more complex cases.

So I think also because healthcare has been so inaccessible, people don’t have great health literacy. A lot of people aren’t connected to their own bodies in the day to day. That’s where I feel really grateful — I know my cycles, I know my energy, I know that recovery is as important as pushing through.

And so I feel that in my body because that was my job, was to tap into those signals. So I think this gives people this opportunity to learn about themselves in a new way. That’s certainly what we’re creating on our platform. And then you ask a question about performance — performance sounds like elite, right?

EL KALIOUBY: Right. It sounds like only for.

HEIL: Totally. So this is both an opportunity and a challenge in terms of how we share this, but performance to me is as simple as what is your goal? Is your goal to wake up in the morning and have more energy and feel good? Is your goal to run your first 5K? Or is your goal to be like the ultimate weekend warrior of a certain sport?

It doesn’t really matter, whatever your goal is. I think everybody has an ambition on how they want to show up in their life and their day to day. And we actually see this as an opportunity to communicate this language to women who have been mainly marketed around weight loss and beauty.

And we’re like, no, this is about what are your goals? How do you wanna feel? How do you wanna show up? And we wanna give you the expertise to do that.

Copy LinkHow Revvel uses expert digital twins to deliver personalized health guidance

EL KALIOUBY: Yeah. Super cool. So let’s go behind the scenes and kind of unpack the technology that you’re building for Revvel. But I first wanna start — what would the experience be like for somebody like me on the Revvel platform? You have a wait list and some beta users I believe, but you haven’t opened it to the public yet.

Yeah. So what would the experience look like?

HEIL: Yeah, well it’s coming real soon within weeks. We’re gonna be opening up access from the wait list. So for us, what’s really important is it’s a simple, uncluttered experience.

And so that again comes to the way in which I was privileged to access my team — it very much was like this concierge experience, right? They’re bringing you in, you’re discussing what the objectives are and then they’re bringing a lot of their craft to the table and kind of giving you a little bit of a needs-to-know basis.

And if you wanna know more, you can certainly ask. So we want to simplify the journey. We don’t want this to feel like a burden where you have research articles and you have to put on your magnifying glass to understand what any of it means. You can see the research articles we reference — all of those we’re very transparent.

That’s super important to us. We have an app, you download the app, you log in, and we have multiple modalities in the way you can interact. So voice is the primary way that we want people to interact because it’s much easier to speak about your health than it is to type it out. But we give you the chance to share your data so that we can get a better picture on you, which allows us to have a more tailored program. So that can be anything from uploading lab results — we actually have computer vision where we can analyze your gait or your movement, which is what these elite experts do to figure out if you have chronic back problems — well, it’s probably coming from your hip. And so what does that look like? How can we create a plan? We even look at voice because there’s a lot of correlation between the tonality in your voice and chronic pain or distress.

And so we can start to create this picture, this longitudinal picture, which is every elite expert or doctor’s dream — to have this richness, but not in a way that’s uninterpretable. And so we’re interpreting that data. And then when you engage with one of our experts, we use that data to give you hyper-specific advice based off of your goals and based off of what we know about you. And that profile only grows over time. And so it’s like this amazing asset that we want people to use proactively, but if you do get sick, if things do change, then you have this asset and this very clear baseline to move forward if you need treatment or whatever that may be, which would be off of our platform.

We don’t do that. But this profile is a huge asset in addition to the advice that we’re offering.

EL KALIOUBY: One of my theses is that the trifecta of using sensors, multimodal data, and both predictive and generative AI will unlock new opportunities for health span and performance and longevity. I wear a whoop, I used to wear a glucose monitor. Are you thinking of allowing users to share all of this data?

HEIL: A hundred percent. Yeah, so we’re integrated already. Any wearable you use — you authorize it if you want it on the platform, which is obviously secure and compliant, and we take privacy and security really seriously. But if you want to share that data, it’s all available to you, so we can get a very complete picture on your health based off of your health records, based off of this day-to-day monitoring through these wearables.

So we see that as one piece. We want this multimodality used to create this picture on your health, this most complete picture.

EL KALIOUBY: Amazing. So one of the key differentiators of your approach is creating these digital twins of health or performance experts. What does that experience look like and why would an expert come on the platform? Like what’s in it for them?

HEIL: Yeah, so there’s a lot of fear, rightfully so, around AI replacing humans. We actually see this very differently — our specific approach is about elevating the humans. So we are taking these experts who have dedicated their life and their craft to developing expertise, to doing research — whether that’s Danny Langford who works with the Warriors around player rehabilitation, and also has a practice around women’s postpartum rehabilitation.

We take that expertise that she’s garnered and we create basically a digital copy of her knowledge base. If you become one of these experts, generally you’re very passionate about moving health forward.

And so we’re a platform that allows them to do this and get their knowledge out of these very niche places. Right now, Danny’s incredibly busy. She works with maybe 20 players, but she has the ability to reach hundreds of thousands and millions of people on our platform. We don’t see this digital twin as a one and done copy. This is like a living being. So they have to continually audit it to make sure that it’s operating in the way they want.

EL KALIOUBY: Yeah. On this podcast, we’ve covered this idea of the virtual human economy a few times with Natalie Ma and others. And it’s this idea that real expertise doesn’t scale, right? A lot of the people you’re talking about, they can’t — even if they wanted to — see hundreds of users and customers at a time.

It’s just too much, right? Time does not scale that way. And so I guess AI provides an opportunity to clone that expertise while they still stay in the loop, which I think is really powerful and very exciting. Are there any functions that Revvel won’t be able to do? Like, I don’t know, make a diagnosis or suggest medications for people?

HEIL: Yeah, exactly. So we are not a diagnostic tool — that is a medical grade device. So we operate below that, and that’s also where we think we can have the greatest impact. And we’re also not a tool for clinicians, right? I think a lot of AI tools are being built for them. We really wanna focus on the individual because we think they’re so grossly underserved.

And we see that women are looking for solutions. They control 80% of the spending. They’re the most proactive with their health. Thousands of dollars are being mobilized every year per person. And so that shows us that there is hunger for solutions and that’s who we wanna serve. We’re not doing those pieces around clinical practice.

Copy LinkWhat trust and privacy should look like in AI health platforms

EL KALIOUBY: Yeah, I wanna talk about privacy because there are some concerns around sharing your health information with AI chatbots. And I’ll just play one scenario out. So say you’re having a conversation with Revvel or ChatGPT — none of these have legal privileges. And this could get dicey. Like, for example, if we’re talking about women’s health, a woman is pregnant and she lives in a state where abortion is illegal and she asks for resources on how to get misoprostol online. There could be serious ramifications. So how do you think about privacy and who has access to what information, and what questions should an end user be asking when they’re evaluating the different options they have in front of them?

HEIL: Yeah, we talked about OpenAI and their approach and how we differ. Another critical piece is you’re uploading your information with no control on OpenAI — I do not recommend that. So there are very good reasons for people to feel nervous about this and to be cautious and to evaluate their options.

We’re operating under full HIPAA compliance. All of our data is encrypted. For us, the number one issue is consumer trust. We have to earn that. We have to prove that we meet all of those standards. And it’s hyper important to consider, and then it also comes down to what you’re comfortable with.

Like, you don’t have to share all of your medical data with us to have value. We can personalize it further, but there’s that scale for each user to decide what’s right for them. And so yeah, moving forward, it’s such early days that it’s easy to be like, oh, I really want this answer, I’m just gonna upload my lab results into OpenAI. But we will see the consequences for that.

EL KALIOUBY: We’re going to take a short break. When we come back: how you can tap into an Olympian mindset – whether or not you’re doing flips on the slope. Stay with us.

[AD BREAK]

Copy LinkHow founders can train resilience like high performance athletes

EL KALIOUBY: Yeah. I have heard you talk about how free skiing is a mental game in some of your other interviews, and I believe entrepreneurship is also like, it requires a lot of grit and resilience in dealing with a lot of uncertainty. For any of our founders who are listening to the show, what are some of your best tips to stay grounded and to stay emotionally and mentally resilient?

HEIL: I’ve already been on quite a journey as an early stage entrepreneur and I think it’s really easy to take too much feedback and take too many opinions, and I think that really impacted me in a negative way. Because as an athlete, you have coaches and you have people you trust around you where you’re very open to feedback. What I learned early on is that I have to be more selective with my team around me and whose feedback I’m taking, because it’s very easy to be a pinball in a machine if you’re taking everybody’s feedback — not everyone is an expert in the space, or they may have a different perspective, or may specialize in something totally different. So that was a piece I had to learn and remind myself to be grounded.

EL KALIOUBY: And trust your intuition and trust your expertise. Right?

HEIL: A thousand percent. It’s not different than standing at the start line trusting you can navigate this crazy course at high speed. That’s a big part of it. And then just get up, when you crash you just have to stand back up, and have a support network. Yes you have to hustle, but you also have to be careful of burnout.

And so where are you recovering? What are you doing to make these efforts sustainable?

EL KALIOUBY: Yeah, in my early journey at my company Affectiva I was approaching this as a sprint and not a marathon, and at some point I realized, self-care is important — prioritizing time for self, and just sleeping well and eating well, and doing all these things. For the first few years at the company, I was not doing that.

And I think that kind of hurt my performance, but also it set the wrong tone for the team. So I totally agree with you that it’s so important.

HEIL: I am a sprint athlete, so I have to watch myself, but it’s like it’s a—

EL KALIOUBY: —a series of sprints, yeah.

HEIL: Exactly. And to your point, as a leader, how do you make sure your team’s coming with you, right? You’re not burning them out too, and you’re creating the culture where you can find that joy. If you’re exhausted and full of anxiety, you squeeze that joy out of the experience for everybody. And there are sacrifices to want to join an early startup for employees. So you have to make sure you’re creating that space for them too.

EL KALIOUBY: Yeah. Okay. So in honor of the games coming up I thought it would be fun to play a little AI Olympics game.

HEIL: Yeah.

EL KALIOUBY: All right, so let’s go. Okay, so who’s getting gold, silver, and bronze — ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini?

HEIL: Oh, I think it’s gonna be Claude. Gemini. ChatGPT. I’m only focused on winning.

EL KALIOUBY: Oh, you’re just going for the gold. Okay, great. Wearable tech — wristband, ring, and glasses. Let’s do the full podium.

HEIL: So I want the least invasive. So I’m going ring, I’m going wristband, and then glasses.

EL KALIOUBY: AI created workouts, yay or nay.

HEIL: It depends — from who? Are we talking generalized information or are we talking from one of our experts who has trained 40 Olympic medalists. Scott Livingston. I’m gonna take the latter on Revvel.

Copy LinkSimple ways to start building your own AI habits

EL KALIOUBY: Absolutely. I love it. All right. Olympic level sports require a lot of practice and consistency. For our AI novices out there, what’s one way they can start practicing using AI in their daily life?

HEIL: Oh, well, it’s pretty easy. Just open one of the models and ask anything you’re curious about. That’s it. I do wanna say AI has been so rewarding to build in this space because I think it does open up the number of people who can contribute to AI, right? You no longer need to code to be able to help influence this technology. So yes, it’s intimidating, but having that first step into it — it’s amazing what can open up to you.

EL KALIOUBY: Yeah. Amazing. Jen, this was so inspiring. We will be on the lookout for incredible results at the Olympics. Thank you for joining us.

HEIL: Thank you so much. Such a pleasure.

Like many of us, I want to have agency over my health. I do my best – I exercise everyday, eat clean, sleep well, practice mindfulness — but sometimes I wonder if I am doing it right! To make it worse, we are all inundated with so much information. Should I be doing intermittent fasting or not? Should I be on a Keto diet?! How much weight lifting should I do …?! I want science-backed, personalized recommendations – not the latest trend.

And this is what Jenn’s building. Revvel will amplify elite expertise so that the rest of us can access this information. Because you shouldn’t need to win a gold medal to have agency over your health.

It was great having Jenn on the show. And I’m rooting for her and team Canada on the slopes.