Sandy Jen: Rethinking Home Care @ Talks at Google (Transcript)

Here is the full transcript of Sandy Jen’s fireside talk: Rethinking Home Care @ Talks at Google conference.

Moderator: JORGE CUETO

JORGE CUETO: Hi everyone. Welcome to Talks at Google, and it’s great to have Sandy Jen, co-founder and CTO of Honor here with us today. Sandy founded Honor in 2014, and prior to that, she was co-founder and CEO of Meebo, which is a customer internet company that focused on connecting publishers and consumers socially. And she led their engineering team and then joined Google, actually, in the social team when Meebo was acquired in 2012. And before that, she also got her BS from Stanford University in computer science. So it’s great to have you with us today, Sandy.

SANDY JEN: Great to be here.

JORGE CUETO: I’d like to get started by having you tell us about what Honor is in your own words.

SANDY JEN: Sure. So Honor — our mission, basically, is to change the way that our parents age. I think aging is a topic that a lot of us don’t talk about with people, especially our own parents. There’s a bit of sort of child fear when talking about issues like that.

And so Honor’s goal, really, is to remake the way that folks can age at home specifically. So we really focus on non-medical home care, which means that we help folks with what we call ADLs– so Activities of Daily Living– things that you and I take for granted — brushing your teeth, getting out of bed, going to the bathroom. And we have a whole host of really awesome care professionals that go and do that work.

JORGE CUETO: And what inspired you and your team to start Honor?

SANDY JEN: Good question. So three of the four founders are multi-time entrepreneurs, and so we all kind of cut our teeth on social media. I’ve obviously been at Google for a little bit. And once we sold those companies and took a little time off and we really wanted to do another venture, we really wanted to think about, OK, well, what would make us really want to work hard — like really, really hard? Because startups are a lot of work. And we ended up thinking about what’s important to us, and we were a little bit older a little bit more mature. Some of us were having kids, and we really wanted to have impact. That was the biggest thing.