Inspired Execution

Chet Kapoor:

Welcome back to the Inspired Execution podcast. Each episode shares the experience and learnings of a world-class leader on their journey to success. The guests on this podcast are bold, brilliant, and not afraid to change. As you navigate your own path, we hope you feel inspired by their stories, lessons learned, and the vision of the future.

Jeroen Tas is a lifelong innovator. He helped paved the way in internet banking at Citi, co-founded a leading IT company and spent more than a decade at Philips driving impact in healthcare. Jeroen has won many leadership awards, spoken at major events, including CES, the World Economic Forum, and Dreamforce these days. In addition to being a board member and an advisor to multiple companies, Jeroen is a avid surfer. On today's episode, we talk about innovating with purpose, the impact AI will have in healthcare and so much more. Jeroen, welcome to the podcast. Thank you for being here.

Jeroen Tas:

My pleasure, Chet, it's always interesting to talk to you.

Chet:

You have had a diverse career, right? Started at Citibank in finance, co-founded a leading IT company, and then spent more than a decade at Phillips. What has been the inspiration that has guided you along the way?

Jeroen:

Well, I think ever since I studied computer science in university, I really was kind of taken by what you could do with the technology. The fact that you could write prose and it would actually do what you wanted to do, sometimes, not exactly, but it led me to think about what could be the impact of that technology? What could you do?

When I graduated, early eighties, so early, early, early days, and of course I had ideas about what you could do, what you could do with data, but I could never have dreamt about what we can do today. And it's really about the application and the application to have an impact on people's lives. And when I started out in finance, it was really driven by the idea, can you make it very accessible? Can you make it easy to use? Can everybody have access to payments, to loans, to credit cards?

I really, in the beginning, already started thinking about how can you use technology to impact people's lives? But I think that was cool. Inventing internet banking was really cool, but I think what I did after that was way more interesting. That's applying it to healthcare and what triggered that was actually when my daughter, one day she was diagnosed with type one diabetes and it was really very emotional period, but I was amazed at how bad healthcare was organized, how little they did with technology, and that kind of haunted me. Coming from the financial services world where technology, real time, always on, it's normal, everybody... I can pay anywhere, but even today, there is no way to exchange health data. So if you come to Amsterdam and something happens to you, the data is not accessible. It's not there. That's just a simple example. So I felt there's so much we can do with the technology to create better outcomes for patients, even to prevent disease and what's happening today is really absolutely mind-boggling.

Chet:

That is awesome. For the listeners, Jeroen has actually written a book with his daughter on the journey that she went through.

Jeroen:

No, I didn't write a book, I wrote a blog.

Chet:

You wrote a blog, and we'll make sure that it's published and so people can take a look at it. It's very, very interesting. So you've taken a startup from ground zero through acquisition. It's a long journey that requires... You have to have deep belief in the mission, you have to focus on execution. What was the hardest part and what did you learn from it?

Jeroen:

I think the hardest part were the people choices you make, you never do it alone, you know that. You have to surround yourself with the people that have the same drive, but that compliment you in their capabilities, in their attitudes, in their diversity of thoughts, but you need to be driven in a similar way. As you said, you need to have that mission in front of you and think about it every day.

And there were people, for instance, that we brought along from Citibank that really functioned well in Citibank, but found it hard to work in a startup because in a startup there is no process, there is no structure, and everybody has to pull their weight and things are not defined. You're defining them on the fly. So if you cannot deal with that, it's hard because you're shaping as you're going. And some people love it.

These are the serial entrepreneurs. You know them, you're one of them. People love to shape, love to create, and they can do it with nothing. They can do with little funds, with the right people, and a great idea and not everybody is like that. And then you find out along the way that some people have a good narrative, they have a good story, you bring them on board, and then you find out quickly it doesn't fit, negative energy, not the competency I had expected. If I look back, you know it. You see it, you know it, but you don't act on it. Another three months, another six months, and before you know, you lost a year.

So yeah, if I look back, then there's a whole bunch of other things I've learned, but it's all about people. It's all about who do you trust? Who do you let invest in your company? It's not about the money. The money is important, but it's way more important, can you trust the people that bring the money? Will they help you succeed or are they going to push you, push you, push you on the numbers all the time, compare you with other companies all the time, while you are trying to create something unique? So I would say everything I learned is all about people.

Chet:

It is interesting, I've always said on people when there's a doubt, there's no doubt.

Jeroen:

Yeah.

Chet:

And our problem is we are good human beings and we want to say, no, no, no, give it another three months. And the problem is the person who you are thinking about is also suffering because they also know that they're trying and not succeeding, and you're making the rest of the organization suffer along with it. So my take is from the time you have a doubt to the time you act should be as close to zero seconds as possible.

Jeroen:

Yeah, well acting your slogan of real time. Real time insights, real-time decisions.

Chet:

Yeah, because I think it takes us... A lot of people don't realize that leaders, they take a while to get to a point where they've said, I've given up on an individual, but when they get there, they should act very quickly. That's the key takeaway.

Jeroen:

Yeah, and I actually had this discussion yesterday with a CEO I'm coaching. He said something like, actually the decision I made was liberating. And it was liberating, not just for him, but also for the other person. And sometimes, you know it, you act on it.

Chet:

Everything we've talked about people so far, how does it apply to innovation, right? You've talked a lot about people-centric approach to innovation. How do you translate everything you've talked about, which are the players, the tourists, the prisoners, right? All kinds of stuff. How does that apply to innovation?

Jeroen:

Well, innovation starts with dreaming, with being able to imagine what it could do. When I started reading, playing around with AI, I never had the intent to create my own large language model. The intent was, what is the power of this technology? Where is it heading? These emergent behaviors are super interesting. Let's see what we can do and then immediately you start thinking about the way doctors communicate with patients, the way you interpret the complex information coming from different diagnostic tests, the way you follow up on a care pathway. And you immediately start seeing all kinds of things. And I'm not even talking about the esoteric stuff about how can you create entirely new molecules based on reverse engineering on attributes and then look at AlphaFolds from DeepMind, how these molecules can attach to proteins. I'm not even talking that stuff.

So you need a whole lot of imagination to take each of these cases, say, how can this work? Could it work? How easy can we make it? And I think that's how innovation starts. Innovation starts with how can I make it better? How can I create more impact? How can I help people better? How can I make it more convenient? And then you work your way backwards, and as you work your way backwards, you obviously have to know what the technology can do, what the level of maturity is, where the risks are, and you have to link it back to what you have today. So it's almost a reverse journey you're traveling. You go from your imagination, your dream, and you travel all the way back to where you are today. And then you start looking at, okay, how can I start connecting this? So to me, innovation is a lot about can you think holistically? Can you dream? Are you realistic enough to know what the pitfalls are?

Chet:

I absolutely love your quote, to innovate, you need to dream. I think that is something I hope our listeners think about and then take all the details and apply them and work backwards, right? That's awesome. What was your proudest moment at Philips?

Jeroen:

I think my proudest moment was when the CEO of our cath lab business, so the catheter labs is where you do minimally invasive surgery. He called me up and he said, I really want to show you something which will blow your mind. And I've been working with him and his team on applying AI on detecting, but also curing disease. So he said, okay, listen, you have a suspicion of lung cancer, you can walk into this machine. This machine is going to use combination CT technology and ultrasound technology to detect your lung nodules that show a cancer death can be ablated, so basically heat it up. If we see it, we can use the smart catheters to actually go in, ablate the cancer. So you walk in without a diagnosis, you walk out cured. That was, to me, it was not proud for me personally. I was so proud of what the whole team had done and I said, listen, if we could do this for every disease, we would solve the world's problems.

Chet:

I asked people this question because in our lives I call this the jaw drop moment or the ruling moment where you're like, oh my God, you're like a little kid in a candy store. Oh my God, is this really happening? So it seems like that was your reaction, right?

Jeroen:

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And then I said, Hey, listen, I've been 10 years with Philips and now I know we really did some very, very cool stuff.

Chet:

That is.

All right. I'm going to switch gears. Let's talk about AI. It's a super exciting time. You and I talked about this in Amsterdam a few weeks ago, but there are lots of challenges and risks, right? What's the biggest danger of generative AI in your opinion?

Jeroen:

I think this sounds weird, but I generally believe the biggest risk is not a super intelligence. Maybe it is a risk, but a little bit more pragmatic is that everything is going to be fake and people's attention spans that already short, will be reduced to five seconds, and there will be no way to distinguish between what's real and what's fake and the way we start interacting with each other as human beings will go to the next level of dysfunction.

And I think there's already a level of dysfunction because of social media. When Facebook started, I loved it. I said, this is so great. I can connect with my old friends. I found my first girlfriend, connected. I felt it was great, and then I stopped using it a couple of years back. I said, this is so freaking dangerous. It's really going at the most basic of our instincts, and it manipulates the most basics of our instincts, and it can be super dangerous. So you can truly manipulate people. It happens. Elections were influenced, trolls are out there. Now, that will be super-powered. If we don't put constraints to it's going to get really, really ugly.

Chet:

Yeah, no, I totally agree with that.

Jeroen:

And I'm not even talking about bias and hallucinations and stuff like that.

Chet:

It's funny. I did a World Economic Forum thing on this, right? I totally agree with you, and it's been said in many different ways. The risk is not people versus AI. The risk is people with AI versus people without AI.

Jeroen:

Yeah, or people with AI using it for, I would say very dubious goals and intense. And I think I'm a very positive and optimistic person, but there are people with bad intent out there. I know that for certain.

Chet:

And just to be clear, there's no technology innovation that's happened in the history of mankind that has not had a negative aspect to it.

Jeroen:

Yeah.

Chet:

Right? So it's always happened. The thing that's different this time around is that it's in our face right away

Jeroen:

And it's going so fast. I think there are two things.

Chet:

Correct, and the speed at which.

Jeroen:

Yeah, the speed is one thing. And the other thing is that the people who create it say that there is emergent behavior. There's stuff happening because there's a trillion parameters. We have no idea what's going to come out of... It's almost like the result of what mankind ever has published and said and done and stuff is going to happen that's very unpredictable and there will be huge unintended consequences that it cannot be any different. But therefore I share the concern that we need to keep our eyes wide open.

You don't regulate by saying stop developing. You regulate by saying where are the boundaries? What are the boundaries we cannot cross? What is the responsibility of the people developing this? How can we hold them to their commitments and responsibilities? And yeah, you cannot say, ah, we are not going to do it in the US because they're going to do it in China and they're definitely going to do it in Russia. Listen, I don't think all the Russians have the best intent, at least from my perspective. So you also got to keep the technology evolving, but you constantly need to look at the boundaries.

Chet:

Correct. No, I agree. And I am actually encouraged. I'm encouraged by how the US regulators are starting to take a proactive approach to this, working very closely with it. I actually believe, just reading some of the news and talking to a bunch of people, that there may be some possibilities of some global cooperation on this, right? Maybe not with Russia, but China, a bunch of the European countries, India. I'm definitely hopeful on this, right? Which is because I think we need to get ahead of this.

Jeroen:

They did it with nuclear power. There's been treaties and yeah, there's still North Korea and we don't know what's going on in Iran.

Chet:

There's always outliers.

Jeroen:

But I think if the big guys get together and give this the right direction, then it will be controlled, in as much as we can.

Chet:

So given your background in healthcare tech, where do you see the biggest opportunity for impact of AI?

Jeroen:

I think there are a number of areas. Number one in diagnostics. So I'm personally invested in quite a number of AI-based diagnostic companies, also supporting a number of them. So working with two very large labs, very simple. I said, okay, you do a blood test and what happens is you take blood, goes into machine, machine spits out a bunch of biomarkers. So if you're within range, you're fine. So you get this printout and you're in range or you're outlier, then your doctor look at it. I said, well, what if you put it in context? So if you look at prior studies, if you look at medical records, I'm sure you're going to see way more in the same test, so if you contextualize it.

And then if you obviously aggregate it, you start seeing patterns and these patterns, they need to be linked back to the treatment and the outcome. So you start also building a feedback loop. So with every diagnosis, every treatment and every outcome you measure, you create a feedback loop that tells you that, okay, you should be looking at this. You can look at an image and a radiologist can see disease, but the probability is higher that AI will see a disease that the radiologist didn't see because the radiologist has cognitive bias. He gets a referral from a cardiologist who ask him, make a CT and tell me what you see on the heart. But there may be something on that image that he's not looking at, he's not looking for, but that's there.

I think that cancer is so complex that human beings cannot even get their minds around it. Even the best oncologists. So you have the pathology, you have the genomics, you have the images, you have the blood test, you have the history. I compare that to self-driving car. You have motion sensors, you have computer vision, you have GPS, you have lidar. None of them in themselves will tell you exactly what's going on. But if you fuse it in real time, there's enough intelligence to tell you whether to break, whether to accelerate, whether to turn left or right. I think it's the same with healthcare.

So the more information you have and the more you fuse these modalities, the better you get insights in not just disease, but even what drives disease, what drives health. And then I think in treatment, as I said earlier, it's not just the example I gave where you can do more precise ablation, you can do more precise chemotherapy. Now you can actually create whole new chemicals that may interact differently in your body.

Already in MIT, they've created artificial limbs that not only you can control by your thoughts, you can actually feel, so the sensation of touch is going back to your brain. Deep brain stimulation has been around for decades. Actually Philips invented it. What you can now do with AI and deep brain stimulation, you basically can reprogram what people think, what they feel. There's so much still ahead of us.

I think one of our biggest problems is mental health. We know very little about the brain and I think we're going to learn so much more about the brain. We're going to find new chemicals that will allow people with PTSD to be cured, that will allow people with addictions to be cured. Now, it may take 10 years, it may even take 15 years, maybe even 20 years. But it's going to happen because people start seeing stuff they could never see. AI is going to sense like human being sense. They can see, they can smell. I've invested in a company that can smell cancer, so they're using photonics. So they use a breast analyzer with photonics that analyzes the chemical decomposition, using AI. So it can smell, it can see it, can feel it can touch. It knows what your heart rhythm is, what your respiratory rate is. It knows whether you are stressed, it knows whether you feel relaxed. So we can sense everything, at scale.

Chet:

It is such exciting times. I'm just listening to you and I'm like, wow. And the good news is, we don't have to wait for a hundred years for this. This is going to happen very quickly. So as everybody knows, gen AI and predictive AI, all of it together is going to change all industries and it'll happen faster than any other technology wave, right? And so I think the good news is it's coming really quickly and it's exciting times ahead of us.

Jeroen:

Yeah, but it's also more impactful than any of the earlier...

Chet:

For sure. And I think the impact will be very deeply felt in the business models of the company that are... Across the board, right? Bottom line and top line, so it's going to be super interesting.

I'm going to now shift gears to rapid fire. I'll ask you a few rapid fire questions. So let's go. What's the best meal you've ever had?

Jeroen:

The best meal, I'm going back to every year, it's my pilgrimage to Aponiente in Cadiz. It's a three Michelin star restaurant where everything comes from the ocean. You love water, I love also what's in the water. It's just one of these amazing places. It's not just a great meal, it's also a whole show, it's a culinary delight.

Chet:

Where is the most unusual place you get inspired?

Jeroen:

Yeah, it's really unusual, but I get inspired in the place I'm sitting now. I renovated an old watermill. It's 300 years old. The millstone is next to me. It's just a place that has history. But also our place is where two ecosystems meet, so where the Mediterranean and Atlantic meet. And it's also where 300 million birds migrate every year, where fish travels from the Mediterranean to the ocean, where the weather is unpredictable because it can come from the east or the west. And nature is just amazing here. Actually, I got a lot of my ideas about ecosystems here. I also found out there's a lot of... In an ecosystem you cannot control. I cannot control my garden. I can influence it, I can plant things, I can water plants, but I cannot control it. I just can't.

Chet:

That's absolutely the case. If you would have dinner with any two people alive or dead, who would you choose?

Jeroen:

There's somebody, he's still alive and I would love to meet him. Daniel Kahneman. My company's called Fast and Slow. So basically in honor of his book, I think it's one of the most insightful books I've ever read. And it triggered a lot of thinking, also about how people make decisions, how people relate to each other, et cetera. So that's one person. I would say the other person dead, is Gandhi. His calmness, his way to influence one of the biggest events in history is kind of mind-boggling and I would love to get inside his brain.

Chet:

Those are awesome names. What is the most underrated leadership quality?

Jeroen:

I think curiosity is rarely mentioned. I think it's probably the biggest and most important quality. There are a whole bunch of other things, but I think that deep curiosity about other people, about making an impact, about understanding how things work, where things might go. And of course there are a bunch of other things. You need to be empathic, you need to be able to reach situations, you need to be able to analyze. You should be strong and stand your grounds. You need to be able to dream you all of that, but I think if you don't have curiosity, you cannot be a good CEO.

Chet:

Last question, what do you want to leave behind as your greatest impact?

Jeroen:

I would love to look back and say I had a little bit of impact on the happiness of people's life because what I did in terms of the technology that could help them live healthier lives and therefore happier lives, more capable of balancing what they can do, lifting some of the constraints they feel both in their head and the body. If I can just have a little bit of impact there, I would be very happy.

Chet:

I think most people would say you already have had it and it seems like you're continuing to actually do a lot through investment, through mentoring. So that is awesome. Jeroen, this has been great. I reflect back to our conversations over the last 15, 20 years and every time we've chatted, it's been a blast. I think our listeners, they're going to learn a lot and they will see that they need to find out a lot more about what you're trying to do. So we really, really appreciate your time. Thank you.

Jeroen:

My pleasure, Chet. And you bring it out in people. So thanks for having this conversation and thanks for your friendship.

Chet:

I'm coming in hanging out with you and learning kite surfing soon.

Jeroen:

Promise.

Chet:

Thank you so much for tuning in to the Inspired Execution podcast. If you enjoyed today's episode, please like and subscribe. We have many more phenomenal guests and inspiring stories to come. So be sure to join us next time.