In 2020 I joined a young company that had built encrypted, tamper-proof records and was looking for the place they mattered. It was the middle of the pandemic. Large organizations had bought up most of the COVID testing, while entrepreneurs were opening new labs as fast as they could.
That was a marketplace with two sides. Employers needed their people tested before they could work. New labs needed people to test. We sat between them: the employer paid for the record, the lab produced it, and the result landed, encrypted and tamper-proof, in a wallet on the person's own phone.
For most people, it was the first medical record they had ever held.
That was the real bet. Every test meant one more person holding their own record, at the end of the record nobody owned. The software doctors use was being consolidated. The patient's end was empty.
The competitor was not the insurers or the clinical software vendors. It was Apple Health, because in 2020 it was the only place people already kept health data with a privacy promise they believed.
Nothing on this list worked on its own.
An anchor customer. A performers' union whose members were making films in different places under different local rules, and needed a result before they could work. We doubled a small base around it.
The next audience. Universities, because students want to be together. Test a couple of days ahead, show the result in your wallet, get into the event.
The other end of the record. An investor in Canada interested in us as the patient's end of the record, next to the doctors' end being consolidated.
The infrastructure. The money raised gave the company the technology to carry on.
It had a trajectory. It was underfunded.
A test was a reason to download something. The record was a reason to keep it.
When ATB Ventures asked me to help reinspire a team working on digital wallets and open banking, it was the same problem one step further on: nobody had settled how people or banks wanted a wallet to work, and the experience was broken. Alberta was having a hard time, and I have family there. I went.