Building Technology to Prevent Diseases

Interested in starting your own entrepreneurial journey but unsure what to expect? Then read up on our interview with Irewole Akande, Co-Founder of City Health Tech, located in Chicago, IL, USA.

What's your business, and who are your customers?

City Health Tech Inc is a public health tech company that aims to prevent the spread of diseases by using technology. And to improve how people enhance their personal health and safeguard the health of their community. Our main goal is to take bad behaviors and implement our solutions to convert them into good behaviors. Our first product is Opal, an IoT platform that uses education, behavioral design, and data to encourage and sustain healthy hand hygiene practices. We do this by installing our device by the sink, and the device detects users who put their hands in the sink and plays an animation to get them to wash their hands for at least 20 seconds. We then collect data on the performance of each animation to measure the impact on community health and create better animations to entrench proper handwashing as a habit further. Our major customers are food handling manufacturers, restaurants, K-12 schools, and life science office spaces.

Tell us about yourself

I am an engineer and product manager who is driven by solving the most difficult problems in ways that have never been envisioned before. My professional background is in Engineering Management & Electronics Engineering. I launched my career within WPG Holdings, one of the largest semiconductor distributors in the world, where I specialized in the Internet of Things (IoT), Embedded Systems, and Memory. I am also an MBA graduate from the SMU - Cox School of Business, specializing in Business Analytics and Entrepreneurship. I have been recognized as a Lewis Latimer Honoree by the Edison Awards, celebrating top Black Innovators in the country. And most recently, awarded the Texas Future Business Legend award by the Texas Business Hall of Fame, presented to the best and brightest business leaders Texas has to offer. I co-founded City Health Tech, a public health startup geared towards building disease prevention technology. I co-founded CHT because I am passionate about using technology to impact people's lives positively, and I believe disease prevention is one way I could do that. My major motivation is the opportunity to create unique, ethical, and inclusive products that directly impact individuals and organizations. Outside of my academic and professional experience, I am an avid soccer player (played varsity soccer for four years), a marathoner, a traveler, and an amateur chef.

What's your biggest accomplishment as a business owner?

My biggest accomplishment is inventing our first device - Opal. I spent several months implementing the balanced breakthrough innovation model to build a product from scratch that should effectively solve the problem at hand.

What's one of the hardest things that come with being a business owner?

The hardest thing about being a business owner is focusing on the problem you are solving. With so many competing priorities, it is easy to forget about your customers and instead be focused on activities like raising funding, managing expectations, etc. And while those are important, the moment you stop being focused on solving customers' problems, your company is already done.

What are the top tips you'd give to anyone looking to start, run and grow a business today?

Just do it. Dive in head first, fail, and learn from failure because you miss 100% of the shots you don't take.
It is not a glamorous job. The highs are very HIGH, but the lows are also very LOW. So invest in therapy/mental health because you'd need that tenacity.
Technology is not a solution; it is a means. Never conflate that because you forget about people and become focused on the product.

Entrepreneurship requires sacrifice, more hard days than easy days, and a more likely possibility of failure than success. But the thrill is in the journey!

Where can people find you and your business?

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/irewole_a/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/irewoleakande/

If you like what you've read here and have your own story as a solo or small business entrepreneur that you'd like to share, then please answer these interview questions. We'd love to feature your journey on these pages.

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