I recently sat down with Ken Mayer CEO of Health Cloud Corporation and founder of Safe Health, for what turned into one of the most fascinating conversations I've had on the #DynamicDecisionsPodcast.
Ken's journey from publishing entertainment magazines at 19 to revolutionizing healthcare diagnostics is a masterclass in adaptability, strategic thinking, and understanding when you're ahead of your time.
Ken has the unique distinction of creating precursors to two of today's biggest platforms—YouTube and Slack—years before they became household names. His company GTV launched in 1999, six years before YouTube, but had to shut down after nine months because bandwidth costs were crushing.
They burned through $10 million just trying to keep the streaming alive. Similarly, his enterprise messaging platform Sonork was nearly identical to Slack, serving clients like HP and the Department of Justice, but the market wasn't quite ready.
What strikes me about Ken's response to these "too early" experiences isn't bitterness—it's wisdom. He kept the ideas, kept innovating, and eventually found his way to healthcare in 2018, forming a partnership with Mayo Clinic.
Sometimes being a pioneer means you light the path for others, and the key is staying in the game long enough to eventually catch the wave you started.
When we explored Ken's decision-making style through my persona assessment, he articulated something that really resonated: mission matters, but it can't exist without commercial viability.
He rated mission-driven decision-making at 30%, explaining that you need to balance purpose with profit using roughly the 80/20 rule.
"You can create the greatest thing in the world, but if it's not commercially viable, you need to make a profit in order to make it available to people."
This isn't cynicism—it's sustainability. Too many founders get so caught up in their mission that they forget someone has to pay the bills. The most impactful innovations are the ones that survive long enough to scale.
Ken shared Safe Health's strategic mantra: "Arm the incumbents." Rather than positioning themselves as disruptors trying to tear down existing healthcare systems, they focused on enabling established players to evolve.
This approach is slower and filled with demoralizing conversations where rational solutions get buried under excuses, but it's ultimately more sustainable.
The status quo is powerful, and incumbents have legitimate reasons for resisting change. Fighting them head-on often means getting crushed. Partnering with them—even when frustrating—creates pathways for actual implementation at scale.
One of Ken's "crazy metrics" that his team probably questions is his unwavering focus on the five-to-seven-year horizon for connected diagnostics. He knew from day one this would be a marathon, not a sprint.
It required creating an entirely new FDA regulatory pathway, convincing CMS and commercial payers of the value proposition, and fundamentally changing how diagnostic testing integrates with telehealth.
Most entrepreneurs would have pivoted after year two. Ken stuck with it because he understood the problem:
The "gray tsunami" of baby boomers hitting their high-healthcare-consumption years will break the current system.
Decentralized care isn't just innovative—it's necessary. But the long pole in that tent is diagnostics, which can't be solved with a quick fix.
Ken only allocated 15% of his decision-making persona to being data-driven, and his reasoning was compelling. He invoked Steve Jobs' famous insight:
If you'd asked consumers what they wanted for portable music, they would have said a smaller Walkman. Nobody would have described the iPod because they couldn't conceptualize it.
"Data represents what's there today," Ken explained, "not what you're building and bringing to market tomorrow."
This doesn't mean ignoring metrics—it means understanding that innovation by definition involves creating things that haven't been done before. You can't always have empirical data for unprecedented solutions. Sometimes you need vision first, then validate with data as you build.
Ken's advice for aspiring entrepreneurs centers on one word: tenacity. He recommends reading "Innovation Stack" by James McKelvey, which distinguishes between true entrepreneurship (building something genuinely new) and incremental improvement.
If you're building something truly novel, dead ends aren't just possible—they're guaranteed. The key is expecting them, so when you hit one after months of hard work, you can dust yourself off, backtrack, and find the next path forward without being destroyed by the setback.
Ken's journey from entertainment to healthcare, from being too early to finally catching the right wave, from fighting incumbents to arming them—it all comes back to this fundamental truth: innovation requires the stamina to keep going when everyone else would quit.
And sometimes, the best decision is simply deciding to stay in the game.
