380: Go Where the Pack is Going with Chia-Lin Simmons
Chia-Lin Simmons, CEO of LogicMark, helps entrepreneurs go where the pack is going by examining the market forces that determine whether strong people and products can succeed. Guided by a belief that technology should serve people, she leads LogicMark in developing AI-enabled connected-care and personal-safety solutions.
In this conversation, Chia-Lin introduces The Ephemeral Why Framework—Demographic Shifts, Emerging Needs, Adoption Conditions, Opportunity Timing, and Trend Runway. She explains why leaders must examine uncontrollable market conditions before joining a company, launching a product, or making an acquisition; how changing dual-income demographics helped meal-kit services mature; and why aging, caregiver shortages, and technology adoption created an opportunity for LogicMark. Chia-Lin also discusses closing the caregiving conversation gap and shifting personal-safety technology from reactive alerts toward predictive, proactive support.
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Go Where the Pack is Going With Chia-Lin Simmons
Good day, listeners. Steve Preda here with the Management Blueprint, and my guest today is Chia-Lin Simmons, the CEO of LogicMark, a company offering Internet of Things and AI machine learning applications in healthcare communications, remote patient monitoring, and personal safety applications and services. Chia-Lin, welcome to the show.
Thank you for inviting me, Steve. It’s a pleasure to be here.
It’s great to have you, and I’m very curious about what you have developed, your business, and your journey. But I’d like to ask first, what is your personal why, and how are you manifesting it in your business?
Sure. I think that’s a wonderful question. For a lot of us who’ve been in the tech business for such a long time, especially at a difficult time where everybody’s asking, “Are we going to be dominated by AI in the future, with AI as our overlords?” there’s always a question of what you are doing and why you are doing what you’re doing, in tech especially. And so the personal why for me is, what can we do in terms of technology to serve people?
And so that has been what has driven me for a very long time. My personal why of working in tech is, how do we use technology to enable a better living experience for everyone? And so that’s really the framework that I go into every job that I take on, and consideration of every opportunity that I consider in terms of a new role.
Yeah, I mean, I love the orientation in healthcare and safety. Internet of Things probably also connected to healthcare as well. So obviously that’s a very big area and a very important area. What attracted you to technology?
Yeah. So I was one of those geeky kids who was always driven by how can we do things better. And so whether or not that came down to, like, creating shortcuts to getting things done or looking for ways to, again, utilize technology in the old days, though, to make things faster, easier, better to understand. And so I actually wasn’t sure that I was going to work in technology purely. I actually came out of the world where I thought I was going to go into publishing.
And actually, the technology piece came upon this where I was just learning about, for those of us old enough to remember this, the first browser, right? The first Netscape browser or the first browser out there. So in 1993, I looked at that and went, “That would make publishing so much easier.” Like, can you imagine sharing newspapers this way or, like, reading a book? And can you imagine this could be a movie? And this is very early on in ’93 when it’s just the first browsers. None of this was happening. We were lucky if we were able to get text to blink in those days.
Yeah. And so as an undergraduate, that was kind of what drove me into tech, was that I had this, we could call it, futurist vision of a future where digital media would be portable everywhere. And the only example I had was this browser that was on a computer. Email was still not even in Outlook. It was using Elm and, like, things like this, right? So very text-based. Not a lot of visuals. But I had this vision, and this company called Apple had created something called the Newton. It was pretty sizable. And I postulated that the future was going to be newspapers, magazines, books, and even something like movies and music traveling with us everywhere, and it was going to be in a computer, and you could pick it up wherever you go.
I think I call it round-tripping, and so being able to sort of look at digital media somewhere on TV or on a computer or a device and pick up where you left off. And so I’ve been chasing that vision ever since. And so it really culminated in then going to Audible and making an audiobook available in a car. That was my sort of last frontier. And going to a connected car company for Aha, which is backed by Venrock. So a lot of what drives my interest in technology has just been trying to look for ways to ease, I think, what we call human problems and human conditions.
Looking for technology to solve problems that we're seeing versus coming up with cool tech and then trying to shoehorn that into something.
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Yeah. Which is the rest of the tech industry. Like, let’s do something cool like crypto, and then I don’t know what we’re going to do with crypto. Yeah. But really trying to be driven by human problems and concerns and utilizing technology to solve them. Yeah. Love it. And that’s an amazing experience.
Okay. So that’s great. So let’s talk about frameworks because this is kind of the meat of this podcast, is what are those frameworks that entrepreneurs like you discover that help you think of the world in simpler terms? Maybe it’s a three- to five-step process that you have discovered or developed, or maybe it’s three ways to look at something, to interpret something, or to communicate. Anything that comes to mind?
Yeah. So the first thing that my people ask me, and it’s sort of that time of the year especially, and at a time of crisis when people are talking about, like, “Will AI take my job?” and more things, is how do you make decisions about what you want to do and what companies to pursue and so forth? So I have a framework that I call the three-legged stool of technology success, which is that you have to be driven to go to a company where you feel like you can make an impact on the people, the product, and then the third piece is the part you can’t influence.
And so you look for whether or not there’s a good condition for that third leg, which I’ll call the ephemeral why. And so that ephemeral why could be a combination of demographic changes, structural changes within an industrial environment. And usually those are things on a macro level that you can’t change. And so when you make a decision about what you want to go into, whether or not that is going to a company, whether or not taking a job, or whether or not you should pursue or develop a technology, you look at this framework and say, “Do I feel like I have the capability to sort of provide the right people to make this change? Do I feel that the product that we can develop can actually effectuate that change?”
And the third is, is the market condition, the ephemeral why, is it sort of structural? And let me give you an example of sort of how that looks. So in 1999, I had been offered an opportunity to go to a company that was basically like Blue Apron, right? A box company for meals. And so this is 1999. The executives there were fantastic. They were from Webvan. They really knew how to do structural work around shipping produce and things that were perishable. So they had the right sort of leadership. The product seemed like it was conceptually correct, like you box sort of like prepackaged or kit meals created by chefs. It was a very delicious interview, and everything seemed well.
But the third ephemeral why was the problem, right? So when you look at that in 1999, less than half, like around 40 to 45% of Americans, were dual-income families. Which meant that, to a certain degree, there was somebody in a family, whether or not that’s a woman or anybody, who was going out grocery shopping and doing the cooking, and so it was not a dual-income sort of environment.
So what was this product going to do in terms of replacing people? Was the demographic and the financial aspect of the economy right for having to ship this particular product? Even if the product itself was good and the leadership was good, was the market, the ephemeral why, there for success? And the reality was that it wasn’t, so I did not take the opportunity. I just felt like it was very much a niche sort of situation, that it just wasn’t there.
Yeah.
From the time that Blue Apron sort of rolled around, why was Blue Apron successful even though it’s the same exact product, right? Good leadership, amazing product, good idea, but it’s because the ephemeral why, the market condition, has radically changed. It’s a leg that you can’t control in this three-legged stool of success, right?
You just need it to be very firm. And it’s because 65% of Americans were dual-income now. Yeah. Whether or not that’s part-time or full-time, people just have less time to cook and to shop, all those things. And so now the market condition was right for it.
So the ephemeral why, is this a timing issue? Or is there a process to figure out your ephemeral why?
I think that you would apply the three-legged stool to every sort of scenario, and that third leg of ephemeral why is the one that often people don’t do a very good job analyzing. Because they think that the other two legs, the leadership, the product, so long as they feel very solid about them, then this must be a win. And I would argue that, in fact, using this three-legged stool of success, if the third leg is not there, if you cannot really fundamentally figure out what the ephemeral why would be, then there’s not going to be success at this company or for that product to launch, right?
The product could be fantastic, the leadership could be fantastic, but the market condition, the economic sort of know-how, the adoption curve, all of those things make up that sort of nugget. And people don’t—because it’s non-controllable, they feel like it’s the lesser of the three legs, and so therefore they kind of, for lack of a better word, cast it aside in the decision-making mode. And I would say that when you make a leadership decision about launching products or going to a company or acquiring a company, that third leg is the one that you need to do the most examination for, and it’s the one that people disregard the most because it feels out of control. It’s macro.
Yeah, it is out of control, but I guess that’s what entrepreneurs are there for, to tap into it and to find it.
To find it, to identify it, to understand whether or not, from a timing perspective, there is potential longevity to it.
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And I would say that some of the decisions, for example, are around: Is this a now situation that is probably capable of being fully fleshed out within a year, and then there’s not a lot of runway? Or is this something where you’re seeing the percolation of an issue now and that it will become a much larger issue two to three years from now, or it’s a percolation of an economy that will change rapidly within the next two to three to five years, right?
Go where the pack is going, not where the pack is.
Going where the pack is going, exactly. Yeah. I’m a Wayne Gretzky person, right? You don’t skate to the pack. You skate to where the pack is going to be, right? And for those people who don’t play ice hockey, and I’m not an ice hockey player, but I’m a believer in Wayne Gretzky.
Yeah. Yeah.
That’s really what you need to do. Yeah. I mean, it’s for entrepreneurs to win.
Yeah. Love it. So let’s talk about your business, LogicMark. What drives growth in LogicMark? Where is the pack going for LogicMark’s business?
Yeah. So I think what was very exciting about LogicMark and what drove me to take this job, because when the initial opportunity came, it was not exactly the sexiest thing on Earth. Like, I will tell you, I loved the recruiter. To this day, I think he’s a fantastic recruiter. But in essence, he presented an opportunity where it was like, “Hey, this company’s about to be delisted. It has two lawsuits. Hey, and it hasn’t built any new product since 2015,” and at this time it was like 2021.
“So I don’t know if the money situation is, like, super, super firm, so what do you think?” And so I was like, exactly, I’m like, “Oh, well, thank you so much for thinking of me. Sounds awesome.” But I thought about it some more, and I put it through that framework. I think I could apply the right people to the opportunity. I think I could create the right product. But is that third leg any good? Is the market condition good? And what drove me to this was that it was what I call the tsunami, the sort of perfect storm of all the things that could happen to make a condition really proper.
That condition really includes the fact that, from a demographic point of view, we’re going to see the largest aging population that we’ve seen in decades, right? By 2040, one in four Americans, and that’s Americans only, will be 65 and over, right? And for people who are 65 and over, one in four will fall. And it’s catastrophic often when they do. And this is the U.S. market only, but if you looked at it and extrapolated it into the larger global market, that number was even worse. In fact, the aging population on a global basis outside of South America and Africa is fairly dire.
We’re having fewer kids, and our population is aging. And so because there is an asymmetry when it comes to people who are younger taking care of the elderly, there is a gap in terms of the technology for caretaking. But it’s also one where, because it’s not sexy, right? It’s taking care of the aging. People don’t want to think about things that are scary from a health perspective, potentially. Then it’s one that just doesn’t seem like it has a lot of traction, right?
People like to do things that are like cryptocurrency or interesting, fun things that young people really resonate with from a technology development point of view. But this is one where it’s a large demographic problem. It’s an industry that, from a service perspective, has not been focused on. And then third is that the caretaking demographic has gotten even lower, so people are having fewer kids, but also even professional caretaking post-COVID.
When we were looking at the data in 2021 about whether or not this was a good opportunity, in 2019, there was a study in which we were having a gap of more than 350 caretakers shortage. And then if you think about post-COVID, where all the healthcare providers were burning out post-COVID it was a lot of sadness, a lot of burnout. That number became astronomical. So suddenly it’s not just about you and your family members or your friends, but it’s about professional caretakers who you may rely on to take care of a loved one in another state, professionally, who were also in short supply.
So when we talk about the perfect storm of things that make that third leg really solid, it’s the demographics. It’s the industry that does not care, and it’s the young population gap. And then it’s this population of young people, from Gen Z to millennials to Gen Xers, who are comfortable with technology and utilize technology to solve everyday issues but were not seeing that solution offered to them in this very interesting, difficult category area, which is caretaking. So they’re used to having it take care of everything else, but somehow there’s a big gap here. So when we looked at that third leg, it was beautiful, right?
And the people who deal with this, they have money, right? They are affluent because typically it’s people who are late in their working lives. They’re taking care of their parents, like my age, frankly, and then the parents could also be affluent.
Yes.
So there’s a lot of money behind this business, which is also attractive. So what is one thing that you’re actively trying to figure out in this business right now?
I think we really want to actively solve the issue of what I would call the discussion. So we did a survey this past year about caregiving and the gap between sort of what’s happening. Why are people more reluctant to basically look at caretaking measures from a technology point of view? And it really stems around—it’s not that the technology that we’ve developed is not great or that there isn’t a larger need for the technology.
It’s actually the gap in terms of communication. It’s that even though 80% of the people who are being cared for, the elderly people, are concerned about what it means to age at home by themselves or, like, being, you know, there’s a burden in terms of caregiving. And for those going as young as Gen Xers, Gen Zers, about the concern and fear of taking care of your elderly loved ones and friends, there is a huge—everybody has that 80-plus percent of fear and concern, but yet only 19% have had the conversation about what it means to age by yourself in a home.
90% of people who are aging want to age at home, but they have no plan, they have no discussions. And so discovering this and trying to solve that issue of how do you start that conversation when what typically drives the usage is a first incident. Your parent falls and they break their hip, and now things are already deteriorating, so you’re making decisions in this very tight decision-making timeframe. And so the impact of making that decision is big, and your time allotment is very little.
And so the risk of making poor decisions could be relatively high. So how do we shift that conversation and help people shift that conversation so that it’s about a certain ease of having conversations early before something catastrophic occurs?
Wow.
And the way that we look at it is to say we’re not just about reactive technology, helping you when you’ve had a catastrophe, right? This is the typical industry that we’re in.
But we're in the business at LogicMark of saying predictive, proactive technology.
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So we’re trying to figure out, by your behavior, how often you take your meds, are you walking enough, and are you waking up early?
Like, any of the stuff to basically say what’s in your gait, like, all of these things, do they give us an indicator that you may be more likely to fall? Are you seven years ahead of, like, Alzheimer’s? Like, trying to get ahead would actually allow us to provide that conversation.
So who should initiate that conversation? Should it be the aged parent or should it be the offspring?
I’m not entirely sure that I think it matters who. I certainly think that perhaps the discussion should be, if comfortable with the aging parent, like, that’s the best place to start because nobody wants to be the one to say, like, “Hey, you’re really getting old. I feel like you’re going to need some support,” right? And we would actually advise people not to have that conversation, to take a look at aging as not a time of frailty and problems, but one of freedom and flying. I always tell people we’re in the business of actually not trying to stop people from flying.
We’re in the business of offering a safety net so that you can fly. And with the sandwich generation, for the young people and for the old people, my job is to supply the safety net so that when they’re flying, they can fly free, but there’s a safety net should they need it. But our job is not to use that net to control people, right? And so the conversation should be had. And I remember advising a friend, and I was like, the discussion shouldn’t be, “I think you’re going to fall and hurt yourself by yourself,” but more, “Do you want to consider moving near me so you could see your grandchildren more and be a more active part of their lives?” Or, “Are you considering staying at your home?” So that first conversation is not about you’re going to be failing, but more, “We want you as a more active member of our lives, and so what can we do to make that happen for you?”
And even for the senior parents, it’s saying, like, “I want to live in my home, but I’d like to be closer to you, and what are the ways that we can do that even if we’re in a different state?” “What are the best ways for us to communicate in a way that is valuable and easy to do for both parties?” And having those conversations is not about frailty. It’s about, “I’m going to go and live my life, but what’s the best way for us to stay connected?” Right?
So how can people tap into what LogicMark is doing in order to improve their situation and to have that conversation and be able to provide their loved ones with the right kind of solutions?
Yeah. I mean,
I'm a big believer that data drives discussions, and so I would welcome anybody to come and take a look at the recent survey because it's always hard to have that conversation when it feels personal, like it's about you.
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Like, “Mom, I think you’re the one who’s going to be failing,” or “Dear daughter, you’re going to be that kid who’s never going to stay on the path, and so I think you’re going to need, like, a personal technology safety product,” right?
It’s not about you per se, but it’s about the greater, larger ecosystem that we’re in and the discussions everyone should have. So I urge people to come to us and take a look at the survey because the survey’s not about us. We actually worked with an independent third party, and they talked to, like, 1,500 people around the U.S. who are caretakers and loved ones. We just did a survey about women’s safety for, like, Gen Z college women.
So that data is a great place to start to have that conversation, to say, like, “Mom, have you been…” Like, there’s this great survey, and it’s all laid out nicely in infographics even, to say, like, “Hey, I saw this recently. What do you think? Do you feel like you’re concerned about being a burden?” “I don’t think you should be because we love you and we want to be here for you. But what are the ways that we can do that to make you feel less stressed about it? Do you feel stressed about it?”
So, like, I saw that 1,500 people said, like, 80% of people said this. Then it doesn’t feel so personal. It feels like it’s a greater part of a conversation everybody’s having. And even that dialogue that I have with my own daughter about personal safety was easier to say, “Hey, it’s not that I don’t trust that you’re not going to get roofied in a bar and you’re going to be drinking.” “Like, it’s not about you drinking. It’s about 65% of young women have been roofied or know somebody personally that’s been roofied, and so that’s a pretty darn high percentage.” “So how do you feel about it, and what does it mean to take care of you while you’re away from home?
And so what are the things that we can do to help you stay safe?” Yeah. And so then it’s not personal judgments about your frailty or your lack of capabilities or anything. It’s really about this being a larger conversation and fear for a lot of people. It’s a great conversation to have. How do you feel about it? And then what can we do to help you alleviate your concern?
Yeah.
And I think that’s a great way to start with us. I mean, we would love for you to buy our products, of course, right? We think that they’re best in class. But I would be very happy if our surveys just started that dialogue so that it’s 80% of people having discussions versus 19% of people having discussions.
Yeah. Yeah. So where should people go to fill out this survey and to learn more about LogicMark’s products and services and IoT technologies and AI applications? What’s the source? Is it LogicMark’s website? Yeah. Or is it your LinkedIn?
Yeah, so they could definitely find us on the LogicMark website. And they don’t need to fill out anything. That survey is available and free. It’s already been conducted by third parties, so it’s a great piece to take to people and have that conversation now. Your younger loved ones as well as your older loved ones, great dialogue providers. And if you’re interested in our products, they’re all there as well on LogicMark. And you can feel free to go to our social media on LinkedIn, and I guess it would be Instagram and TikTok as well, to find out more.
Okay. So if you have family members who are older than you or younger than you, then this is relevant for you, and check out the survey and what it says. I mean, it’s shocking that 65% of women have been roofied. I hope my daughters are safe, but they seem to be. But I didn’t know the statistics. I wish I didn’t know this.
Well, like 65% of women either have been roofied and/or know somebody who has had experience.
Yeah. Okay, so that’s a little bit better. Anyhow, so this is very valuable stuff, even if it’s not necessarily the most comfortable thing to talk about, but it’s a must-have. So check out LogicMark. And if you want to hear conversations like this with seasoned entrepreneurs like Chia-Lin Simmons, who runs LogicMark, then make sure you are tuned in.
Chia-Lin, thank you so much for coming on the show and sharing your experience and the three legs of the stool and the ephemeral why. I’ve never heard this expression. This is super cool. So thanks for coming, and thank you for listening.
Thank you so much, Steve.