 And I'm delighted to be joined by Ida Tin, co-founder and CEO of Clue. We're going to be talking today about how companies build and honor trust. So Ida, I thought I'd start by asking a bit about your own story. Clue is trying to integrate into a very personal aspect of people's lives, particularly women's lives, and to get quite personal information from them. When you were starting out, how did you approach that? How did you initially build that trust with your users? So I think we were trying to express where we were coming from, like, why are we building this app? And who are we? And then we did things like, say, you can use this app without having your data go anywhere, except on your own phone. In fact, we made the choice to not offer the solution of us storing the data, because we were a young company. And we're like, we're not ready for this. When we ask people to trust us with their data, we want to know that we are as good as we can be. And it actually took us, I think, two years till we felt we were like, OK, now we can do this. So that was the first big decision to really take it seriously, that we're not going to ask for somebody's data till we feel really, really confident about it. And why is that so important to you as a business to build that level of trust with people? So first of all, I think it's, for me as a person, it's the right thing to do. That's my own ethics. I think that when you ask people to share very intimate data, it needs to be a very transparent exchange so that people understand what do they give and what do they get. And so I think it's both right and needed. And the reason why I think it's needed is because what I really want to do is help people navigate their bodies and their lives. I can't do that if they're not willing to share their very intimate data with me. So I can't provide the value to the user that I'm hoping to give unless they trust me with their data. So I have to do it. But I also think it's the right thing to do. I also think it's the future, but that's a second part, maybe. So from the ethical standpoint, it's the right thing to do. As a company, does it give you other advantages as well? What's the business argument, I suppose? The business argument. So we're heading into a future, or we're already in a future where everything is creating data points and data streams and figuring out how does data flow in the world? Who aggregates data? What is their intention? What's their purpose? What do they do with it? There is very little transparency at the moment into that whole flow and exchange. And some companies take advantage of that. They track your behavior without me as a user being aware. And I think as awareness goes up in the public, we'll start to be like, hold on, you're tracking this, you're creating this data, and I don't have access to it. I can't amend it, I can't port it, I can't question it. That doesn't feel good. And I think there will be a higher and higher demand from users to really understand what data are you creating, what do you do with it? And it needs to be in the user's interest. It really should be. And I do believe that there is a lot of wonderful things we can do with data, and we should do them. And people would, you know, they will see the benefits as well, right? It's great that Netflix can recommend me a movie that I'm really gonna enjoy. And we can do the same in house, but it needs to be based on this concept that I want to give you this data and I understand what you do with it so that I can benefit. And then I as a business will also benefit because I can give you what you want. It's great. And do users care that much about it? Do they currently understand, are they demanding that transparency that you're seeking to give? The really honest answer is I don't know for sure. I mean, we have people who are vocal, you know, who ask us and are very aware. I think probably the truth is that there's a great proportion of people who if they knew would care, but it's just black box that don't think about it. But I think more and more people will know. But I mean, the world could go in a direction where people say post-privacy, you know, I'll trade my privacy and my data to get a free service. The world could go in that direction, but I hope and want to and trying to create another direction which is more understanding of data is a really key thing we need to manage and understand as individuals and build services that honor kind of that relationship. You talked about with Clue being very transparent with your users about the data you're using and how you're using it. How do you communicate that to people? How do you help them to understand? It's actually an educational task. So one of the things we've done is that, you know, our terms of service is written in a language that is understandable. We really, we tried to highlight it, encourage people to actually read it. We did a writing which was trying to explain what happens when you do a data entry into Clue. Where does the data go? Where is it stored? What third-party providers have access to what kind of data? Right, really trying to explain for users how does this data flow. I don't know how many read it, but I was pretty proud of that piece of writing because it was really educational. It was like, and this is helpful information, not just for Clue, but for any service that you use, yeah. Wow, you're maybe the first person I've met who said you're really proud of your terms of service. Yeah. Yeah. Great, now as well as Clue, you're well known for coining the term FemTech and being sort of an advocate for that sector of technology designed for women. Do you think building things for that community, does that influence the way that you treat your users at all or do they have different demands maybe, or have you noticed any trends? I think the first thing to even say is to recognize that there is needs that women have because of their biology that technology can help solve. That's, it sounds so simple, but it hasn't been there until now. Like if you look at family planning, there has been no innovation since the pill came out 70 years ago. Like that's very long in the history of technology. So now there is a thing happening where a lot of people are starting to tackle small areas of female health. They're building products and services and companies and it's really great, it's really great. And I think it's still young and we haven't started seeing these services kind of clustered together and really building each other. I think that's the next generation that will happen within FemTech. But there is so much to be done. Oh my God, I mean there is so many unmet needs still in female health. There's a ton of opportunity for technology and for investors to start looking at this space. Does that affect the relationship that you're building with people? The fact that a lot of this data is very sensitive, it's a lot of it is health data or intimate data. How does that influence your relationship with consumers? I think first of all it means that you have to have a relationship with the user. You have to really understand where they're coming from. I mean one thing that we think a lot about is the emotional intelligence when you build a product. It's not just about collecting data, mirroring the data back. You need to interpret the data and you need to help people understand what does this mean? And you have to kind of, female health and health and gender is very intimate. It's close to our hearts. It's related to our sexuality, our identity, our big life decisions. So we need to, as a company, we need to really meet people where they are. And so I think that that does affect the relationship. It's like, you know, I need to, I mean of course everybody needs to understand their users, but I think here it's not just understanding like a black and white need, it's really understanding the whole, kind of the wholeness of what that needs does to somebody in their lives. It's pretty complex. And I know you have quite a vision for how things could change in the future and you just alluded to that as well. How do you think things will change with data use and data sharing as you get more information about people? What will that allow you to do and how will that change your company as well? So right now, there are so many errors where understanding female health is not playing a role. I mean, how you develop medicine, you have traditionally not tested it on women because they had cycles and it was very inconvenient. Now it's like, oh, actually, maybe we should start understanding that instead of ignoring it and that goes for, I mean, it goes for things like disease detection or it goes for understanding sleep or it goes for understanding moods or like there's so many areas of life where if you overlay the data set of what's happening in your cycle and your cycle is the whole thing, remember that. It's not just your period. It's actually like the whole thing that goes on for 40 years. You will start understanding correlations that we've never understood before. And I believe that when people start having longitude data sets, we will be able to start doing something like, say detect something like ovarian cancer, which at the moment is very hard to detect and usually it gets detected so late that people die from it. When in fact, it's very treatable if you detect it right. This is just one example. But I think people that have this longitude data set, it'll start being something like a health insurance. Like you will really start being able to take care of your health and do preventive things in a way that you can't do at the moment. And of course these kind of data sets, you can't buy for money, right? So I think they'll be, start having data around your body. I think it'll become this thing that people know is kind of a valuable asset to have and from there we can do many, many things with it. What will it take to get to that place where you've got that really longitudinal data and layers of very different data, perhaps things that you didn't even realize might correlate? How do you get to that position? So what we're trying to do a clue is really build this platform where we can take all this data and overlap it. And what will it take? It'll take a little bit of time. But again, I see all this activity in the Femtex space and I think we'll start seeing small ecosystems emerging that we can, that help. So for the user right now it's a totally fragmented experience, right? My peer tracking app doesn't talk to my doctor, that doesn't talk to my DNA test, that doesn't talk to my prenatal screening. And we need to start bringing these things together so we can build something like a female health graph. And it's coming. So we're working on it every day at Clue. And how do you keep control of that so that the right people have access, your doctor, your health advisor, but the wrong people don't have access? I think the key concept is that the user is in control. The user will be the one saying, I want this data set to go there or this segment of my data to be seen by this person. An example of that that is already implemented is that at Clue there is a feature called ClueConnect where a user can choose to invite somebody that they trust to see a high level set of her data. So it can be a romantic partners, it's helpful that if my boyfriend knows when I'm about to maybe experience bad moods or my peer is about to come or the times where I can become pregnant. So again, it's the user who can in one click say, no, now I don't want to share this data anymore. I think, again, in my view, and maybe there's certainly lots of things I don't know and this might be one of them, is that how is all this data really gonna flow between doctors, apps, health insurance, your workplace? This whole flow of data I think is still so early. We don't really know yet but I think they're really good principles to build around which is the user needs to own the data, the user needs to be in control, they need to be able to port the data to amend the data. These key things and then from there we have to find practical solutions. And as the technology is developing, so to our regulations around data and in particular next year we've got GDPR coming in, in Europe, the new data protection regulations. Does that affect your work at all? So I was going through it and I will say, I think Clu is in a very good space to be compliant. I feel that some of the early investment we did in this kind of thinking around data is now actually really paying off on a very practical level. We have very little work to do to be compliant. There is actually only one point. So from May, users that are under 16 will have to have parent consent to use an app like Clu. I think that is highly problematic, not only because it's a headache for us to solve but we'll solve that but I think what you're doing is that you're limiting access to health information and health education for the people who really have a great need to get off in the right direction in life and for whom it's difficult to go to your parents to have that conversation or even a doctor and honestly I'm all in for regulations. I think it's an absolutely needed thing. I just think this is one point where maybe we should see if we need to tweak the policies to actually promote female health for the really young girls that's so needed. So that's something that's coming in across the board. It's the 16 age limit up to 13. Before it was 13 years old, now it's 16 years old and I do think that's not helpful for the people we're trying to protect. Is that something that you're working on or do you know how you're going to address that? So we have created a little gathering of FemTech CEOs and founders. We've gathered twice in New York and I think this is a great thing to maybe try and have some collective voice on but it's on my to-do list. Great. And finally we're coming close to the end of our time here but what advice would you maybe give to the other founders and the startups out there, a lot of whom will be working on products that need to collect data in order to work and to offer something to their users? What words of wisdom would you share with them? I don't think there are like corners to cut. I think you need to be really solid and do what you know is right all the time, every time and communicate that to users. I cannot promise that it's gonna be the winning strategy but I really want it to be and I think if we all do it, it will be the winning strategy. You know, it's, I don't know, that's the kind of company I wanna build and I hope that's also the kind of company you wanna build. And what can we expect to see next from Clue? Making more sense of the data. I think that's really the key. Like, you know, we have an amazing amount of data now and we're really getting our heads down to figure out how can we provide more value back to the users based on the data. So that's the key thing. We also wanna be a sustainable business. So we're also figuring out how to make money in ways that feel good for the user as well. Again, very transparent. It's one of the reasons I really wanna have a very visible business model so people understand how we make money. That's another way of building trust. You know, we have been venture, we are venture-backed and we haven't made money yet. It has been a free product. And then some people say, we assume that you're selling my data since you're free and we're like, no, no, no, we are not. But you know, it highlights for me that you need to show users how you make money because now there is, there's so much negative connotation to data that people just assume that you are doing something nasty with the data. And if you are not, you need to actually actively do something to show how it works. And how do you plan to make money? What is your business model? So we are still early and doing lots of different experiments. But I think enabling and allowing people to dive much deeper into the data and get more out of the data is something that people will be willing to pay for. Great. Well, thank you very much for joining us, Ida. It's been a great conversation and I look forward to seeing what Clue does next. Thank you so much. Thank you.