If you’re a hammer, you just want to smash nails; if you’re a programmer, you just want to build features. But features do not a successful product make. This is the central myopia that eventually blinds even the most brilliant engineer-entrepreneurs, unless they’re smart enough to surround themselves with people who can check their bias.
If you want an interesting example of this phenomenon, look no further than Adam Bosworth, the co-founder and chief technology officer at San Francisco-based health gamification startup Keas. There’s no question about this guy’s brilliance. At Citicorp in the late 1970s, he invented an analytical processing system that helped the bank predict changes in inflation and exchange rates. At Borland, he built the Quattro spreadsheet, and at Microsoft, he built the Access database. He was one of the first to propose standards for XML—the foundation of most Web services today. At Google, he helped to develop Google Docs before moving on to start Google Health.
But as everyone knows, Google Health was a failure—and so was Bosworth’s next effort, Keas, at least until the venture-backed startup went through a dramatic pivot in 2010. How Bosworth figured out that his old approach wasn’t working, and how Keas reinvented itself as a provider of health-focused games for large employers, is the tale I want to tell you today.
It’s looking like there will be a happy ending: Keas (pronounced KEY-us) is bringing on 90,000 new users per quarter and has grown to 20 employees, thanks to continued backing from Atlas Venture in Cambridge, MA, and Ignition Partners in Bellevue, WA. But to hear Bosworth tell the story, things were touch and go for a while, and Keas didn’t really turn itself around until Bosworth stopped looking at his beautiful software code and his analytics dashboards and started listening to young psychology majors and game designers.
“Most software people don’t start by thinking about psychology,” Bosworth says. “Most software people think about features first, because they are concrete and they know how to implement them. They think, ‘I would want this, therefore my users would want this.'” But sometimes—perhaps most of the time, Bosworth argues—they’re dead wrong.
Bosworth grew up in New York and graduated from Saint Ann’s, a private academy where his father, Stanley Bosworth, was the founding headmaster. He says he discovered early on that he is dyslexic, and that he learned to compensate by thinking in pictures. This gave him a talent, he says, for “basically taking Lego blocks for adults, and finding really simple ways to help people build solutions to hard problems.” Those skills enabled him to make breakthrough after breakthrough in the software world, and turned him into one of the hottest commodities in Silicon Valley—Bosworth has ducked recruiting attempts by Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, among others.
But it was during the Google Health project that the limitations of Bosworth’s data-centric point of view began to show through. The idea behind Google Health was to get millions of people to put their health records—medications, lab results, immunizations, chronic conditions, and the like—on the Web in a central, secure repository accessible to them and their caregivers. “The idea I had was that in order to help anyone be healthier, you would need their health data,” he says. “This was in 2006, when only 10 percent of doctors had access to electronic health records, and only 10 percent of them would share it with patients, meaning that 99 percent of people weren’t able to get their own health data electronically.”
At the same time, coincidentally, personal financial management startup Mint.com was getting off the ground. “I had in mind doing Mint.com for health,” says Bosworth. Mint had three features that Bosworth wanted to emulate:
