Episode 436 of The VentureFizz Podcast features Shilpi Gupta, Founder of Qyn Labs.
Lived the problem and driven to solve it.
If I were a venture capitalist, that would be the most critical pillar of my investment thesis. It’s not impossible to succeed otherwise, but entrepreneurs who have personally experienced the friction they’re solving, I believe, will always have a massive edge.
Shilpi fits the mold here. It was her own personal health experience that led her to a stark realization that hormonal health data is currently reactive, fragmented, and sparse. She knew there had to be a better way, so she founded Qyn Labs to solve this problem and as you’ll learn, she is uniquely qualified to build this company.
For context, our brain communicates in two ways: electrical and chemical. Hormones are the primary chemical signals in our body, yet we have almost no real-time visibility into them. Qyn is changing that with a data-driven platform designed to bring clarity, precision, and understanding to hormone health through simple, at-home testing.
Before Qyn, Shilpi spent her career scaling complex robotics and consumer hardware products. She was part of the Roomba team at iRobot, then she played a key role in making Prime One-Day delivery happen through her work at Amazon Robotics, and then she learned about healthtech while leading product at Pison.
In this episode of our podcast, we cover lots of great topics, including:
- The challenges of building hardware products in the healthtech industry and the importance of talking to your end customers.
- Shilpi’s background growing up in a military family in India, her love for basketball, and her early aspirations of becoming a fighter pilot.
- How she landed in product management and her experience at iRobot, Amazon Robotics, and Pison.
- All about Qyn in terms of their product and why now is the right time for this type of at-home testing.
- Lots of entrepreneurial advice for first-time founders.
- And, so much more!
Keith Cline:
Shilpi, thanks so much for joining us.
Shilpi Gupta:
Thank you for having me, Keith. I’m excited to be here.
Keith Cline:
Likewise. Our paths have crossed through the Boston tech scene, but I was at the Mass AI Coalition 100-Day Event, which was such an awesome day. They brought different entrepreneurs up on stage. One was Andrew Beck, who had exited PathAI for a billion-dollar-plus type of exit. And then they brought you up on stage, and I was like, “I need to have Shilpi on my podcast.”
Your background is awesome in terms of how you’ve built your career, but what you’re working on now as an entrepreneur is extraordinary. It’s such an area that has been underserved. We’re going to get into all the details of that. It’s just fascinating when I learn about different pieces of health and what isn’t being measured and monitored. It’s shocking based on how important it is.
Before we get into all that, I do want to talk about building in the healthcare category. There’s hardware, there’s software—it’s a complex industry. What advice would you have for entrepreneurs who are building something in that consumer healthcare category?
Shilpi Gupta:
The main thing that I keep top of mind, and that I’d share with other entrepreneurs in the space, is that when you’re building in health tech, you are building a product or a service that is a very personal decision for someone. It’s very intimate; it is about their health. You have to take that very seriously, which means you think about the person before you think about the technology.
Yes, the technology stack, especially in the space that we’re building in, is complex. There are multiple aspects to it, and we’ll talk about that later in the podcast. But I’d say stay true to the customer, stay true to the person you are trying to serve, and everything will fall into place.
Keith Cline:
It’s all about the customer, right? That is the anchor. That’s such a repetitive theme on this podcast, but why is it a repetitive theme? Isn’t it just obvious that you should be talking to your customers? Whether you’re building enterprise software or some AI, it seems so obvious to talk to your customer.
Shilpi Gupta:
It’s true, but it’s also shocking how we all understand this as common knowledge, yet we sometimes tend to forget to practice it. Especially when we’re thrown into very complex environments and we’re trying to solve hard problems, people tend to forget. It can’t be emphasized enough that customers should be put right in front of you.
And simplify. I think simplicity pays off tremendously. Sometimes we tend to chase the glory of complex solutions as engineers, but again, go back to the customer and simplify just to serve them. I feel like that is the best thing you can do for your business.
Keith Cline:
So true. I’m listening to a book right now—I listen, I don’t read, so I do a lot of audiobooks—and I’m listening to Build, which is Tony Fadell’s book. Obviously, he’s a legend from the iPod, iPhone, and Nest. He talks about that so much. I didn’t realize he had a first-generation company that was trying to build an iPhone-type company way too early, and they just threw a bunch of stuff into this thing that consumers had no interest in because the tech wasn’t there yet. Anyway, he was just like, “Yeah, we learned the hard way of building something that consumers did not want.”
Shilpi Gupta:
There you go. A great example.
Keith Cline:
Alright, so where did you grow up? What were you like as a child?
Shilpi Gupta:
I grew up as an army kid in India, which meant we moved around a lot. By the time I finished school, I had studied in maybe nine different schools. But the beauty of that, I feel, is that it really prepared me to thrive in ambiguity. It taught me to understand my environment even while it was moving and unknown, and to stay disciplined. That has become the core of who I am.
Also, growing up in a military family, my dad was a military engineer. I heard stories all the time about him and his team building these bridges in impossible conditions. That is a visual that stuck with me forever because what it meant was that he, with his friends and his company and the people he worked with, were solving something together. The teamwork and leadership made impossible things happen. Again, those are things that have stuck with me from my childhood.
I also loved basketball. That may be an odd thing coming from someone like me, but I loved basketball. Like I said, we moved around a lot, and sometimes we even moved to a small town where there was not even a girls’ basketball team. There were no girls playing basketball. But I remember I carried my basketball around in my backpack everywhere. Why? Because the minute I saw the opportunity of someone playing, I would say, “Hey, can I join?” or “Can I use your court when there’s downtime?”
I feel like that is something that defined me—creating my own opportunity when I was really determined to stick with something. It’s funny because I met my coach just like that. He took me under his wing, and many years later, I became the captain of the girls’ basketball team in college. This was the sort of journey that was woven into my childhood that has made me who I am today.
Keith Cline:
Nice. And legend has it that you wanted to be a fighter pilot.
Shilpi Gupta:
I actually honestly thought I was destined to be one. As a kid, we would go to these Air Force air shows where I saw these fighter jets that were beautiful, complex machines flying so close together in complete precision. I was enamored and fascinated by the people who were operating them with such precision, and how those complex machines were working.
That’s why I thought, “This is what I want to do, and I’m destined to do this.” But again, my dad was an engineer, and he saw the curiosity in me and said, “Look, if you want to understand planes, you need to become an engineer. Go learn, go study, and then decide what you want to do.”
That was the turning point in my life because I went to engineering school and I fell in love with robots. I met my professor, who was a super cool guy who helped me get into the field. I saw how hardware, software, intelligence, and human behavior all connect, and there was no looking back.
Keith Cline:
Well, after college, how did you get your career started?
Shilpi Gupta:
I started out as a software engineer and was writing code for a couple of years. Through this, I quickly realized that my right brain and my left brain are perfectly wired to look at a problem and start understanding how to size a solution to it.
I really got attracted to sitting at the table with the client and understanding exactly what we needed to do to solve their problem. I was leaning towards that side of the equation. There was a point where I said, “All right, well, then I’m gonna give it a try,” and I joined a startup.
I threw myself into the chaos and got exposed to all the different problems that startups face—like hiring a team and building things while there were no processes. That made me realize that I needed to quickly acquire the skills to actually build a company. It was teasing my passion because I love building, I love products, and I thought, “I want to build a company. Now I need to learn how to do this.” This is when I decided to go get a business degree.
Keith Cline:
Right, and you went to the great school of Babson, which is a legendary school, especially for entrepreneurship. So that’s perfect. How did you get into product management? Because you were hinting that you liked being with the customers, which makes sense. Product management is more of a known thing now, but you don’t graduate with a product management degree, so I’m always curious how people land in it.
Shilpi Gupta:
Well, I took a course when I was at Babson that was in collaboration with IDEO. It was focused on product development—it wasn’t called product management, actually, you’re right. Because it was IDEO, I got my hands dirty coming up with an elegant solution for a problem.
My first project in that course was interesting. In developed countries, there is an incubator that uses blue light to address neonatal jaundice, but it’s a very expensive piece of equipment. My goal as part of that project, working with IDEO, was to figure out how to translate this into developing markets.
That completely exposed me to the idea of reimagining a product for a completely different customer, and that was my starting point as a product manager. What came out as a solution was very interesting—I still have pictures from it. It was kind of a sling that Vietnamese women carry for their babies, and it had cooling blue LED lights built into it.
This was my solution for a situation where the hospital is really far away, and the mom has to have the baby and take care of the baby. It was a really tiny project, but it started my career in product management because then I started seeking out that space. I knew I wanted to build products for people.
Keith Cline:
All right, so you got started in product management at iRobot. What did you work on?
Shilpi Gupta:
iRobot was a full circle for me because I had fallen in love with robots back in engineering school. It was a great opportunity for me to land back in robot land. I joined as a junior product manager right out of B-school, but quickly got the opportunity to work on Roomba.
Back then, it was really small and very early in its journey. It was about $100 million in revenue, not profitable, and there was a lot still to be desired about the product itself. That was my opportunity to come in and really make a mark.
Eight years later, Roomba was in its prime. That was my journey—building it from scratch, owning the technology roadmap, bringing the product to market, managing the go-to-market strategy, launching it in countries in Europe, China, and different parts of Asia, and really growing the business. That was a tremendous learning curve and the most exciting career journey.
Keith Cline:
What was the last model you worked on there?
Shilpi Gupta:
The last model I worked on there was one of the 900 series. I’m not even sure if that’s around anymore because this was ten years ago. But this was when we brought navigation into the picture. Before then, we did not have SLAM (Simultaneous Localization and Mapping) on the robot. This was the turning point when home robots started to become mapping robots and included visual SLAM.
Really, what it meant, going back to what the customer wants, was that they didn’t care about SLAM. What they cared about was that the robot was getting everywhere and doing it in a disciplined fashion. That was very, very gratifying.
Keith Cline:
Right. Colin Angle was on my podcast about a year ago. It’s obviously an amazing company, great success, and highly innovative. What did you learn while you were there?
Shilpi Gupta:
A lot of learning lessons for me at iRobot. The main one that I would share is around consumer products that are built around hard tech. Making a mark with consumers means that—especially because this is a robot, a solution that somebody is bringing into their home—it is a very high-stakes decision.
I am inviting this technology, this product, into my home. I want it to work, and I want it to disappear. That is the expectation. So that shaped how I think about building consumer tech and consumer products: add value, but disappear. Make it so easy for the user that they don’t even have to think about using the product. I think that played a big role in not just adoption, but retention. 50% of our customers came back and ordered a new robot or a better model, which really was a testament that we were doing something right.
Keith Cline:
So true. It becomes a family member. We had an i7 and sadly, Alice—we named our Roomba Alice—finally just finished a great run. We haven’t replaced Alice yet, but we need to. It’s definitely a product where I totally miss it.
Okay, so then you went to Amazon Robotics, which acquired a company called Kiva Systems many, many moons ago, and that became the foundation of Amazon Robotics. There’s a massive location for Amazon Robotics sitting there in North Reading. You were part of the team that made this delightful consumer experience of the Prime One-day delivery app happen.
Shilpi Gupta:
Yes, I joined Amazon Robotics to really bring up their autonomous mobile robotic solutions. That was the core of why I was brought in. But my team delivered not only that, but also the robotic systems that are fitted into these giant air hubs. Think about buildings that are processing half a million packages in a day and loading them into ten different planes that are then going to our homes and bringing packages over to us within a day.
That scale was exhilarating for me and the team working on it, but it also meant customer obsession again. That’s one of the leadership principles at Amazon, and rightfully so, because every single product decision that I made impacted millions of customers. The scale of that meant being diligent about the decisions I was making, ensuring they were data-based, and that we were simplifying relentlessly.
Keith Cline:
Did you have to create those two-page memos that people have to bring to any type of meeting? They’re well known for that.
Shilpi Gupta:
Yeah, that was the core of getting internal buy-in for things. It’s called the PR FAQ, a working backwards document. It essentially means you write one page that is like a press release for your product and your solution, and then you have a couple of pages designed as FAQs for the customer and for the investors.
This is where you get into the hard questions that would be asked, such as: what is the ROI that you would bring in in three years? What would be the return on investment? Why would a customer want this, and how would they use it?
That was quite a learning experience for me because I was originally doing traditional slide presentations and being in the room to tell the backstory. But at Amazon, because of the scale of the organization, your document had to do a lot of work for you because it would go places without you.
That very much ties into what I’m experiencing with Qyn Labs right now. We’re about to start a raise in a couple of weeks, and we want to tell people what we’re building in a very organized fashion, in a way that answers their questions meaningfully. I’ve come back to the PR FAQ template, and it works great for me.
Keith Cline:
Well, I run a product management community. I’m going to have to have you present to our community about that process because the Amazon way obviously is incredibly successful and it’s a different way of thinking. I think that’s really cool. All right, so what did you do after Amazon Robotics?
Shilpi Gupta:
Great experience and great scale at Amazon, but I still had the itch of going back to my original goal and roots of wanting to be an entrepreneur and be in a startup environment. So I joined Pison, which was a Series A company when I joined, and this is where my journey into health tech started.
At Pison, we were measuring physiological signals between the brain and the muscles to understand cognition, fatigue, neuromuscular performance, and early disease detection. This is where I deeply experienced what continuous human data tied to physiology means, and how you make that meaningful.
I joined as the head of product, and there was no product team at this small startup at the time. They had a cool technology, and we needed to build out the product strategy to turn it into a valuable solution. While I was building up the team at Pison, I was also going through my own journey on the personal side. I was in my late 30s at this point. This was like the stars aligning because here I am in a company deeply involved in continuous physiological signals, and I’m experiencing a problem in my life where I’m starting to wonder if it’s related. I realized there was a data problem in my life that I should be solving. That’s what happened.
Keith Cline:
The product itself at Pison is a wrist wearable device, right? From the point when you started to when you left to start your own company, where did you take the product itself?
Shilpi Gupta:
When I joined, we had a prototype that was able to read electrical signals using surface electromyography on the skin. The company was very much focused on a gesture-based application in its early stages to prove that it could work. They were focused on one application—raise your index finger and something happens. That was a really cool idea because I do believe that’s where the world will go, where our user interfaces will be multifaceted, including gesture and other body language alongside voice and text.
It was cool, but what I realized was that there was such rich data in there around our neuromuscular condition that we needed to harness it for health and performance. The way to do that for Pison was to embed it into smartwatches. Being a small startup in a space that was compatible with what smartwatches were already doing, it was the easiest path to get large adoption, secure that data, and solve that problem from an intelligence standpoint.
That’s where I took the company. We built out our minimum viable product. For non-product people, that is the first thing you do when you think about taking a technology to a solution: you think about the minimum you need to deliver with this technology to delight a customer, who that customer is, and how you delight them with that minimum version. We took the wearable and made it so that it could be embedded into multiple different smartwatch form factors.
Keith Cline:
Again, focusing on the customer, which goes back to those roots we talked about at the beginning. Okay, so now to the journey you’re on now—what led you down the path of starting your own company?
Shilpi Gupta:
I mentioned how I was going through my own personal journey while I was at Pison. It was a hard time for me because I went through multiple miscarriages on our way to having our daughter, who is four today. This was back around 2020 and 2021.
I went through these multiple miscarriages, and I was seeking answers, asking why this was happening. The answer that I kept getting was that this happens to 25% of women and that I was just one of them. I could not take that answer.
Keith Cline:
That’s the answer. Wow. Okay.
Shilpi Gupta:
Especially as an engineer. So I got into it. I started learning, reading, talking to clinicians, and talking to leaders in the space to really get to the root of the problem of why we do not understand what is going on.
Long story short, I realized that I was actually dealing with a hormonal imbalance—an estrogen and progesterone imbalance. It was very correctable. I did it within 90 days by correcting my nutrition, my sleep, and my exercise, and I had my daughter Mahi absolutely naturally after that. That simple.
That opened my eyes. It said to me, “What if I understood this imbalance from the get-go? Did I have to go through all of that?” And why did nobody even think to question this part? It comes back to the fact that we don’t have the information. It’s nobody’s fault, we just don’t have the information. The data around hormones doesn’t exist because the tools have never existed. It’s only been an episodic lab test once a year, maybe not even that, and hormones change all the time.
There is definitely a factor that women’s health has been underserved, underinvested in, and overlooked for a long time. Apart from that being a big umbrella problem, we just don’t have the tools to understand our hormones. Hormones are the crux; they’re the communication signal of our body. Our brain communicates in two ways—electrical and chemical—and hormones are those chemical signals. When they’re off, we suffer, and we don’t understand them.
I took it as a systems engineer problem. I said, “All right, let me dig into why that is. Why are we not tracking these hormones the way we should?” I got really deep into the technology, understood where the landscape was, built up the team, and Qyn was born.
Keith Cline:
Perfect segue. When I hear stories like this, I’m always shocked. Look at your website. No one was working on this? The amazing scientists out there advancing medicine and healthcare—if this is such a critical piece, your control system, how were we not measuring hormone levels already? What did you do, and how are you solving this problem?
Shilpi Gupta:
Timing has a big role to play in technology. We are able to do this today because the technology landscape has matured to allow us to do it. That could be one of the reasons why this was not done before. With CGMs (Continuous Glucose Monitors), sensor technology has come a long way in terms of capability, cost, and size.
To answer your question about how we’re solving this and why it wasn’t done before, a couple of things are making us capable of doing this today: sensor technology and AI. We know that AI provides a whole different level of being able to handle large amounts of data and noisy biological signals, turning all of that into insight. That’s a major turning point and an inflection point in technology capabilities.
The third thing is a very interesting behavioral change that has happened: we as consumers and as people have taken ownership of our own health and are demanding more. When that meets the capability of technology, our behavior changes from “I’m going to show up when I have a problem” to “I’m going to do what it takes to stay healthier for longer.” That’s when solutions like ours can emerge. This allows us to look at this huge problem, see the big data gap, and say, “Okay, there are ways to solve this, and we can do it. We’re going to put our focus on this.”
Keith Cline:
All right, so how does it work?
Shilpi Gupta:
We have broken this problem down into two parts in a pure systems engineering product way: detecting continuously versus detecting accurately are two separate problems. We’re starting off with detecting accurately, giving people a solution to take home—an episodic device like we saw on the website.
It’s an episodic device that lives in your purse, and it is capillary blood-based, which is the gold standard of understanding our hormones today. We build the foundation of this database with the gold standard blood data that we need. We’re solving it with an episodic device first to get to the hormone levels directly.
Then we take the same technology and embed it into a wearable that is capable of taking multiple samples in a day, monitoring frequently and continuously, and layering in how we feel alongside that to provide complete intelligence around our hormones and how they’re impacting our bodies.
We take all this data and turn it into a personal baseline. What is good for you is different from what is good for me, and that’s exactly what we need to understand with our hormones. We build a personal baseline for people once we have that longitudinal data, and then we’re able to see when there are deviations, major fluctuations, or when they are not following general patterns and stability is impacted. This is when we feel differently. When our hormones change suddenly or don’t follow our regular trend, that’s when we feel symptoms like fatigue, or when our sleep is not restful. These are a couple of symptoms we start feeling when the stability and the rhythm of our hormones is off.
Keith Cline:
Yeah, and you said it’s a male thing too, it’s not just female. It affects so many things—fertility, menopause. It’s just crazy. To your point, the technology wasn’t there before to do what you’re able to do now, and the consumer is accepting ownership of tracking their own health now versus just trusting doctors because of the access to these devices. A lot has changed, and timing is a key part of a successful startup.
You talked a little bit about investors. If I was a VC, I would look for entrepreneurs who are solving a problem that they cannot not solve because it’s something they personally experienced. Your background uniquely qualifies you to build what you’re doing—a consumer device—because you have that background of building real products, you worked in the consumer healthcare wearables market just prior, you lived this problem, and then you were maniacally focused to find a better way. Like a good engineer, you built this, so I think it’s extraordinary.
Shilpi Gupta:
Thank you. I am driven, and so is my team. We will not stop until we get it.
Keith Cline:
You’re still getting into the market, perfecting the product and the overall consumer experience. Will users be testing once a day or multiple times a day? Is it up to them? And then they get the information from the device sent to their phone? How do you envision the flow of data for the consumer to get the results they need, and is this shared with their physician?
Shilpi Gupta:
Great question. Yes, it is on demand. You test when you need and when you want. User experience is a big part of it, so we will handhold the user to a great extent. We will guide them based on their data. For example, for women who are already tracking their cycles using WHOOP or Oura—both of which turned on features recently that allow you to know where you’re at in your cycle based on derived trends from body temperature and HRV—we will guide them to test themselves at certain points in their cycle. This gives them the right timing to get insight around real hormonal levels. That is one example of a user experience where we guide the user when to test.
Also, there’s a big population now starting to take hormone replacement therapy (HRT), and there’s a big change in the regulatory environment. The stringency that the FDA had on HRT for women, or even TRT (Testosterone Replacement Therapy) for men, has been greatly relaxed recently. This is news as of a couple of months ago for women, and just two days ago for men. This means much greater access to HRT for people. And why not? We all want to feel our vitalism, feel good, and address the single most important communication signal in our body. If it’s declining, we want to do what it takes.
People taking HRT will be able to learn where they’re at and how they’re responding based on when they test themselves. This data will show up in their app. The frequency will change based on whether you’re a cycling woman or on HRT, and we will guide them. The data will show up in the app, and you will see the trend lines.
We’re going to simplify it further by giving them a score—a rhythm score—which is based on their personal baseline, the stability of their rhythm, the continuity of their rhythm, and a couple of different factors. This means they can look at it and don’t have to decipher a complex graph. People like to double-click and see their trends, but when they look at the app, they’re going to instantly know where they stand. That’s the vision and where we’re going in terms of how people test themselves and how this shows up in their apps.
Keith Cline:
One of the biggest challenges for building a physical product is—as they always say—hardware is hard. Manufacturing is tough. How do you think about that and ensure you’re working with the right partners who can create what you actually need and make sure it’s right?
Shilpi Gupta:
Yes, hardware is hard and simplicity goes a long way. Building something that is a prototype is a hundred times easier than building something that is manufacturable and scalable. A lot of times, hardware companies fail in the exact transition from “we built something cool” to “this is usable, manufacturable, and scalable at the right cost.”
The best thing one can do, and that’s exactly what we’re doing at Qyn, is to work with partners early. Bring in the manufacturing partners and your scale partners right from the prototype stage. If they weigh in early, you build it right from the get-go.
Keith Cline:
Yeah, I’ve heard that feedback from others too. It’s so important to involve manufacturing partners from early on in the process. As a first-time founder raising capital, what has that experience been like for you, and what advice would you have for entrepreneurs?
Shilpi Gupta:
It is a journey and definitely a learning experience as an entrepreneur. I am taking some lessons learned from Amazon because Amazon operates like multiple startups within the company; each product person has to internally raise their own funds for their product line. I’ve been through that internal process and took some lessons from it.
But as an entrepreneur raising money, the first and foremost thing that is important is to get buy-in on the vision and the problem. For us, when I started a year and a half ago, the problem was not obvious to everyone, and I found myself explaining why we’re doing what we’re doing. Today, the problem is right in our face. We all understand we need this.
It has been a journey of bringing people along and explaining over and over again why this is important, why hormones are the communication signal of our body, and why this is going to lead to better health for longer. Investors are buying in. They understand the vision and the problem, especially investors in the spaces of longevity, health tech, and consumer health.
It’s really about finding the right partner investors—the investors who will back you up as you’re building deep tech. Deep tech is not always straightforward; it goes in turns and it’s not a very linear journey. You need investors who are in it for the long term. It has been very exciting for me to learn that process of inviting those kinds of investors to the table and having conversations that are very frank and transparent, where we talk about being partners more than anything else.
Keith Cline:
Yeah, I’ve heard the statement that it’s harder to divorce your investors than it is your companion, so make sure you’re in it for the long haul because it’s a 10-year journey together. What about the business side? I know you’re not necessarily in the market yet, but are you envisioning this will be a subscription for the consumer? Is this something that will get reimbursed by insurers? How will that work?
Shilpi Gupta:
We’re targeting consumers, although we are starting with concierge clinics to get the ball rolling with early adopter clients. From there, once we have momentum on the data and our intelligence is looking clean and we’re ready with the user experience to go broader, we will go direct-to-consumer. I envision this to be a subscription model, which allows us to provide data on a continuous basis, continue to update the intelligence, and provide value on a daily basis.
Keith Cline:
I always like to ask entrepreneurs how they are leveraging AI for their own day-to-day work or personal life.
Shilpi Gupta:
This is a very exciting time, as we all know. I use AI a lot, and I use it in many ways for the startup. It has become a superpower to enhance ourselves. We’re a small team that is probably doing the work of a hundred people today because we are seeing the power of enhancing ourselves with AI.
I use Claude for sure, and I use Replit and Lovable—apps that allow me as a product person and as the leader of the organization to share my vision with the team in a very fast way so we can iterate quickly. Administrative tasks can also be made a lot easier with AI. I have an AI assistant, Howie, that helps me manage my calendar. These are things that add up and allow much greater efficiency for us as a company and for me as an individual and a leader.
Keith Cline:
Alright, three apps you can’t live without. It can’t be Slack, email, or calendar.
Shilpi Gupta:
Definitely Strava and WHOOP because I cycle. I love cycling when I have the time, though not much lately.
Keith Cline:
Yeah, you’re into long-distance cycling, right?
Shilpi Gupta:
Yes, my husband and I used to love designing our vacations around cycling. If we visited Croatia, for instance, we would spend three days cycling from one island to another, clocking like 60 or 80 miles a day.
Keith Cline:
Wow. It’s a great experience though because you really get to see the country and take it in versus just going to a major city.
Shilpi Gupta:
Yeah, and then you get to experience the food at the end of the day with no guilt because you cycled all day. We love long-distance cycling. I’ve been cycling for a long time, and I love the sport because it teaches me endurance and the idea of being comfortable with the uncomfortable.
Going back to the apps, definitely Strava and WHOOP because it’s about performance, and cycling brings that in. Now, it’s also about optimizing my health, so we’re all in on WHOOP, and sleep is key. And Claude—I’d say Claude is not just an app, but a very important tool that I use every day.
Keith Cline:
Well, Shilpi, thanks so much for taking the time to walk us through your background story, your professional journey, and obviously all the great work that you and the team are up to at Qyn Labs. Wishing you great success ahead.
Shilpi Gupta:
Thank you so much. What a pleasure speaking with you.