170: Gabriela Sabate (Health Semantics)

Gabriela Sabate on Innovation City

“You have to trust yourself…. Trust your intuition. Perhaps you’re wrong, perhaps you’re right. But I think that you will never regret having listened to your intuition and gone for it, even when you’re wrong.” – Gabriela Sabate

Welcome to Season 3 of Innovation City, a podcast featuring innovators, creators, and disruptors to discover how business is changing in the modern world.

Created and produced by SLAM! Agency in cooperation with Venture Cafe St. Louis and Venture Cafe Miami, Innovation City gives you an inside look at how rapidly business and culture are changing thanks to increasing diversity and inclusion, heightened creativity, and a stronger and better-connected business community. Venture Cafe is the largest combined gathering of entrepreneurs and innovators anywhere in the world. Events are held every Thursday in St. Louis, Miami, and other leading innovation cities around the globe.

Today’s guest is Gabriela Sabate, Founder & CEO of Health Semantics, which combines digital health and remote monitoring in clinical workflows to prevent chronic conditions like diabetes and hypertension. Gabriela is an entrepreneur with 25 years in venture creation and operations, and she is passionate about innovation. In this episode, Gabriela sits down with the team to discuss how she got into the healthtech industry, the many more things we can do with technology, how to identify the right team members, and much more!

They discuss:

• Joining her technology and healthcare interests and experience to find a field of relevance where she could make an impact in people’s lives
• How she got into the healthcare industry
  • She grew up in a family of doctors
  • Sharing in the special moments, stress, ups and downs of being a doctor with her father
  • It’s a highly regulated industry, so solutions don’t flow quickly
• There are so many things you can improve with technology
  • Making better food choices
  • Exercising
  • Patient journeys
• Gabriela’s takeaways from her top roles
  • SoftBank
    • The gap between the talent and eagerness of diverse entrepreneurs, and their ability to access capital.
  • Health Semantics
    • It’s great to have vision, but you can go too far. Align your vision with the times, or with your market.
• The technology evolution in the age of the global COVID-19 pandemic
• How Gabriela identifies the right talent for her teams
  • It depends on what you’re building, and what stage of company building you’re in
  • Get out of your comfort zone of finding people just like you
  • Shared vision, commitment, core values if that’s important to what you’re doing
  • Find people who can be flexible
• The “why” can change
• Get in touch with Gabriela: @Gabriela Sabate on LinkedIn; @gsabate on Twitter; still working on Tik Tok!

Lightning Round:

1. If you could run your own country, what would it be like?
   • Independent but collaborative
2. What question would you ask a fortune teller?
   • Are we going to be better in 20 years as a global society?
3. What did you learn from your biggest regret?
   • You have to trust yourself and your intuition. Even if you might be wrong.
4. What or whom are you grateful for?
   • Life. My kids, family, society.