[MUSIC PLAYING]
Friends, this is Erdin Beshimov here with Hanna Adeyema.
Hanna is the MIT entrepreneur who
is co-founder of Tenacity Health.
And Hanna and I share a special bond.
We are both from the former Soviet Union.
Hanna is from Nigeria and Bela-Russia.
And I'm from Kyrgyzstan, so we both speak Russian.
And we share that connection of MIT entrepreneurs
who came to America from other countries
and are loving the spirit of an immigrant entrepreneur.
And Hanna, when I first got to know her as a student at MIT,
I actually thought-- and she might find that interesting--
she was going to be a corporate soldier, that she was going
to work and go and work for a big company.
And lo and behold, she just surprised us
all by embarking her really interesting
entrepreneurial journey.
So we're going to learn about Hanna.
We're going to learn about Tenacity Health.
But Hanna, tell us about Tenacity Health.
Well, thanks for the introduction, Erdin.
It's a pleasure to be here.
Tenacity is a company that I founded while still at MIT.
And I'm sure you probably saw me running around
in interview outfits looking at different positions
in organizations.
I think a corporate career is very viable option
for many people.
But it just so happened that while I was still at school,
I met these amazing founders, future co-founders, that
just made it easier for me to choose
an idea of entrepreneurship.
Tenacity helps larger organizations
save on healthcare costs by creating
healthier and happier workforce.
And that's something we've been working for about over a year.
Well, the really interesting point
here is that you don't have to be born an entrepreneur.
And you don't have to always feel
that you were meant to be an entrepreneur.
Sometimes it becomes something that catches your curiosity,
and then you embark on the journey.
So I think that's a very important point.
But take us to the early days of Tenacity Health.
So even before you knew there was
going to be Tenacity Health, how did it all come about?
So I was taking this class.
And one of my future co-founders was taking the class also.
And both of us happened to be interested in health
and attracted by the idea of maybe toying
with starting our own company or joining a very early stage
company.
And as we grew into the class, we
came up with the idea for Tenacity,
which obviously has changed since then.
So the first feature that we came across and decided
to implement was the idea of how do
you motivate people to do things continuously.
And how do you attain sustained motivation?
And what we find is that people are very much motivated
by their social obligations.
And so there are different ways of creating a social obligation
from what we are familiar right now.
Most people share their information on Facebook,
and that kind of sometimes gets them motivated to do things
that they wouldn't otherwise be motivated to do.
There's another way, that is much better,
is creating personal relationships
inside a community where you have personal accountability
partners.
And that was the original idea behind Tenacity.
Let's take a look at the Tenacity app.
Absolutely.
So here's the application.
Well, initially, when you sign up,
you go through an onboarding process.
And you connect to the people in your network
that you think will be good at supporting you.
And also, you may find people that you can support.
And then once you start using the app,
you get your behavior tracked.
Right now, it's just the activity levels.
There's also going to be food points,
but they're not yet available.
And you can add extra points whenever
you surpass your daily averages.
And you've got historical data and all sorts of information
that you can look up about your own performance.
But most interestingly, you also have these two friends.
I have my two co-founders that I support.
I can see instantly that one of them have been very active
and the other one hasn't.
So I can send a thumbs up to the one that has been active.
And then I will write a separate message, not right now,
to the other one with some very motivating words
to get them going.
And the reason I really care about it,
it's not just because they're my friends,
but also their performance really
translates into something very tangible for me every day.
I have a log of all of their points they have ever received.
And by now, I have accumulated enough to get $94 for that.