Keller Center: Why are you and your team addressing issues with health care data?
Brian Kang: The current healthcare model gives you a 1-in-365 view of your health, which means that when you go to your primary care provider for your annual check-up, you might run a blood test to test for specific ailments. Besides that one test, you're running in the dark for an entire year with respect to the status of your health. This system is itself symptomatic of a responsive healthcare behavior that seeks to provide treatment when an issue arises, rather than before. What we see now is a desire in the market for more preventative measures like nutritional supplements, diet management programs, and early diagnostic tests. We hope that through a daily or weekly saliva test, one might be able to gain a deeper understanding of their own body and be able to shape their lifestyles around hard data.

KC: What innovations do you think you can bring to accessibility to personal health data?
BK: Our core technology is an adaptation of a common biochemical assay that measures the quantity of proteins in a fluid. The fluid used is very often blood, but we think that step one of accessibilizing health demands an introduction of non-invasive methods of health assessment, so we've decided to target the analysis of saliva. The goal is to use saliva to measure hormones/proteins every two days or so to provide people with a more frequent snapshot of their health. With enough data in the future, we want to enable everyone to make accurate, informed decisions regarding their health, whether it be a change in diet or a recommendation of certain nutritional supplements.

KC: What are your short and long term goals with Baseline Labs?
BK: Baseline Labs is still very much in its infancy, so I'd say that our short-term goal is to make noteworthy strides in the development/engineering of the technology and to find product-market fit eventually. We want first to be able to develop a product that is both accurate and useful to the people that it serves, and that is going to be our internal mantra for the coming months.

KC: What entrepreneurs inspire you and why?
BK: I admire the work of everyone across today's startup landscape -- it's an incredible time in human history for innovation. But if there is one company that I'm eager to follow, it would be Uber. They had such an incredible launch story, and there is so much room for them to keep growing. I'm excited to see how they continue to transform the paradigm of transportation.