Quinn Underwood is an alumnus of the 2015-16 Munk One Cohort and a graduate of the University of Toronto with a double major in Immunology and Health Studies. During his time at U of T, he deepened his passion for health issues and explored different avenues to make an impact. Today, he is the Co-founder and CEO of his own startup, Animo, an AI and data analytics solution to track mental health in real-time. We caught up with Quinn to discuss his interest in global health, life as an entrepreneur, and how Munk One played a role in his journey.

What global problem are you most passionate about? How did you become interested in it?

I’ve always really been passionate about health, which is somewhat difficult because it’s all-encompassing once you start thinking about health not just as a biological challenge, but also as being socially determined. Over the years, my interest in health kind of morphed in terms of which parts of it I’ve really focused on. When I was in Munk One, I was really interested in global health, and I actually conducted research with a fellow student, Jillian Sprenger, on the potential application of mobile health technology to the diagnosis and treatment of child malnutrition in Myanmar after the transition from military government to semi-democracy. The experience of looking at the intersection of technology and health kind of influenced everything I’ve done since, so then I started working in Bangladesh and East India on a digital health startup. We were looking at telehealth technologies – basically allowing a physician to call into a remote care centre from an urban location, and to provide high quality and accurate diagnoses at a lower cost.

From those experiences, I would say there was a steady progression in my thinking towards conceptualizing healthcare in a more preventative manner, which eventually led me towards mental health, the domain of health that I’m really focused on now. Mental health is really interesting from a preventative health care perspective because it is one of the most significant determinants of long-term physiological health conditions. Take stress, for example – chronic stress is one of the most significant contributors to cardiac disease and all sorts of different downstream issues, so it’s both an acute health challenge but also affects a lot of other areas of health. This is something I’m super passionate about and is particularly relevant in light of COVID-19.

Can you tell us a bit more about how you ended up becoming an entrepreneur and what you are up to now?

Serendipity probably played the most significant role in it. I knew health was the area I wanted to play in, but that’s so general. So, for me, I was really interested in doing something that had scalable impact. I had been running an NGO since I was in high school with a couple of friends who are working in North India. I realized pretty quickly – actually through a lot of the classes I had at U of T – about the challenges with systems around aid provision and development. Through the research we did in Myanmar, we realized that a lot of the NGOs weren’t effectively solving the problem, and were actually contributing to the challenges, so I was interested in what it looked like working with the government.  While I didn’t end up working in government, when we were doing the digital health company in Bangladesh, we actually signed contracts with the government there. It was an incremental process. While you can certainly achieve scale, which I really wanted, it was a really slow-moving process. Of course, there are pros and cons to that, but I thought that a startup could provide an interesting intermediary between speed and scale.

In university, I started coming up with different ideas and finding friends to work with on those ideas. In my mind, being a student provided a kind of safety net to have the freedom to explore without taking on too much risk. I was in this place where I could meet with so many different people with so many perspectives and expertise in different areas that I didn’t have that I figured it would be harder to meet and get to know later on. In the end, one of those ideas, Animo, happened to stick. We are developing a platform to make mental health measurable in real-time. The idea is that what can be measured can be managed. Our vision is to build emotional intelligence as a service, with relevance to helping workplaces better understand how they impact the well-being of employees, helping therapists understand how patients are doing in-between visits, and at the end of the day, giving people value for their own data rather than just using it to market or advertise to them.

You started your U of T journey in the Munk One program. Thinking back, what was the most interesting or rewarding experience you had through Munk One?

For me, it was the opportunity to be surrounded by people who were so intellectually curious – audacious is the term that Professor Joseph Wong liked to use, and I found that for myself, in the area of entrepreneurship, the experience helped in reassessing the bar I set for myself. Professor Teresa Kramarz and Professor Wong are very clear in their expectation that you might be a first-year student at university, but you are at one of the best universities in the world, you are surrounded by incredible resources, you don’t have a lot of risks relative to what you might face later in life, and there is a real opportunity to not just take a traditional path, but really explore what is possible. For me, that was huge, and honestly, life-changing. I don’t know if I would have done the research in Myanmar in my first year, which led to all of these other things I had never planned for. So for me, the most amazing part about Munk One was being surrounded by people that had high expectations of themselves and of one another, and then professors that nurtured that. Through Munk One, I actually got to know people and form friendships with them. In a school as large as U of T, when every other course I was taking had hundreds of students, this was valuable.

I also want to add – I grew up in the US and one of the things that I’ve heard from investors a lot is, there’s an interesting mindset difference between Canada and the US. In the US there is this kind of grandiosity and a sense of ‘I can do everything,’ which is kind of a double-edged sword, but it’s something that isn’t as prominent in Canada. Even when we were raising money, we would have two pitch decks: one for Canadian investors, one for US investors. For Canadian investors, it was ‘how were we going to reach profitability in three to five years?’, but for US investors it was ‘how do we reach global scale and have a massive impact in seven years?’.  I think Munk One gives you a bit of that ambitious thinking while also teaching you how to identify the pitfalls of that simplistic vision of the world, with one person going out and fixing things without having an understanding of what it actually takes or taking into account the opinions of the people they’re trying to help. That perspective is really valuable.

What does a ‘typical day’ as the founder of your own startup look like during COVID-19?

This is true for a lot of different people, I’m sure, but particularly in a startup, your day looks so different from one day to the next. On a typical day though,  we’ll get up and have a team stand up – we are a team of five right now and are hiring a couple of more. We have a quick chat, talk about what we need to do during the day, identify roadblocks to getting them done, who needs to have a call with who, and then really, it’s attending to what (metaphorical) fire needs putting out! That’s what I’m focusing on, from reaching out to customers, to talking with users, to designing products. Today, I’m talking to investors, and I have to write an investor update. So, yes, it looks different every day, but the core theme is getting to work with really, really cool people that I have been able to choose, and getting to work on something I really care about.