A reflection on 2024 (a letter from our CEO)
Looking back on one of the more complicated - but also more fulfilling - years of my life so far, I think I’m starting to understand how nearly everything worth doing requires the strength and extreme generosity of the spirit of the people around you, and your own willingness to lean on them and be one of the members of a team.
2024 has not been the simplest year, but from my perch on this December 31st, I have overwhelmingly positive reflections. From a cool product and some interesting early studies, our mission-driven team has sprinted to build a robust, scaling, impactful company that is enabling patient-driven research and drug development by measuring the changes in health that matter most. At home, our little babies have grown into interactive, happy humans who bring joy to the world around them (except when they’re hungry, tired, or being asked to share). And personally, I feel like a more complete human than I was at the start of the year, with perhaps the beginnings of some wisdom in the back of my brain. All of this, despite an objectively complicated journey over the past 12 months.
January began with a pretty sick infant, while the Folia team and I were navigating stormy seas.
We had to part with some great team members at the start of the year, but with remarkable and inspired work by our great crew, we closed a significant round of funding and an exciting, meaningful new partnership the same week that my grandmother passed away and my son was weathering a difficult infection. That was just the first quarter.
It honestly didn’t get a lot easier on the health front through the year - our little family ended up with nine ER visits (I think) in 2024, three procedures, and two admissions.
I have been surprised to learn how much I didn’t yet fully comprehend, despite nearly a decade working in this space, about the frustration, fear, self-doubt, and baseline stress that accompany frequent high-stakes encounters with the healthcare system. You almost have to reach a new level, inside yourself, to compartmentalize a bit and keep going with your life. It’s been a strange experience of life imitating work, but I’m also a bit proud to be a new member of this club - complex patients and their caregivers are a pretty amazing group.
Through these experiences, our family has been lifted up and allowed to continue to thrive (somehow!), by the warmth and deep reassurance we have found in the support of all the remarkable humans that have helped us: the family members, friends, and neighbors who have upended their days to help us get some rest or find space to do good work; the teammates who have gracefully navigated changing schedules and have seamlessly picked up the mantle of big projects; the clinicians who have offered good and compassionate care.
Forgive me if this has been obvious to everyone else, but I’ve entirely relied on the strength, abilities, and goodness of others to have a year that has been, on the whole, pretty great.
As you might have already guessed, this ties back very neatly to the whole core of what we’re doing at Folia - harnessing the power of individuals to better understand complex disease and uncover what is likely to work best for each one of us, as we walk along our journeys and try to keep health problems at the back.
A surfboard for riding the 2024 wave of patient ownership in our healthcare system- designed, prototyped, and produced by our multitalented Folia team members (detailing is our backup plan)
I wish I could say that I planned it this neatly - but as I have been going through this personal realization, our team has discovered, in parallel, that Folia “Level 2” will be all about the collective power of the strength, wisdom, and generosity of individual people.
In 2025, we will be expanding from our original focus on enabling each individual to collect and use a full view of their own health, to step into the potential of a Collective - enabling new, and hopefully transformative, community-driven insights in nearly a dozen high-need conditions.
See you on January 2. For now, I’m going to sign off, write a stack of overdue thank-you’s, and enjoy the rosy glow of over-sugared toddlers.
(And thank YOU, for everything you have done for us and for those around you, in 2024.)
Wishing you a peaceful and joyful New Year,
Nell
A bit about the research that our participants enabled this year.