wisdom – COOPER GENERAL NEWS

Sometime in the middle of April I took up space in the world again, the bigger one outside of my apartment, outside of my neighborhood. Taking a seat is a bizarre feeling after a year inside. It’s sometimes exciting, sometimes terrifying. It’s always strange.

As we get out of the pandemic, not only do we walk around without masks, we learn how to re-enter our bodies. It’s wild out there – which means the happy, nerve-wracking combination of New York City and lifted restrictions – but it’s still time to hold on to whatever is slow.

The pandemic, devastating in many ways, was also an opportunity to explore the value of the body and the everyday, to refocus the eyes and to see, as dance critic Edwin Denby wrote, “Daily life is wonderfully full” of seeing things . Not only the movements of people, but also the objects around them, the shape of the rooms in which they live, the ornaments that architects make on windows and doors, the peculiar way how buildings end up in the air. “

In his 1954 essay “Dancing, Buildings and People in the Streets” (also the title of a later volume) Denby explores the art and the act of seeing both in performance and in the daily dance of life. During the pandemic, I put a lot of thought into Denby’s essay, a reminder not to stop looking at the details of everyday life. People slowed down. And you could study your body just as you could study the world.

With the increase in vaccinations, the world has changed, although it is not what it was and will not be. This spring there were again dances to be seen in person; In May, I wondered if it was time to buy an unlimited MetroCard. Some of it was great – like when members of the club world performed at the Guggenheim on Ephrat Asherie’s UnderScored, part of the Works & Process franchise. Some things were forgotten. But a lot seemed right at the moment: processions in nature, a participatory installation at MoMA, an intimate studio performance. In different ways, they all reflected the time we are in – a borderline in-between place that won’t last forever. (Hold on to it.)

Watching a performance is now not just about the dance itself, but about a glimpse into our position – maybe even a way to pause the world for a moment longer. What does it mean to watch dance like in life and to move through the room? How does your feeling affect your vision? What should be preserved from the pandemic and what could dance teach us about it?

Dance sprouts all around us; it’s purposeful, serious, healing, transgressive, inclusive and beautifully laid back. And while the theaters haven’t fully opened their doors yet, the choreography has spread to rooftops and parks, studios, cemeteries, and museums.

Processions, these performances with built-in cast, are also ubiquitous. Why now? They’re practical, of course – kept outdoors, they don’t require excessive choreographic construction. And they feel right for this time in between: They are not shows, but events that arise in the moment. And how they develop – that is, how they look and, more importantly, how they feel – depends on who shows up.

The last River to River Festival in 2021 in collaboration with Movement Research presented three processions led by Miguel Gutierrez, Okwui Okpokwasili and the Illustrious Blacks. What does it mean to inhabit our body – and the city – as individuals and as a group? “It was almost like opening doors of opportunity again as we come out of the pandemic and step into this new world,” said Lili Chopra, executive director of arts programs at the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council. “It is a participatory moment that you do together, but which you can take with you.”

A procession led by Gutierrez in Teardrop Park in Lower Manhattan was about thinking about the land we were walking on; it was also about slowing down and seeing. Before we started, we performed a movement at Gutierrez’s instruction in which our outstretched arms cupped and scooped the air forwards and backwards.

For him the action could do many things; it could be a conjuring gesture or it could contain the idea of conjuring. It could be about moving or banishing energy. He spoke of waving as a gesture of awakening: “Healing”, he sang, “there is no space for oblivion”.

At a time when it looks like a lot of people have pushed the past year and a half out of their heads, the gesture was grounding and reassuring. It also echoed: as we walked towards the park, two children were seen in a high-rise apartment with their arms curled in the same meditative slow motion; they stood behind a window, but their attention – they watched, they copied, they moved with us – made the procession important even before it really began.

Moving as a collective, especially after so much loneliness, has a hypnotic effect. This idea of togetherness was the focus of the Global Water Dances 2021 in Locomotive Lawn in Riverside Park South in June, which drew attention to the cause of clean and safe water with movement. Martha Eddy, the dance teacher and one of the coordinators of the event, helped lead a dance in which participants, dancers and spectators alike made waves with their bodies.

“You’re starting to feel harmony,” Eddy said of the liberating power of moving with others. “And we build a kind of collective effervescence that both senses fear and releases joy in what humanity can create.”

But I’ve found that effervescence isn’t just about large groups; it’s not even about being outside. In a series of individual performances, dance artist Kay Ottinger played a solo by Melanie Maar as part of a larger project that she initiated with three mentors. Everyone passes on an exercise or a piece. For Maars Solo, Ottinger turned her body with a heavy wooden pearl necklace that was wrapped around her waist. As she circled her hips for 20 minutes, she rocked back and forth, transforming the room, a dingy studio in Judson Church, and the air in it.

There is something priceless about live performances: the energetic exchange between a dancing body and a quiet and attentive body. Mirror neurons – how a brain cell reacts to an action, either when it is performed or simply observed – are charged. I felt that with Ottinger and in “Embodied Sensations”, a participatory work by the Chicago-based artist Amanda Williams. Williams is trained as an architect and takes care of space; Her piece was one of my favorite experiences of bodies in space – and my body in space – of the past year.

Williams teamed up with Anna Martine Whitehead, a performance artist from Chicago, for “Embodied Sensations”, which is presented in the huge atrium of the Museum of Modern Art; The spectator’s job was to perform movement instructions amid a maze of piled furniture – benches and chairs that had been removed from parts of the museum due to social distancing protocols.

Each performance consisted of four prompts, which the audience performed twice over 30 minutes. One of me was, “Take three full minutes to do absolutely whatever you want in this room.” Another was more direct: “Imagine there is a black hole in the center of this room. Go to the edge of the black hole and practice resisting its pull. “

If the pandemic raised our awareness of our bodies, “Embodied Sensations” was a way to find out who has the freedom of movement and why. One instruction read in part: “Imagine you are a walking goal post or a moving target. Decide if you want to be caught. “

In an interview, Williams said, “I can imagine what my brother’s answer would be, what my 7-year-old’s answer would be, what my upper-middle-class white classmate would be from Cornell’s answer. Then it was incredible to see these people perform. “

But even when the instructions were less burdened, their execution had levels of meaning. During the first lap, I felt like I was carrying out the instructions; the second time I just did it and that had a relaxing effect. I was in space, wearing a mask, and could breathe. Deep.

Meanwhile, certain instructions were reminiscent of moments from the pandemic experience: “Choose any room,” one read. “Close your eyes, hear and smell intensely for about 2 minutes. Choose a new place and keep your eyes closed. Focus on how you are feeling for a minute. Repeat this even if you are bored or tired. “

In the past year and a half, haven’t we all been bored and tired? Alone with our feelings? Without the space to move much, we looked inward, at the body. And for those of us who normally see a lot of live performances, we had to pay attention to the bigger world – the angles in nature, the choreography of the everyday. Both were gifts. Now there is little shortage of dance events, and here are two: STooPS BedStuy, an annual arts event, takes place on July 24th; On August 7th, Dance Church, a guided improvisation class from Seattle, is making a tour stop in New York.

Or borrow a re-entry experiment from Williams. Close your eyes. Focus on how you feel. And then repeat. Think about how your body, not just buildings, ends up in the air. It’s about enjoying the in-between.

Jeff Tangney, CEO, of Doximity at the New York Stock Exchange for their IPO, June 24, 2021.

Source: NYSE

Jeff Tangney launched his first health-tech start-up, Epocrates, in the middle of the dot-com bubble. While the company survived the crash and eventually went public, the endgame was a disappointing acquisition for less than $300 million.

By the time Tangney started his next venture, Doximity, in 2010, he’d learned a few things: Don’t raise too much money. Don’t burn too much cash. Fix a real problem for doctors.

With Doximity, Tangney created a web service that’s both a professional network — think LinkedIn for doctors — and a secure way for medical experts to communicate and share information with patients and colleagues. It now counts 1.8 million medical pros in the U.S. as users, including over 80% of physicians.

On Thursday, Doximity debuted on the New York Stock Exchange, closing the week with a market cap of almost $10 billion after raising around $500 million in its IPO. Tangney’s stake is worth $2.9 billion.

Those are big numbers especially when you consider that, prior to this week, Doximity never showed up on a “unicorn” list of billion-dollar tech companies. Its last financing round in 2014 valued the company at under $400 million. Tangney said that because Doximity is profitable it still hasn’t touched the $50 million it raised seven years ago.

“I did resist some of the Silicon Valley wisdom of, you need to go big, you need to hire 40 more salespeople and do all these things,” Tangney, 48, said in an interview on Thursday, after ringing the bell at the NYSE.

In Doximity’s target market, there’s no point in aiming for rocketship growth, Tangney said. The company generates revenue from drugmakers, who use the site to market treatments to a very targeted audience, and health systems looking to promote content to doctors across the country. It’s also a recruiting tool hospitals and health centers use to fill key jobs.

Tangney recognized early on that he could expand only as rapidly as customer budgets would allow.

“The reality of health care and our clients, who are very staid institutions, a lot of non-profits that have been around for 100 years, is that even if you lean in and hire tons of sales and marketing people, they’re not going to let you grow,” Tangney said.

He’s also not inclined to pay for branding just for the sake of building his profile — another reason why the company has remained largely unknown in Silicon Valley even though it’s headquartered in San Francisco. Doximity’s advertising budget for last fiscal year totaled $2.6 million, or roughly the amount Uber spends on an average day.

Tangney said the best advertising has come from doctors touting the product within their practitioner networks.

Meanwhile, the company generated over $200 million in revenue last fiscal year and produced over $50 million in net income.

Climbing trip at Stanford

Tangney’s journey to Doximity started in the late 1990s while he was living in New York with a trained physician named Richard Fiedotin. From their un-air-conditioned apartment, the pair came up with the idea of creating an app for the Palm Pilot, which had just hit the market, that would allow doctors to get critical information.

Tangney and Fiedotin took that idea with them to Stanford Graduate School of Business, where they met another physician named Tom Lee. The three bonded over the intersection of tech and health care while on a teambuilding climbing trip for students in the program.

In 1998, they started what became Epocrates, and over the next two years raised about $40 million from some of Silicon Valley’s top health investors. As mobile moved to BlackBerry devices and then to iPhones, Epocrates gained traction as a way for doctors to make decisions about prescriptions and patient safety while on the move.

The venture capitalists told Tangney to hire like crazy, so he did. Then came the tech crash and the crisis from the 9/11 terrorist attacks. In 2002, Epocrates was forced to cut a bunch of jobs, Tangney said.

The company held on, but it was a slog. Fiedotin left a few years later, and Lee departed to start One Medical, a chain of primary care clinics that uses technology to improve the patient experience. Tangney stuck around a bit longer, and tried to take Epocrates public. Then came the financial crisis of 2008, and the company had to withdraw its prospectus.

Tangney finally left in late 2009, a year before the eventual IPO and four years before Athenahealth bought the company for $293 million.

“There was a point during the last couple years of my tenure where it felt like we were in this tunnel, marching toward a goal,” Tangney said. “I wasn’t having as much fun. When you’re not in that place of loving what you do, you’re not doing your best work.”

Tangney had spent the past decade selling products to medical centers and talking to doctors about the challenges they faced doing their jobs. He kept those conversations going and learned that communication was a constant point of stress, whether it’s getting in touch with patients, other doctors, administrators or recruiters. In Tangney’s estimation, 80% of communication in the industry “is done via snail mail and fax.”

“Software is indeed eating the world but it kind of choked a little bit on health care,” he said.

Shari Buck had worked with Tangney at Epocrates. She’s one of the first people he approached with the idea of creating a professional network designed for doctors. Buck said she hopped on board “without reservation,” joining as one of the three co-founders, along with Nate Gross, a doctor who is also the founder of health-tech incubator Rock Health.

Doximity co-founders Jeff Tangney (left), Nate Gross and Shari Buck

Doximity

“Before we had an office, Jeff would drive up to Marin to meet me,” Buck said. “We would meet in a workspace above the garage. We used to laugh at how Apple it was,” she said, referring to the storied location where Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak started their computer company.

Tangney also turned to Lee as a sounding board and advisor. At One Medical, Lee had the perfect test audience for Tangney: A growing base of doctors who were enthusiastic about technology.

At the time, Tangney was not at all focused on revenue, but was rather pursuing an approach more akin to consumer internet start-ups, trying to build a big base of engaged users with the hope that money would eventually follow.

Lee said they batted around ideas for future revenue opportunities. Helping medical recruiters find talent was a clear possibility.

“Recruiting doctors is not a well-defined profession and had been done poorly,” said Lee, who’s now founder and CEO of health company Galileo. “A doctor receives a lot of job opportunities. In classic medical marketing, you’d get these glossy photos of opportunities that were completely outdated, showing glorious pictures of suburban communities and symphony life and fishing.”

Best ideas come over cocktails

For Tangney, product development at Doximity has always been centered around what doctors need. So he created a medical advisory board a decade ago, bringing together a few dozen physicians in the network for a weekend every year.

The group gets together on a Saturday afternoon to provide feedback on new products, learn about updates that could be coming and for some general brainstorming. The talks continue informally over evening drinks and then resume Sunday morning, ending with lunch.

“Software is indeed eating the world but it kind of choked a little bit on health care.”

While Doximity had to skip this year’s gathering because of Covid-19, the event has been held in Napa and at Pebble Beach, and more recently at the company’s San Francisco office.

“It’s been probably the biggest influence on our product roadmap,” Buck said. “We talk about what we plan on building, individual features and new crazy ideas that we have. The best ideas come at cocktail hour on Saturday night.”

Buck said Tangney is known for carrying around little notebooks that he diligently fills up cover to cover over the two days.

Kevin Spain of Emergence Capital attended the Napa weekend in 2012, not long after his venture firm led Doximity’s first investment, a $10.8 million financing round.

Spain was thoroughly invested in Doximity’s success, and not just because of the money Emergence had on the line. He wasn’t yet a partner at the firm but had convinced his superiors to back a pre-revenue business. It was an atypical bet for Emergence, which focuses on early-stage cloud software companies.

Spain said that while board meetings were instructive because he could see signups going in the right direction and engagement on the site increasing, the Napa weekend was much more insightful. He got to hear directly from doctors about what they needed to improve their practice.

“They felt like they had a hand in co-creating this thing Doximity was building,” said Spain, whose firm owns a $1.35 billion stake in the company as of Friday’s close. “I’d never seen that before.”

Some of those doctors ultimately made good money from the IPO. Doximity allocated up to 3.5 million shares to doctors on the platform, representing 15% of the offering. After Doximity’s stock price jumped 115% in its first two days, the value of shares owned by doctors climbed from $91 million to over $195 million.

“Physicians are sort of outsiders in the financial markets and business world,” Tangney said. “Yet in our life and world they’re the insiders, they’re the people we care about most. We’d rather the shares go to them if there’s a pop than to some hedge fund somewhere.”

One challenge for Tangney as he continues to seek expansion opportunities is that there’s a finite universe of users and the core product already reaches the vast majority of them. The company serves more than 80% of U.S. physicians and over 90% of recent medical school graduates. There are only about 1 million doctors in the country.

Still, Tangney sees a decade of revenue growth ahead. There are digital ad dollars to capture as pharmaceutical companies move spending online. And there’s the power of medical referrals, helping doctors get patients to the right places based on where the top experts work and which hospital specializes in treating a particular disease.

Doximity also just entered telehealth, a $4.3 billion market opportunity, according to the prospectus. As a response to the pandemic, Doximity launched a video-based virtual visit service that doctors can use from their existing app and patients can use without having to download anything.

The company said it signed over 150 telehealth subscription agreements with medical systems and served over 63 million virtual visits in the fiscal year that ended in March. Yet the product only accounts for 2% of its revenue.

At the highest level, Tangney said, health care accounts for 18% of the U.S. economy, so there’s no shortage of money available if Doximity’s service continues to add valuable features.

“We’re steadfastly focused on these very busy million people who really take care of the sick all day and aren’t given great tools to collaborate with each other easily and to make care better,” he said.

WATCH: Disrupting Healthcare