There is an entry in my Tractor and Silo record for a work offsite on Wednesday, May 6, 2015. Moves captured it.
On May 8, 2019, I added a note to it. Here is the entry, with the note as I wrote it.
Lewis Communications, Nashville
Wednesday, May 6, 2015, 10:00 AM to 1:03 PM. Captured by Moves.“Work offsite when I worked at Vanderbilt. I think this had something to do with our research and dive into what we perceived the future of healthcare to be. My answer: The future of healthcare is prevention. I couldn’t believe more strongly in that. It’s just so true. Today is Wednesday, May 8, 2019 … four years later and I still stand by my belief from this experience.”
I read it again today, October 16, 2026. That is eleven years after the offsite and seven after the note.
The note hedges on what the meeting was about. It doesn’t hedge on the answer.
Quantified Self
I wasn’t new to the idea in 2015. Around 2012 I founded the Nashville chapter of Quantified Self, the people who track their own bodies and habits to learn something from the numbers. That year I went to the founders workshop before the QS conference at Stanford and sat on a leadership panel. Nashville’s healthcare industry is built around running hospitals, and my meetups there drew almost no one.
In 2015 I went to the conference again, in San Francisco. On June 18, six weeks after the offsite, I took a picture of a Scanadu banner. It said, in capital letters, “We are the last generation to know so little about our health.”
Scanadu was building a handheld sensor for blood pressure, heart rate and blood oxygen. The company later shut down.
That was the conviction in those rooms. A small band of people, fourteen years ago, saying the same sentence. The future of healthcare is prevention.
Eleven years later
This week I watched an interview with Daniel Ek on the All-In Podcast. Ek built Spotify. In 2018 he co-founded Neko Health, which does full-body scans, and its first clinic opened in Stockholm in 2023. Partway in he says it plainly: “we have to take healthcare from reactive to preventative health.” He says the whole industry agrees on that now, and the arguments are about how. He says the reason we don’t catch things early is that we don’t have enough data.
Function Health is the same idea from a different direction, a yearly membership of lab tests across more than a hundred biomarkers.
So the companies exist. It took more than a decade, and some of the best-funded founders in the world, to get from those rooms to them.
What gets me isn’t that they built them. It’s how long it took the world to agree.
The record
I didn’t build the prevention company. I couldn’t have believed in the idea more strongly, and I never started one.
I built the record.
The record is how I know I was at Lewis Communications from ten until 1:03 on a Wednesday in May 2015. My note is how I know what I said there, and that four years later I still meant it. Moves shut down in 2018. The entry is still there, with my words on it.
Memory would tell me I always believed this. The record has a date on it.
A phone did the capture on its own. The note is what makes the entry mine.
Give future you something to look back on. It’s the Tractor and Silo line, and this entry is what I mean by it.
It’s 2026 now. I still stand by it.