“An EQ to match her IQ.” That’s how the head of sales for Ceribell described co-founder and CEO Xingjuan (Jane) Chao when Fogarty’s chief commercial strategy officer Marga Ortigas-Wedekind asked about her working style.
At Fogarty’s recent educational event, attendees enjoyed a dynamic conversation as Chao shared more about her eclectic background and her journey with Ceribell, which is revolutionizing medical management of critically ill patients through AI-powered brain monitoring.
Chao is a rarity as a medtech founder who has remained with the company from the concept stage all the way through its $200 million IPO. As the company evolved, she learned to adjust her leadership style, and she generously shared this wisdom with the group, along with how her background in science, art, and business helped pave the way for her leadership success.
A wide-ranging background shapes her path
Born in a small city in China, Chao was the first in her family to attend high school and college. “Some leaders or CEOs might grow up assuming that will be their journey, but I never thought, ‘Oh, I just know one day I’m going to build a company and become the CEO,’” she said.
While Chao’s North Star was science, a girl who liked science in the ‘80s and ‘90s didn’t always receive the support she deserved. In fact, many of Chao’s teachers told her she would never be as good as the boys, which motivated her to work harder, becoming one of only two girls in a cohort of 25 selected to be part of an accelerated STEM program. After attending Peking University, she came to Cornell University to pursue her PhD, drawn by an innovative interdisciplinary program that included chemistry, physics, and biology.
But in a surprising twist, Chao didn’t immediately launch a medical or research career upon graduation. While she initially thought she wanted to be a professor, during graduate school she realized this path felt isolating, as she couldn’t immediately see the impact of her research. Recognizing that she had never explored something “just because she found it interesting,” she decided to tap into her strong artistic side and did a one-year of study in cinematography and directing at the Beijing Film Academy.
This career detour proved to be extremely valuable as she developed her signature leadership style. “It made me appreciate even more the rigor and rational thinking of my discipline, and my work in documentaries has provided another layer toward understanding people,” she said. “As I started the company, one of my strengths has been my ability to connect clinical technical elements to the empathy you need to lead effectively. If I hadn’t gone to film school, I probably wouldn’t be able to do that as intuitively.”
She then took another, somewhat unconventional turn, beginning her career as a management consultant at McKinsey & Company. Here again, she credits this experience with helping her establish a strong foundation that gave her the fundamental tools to succeed in business.
“I think the key takeaway is that there’s a lot of randomness in life,” she said, explaining that she got the role having never taken a single economics or business class. Instead, she had joined her friend at an open house where she met a first-year associate with a PhD from Caltech in theoretical physics who told her how McKinsey offered a great opportunity to learn and grow if she was unsure about her path. “I now call my four years at McKinsey my ‘paid MBA,’” said Chao. “I loved the business cases and the creativity they required.”
From there, her career in the healthcare field blossomed, as she held positions that included senior strategy manager at Novartis and principal manager of portfolio management strategy at Genentech before starting Ceribell with two professors from Stanford.
The Growth of Ceribell
Today, the FDA-cleared Ceribell system enables rapid diagnosis and continuous monitoring of patients with serious neurological conditions that affect about 3 million patients in the United States, representing a total addressable market (TAM) of about $2 billion.
When they first started researching this solution, Chao says she was shocked by the size of the gap in time between when a patient experiences a non-convulsive seizure and when it’s discovered. The team subsequently determined that none of the currently available products designed to address this issue were effective, even though EEGs are one of the richest sources of information about brain functionality.
From their initial goal of turning brain waves into music, she and her two cofounders pivoted to this broader need and subsequently invented a novel neural monitoring process consisting of a platform with hardware that simplifies the EEG set-up, software, and an AI-powered algorithm that helps provide detection of non-convulsive seizures.
“Conventional EEGs take hours, but studies suggest every hour of seizure delay can lead to a significant increase in mortality and morbidity, so we removed all the bottlenecks, helping physicians to see how the patient responded to different treatments,” she explained. “We created a highly patient-centric approach with numerous published studies underscoring its ability to improve patient outcomes.
Ceribell is exploring potential future applications, including stroke triage and detection of delirium in the acute care setting.
Ceribell’s evolution over the years underscores an important lesson for anyone building a company. “You’ve probably heard that the initial product you’re envisioning likely will not be the product you commercialize, and the product you commercialize might not be the product you actually have five or ten years later. And that’s true for us.” she said.
Her other piece of advice? “When you start to commercialize your product, please carry the bag, especially if you are a CEO or founder with a technical background like me. Nobody should be able to sell the product better than you.”
Humility and candor prove successful for strong leadership
Despite her passion for the technology’s promise, Chao lacked experience as a CEO when she first took the helm. In fact, she admits she didn’t even have a ready supply of confidence, adding that she doesn’t think that’s unusual for most first-time CEOs. Her confidence grew quickly though, as the team accomplished their goals by focusing on the problem they needed to solve—the prototype, the business model, the economics—rather than on how to build a company to go public.
It was an intense time, and Chao discovered the only way to lead a company is to be yourself. “One of my strengths is that I am really mission-driven, and I believe that’s what attracted a lot of early employees. I think if you genuinely believe in something, everyone feels it, from your team to your investors,” she said.
As the company scaled, it also needed a different approach to failure, which she came to appreciate when reading a book called “What Got You Here Won’t Get You There.” As she explains, in the early days everything is existential, and you are vigilant about all the details. However, when you get to a certain scale, you must adjust the bar so that people will take smart risks.
“You have to allow small failures, while having guardrails to avoid big failures, so the team can really feel empowered,” she said. “But if you have that attitude on day one, you probably won’t make it.”
Chao believes that the credit for any thriving company goes to its people. “When you have the right team, things just work magically,” she says. “We can never invest too much time in finding the right talent, and as you scale the culture, you have to prioritize maintaining and evolving it. Paying attention to people and culture isn’t ‘soft.’ It’s absolutely the foundation of any company.”
This article reflects the personal experiences and opinions of the speaker and is not intended to provide medical guidance or forward-looking statements regarding Ceribell’s performance.