Name: Tania Joffe
Designation: CEO & Principal
Company: Unu Health
- What do you do every day?
I am in touch with sales on a daily basis and celebrate all new client acquisitions – the drive for confirmation of product market fit in the first year of a start up’s life is a big focus, as is the establishment of predictable and scalable growth. Additionally, connecting with each member of our leadership team throughout the week, so effectively daily meets, is also key – we draw on each other for stamina and support through the many cortisol baths. - How did you get into the tech space?
I love tech when it works, when it is effectively invisible and just enables a user to achieve a goal, an outcome …. when it’s so intuitive, that there’s almost no awareness of it. Tech in service of us owning our wellbeing can be so powerful, if curated and orchestrated in that intuitive and invisible way… So while I lead a health-tech, my focus is on how we transform healthcare. Much of my career has been in financial services, which has seen so much tech enabled change, with big adoption of mobile banking, automation etc. It’s striking that healthcare is not delivered at scale via our mobile devices. My background is not tech. I’ve run large scale financial services operations, where we’ve leveraged tech to introduce new channels and customer facing capabilities. - What was the best advice anyone ever gave you?
Take the shot, always… ‘The man in the arena’… - What advise would you give to someone wanting to get into tech?
We are all in tech, as users and consumers. You are in tech, and there are so many facets to the ‘tech space’ which is evolving so quickly, with careers emerging constantly. Increasingly, all roles touch tech, whether in terms of design, user experience, actual dev work/ coding, or more broadly in terms of ethics and legal frameworks etc. I am not sure that there is ‘a way’, as I think my own journey demonstrates. - What motivates you to get out of bed every day?
I am absolutely driven, even possessed, by the thought that we have the opportunity to transform healthcare, and in doing that, improve the lives of so many people in Africa by reducing the disease burden that’s disproportionately carried by those with less means – and that among those, who we may impact, there may be the person that helps us solve the impact of climate change, or is a force for greater gender equality and so forth. A virtuous spiral of positive impact for good.
About The Author: Samantha
Samantha Perry is the owner and founder of SJ Perry PR, a small, independent agency that specialises in providing public relations and media relations services to small to medium-sized businesses. She recently served as the JHB Agency Lead for Irvine Partners, an integrated public relations and marketing agency. She has over 20 years' of experience writing for a range of media - print and online - mainly in the ICT sector including Computing SA (editor), ComputerWeek, and Brainstorm magazine (editor). In her capacity as a PR professional and consultant, she has and does work with a variety of companies including Google (South Africa & Nigeria), Salesforce, CLEVVA, Euphoria Telecom, Paymenow and Tiger Content (UK). She also has a Masters degree in ICT Policy & Regulation. She served on the IAB SA Marketing Council as the PR rep, has worked as an independent telecoms researcher for some of the analyst houses in that field and was regularly called upon to comment on telecoms issues in the press. Nowadays she can be found commenting on women in tech issues in the press and speaking at conferences on the subject and the issues women in the sector face.
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