After more than a decade leading teams building B2B SaaS products, I felt the urge to do something different. The products I've shipped help businesses grow and run more efficiently—but I found myself repeatedly circling back to the idea of building technology that didn't just help companies make money, but actually improved people's lives.

So late last year, I made a pivot into healthcare.

While I’m relatively new to the field, I had been thinking about this space for quite some time. For the past several years, I’ve followed the growth of telehealth, explored open health datasets, and spoken with clinicians, operators, and healthtech founders about where technology can make the biggest impact.

Some ideas were less inspiring.

For instance, hospital billing systems or payer infrastructure closely resembled the transaction-based business applications I used to build in my SaaS days. Sure, these systems are important within the healthcare ecosystem, but they felt too far removed from directly impacting people's lives for me to really connect with them. And while claims of “efficiency in the healthcare system leading to downstream savings for consumers” might be true, that level of indirection just didn't resonate with what I was looking for.

What interested me most were the ideas that directly impact patient outcomes.

Tools to help clinicians diagnose more accurately. Technology that empower patients to better understand their conditions, and take a more active role in their care. AI that improves clinical outcomes and operational efficiency. These are the kinds of problems I'm excited to work on.

Aware Health

Aware Health is a rapidly growing virtual healthcare provider specializing in musculoskeletal (MSK) care and mental health coaching across the United States. It's mission is to help patients heal and recover faster from MSK conditions—such as muscle pain, joint stiffness, and other orthopedic issues—while avoiding many of the unnecessary imaging and surgeries that drive up healthcare costs.

Having personally experienced multiple situations in which physicians recommended surgeries that felt overly aggressive or simply didn't sit right with me, Aware Health's approach immediately resonated. In each case, I sought a second opinion and ultimately found effective, non-invasive alternatives that resolved my issues without the need for surgery. If my efforts can help others do the same—recover more quickly while avoiding unnecessary procedures—then that's a mission I can get behind.

At Aware Health, I oversee product, engineering, AI, security, and compliance. My new teams are still building technology-driven products, but the inspiration is different. We're creating AI-powered tools that streamline healthcare delivery, improve clinical outcomes, and enhance patient experiences. The work is familiar in process—but radically different in purpose.

Looking Ahead

Pivoting into healthcare has been deeply rewarding. The challenges are complex, but the opportunity to make a real difference is enormous. Every day, I read feedback from many patients whose lives we've positively impacted, and it's a powerful reminder of why this work matters. I’m excited for what we’re building at Aware, and even more excited for what's ahead. There’s real work to do, and I’m grateful to be doing it.

A few months ago, I left my role as the chief of engineering for Chartmetric, and switched into a technical advisory role. Stepping out of day-to-day operating responsibilities afforded me some rare free time to finally hack on a few projects.

Most of the projects thus far have been AI/ML-related projects (LLM fine-tuning, retrieval-augmented generation applications, vector databases, experimental prompt engineering, a few ETL pipelines, and some analysis of two large public datasets).

But a desire to take a closer look at the Go Programming Language (aka Golang) coupled with an interest to build a modern CLI application drove me to double-click on a project I've been wanting to build for quite some time — a CLI tool for the Chartmetric API.

Introducing the Chartmetric CLI

As of this writing, the Chartmetric CLI is still a work-in-progress.

But the tool has reached a point now where it is more or less stable to use, and it's a good time to share the current state of the project to solicit some user feedback.

You can download and play around with the Chartmetric CLI here.

Functionality

The Chartmetric CLI enables querying the Chartmetric API from the command line. It runs from any terminal window on Linux, MacOS, and Windows and supports both x86 and ARM architectures.

As long as you have a valid refresh token, you will be able to query almost all of the available Chartmetric API endpoints.

Future versions may support additional functionality — such as the ability to edit and save information back to your Chartmetric account, or perhaps compound commands (where one command may chain together a sequence of actions). For now, I'm keeping it simple.

Documentation

The Chartmetric CLI is designed to be intuitive enough to use immediately. CLI help screens highlight available commands as well as supporting flags to customize the commands.

Nevertheless, documentation for the Chartmetric CLI is available online (and mirrors the documentation from the CLI help screens).

It's important (to me) that the online documentation matches the CLI help screens, which enables a single source of truth and will minimize a lot of future headaches from version mismatches or outdated information.

Markdown files were autogenerated using the existing usage information in the codebase, for every command. These files were further customized to insert some "front matter" into each file, which enabled them to be served as statically rendered web pages through an existing web site running Jekyll.

As the tool evolves, this will ensure the online documentation stays current with the tool's built-in help screens.

Motivation

I've long appreciated the ease of using many popular CLI applications. The Stripe CLI, for example, is one such inspiration.

We use the Stripe API on Chartmetric, and their SDK is integrated pretty heavily into our codebase. Nevertheless, I found the Stripe CLI to be quite helpful and complementary to our use of the API.

For instance, I regularly use the Stripe CLI to do quick and efficient lookups. It is extremely fast to drop into a shell and run a command vs booting up a development environment and/or loading a GUI tool such as Postman.

The Chartmetric CLI is intended to make it easier to build applications powered by the Chartmetric API.

Feedback

If you give the Chartmetric CLI a go, I would be keen to learn how you get on with it. Opinions and suggestions are welcome at jay@jayhung.com.

Every founder gets advice — a lot of advice. Investors will offer opinions. Board members will offer opinions. Customers, users, friends, and advisors will all offer opinions. And if you're even a little successful, people who you've never met will offer opinions too.

The question isn't whether to listen — it's what do you believe?

This is where having a strong point of view becomes essential. It’s what keeps you grounded when feedback conflicts, when market trends shift, and when the easy path looks tempting. A point of view is a compass. A belief system that helps you decide what to embrace, what to ignore, and what to revisit later.

A strong point of view doesn’t mean shutting out new ideas. It means knowing who you are and what you stand for. It means having conviction in your strategy, your differentiation, your “secret sauce.”

Take Ben Horowitz during the Loudcloud days. The dot-com crash gutted the hosting business, and conventional wisdom said to shut it all down. But Ben and his team believed the real value was in their software, and not the hosting itself. That conviction led them to reinvent Loudcloud as Opsware, which was later acquired for $1.6 billion. Without that belief, they might have just followed the conventional advice and folded.

Or consider Slack. Stewart Butterfield and his team were building an online game that failed. But they noticed the internal chat tool they created was solving a real pain point. Many would have told them to stay the course, tweak the game, or chase another consumer idea. Instead, their point of view was that workplace communication was broken, and they leaned into that. That insight, and the conviction to follow it, became Slack — one of the most compelling enterprise software companies of the last decade.

There will always be plenty of advice. Often it will be contradictory, and occasionally just flat-out wrong. Sometimes — many times — the loudest advice comes from people who've never done the work they're advising about.

What makes the difference isn’t just what you hear, it’s what you believe. You may find later that your point of view was wrong, and when that happens, acknowledge it and course-correct quickly. But if you don't have a point of view to begin with, you'll find yourself constantly flip-flopping — and you'll come off as someone with no idea what to do.

From time to time I come across founders — and non-founders — who are easily influenced and quick to change opinions when the latest advice rolls in. This often manifests in shifting priorities and changing directions, which creates friction and resentment across teams. People lose confidence when leadership has no conviction.

At the end of the day, you can’t control what advice comes your way. But you can control what you stand for.

In startups, as in life, having a strong point of view isn’t just helpful — it’s essential. It's what separates leaders from followers, and builders from imitators.

I have no work life balance, and I am perfectly happy with that. In fact, it is very much a choice and very much intentional. Here's why.

Work Life vs Life

Most people I know (including many that are close to me) view work and life as a dichotomy—as two separate things that are constantly at odds with each other.

Work is what you're doing for your "job"—mostly during business hours on weekdays—and life is what you're doing the rest of the time.

Many of these folks, even if they enjoy the type of work they do, would prefer not to "work" if given a choice.

For them, work is something that gets in the way of life.

This is not the way I view work or life.

For me, there is no dichotomy. I don't have work, and separately also have life.

For me, what I have is life—my overall life—and work just happens to be one contextual part of it.

For me, life consists of family, work, exercise, play, and various other contexts that are all collectively part of my life.

For me, life doesn't happen just outside of work, it also happens during work.

Fortunately, I happen to love my work, enjoy what I do, and consider it an integral part of my life.

Work

My work mostly revolves around software, technology, and startups—three passions of mine. And I would be doing something along these lines even if I'm not getting paid for it.

For me, work is play—and even when it's tough, it's still usually fun. Usually.

I don't dread Mondays, and in fact I typically look forward to them as I'm often eager to finally get to work on something I've been thinking about over the weekend.

Some days I may work more, and other days I may work less. Some days I may start very early, and other days I may work until 1am or 2am. Occasionally I may have some gaps mid-day where I'm not working, or weekends where I have to work, or need to take some calls when I'm with my family.

In general, I try to keep these reasonable. I don't dread working late, and I don't dread working on the weekends, and I only mildly dread working extremely early.

Family

I love spending time with my family, and look forward to seeing my wife and kids after work, and spending the weekends with them.

Especially when it's quality time.

Time to do whatever we may choose to do together (e.g. outings, board games, sports, activities) rather than what we have to do together (e.g. homework, baths, errands).

When I am spending that time with my family, I aim to be present and in the moment, with my attention on them rather than on my phone. I still have some improvements to make in this area.

And insomuch as I would like to have more time to spend with my wife and kids, I don't view work as a thing that gets in the way of family.

Nor do I view work as something I need to get out of.

Balance

Don't get me wrong, for me it is still about balance—I just view it as life balance.

If I didn't have work in my life, I wouldn't feel balanced. If I didn't have enough family time in my life, I wouldn't feel balanced. If I'm not getting enough exercise in my life, I wouldn't feel balanced.

Of course I have to figure out the right balance—both for myself, as well as for what my family needs. If I feel I'm not spending enough time with my family (or my family simply needs more of my time), I'll make some adjustments to find that balance.

Then there is fitting in (or trying to fit in) all the various other contexts that collectively comprise my life. Fortunately, not all contexts demand the same amount of time, and not all contexts have the same importance or priority.

And I do get the balance wrong from time to time.

But as long as I'm aware (and honest with myself) when the balance feels off, and strive to improve that imbalance, I have managed to be ok.

Just Life Balance

So perhaps it's just my perspective—I choose to view work not as something outside of life, but as something that is an integral part of life. It works for me, and I have been doing it for years.

I don't strive for work-life balance, I strive for life balance.

Photo: Overstock's Outsunny Teeter Totter 4 Seat Outdoor Seesaw (edited)

On Dec 27, 2014 at 3:28pm in San Francisco, we unveiled our latest product—a bundle of joy named Alexa Chelsea Hung. Specifications weigh-in at 6 lb 9.5 oz, and 18.75" in length.

The launch and birth of version 1.0 was quick and seamless, and our CMO (Chief Maternal Officer) is doing very well after a grueling 9 months of intense product development.

Product Branding

Our product's first name of Alexa was chosen after careful data analysis and cross-validation of the founders' unique backgrounds and creative tastes, involving numerous usability studies of three-syllable baby names.

Her middle name of Chelsea was decided much more quickly, as it was inspired by the New York City neighborhood where the founding team and key stakeholders (aka parents) found their product market fit (aka fell in love).

Beautiful Design

Alexa's organic UI is seamless and world-class, and her adaptive Human Interface Design ensures longevity and relevance in an increasingly crowded marketplace platform called The World.

Iterative Roadmap

The mother and father co-founding team will be iterating rapidly over the next 12 months, with an intense product roadmap that includes highly-anticipated milestones such as tummy time, rolling over, first solids, first steps, and first words.

Disruptive Innovation

In a private statement released 24 hours post-launch:

"We are so very excited and happy to bring our latest offering to market, as we believe this to be yet another game changing release for us.

"Alexa’s patent-pending AI technology and complex learning algorithms enable her to evolve and learn over time, adapting to an ever-changing array of inputs and environments.

"As the second offering in our growing family portfolio, she is an immensely complementary asset and we expect to see impressive growth year over year, earning a tremendous return on our investment."

Closing

We couldn't be more pleased to share Alexa—our latest release and second product offering—with the Open Stork community.

With lots of love from San Francisco,

Pauline and Jay (Co-founders, The Hung Family)