Wednesday, January 11, 2023

One Verily Forward

One Verily Forward

Shared by CEO Stephen Gillett with all Verily employees today

This is an important day for Verily, as we announce our refined strategy, prioritized portfolio and simplified operating model. This is work that has been in process for many months, and it’s time to begin sharing our path forward with you.

Before detailing all of the changes that will begin to roll out today (and fair warning, this is a long email), I want to thank each of you for everything that you’ve brought and contributed to Verily. Verily is the company it is today due to the combination of your expertise and determination to make a difference. That’s a big part of what I call the “Verily magic” and that is testament to all of you and what you bring to your work every day.

Since being spun out of X seven years ago, Verily has made significant accomplishments across a broad range of healthcare initiatives with blue chip and specialty partners. We have advanced foundational capabilities that allow us to improve healthcare from many vantage points and have been chosen by a wide variety of partners we respect and admire who are equally interested in novel approaches. We’ve collaborated with distinguished healthcare and industry leaders including the Mayo Clinic, Swiss Re, Dexcom, L’Oreal, Otsuka, Highmark Health, iRhythm, Resmed and Sosei-Heptares, among many others.

These partnerships have resulted in extraordinary products and innovation. They include the development of technology for Dexcom’s G6 and G7 continuous glucose monitors (CGM), the smallest CGMs of their kind. We built Project Baseline, whose studies have included over 600K people as we’ve worked with organizations such as the American Heart Association, Crohn’s and Colitis Foundation and major pharmaceutical companies. We advanced our Onduo and Granular joint ventures, which we’ve now taken full control of to allow for cost savings and greater integration with other Verily products.

Our path forward is driven by the need to make deliberate choices about where we can have the greatest impact in precision health and to put ourselves on a faster path to sustained commercial success. It's about accelerating the things that are working best and that customers need the most. We've made some hard but necessary choices to focus our resources where we can make a meaningful difference and that will help us build a business that impacts the healthcare ecosystem with interconnected products as we grow.

At a high level, here’s what is happening:

We are making changes that refine our strategy, prioritize our product portfolio and simplify our operating model. We will advance fewer initiatives with greater resources. In doing so, Verily will move from multiple lines of business to one centralized product organization with increasingly connected healthcare solutions.

Specifically, that means:

  • We will center our strategy on closing the gap between research and care, and becoming the data and evidence backbone for precision health, with a focus on applying AI and data science to accelerate learning and improve outcomes. We will also continue to grow our precision risk solution, Granular. Advancing precision health remains our purpose, with the goal to ultimately be operating in all areas of precision health.

  • We will prioritize products that accelerate evidence generation and deliver more precise interventions, and that combine solutions from both research and care to drive even greater value over time, all underpinned by Verily’s commitment to transparency, privacy and health access.

  • We will make changes to our operating model that simplify how we work, and promote more “One Verily” collaboration across our teams. We are designing complexity out of Verily. As a result, Amy Abernethy, Scott Burke and Lisa Greenbaum will all assume new responsibilities as we go forward.

We will talk about all of this in more detail shortly, but here is what that means for our products and the way we work.

Focusing our product portfolio

Going forward, we are going to do fewer things and leverage our strengths and capabilities in the process. This aligns with our purpose and puts us on a faster path to value creation for our customers and ultimate commercial success. Products will largely fall into research or care.

  • Research: This includes products and services designed for sponsors and research sites, and aimed at bringing safe and effective therapies to more people, more efficiently. This covers solutions that accelerate clinical trials, build real world datasets that improve the diversity and representativeness of research, and discover targets that can result in new medicines for patients, building on Verily’s Clinical Research, SignalPath and Terra offerings. It also includes a precision measures suite that provides novel approaches to better characterize aspects of health, and elements of our current Immune Profiler, Digital Pathology and devices offerings.

  • Care: This refers to products and experiences designed to help people make more informed choices for their individual health and for healthcare professionals to better tailor care. This covers personalized care solutions that support patients with chronic conditions and engage patients in clinical research, and integrates elements of Onduo and Project Baseline. It also includes products and services that speed diagnosis and improve the delivery of care, such as Verily Retinal Service, an AI-based solution in development to aid in the diagnosis of diabetic retinopathy.

Granular (our precision risk solution subsidiary), OneFifteen and select early investments will remain as separate elements of the Verily portfolio. Wastewater, Debug and R&D Lab efforts will continue as ongoing research and development investments.

Now, the hardest part. To enable greater focus on our updated portfolio, we are discontinuing the development of Verily Value Suite and some early-stage products, including our work in remote patient monitoring for heart failure and microneedles for drug delivery. While these programs are promising and led by talented Veeps, and some of their innovations will integrate into our other core solutions, we cannot do everything and have had to make some difficult choices. Some Veeps will be redeployed to other teams; others will unfortunately be leaving us. These people have helped make Verily the company it is today, and I know how hard it is to see valued friends and colleagues depart.

I have promised you all transparency in what we’re doing, and this means we have eliminated approximately 15 percent of Verily roles due to discontinued programs, full control of Granular and Onduo, and redundancy in the new, centralized organization. Our most immediate priority is ensuring that these Veeps are given the support they need to ease their transitions, and we will offer help in many ways over the coming weeks and months ranging from severance to coaching and outplacement services. I am truly grateful for their contributions.

Simplifying our operating model and the way we work

We will make changes to our operating model that simplify how we work, and promote more “One Verily” collaboration across our teams. Specifically, we will move from multiple lines of business to one centralized product organization with increasingly connected healthcare solutions. The new Verily Leadership Team (VLT) reporting directly to me includes the following individuals, and reflects an expansion of responsibilities for some leaders and a deeper collaboration across all of our teams:

  • Amy Abernethy will expand her role to become President of Product Development & Chief Medical Officer, a new position leading commercial product development and clinical teams across Verily and putting product development under one leader versus multiple business unit presidents.

  • Scott Burke will expand his responsibilities as Verily’s Chief Technology Officer, adding hardware engineering and devices teams to his existing scope, and serving as the bridge between product development and customer needs to ensure products meet and exceed technical and UX expectations.

  • Lisa Greenbaum will expand her responsibilities in a new Chief Commercial Officer role, overseeing sales, marketing, and corporate strategy teams to ensure a deeper understanding of customer needs and delivery of that intelligence back to the product development team.

  • Cynthia Patton will continue in her role as Chief Legal Officer and oversee Verily’s legal, privacy, compliance, and government affairs teams.

  • Kerrie Peraino will continue in her role as Chief People Officer, and oversee Verily’s People & Culture (PACT) teams.

  • Preston Simons will continue in his role as Chief Information Officer, and oversee Verily’s IT teams.

  • Denny Weinberg will continue in his role as Chief Executive Officer of Granular, Verily’s risk insurance business.

  • We will continue in our search for Verily’s next Chief Financial Officer, to be announced separately.

  • We are hiring for a new Chief Scientific Officer, to be announced separately.

Jordi Parramon, President of Verily’s Devices business, will be leaving the company later this year, and will stay on as an advisor to help with the transition period. Jordi has been with Verily since our early days, and has led the Devices team through many milestones and changes over the years. A personal thank you to Jordi for his leadership and for supporting Verily and his team during this time.

We will hold our first Company Update next week, on Jan. 18 (invitation to follow), where we’ll share more about these changes and our path forward. You’ll also begin to hear from your new leaders and managers in the coming days, and we’ll re-establish the former “Ops Chat” as a new Veep chat space soon. I know this is a lot to take in at once, and this communication is just the beginning of more to follow in the coming weeks.

This is a significant transformation for Verily, and one that builds on all of the work and contributions over the past seven years. I am confident that we are on the right path and this focused portfolio and streamlined structure will unlock our potential and advance meaningful growth. We would not be here without the passion in our purpose and commitment from you and the Veeps who will be leaving us shortly, but who will always be a part of our story and One Verily team.

Thank you for your support and belief in our purpose,

Stephen