Where are They Now? – Leslie Krumholz
This summer, with the help of our fabulous Communications Intern Isabel Thompson, we’ll be maintaining a “Where Are They Now?” blog series. It’ll check in with past winners of our annual Impact Challenge as well as with past participants of our Accelerator Program, and document where they are in their work today. In this edition, we interviewed GoodStreets’ CEO Leslie Krumholz.
Leslie Krumholz and I recently got together over a cup of coffee in Guilford, CT, which happens to be where we are both from! She talked about her experiences with a past venture, GoodStreets, and with a new one and where it is heading.
I asked Leslie a bit about her background, including prior to the conception of GoodStreets.
“My focus has always been on impact and community,” Leslie replied.
Leslie has worked locally throughout her entire professional career. She opened up a preschool in Madison, CT; co-founded The Guilford Fund for Education; and served as Program Director for The Women and Family Life Center in Guilford, CT.
It was through these roles that Leslie became aware of the state of local business on the Connecticut shore and in particular, enterprises’ inability to reach ever growing and diverse constituencies.
“I realized what I wanted to do was help local businesses meet the needs of today’s consumers,” Leslie stated.
This realization was what led to the creation of GoodStreets. GoodStreets was an online platform for small businesses and customers to connect. It was a place where businesses could receive feedback and recognition for their goods and services.
In September 2012, GoodStreets was named one of the state’s top “Tech Companies to Watch.” Leslie had the opportunity to participate in a poster session at the Innovation Summit that same year. And it was there that she met Kate Emery, reSET’s founder and CEO. Leslie was moved by Kate’s speech about social enterprise during the summit and saw her company in reSET’s mission.
In January 2013, Leslie enrolled in our first Accelerator Program. I asked her what she liked most about her experience and her immediate reply was, “the bonding.”
“For me, starting out was pretty lonely. I didn’t really have a community,” Leslie explained. “Through my work with reSET, I started connecting with people not only because our businesses were at similar stages, but we were philosophically aligned too.”
After completing the Accelerator Program, Leslie entered GoodStreets in our annual Impact Challenge and won the 2013 award.
“It [The Impact Challenge] made me really focus,” Leslie said, “It made me think hard about impact.”
GoodStreets officially launched in February of 2014. The online system evolved constantly. GoodStreets created an innovative review system, gave businesses the opportunity to host small web stores, and connected customers to sales and events that were happening locally.
“The site provided all of the tech tools that were available at that time, but to small businesses that might not have been able to afford them otherwise,” Leslie said.
According to Leslie, although GoodStreets was an excellent platform for customer-business relationships, it lacked the involvement it needed to maintain itself. The company shut its doors this past Spring.
“The good news is that I learned such an incredible amount over the last three years. I never could’ve gone from there to here by just reading a book,” Leslie told me, “I met amazing people! Not only in the impact ecosystem, but locally!”
I went on to ask Leslie what was the most valuable thing she learned through her innovation with GoodStreets and she replied, “The importance of collaboration. You can never do something like this all by yourself,” she continued, “I started out in my own vacuum and I ended up being part of an amazing community.”
And what can we expect out of Leslie in this next year? “Well, we applied to the Impact Challenge again!” She answered with enthusiasm. And, who is “we” you might ask?
“This all started with my husband (Harlan Krumholz, a cardiologist at the Yale School of Medicine.). He is at the forefront of national health reform. All of his research is about how the health system can perform better, better serve patients, and help everyone make better decisions,” Leslie explained. “He’s been passionate about a patient’s right to own their own health records and the power that health data can have on transforming one’s own health as well as healthcare delivery.”
“So we are building a secure cloud-based patient-centric personal health record that aggregates health information from a variety of sources and curates it for patient and physician use.”
“We’ve got a really skilled tech team working on the backend and we are exploring the user interface because we know how important it is for people to access their information easily,” Leslie shared, “We are talking with and surveying potential users right now about what makes sense. As our team is building the back end, we need the front end to be easy and intuitive.”
As we neared the end of our conversation, Leslie announced that they are partnered with the Yale New Haven Health System. They plan to Beta test the system this Fall and to expand from there. We wish them luck in their endeavors and we will be rooting them on during our very own Impact Challenge this fall!
For more information on her work, contact Leslie Krumholz (leslie@hugophr.com).
