It's not often you find a founder of a health care technology startup who's asked former U.S. President George W. Bush questions during White House press conferences or reported internationally for one of the world's most well-known magazines. But such is the case with Jay Newton-Small.
Newton-Small founded MemoryWell, a health care storytelling startup based in Washington, D.C., in 2016. That company, launched after Newton-Small spent years caring for her father with Alzheimer's disease, recently pivoted to a new model, the Washington Business Journal, a sister publication, reported in April.
Called PlanAllies, the new offering is a software-as-a-service platform that integrates real-time human-to-human interactions into health and insurance plan practices. While Newton-Small launched and has operated MemoryWell in D.C., she's lived in Albuquerque for three years and plans to continue developing the SaaS platform in New Mexico.
But before all of that, Newton-Small was a journalist. She served as a reporter for Bloomberg News covering the White House and U.S. politics, and as a Washington and international correspondent for Time Magazine, where she still contributes.
That journalistic background, plus her experience working and building a startup on the East Coast, provides Newton-Small a unique perspective on the startup and technology ecosystem in the Land of Enchantment. New Mexico Inno sat down with Newton-Small to hear more of the health-tech founder and award-winning journalist's thoughts on the state going into 2024.
The interview was edited for brevity and clarity.
New Mexico Inno: As a former White House and international correspondent, I'm sure you've written many headlines. What is your headline, if you had to write one, for 2024 in New Mexico's startup and tech ecosystem?
Jay Newton-Small: I would say that it remains a mixed bag for 2024, with some points of light like the launch of Roadrunner Venture Studios and America's Frontier Fund. But as someone who's raised over $4.5 million across the country and is raising money now, it remains a hard ecosystem for venture. It's hard everywhere given the investment climate, but I'm having a lot more luck outside of New Mexico than in it and I hear that from a lot of my peers.
If you could wave a magic wand and see one thing implemented in the state, what do you think the most impactful thing would be to make the ecosystem more positive going into the year ahead? I work in health care, and health care is the largest industry in the country. Obviously, it's a large industry in New Mexico, like it is anywhere else in the country. I think creating a better infrastructure system for the health care startups in the state that better connects them with on-the-ground, brick-and-mortar resources that are already here would be really great. Even Arkansas and Alabama have health-tech startup venture groups that connect big companies in the state with startups in the state. Or Minnesota, L.A., D.C. — Boston has a gazillion of these things like MassChallenge Health. There are a lot of states that have a developed ecosystem that connects startups in their state with the big companies that exist in their state, and something like that still doesn't exist in New Mexico. So, creating something along the lines of a MassChallenge health accelerator, or 1501 attached to CareFirst in the mid-Atlantic region, that can help startups looking to get involved in the New Mexico companies here — a path to contracting, a path to piloting — would be really amazing.
