We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Yoky Matsuoka . We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Yoky below.

Alright, Yoky thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. We’d love to have you retell us the story behind how you came up with the idea for your business, I think our audience would really enjoy hearing the backstory.

I have always been motivated to create technology that helps people be who they want to be. I’ve worked in academia as a professor at Carnegie Mellon and the University of Washington, where I founded the Center for Sensorimotor Neural Engineering and the Neurobotics Laboratory. We merged these fields to create devices that would restore the human body’s capabilities for sensation and movement, and leveraged early AI to map brain signals to limbs, ultimately creating the first brain-powered robotic hand.

My work as a professor was incredibly rewarding, but I wanted to expand beyond theory into creating practical solutions for consumers. Around this time, Google called and asked me to co-found Google X, their moonshot lab. From there, I then started a wearable health tech startup, before going on to help develop the Nest learning thermostat as Chief Technology Officer at Google. Around this time I had been thinking of starting something new – a company that would use technology to make life easier on families. Then the pandemic happened, and it made my mission clear.

As I struggled to keep up with my responsibilities as a mom, wife, daughter, CEO and friend, I got increasingly frustrated – and then I got motivated. As a CEO, I am expected to delegate. In fact, CEO’s who delegate are 30% more successful than those who do not. Why don’t we allow parents – the CEO’s of the family – to do the same? I wanted to use technology to lighten the unfair load parents are expected to carry, remove the guilt that comes with delegation, and rebuild the village modern families are missing.

That’s why I created Yohana. Our flagship offering, The Yohana Membership, is the first tech-enabled concierge service that uses AI – and always with real humans in the driver’s seat – to tackle the family to-do list so they have time to prioritize well-being.

Yoky , love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

My mission has always been to create tech with a human touch, but now that has evolved into leveraging technology to help modern families thrive.

he Yohana Membership, matches families with a team of specialists who help tackle your to-do list. We have helped thousands of families delegate 20,000 to-dos, and save some members 8-10 hours a week. That’s incredible when you consider moms typically spend 98 hours a week on parenting tasks. We want to chip away at that “invisible” labor to give parents time back for themselves. I am so proud we’ve been able to do this.

Every member gets a guide to map their family’s well-being goals, a team of specialists who tackle your to-do list, from parenting tasks to household chores and things you always have to put off. Members also get access to a Pro & Partner network of trusted local businesses that we vet out for you and can take on bigger household projects. It’s all managed through the Yohana app or website, where you can assign tasks and watch your to-do list disappear.

The Yohana team does it all, like planning a birthday party, finding summer camps (and waiting in the virtual line), searching alternative cable providers and comparing pricing, planning family menus for the week, hiring a tutor, and so much more. Whatever is weighing you down, we can take that on instead.

We are now available nationwide – and in Japan too!

Can you talk to us about how your funded your business?

Yohana is a fully-funded independent subsidiary of Panasonic, which may surprise people because I come from a career in Big Tech. However, when I set out to find partners to fund the company, none of the usual suspects felt like the right fit. Then I met with Panasonic. They saw Yohana as an opportunity to rethink the future of the brand’s innovation, and operate Yohana like a startup within the company, almost as an innovation incubator. I would have full creative control and be able to scale quickly, which isn’t always possible in the scrappy VC-backed startup world. It was the exact right fit, and they’ve been the ideal partner. They are also one of the oldest mission-driven brands in the world, and their philosophy to help families thrive was an exact match for mine.

Can you share a story from your journey that illustrates your resilience?

I was an avid tennis player growing up and played for Berkeley in college, but I kept getting injured. Eventually, I had to come to terms with the fact that my dreams of playing professional tennis weren’t meant to be. I had always had an interest in math, science and robotics, so I decided to pursue that path – a part of me I’d always hidden because I felt embarrassed about it. My first project was a tennis buddy that would play with me – but then I realized I was missing an opportunity to use robotics, neuroscience and AI to change real people’s lives. It got me thinking about natural intelligence vs artificial intelligence, and I started thinking about how I could help people, especially those with physiological or neurological disabilities.

I had always thought I’d be a professional tennis player, but when that road closed, I didn’t give up. I found another way forward.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.yohana.com
• Instagram: @joinyohana
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/yoky-matsuoka-a2341155/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/yokymatsuoka?lang=en
• Other: https://www.yokymatsuoka.com/

Image Credits
Yohana