Quinn’s open letter
Dear current & future members of the Quadrant Eye team,
Thank you for choosing to spend your time and energy on QE. Thank you for lending us your skills, knowledge and neuroplasticity. And above all, thank you for believing in the QE dream.
As you know, we’re working to bring high-quality eye care directly to the people. Our mission is to make at-home eye care, an entirely new product & service category, as normal and easy as charging one’s phone.
Currently, around 50 million Americans (likely more, given inconsistent demographic data) are without basic eye care. In other words, shocking numbers of people have been missing out on the vivid visual details that add texture and joy to the human condition.
With better eyesight and generally healthier eyes, so many more people can experience greater productivity and fulfillment in their day-to-day lives. This all starts with increased eye care access, which QE aims to provide. And not only will we provide this access, but we will do so with efficiency, effectiveness and elegance.
I started QE out of frustration and necessity. In May of 2020, I took care of a sweet grandpa who I will call “Bill.” Over the course of a few months, Bill went blind in one eye because he was too afraid to leave home and had no one to ask for eye care advice.
Bill’s vision loss could’ve been prevented with access to very simple online eye care services. His tragic story, which I’d seen in various forms throughout my training and practice, was the last straw for me — I knew that if someone didn’t do anything about the eye care access problem, these tragedies would continue to play out well after Covid-19 dies down.
And because I couldn’t find any existing scalable at-home eye care solutions, I figured that that someone might as well be me.
I now want to address something very near and dear to my heart.
If you’ve at any point felt like a misfit, you are not alone. I know this feeling very well. I will likely always feel it.
I was an often-scolded black sheep throughout medical school and residency. Because I saw so many ways in which healthcare could be better, I loudly went out of my way to create mini systems that prioritized mental health, efficient workflows and interdisciplinary communication. These were unfortunately not well received by the powers that be.
As a private practice cataract surgeon, I adopted unorthodox surgical techniques like immediately sequential bilateral cataract surgery, or ISBCS, which many of my colleagues fear and dislike. But what mattered was that my patients loved having fewer pre and post-op visits, decreased anesthesia and Covid exposure, less time off work, etc. etc. Simply put, they were so much happier.
Because of my combined humanities and medical background, I am also a bit of an oddity in tech. I will never fully speak, act or look like the traditional tech founder/CEO. And as painful as this has been, I ultimately prefer it this way.
If you and I and the rest of the team do things right, QE will always attract and welcome brilliant, nontraditional people. And this open-mindedness is part of why we will succeed. The other reasons revolve around the fact that I believe in you and you believe in me and we collectively believe in our ability to achieve this ambitious at-home eye care dream.
For some of you, QE will be your direct vehicle to professional success. For others, QE will be the stepping stone onto even bigger and better things. But for all of you, I hope that QE will feel like home for whatever length of time you end up spending with us.
Incredibly, QE has evolved from a simple Typeform survey to a venture-backed company in less than a year. And now I’m relying on you to help QE keep leveling up throughout the next weeks, months and years.
Startups are hard, but people like you make them magical. I’m so happy and lucky to be part of this topsy-turvy world.
I love our talented band of Quadrant Eye misfits, and I am 100% sure that we will do great things.
Through it all, I will do my best to not let you down.
With awe and respect,
Quinn
Co-founder and CEO at Quadrant Eye
