ElationEMR’s Kyna Fong On Taking The Family Business To A New Level

Small startups are like families, especially when you found said company with your sibling. For this week’s Founder Stories, I met with Kyna Fong, co-founder of ElationEMR, who has done just that.

ElationEMR is a health-care startup based in San Francisco that offers a clinical platform to physicians to assist them in viewing, capturing and quickly acting on the health-care needs of their patients. Kyna and her brother Conan have designed a web-based electronic medical records solution based on the perspectives of physicians in order to make it as easy as possible for doctors to quickly make well-informed medical decisions. “My brother and I really latched onto this idea of how technology was going to transform healthcare,” says Fong.

The very basic early prototype was built by me and my brother and we had no prior experience building anything of the sort. And my brother happened to have a knack for design and I kind of had a bit of a knack for engineering and learning quickly to pull things together.

Kyna credits her passion for streamlining the health-care system to her father’s family practice. She explains why she left an academic life as an Economics professor at Stanford University to follow her passion and the family business.

On starting a company with her brother:

When I see a lot of successful founder relationships, they end up becoming like siblings in some sense. So I wouldn’t do it any other way.

Editor’s Note: Michael Abbott is a general partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, previously Twitter’s VP of Engineering, and a founder himself. Mike also writes a blog called uncapitalized. You can follow him on Twitter @mabb0tt.