Neo grew up in a maximum-security correctional facility, where his father was the first black correctional officer. While society had deemed these individuals unfit, Neo didn’t connect to their crimes. He connected to their background, their families, their kids, where they grew up, who used to visit them, what they were like. His first tennis coach was a prisoner. This created a lifelong perspective to see people as people – not as patients, or workers, or convicts, or whatever they had been typecast as.
Neo attempted to create his own company innovating the last mile segment for parcel delivery. During this period, he contracted tuberculosis and, no longer holding a corporate job with private healthcare access, found himself dependent on the public health system. Sitting in the queue at his local clinic for hours on end, he started asking himself how he could address this problem – for himself and the thousands of other patients he saw regularly at the clinic. When he then saw his father go through the same ordeal, he decided to do something.
He spent months observing activity at clinics and engaging with patients, nurses, and others. He set out to solve the problem for the patients, but after asking a nurse who he always saw yelling at patients why she was so angry, he began to see that everyone in the system was frustrated for different reasons. He realized that the only way to solve the access problem for patients was to address the problems of all the stakeholders in the system.