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Interview with Manny Hernandez, Founder and President of Diabetes Hands Foundation
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I met Manny Hernandez, Founder and President of Diabetes Hands Foundation, on Twitter. He started to follow me on Twitter and when I took a look at his profile, I realized he'd be a perfect fit for this column. From the personal challenge of being diagnosed with diabetes, Manny has grown his foundation and the two social networks (tudiabetes.com in English and estudiabetes.com in Spanish) to help people who are also grappling with this disease. Like so many successful social entrepreneurs, Manny took his skills of web product management, on-line community building, and writing, and combined them with his personal passions to find a cure for diabetes and to help people living with the disease manage their lives.
I was honored to get to interview Manny about Diabetes Hands Foundation, his personal connection to diabetes, and his leap of faith into entrepreneurship.
Christa: You have a collection of companies, organizations, and published materials that you work on. How did you get started as a writer and social entrepreneurship?
Manny: My background as a writer goes back to when I was a kid... That sounds a bit presumptuous, perhaps...
I used to "publish" a newspaper in our home, which my parents gladly bought from me (I only did single editions). My love for writing continued to grow during my college years. I joined my university's newspaper back in Venezuela (where I am originally from) and eventually became the editor of the Opinion section. When I came to the US for grad school, the Internet was "coming out of the oven" (so to speak): it was 1994 and I fell in love with it. The web bug bit me then and I started to create and maintain web sites which I also loved populating with content.
In 2000 I started writing reviews in Amazon.com, where I eventually became a Top 100 reviewer. Though I don't review as many items as I used to, I still write about the books I read and a few music albums I really enjoy (or dislike).
In 2002, shortly after I became diagnosed with diabetes, I started blogging at askmanny.com. I wrote about daily happenings, music, books, current events and just about anything [including diabetes]. I kept blogging all these years, always with an eye on new media trends. When MySpace came about and Facebook entered the landscape a bit later I found the social media space fascinating: over time I tried a large number of social networks and ended up "settling" in a few. Besides the social networks we run, nowadays I spend most of my "social media time" on Twitter (@askmanny), Facebook, and LinkedIn.
Discovering social media and being diagnosed with diabetes were two big influences in the decision to start our two social networks for people touched by diabetes back in 2007. The other drivers were reading the book The World Is Flat by Thomas Friedman and being a part of a local club of insulin pump users (insulin pumps help automate most of the insulin delivery process for people with diabetes that use insulin as part of their treatment). Friedman's book made me think about the potential for taking social networking as a platform and applying it to a higher purpose, something beyond simply socializing. Being a part of the insulin pumpers club made me realize the importance of connecting with other people with diabetes, as a way to learn and share experiences and not feel alone. All those things together resulted in the start of my research at the end of 2006 for the best option to run a social network focused on diabetes.
In March 2007, I landed on Ning, a platform that lets you create your own social network and created TuDiabetes.com within minutes. In spite of the name ("tu" means "you" or "your" in Spanish), TuDiabetes.com is actually an English social network for people touched by diabetes. Later that same year, I started EsTuDiabetes.com in Spanish. With my wife's help and the support of a few volunteers (many of whom have continued to be there) I ran the two sites as a side project, with the goal of connecting people touched by diabetes and in early 2008 we formed the Diabetes Hands Foundation, a California nonprofit, to house both networks along with a number of projects we'd developed to help raise diabetes awareness.
My most recent experience with writing was the publication of my book Ning For Dummies in April 2009. It was an incredible (though exhausting) experience that I look forward to publishing again in the future... not too soon, though!
Christa: Could you talk about your decision to be not only an entrepreneur, but a social entrepreneur?
Manny: I was an entrepreneur (on the side) for several years. Between 2004 and 2008 I had my own consulting firm with my wife, while I worked full time. Naturally, it was a "safe" endeavor, since it wasn't something I was doing full time, but it was something that gave me the freedom to pursue projects and ideas that were beyond the scope of my day-to-day work. It also helped me break outside the egg shell that you live in when you work for a company, sheltered from certain kinds of interactions and not necessarily forced to make decisions that are more common when you are an entrepreneur. Pricing a product or service, for example. That would be where the entrepreneurship seed got planted and started to grow in me.
Reading the Friedman book in 2006 was a very important influence in terms of seeking to go beyond my immediate surroundings, beyond benefiting our household alone and seeking to make an impact in the lives of others. For the past two years, I've gotten my hands on every book, publication, and blog I could find about applying social media to the greater good. I've learned a lot from the nonprofit social media community as well as from a number of other social entrepreneurs who are doing incredible things, going out of their way to help others. Joe Solomon, Peter Deitz and Christine Egger (from Social Actions) and folks like Tori Tuncan (from Lend4Health) and Nina Rosete (from Dare to Dream Fund) are great people doing inspiring work in social media.
Christa: Some of your work focuses on servicing and writing for Spanish speakers. Do you think the Spanish-speaking market is one that needs more attention from entrepreneurs?
Manny: Yes. A recent video I saw with Seth Godin comes to mind. He spoke at a recent TED event about the concept of tribes. The "Spanish-speaking tribe" (of which I am a part of, as a native Spanish speaker) needs more leaders, more people who will take the baton and find creative ways to solve the problems and flip the dilemmas we are facing: in the US, for example, we face a higher incidence of type 2 diabetes among Latinos compared to the total incidence. This may very well be a dilemma (a problem that cannot be solved) but one that is waiting for creative entrepreneurial minds that won't take no for an answer.
There are many unique cultural elements to the global Latino community that can play in our favor or against us, depending on the situation. Acknowledging our unique culture is the key to finding solutions to serve the needs of Spanish speakers in a way that simply translating a working solution won't.
Christa: Could you share your personal experience with diabetes?
Manny: I was diagnosed with type 2 diabetes in 2002. In early 2003, it was clear that the treatment I was undergoing was not working, so I was referred to an endocrinologist who found that I actually have type 1 diabetes (which meant my pancreas was no longer producing insulin, a hormone that is required for the body to be able to absorb the energy stored in foods). So I was put on an insulin treatment from that point on.
For a few years, I donated to charitable organizations searching for a cure to diabetes. (There is currently no cure for it.) [In 2006, I decided that I needed to do more.] Today, TuDiabetes.com has almost 10,000 members and EsTuDiabetes.com has over 4,000 members. Both are growing at a rate of nearly 10% every month which [is] cause for celebration. But when you realize how many people with diabetes are out there (250 million worldwide and more than 24 million in the US alone) and when you see as we have seen that people with diabetes tend to keep their condition to themselves, which leads them to feel very lonely, you realize that there's much more to be done.
Christa: Did you feel any fear when starting your own organization and publishing your writing? If so, how did you overcome your fear?
Manny: I am not sure if I would call it fear but rather a sense of "when will this be ready for others to see it?" As someone with a background in web product management and online communities, I spent a few months thinking through what I wanted the experience to be like for others, how I wanted it to look and then working in the direction of that initial vision. Many weeks passed before I felt comfortable enough to invite people (friends and family first) to join and give me their feedback. Eventually, I felt I could reach out to others in the online diabetes community so that they could join [my network] and help me spread the word about it. They were very supportive of the work we were doing and seeing people join and describe how the community made them feel "no longer alone" was very reassuring. We saw testimonials like this over and over again, and to this day we continue to see them. That makes it all worth it!
The concerns that cross my mind these days are of a different kind:
* How do we maintain the member experience, in spite of the larger size of the community?
* How do we extend the reach of the network, to tackle other problems and dilemmas in the "diabetes tribe" that need our attention?
* How do we sustain our work over time, in spite of the bumps of the economy?
Christa: What advice would you give to people interested in starting their own businesses, particularly in the current economy?
Manny: [Very recently] I was driving and saw a billboard that said something along the lines of "Remember that Bill Gates started Microsoft during a recession..." There is something to be said about the determination required to start a new venture of any kind in tough times. Even when things improve with our economy there will challenges of some kind and leaders need to be ready to face these challenges head on.
There is a book I am reading now that I highly recommend to anyone thinking of launching a new project in the coming years. It's called Leaders Make the Future by Bob Johansen. He is a Distinguished Fellow with the Institute for the Future in Palo Alto. In the book he presents ten new leadership skills (dilemma flipping being one of them) he considers critical in a world that is certain to be characterized by volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity. A phrase from the introduction stuck with me: "One of my jobs as a forecaster is to help people learn how to be comfortable being uncomfortable - but certainly not passively comfortable." That kind of balance will be critical for anyone wanting to launch into a new endeavor in the years ahead.
For more info: Diabetes Hands Foundation; In response to some of the comments to this piece, the Board of Directors has made the following statement: http://tudiabetes.com/
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