Yoky Matsuoka, 51, always thought she'd be a tennis player. The Tokyo native moved to the U.S. with her family at 16 to pursue a professional career in the sport, but was forced to quit after multiple injuries.
By that point, Matsuoka was pursuing her undergrad at the University of California, Berkeley, and decided to find another way to focus on her passion. "That's when I came up with idea to build a tennis robot that could play tennis with me," she says, focusing her major on electrical engineering and computer science.
While getting her master's in the subjects at MIT, Matsuoka had a change of heart.
"I thought, 'how selfish of me to try to build this super advanced tennis robot when some people are just barely eating, barely communicating,'" she says. She realized she'd been accruing the skills to build tech that helps people with disabilities and pivoted to focus on that. In 2007, she became a MacArthur Fellow for her work.
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Today, Matsuoka is the CEO and founder of Yohana, a subscription service that helps customers cross tasks off their monthly to-dos by providing a dedicated team to do them. It's taken decades to connect the dots between her mission and the best way to implement it on the ground.
Here's how she went from tennis player to Google X co-founder to entrepreneur.
'Writing journal papers isn't really helping people'
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Initially, Matsuoka decided academia would be the best arena to further her desire to marry disability and tech.
She wanted to help people who were missing basic functions such as speech and took the approach of an engineer, she says, thinking, "if a human brain is a computer, I should be able to create the part that's missing."
After getting her Ph.D. at MIT, Matsuoka did a postdoc at Harvard then worked as an assistant and adjunct professor at Carnegie Mellon University and an associate professor at the University of Washington, always focused on engineering and neuroscience. She and others in her field were researching how to build prosthetics that could be controlled by a chip.
But after spending about a decade in academia, she realized something was missing. "I realized that writing journal papers isn't really helping people every day," she says.
That's when Google called.
'Do you want to help start this new unit called Google X?'
In 2009, "I basically got a call saying, 'Hey, do you want to help start this new unit called Google X?'" she says. Now called X, it's the branch of Alphabet dedicated to building "radical new technologies to solve some of the world's hardest problems," according to its website.
While there, she worked on Loon, which attempted to expand internet connectivity through stratospheric balloons, and Waymo, which works on self-driving cars.
Within a year, Matsuoka was offered a job as vice president of technology at startup Nest Labs, then working on a sensor-driven thermostat, and which got bought out by Google within her tenure. Working at Nest was "the true awakening moment," she says. It's where she went from "academic thinking to consumer product thinking," meaning creating products that could be available to consumers now as opposed to innovations that would take years to reach the public.
She then worked as a senior executive at Apple and ultimately ended up back at Google as a vice president of the company's health-care organization. By then, she'd connected the dots between her decades of work in academia, tech and the desire to create products that make people's lives better.
"I wanted to build a combination of hardware, software and people to build the solutions to help everyday people," she says.
Find your passion and 'pursue that hard'
That's what brought Matsuoka to her current venture, Yohana, which she founded in 2020 as a subsidiary of Panasonic. The company offers a monthly subscription service in which a dedicated team helps subscribers tackle their monthly to-dos, from buying family birthday presents to planning three-day weekends, via the Yohana app. The service costs $249 per month (plus taxes) and currently serves all 50 states and D.C.
"Think of us almost like a support system for the modern family," Matsuoka says.
Long term, she knows she wants to use the app to zero in on some of those populations that inspired her to build tech dedicated to people in the first place, like the disabled. For now, she's focusing on a wider net.
When it comes to Matsuoka's career advice for others, it's "find your mission," she says.
That can be tough. It took decades for her to figure out that her mission was to help people's day-to-day lives through tech. But she leaned into her passions, first for tennis, then for how tech can potentially transform lives, and she ultimately landed on it.
Your passion "could be about eating a lot of good food," she says, "or it could be about coding a lot of code." Whatever it might be, "pursue that hard."
That's how you, too, will land on your mission, she says.
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