Member Spotlight
Johanna Yi
Johanna Yi, Founder and CEO at For People
Published on July 17th, 2024
Meet Johanna Yi, whose career pathway is marked by pivots from discipline to discipline, building meaningful relationships, and adopting new skills along the way. Today, she pursues a career of significance in healthcare for America’s vulnerable populations at For People.
“I made slight pivots with the skills I had, applying it in a different manner each time, all the time acquiring new skills for my toolkit.”
Johanna’s career started far from public interest technology. At the age of 15, she entered the K-Pop industry, where she developed a strong work ethic by working 20-hour days to meet the demands of the entertainment industry. This early career in entertainment was cut short when she suddenly became the primary caregiver for her single mother, who was diagnosed with cancer. Her work ethic provided a strong foundation as she immediately took on multiple entry-level jobs and worked towards financial stability for her and her mother. While Johanna’s entry-level jobs, including working as a grocery bagger, provided minimal financial support given her situation, they did come with the silver lining of providing vital skills and experience for her future career.
As her mother’s battle with cancer continued and medical debt increased, Johanna and her mom were forced to file for medical bankruptcy. Johanna needed to find higher-paying jobs. She found a more lucrative role as a Korean Translator for the Department of State. Tasked with eight-hour days of translating documents, Johanna was sure there must be resources to make her work more efficient, which brought her to the tech world.
Johanna quickly found that human language technology was lacking. In their eagerness to adopt AI to solve communication problems, companies developing this technology sought language experts to help improve their machine-learning models. Johanna leveraged this opportunity to work her way into the U.S. Intelligence Community.
“Give employers a value proposition - why should they work with me?”
Johanna excelled in the Intelligence space, and could have pursued an upward trajectory of promotions within the field. However, she instead decided to utilize her marketability from working in the Intelligence Community to enter a new field where her ambitions lay. After years of working in and around the Intelligence Community, Johanna pivoted her career to apply her government knowledge to be a leader at a health tech startup in Silicon Valley. Johanna’s work had extended from translating language to translating between technologists and government changemakers.
Two years later, in 2020, Johanna combined her varied experiences and founded For People to build and support better government services with people like her mother in mind. For People works with government partners to enable better government services for vulnerable populations, investing in the five social determinants of health. As founder and CEO, she uses her background in product and data strategy to build people-first data ecosystems for partners like the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services and the Department of Commerce.
The Art of Building Relationships
Johanna learned the importance of relationships at her first job in the U.S. As a grocery store bagger, she took the time to get to know regular customers and even began making tips. Today, she traces her people skills back to this job.
As Johanna’s career evolved, she continued to form genuine connections with people across roles, from technology staff and leadership to building security and custodians. Johanna holds an earnest interest in understanding peoples’ stories and backgrounds as part of providing the ideal “customer experience” in her work. Her drive to fight for the underserved and disadvantaged today is bolstered by the relationships that she has cultivated throughout her career.
As Johanna puts it, being open to relationships is key because “you never know when the right opportunity will come, or perhaps an opportunity you hadn’t even thought about.” Rather than developing a tunnel vision for the ideal job, Johanna urges early career professionals to learn about the different work the people around them do and to assert their interest in it.
“My career is not a linear path of promotions. I was confident in myself that I would always find a way to bring value to the organization.”
Have a Focus, but find Flexibility
Early in her career, Johanna’s primary focus was financial security—putting food on the table during her mother’s cancer treatment. Johanna’s nimbleness was crucial both in developing that financial security and in building her career. As she identified the bridges from translation to AI and from AI to intelligence, Johanna learned as much as she could on the job. She procured the appropriate licenses and certifications to present herself as an ideal applicant.
Johanna often made lateral, or even backward, moves rather than seeking consecutive promotions in one sector or discipline. Over time, this led her to more fulfilling roles. Once she had attained financial security, Johanna sought employers and missions that aligned with her values.
“What if I chased after a life of significance? What would that look like?”
Discover your Intentions and Passion
When Johanna reached financial security, she had already developed the skills of flexibility and a human-centered mindset. She took the opportunity to shift her career vision to a purpose more close to home—equitable healthcare services.
As a leader in the public interest tech space, Johanna extolls the values of intentionality and passion in this field. She suggests that people applying for positions in public interest tech research any organization they are interested in. She advises examining the company’s leadership to gauge whether the organization’s practices align with its stated mission.
“The best thing you can do before accepting a job from a potential employer is to figure out what you want.”
Johanna built For People to be the kind of mission-driven organization that tackles challenging and important government problems. Among For People’s mission-focused initiatives is the development of Medicaid’s first data strategy, recently authored in cooperation with the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. Johanna pushes herself and leads For People towards scaling her passion for community building and uplifting the underserved.