I used to diagnose companies.
At McKinsey, that meant taking interviews, data and the noise of daily operations and turning them into one picture. Not a list of problems, but what was driving what, and what to change first. What struck me every time was the same moment: when the pieces suddenly made sense together. From the inside, people could see their own functions, incentives and problems clearly. What they could not see was how those pieces interacted at the company level.
At the McKinsey Health Institute, I helped bring companies together around a shared way to measure how work affects health: workload, managers, pace, whether effort is recognized, whether anyone feels they belong. The research kept saying the same thing. Much of what gets treated as an individual problem, such as burnout, anxiety or poor sleep, is shaped by the conditions people work in. You can coach the person and leave the environment untouched. The result does not move.
I did not yet apply that to myself.
I was exhausted, anxious and restless, and my own health kept getting worse, however much data I collected on it: bloodwork, hormones, inflammation, sleep, genetics, childhood patterns, attachment, habits. Doctors, therapists, papers, protocols. Each lens explained something. None of them added up.
At the end of an appointment with the nth endocrinologist in ten years, she half-joked that what a thyroid needs most is someone who hugs you tightly. It was not medical advice. It was a reminder that a lab result lives in a life.
By then I was working at an AI startup, where one idea we explored was a digital twin of a person: biology, history, circumstances and behavior in one place. We never built it. But I had become fascinated by what models could do with scattered data, so on my own time I started feeding one with years of my own records and asked what it saw. It found connections I had missed, but it also produced explanations that sounded convincing and were wrong.
What I lacked was not more information. It was structure: which pieces deserve weight, how body, circumstances and patterns act on one another, and what to test first. That structure is what Tessera is built around.
I am not a physician or a therapist, and Tessera does not replace either. It is for the woman who has read the books, seen the doctors, done the work, and is still stuck. If it works, it is because it makes your own story harder to romanticize. Mine included.