Science Human Connection: Can Technology Build Better Relationships?

Can technology help us build authentic and meaningful relationships? This is something that Nina Iordanova, an award-winning actor turned tech start-up founder, and Niloo Ravaei, an ex-film maker and blockchain professional, set out as their mission to build. Both Nina and Niloo were tired of endless swiping on the phone and realized the one area where technology has not helped to improve is our relationships. They discovered our relationships have one thing in common: ourselves. So perhaps that is where it needs to start: with ourselves. Can technology help us understand ourselves better, and how we view the world around us? To accomplish this mission, Nina and Niloo built a personalized meditation app called HelloIris, which helps us better understand ourselves and how we see the world. If we better understand how we view the world, and the impacts of our interactions with others, we can grow, learn and improve. “Remember: despite how open, peaceful and loving you attempt to be, people can only meet you, as deeply as they’ve met themselves.“ - Matt Kahn To help ourselves understand each other better, Nina and Niloo built an AI matchmaker that worked over SMS which went into Techstars in 2019. The algorithm analysed the user’s personality by using only 160 words of free-word text - and the accuracy was astonishing. In the end, they found the answer not in technology, but in community. After having built all of this advanced technology they pivoted into a community service called Good People - which is a cohort-based community program to find like-minded people. In this episode, they will share their journey and all the learnings they gathered along the way - where the one mission has been to help people build better and more meaningful relationships.