In 2017, Andrew Parker launched Papa with a 1-800 number, offering 'grandkids-on-demand' in Miami. By 2021, the company was valued at $1.4bn (backed by SoftBank and Tiger Global).
This is a YC-backed gig economy company operating in the regulated elder care market at unicorn scale.
On paper it shouldn't have worked -- and yet it did.
Links
Papa: https://www.papa.com/
Dr Mustafa Sultan: https://www.musty.io
According to Business Insider, Omada Health has quietly filed its S-1 to prepare for an IPO. Here's how Sean Duffy (CEO & Co-founder) built it.
0:00 Intro
0:17 Signing first customer
1:51 How to have good ideas in healthcare
4:00 Why metabolic health is a hard area to innovate in
5:18 What the MVP product looked like
11:16 Sean's secret tactics
14:55 Operational innovation as a differentiator
20:19 The Omada playbook — is it repeatable?
25:31 What boss moves have you made Sean?
29:37 The difference between good and great
32:29 Sean's best tip on selling in enterprise healthcare
33:35 Sean's advice to himself
Links
Omada Health: https://www.omadahealth.com
Dr Mustafa Sultan: https://www.musty.io
Dr Aengus Tran is the CEO of Harrison.ai — an Australian radiology AI startup who have raised $160M.
Harrison.ai just released their radiology foundation model, Harrison.rad.1. And it's really good.
0:00 Intro
2:25 I'm glad I didn't found my startup in the US
4:21 Partnering with a clinical operator is key
7:28 Scrappy stories from the early days
11:17 Where human radiologists outperform AI (zero-shot learning)
17:23 Big bets on the future of radiology
21:18 What happens when GPT-8 arrives?
25:29 How can AI reach suprahuman radiology performance?
28:58 What boss moves did you make?
Links
Harrison.ai: https://harrison.ai
Dr Mustafa Sultan: https://www.musty.io
Michael Meucci (CEO) transformed Arcadia — formerly a mid-sized consultancy into a healthcare platform with $100M of Annual Recurring Revenue. How?
Lots of smart moves, including becoming really good at enterprise healthcare selling. Here's how he did it.
Links
Arcadia: https://arcadia.io/
Dr Mustafa Sultan: https://www.musty.io/
Dr Elina Berglund is the CEO/Co-founder of Natural Cycles, which she has grown to 2M users. When every other app seemed to be free — she made a brave decision: She charged her users a monthly fee. And it worked...
0:57 - The Birth of Natural Cycles 2:57 - The Decision to Charge from the Start 3:47 - Building Trust Through Pricing 4:23 - From Personal Struggles to Public Solution 5:52 - Creating the Fail-Safe Algorithm 6:32 - Collaboration with CERN Colleagues 7:13 - The Human Body: Complex Beyond Measure 8:37 - The Promise and Challenge of Wearables 10:16 - Understanding User Behavior 11:04 - Gaining Regulatory Approval 12:26 - Secrets to Growth and Marketing 13:43 - The Challenge of Direct-to-Consumer Healthcare 16:02 - Data-Driven Decision Making 17:13 - Instincts Versus Data 19:01 - Staying Honest with Data 21:20 - Calibrating Communication for Investors 22:30 - Benefits of Being Profitable 24:08 - Data as a Superpower 24:59 - Overcoming Negative PR 27:13 - Future of Contraception 29:30 - Impact of Roe v. Wade Overturning
Links
Natural Cycles: https://www.naturalcycles.com/
Dr Mustafa Sultan: https://www.musty.io/
Konstantin started Kaia Health after paying $50,000 to cure his back pain at an elite pain rehab centre. It worked. But it seemed stupid. Why did this need to cost $50,000?
Kaia Health has since raised $125M and helped 625,000 users.
0:00 The 90 second story
1:22 How did he grow 20% every week?
2:15 Market timing is everything
7:43 We never put pressure on this making any money
10:51 How does an app cure back pain?
14:43 US vs Germany for digital health entrepreneurs
16:40 Go to market of Kaia Health
19:51 Why raise so much money?
24:57 The hero license
Links
Kaia Health: https://kaiahealth.com/
Dr Mustafa Sultan: https://www.musty.io/
Jon Ronson is one of the most interesting people alive today — period. He’s the author of the Men Who Stare at Goats, So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed and The Psychopath Test — which spent 10 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. His two Ted talks have been watched 20 million times, his books have been brought to life by George Clooney on the big screen, he has written screenplays for Netflix blah blah blah. Don’t believe me, listen to a pitch Jon wrote for ‘the Psychopath Test’. If you are not dying to hear what happens next — then, I don’t what to tell you…
0:00 Jon's pitch for the Psychopath Test
1:41 Jon's story
6:00 Strategies Jon used to bypass career gatekeepers
7:03 Would Jon Ronson be on Substack/podcasting
12:05 Does Jon Ronson pay attention to analytics? Post mortems
16:26 Startup philosophy applied to storytelling
19:08 Writing Advice from Tim Ferriss: Jon's opinion on doing interesting things to write better
24:59 Does Jon Ronson like being famous?
28:49 Analysis of 'The Psychopath Test' pitch to Ira Glass
37:30 Should you make decision based on what would be a good story
38:48 Jon Ronson's habits for creative success
Max Parmentier is the CEO of Birdie, a Series B AgeTech startup who have raised $52M from the likes of Sofina, Omers Ventures and Index Ventures — and captured 10% of the UK market whilst currently scaling into Europe.
0:00 Intro
2:37 Shopify vs Amazon model in AgeTech
7:26 Product pivots: D2C never wins
11:56 Predictive AI AgeTech
13:58 I pitch an idea to Max
19:34 Lessons building Birdie
24:13 Leaving money on the table for purpose
Links
Birdie: https://www.birdie.care/
Dr Mustafa Sultan: https://www.musty.io/
Tom Wicher is CEO of DrDoctor — who have served over 20M patients and just raised £10M in their recent Series A round. But he spent the first 7 years bootstrapping, and diverged from his colleagues: Opting for the slow and steady gentle disruption path. Why?
0:00 Gentle disruption beats move fast and break things
3:36 Picking a problem in healthcare
5:44 Behavioural change theory
7:52 Stop treating patients like kids
10:30 Systems-level efficiency vs personalisation
13:02 Why don't patients show up for their appointments?
16:02 Overbooking: Learning from airlines
18:54 Carrot or stick: Motivating health behaviors
22:35 There's no big conspiracy in healthcare
26:24 PIFU model of patient booking
28:14 Sometime it's better not to empower patients
31:16 Habits/frameworks that have helped Tom succeed
Links
DrDoctor: https://www.drdoctor.co.uk/
Dr Mustafa Sultan: https://www.musty.io/
Drug discovery is becoming more expensive and producing less results than ever before (Eroom's Law)—why? One of the ballooning costs are clinical trials. Pharma/biotech often outsource their trials to CROs (contract research organisations). But many CROs are incentivised to make trials as bloated and inefficient as possible. That means more money and less results. Meri Beckwith is building the anti-CRO: Lindus Health—to solve this problem.
0:00 Intro
1:39 The big problem in drug discovery
4:10 Why do CROs exist?
7:24 The incentive problem in drug discovery/CROs
10:57 Pharma are anti-startups
12:11 How much a clinical trial costs
15:11 How can you compete with big CROs?
17:26 Are you going to build your own drug pipeline?
18:56 Lessons from VC to Founder
23:42 Brand/PR/Positioning as a biotech startup
29:03 Billion dollar ideas in bio/health
31:33 Habits that have helped Meri
Links
Lindus Health: https://www.lindushealth.com/
Meri Beckwith: https://twitter.com/meribeckwith
Mithi Thaya: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mithi-thaya/
Dr Mustafa Sultan: https://www.musty.io/
Rewind.ai just raised their Series A at a valuation of $350M. Investors include Andreesen Horowitz, Reddit’s Alexis Ohanian and OpenAI’s Sam Altman. Rewind sits on your computer and phone, and watches everything you do. Then you can ask it questions like: What was that really great Mediterranean recipe I looked at last month? Or I’ve got a call with a client next week, can you summarise every interaction I’ve had with them? But here’s where it becomes even weirder, powerful. They’ve announced the Rewind Pendant, a small audio recorder that sits on your chest. Rewind will be able to listen in to every conversation you have. You can ask it: What birthday present should I get for my partner? Did they drop any hints? Or how many arguments did we have last year? Pretty Black Mirror, right? Once you get over the ick however, you realise that this is correcting a lagging human function. Just like the cursed amongst us wear glasses; tools like Rewind will repair our broken memories. I spoke to Dan Siroker, Rewind’s founder— 0:00 Intro 1:54 Lessons from the Obama Campaign 3:28 How to use science to make your startup succeed 8:21 Privacy concerns 17:00 Rewind.ai as a brain-computer interface (BCI) 20:27 Forgetting is important for human wellbeing 22:26 Societal impacts of perfect memory 28:42 Rewind's tech stack 31:56 The existential risk of startups using GPT 35:21 D2C is harder than B2B 37:49 Leadership lessons 40:31 Perils of being a second time founder 46:44 Is any publicity good publicity? Links Rewind: https://www.rewind.ai/ Dan Siroker: https://twitter.com/dsiroker Dr Mustafa Sultan: https://www.musty.io/
People are wearing Apple Watches to their wedding days. Has this whole 'quantified self' movement gone bananas? Is any of this data actually useful? I spoke to Maitham Dib about this. He's building Vital (YC21); a startup which makes all wearable/lab data available to other startups/companies. 0:00 Wearable data is mostly useless 3:22 The case for wearable data 6:37 Wearable data is mostly useless 8:06 Wearable data is useful 10:16 The big opportunity with wearable/lab data (startups) 14:15 Naivety as a superpower (Paul Graham) 15:45 Why building Vital is so hard 19:31 Pros/cons of an infrastructure play in healthcare 20:51 How to enterprise sales 24:09 Lessons from YCombinator 27:32 The benefits of being an immigrant Links Vital: https://tryvital.io/ Dr Mustafa Sultan: https://www.musty.io/
Dr Jared Dashevsky writes Healthcare Huddle (acquired by Workweek). He's scaled to over 30,000 subscribers. And it was pretty simple.
Here are 12 frameworks that work for healthcare content creation (and mistakes to avoid).
0:00 Intro
1:14 Consistency is king; systematise it
7:40 McKinsey reverse pyramid principle for writing
9:10 You need to have a unique/controversial take
11:41 Content for network building
15:51 Lean startup thinking does not work for content
20:35 Nobody cares about errors
25:52 Injecting personality is a competitive advantage
29:32 Boring content will make you rich
34:13 Don't make a useless audience; acquire data
41:19 Lessons from Jerry Springer
45:18 Hyperoptimisation paradox
48:49 Do things that don't scale
Links
Healthcare Huddle: https://workweek.com/brand/healthcare-huddle/ Dr Jared Dashevsky: https://twitter.com/jareddashevsky Dr Mustafa Sultan: https://www.musty.io/
Despite $billions of investment into the sector — there are still no AI discovered drugs on the market. Why? Recursion Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ: RXRX) is one of the hottest AI drug discovery companies on the market. Especially after NVIDIA's $50M investment into them. Dr Imran Haque (SVP of AI and Digital Sciences) explains why AI drug discovery is so tricky — and when it's arriving. 0:00 Intro 0:42 Decoding biology (the big idea) 2:18 Why is AI drug discovery harder than it looks? 4:48 Simulating the Sims (game) vs AI drug discovery 6:58 Building data for AI drug discovery 14:47 Recursion's successes and failures 24:22 The barriers to AI drug discovery 26:45 How optimistic should we be about AI drug discovery 35:26 Being aggressively generalist for success People Dr Imran Haque: https://www.recursion.com/team-members/imran-haque Dr Imran Mahmud: https://www.imranmahmud.com/ Dr Mustafa Sultan: https://www.musty.io/
0:00 NVIDIA's $50M investment into Recursion Pharmaceuticals 2:28 NVIDIA is becoming a seed investor 3:45 Bull case for Recursion Pharmaceuticals 9:20 Recursion's two big acquisitions 13:05 How are Recursion going to make money? 14:15 Recursion is overhyped 19:45 Recursion is unprofitable 22:21 Kim Kardashian's full body MRI scan 26:03 Longevity doctor's advice to Kim K 31:49 Speculating on Kim K's longevity regime (what she takes) 35:00 Outro and feedback Podcast Links YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@bigpicturemedicine Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/big-picture-medicine/id1500446262 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5707RPmWOJkVZyUHNRSUfS?si=96c7fff6bccb456a People Dr Imran Mahmud: https://www.imranmahmud.com/ Dr Adam Bataineh: https://twitter.com/DrAdamBat / https://numenor.health Dr Mustafa Sultan: https://www.musty.io/
Ever waited months for a scan? Scan.com is making getting a scan as easy as booking an Uber. Behind the scenes of the disruptor changing medical imaging forever. 0:00 Race to the bottom? 1:34 AirBnB 11 star framework 9:57 Scan.com looks really easy to build — what's hard about it? 12:19 Lessons from working at Deliveroo 15:14 How do you make a lot of money? 19:41 Buying the domain name Scan.com 24:16 How to build a marketplace business 27:50 The perils of price transparency 30:36 What I would do to build a competitor 32:43 You need grit when building a health startup 35:46 Billion $ health ideas Podcast Links YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCEzluDRmBTVby0WsO37V-xg Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast... Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5707RPm... People Dr Mustafa Sultan: https://www.musty.io/ Charlie Bullock: https://scan.com/
0:00 David Sinclair's controversial claim 1:39 Bull v bear case 6:23 David Sinclair's history of exaggerating and profiteering 8:34 Adam Neuman's involvement 11:40 Raising from unsophisticated investors 16:30 Why aren't big pharma interested in longevity? 22:45 Cynics are right, optimists get rich 25:26 Will a longevity drug be the most valuable therapeutic ever made 28:52 Feedback and outro David Sinclair's Tweet: https://twitter.com/davidasinclair/status/1679178670743732249?s=20 David Sinclair's Research Paper: https://www.aging-us.com/article/204896/text Elon Musk Tweet: https://twitter.com/davidasinclair/status/1679504700285104129?s=20 Dr Charles Brenner's Critique of Sinclair: https://twitter.com/CharlesMBrenner/status/1679213673771057152?s=20 Podcast Links YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@bigpicturemedicine Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/big-picture-medicine/id1500446262 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5707RPmWOJkVZyUHNRSUfS?si=96c7fff6bccb456a People Dr Imran Mahmud: https://www.imranmahmud.com/ Dr Adam Bataineh: https://twitter.com/DrAdamBat / https://numenor.health Dr Mustafa Sultan: https://www.musty.io/
0:00 Why not let the builders build? Move fast and break things?
1:56 Why don't you ban people from googling their symptoms?
3:28 Is a disclaimer enough?
5:27 Why are LLMs difficult to regulate?
10:13 Move fast and kill patients — principal agent problem
12:23 People aren't idiots (they are)
14:20 Dr ChatGPT will never work
17:35 Spotting bubbles in healthcare
19:20 How much time does regulation add onto medical device approval?21:40 Can we ever regulate LLMs?
Podcast Links
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@bigpicturemedicineApple: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/big-picture-medicine/id1500446262
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5707RPmWOJkVZyUHNRSUfS?si=96c7fff6bccb456a
People
Dr Hugh Harvey: https://www.hardianhealth.com/ Dr Mustafa Sultan: https://www.musty.io/
Daniel Ek (Spotify Founder) has raised $65M for his new longevity startup: Neko Health. 0:00 What is Neko Health 2:18 They're doing nothing new 5:33 The bull case; why it's going to be huge 7:47 How are they possibly going to make money!? 18:30 Why aren't they doing full body MRI? 20:26 The bear case; why this will fail 25:13 Smells a bit hypey 29:15 The risks of longevity startups and early testing 35:41 The lowdown 37:47 Unexpected way of making $$$ 40:00 Outro and feedback Podcast Links YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@bigpicturemedicine Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/big-picture-medicine/id1500446262 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5707RPmWOJkVZyUHNRSUfS?si=96c7fff6bccb456a People Dr Imran Mahmud: https://www.imranmahmud.com/ Dr Adam Bataineh: https://twitter.com/DrAdamBat / https://numenor.health Dr Mustafa Sultan: https://www.musty.io/
0:00 Leaked secret Apple health report
5:06 What Apple are up to in healthcare
9:21 Decentralised clinical trials
11:35 Apple healthcare leaked documents controversy
15:38 Apple is going to become a health insurer
23:07 Imran's advice to Tim Cook
26:11 Being a healthcare provider is unprofitable
28:12 Apple will make a longevity/subscription health play
30:27 Outro and feedback
Links mentioned
Apple Struggles in Push to Make Healthcare Its Greatest Legacy (Wall Street Journal): https://www.wsj.com/articles/apple-struggles-in-push-to-make-healthcare-greatest-legacy-11623832200
Podcast Links
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@bigpicturemedicineApple: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/big-picture-medicine/id1500446262
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5707RPmWOJkVZyUHNRSUfS?si=96c7fff6bccb456a
People
Dr Imran Mahmud: https://www.imranmahmud.com/
Dr Adam Bataineh: https://twitter.com/DrAdamBat / https://numenor.health
Dr Mustafa Sultan: https://www.musty.io/
