Ayo Omojola: preference

Transcript context

…Let's come back to Carbon Health for a bit, I just have a couple of questions that I wanted to touch on. One is just about starting a company in healthcare, in health tech, there's so many companies that launch every day, every week, trying to make the healthcare industry better in various ways. But for all these reasons, I don't know, the incentives are off, there's regulatory capture, there's things take a long time, things just like often don't work. Carbon Health is an example of something that is working really well. What is your advice often to founders who want to go after the healthcare space as a tech company? What do you need to know, what should you do right, do wrong? What is your advice there? Yeah, so one thing I would say in healthcare that fortunately or unfortunately I think is true, is very often the way to make things happen is network-dependent, not necessarily about the merit of the thing itself. So it's just like, there's companies that exist because the founders know the CEO of every major payer in the country, and so there's just like a deal they can get, or data they can get that's not available in any other context. So I think there's just a thing there of understanding if that's the business that you're in. I think in Eren and Caesar's case in Carbon, because we're direct to consumer, we're not trying to sell to payers, we're not trying to sell to employers. And Eren, obviously just hugely successful, [inaudible 00:43:13] person starting the largest education platform on the planet at Udemy. There was actually really, really good founder market fit, he was a person who had very, very technical, and had a ton of DTC success doing another thing that was DTC. But there are businesses, like there's a company that I recently invested on working with, where the founders are incredible and very, very technical, and not super high on network. And so a lot of what I try to do with them is like, "Hey, I need this person to talk to this person. And then also, this is like a really crisp, specific use case that you need to optimize around." And maybe I'm wrong, who cares, I'm just some guy. What does it matter what I think? It doesn't have to be what I think, it just has to be crisp. And using that as a way to like... Because the more crisp it is, the easier it is going to be for you to know who the decision-maker and the organization you need to get to is. Because I just find... I'm sure you see this in B2B, this is so much... There's just so much leverage in knowing the person in the place who actually has their finger on the button, versus trying to network your way in, and people don't want to spend their social capital introducing you to this department, or they've just got like 19 other things going on. So I think that network thing is just a thing that sticks in my mind, that when I see a lot of healthcare tech startups swimming through the soup, a lot of it is about there's some organizations that have to navigate to get to the right decision-maker, and they have to do it 100 times. And so much of it is like, just waiting for the guy who promised me the intro to make the intro. That is really good and practical advice. Before we wrap up, I want to give you a chance just to describe Carbon Health for folks that may not be familiar with it. Just like, what is it, where can you use it, how do you sign up, who's it for?…

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