Dan & Moxxie Ventures’ Katie Stanton talk about the softening market finally bringing startups valuations to a “normal” place (1:00), how a gloomy economic outlook is altering the war for talent (5:39), Katie’s tenure so far on the board of Yahoo and CEO Jim Lanzone’s plan for the tech company’s future (8:16), and the risks & benefits of working at a startup versus legacy company (11:24). Later, Dan & Katie have a conversation with Forward’s Founder & CEO Adrian Aoun and discuss Adrian’s remarks at the 2022 Code Conference and his key takeaways from the gathering (19:53), Forward’s push to deliver more healthcare innovation than its rivals (23:40), the challenge of bringing scale to primary care (33:33) why the cost of innovating in healthcare is the industry’s biggest problem (45:11), and Adrian’s experience working with Google co-founder Larry Page (48:12).
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NewsTranscript
00:00 Hey listeners, it's Dan here. I want to tell you about a company that I'm really excited about.
00:04 It's called Current. It's a fintech company that's completely disrupting traditional banking.
00:08 I'm a new Current customer and it's already helping me and my entire family manage our finances,
00:13 all from one easy to use app. So try Current for yourself and get the app by going to Current.com/ok.
00:20 That's Current.com/ok. Current is a financial technology company, not a bank.
00:26 Banking services provided by and Visa debit card issued by Choice Financial Group, member FDIC,
00:32 pursuant to a license from Visa USA Inc. and can be used everywhere Visa debit cards are accepted.
00:37 Okay, welcome to OK Computer. I'm Dan Nathan. I am joined with Katie Stanton of Moxie Ventures.
00:43 Katie, how are you?
00:45 I'm great. How are you doing, Dan? Good to see you again.
00:47 It's been a little bit and you and I have lots to catch up on.
00:50 You brought a pretty amazing guy. We just got done with this conversation,
00:54 so you guys have to stick around and check this out. Adrian Aoun, he is the founder and CEO of Forward,
01:00 an AI-based healthcare system that he founded in 2016. Pretty exciting stuff there.
01:07 But first things first, Katie, what's going on just in general? You and I have not checked in a little bit.
01:12 What's going on with the Moxie portfolio? I know there's a lot of interesting stuff going on there.
01:15 The investment environment, some of the deal flow that you're seeing, valuation.
01:18 I'm just curious, like, just thoughts out there. You are in Boulder.
01:22 I get a good read from the people here in New York. A lot of fintech stuff is kind of depressed here.
01:26 A lot of the Web 3 stuff is a bit depressed here. It seems like the West Coast seems to be in the middle of it, too.
01:33 I'm just curious what's going on in the middle of this country here and how you're thinking about things.
01:37 Yeah, things have been great. You know, aside from being based in Boulder,
01:40 I spend a lot of time either in the Bay Area or in New York as well.
01:43 So I feel like I have a good, solid overview of what's been going on.
01:48 I think for us at Moxie, and I think this is consistent with a lot of my peers and friends who are also seed investors,
01:54 is that the market has certainly softened, but we remain in the best possible place because we're early
02:01 and we have very long time horizons. And the next few years are times to build.
02:06 And we have a plethora of big problems in the world, from health care to climate, economic mobility.
02:11 So there's still a lot of work to be done.
02:14 The other good news, at least for investors like us, is that finally, valuations have gotten to a normal place
02:21 and the speed of doing deals feels a bit more reasonable. It used to be the case.
02:26 I mean, a year ago or so, I would get on a call with a founder.
02:28 They're like, we need to know by the end of this meeting if you're in or not, which is ridiculous.
02:32 Like you have to do your research. You have to do your diligence.
02:35 And it's like having a shotgun marriage after one match.com swipe or something.
02:40 You have to do your diligence. So I've been happy to have been spending more time with founders
02:45 and also trying to invest at more reasonable prices.
02:48 And then the other thing, at least for us over the summer, we spent a lot of time with our existing portfolio companies,
02:54 basically just looking at their operating health. Do you have enough runway?
02:59 What does your burn look like? Where can we help with customer intros?
03:02 Where can we help with hiring? What are the best things that we can do to ride this very crazy time?
03:07 Because we don't know how long the markets will feel depressed.
03:11 And so you just have to ride these things out.
03:14 Things are never as amazing as they seem and they're never as terrible as they seem.
03:19 So you have to be somewhere in the middle and as practical as possible.
03:22 What's the general mood among some of those portfolio companies?
03:25 They obviously probably made some cost cutting endeavors, if you will.
03:29 I mean, did you feel that a lot of the companies in your ecosystem, did they cut hard and fast?
03:35 Or are they trying to take a wait and see approach to it?
03:38 Because it does feel like in different industries, there's different paths forward here
03:43 because some of these inflationary inputs or some of the weak consumers,
03:47 it's just not affecting certain areas, I guess, of the private tech,
03:51 especially where you are probably in climate and health tech,
03:54 because you articulated, I think, over a handful of pods in the spring,
03:58 some of the stuff that you're looking at is really recession proof.
04:01 We think so. We hope so. And I would say the really great founders can anticipate problems before they even occur.
04:08 And there's this great Henry Kissinger quote, whatever must happen ultimately should happen immediately.
04:14 And I think for a lot of those founders, this market is going to be tough for a while.
04:18 You need to become investable. You need to make sure that you are proactive.
04:22 You need to make sure that you get to product market as quickly and efficiently as you can.
04:28 And so the best founders in our portfolio were able to anticipate a lot of these things and cut even before we told them to cut.
04:35 I would say actually, if it were me telling a founder to cut and then they cut, then it's too late.
04:40 So most of ours, you know, he did these warnings really early.
04:44 And now we kind of wait and we've had companies that have gotten to their series A during this time.
04:50 So that's a good sign. The bigger investors, the upstream investors, the big multistage ones,
04:56 the Andreessen's, General Capital is like, they're all still deploying capital,
04:59 but they're deploying capital investing in the very best companies out there that are surpassing their metric.
05:06 So, you know, I'm still bullish in the long run.
05:08 I feel very privileged to be in the space that we're in to be able to optimize and affect outcomes.
05:14 Investing in software solutions that help a lot of people, that's a great place to be in.
05:19 And again, we're there for the long term.
05:21 It's so funny because we've all spent a lot of time thinking about, at least I do, in the public markets,
05:26 about a lot of these consumer Internet companies, which are not really solving big problems.
05:31 They're actually helping us waste a lot of time. In many ways, you think they're more productive.
05:35 So I love listening to you and the stories about the companies that you're investing in and the founders
05:40 and these big problems that they are trying to solve.
05:43 And that was one of the things that really came across in our conversation with Adrian.
05:47 So last week on the pod, we had Deirdre Bosa. She is a CNBC's tech reporter on Tech Check.
05:52 And she was at Code Along with me. And we did a little bit of a wrap.
05:55 And it was kind of interesting with our conversation that the listener will hear.
05:59 With Adrian, he was obviously out there.
06:01 His comment was that there was a lot of really big names there that said a whole heck of a lot of nothing.
06:05 Now, I come from a little different camp as a public markets investor.
06:08 For me, it's always amazing to get access and to see the body language of some of these big CEOs,
06:14 of these companies that are managing tens of thousands of people, deploying billions of dollars
06:19 or hundreds of millions of dollars in R&D and how they think about their businesses.
06:23 So to me, it really is often about body language.
06:26 Sundar Pichai did say something. They want to become 20% more productive.
06:31 And so what do you take away from that as a public markets investor?
06:34 There was a lot of analysts. There was a lot of investors who were talking about that after the fact.
06:38 So even though some of these guys, and they are generally guys, sorry,
06:41 are not laying out these big initiatives or these big areas because they're always really tight-lipped,
06:47 it is interesting to gain their body language.
06:49 I didn't get a sense overall that some of those big companies are that worried about really deep, long recession.
06:58 And that's something that I think the investor base is pretty obsessed on right now.
07:02 So I'm just curious, your thoughts as you broaden it out away from private tech markets,
07:08 how do you think just the kind of bear market that public tech stocks are in,
07:13 how does that affect the psyche, if you will?
07:15 Because again, there is not an all-day cable news or financial news channel
07:20 dedicated to private tech or private markets.
07:23 It's about public markets.
07:24 And I know that oftentimes some of the sentiment seeps into where you live a little bit.
07:29 Yeah, I think some of the noticeable effects for us in the private markets,
07:33 and especially for early stage, are first, getting talent.
07:38 There was already a talent war, but it's harder to get people to leave their very secure jobs at Google,
07:45 at Stripe, at Facebook.
07:47 Facebook's actually pretty easy because no one likes working there,
07:49 but places where they're very secure with benefits because they know how rocky things can be
07:54 in an early-stage startup and how risky things can be.
07:57 The second thing that affects us is that longer sales cycle.
08:01 A lot of our software companies who try to sell into the bigger companies,
08:04 either they have pulled back or they're taking a really long time to buy things.
08:09 This summer was pretty rough.
08:11 We saw a bunch of our companies who were on very steady clips selling into larger companies
08:16 suddenly realize that things were taking a longer period of time.
08:20 But this also made me think of one person that I'm going to segue here,
08:24 one person that I want us to have on our pod,
08:26 who I feel has really elegantly navigated a lot of these things, is Jim Lanzone, the CEO of Yahoo.
08:34 Oh, my God.
08:35 This guy, I swear to God, will go down as one of the best CEOs of all time.
08:40 I've known Jim for now 20 years.
08:42 When I was at Google, he was at Ask Jeeves, and we were selling our search and our search results into Jim.
08:49 And as smart as everyone was at Google, Jim asked the hardest fucking questions,
08:55 and no one could answer them.
08:57 And he kept pushing and pushing and pushing so much, I was like,
08:59 "I never want to be on the other side of that guy."
09:01 And we have been friends for a long time, but now I'm on the board of Yahoo.
09:05 And the way that he has navigated a really tough and erratic market with an older yet beloved brand
09:13 and delivering a lot of positive outcomes, I think it's just,
09:17 it might be a really amazing story to tell whenever he may be ready.
09:21 Well, you know, in late July, he was on 20 Minute DC with Harry Stebbings,
09:25 and it was actually really surprising.
09:27 I'd never really heard him speak.
09:28 I've met him a couple times over the last year or so.
09:30 And again, I think there's a lot of investors in the public markets who are probably very skeptical.
09:36 You and I have talked about it a little bit, of what a Yahoo turnaround looks like,
09:40 because the brand has not been top of mind, I think, for investors in a very long time.
09:45 It was obviously sold to Verizon seven years ago, mashed together with AOL.
09:50 And now I think the best parts spun out.
09:53 Obviously, Apollo bought it here.
09:55 What's interesting to me, though, is just the audience that they still command in finance and sports.
10:00 And I know there's other parts of that business, mail, that are very interesting.
10:03 So again, I'll take your word for it that he's a grade A CEO.
10:08 There aren't too many examples, though, where old great brands have been gobbled up by big stodgy company
10:15 and kicked back out by private equity where there had been a resurgence.
10:19 But I use a lot of Yahoo Sports.
10:21 I use Yahoo Finance, tapping into that user base, figuring out how to better monetize them,
10:26 keep them there longer, introduce a couple new services, I guess, would make a whole heck of a lot of sense.
10:31 Is that part of the plan?
10:32 I will tell you that he is a fantastic CEO who has built and rebuilt his executive team that is A+.
10:41 Like you, there are millions, hundreds of millions of customers who go back to Yahoo Finance,
10:47 Yahoo Mail, Yahoo Search every day because they're comfortable there.
10:52 They love the brand.
10:53 It's trusted.
10:55 And it's just something that they've always done.
10:57 And his board is great.
10:58 I'm not trying to be pompous here, but like the other board members are amazing.
11:01 I think this is going to be a really, I mean, knock on wood, but I feel very lucky to have this front row seat to history
11:07 because I agree with you, it is very hard to save an old brand, especially technology.
11:12 It's always like the new, new, new, new thing.
11:14 But I think Yahoo might defy the odds.
11:16 All right. Fair enough.
11:17 I'm keeping an eye on that.
11:18 I'm rooting for you guys.
11:19 So when you and Jim are both in New York City, let's all sit down over a bottle of maybe a Como Sim.
11:24 We'll have a little pod there.
11:25 And I do recommend to our listeners, they should go listen to that 20-minute VC with Jim and Harry Stebbings.
11:30 It was pretty great.
11:31 One last question here to you, Katie, because you worked again, you started your career at Yahoo.
11:36 You worked at Google.
11:37 You worked at Twitter.
11:38 Talk to us a little bit about like the mindset, what it's like.
11:40 You just mentioned Facebook.
11:42 No one wants to work there.
11:43 And again, that stock has been more than cut in half.
11:45 It's down 56% of the year.
11:47 It's down more from its all-time highs.
11:49 It's pretty astounding.
11:50 When you think about where the stock was trading last year prior to Zuck making this very, very prominent pivot to the metaverse,
12:00 this stock was almost a trillion-dollar market cap, and now it's below-ish $400 billion or so.
12:06 Talk to me about like the psychology of being an employee.
12:10 You probably rode out some difficult times over the years.
12:14 Obviously, stock-based comp is a big part of compensation with a lot of these companies.
12:19 What's it like being in a place like that in a period like right now?
12:22 I mean, it's risky, and it depends on where you are in your life cycle.
12:26 So, for example, if you're in your 20s, you're not married, and you have an appetite for risk, you don't have a mortgage,
12:32 it might be worth that tradeoff to work at any of these companies where it's bumpy because if you stick around and the company pulls it through,
12:39 you could be rewarded handsomely.
12:41 But if you're a new parent or you're taking care of your parents and you have a lot of responsibilities,
12:46 sometimes that may just place all this added pressure on you.
12:50 So maybe it is worth finding a place that may be more comfortable.
12:54 But ultimately, you have to believe.
12:57 You have to love the people that you work with.
12:59 You have to love the product you're building.
13:02 You have to be proud of what you're doing, and you have to feel like you're making a reasonable, positive impact in both your work and in the world.
13:10 And if all those things are true, you'll be fine.
13:12 That's my take.
13:13 You know what's interesting?
13:14 Some of the hardest-hit names in, let's call it the internet space, if you will, over the last year, year and a half,
13:20 I mean, they started correcting well before the NASDAQ started correcting, which was late last year.
13:25 And it's interesting, if you pulled up a chart on your Yahoo Finance or, as I use FactSet,
13:30 pull up a Chegg or a Pinterest or obviously Twitter because it's got a $44 billion bid, lift.
13:37 Some of these stocks have not made new lows in months.
13:40 That's a really interesting thing.
13:42 Pinterest had an activist.
13:43 There's a whole host of other things.
13:44 There's been a little M&A, so maybe there's some more M&A.
13:47 Gavin Baker of Attriti's Management tweeted this last week that if you're not a fang company, you can probably buy whatever you want.
13:54 You saw Adobe pay $20 billion in cash and stock for Figma, a company that's going to do, I don't know, $400 million in revenue this year.
14:03 You can do the math on that.
14:05 So maybe there is light at the end of the tunnel.
14:07 A lot of these companies, despite interest rates going much higher, the cost of capital being much higher, they have a lot of cash.
14:13 They generate a lot of cash.
14:14 Maybe there's some opportunities to kick through the wreckage here a little bit.
14:17 But to me, I'm seeing some relative strength among some of these stocks that have just been absolutely destroyed over the last 18 months.
14:24 Yeah, I mean, I'm a long-term investor, and I buy and hold, and I just ignore it.
14:28 So I'm at the other end of the spectrum.
14:30 You pay way more attention than I do.
14:31 Yeah, but are any of these stocks that have been down 70%, 80% or any of your pals in Silicon Valley saying, "That was it.
14:38 That's enough is enough.
14:39 This thing is a double, a triple from here"?
14:41 Do you ever look at the stock market and think about how I could use your knowledge to generate VC-type returns over, let's say, a five- to seven-year period, especially after, again?
14:51 I mean, there are dozens and dozens of high-quality companies whose valuations have just gotten absolutely destroyed, probably for good reason, that are down 70%, 80% or you're just primarily focused on the private markets.
15:04 Yeah, I mean, I have so much of my own personal capital, like in Moxie, and I've invested in a bunch of early-stage companies and some funds that I have to be very conservative in the public market.
15:14 So I'm basically an index fund investor, and then I've invested in five companies whose products I admire and I use every day and I believe in the management, and then I just kind of close my eyes and hope it works out.
15:26 As an investor, too, I think we always have FOMO.
15:28 We have to have a lot of diversification.
15:30 There are a couple of really smart crypto investors, and I'm like, "I don't really understand a lot of it, but I know you do," or you sound like you do.
15:38 So here's a little bit of capital, and maybe one day it works out.
15:41 All right.
15:42 Well, there you have it.
15:43 I'm Dan DeMozzi Ventures, my co-host here on OK Computer.
15:45 Thank you very much for that commentary, and stick around, people.
15:49 We have Adrian Aoun, the CEO/founder of Forward.
15:53 Hey, Dan.
15:56 What up, guy?
15:57 You're into this fintech.
15:58 What's all this I'm hearing about Current?
16:00 You're going to like this guy.
16:01 Current is a fintech company that's completely disrupting traditional banking.
16:05 Wait a second.
16:06 Does that mean I don't have to drive to the bank anymore?
16:09 Yeah, exactly.
16:10 I'm a new Current customer, and I manage all of my finances from one easy-to-use app.
16:14 Well, I got to get this app, but where can I learn more?
16:17 It's super easy.
16:18 Just go to Current.com/OK, O-K-A-Y, and download the app.
16:22 That's Current.com/OK.
16:24 Current is a financial technology company, not a bank.
16:27 Banking service is provided by and Visa debit card issued by Choice Financial Group, member FDIC, pursuant to a license from Visa USA, Inc., and can be used everywhere Visa debit cards are accepted.
16:38 Hey, it's Dan here.
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16:56 Blue-chip art has seen price appreciation that's outpaced the S&P 500 by 164% from 1995 to 2021.
17:05 And the Wall Street Journal recently called it among the hottest markets on Earth.
17:08 It's no wonder the ultra-rich like Jeff Bezos recently sold tons of Amazon stock and bought more art.
17:14 And now you can too with the art investment app called Masterworks.io.
17:18 Join over 300,000 members for free on Masterworks.io.
17:22 Just go to Masterworks.art/OKcomputer, O-K-A-Y.
17:27 That's Masterworks.art/OKcomputer.
17:30 See important disclosures at Masterworks.io/disclaimer.
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17:40 You know Taboola if you ever went to websites like CNBC or USA Today.
17:45 When you finish reading an article, it's that tricked out recommendation engine pointing you towards additional content you will like.
17:51 They also help brands reach over 500 million daily users, which makes them a compelling alternative to Facebook and Google ad platforms.
17:59 Taboola has long-term exclusive partnerships with publishers, which means they help people like you and me discover content outside of social media.
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18:11 Find out more about their mission at Taboola.com.
18:15 Adrian Aoun is the founder and CEO of Forward, an AI-based healthcare system started in 2016.
18:23 Before Forward, Adrian was the head of special projects for the CEO of Google Alphabet.
18:28 While at Google, Adrian led the founding of the company's Sidewalk Labs, which focuses on urban planning and infrastructure solutions.
18:35 Adrian came to Google after it acquired his startup WaveEye, a natural language processing and news summation app, back in 2013.
18:43 Adrian, welcome to OK Computer.
18:45 Thanks for having me. I'm excited to be on.
18:48 This is pretty cool, Katie. I told you this, that I was at Code, Kara Swisher's final Code conference in LA two weeks ago.
18:54 And I'm looking at the rundown and I'm seeing Sundar, there's Tim Cook, there's Johnny Ive.
19:01 The list went on and on and on. And I see a name that I kind of recognize, Adrian Aoun.
19:06 He's right between Mayor Pete Buttigieg and Bob Iger, the former CEO of Disney.
19:13 And I'm like, wait, I recognize that name. He's going to be on our podcast here.
19:17 So how did it come, Katie, that we have Adrian joining us at OK Computer, one of the major tech luminaries that was just at the last Code conference?
19:25 Well, a combo of luck and strategy, right?
19:29 Yeah, I think the better question is how the hell did I make it onto the Code conference?
19:32 But I think when the program came out and I was on their website and I was very lucky.
19:37 My last name starts with an A, so I'm like kind of at the top of the list.
19:40 And then there's Tim Cook and then there's Sundar and John Doerr.
19:43 And I'm sitting there figuring like, finally, I'm amongst my peers.
19:47 No, I'm really thinking like, holy shit, who made the mistake and invited me?
19:50 But Kara was very, very, very kind to invite me. And honestly, it was an absolute blast.
19:54 It was a great conference, especially since it was her last, though, you know, Kara, she'll say it's her last.
19:59 And then she'll just go do three more conferences that are exactly with the same red chairs and just a new name.
20:04 So I look forward to hopefully being invited back to the next incarnation.
20:08 Well, you know, Adrian, that OK Computer is basically the podcast of the Code conferences
20:13 because we have also had Kara Swisher on our pod. So you're also in very good company here.
20:19 That's awesome. I just follow Kara wherever she goes. That's my whole strategy in life.
20:22 As we do, too. And, you know, it's really funny because when Kara came on, I think it was in February, Katie,
20:28 we just launched the podcast and she's like, what's up with the name? It's kind of dumb.
20:31 And we're like, you have to let her have that. And I actually really like the name.
20:35 I came up with it, but Kara is going to be Kara. What was your takeaway, Adrian?
20:39 Because it was really interesting to have in a 24 hour period, three CEOs of a combined six trillion dollars in market cap
20:47 that have a combined one point two trillion dollars in annual sales.
20:51 They were all on the stage there. There was obviously a lot of other very influential investors and founders like yourself
20:58 and some very large but private tech startup companies. I'm just curious what your takeaway was from the vibe there.
21:04 Maybe I'm going to be a little blunt. Forgive me and what I'm about to say, but I've never seen so many smart, amazing people say absolutely nothing while using so many words.
21:12 Look, I've been very fortunate. Maybe, you know, my background and I've worked very closely with some of these folks.
21:17 So I'm not trying to say anything super obnoxious, but dear fucking God, can you get on stage and say something?
21:24 Their media training is getting so good. They've spent too much time with Katie and her expertise.
21:29 One of the big problems in Silicon Valley these days, if you think about it, is Silicon Valley companies, the big tech companies have become so large, so powerful
21:37 that their CEOs sit there and they basically play defense because any time they open their mouth, their employees want to jump at them.
21:43 Anytime they open their mouth, the regulators want to jump at them. And anytime they open their mouth, the shareholders want to jump at them.
21:49 So they've iterated to this magical world where they come on stage, they spend an hour basically saying, really, like, fuck all nothing.
21:57 Tell me I'm wrong. And you know I'm Sundar's biggest fan. Like, I think he's an amazing human.
22:01 But tell me the thing that Sundar said or tell me the thing that Tim said. And this is my issue.
22:04 Probably the most interesting one was in some ways Bob Iger, because he's like, look, I'm not running a company anymore.
22:09 So let's say it like it is. And that's what I think is in some ways incredibly bad for society at this point,
22:15 because you do have these people that could materially change the world, but are shying away from it.
22:21 And that's not really great. I think we're going to end up in a world where this is actually much worse for all of us.
22:26 All right. Well, actually, that's a pretty good segue because you started a company in 2016 that basically wants to make the world a lot better for all of us.
22:36 Talk to us a little bit about Forward, how it came about. I heard about it on the stage at Code.
22:40 It sounds like you guys are moving very fast to fix a problem that has been, I don't know if you'd say it's just kind of been pushed under the rug.
22:48 It seems like almost generationally here in America and you're trying to use some of your expertise working at some of these large companies.
22:55 You sold an AI company right to Google years ago.
22:58 And so talk to us a little bit about how you came up with the idea for Forward and what the problem is you're trying to solve.
23:03 Yeah. So in some ways, it does kind of segue well, because it actually kind of half deals with my frustrations from the big tech companies and half deals with my hope for humanity.
23:13 So I was at Google, you know, as you mentioned, sold an AI company to them and helped build out a bunch of the AI division over there.
23:20 But after doing that, I spent a few years roughly as kind of Larry Page's right hand man, helped him kind of create Alphabet and create a bunch of the Alphabet companies.
23:30 And the whole thesis of this was it was awesome. I mean, it was incredible. It was like, look, we've got this war chest of money.
23:36 We've got all this talent. Imagine being like Michelangelo and painting and looking around and like, holy shit, it's the Renaissance.
23:42 Well, we are engineers in the middle of the information revolution. Like we could not be better positioned to affect the future of humanity.
23:49 So we said, like, it's incumbent upon us to go improve the world.
23:53 Let's go take on some of the largest problems of the entire world and see what we can do to contribute back to humanity.
24:00 In some ways, this is fantastic. This is wonderful. You would say, like, how could anybody be better set up for this?
24:05 But at the same time, what you actually find is the reality of that doesn't come to bear.
24:11 So it turns out that large companies have a lot of trouble getting out of their own way, whether it's the regulators, whether it's literally your own employees.
24:19 And that could be the individual contributors, frankly, just the management teams fighting with themselves.
24:24 And so as an example, one of the things that I was really excited by, I really wanted to go into health care.
24:29 So I have a brother and my brother, aside from picking on me nonstop when we were kids, when he was older, he had the unfortunate circumstance of having a heart attack.
24:38 And I kind of watched what he went through and I said, this is all the stuff you and I know, right?
24:42 Like the health care system is just garbage. It wasn't there for them. It's a shitty experience. It costs a lot.
24:47 Every single part of this was garbage. And I said, we have to do better.
24:50 And then I kind of looked into it even a little more. And I looked around and I was like, and this is from a guy who's, you know, a high earner in New York and one of the most developed cities on the planet.
24:59 Imagine what the rest of the planet has. I mean, this is really just garbage.
25:03 And so one of the things that I did was actually while I was at Alphabet at Google, I said, you know what, let's go and let's acquire One Medical.
25:12 I had this idea far, far, far before Amazon. And I went and I sat with the founder of One Medical, really nice guy, Tom Lee.
25:20 And you know what? He had a really kind of interesting reaction. So I went up to him and I said, you know what, Tom, let's pretend I buy you tomorrow and I give you billions of dollars.
25:28 What are you going to do? Tell me the brave new world that you're going to create. And he told me something that was just seared in my brain.
25:35 He said, you know what, Adrian, in health care, technology investment is not ROI positive.
25:41 And I was like, what the fuck? Like, what are you talking about? And fucking gardening is ROI positive. Like how on earth in health care is it not ROI positive?
25:50 But think about what he was saying. What he was saying is when he invests in engineers, he doesn't really get that money back. Now, why?
25:59 Well, it just turns out that in a world based on like billing codes in a world in which you only make money in the world of health care based upon these insurance decided codes for procedures,
26:12 it turns out that optimizing what you're doing does not get you a different billing code. So you ask yourself, well, why does my doctor not, I don't know, sequence my DNA?
26:20 Why does my doctor not ingest my Apple Watch data or my Strava data? Sure. It turns out there's no billing code for that. Right.
26:26 And so at the end of the day, you're just going to waste a bunch of money. And so you have a system that's literally not incentivized to get better and better and better.
26:33 And so obviously I looked at that and I said, well, hold on. This is why they've iterated to pretty couches, not preventing cancer.
26:40 So why on earth would you ever acquire this thing? That's a disastrous idea. Right. And so all of a sudden I looked and I was like, wait, what do we need to do if we really want health care to get better?
26:50 Now, when you take that frame and you kind of look around, you look at the entire health care system as it is today, you actually start to kind of realize that the whole health care system and everything that we talk about
27:02 is not innovation in care. It's financial innovation from ACOs to Medicare to high deductibles to Obamacare and the ACA. All of this shit was financial innovation.
27:14 You know, it's not getting better. My fucking heart. It turns out that financial innovation does not prevent cancer. You know, it just turns out very basic science.
27:21 It turns out not a single person at all. These companies is actually working on the actual care innovation.
27:27 And you know this because imagine going up to your kids one day and just telling them what it was like to go to a doctor. It's like, well, OK, wait, mom.
27:34 So you're telling me you walked into a room and there was this dude in a white coat and you just told them what was going on and they just kind of defined what was wrong with you.
27:42 Like, are you fucking kidding me? You went up to a fortune teller. Let's be real. Doctors are kind of the fortune tellers of our time. It's not their fault. Right.
27:50 They went to massive school like they're super smart. They mean well. It's our fault. Like we just haven't built them good tools.
27:57 Like imagine if you took your BMW to the dealer, you walk in, you're like, my BMW is making some sounds.
28:03 The mechanic just sits there, strokes their beard and they're like, ah, it's your carburetor. What are you going to say? You're like, fuck you.
28:08 Plug your damn laptop into the thing and tell me what's going on. Right. And so you realize is like you literally will not take the substandard care for your BMW.
28:17 You're like, no, I want the technology for my BMW. Yet you will take it for your body.
28:22 So for some reason, just think about it. You walk up to a software engineer and you ask them to build you a website. What do you do?
28:28 You hand them a laptop, which is the sum culmination of all human advancement in the most beautiful two pound device that you've ever seen.
28:35 But for some reason, it's totally OK to go up to a doctor and say, save my life. And you start by handing them.
28:40 I shit you not a stethoscope, a hollow tube invented in the eighteen hundreds. You know, when your kids want to like, you know, hear what you're saying in the other room.
28:49 What do they do? They take a glass to the door. Right. Come on. We have to do better than this.
28:53 And so what you realize is we've been stuck in the stone ages. And so all of a sudden, all I realized was if you actually want health care to be better, the first step is really, really simple.
29:03 You have to align your incentives. You actually have to work for the customer. I always like to think of it as like we're kind of in the Blackberry age and somebody needs to build the damn iPhone.
29:12 You remember Blackberry was like, we're going to build for your IT department and it's going to, I don't know, do security shit and I teach it. It's like, great, that's fine.
29:18 I don't care about that. I want the phone to do what I want. And so Apple comes out and like, hi, IT department. No, we're not going to give you all your security bullshit.
29:27 But you know what we're going to give you a phone that fucking works. And so that's what I got. I got a phone that works. And all of a sudden, everybody's like, wait a minute, this is what phones could look like.
29:36 And the world takes off and you get this mobile computing revolution. Well, now I would ask you, what would health care look like if it was built for you?
29:43 And all of a sudden you're like, wait a minute, you mean health care could catch things before they happen? Wait, you mean health care could be on my terms?
29:50 Let's just ask ourselves a really, really simple question. What would health care look like if it was made by Apple? All of a sudden, when I get the flu, the flu would be a very different experience.
30:00 Let's just kind of play out the analogy. Imagine that you're a Ford member and you have our mobile app and you find a bug in the mobile app. You're really annoyed.
30:08 So you walk up to Jess on our engineering team and you say, hey, Jess, do me a favor. Will you fix this bug? Jess is really nice. She fixes the bug. She sends you on your way.
30:15 The next day, Katie, you have the same bug. You walk up to Jess. You know what? She's nice. She fixes the bug. She sends you on your way.
30:21 Next day, I have the bug. I walk up to Jess. She fixes the bug. She sends me on my way. At some point, I'm Jess's boss. What the hell should I do?
30:28 I should fucking fire Jess. Just fix the damn bug once and for all. What the hell, right? Now let's pretend you have the flu.
30:34 You walk up to one of our doctors. Doctor fixes the flu, sends you on your way. Next day, Katie has the flu. Katie walks up to the doctor, fixes the flu, sends you on your way.
30:42 Next day, I have the flu. I walk up to the doctor. Doctor fixes the flu, sends me on my way. At some point, why am I not firing the doctor? Just fix the damn flu once and for all.
30:51 And now you realize the world that we live in. We live in a world where literally something as common as the damn flu that we've seen billions of times has literally not been fixed.
31:00 How are we accepting this? This is the flu. If we can't fix the damn flu, how are we going to prevent cancer and heart attacks, things that are actually killing us?
31:07 And that's the world that we need to get to. We need to get to a world where healthcare is actually a product that is truly invested in with real technology.
31:15 And that's what we're trying to build here at Ford.
31:17 Amen. Adrian, that was so good. And I had told Dan we have to get Adrian on the pod because, one, he's really smart. Two, he's very opinionated.
31:27 And that makes for a really great podcast. And I want to share, too, the origin story of me meeting you, which was very early in my investing career where I was just kind of angel investing.
31:38 I really didn't know too much at the time, but I knew the fundamentals of investing, which is just investing in determined, focused, relentless, smart people.
31:48 And I think Elad Gil, maybe the most prolific, amazing investor of all time, who was a mutual friend of ours from Google, he had made the intro.
31:56 And then we had met via #Angels, our investment collective. And I now have probably invested in over 100 companies and have probably met thousands of founders.
32:06 And there are maybe 5 founders that I vividly remember exactly the pitch, the moment and the "Yes," and you are one of them.
32:17 I remember sitting at my kitchen table. We were having this conversation. And your message is very consistent, which is remarkable because most founders will kind of pivot and jiggle around a little bit.
32:28 But I remember you giving the metaphor of like, why is it that we can walk into the Apple store, someone is there to greet us, they diagnose our problem instantly, and very quickly we can leave with the solution to our problem?
32:43 Whereas you go into the doctor's office, and there's a delay, somebody has to go through like records, they don't really know. And then the big question, who's going to pay?
32:54 And I remember just hearing your story and how you're going to make going to the doctor feel like going to the Apple store. And I was like, "I'm in," just in that moment.
33:03 And I am very, very proud to be a small angel investor and to know you. And now, literally, I will send for everyone else's benefits, I will send most of the health tech companies I look at back to Adrian like, "What do you think? Is this going to work? Are they full of shit? Is this going to help solve this problem?"
33:21 Because I think you've had your thumb on this problem for a very long time and have really helped move the industry forward. So thank you.
33:27 Well, you're very kind. We wouldn't be here today if it wasn't for your support. So I really, really do appreciate it. You touched on something that's kind of really interesting, which is you said you've been consistent since the start.
33:36 And I think the reason for that isn't that we haven't quote unquote, "pivoted." The reason for this is in some ways, I think we've pivoted more than almost any company you've ever seen.
33:44 It's just that most companies when they start, what they fixate on, like if you walk up to any of your friends, you're like, "I'm starting a company." What's the first thing they say? "Great. What's your company do?"
33:54 "I don't know. We build widgets." And so every single person, what they do is they fixate on the solution. And at Forward, we do not fixate on the solution. We fixate on the problem. Problems matter more than solutions.
34:07 So from the beginning, the only thing that we've ever cared about – it's very, very simple. We want to get healthcare to billions of people. That's it. We don't actually care how we do it.
34:15 So today we build doctors' offices. We put doctors in them. I'll actually tell you right now really simply, there is no chance in hell that doctors' offices with doctors in them ever scales to billions of people.
34:25 So we know that that's wrong. Think of how weird that is. I just told you that every single thing that we do today, we know 100% for certain is not what we will be doing in N years.
34:35 But that's okay because once you take that mentality and you care more about the problem than the solution, you realize that all you're doing every single day is just trying to learn the right answers. We're just trying to iterate to a better and better solution.
34:47 So our strategy is incredibly simple. We know that healthcare for a billion people – if I just came up to you and I said, "Look, I want to get doctors to the whole planet, middle of India, the middle of Rwanda. I want to get doctors to billions of people."
34:58 You're going to say, "Well, wait a minute, Adrian. Where are you going to get all these doctors and who the hell is going to pay for them?"
35:03 But if I walked up to you and I said, "Hey, I want to get smartphones to the whole planet. I want to get smartphones to the middle of India, the middle of Rwanda to billions of people."
35:10 You're going to say, "Well, hold on, Adrian. I think it's already happened. I think you're late to the game."
35:15 So what do you intuitively know? Well, you kind of intuitively know that humans don't scale in a way that technology does.
35:21 Another way to say it is doctors don't scale in a way that hardware and software does.
35:26 So at Forward, we only have one key insight that we believe that no one else believes, which is we believe healthcare should be a product, not a service.
35:33 In other words, we just want to take every single thing that doctors and nurses are doing and just migrate it over to hardware and software.
35:39 That way, we can scale it up to billions and billions of people.
35:44 We know that technology scales, and we know that if we do this, we can get healthcare out, we can make healthcare equitable to the whole planet.
35:51 So if you think about what we're doing, you can almost think of the doctors' offices that we build now, I think, I don't know, 25 of them all across the nation, as roughly being our Model S.
36:00 And at some point, we need to go to our Model 3.
36:02 So in essence, what we're doing is we're just watching every single thing that happens inside of them.
36:07 You come in, you sit in the exam chair, you talk to your doctor about the flu, and we immediately go, "Wait a minute. Why did you even come in? Why not build that into the mobile app?"
36:15 Next person comes in, they sit in the exam chair, they talk to their doctor about their skin issues, we build a skin scanner.
36:21 Next person comes in, they sit in the exam chair, they talk to their doctor about their heart issues, we build a body scanner.
36:26 Slowly but surely, what you see we're doing is we're just migrating every single thing from doctor and nurse to hardware and software.
36:33 At the limit, Forward doesn't build doctors' offices, we just build hardware and software.
36:38 In fact, we don't even believe doctors' offices should exist.
36:41 And so the key from the very beginning was fixate on the problem because problems will not change.
36:47 It's not like the whole planet's going to get health care tomorrow.
36:49 By the way, if they do, I'm happy to go work on the next problem, climate change, or you name it.
36:53 I'd be very happy with that.
36:54 But the thing I would just emphasize to anyone, if I can just give you one piece of advice, if I can have the arrogance to do that, is please care more about problems than solutions.
37:02 Your solution will change a million times, problems tend not to change.
37:06 That's great feedback.
37:07 And maybe double-clicking on that, one of the biggest problems, I think, in health care are the billing codes.
37:14 And you had talked about this, the lack of incentives and the lack of aligned incentives.
37:20 So talk to us a little bit about your business model.
37:23 How are you able to get this to even work?
37:25 Who pays?
37:26 So good news, there are no billing codes in our system.
37:28 We don't understand billing codes.
37:29 We don't do this ICD and CPT.
37:31 And honestly, I barely understand them myself, so I'm about to say something stupid.
37:35 Whenever I talk about the health care industry, I honestly say something incredibly stupid.
37:39 In fact, I'll give you a really good story, and then I'll answer your question.
37:41 The other day, I was going to be on a panel with a bunch of health care system CEO folks.
37:46 And so somebody on our team, this really smart girl, was prepping me for it.
37:49 And she was like, "Just so you know, this one, they run a Medicare system.
37:53 This one, they run a Medicaid system."
37:55 And I looked at her, and I was like, "Hey, what's the difference between Medicare and Medicaid?"
37:59 And she just looks at me, and she turns completely white.
38:01 And she goes, "What do you mean you don't know the difference between Medicare and Medicaid?
38:04 You run a national health care system.
38:06 What do you mean you don't know the difference?"
38:08 And I look at her, and I'm like, "Well, hold on."
38:09 But it's almost like going up to Larry Page and being like, "What do you mean you don't know how the Dewey Decimal system works?"
38:14 It's like, "I'm not trying to build the Library of Congress.
38:16 I'm trying to build Google."
38:17 And so fundamentally, we do not want to rebuild the existing system.
38:22 We want to build a new system.
38:24 And so step one for us was we said, "Who should be your customer?"
38:28 Just from first principles, just ask yourself, "Who do you want to work for?"
38:31 And we realized from day one, our customer should be the member, should be the end user, right,
38:36 the person we want to keep alive and the person we want to keep healthy.
38:38 So we work directly with you, right?
38:40 You pay us.
38:42 That is the most simple model you could possibly come up with.
38:44 There's no fanciness here.
38:46 And then we went a step further and we said, "But how should they pay us?"
38:49 And most doctor's offices are episodic, what I think of as like a repair shop for humans.
38:54 You wait for something to go wrong, you pay them, they fix you.
38:56 But if you think about it, that's kind of fucked up.
38:58 You don't want to wait for something to go wrong.
39:00 You want it to never go wrong in the first place.
39:02 And so actually, we're a subscription model.
39:04 And so what you do is you just pay us monthly.
39:06 Okay, again, pretty basic.
39:08 I think you can explain this to a 4-year-old and they would understand.
39:10 Okay, now we charge $149 a month.
39:14 And immediately you go, "Wait a minute, this breaks down, Adrian."
39:17 Because if you want to get to the middle of India and you want to get to the middle of Rwanda,
39:20 they can't afford $149 a month.
39:22 So what the fuck are you doing? Walk me through it.
39:24 And here's where you just have to remember how technology works.
39:26 Almost like when Elon comes out and he says, "I'm going to solve climate change.
39:29 Here's a $140,000 sports car."
39:31 And you're like, "What are you talking about, dude?"
39:33 And then 15 years later, he comes out with this thing called the Model 3.
39:36 Or I remember the first personal computers were like, I don't know, $3,000.
39:40 And they're like, "The whole world's never going to get these."
39:42 And then in the middle of India, we've got personal computers for $20.
39:45 Well, same thing.
39:46 If you remember the whole pitch, the whole pitch is, "Wait a minute, we're going to shift healthcare
39:50 from being a labor-based business to a technology-based business."
39:53 Well, once you're a technology-based business, once you're based on hardware and software,
39:56 you get to do this awesome thing, which is you get to ride this curve called Moore's Law.
40:00 And what I love about Moore's Law is it decreases logarithmically,
40:03 aka today we charge $149 a month.
40:06 Pretty soon, $99.
40:08 Then $79, then $59, then $49, then $39.
40:10 And now you see where we're going.
40:12 We're actually pretty well on our way towards $99.
40:14 Go to our website, and basically at all times, we're discounting to $99.
40:17 So we're getting there, we're getting there.
40:19 And it's early, but that's where we're going to go.
40:21 So our whole mission is healthcare for a billion people for free.
40:24 That's what we want to do.
40:25 And we're either going to get healthcare to the middle of Rwanda, or frankly,
40:28 we're just going to leave an enormous crater of destruction in our path to do so.
40:31 There's no middle ground for us.
40:32 This is why we're here.
40:33 - So Adrian, in your pinned tweet, we like to check out people's tweets a little bit here.
40:38 You laid out a little bit of a mission statement, maybe a gauntlet.
40:41 And you were asking the question of what's wrong with the healthcare system.
40:44 And you basically laid out some of which what you just talked about a little bit
40:48 with the codes and all this stuff.
40:50 It really is the insurance infrastructure here.
40:53 But that's primarily a U.S. thing.
40:55 And you talk a lot about what you can do globally.
40:58 Is it really meant to figure out how to fix the system here
41:02 and then broaden it out globally?
41:04 Because of the tech-enabled platform that you're building,
41:07 you do have the ability to just kind of push it out
41:09 and maybe some domiciles that are just easier to do it with.
41:12 - People tend to think of the U.S. healthcare system as materially different
41:16 than, I don't know, the U.K. healthcare system.
41:18 People love to come to our country here and be like,
41:20 "Ah, you guys have shitty healthcare, but you know what?
41:22 I'm from the U.K. and I've got great healthcare.
41:24 I'm from France and I've got great healthcare."
41:26 Look, I'm French originally.
41:27 I'll tell you, bullshit. Flat out bullshit.
41:29 And so let's just ask ourselves a really simple question.
41:32 What is life expectancy in the U.S.?
41:34 And how does it compare to life expectancy basically anywhere else on the planet?
41:38 Is there someplace on the planet where people live to like 250 years old?
41:41 No.
41:42 If you got cancer today, are you like, "Oh, no worries.
41:44 I'm just going to fly to London and all of a sudden my cancer's cured"?
41:47 No, it's the same fucking thing.
41:48 It's literally the same fucking thing.
41:50 Again, all we talk about is the financial innovation difference.
41:53 The product delta is the thing that actually matters.
41:56 And the product is the same damn product wherever you go.
42:01 So actually the only reason that the system matters is because the system hasn't fostered the innovation.
42:06 The system hasn't allowed the product to develop.
42:09 But at some point you just have to be like, "We're all on landlines and we want fucking iPhones.
42:13 No one built the damn iPhone. We're on landlines.
42:16 I don't care what country you're in."
42:17 And so I want to build the damn iPhone of healthcare.
42:20 And once you have that, then I want to export that to every damn country that you possibly can,
42:25 to literally hundreds and hundreds of countries.
42:27 But at the end of the day, to me, what system you happen to operate in of insurance, etc.,
42:32 is all like inconsequential and bullshit.
42:34 Can we just make the things so inexpensive that we don't even need any of that?
42:38 That's the world I want to live in.
42:40 Okay, I want to go back to the practical stuff about what you get for your membership.
42:45 So this is your marketing section.
42:47 Tell us where you have locations.
42:49 What do people get for their $149 or $99?
42:52 And I'd love to know a little bit too the data that you're seeing in aggregate.
42:55 Like what are the most requested features or services that people have?
42:59 So the goal of Forward, just to be super, super clear,
43:03 is we want to rebuild the entire healthcare system for the entire planet from the ground up.
43:09 So when I say everything, I mean everything.
43:12 From open-heart surgery to delivering babies to oncology to pharma, we want to do it all.
43:17 But we want to do it all as a product.
43:19 So don't expect surgeon and oncologist.
43:22 Expect product. Expect hardware and software.
43:25 Now, to get there is obviously a long road.
43:28 It's a long path.
43:29 So it's a little like when you got your first iPhone.
43:31 I don't know, for folks that are listening in, if you remember, like, the first iPhone a whole bunch of years ago,
43:35 it was this, like, really cool phone, but it didn't have all the apps yet.
43:38 It didn't have, I don't know, the Spotify's and the Netflix's.
43:41 Those had to get built out over time.
43:43 So you start with the phone, and then every single day what we're doing is we're just watching
43:48 what we have to refer our members out to the existing system for.
43:52 And every time we do, we just say, dear God, we should have just built that in-house.
43:56 So early on we realized we were referring our members out for things like genetic counseling,
44:00 and we said, oh, let's build that in-house.
44:02 Now we sequence your DNA.
44:04 We tell you what risks you're going to have, like which diseases you're going to develop later on in life.
44:08 We then advise you on how to prevent those.
44:10 Then we did things like we built a body scanner that helps us track what's happening to your body over time.
44:14 We built skin scanning to help us catch things like your skin cancers.
44:18 We do things like managing your prescriptions.
44:20 We do things like helping you with your heart health.
44:23 We do a bunch around women's health and men's health.
44:25 We do everything from doing things like your blood tests and your urine tests
44:29 to helping you with things like weight loss and mental health.
44:32 And every day what we're doing is we're just adding more and more of these services.
44:36 So we become your doctor.
44:37 We are your doctor.
44:39 We do not upsell you.
44:40 There's no extra for blood tests or whatever.
44:42 There's no co-pays.
44:43 We don't do any of that bullshit.
44:44 And then what we're doing is just every day we're adding more and more of these services.
44:48 We're live today in roughly, I don't know, about 20, 25 cities,
44:52 basically most major cities in the U.S.
44:54 And we're expanding pretty fast.
44:56 You can go into the locations.
44:58 You can communicate from your phone, from your laptop.
45:00 And we're there kind of by your side all the time.
45:04 What's pretty cool is most doctor's offices, they want to see you once or twice a year.
45:07 We want to see you 100 times a year.
45:09 That's why you've got this thing called a mobile app.
45:11 So you can communicate with us literally as much as you want,
45:14 but we're also going to monitor your metrics and check in with you
45:17 and kind of keep up and tell you what you need to be doing because, again,
45:20 the whole goal is to be preventive.
45:22 And once we identify the main things that you should be working on,
45:25 we're going to go ahead and kind of check in with you.
45:27 So we're just at the beginning of the long road that we want to go down,
45:30 but already it seems to be working pretty well and people are pretty much liking it.
45:33 So hopefully that gives you some sense of where we are and where we want to go.
45:37 I love that.
45:38 Well, I'm excited for you to hopefully open one in Boulder, which is where I live.
45:42 I think we're in Denver now.
45:43 We're not in Boulder, but we are in Denver.
45:45 Okay, close enough.
45:46 And I love that you've been pushing us and the industry, frankly,
45:49 from this sick care system that we live in to ultimately the real health care system
45:54 that we ought to live in.
45:56 And maybe lastly, for you to talk a little bit about what are sort of the open
46:01 opportunities that you're most excited about in health care,
46:05 like AI for pathology or radiology, dermatology,
46:08 what are the categories or subcategories that you're really excited about?
46:12 So if you take a step back and you think about health care, in some ways,
46:16 the biggest thing that we are missing from the world of health care is,
46:20 and that is going to be kind of a counterintuitive view,
46:23 is not actually these point solutions that anybody's going after.
46:26 It's not the, hey, let's go build the thing for radiology
46:28 and let's build the thing for pathology, et cetera.
46:30 It's actually the number one thing that we are missing today is actually
46:33 that the rate of innovation in health care is abysmal.
46:36 And so when you think about why the mobile computing revolution took off,
46:40 it really comes down to the fact that 22-year-old at Stanford named Kevin
46:44 Systrom could sit at home, have an idea, and push it out to the world,
46:48 and boom, we all have Instagram.
46:50 Or Daniel Eck can push out Spotify to the world like that.
46:53 And so the cost of innovation goes down, which means the rate of innovation
46:57 goes up.
46:58 And like anything, you get this compounding effect.
47:01 And so today the biggest problem in health care is actually just that
47:05 the cost of innovating in health care is wild.
47:08 It's just insane.
47:09 And so the number one thing that I think that Ford can bring to bear
47:13 is actually just lowering the cost of innovation.
47:16 Namely, if you were at Kaiser today, let's just take a simple example,
47:20 and you just say, you know what, we want to change in people
47:23 with high blood pressure, we want to change them from this med
47:25 to this med.
47:26 You literally, I'm not joking, it will take you roughly one to two years
47:29 to get Kaiser to switch the med that they use.
47:32 If you want to do it at Ford, take you, I don't know,
47:35 you can do it this afternoon.
47:36 Roll out that change, you're good to go.
47:38 And so what you realize is that that pace of innovation is wild.
47:42 Now, when you innovate quickly, you can change the world
47:46 in a super rapid rate.
47:48 And so I think that the biggest effect that you're going to see in health care,
47:51 the things that are really going to change the world of health care,
47:54 is not that Ford is going to come across all these discoveries.
47:58 But it's that Ford over time will enable others to come across
48:02 all these discoveries.
48:03 And to me, that's the part that's going to be really fascinating.
48:06 When the people who want to work on radiology don't have to go stand up
48:10 all of this nonsense, but that they can actually go ahead and build
48:13 on top of the tools that we've built for them, and kind of start
48:16 to experiment at a super, super rapid rate.
48:19 To me, that's where the world is going to become incredibly interesting.
48:22 Adrian, it seems very Web 3 for health care is what you just described
48:25 in some ways.
48:26 If you put Web 3 anywhere near my fucking company,
48:29 I'm going to literally come through this screen,
48:32 and I don't know what I'm going to do, but it ain't going to be pretty.
48:35 Way to wrap up the podcast, Dan.
48:37 A year ago, you might have been really open to that.
48:40 No. I literally asked Katie, she's like, "Hey, Adrian,
48:43 what sort of deals are you investing in?"
48:45 And I'll literally reply, "Anything but crypto and NFT."
48:48 I need things that actually build value.
48:51 Come on. Build something. Make something.
48:54 Use your own two fucking hands. That's my deal.
48:56 Okay. Let's end on a better note.
48:59 Who inspires you?
49:01 Who are the founders?
49:02 Who are the writers that you get excited about?
49:06 I'm maybe not that original, but I get the opportunity.
49:09 I was very lucky early on in my career, I got the opportunity
49:11 to work for Bill Gates.
49:13 More recently, as you know, I worked a lot for Larry Page.
49:15 I mean, I'm an engineer at my core, and I think that people
49:19 who are very, very strong multimodal engineers are the people
49:23 that I tend to gravitate towards working with Larry Page.
49:26 His ability to both think at large scale and cross domains
49:32 is pretty incredible.
49:33 You would sit in a meeting with Larry talking about how to
49:36 construct the world's largest building, which we were working on,
49:39 while at the same time, he would say, "Yes, but what you're missing
49:42 is that one time when we were putting a satellite in space,
49:46 we used this technology."
49:47 That ability is really, really fascinating.
49:49 That's something that I feel is really incredible,
49:52 and I took with me.
49:53 Now, in some ways, maybe something that impresses me more,
49:57 because it's maybe something that I don't think I will ever be good at,
50:00 whereas I do think I can get good at the Larry Page thing,
50:02 was actually in some ways, I think something that Steve Jobs has
50:06 that you don't see in maybe a Howard Hughes or a Larry Page
50:09 or an Elon Musk, is a little, actually, what they talked about
50:13 at the Code Conference.
50:14 Steve surrounded himself with poets and artists in a way where
50:18 he surrounded himself with non-engineers.
50:20 In fact, Steve maybe, not to say something mean,
50:22 but maybe wasn't the best engineer.
50:23 If you don't believe me, go open the apps on your iPhone.
50:26 I just got this new iPhone on Friday, and it makes me log in
50:29 to 400 different apps with 400 different usernames and passwords.
50:32 It's like, well, obviously, that was parable architecture.
50:34 You can imagine that actually there's a bunch of things
50:36 that he engineered poorly, but he designed fantastically.
50:41 I think there's an element of art in what he did
50:44 that you don't see in pure engineering, and that's something
50:48 that I would absolutely love to learn or experience.
50:51 Frankly, I don't think I'll ever be great at that.
50:53 I had the opportunity to go work with him.
50:56 That was another potential acquirer.
50:58 We had an offer from my last company to go to Apple instead of Google,
51:01 and part of me wishes maybe that was a better road to have taken.
51:04 So I don't know. I can't replay history, but certainly,
51:07 that's someone who inspires me as well.
51:09 Well, Adrian, we really appreciate you joining us here
51:11 straight from the Code Conference to OK Computer with Katie and myself.
51:15 Really fascinating stuff, what's going on with Forward,
51:17 and I think you sitting there or standing on a stage
51:20 in front of many of your tech peers who probably get a lot of the stuff
51:23 that you're talking about, but they haven't thought about applying it
51:26 to such a big problem the way you are doing it with health care.
51:30 So for us, it's really fantastic to have you with us.
51:32 We hope you'll come back and just kind of update us
51:34 on the progress of Forward. So thanks for joining us.
51:36 If you are willing to have me back and not talk about Web 3,
51:41 I am willing to be back, my friend.
51:43 It's a promise.
51:44 You got it, man. Thanks, Adrian.
51:46 Thanks, Adrian.
51:48 Thanks again to our presenting sponsor, Current,
51:50 and our supporters, Masterworks and Taboola,
51:52 for bringing you this episode of OK Computer.
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52:00 And we want to hear from you.
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52:08 We'll see you next time.