Venkat Mocherla
speaker
203 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Jan 2025
last heard Feb 2025
Venkat Mocherla’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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And then left that to start a company, like you said, called Midstream, which is all about how do you advance financial sustainability in health care using AI? So that that's sort of my my my career trajectory. It's been it's been really fortunate to work with some amazing people. And I've tried many different purchase, if you will.
I think, look, I've been now. I've been fortunate enough to be part of startups in the last 15 years of all shapes and sizes. And I think about whether it's angel investing, starting my own company or, or helping an entrepreneur. And I've been fortunate enough to do that over and over again, which is that I think I think a lot, of course you start with a thesis and you know, your thesis,
You know, I've got one in sort of thinking about autonomy in health care, and I'm happy to get to that. But, you know, it doesn't take a genius to understand the challenge in health care. We have a massive workforce shortage. You know, we will be a couple hundred thousand physicians and six million nurses short by 2034.
If you ask any of your friends who are leading health systems, finding, you know, whether it's a phlebotomist or a back office function person is increasingly challenging. Second, we are way too expensive in this country. And, you know, how do we allow as the top economy in the world for a cancer patient to be five times more likely to be bankrupt as an average citizen?
You know, how are you spending more money than the Italian GDP, you know, in American health care? I mean, like Ferrari's pasta, the whole thing. And American health care outstrips all of that. Obviously, a big burden of that is the administrative function we built on the system. How are outcomes, frankly, not acceptable? How are we 55th in maternal outcomes in this country?
And then I don't have to talk about access and experience, ask anybody the number of people who probably ping you and me to say, hey, do you know someone? And then when unfortunately, when we ourselves have been through the system or a loved one, we don't have to talk about the experience. And so it doesn't take a genius got to sort of understand the problem set.
The question, I think it takes a special kind of entrepreneur, which is beyond the thesis. And I'm happy to talk about autonomy and health care. is the team. And I think in the early stage side, that's what we think a lot about, whether you're an angel investor or a seed stage investor.
It is that more than the product market fit, that founder market fit of a special kind of person who's willing to understand the payment flows, understand all the sort of regulatory policy stakeholders. Is it a payer, provider, life sciences? government sort of stakeholder play. If you're in pharmacy, there's so many stakeholders involved, like the PBM or any other middleman.
And then, you know, the timing of these things, the average sales cycle, which to me is just a way of how often does it take to take an idea and really start to play around with it? you know, you can say that it's a sales cycle, but that's 18 to 24 months. So by the way, you raise money for 18 to 24 months. So by the time you can get an idea to see it in place, you're running out of money.
And so it's a special kind of entrepreneur, Scott. And so when I think about, you know, my co-founder at Midstream, you know, Samit Kadakia, yes, he's built and scaled infrastructure, you know, a healthcare infrastructure company and a pharmacy from zero to 2,500 people. And he's been an entrepreneur, but
The reason he can go the distance is because his dad, he grew up in West Virginia, Scott, and, you know, as a rural physician, the four hospitals his dad's worked in before this have shut down. And so he's mission oriented to go the distance. When I think about, you know, someone you and I know, Mehul Mehta, who started a company called Fairy Health. Yeah, he's brilliant.
He's identified this amazing space on how do you apply AI for navigation. But his dad had an acute event and he and his brother got activated around, hey, this is not acceptable. We're really smart people. We've got means. And yet it's so hard to navigate this very complex health system. Or Vikas, in my mind, who...
worked at Glassdoor and is now trying to figure out how to navigate for physicians. And so there's this, there's a sort of, I think founder market fit. So we spend a lot about team and then timing. I think that things got, you know, Mark Andreessen famously said is that, you know, you gotta just admit that all ideas actually work out. The question is when.
you know, and that timing is, that's the last thing I'll sort of say is the timing.
Yeah, yeah. Look, I think it's a phenomenal point because I think if you and I talk to CEOs and CIOs all day long and the thing they're constantly thinking about is they've got a couple hundred, maybe if not a thousand vendors to think about. And if you're coming to them with saying, hey, I'm going to solve this little tiny problem for them.
The question that, by the way, crushes my soul to ask is like, is this on Epic's roadmap, which is basically like that pit in the stomach of this idea might not make it to a meeting. But I think, Scott, I'd say two things. One is that, look, you might be worried about point solution.
And if you're an investor, you're thinking about how does a great entrepreneur come up with a second and a third act? But let me be very clear. You have to nail the first act.
So I think that if the pain is so high that whatever I have, Epic, Microsoft, Oracle, whatever the platform that I have that's trying to solve everything, if the pain is still too high, I'm willing to sort of think about the second path. And so I think that you're right in the long term. No one point solution can make it. And you need a comprehensive map, I think.
But I think far too often entrepreneurs at least talk about platforms before they become one. And so you really want to think about the first act. That's great. I think over time, Scott, you're absolutely right. I think the question is, how do you build a space that is unique enough that where other people can exhibit?
I think in my experience in the last 10 years of working on AI companies, you know, from the days of Juventus to now Midstream, I think the core differentiation you have is not always in the technology, which increasingly can get commoditized. It is more in the last mile. It's like, how do you understand change management? Can you change someone's behavior? Do you understand the workflow?
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