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.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
Yeah, I think it's important to understand in all of this, the context of things and where are we sitting today? So if you and I were chatting, I came to the Bay Area in 1999 at the peak of the dot-com era. And the hottest startup at the time was a company called Webvan, right? So if you think about where we are today,
is we're really in the early 90s era of thinking about everything was a dot-com company and I kind of equate it to sort of AI. The fundamental, if you ask yourself, have we been transformed because of the internet? The answer is absolutely yes. Now, I think what you're trying to get to is where does the value sit over time?
And I think just because Webvan didn't work out, Instacart did, and there's business model changes, there's technology changes, there's cost structure changes that have happened over time for Instacart to be a success and for Webvan to be not a success.
And so when I think about, for example, I think you asked about DeepSeek and et cetera, there's been a race, Scott, on the sort of funding of these frontier models for LLMs. And so you've seen OpenAI, Anthropic, and the open source side, there's been a company out of France. There's billions of dollars that have gone into this space. And the reason why DeepSeek is so top of mind right now
Obviously, there's a sort of geopolitical arms race that's happening. Some have equated that this is the race towards the atom bomb, right? So there's a geopolitical race of who will develop the most in AI. I genuinely believe in American dynamism, as a lot of people have said, and I think there's been a phenomenal amount of development done here.
The reason why DeepSeek is so top of mind for people is twofold. One is Again, the news is just coming out, and I think everyone should do their own research. But the cost structure, because of the sanctions on NVIDIA, the limitations that it put on, the cost structure is fundamentally quite different than what OpenAI or others can provide.
So there's a phenomenal difference in what cost of compute and the cost of accessing these frontier models. The second piece of this um, you know, obviously is there's a, there's now a sense because you can, you can, if you go to the app store, deep seek is the number one app, um, now over open AI. And there's an open question of how much data are we sending?
What's the sort of implications of that? There's actually, there's a lot more implications on supervised learning. There's a lot of implications on, you know, what does deep seek mean for the entire ecosystem for startups? But I sort of go back, Scott, again, my one advice for healthcare startups is, Focus on the last mile.
So if you think about compute data algorithms and sort of what is the application layer on the last side, if compute becomes cheaper for everyone, that's great for startups like Midstream and others. Because if you can think about the workflow, the challenges for the front end user, and deliver on a killer app for that person to make that person's life easier, it doesn't change one thing.
And so if you're a venture investor in one of these frontier models, I think there's a lot of implications you're asking, you're talking to yourself. But if you're fundamentally an AI startup in healthcare, this is net effect is there's an arms race happening and you need to focus on the last mile problem.
And by the way, you have to do it in a secure way with the right governance, with the right privacy. And so if you are using a model from DeepSeek, there's implications for that. But at the end of the day, it's as simple as that, Scott. Are you delivering value to the end user? So to me, my mantra has always been think about the last mile.
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I can completely empathize with that. And I think, you know, finding finding the right partner is half the battle in building a company in health care. So I think there's a couple of things, Scott. I think first is understanding there's a there's a sort of there's a famous book that's now been written for a long time called Crossing the Chasm.
And I think in written by the guy named Jeffrey Moore, I believe. But the thing about the crossing the chasm is think about your customers as a sort of like there's tiered of there's early adopters to sort of the late, you know, majority. Right. So Back in the day, there's a person who always lined up for getting the first iPhone to the person who's still using a flip phone.
And I think far too often, entrepreneurs focus on selling. They treat everybody like it's one sort of homogenous customer set. So I think... understanding and doing some research on who are the early adopters of technology and who like to be on the bleeding edge.
You know, systems, you know, in the health system world, you know, there's systems like common spirit that like to be on the bleeding and trying to think about new things. And in some cases, or New York Presbyterian, like in another, right?
So I think actually doing some homework on not just the systems, but who are the people inside these systems that have successfully brought in AI companies, navigated it through and have a perspective on what does it take to help you do that? So I think first step for any entrepreneur is do your homework and finding the right early adopters of technology. The second piece I would say
is trying to actually get to the core P&L owner because, you know, so often I think you might just have an idea, but the operator at the end of the day or the clinician or whoever your end user is can quickly tell you if it's worth their time or not.
And so you might spend all of this energy in navigating this organization, et cetera, but at the end of the day, that core user, if they're like, this is not worth my time, then all of it is a waste. So again, somebody told me early in my career, yeses are obviously great, but the quick no after that is your gift. What kills these companies is a maybe. Right.
So so so I think actually getting to that. And the last thing I'll sort of say is, gosh, you need you need a village to to like partner and collaborate with these health systems and payers and life sciences companies. And so, you know, I find the entrepreneur community, the investor community, other health systems, they're incredibly collaborative. And so ask, reach out for help.
And people like me or others who have been in this industry for a long time can kind of give you a little bit of sort of rules of the road. And so those are some thoughts, Scott. And then I will say, because there's so many AI companies, if you're an executive, I feel for them. Every day, their inbox is flooded with 100 new ideas.
Showing 141–160 of 203 · page 8 of 11
← Previous
Next →