Fireside Chat with Venkat Mocherla on Early Stage Investing and AI 1-30-15
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Who is Venkat Mocherla and what is his background?
Thank you folks so much for joining us. We're thrilled today to be joined on the Becker Private Equity and Business webinar with Venkit Mokurla. Venkit is a brilliant person and a terrific person. He's really two different things. He's an avid early stage investor who's invested across the board in a lot of healthcare companies and digital health companies. Part of his role at one point was Chief of Business Development a great company that grew into a really successful company in the healthcare analytics space. He's also served as an operating partner at Andreessen Horowitz, which is one of the most well-known names in healthcare investing, one of the great venture capital funds of our time.
Finally, Venk, it's the founder recently of a company called Midstream Health. We're going to get a chance to talk to Venkat today about a number of subjects, both investing, founding companies, use cases for AI. I'll probably try and bother him a little bit on what's happened today in the markets with deep seek and all these things with AI and the sort of tumult in the AI world. I'll encourage our audience at any time, text a question. There's a chat box. Send your question by chat or send it to me, Scott Becker at 773-766-5322. Venkat is a close colleague, a fellow investor. We're huge fans of his. Venkat, take a moment and tell us about yourself and your background.
Yeah, happy to, Scott. So great to do this with you, and I'm genuinely excited for this conversation. I've been quite lucky in my career. I've been in healthcare now for nearly 15 years, and my fortune is I've been at the intersection of technology, healthcare delivery, and company creation um so i started my career scott you know believe it or not 15 years ago we're talking about value-based care primary care transformation so i was at davida and a handful of us actually were hand-picked to figure out the future of the business beyond ckd and dialysis and so i got to work with a group of people many of whom I'm still in touch with, started a company called Palladina Health, which is now called Everside and now part of Marathon, I believe, which was the early innings of direct primary care and primary care transformation. And that was for me a blast because I was technically part of a 75,000 employee company.
You know, $6 billion, Fortune 500, but really we're just three or four of us trying to figure out a new company. And for me, as somebody, I grew up in India and I grew up in Silicon Valley, that bug of starting something from scratch kind of got onto me in 2010. I also, because, you know, I'm a big believer in not just thinking about American healthcare, but also around the world, I actually got to go work In the Middle East, I got to work in Europe. I got to work in Canada for a research and consulting firm called the Advisory Board. And then about 10 years ago, Scott became convinced that machine learning and AI applications in healthcare are going to play a big role. Fortunate enough to spend... to get to know three wonderful entrepreneurs out of Silicon Valley, a company that's now called Qventus.
And that was, Scott, if you remember 10 years ago, we're talking about AI now, left, right, and center, but 10 years ago, people were just talking about SaaS and healthcare. And that was an amazing thing to go see something not at a Fortune 500 scale, but, you know, see a couple of people and a couple of desks in a coworking space with an idea really that got started at El Camino Hospital in Mountain View to see how it scales. How does an idea like AI in at that point in time applying it for length of stay in clinical operations, how do you take it to many hospitals? And we did that. I was there through the series B, like you said, got to got to lead a bunch of the sort of business building efforts.
and work with that amazing team and then join Andreessen Horowitz where I was fortunate enough to work with I think some of the best minds in investing and operating and had a real passion for how do you develop a platform that can help and scale the best ideas, the best entrepreneurs to change and transform healthcare. So I was there for about five years
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
Who is Venkat Mocherla and what is his background?
0:00–10:09
2
What key challenges exist in healthcare today?
10:09–29:42
3
How do investors assess healthcare opportunities?
29:42
4
What role does AI play in healthcare and where is it headed?
28:02–41:01
5
What is the significance of unstructured data in healthcare?
41:01–50:58
6
How can healthcare startups succeed in the evolving market?
50:58
7
What are the implications of DeepSeek in the AI investment landscape?
42:29–48:49
8
How does user interface impact healthcare technology adoption?
48:49–53:46
Speakers
1 identifiedMore from Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
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