The Future of Healthcare Technology with Eli Lilly and Company's Diogo Rau
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What challenges does Diogo Rau see in healthcare technology?
Pushkin
Hello, hello, Revisionist History listeners. Happy New Year. 2025 is going to be a great year for this podcast, and I want to give you a little preview of what to expect. The main event of the year is going to be a multi-part series from Alabama, true crime, but with a very Revisionist History twist. So keep that in mind. Then before we drop that, we're going to do two other smaller things. If you remember last season, we did a series of interviews with screenwriters on their favorite ideas that never made it to the screen. We're doing another round of interviews this year, half a dozen or so. And then we're also going to do a smaller batch of old school revisionist history episodes, some weird, some funny, some that will break your heart.
Over here at Pushkin, we've been hard at work, all with the goal of bringing you a little bit of audio happiness. Stay tuned, everyone. Welcome to Revisionist History. We have a special treat today. I had a chance to sit down with a guy named Diogo Rao, who worked for years at Apple, way up high, and then left to become the chief information and digital officer at Eli Lilly and Company, one of the biggest drug makers in the world. Diogo, as you will learn, is irreverent and fascinating and sees a good 10 years ahead of the rest of us. At the end of our conversation, Diogo said to me, you know, we never got to AI, which is true. Can you imagine a conversation about technology so interesting that you never get to the subject of artificial intelligence? That's what you're about to hear. We're going to talk about a whole number of things, but I wanted you to start because you're a very unusual figure.
You work for Eli Lilly, but you are a very unusual figure at Eli Lilly. Is that a fair statement?
I think I have that reputation of being unusual. At least I like to try to do things a little bit differently.
No, no, I was talking about your background.
Yeah, yeah. You worked in the tech industry for how many years? I worked in the tech industry, well, really my whole life. But the last 10 years before I came to Lilly, I was at Apple. And before that, I was doing other kinds of technology work at McKinsey. And before that, I was in the startup world. So I've really spent my whole life in technology.
How many people do you think have moved from Apple to a life sciences company? About five. I know them all. Do you guys get together? I recruited most of them. Oh, I see. Yeah. And how did it, sorry, this is a kind of, I want to start on this little tangent, but how did that work exactly? So somebody comes to you and says, have you ever thought, to work for a pharma company.
Well, yeah, and that's the way a lot of these things start. There was a recruiter that I worked with who gave me a call and said, hey, I've got this opportunity. It's in life sciences. And I was like, I've never done anything in life sciences before. He's like, that's okay. So I look at the spec and the spec is, it's pretty interesting. So I'm like, okay, it's worth a phone call. And then I meet our CEO and our head of HR, and like, these people are really nice. And so that's like the second thing that I notice is that they're really, really, really nice. And that's a big difference, by the way, coming from versus the tech world. Happy to say a little more about that. And then I start talking to our head of research and development about some of the problems that we're trying to solve in life sciences. And I realized, wow, this is like a fascinating space. I kind of thought that like everything exciting in the world was happening in tech. And then I came to realize, no, actually, there's a lot of exciting stuff that's happening outside of just the tech world.
Yeah. So let's start. So you make this. When did you start your job at Lilly? May 17th, 2021. Wow. So go through, just off the top of your head, the most surprising things you learned moving from Silicon Valley to a life sciences company.
Well, the number one thing that I actually saw was actually the nice people part. But you know, the second thing that I noticed was really long time scales. Like the size and the duration of things is just beyond belief. My first executive committee meeting in 2021, we were talking about a revenue forecast that was for 2030. And that's nine years out.
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Chapters
5 chapters
1
What challenges does Diogo Rau see in healthcare technology?
0:04–5:30
2
How does the healthcare industry differ from tech in terms of timelines?
5:30–9:47
3
What is the significance of customer experience in healthcare?
9:47–20:35
4
How is Eli Lilly innovating against counterfeit medicines?
20:35–21:39
5
What new technologies is Eli Lilly developing for medicine safety?
21:39–28:31