Vanessa Slowey: If You Need It, You Should Be Able to Get It | Ep 1319
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Welcome to Corozant Technologies, home of the Digital Executive Podcast. Do you work in emerging tech, working on something innovative, maybe an entrepreneur? Apply to be a guest at www.corozant.com forward slash brand. Welcome to the Digital Executive. Today's guest is Vanessa Sloey. Vanessa Sloey is the president and CEO of TeliRx, a vertically integrated telehealth pharmacy platform transforming how consumers access medications and healthcare. Drawing on more than 25 years of experience scaling high growth companies across international markets, Vanessa brings a unique perspective to the rapidly evolving intersection of healthcare, technology, and consumer behavior. Before joining TeliRx, Vanessa served as group CEO of Digicel Caribbean, Central and Latin America, where she led operations across 27 markets and oversaw more than $2 billion in revenue.
Well, good afternoon, Vanessa. Welcome to the show. Thank you so much for having me, Brian. Absolutely, my friend. I appreciate it. You're hailing out of the great state of Florida. Today, I'm in Kansas City, so we're just an hour apart. And I really appreciate that, making the time to get here. So Vanessa, if you don't mind, I'm going to jump into your first question here. Your path. is certainly remarkable from working in your family's pharmacy in Ireland to building Digicel Asia Pacific from scratch and selling it to Telstra for $1.6 billion to leading 27 markets and over $2 billion in revenue at Digicel Caribbean and now running a telehealth pharmacy. What connects that early experience behind the pharmacy counter to where you are today and what drew you back to healthcare after decades in global telecom?
In many ways, coming to Telerex feels like coming full circle because I grew up over my family's pharmacy in a very small town in the west coast of Ireland called Sligo. And I watched my father care for people in the community. One of my earliest jobs was delivering prescriptions on my bike. And what that meant, riding to the nursing home, a widow down the road or a farmer who couldn't leave during lambing season. My father had a very simple philosophy. If someone needed medication, he figured out how to get it to them. He didn't make access their problem. He made it his problem. Now connect that experience to telecoms because I carried that philosophy with me. even when my career took me into telecoms.
In many of the markets where DigiCell operated, connectivity wasn't a given. We needed to build the infrastructure and allow people to participate in an increasingly connected world. The technology here was completely different, but the underlying challenge was remarkably similar. How do you connect people to something they need and barrier stand in the way? So let's bring that forward to Telerix. Telerix brought those two parts of my career together. My roots in pharmacy and everything I'd learned by technology, infrastructure and scaling businesses. And today those lessons to healthcare and asking the same fundamental question my father did. How do we make it easier for
people to get what they need? Thank you so much. I appreciate that. Vanessa, love the backstory here. Obviously, you're very impressionable by your parents, by your father, helping people in the pharmacy. In fact, you talked about helping him help others. If someone needed medication, you talked about your father. He ensured there was a way they could get it no matter what. And that's just how he... how he was. And obviously that had a big impression on you serving others. But what I really like is you took your father's philosophy here and your vision was really to scale it to help not just maybe thousands in a local community, but millions around the world. And I appreciate that. Vanessa, on the surface, building mobile networks across places like Papua New Guinea and running a digital pharmacy seem worlds apart.
But your through line has always been access, connecting the unconnected. What actually transfers from scaling telecom in some of the world's hardest terrain to scaling health care access in the U.S.?
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