Seed to Exit
Welcome to Seed to Exit, the ultimate podcast all about startups, scaling, and venture capital. Your host is Riece Keck: Startup veteran and recruitment entrepreneur.
Join us as we dive into the journeys of startup founders and venture capitalists who share their insights, successes, and lessons learned from seed stage to successful exit.
Each episode, we bring you candid conversations with startup founders, executives, and investors. Whether you're looking for inspiration, actionable advice, or a deeper understanding of the startup ecosystem, Seed to Exit offers invaluable knowledge and real-world experiences to help you on your entrepreneurial journey.
Tune in to Seed to Exit and get ready to be inspired, educated, and connected with the exciting and ever-changing world of startups and venture capital.
Seed to Exit
Kal Patel, Co-Founder and CEO of BrightInsight (Series C, $166m raised) | Transforming Healthcare Through Technology | Digital Pharma Solutions, Team Alignment, and Healthcare Reform Insights
Kal Patel discusses the intersection of technology and healthcare, emphasizing how BrightInsight aims to enhance patient outcomes through digital health solutions. The conversation explores the founding of Bright Insight, regulatory challenges, team culture, the importance of low-risk solutions, and the broader healthcare landscape.
• Kal Patel’s background and dual degrees in medicine and business
• The founding mission of Bright Insight to improve healthcare with technology
• Navigating regulatory requirements in digital health
• Importance of team culture and ownership in driving innovation
• Strategy of focusing on lower-risk, higher-volume healthcare solutions
• Growth and funding journey during early stages of Bright Insight
• The need for value-based care and alignment of healthcare incentives
All Links: linktr.ee/startup_recruiting
LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/riecekeck/
Twitter/X: x.com/tech_headhunter
Recruitment: www.mindhire.ai
Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@seedtoexitpod
The pharma business and our own business at Amgen. I firmly believe that we can leverage the power of data and digital technologies to improve how this amazing innovation our scientists had done and we had brought to market, how we could drive more impact for patients and do a better job of having these medicines work as intended for a bigger population, you know, over the longer term and so that was really the idea behind Gen Digital Health is how do we take, you know, the existing and future technologies that were coming and really wrap those around our drugs to drive better real-world impact?
Speaker 2:Today, I'm joined by Kal Patel, co-founder and CEO of Bright Insight, a company revolutionizing digital health with its medical grade cloud platform. Cal's career spans leadership roles at Amgen, doctor on Demand and Flex Digital Health, where he's driven innovative healthcare solutions at the intersection of technology and medicine. In this episode, we're going to talk more about Cal's journey, his insights into the digital health landscape and how Bright Insight is helping shape the future of healthcare. So with that, let's dive in. Welcome to Seed to Exit, the podcast where we uncover the stories, strategies and insights that power the startup ecosystem.
Speaker 2:I'm your host, rhys Keck, founder of MindHire, a talent acquisition firm specializing in helping startups build exceptional teams. Each week, I sit down with founders, investors and industry leaders to explore the journeys behind iconic companies and game-changing ideas. Whether you're building, investing or just curious about what it takes to succeed in the startup world, I want this podcast to be your go-to resource for actionable insights and inspiring conversations. Now, if you enjoy the show, please don't forget to subscribe, leave a review or share it with your network. Your support means the world and really helps bring more incredible conversations to life. Cal, thanks for coming on, excited to have you. Thanks for having me, rhys, looking forward to the conversation.
Speaker 2:Absolutely so I want to get things started by going a little bit deeper into your history. When I was doing some research on your background, I saw that you'd gotten your MBA and your MD simultaneously. Other than that sounding absolutely insane from a work perspective and study perspective, no idea how you pulled that off. You clearly had some motivations other than becoming a doctor by getting your MBA. So I was just curious what was your motivation behind that? What were your thoughts when you were starting your career?
Speaker 1:Yeah, happy to share on that. And I always had a strong interest in science and economics. I mean credit to all the great high school teachers out there, because that's what sparked my interest is having two phenomenal teachers in high school. I studied those topics in college, but I always had this desire to want to be a doctor, or at least go deeper on science, and so my plan was to go to medical school and be a practicing physician with an interest in the business side of things, and what I ended up doing was applying to medical school.
Speaker 1:But I had studied economics as my major and all my friends were looking at just the late 90s, looking at jobs in Silicon Valley, wall Street, consulting, et cetera and so I thought it might make sense to take a year off and get some real world experience, make some money, do some travel, and so I was fortunate enough to get a job in consulting at Boston Consulting Group, and that really had a profound impact on where I took my career, because the experience there opened up my eyes in terms of the importance. You know that really had a profound impact on where I took my career, because the experience there opened up my eyes in terms of you know the importance not surprisingly in retrospect of businesses and corporations and the ability you know at an early age to do work that can help them make better decisions and execute better and drive impact at scale. So I just kind of got attracted to this notion of like, how do you help an organization drive impact at scale? But I wanted to do that in health care. So I made the decision to do another year at BCG and then, when I actually started medical school because I deferred my admissions, I decided to do that MD because I made that decision up front.
Speaker 1:Even though I did two programs in four years, I probably had one of the more relaxing medical school experiences because, look, at the end of the day, I didn't have the unnecessary stress you know I did fine on my exams and did fine on my boards but I didn't have that overhang of like I got to get a certain score to get in a certain residency program, so so I was able to learn and pursue and be curious, you know, without that kind of added pressure. So that enabled me to, you know, balance both of those programs and and have a lot of fun and learn a lot along the way and and yeah, took that then back to the business side.
Speaker 2:Got it. So you were at Boston Consulting Group for about six years, you had a stint at Novartis and then, at a certain time, you founded the Amgen Digital Health Program. What was that like?
Speaker 1:Yeah, so just to quickly highlight what you said, the BCG years were largely focused on health care, just given my interest in my medical background. And then I did that you know, us, europe, across many parts of the health care industry. And then I wanted to move into, you know, into the industry side. So I went to Novartis, a global, you know, biopharma school company and was in their pharma side of their business in different commercial roles and and at Amgen you know that digital role was kind of my third and last role within the company so did very different things was had a corporate strategy, was global marketing lead for a major drug called Enbrel and the whole notion with digital was and you saw, from the background we discussed.
Speaker 1:I'm not an engineer, I'm not a technologist. That was not, frankly, an early interest. I never thought of myself as an entrepreneur either. But when I was asked to look at that space and as I dug into it and got deeper and deeper and deeper, what became apparent to me was that the technology was way ahead of the real world impact that it was having in healthcare, of data and digital technologies to improve how this amazing innovation our scientists had done and we had brought to market how we could drive more impact for patients and do a better job of having these medicines work as intended for a bigger population over the longer term, and so that was really the idea behind GenDigital Health is how do we take, you know, the existing and future technologies that were coming and really wrap those around our drugs to drive better real world impact.
Speaker 2:Got it. So moving forward a few years. So you founded Bright Insight back in 2019. And looking at the company now, you have several different solutions you provide. You have several different specialty or practice areas that you work within. I'm assuming those have been built out, you know, incrementally over the course of the last few years. So if we were to go back to the origin of the company, what was the original problem you were trying to solve? How did the original idea coalesce?
Speaker 1:Yeah. So the original problem we were trying to solve came from my and my co-founders experience at Amgen Digital Health. So we were building various solutions, you know. For example, we put Bluetooth into a drug delivery device and got one of the first early approvals from FDA for a drug plus device, backend, cloud and so forth. So the group was working on that. We had other things, for example, in a totally different disease area, on how to help patients track how their disease was progressing over time, so you can have the real data instead of just kind of what you might remember about how your disease is progressing to help inform better clinical decisions.
Speaker 1:So we're working on all these various solutions and a lot of them were POCs. A lot of them, you know, did not end up being, you know, wildly successful. But one commonality between all of them was that when we wanted to leverage the cloud, we had to think about and build end-to-end how do we not just manage data privacy and security, but also the regulatory requirements based on what we wanted to do with that data and that solution? Because if you have what's called a regulated intended use, you want the data to, for example, tell a diabetes patient how much insulin to take the FDA in the case of the United States is likely to regulate that solution, that software, just like in some ways as if it were a drug or a medical device. It's called software as a medical device actually as a category for the FDA, because if something goes wrong in that software stack or in that overall solution you might put a patient in a harm's way, just like if a medicine you know doesn't work as intended, you want to make sure it's going to perform as you know it's supposed to, otherwise could harm the patient.
Speaker 1:So as we moved into and we're exploring these types of use cases, we really understood that there's a market opportunity for being an infrastructure provider that try to package, if you will, in a platform that privacy, security and regulatory side of things and did it at a global scale because all the pharma companies are largely global corporations. And so how do we not just meet the requirements of the US FDA and, let's say, hipaa, but we're doing similarly for GDPR and the European Union's equivalent of the FDA or Japan, etc. So that was the original idea. It came from our own experience at Amgen as we were building and trying to deploy and scale these solutions in different markets to say gosh, we can do this a lot faster, better, cheaper if we had a common infrastructure, and that's what Bright Insight really endeavored to do on the outset.
Speaker 2:What were the early days of the company like in terms of building the products, getting your first few customers?
Speaker 1:Yeah. So one thing I'll say that ultimately we were really fortunate to do is we actually got to incubate the company and part of a bigger corporation called Flex, and Flex is a large contract manufacturer that works across many industries and they're a leading player in the healthcare space. So they actually manufacture a lot of components or end products for medical device and pharmaceutical companies and they saw the same trend we saw around digitization. So I came into the company almost in an EIR type of role, brought in my co-founders and that really gave us a platform to go talk to global biopharma companies with, frankly, a lot of credibility and backing behind us, which weren't just three guys in a garage. We were three guys with a lot of relevant experience working under the umbrella and platform of a major corporation that they already work with and trusted.
Speaker 1:So that gave us an opportunity to do a lot of rapid just build on our own experience but do a lot of rapid market testing and conversations and you know feedback from prospects and conferences et cetera.
Speaker 1:So through that, you know, we were able to both validate the idea, get input into what you know our early you know platform would look like, and then have the conversations that ultimately led to our first couple of customers. And what became clear as we got our first couple of customers was that this company, this product and this company ultimately was better suited to be its own business, which was one of the hypotheses we had when I took the role. But as we kind of got market traction, the CEO of Flex and the board and I agree that it did make sense to now make it a spit out that can still continue to collaborate with Flex but be able to kind of be off to the races on its own. So, yeah, I think we probably really got a great break by being able to incubate within, you know, within a broader established player like that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I can imagine that was incredibly helpful because you know, there's one thing I know about buyers within MedTech Pharma et cetera, is that they don't move quickly and they don't trust very quickly, so I imagine that that brand name was helpful From a funding perspective. Did you start out with some funding from them? How did the original fundraising go?
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah. So if you want to sort of think of it as, like you know, seed or pre-seed type of money, that was really came out of the budget of Flex itself. So, you know, I had a budget and then, as we kind of proved stuff out, you know, got, you know bigger and bigger budget. So I forget the exact numbers, but we probably grew the team out to be a couple of dozen or more people under the Flex umbrella and then we, you know, after we had that early market, you know product and early market validation, I did a fundraising process as part of the spin out and raised a $25 million Series A, you know, co-led by Eclipse Ventures and New Leaf Ventures here in the Bay Area, and so that really was the transaction that brought the company into its own separate entity. That was about five years ago.
Speaker 2:That's five years ago. So when you were in the earlier stages of building, getting those first few customers, did the hypothesis that you originally had in terms of what you felt customers needed. Was that entirely validated, or was there feedback from the market that surprised you that you then incorporated into the product?
Speaker 1:Yeah, a lot of feedback, some surprises, some maybe things we well, there's always surprises in the sense of, in retrospect should have been a surprise or not, I don't know, but if we knew it we should have done it or would have done it right. So for sure, we've evolved our thinking and what we do quite a bit over the last five years. Maybe to highlight a few of them so one is our premise originally was that pharma, even though they would move slowly and cautiously, would in a pretty big way move into that regulated box that I described, which are fairly high risk use cases of data and digital. But we also believe that some of the highest value use cases, and so a couple of our early programs you know we got that market validation because those are the kinds of programs we were working on. But ultimately, I think where the business is, even today, is that the industry is doing some of that, but the higher volume stuff is at a lower risk part of the use case world. So it's much more oriented around. How do we engage patients onto their disease and therapy? How do we help them track things like disease progression? Tracking how your disease is doing is very different than telling you how you might change what you should be doing. Right, if you just kind of think about you know that from a risk and a clinical perspective. So a big thing we've learned is the market is largest today still in terms of, I would say, kind of lower risk, lower complexity use cases.
Speaker 1:Now how that's translated into the product is a couple of important ways. One is we are positioning our go-to-market instead of being at kind of that high-risk use cases. We're talking much more around hey, how do you get moving, crawl, walk run right? So how do you rapidly build solutions that are going to start driving value for the patient and for the business and then over time you can bring in right through your product roadmap. The pharma company can bring in higher value, more complex, higher risk use cases over time. So we kind of start earlier in the journey, if you will, of how we talk to the market.
Speaker 1:The second and probably most important thing we've done is we have taken our experience and instead of early years where we had a compliant platform but it required a lot of custom software build, now we've seen enough use cases where we've been able to massively productize on top of our platform and so most of the use cases that come to us now we can do at a fraction of the cost, a fraction of the time that we were doing before, and so that lets us really be much more of a product company than sort of a platform license with a lot of custom build on top, custom build on top. So it's really meaningfully evolved the business model of the company. You know the type of employees in the company, the use cases that we do. You know what our deeds focused on.
Speaker 2:You know et cetera, and I think it probably would be helpful context to listeners just to understand. I know we talked a little bit about where things were five years ago, but where are you at today, both in terms of employees, fundraising operations, scale, et cetera?
Speaker 1:Yeah. So we, you know we were just tackling all of those. So we're about, you know, 160 or so employees. You know we have a reasonable number of long-term contractors as well. You know we're pretty globally dispersed with that headcount.
Speaker 1:We were heavy US and heavy contractors pre-COVID but over the years kind of spread out and internalized a lot more of, certainly, the software and engineering side of things. Over the years we've done a total of three finan financing. So we had a series B that was led by insight partners. Series C that was led by general catalyst, um, and you know we were part of the. You know the, so the exuberance of 2021, um post COVID.
Speaker 1:In terms of both, um, you know the market for you know, on all fronts, right, the interest from customers, the investment side, our own belief on how fast things would grow.
Speaker 1:So we had a period of time where we certainly were higher headcount but we've adapted to what the growth in the market has been as well as we've, frankly, as we've been able to productize, that's had a big shift. Our customers are our top 20 pharmacos, for the most part top 20 to 30 pharmaceutical companies, and the nice thing is our use cases are largely focused on multi-billion dollar specialty brands that we're supporting our customers in their most important markets like US, europe, japan, important markets like US, europe, japan. So we're really building a nice repertoire of proof points to really show that the kind of problem we solve is really applicable not just to a couple of niche disease areas, but it's really applicable from ultra rare, rare diseases to very common ones and it's applicable across markets and patient types, um and uh, and that when you do that you can drive massive, you know clinical impact for patients and ROI for for our customers.
Speaker 2:There's a lot to dig into there, particularly with that level of growth. Um, what were some of the core principles that you used in order to guide your team and company culture as you've scaled from, you know, that couple of initial dozen to now? Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:So I'll highlight a few. For us to be successful, we have to have the full trust of our customers. So if you think about who our customers are, it's not just that they're pharmaceutical companies and they're highly regulated and they're know these core, their core assets, right. And so if you're working with them on a multi-billion dollar drug, they're going to be incredibly cautious about everything that they do there, right. And then you take that one step further. We're building solutions that are helping for the. In most cases, for the first time ever, have a pharma company collect data about specific patients in the real world using their drugs. Post approval right Pharma companies. They collect a lot of data in a clinical trial setting when they're doing drug development, but historically they've collected nothing directly from patients once you're actually approved and hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands, millions of patients are on their therapies. So you think about the scrutiny that brings from a data privacy perspective, from a what are you going to do with this data? How are you going to keep it secure? So all of these things. Every step of the way we have to have the utmost confidence and trust, and that's not just from a technology perspective, it's also from we really understand the domain we operate in, but it's also just culturally that we are prioritizing their priorities, and so we're not going to take shortcuts on something to do with security or regulatory or privacy because it's faster or cheaper or you know we're going to be, you know, very upfront, transparent and always kind of make decisions that's going to, you know, protect the interests of our customers and their patients. So so I think that sort of notion of, hey, we got to always be solving for, you know, for the customer, and ensuring that we're not doing anything that's going to hurt their trust in us, because if they do, then the program goes right and it's a small world and our reputation goes, and then it doesn't really matter what we have behind that. So I think that notion of really being customer first is really ingrained from the get-go right, and then, of course, gets into lots of things that don't have to do anything with compliance, right, customers asking for something well, that's not in the contract, but we don't think that way, right? Okay, well, what are they trying to achieve and what can we do to help them achieve that right? And let's do the right thing now and then again it'll make it through in the broader success of the relationship and our ultimate success. So I think that's a key pillar.
Speaker 1:I think, secondly, from a within the company perspective. You know we have this culture of everyone, you know, is an owner. Everybody has a, not just a right but a responsibility to behave as an owner, which means like, if something's not working, you know, don't wait for somebody else to fix it. You know, try to fix it, raise your hand if you need others to help you fix it. You know, you know, et cetera, Right. And so you know I've even just was it this week, last week like people will just throw a one-on-one on my calendar and they'll be like, hey, can I talk to you about something? I don't understand why we're doing this. It's not working. You know, I've coming to you because I'm stuck.
Speaker 1:Great, I love those conversations because that tells me that because I can't me myself and the leadership team, we're never going to know what all the problems are that need to be fixed. Right, like this needs to come from, you know, frontline manager level kind of culture of like, hey, you know, we're not going to know or be helpful to doing that. Right. And I have a mindset that, generally speaking, if I'm in there solving a problem. That's not a good situation, because there's very few problems in a company that you know I should be directly hands-on fixing, because you know, for the most part, like, hopefully, others are experts in that domain, right, and I'm not the expert in all the various domains of the business. So so I think that culture comes through like, hey, let's really, you know, um, speak up, fix things, you know, et cetera. Are we perfect? We're far from perfect, we never will be, but we try to try to keep that, you know, keep that, um, that culture going.
Speaker 1:And then the third thing I'll say is, like you know, we truly believe that everybody that works here could have a job that pays you more somewhere else.
Speaker 1:You know that both speaks to the quality of the talent, but also the fact that, like, you're here because you love the mission, you love the people and you want to, you know, lean in and do work that you're going to be proud of, hopefully not just today but for the rest of your life, right, and be able to have that kind of impact.
Speaker 1:And so, you know, we kind of always come back to the mission, we mission, we always come back to guys. Why are we, you know doing, you know got to get a product out on a monday. Why is everybody working over the weekend? Whatever it might be like it comes back to? Well, because we really care about this and we want to. You know, we, we're going to look back and and all of us hopefully, you know, try to pause and look back even now and say, like you know, we can really be proud of the progress we're making and and you know, we're far from being done, but you know, we want to continue to feel proud of the impact we're having and be really driven by the mission.
Speaker 2:You mentioned that if you're getting hands on to something, then that's probably not the best thing, because you should have good problem solvers within the org, and that's obviously that that whole subject has been the subject of a lot of conversation recently in terms of founder mode, et cetera. You know when do you delegate, when do you get hands on yourself. So what are your thoughts on it? It sounds like you have an opinion one way, but I'd love to hear you expand a little more.
Speaker 1:Yeah, look. So first of all, I think there's an inherent personality side of things. Different CEOs leaders are different in kind of what they bring to the table. Ceos leaders are different in kind of what they bring to the table. My personal view and experience is there's so much work for me to do on ensuring that we have clarity of vision, clarity of priorities, you know, clarity of essentially a framework of how people can make decisions, and you know, one of the hardest lessons for me to learn was, like it, just because I have said something once, even if I've said it in all hands or to 20 people in this 20 million company, that's great. Now everybody knows it and has internalized it and understood it, and that's just not the case, right? So so much of the time has to go into bringing clarity, and I think that's something that, to me, is a unique part of founder mode, if you will right, which is you got to have to repeatedly. You know, do that Now. If you do that, I think you actually resolve a lot of the problems that aren't getting resolved. Meaning to say it another way, if you were to. You know, when I dissect why something is broken, it comes back to my failure on providing clarity around, like you know where are we going, what's the construct? You know why are we doing it. You know what's kind of the framework on how people should be thinking about aligning and solving and progressing the business right. And a lot of problems align because one department thinks, you know, this is a priority and another problem department thinks this is the priority. It's probably because I didn't think about it enough or I probably said one thing one time and something else another time, or I, you know, or I myself was hedging and wasn't clear. But it usually comes back to some root cause of lack of clarity. So I think you know, if you sort of accept my hypothesis or experience, a large part of the problems come from that. And then others come from you know some folks that just don't want to align to that. Then it is your job as the leader to drive that replacement. And sometimes somebody who's working for one of somebody on the leadership team and it's my job to bring that back to that leader and say, hey, look, there's an alignment issue, it's not a clarity issue, you got to fix that, or you know, and usually that you know then they will fix that, um, and then you see what problems are left after that and I think those are the true founder mode problems, right.
Speaker 1:So we've made important you know know strategic decisions in the business. You know, whether you call them pivots or you just call them other. You know important decisions that that clearly, you know fall at the level of founder and or a small group of group of people who you know kind of have to elevate above all the day to day stuff and kind of, you know, think about where we're taking the business, uh, or navigate. You know some really really big decisions, um, but I think a lot of that other stuff.
Speaker 1:It just, yeah, I struggle with the scalability of that and and and I think back to like when I was in different roles, like I just don't think most people like to be told what to do, uh, and you know they want to know what you're trying to do, and then they want to. You know they want to know what you're trying to do and then they want to. You know they get satisfaction and learning and feel great about figuring it out Right and just like you know you and I were talking about before we got on about our kids, and so you know it's the same thing. Kids don't want to be taught what to do, but, you know, they feel great when they figure it out themselves. Right, you got to provide them some framework and construct.
Speaker 1:So it might not always be the most efficient way, but I think it's a better way to build a business over the long term. And look, there's going to be exceptions. I'm not Elon Musk, I'm sure. Look, you know, he's a unique character. I could see why he would operate in founder mode 24, seven, and there's, you know, and there's probably others, but that's, that's not. I don't. I don't have that kind of you know talent.
Speaker 2:Well, I think the other thing, too, is that you also mentioned. You want to hire really smart people who want to take pride in their work and figure out how to solve the problems. And if you dictate or micromanage how to solve the problem, as opposed to just saying here is the problem, figure out how to solve it, you're probably turning off some of your most effective people because you're no longer giving them the creativity to work within that framework.
Speaker 1:Yeah, exactly Exactly. I think the part that is most important is to ask the right questions, right? So if you, because you know where could things go sideways? Well, they go sideways because people get too buried, they get lost in the trees, right. And so if you come in as a leader, as a founder, and you're like, oh, oh hey, this is interesting or great or it doesn't make sense to me, or you know, however you want to, your style is, but then ultimately, like, ask the right questions and pull them out from the weeds, and and then they're like, oh yeah, actually you know, you're right, we hadn't thought about that. So really, the right answer is this, not that. Or you pull them out and they're like, yeah, we thought, we thought about that. Then, as a founder, you're a leader, you're like, oh great, like I asked three tough questions and you know their answers. Give them, and I confidence that this is the, you know the path we should be trying. So so, yeah, I'm with you.
Speaker 1:I think the other thing that happens is if people believe that their work and their empowerment is only good until you show up, they're just not going to do their best work, right, cause they're like who cares? Like, you know, next week, when we talked to Cal, he's going to tell us what to do anyway. So, like, why should we spend all this time figuring out what the right answer is? And that's just I, just that's just going to be a horrible subpar weight around the company. Because then you have all these talented people that are not doing great work because they're just kind of waiting for you to tell them what to do, right? Or you get them in a meeting and you they're not going to argue, and you want them to argue with you, right, and you want them to argue with each other with the desire to find the best answer.
Speaker 1:So, again, if you're kind of like, well, I'm the founder, here's what we're going to do, I think that's just not a personally, I don't think it's an inspiring way to lead, but I also don't think it's the best way to get the best decisions and the best output from people. I think you, you know, I love being wrong. Love being wrong, you know, and and because that just tells me that I things are going well because people who are, you know, are making better decisions than I would have made which is the way to scale.
Speaker 2:I think that's a great point when you say that your primary job as a CEO is to ensure the clarity and alignment. How?
Speaker 1:do you?
Speaker 2:actually go about delivering that. Let's say, you've conceptualized the idea, you know where you need to go. How do you then get the rest of the company on the same page at this level of scale?
Speaker 1:Yeah. So I'll say it's not easy. I'm not saying I'm doing a great job, and every time I have a conversation like this I leave being like, okay, I really got to make myself more disciplined, on, on, on, on doing a better job here. So there's the things like you would expect, like all hands. You know, one thing we've done that I think works well is we follow up every all hands within office hours, because we were always like, oh, we'll do questions and we always run out of time for questions so. So now I always have office hours, anybody can come in and ask about anything that they want. So I think that's like an opportunity, you know, again, people to ask whatever question they want. That can help me learn where there might be confusion or what's on people's mind, but hopefully drive clarity right.
Speaker 1:Second, obviously, is in the various meetings, right, so I probably spend, you know, a third to half my time in discussions with folks, right? So there's a an important listening element to that. But then just recognizing that, you know I got to keep repeating and repeating. But looking for is there understanding? Is there passive acceptance? You know, is there excitement and you know engagement, right, massive acceptance, you know, is there excitement and, you know, engagement, right, but there's a kind of continuously reinforce the key things you know, which I think would go a long way to really force myself and the leadership team to say, okay, like let's put this in writing, at least as of today, what we're saying and what we believe, and you know on important topics of course not necessarily all of them and then to make that available for everybody, right, so that so then you aren't playing a telephone game.
Speaker 1:So that's, I think, something that I've thought about and haven't really operationalized, that I think actually would help a lot. So, yeah, so it's those things you know. I think it's. You know I can't kind of be sitting in my office just talking to myself all day, right, like it's the making sure, you know the connection is happening, you know, with team members at all levels. You know in all departments, and and and again there's been times in over the years where I've made that more structured. And again this conversation is making me think that there's probably benefit into me at least analyzing the calendar but, if nothing else, you know, potentially bringing some of that structure back to that. So so it's not getting biased towards certain parts of the business, you know, at the expense of others.
Speaker 2:Well, hey, if anything, you came out of this conversation with some some new next steps, and I do love the office hours tactic. That's not something I've I've heard of other companies doing, but I do think that's a great thing to implement because you're right, as you know, generally everyone has some sort of questions in all hands or they don't feel comfortable asking the thing they're wondering in front of 160 people, but there's probably a lot of other people wondering the same thing. When it comes to the hiring perspective you mentioned earlier, you were pretty heavy US centric and then offshore contractor, and then that model has sort of evolved over the years and I even noticed now a lot of the engineering hiring you're doing is is overseas or near shore. How has that approach changed? What was the thinking behind that? Was it purely just it's COVID and things are remote now? What? Was there something else?
Speaker 1:Yeah, so part of it is involved with the business model I mentioned earlier, where we had the platform.
Speaker 1:But each customer project had its own custom development effort that we typically also kind of owned and ran for them. So we started with a very contractor heavy model, partly because we were incubating and so we couldn't necessarily do all the hiring we wanted to. Partly it was also when you're project driven right, you kind of have to have your headcount be flexible to go up and down. So you know we had that. What we learned from that was having you know a set of contractors for kind of at the platform level. Over time we got to a good place and, frankly, like some of those people are with us today so they've been working with us, you know, half a dozen years and so, whether you call them an employee or a contractor I'm actually going to pay a visit to many of these folks in Vietnam later this month, earlier this year. So it worked well there. But at the project level it just didn't work well because you'd have people coming in. They didn't know anything about the space, what we were doing or the use case or obviously our own SOPs and, as I mentioned, we work in a very regulated space. So we spent so much time trying to train them on how to do things and then the quality of the work et cetera. We just weren't very successful, frankly, and that translated into not just cost overruns and delays but obviously customer satisfaction et cetera.
Speaker 1:So post-release series C, we hired a CTO from the outside and he had a lot of enterprise software experience doing this and part of his remit was to say, ok, both productize the company. But in that process remit was to say, okay, both productize the company, but in that process gave him the keys to figure out the most effective way to build engineering. He had a very clear view of we should internalize and then, of course, have a small group of places we can contract but be able to do that. It's played out and it's played out great. It's played out great both in terms of what the first thing he did was actually build our.
Speaker 1:You know, as we productized the product was built by our own employees, largely in India, but then, when the customer use cases, those deployments also then over time moved from external parties to us doing it ourselves. Right, and now we have a really nice feedback loop. Right, are building the product, know that they're going to also have some or a lot of responsibility on its configuration and deployment, and so you create a team that really has full accountability and isn't throwing stuff over the wall or thinking of it as a project, and then they're off to their next, to their next thing. So, yeah, it really played out. The learnings played out in the first couple of years, the operationalizing of this, you know, has happened over the last few years.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean there's a lot of startups that prefer to hire here for on engineering specifically, for a few reasons you know. One is there's the obvious things like the you know less time difference. But then there's also often a consideration, for you know that the talent bar here that you find can be better than necessarily what you'd find in India. How do you keep your talent bar high when you're hiring offshore?
Speaker 1:Yeah, so a few things. So first of all, to your point, like we definitely have key people, you know people onshore, near shore as well, so it's not 100% India, to your point. So we do a couple of things. So one is, the key folks in India that are leading there are people who have direct experience with other leaders at Bright Insights so not with me, but either CTO or head of HR et cetera. So we've kind of put in place folks that have kind of been there, done that before with us, with people on my team, so they can bring both their networks and their experience recruiting et cetera. So that's one. The second is we have people come through San Jose on a pretty regular basis, especially the leadership team there in India. So they're both staying very close to you, know the product and engineering leadership team and are, you know, whiteboarding and solving problems et cetera, and so in that you know you both close some of the communication, you know time zone and otherwise gaps, but you also are going to see quality in those discussions directly. Right, if someone's with you for a week whiteboarding and solving problems and having breakfast, lunch, dinner, you're going to get a good sense of like, hey, you know to my earlier point around you know mission alignment, clarity, you solve all those things but also like, hey, is this person, you know the kind of quality we need? And then then vice versa, which is, you know, leadership here, going to India and doing the rounds there, meeting directly with people, and not just like, hey, let me show up, shake hands, have a meal and take off, but more like hey, we're going to be here for a week and we're going to roll up our sleeves and tackle important things we're working on the product roadmap or problems that need to be solved, or, you know, figure out, you know kind of the next step in the technology journey, etc. So trying to really collapse that geographic and time zone.
Speaker 1:And look credit to my cto. He is up late at night and in the mornings, like very regularly, like it's just, that's just how he operates, right, like you, there's always a flurry of stuff coming from him. You know, past midnight, um, and so I think that's just how he operates, right, like you, there's always a flurry of stuff coming from him. You know, past midnight, and so I think that's just kind of his cadence, of how he operates. So he's, you know, he's, I gotta imagine probably you know I wasn't saying almost daily basis, probably actually a daily basis having conversations with, with, you know, with leaders and team in India.
Speaker 2:Got that. Yeah, that that in person component is so important, even when you're remote, so it's great to hear that you're doing that. When we look forward a little bit, you've done really well on the fundraising side. Like you mentioned, you raised the Series C, which was 101 million, led by General Catalyst, and that was a couple years ago. How are you thinking about future fundraising efforts, if at all?
Speaker 1:Yeah, right now we're largely heads down focus on execution and I kind of alluded to this earlier. But as we've productized the platform, we've been able to accelerate our ability to bring on and deploy use cases. So we're in a period where we want to keep doing that and bring proof points to market so that we can walk into our prospective customer and most of our prospective customers they've never done what we sell, so it's not like they're like we were doing it this way and now we'll do it with Bright Insight. They just haven't. We're creating a market, so that's what we're now focused on Keep scaling, deploying, scaling these use cases, get the data and the proof points so that we can come in to a brand manager of any pharma company and really compellingly make the argument of why they should be doing this and why they should do it with us.
Speaker 1:So I think once we keep, we'll keep doing that and then maybe in the future, if it makes sense to kind of put more fuel on the fire, we would think more proactively about a fundraise. We're deploying a second product line right now and that might be the trigger point. Once we're in market and have market validation with this new product line, then we may say, okay, should we bring on more capital to accelerate product development and go to market for that second product line? So so nothing, nothing kind of you know proactively in the works or on the calendar right now.
Speaker 2:And when you think, of course, about the next couple of years. Obviously, you work with pharmaceutical companies that are global, but of course, the U? S is a huge market. You're a U S secret company and, yeah, we have a new president elect. Politics aside, our potential changes to legislation and the larger healthcare market from a governmental perspective playing into your plan at all, how are you approaching that? Yeah, that's a good question.
Speaker 1:So I'm sure, as most of your audience knows, the United States is the largest healthcare market in the world. We spend a higher percentage of our GDP on healthcare than, I think, any OECD country, probably any country in the world, and that percentage has been going up. And I'll tell you, we were talking about this when I was a consultant 20, x years ago and saying this is an unsustainable chart and nothing's really changed. The chart's still going up into the right and I think we're you know, we're probably approaching 20% of GDP going into healthcare. The issue to me is not primarily how much money we're spending, but it's the lack of value that we're getting from that spend. Right, and that's all of us right. It's not about whether it's all of us as citizens of the country, and there's a lot of reasons for that.
Speaker 1:But I think there's a real, not just opportunity, but I would say personally, a need for government to really step back and rethink its role in healthcare.
Speaker 1:They spend you know the government is the biggest spender in the biggest country, biggest market, you know, of healthcare, right? So the US government, single-handedly, you know that largest player and they're largely spending most of their money on sick care. Right, the money is getting deployed after folks are sick and then they will throw a lot of money at that and it's kind of can it have a heroic impact? Absolutely, and should we continue to do that much of it? Yes, but I think if you actually went upstream, right, most significant part of disease and you know, and ultimately death could be meaningfully delayed. So you extend both quality of life and deploy you know and push back the end of life at scale by, in my opinion, going upstream, not by looking for innovation. You know at the, you know after somebody has disease, and that's a paradigm shift that I don't think. At least you know Republicans, democrats, whoever that at least you know in any sort of meaningful way anybody's talking about.
Speaker 1:So all the healthcare you know kind of rhetoric or reforms or suggestions that you hear, you know in kind of, you know, mainstream media is largely, in my opinion it's important, but it's really, you know, on the margin ultimately of the big picture of you know how much we're spending, what kind of health do we actually have in the country and ultimately, like you know, what kind of value are we getting for all that spend.
Speaker 2:Yeah, well, I mean, if we all, you know, if we all ate our vegetables and stopped smoking and drinking and got eight hours of sleep at night, then healthcare spending would plummet because we would all be in much better shape. But is that the role of the government to regulate? Or is that even something the government could regulate in some way, either through, you know, call it increased taxes on things that are unhealthy, or something else along those lines?
Speaker 1:Yeah. So it's a great question, so I'll give you a couple of responses. So, from a pure regulation perspective I mean you already gave examples the government regulates certain things already, right, like tobacco, like alcohol, like other drugs, conversation about the role of ultra-processed foods around, the role of, you know, sugar, and and again, it's you know, you can don't have to go to much of a google search to figure out what percentage of calories our children get from ultra-processed foods and sugars, and even adults in this country, etc. Right? So so you know I'm not giving a specific answer, but I think you know there certainly is. At least we should have a diligent exploration of the role of government and saying, okay, like, are we discouraging or are we frankly encouraging? You know, the wrong kind of consumption, you know, in our diets, as, as one example, right, I think, when you get into things like what we're doing with you know, you know, in terms of exercise or sleep and other things like that, personally, for me, I think it's less about regulation, it's you know, I don't think education fixes it, because I think most people would say the same thing you said around, like, oh, I should eat more veggies and sleep more and be less stressed out and be on social media less, et cetera.
Speaker 1:And then it gets into the notion of, like other behavior changes, like, what can we do from an incentives perspective? Right, right, what can we do from a carrot and stick perspective, where you people, you know personally, believe you still give people, ultimately, you know, autonomy and choice, uh, but do you, you know, do you shift dollars, uh, you know, in a way that uh, incentivizes more of what will ultimately be good for them, at least from a health perspective, right, and, and of course, just like smoking, at the end of the day, somebody can choose to, not, to not go down that path and make their own independent choice, which you know, I believe they should be able to. So there's not a, you know, some easy answer to implement here, right, and, and you know, and if you play this through, you know if someone's been a third, you know smoke for 30 years and everything else, and now you know they're in this precarious, you know, cancer, lungs, et cetera situation. What are we going to say? We're not going to treat them at that point.
Speaker 1:You know, I don't. You know, certainly, you know that's not the kind of society America is. I don't think it's anywhere near that. I'm not advocating for that, you know. I think the question becomes can you shift resources so that you minimize the number of people that end up in that situation? Right, because you, you know, through education, through incentives, through disincentives, you know, et cetera. You know, hopefully have more folks you know on a different trajectory than that one.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, I mean I think you can guide behaviors, but certainly, yeah, you can't. Your government mandated 20 pushups per day, or what have you?
Speaker 1:I go back to my economics days here, where there's so many misalignment of incentives and so a lot of physicians are incentivized for volume, not outcomes. We've been talking about quote unquote something called value-based care. If any of your listeners want to Google that again, since when I got out of college and was doing my first years at BCG, very little of the country's healthcare dollars go into these value-based contracts. 30 years later, and the notion of the whole concept there is how do we incentivize the healthcare system to keep you healthy versus get paid for sick care? But the reality is most of the dollars go to people who are incentivized and make more money when there's more sickness, right? So if I'm a surgeon and I do X, well, the more people that come through with that issue, the more money I'm going to make. I don't make more money because I've kept people healthy and they've never needed that surgery, right? That's just one example. If I'm a pharmaceutical company, well, the more patients that need obesity therapy. We'll just look at the stocks of Novo Nordisk and Eli Lilly. They've become household names now because of the GLP-1s that they developed. Well, look, I know people in both of those companies. They are incredibly mission-driven, amazing people that are trying to do their best work. So I'm not challenging anybody I've met at any of those companies.
Speaker 1:But the point is that the system is set up where they were incentivized to innovate there instead of innovate, let's say, for a different disease, right? So they are responding to the problem society has created, which is what you expect a rational, compassionate person to do, right? The surgeon is going to say I spent all these years trading, I'm going to go in and I'm going to fix this problem over and over. But no one's kind of saying well, how do we just get less people with that problem so that you don't have to operate on? You know people with lung cancer, you know there's just not enough of that shift happening, right?
Speaker 1:And those incentives are laden through the entire healthcare. So if you're a hospital, guess what? If everyone in your neighborhood is healthier and you have 10 or 20 percent of your beds empty on a given night, that hospital is going to go bankrupt. That hospital is going to need government subsidy to stay open because they've built out these beds. And you go into any part of the country, how much of the new construction you're seeing is like new health care facilities going up. So the whole incentive system is responding as you would expect it to respond, so you kind of have to go. You know you got to go back to some of these first principles in order to address some of these things. Right and and. Again, I don't blame anybody. I think people are all trying to do their best. But you know, obviously I have tons of friends from medical school that work their butts off, um, but they're a cog in the wheel. Uh, in the sense of you know the system right, that that we're all operating in, you know, myself included, right, yeah, well, and it's also so.
Speaker 2:There's like there's this huge equilibrium where we we need a certain amount of sick people and ideally we'd have less, but then, like you said, if we get less sick people, then the system collapses because the hospitals run out of money. So bigger problem than we can talk about here on the podcast. So I want to wrap by talking about you a little bit more. So just two final questions. One you're obviously very busy. You run a big company, you have three kids. How do you manage your time? How do you yourself become as effective as you can?
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's a good question and that answer has also changed a lot over the years. So this is not how I was certainly four or five, even three years ago. But I've learned through great advisors and folks who I work very closely with, who've kind of helped me both evolve my thinking and build a skill set that I try to implement regularly. So, first of all, I genuinely believe that if I don't feel healthy, I don't feel good, it's going to have a negative impact on everything around me. And that's again, it's not rocket science, but I keep reminding myself, if I'm short tempered with the kids, why is that? Well, it's because I probably didn't get a great night's sleep or I was on the red eye flight or you know something else was you know else is leading, or I'm just stressed out, bringing stress from work into the home and vice versa, when I'm looking like, hey, if I was short in a meeting or I made a bad decision or gave a bad like, where's the source? So I have enough data points in my own life to know that, like, foundationally, if I'm not physically healthy and mentally healthy, I myself don't have a great day and I, and that I sort of multiply that negativity in my interactions around me. So, so I very much foundationally focus, focus on that right, and it's the things that you would expect you already mentioned. I mentioned sleep is is key, so foundationally key, key in that. Secondly, you know, for me anyway it's, it's working out right. So I now schedule into my week one once a week, yoga once a week, a personal trainer um try to find obviously other times around that get on a Peloton. My wife and I do a lot of things together, um, meditation, um, you know, I have a coach who, um can tell when I've dropped off. She doesn't even ask me. She's like oh, you know, I think we should get back on to you know, reconfirming that. And you know what, as soon as I get back on that boat, I immediately see the positive feedback loop on that right. You know, I'm very conscientious, I would say, about what I eat as well, but I think that foundation is just a big part of it and when I have that, that just gives me the fuel to work through the hard stuff, you know, and kind of you know, the rest of the rest of the hours.
Speaker 1:The other thing I'll point out is and again, none of these are black or white, right, and you kind of have to keep investing in them, is to just have, is to ultimately have some amount of perspective on the challenges that get thrown at you know, me or any of us on a given day, as well as the amount of work that needs to be done. And just having some element of perspective, like, hey, at the end of the day, you know how am I going to look back at this in a day, in a week, in a month, in a year? Like, am I going to be as stressed out about this as I am? You know, right now, you know whether it's going well or not going well and, frankly, it's the same thing for the wins, right, it's like okay, this was great. Wait, wait, how much does this matter? Right? And I think that helps kind of keep a level of of calmness and perspective. So, without having kind of, you know, getting super down or getting super excited and being able to, you know, have that sort of perspective of that I think ultimately enables again better decisions. You know, have that sort of perspective of, uh, that I think ultimately enables again better decisions.
Speaker 1:Um, you know, cause again once when your blood pressure goes up and your sympathetic nervous system kicks in like nobody makes good decisions. You know, unless you're running away from a lion, you're not making good decisions there, right, and so so it's not. You know, it's not to be mistaken with like, oh, how do I get perspective? And I don't really care what happens. It's the opposite of that. It's like. You know, caring means being able to have enough perspective to be, you know, calm, collected, have a longer term view. You know, roll with the punches, celebrate, but not think that you're done. Um, yeah, and, like I said, all those things, you know, are you kind of need, need reminders.
Speaker 1:And last thing I'll say for those that have kids is you do like, you know, there's just something so special about spending time with them, and I've worked a lot on trying to really turn off the work brain when I'm with them, and not just because they deserve it and that's what I want to be doing, but honestly, that makes me better at work. You know, if I, you know, if it's just a half hour playing catch or goofing around, doing whatever you come back with, oh, I have just had a great idea about work. You're like well, how did that happen? I wasn't thinking about work. Well, you know it's again. I'm not saying anything new, but it does work, at least for me it works. So it becomes a huge win-win. Feel so much better about the time I spend with them, feel refreshed, recharged, but then I'm able to be more effective at you know, on the work side.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I love that. I mean the, the physical and mental part is so important. I mean it's. It's something I struggle with. You know what I mean. But even tonight, uh, I've got to go, you know, work out from six, 30 to seven, 30, and try to come home and crash by you know nine to get a decent night of sleep, and everything in me is screaming like no, that's an additional like three hours of work you're losing that you could be putting in.
Speaker 2:But yeah, you really, you really have to to segment things, cause it's it's like you know, should you operate at nine to 10 hours at a hundred percent, or work 12 to 13 hours at 60%? The math just just doesn't math out. So so, last question then you know there's a lot of talk always about the founder journey, and it's something that's very, very personal to every founder and very unique. What have you learned about yourself over the course of the last five years in terms of founding? Bright Insight.
Speaker 1:Oh, I think I want to highlight, you know, short answers a lot. What I would say is I mean, look one, probably the most important thing for me is a sense of confidence and conviction that I'm on the journey that I want to be on. I don't have self-doubts about the path that I've taken. I think early on, you know, there was a lot of that like, oh, you know, should I be doing this? You know, I was in a big company, had a nice paycheck, you know all that kind of stuff, and you have those doubts. And now, regardless of where Bright Inside ends up, you know I'm not going to have any doubts.
Speaker 1:I'm like I should have pursued a different path and I think that's a very freeing and I guess you know, let's say, freeing, rewarding, but also just like it brings a lot of gratitude for me that I have that perspective.
Speaker 1:You know that this is exactly what I want to be doing and where I want to be doing it right now in my life.
Speaker 1:And, you know, almost regardless of outcome. Again, I'm not trying to say I don't care about the outcome, but you know, I'm actually able to be better at driving to the right outcome by having, you know, having that sense of knowing that I'm doing what I want to be doing and where I want to be doing it right now. And I think that's, you know, important for folks, no matter what job they're in or what career they're in right Is, you know, when you can kind of be like is this what I want to be doing now and what I want to be doing? Maybe tomorrow or six months from now or five years from now might be different, but this is what I want to be doing now and if you can have a calmness and a confidence in that, it's very freeing then to, you know, focus on that versus kind of having a voice in your head being like, you know, whatever that voice is, that's distracting you from enjoying the work and doing the work.
Speaker 2:Love that Cool. Well, Cal, this is an awesome conversation. Thank you so much for coming on. I really appreciate it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I really enjoyed it. Thanks, Rhys.
Speaker 2:Thank you for tuning in to this episode of Seed to Exit. I hope you found today's conversation insightful and valuable. If you enjoyed the episode, please take a moment to subscribe, leave a review and share it with your network. Your support means the world helps us continue to grow and bring more incredible guests onto the show. Now for more content and updates, follow me on LinkedIn or Twitter, or you can check out MindHire, where we help startups build exceptional teams. No-transcript.
