Latest / Mork Unfiltered / From Exits To Impact: The AI Helping Patients Get Care Sooner.

Transcript

From Exits To Impact: The AI Helping Patients Get Care Sooner. · Mork Unfiltered

• speaker-0: I know you know your math, but I'm gonna teach you how to beach in this country. ⁓ speaker-1: Why go into the investment side instead of just doing another startup? There's a speaker-0: Fine line between telling a story and pushing it too far. speaker-1: Living in ten other countries, I find the US healthcare system still among the worst that I've had to deal with. speaker-0: He's like now that you're a CEO, how do you push through hard? speaker-1: I every time that there's a safe door that's wide open, you seem to kind of ignore that and go in a different path. speaker-0: The bad was that I took the leap to take the leap, not because I was passionate about something very specific. speaker-1: Both the good and the bad of being at Hoop. Welcome back to Mork Unfiltered, folks. Here's a question for all of you out there today. What do you do when the thing you keep building is working, the doors keep opening, the safe path keeps calling, and yet you keep walking away anyway? Today's guest has left Google twice, sold two companies, launched an AI venture fund from inside one of the world's most powerful companies, and then also walked away from that. He's now building something that most people said was impossible. Automating the most critical time-sensitive phone calls in the American healthcare system at a scale that now touches 44% of the Fortune 50. But the most interesting thing about my friend Ankit Jane is not what he built. It's what keeps driving him to leave his comfort zone every single time. This is Mork Unfiltered, and this is Ankit Jane. Ankit, good to see you, my friend. speaker-0: But it is so ⁓ so good to have this conversation. I I still remember the first time ⁓ we met, I wanna say it was circa twenty ten, maybe twenty eleven, ⁓ when we were working together on Google Play and and the energy still exudes you. It's amazing. speaker-1: After all these years, you'd be like, where does he get this energy? He must be taking something. Nothing more than a normal cup of Java today. But ⁓ yeah, look, welcome, man. It's it's you know, I want to start our our our conversation today with something that, you know, oftentimes people skip over when they're interviewing and talking to, you know, entrepreneurs and serial entrepreneurs. I mean, you grew up, as far as I understand, in a household in the Bay Area that was already entrepreneurial in nature, right? And so You know, a lot of people say that about themselves, but I wanted to know from your perspectives, what did that actually look like? When you were growing up, you know, in in in an entrepreneurial household, what were you watching? What were you seeing? What were you hearing? And more importantly, what did it teach you about what you later wanted to in your speaker-0: So slight correction to that. I grew up in India ⁓ and ⁓ yeah, I I grew up in India. I ⁓ grew up in in Mumbai and ⁓ in nineteen ninety-seven ⁓ my dad had this idea that he wants to move to Silicon Valley because ⁓ he was a builder. ⁓ and he said managing people gave him no pleasure because in India in the nineties, if you were a manager, you told people when they were allowed to take PTO, when they where they should sit, what projects they should work on. And he just wanted to build. ⁓ and so he ⁓ convinced my mom to give up an incredible career, ⁓ which we should talk about as well. She was a negotiator for the government of India, ⁓ to to raise money for the government to buy and sell ships from the Middle East. But she he convinced her to give up that ⁓ career and for the three of us to move here to ⁓ Silicon Valley to be part of that story of building. ⁓ and so what I saw at home ⁓ what was ⁓ w was something probably not what you were expecting. It was it was a combination of ⁓ fights that each of us were going through ⁓ in our lives. I saw my dad trying to prove not just to himself but to all of us that it was a good decision for us to uproot ourselves and move here. ⁓ for me it was ⁓ I was twelve ⁓ moving here ⁓ as a 12 year old, ⁓ it's an interesting time in life. You're going through puberty, you're trying to find your place in in society, ⁓ but then you lose all of your friends and you have to start all over again. ⁓ it's ⁓ it has its own challenges. ⁓ but but you know I I we'll talk about Cupertino, which is where I I landed in and why that was such an incredible place to land in ⁓ as a 12 year old. ⁓ and then my mom, who her entire life had been defined by ⁓ by career progression and being in rooms that she wanted to punch her way into ⁓ to say, I need to start all over, ⁓ being on an H4 dependent visa which where you weren't allowed to work, what that meant for her as well. And so ⁓ and along the way, by the way, ⁓ you know, doing things like ⁓ collecting ⁓ plastic bags because you got the five cent refund at at the Safeway for recycling it, right? It was a it was a very different ⁓ part of life which which I I I think has has helped me think about ⁓ how to build, who to build with and have that drive that I think it drives me to this day. speaker-1: How tough were things when you first moved here? Because it sounds like first, like as you said, you know, you were twelve, right? I I remember when I was twelve, I moved to Brazil and and that was a big shock culturally as well. ⁓ so you're you moved to the you know, to the Bay Area, you're twelve years old, your father, I guess, is starting from scratch, your mom can't work, so she has like lost the thing that she loves. How tough was that? No. What was that like? speaker-0: I don't think they let me see how hard it was. ⁓ you know, that's the reality of it, 'cause they knew I was going through a lot as well. And I've talked to them about this over the years. And so now as a parent you you realize how much you shield your kids from. but what I remember is coming off that plane and my parents saying, We wouldn't have been able to move here without you. Thank you for pulling the carry on bags and I felt so special as a twelve year old going, man, I had responsibility ⁓ speaker-1: Yeah. speaker-0: ⁓ you know, I I remember ⁓ you know, making my first friends here, making my first arch nemesises in school that were picking on me for my accent, picking on me for ⁓ for not sounding like them, thinking like them. ⁓ I remember my seventh grade ⁓ math teacher, ⁓ Mrs. Fay Zink, ⁓ and and the reason I remember her was, you know, coming from India, I was very proud of the the quality of education there, especially in the STEM ⁓ stem areas. And so what when I went to seventh grade math, I was like, ⁓ this is a joke. I'm gonna I'm gonna ⁓ crush my way through it. And I remember my first Friday quiz. And we weren't used to quizzes in India. You just had the final exam and that was your your grade. I still remember my first Friday quiz. I got a nine out of ten. And I was so darn pissed. ⁓ and the reason I got a nine out of ten was it asked me to I still remember it was a a ⁓ graph with different colors. And I to describe it. And I spelt the word color, C-O-L-O-U-R. And Mrs. Fe Zank took a point off of me for that to teach me that in America it's spelt C O L O R. And she said, I know you know your math, but I'm gonna teach you how to be this country. speaker-1: ⁓ my God. So she talked you appointed for something that had nothing to do with math even. Okay. speaker-0: Looking back, I think just in as humans, we're good at remembering the things that made us who we are, and we forget the things that don't matter. And I you know, I I I think I'm pretty blessed that my parents made that transition as painless as they probably could, even though they were struggling through that ⁓ that change themselves. ⁓ but coming into Cupertino ⁓ at a time when there were a lot of immigrants coming there from many parts of the world, but especially Asia. ⁓ made it a very interesting place. Many of my ⁓ friends' parents were in very similar boats to me, ⁓ where their parents had a dream and they wanted to come to this land of building. ⁓ and out of my high school graduating class, man, the number of startup founders that have been there are ASP vice president founded Doordash. Someone else from our class started a company called Ashby, which is in the recruiting world. And the list goes on. I think we have a a Lindbrook alumni a founders club. ⁓ and it's, you know, a few hundred people. speaker-1: Nice. Nice. And then so you go through this adaptation. Very, very challenging. Your father, I guess, was an entrepreneur. speaker-0: At the butt at the time he came and he joined the startup, ⁓ but over over his career he started a couple of companies himself. speaker-1: Okay. And so how much did that play an influence at home watching him develop his career, watching him adjust to a new culture? I mean, obviously there must have been challenges for him too adapting to that. What did you see and how much did that shape you? speaker-0: I think it impacts me more now than it did back then. I still remember in two thousand five, I was a student at Berkeley. ⁓ dad was on his second startup and ⁓ it was going through a pretty hard time. ⁓ right, they'd ⁓ they'd come up with ⁓ in retrospect what was quite an incredible idea, ⁓ but it just wasn't it hadn't had its moment yet. ⁓ it was in the network security space, ⁓ something in in hardware to do DDoS protection, ⁓ And the sales just weren't taking off and they couldn't get more funding. ⁓ it was a pretty quiet time in the in the venture industry. And I remember as a sophomore in college having this conversation with him and going, Dad, why are you doing this? Why don't you shut it down and go work on something else? ⁓ like you're not able to raise funding. They went, I I think they went three or six months. I don't the full details, without payroll, and most of his team stayed with him. The few people that were on H1Bs were paid the minimum required to keep them ⁓ in this country, but they made it through it and then they had this inflection point of fighting through. ⁓ ended up building a a a profitable business that was bought by Fortinet. And I think something like sixteen years later, my dad's still there, his team is still there at Fortinet building these products. But when I look back at him, I I think it was two or three weeks ago I was chatting with him and ⁓ You know, we were on a walk and he said, Unkit, do you remember that conversation we had in two thousand five? ⁓ and I said, I do. Why do you bring it up? He's like, Now that you're a CEO, how do you push through hard times? Do you give up? Do you ⁓ push through? How does how do you take your team through that? ⁓ and so so it wasn't something that I thought about actively growing up, but it's moments like those that serve as examples when you go through either a moment that you want to celebrate or a moment that you want to kind of step back and Think through how to go through that hard time. speaker-1: Yeah, absolutely. And I mean, as entrepreneurs, we all go through tough times, right? I think it's that's just part of the entrepreneurial journey. You know, I mean, when when you so you graduate ⁓ Berkeley, right? And then I think you had an opportunity. It sounds like, you know, you had an internship at Microsoft, you know, potentially had the opportunity of going there, but instead of that, you go to Quill, looks like right. You go to a startup. What what was what was the decision between going to cool instead of potentially joining a big speaker-0: Four offers on the table. ⁓ offer number one was Microsoft. Offer number two was Amazon. ⁓ offer number three was a startup called Strategic Wealth Management. And offer number four was cool. ⁓ and I think I'd made up my mind that I wanted to go to a startup. So really it was between strategic wealth management and and cool. And ⁓ I remember ⁓ this this pretty clearly. My grandfather thought I was crazy for going to a startup. ⁓ Yeah. He's like, dude, go make a career at one of these two big companies. ⁓ my parents were like, Go learn where you can learn the fastest, which is gonna be at a startup. They're and by this time, you know, we we were ⁓ we'd been in in the US for about eleven years and they had built enough of a ⁓ comfort around, you know, the the base layer of Maslow's hierarchy where they said, Go invest in yourself, which I'm again eternally thankful for them for. But then I got two these two offers from these two startups. Strategic Wealth Management offered me $112,500. $112,500. And then some stock options, which again, like most people getting a job, I have no idea what that means. ⁓ And then Cool offered me $102,500 with some stock options. ⁓ And so you know, I'm having this conversation at home. And I say, Mom, Dad, I'm going to take the strategic wealth management offer. It's $10,000 more. Right. And again, when you come as an immigrant, when you go through that, you think about money and you go ten thousand dollars speaker-1: It is a lot of a lot of money. speaker-0: Sure. And my mom said, You should go to cool. And I said, Why? She's like, Because strategic wealth management is an asset management company where you'll be the IT guy. Cool is a search engine startup started by technologists, run by engineers, and you will be an engineering and engineer at an engineering first company. So you will learn the art of engineering and the art of building technology in that way. So the ten thousand dollars will be made up in your career. And she said, if it won't, I will give you ten thousand dollars. But I think you'll learn a lot more by going to cool. And ⁓ that was the again, I I I that's how I ended up at Cool. ⁓ and I'm so thankful for it. I mean, i it was with folks that were early at Google, it was with folks that one of the founders of Alta Vista, many incredible people across all the orgs. Our our PR person was the spokesperson for Arnold Schwarzenegger. So I learned about PR in a way that I otherwise wouldn't have. They were really trying to get the best at many parts of the of building a startup. What I don't think they had was the business model. you know, there were many things I learned how not to do it cool, ⁓ but I learned the art of engineering there. And then we were fortunate to get ACL hired into into Google where where we met. speaker-1: Yeah. Yeah. And and what was that adventure like? What did what did you take away from your time at Google? What was the good and the bad? speaker-0: The week before I joined Google, ⁓ I had a a close college friend who was leaving Google to start a company. And I asked him, Hey, what's one piece of advice you'd give me as I'm entering Google as a as an engineer? ⁓ and he said, There's a lot of politics. There's a lot of people. Any large company you go to, there's gonna be politics. A lot of people take the politics very seriously. If you look at it like a video game and optimize for winning the level and moving to the next level, you'll have fun and you'll actually succeed because you'll do things that you're optimizing for the game. And I thought that was an interesting piece of advice that ⁓ has stayed with me that where whatever you're doing, you have to understand the game that you need to play and play that game while achieving your own goals. Right. So you have to have the company's goals, your goals, and your team's goals, all you're thinking about all of them because when you can align them. you win a lot bigger than ⁓ than when you just think about yourself and you stress too much about it. ⁓ I I think that the journey of Google was fascinating. I think ⁓ you know often folks think about large companies as slow monolithic organisms. ⁓ I think the organization we were in was anything but that. And Android we were very Android was chaotic. Android ⁓ was a place that was growing in a way that we didn't think we could sustain, but we survived. It was it was survival instinct. And so when you think about, you know, when when I think back about all the places I've been a part of, ⁓ there's been this piece of underdog and survival instinct that has driven ⁓ me and the team I've been a part of, ⁓ which I really enjoy. ⁓ and when it ⁓ gets to a scale that is ⁓ too stable and not with that underdog sc ⁓ hunger mentality, ⁓ There's a there's a question of how do we mi get get back into that ⁓ into that rhythm. Yeah. speaker-1: So, you know, that that that leads me to my next question, right? So obviously, you know, you're at play, you launch play, you know, it starts off as a pretty skeleton team, right? I've I I was there with you on the other side on marketing, and it was a very small team. We were doing a ridiculous amount of work with very little resources. And then all of a sudden it starts to scale. And with that scale comes the good and the bad. Yeah. Right. More resources, but more bureaucracy, things slow down, et cetera. What for you was kind of like the pivotal moment if there was one? I don't know, maybe there were several, but What was the point at which you said, I think I've gotten enough out of what I'm gonna get out of Google? It's it's time to kind of like leave and and and eventually launch Ketra, which you would do in two thousand speaker-0: ⁓ I I I don't think there was one moment. I actually ⁓ I was doing very well. I was twenty seven at the time and I wasn't married, wasn't seriously dating anybody. ⁓ and I said, now's the time to take a risk, bet on myself, ⁓ and start something. ⁓ both good and bad in that statement. ⁓ the good was that I was ready to take that leap. The bad was that I took the leap to take the leap, not because I was passionate about something very specific. And then speaker-1: Well why why does that matter? Like go ⁓ tell us a little bit more about that. So it's interesting. So you you're passionate about taking the leap, right? But you go and you start Ketra. What what was the problem with not being passionate necessarily about speaker-0: Well so so so it wasn't a blind leap. It was a leap based on some insight from the time at play, which is there's a lot of data available on mobile phones. And again, rewind back to twenty thirteen, mobile ads absolutely sucked. Like you go you you open any app and there's these ugly banner ads that are not personalized at all. And I'm like, guys, Android and iOS have so much data on them. Can we personalize it? So the original idea for Quetra was to personalized mobile ads based on the data on there. So I left, struck a ⁓ a partnership with a with a company that had an app on about 250 million phones around the world. They invested in Quetra in return. I got to put my SDK in their app and get all the data from a quarter of a billion people to start personalizing ads. ⁓ now I was enjoying this journey. Google Ventures invested in us all the things that you can dream of as a ⁓ As a founder, we're going right. And I remember because of what I had done leading a lot of the the engineering teams at play, I was getting meetings with folks that I probably didn't deserve. And some of those meetings in this world were with some of the largest ad publishers in and advertisers in the ads world. And I said, I have a an idea based on my time at Android and they wanted to hear me. So I got into this room and they were like, That's a great idea. I'm like, Great. So are you ready to spend on this? Because talk is cheap. I want to see if you'll actually spend on it. Show me the money. Show me the money. And the first one said, Yeah, I'll give you $5,000. I'm like, huh? You manage five billion dollars of ad spend. You're gonna give me $5,000? They're like, with all due respect, Unkit, the pitch you gave me was great. The the core of it was you have got better data than anybody else in the mobile system. Like, that's exactly right. So should don't you want to spend more? They go, the last three pitches I got were from people that said that they've got better data than anybody else. In the mobile system, because everyone tells that story. We don't know who's right and who's wrong. So I'll give you five thousand dollars. If you prove right, I'll give you ten. If you prove right, I'll give you fifty. Because now the first three tests are to see if you've got good data. But then the second set of tests becomes how much can you scale it? Because many people have data on small populations. I need to go spend hundreds of millions. ⁓ so we're gonna slowly scale this up. And that tested my commitment to the idea. I said, ⁓ speaker-1: Everybody. speaker-0: This isn't really something that I'm passionate about proving myself that I've got better data, because I know I have better data. Why are th I'm competing with a bunch of people that are lying? Like, is this the game that I want to play? And again, the twenty-seven-year-old in me said, Screw this, what else can I do with this data? And so we ⁓ we very quickly changed the company to become a personalization company and we started saying, within twenty milliseconds of being on a phone, we can tell you what we call the portrait of the user. So you can personalize this a BuzzFeed and Flipkart and a bunch of e-commerce and ⁓ and news apps started using us that grow that the surface area of our penetration grew and we started selling the data. Right. And I I discovered this whole area called competitive intelligence, ⁓ where we sold the aggregate information to hedge funds and to corp dev teams at large. ⁓ companies like Microsoft and Snap and we actually sold the data back to Google Play, ⁓ which I thought was by the way, mind the it was mind blowing because I never expected it. ⁓ I was like, wait, I'm selling Android app usage data back to Google Play. I still remember asking the team, I'm like, guys, you already have this information. I can tell you which database table has it. Why can't you use that? And they said something that again is one of those moments in my life that I speaker-1: Back to Android. speaker-0: that I will remember, they said, Well, our contracts with our app developers is that we won't use their data for anything but servicing them. But we need to be able to get in front of a large crowd and tell them about the success of app developers on our platform. So we need to buy it from a third party 'cause then we're not using the data we got. speaker-1: Exactly. ⁓ my God. Yeah. ⁓ it's that's so true. I mean, Google, that was one of the things I remember being there is there are all these Chinese walls where it's like, you know, you couldn't even share data between the different business units, which would have made so much sense for us to like collaborate with YouTube or collaborate with a search team to know more information to help play users and search the right apps. And we couldn't do a lot of that stuff. It was to some extent it was understandable, but to another extent from a business point of view, it was ex incredible. speaker-0: ⁓ I learned that sometimes there's blind spots that you wouldn't expect to have blind spots, right? Like this was a big blind spot for the play marketing team that we were able to unlock ⁓ back in the day. Anyway, so so that was a a fun journey, but again, it wasn't one that I was passionate about. It wasn't one that I could see myself working on forever. It just felt like it me looking for a business that I could build a business because I started a business. And then ⁓ eventually I ⁓ because of the data that we had, the customers that we had, a larger competitor ⁓ came to us and said, Would you like to sell the company to us? And we said, Sure. And again, it was one of those moments where I was like, I didn't even think twice. I was like, Yes, the team's gonna find a home. The investors got a great return. and I went, This was a good journey start to finish for me, but it wasn't my life's work. Yeah. speaker-1: It's super interesting because, you know, one of the things that's come up so much on on this podcast, time and time again, you know, a few weeks ago I just interviewed Andrew Lacey, you know, the founder of Prenovo. And, you know, when you're talking about saving people with scans that, you know, or do early detection of cancer, right? That that that's kind of very meaningful work, right? It's like on the scale of what you're doing at Infinite. And and so that that was one of the things I was interested in is like, you know, how do you stick with it when times get really tough and you're not like all in super passionate, changing the world in a company. And and did you ever face that with with Ketra? Is that was that part of the reason why you sold when Similar Web made you the offer? speaker-0: Possibly. I I mean it wa it it was one of those things where we realized that the tides were turning, privacy was becoming a bigger thing in the mobile ecosystem. You're not gonna be able to have the same access to the data. ⁓ and it wasn't an idea like most of the folks that joined us on that journey were relatively early in their career and were just looking for that startup experience and they had had it. And you know, we were about two years in and we had ninety percent of the money we had raised in the bank. So we could have pivoted, we could have done anything. But again, as a at that point, a 29-year-old, I said, let's take the W and go fight the next battle after that. And I think the team was very thankful that we did that. And the thing that I'm you know proudest of, you know, the the product that we sold actually continues to exist to this day. The company that bought Quetra, similar web, ended up going public a few years later. and again it was a big win for both the employees and the ⁓ and the investors. But the the thing that I always think about is nine out of the ten team members ended up buying houses in the Bay Area ⁓ as a result of that exit. And so when I think about impact on ⁓ on the people, that's what matters, right? Like it's a ⁓ you know, you can talk about anything else, but the fact that everyone now has and many of them, they're still in those homes and we're you pretty speaker-1: Tight knit group. Yeah, that's no, that's a that's amazing. I mean, being able to do that for people and help them getting on the property ladder, especially, you know, I mean, it's it's it's always a good time. Now, obviously today it's a lot harder than it was back then, but but then you make an unusual decision, right? Rather than go do another startup, you go back to Google. Only this time you're doing it in in, you know, in with gradient ventures, right? It's an AI focused venture fund. So walk us through a little bit that logic and how that happened. Like, why go back to Google? Why go into the investment side instead of just doing another speaker-0: You know, about a year and a half into my journey at at Similar Web, ⁓ my old boss, Anna Patterson, who had started cool that ended up coming to Google, ⁓ she and I were catching up and she said, Hey, we're about to publish this paper call ⁓ about trans the transformer model, attention is all you need. And the thesis that she had was that this was gonna fundamentally change how technology would evolve ⁓ and in a way that justified investing in companies that were going to build the infrastructure and applications ⁓ that were powered by this this technology revolution. And the first question I asked her was, well, why shouldn't this just be part of Google Ventures? ⁓ Like, why should it be, you know, why should we create a new fund? Because she was asking me to come on board and help her create and launch a new fund. And she said, well, I want to do it in an Andreas and Horowitz style. Like what does that mean? And she goes, ⁓ a fund run by founders. She'd started a couple of companies. I'd started a company and technology founders that weren't just thinking about the money, but were thinking about technology fundamentals because that was what you would see in those early days of ⁓ of this new wave. Again, this is 2017, way before the world talking about ⁓ large language models, etc. They were talking about transformer models and what this means. And you know, model zoos were a thing ⁓ for a few years after that. And so I came back to Google for three reasons. One, ⁓ to work again with Anna. Two, ⁓ you don't everyday get asked to start a fund that is soul soul funded by Google. ⁓ so that was ⁓ the second reason. The third one, I knew I eventually would start ⁓ another company. I didn't have the again, I I knew that I wouldn't start a company unless I was passionate about it, unless I saw the size of the market, the buyers, etc. And ⁓ I wasn't there yet. So I said, let's be on the other side. Let's understand the venture side of the ⁓ of the business ⁓ because it's such an important part of this ecosystem. And I'm so thankful I did that because now as a CEO, knowing how the venture side thinks is so powerful as you think about ⁓ financing a business and scaling it. speaker-1: What was it that most surprised you being on the other side of the table? So all of a sudden you're on the other side of the table, you're hearing hundreds of founders pitch you their business, you're on the investment side. What most surprised you being on the investment side? speaker-0: ⁓ how how important it is and how dangerous it is. ⁓ right. We we all hear about the stories of Elizabeth Holmes or other folks as well. Incredible storytellers. And there's a fine line between telling a story and pushing it too far. ⁓ you know, the the distance between story and the fiction and reality is very blurry. ⁓ the best founders can dream big, which means they're in fiction land, but then they're able to convert That into reality. ⁓ and the ones that that blow up ⁓ tend to stay in fiction land and never can deliver on reality. ⁓ and it's the job of the investor to be able to make enough bets where some of those fiction fictional ideas become reality, ⁓ and few if none of the fictional ideas become fraud, right? That's the that's the key key balance. speaker-1: Yeah. Interesting. And and seeing these founders pitch and seeing the and hearing the stories and being on the other side, what was the impact on you of of seeing these founders and seeing the pitches? I mean, did it did it have any impact on your self confidence or how you saw yourself? I mean, seeing seeing these founders? What what did that make you feel? speaker-0: I'm not one of those people that ⁓ that is constantly measuring myself. I look at all of these as learning opportunities and you know, the what was clear I and I and I went back and I thought about how many pictures I saw. I probably saw twenty five hundred pictures in two years or so. ⁓ right. And so but there were still just a couple of dozen that stood out. ⁓ right. Many of them people are doing the motions. They're they're not telling you why they care about ⁓ the future. ⁓ there's ⁓ there's a guy named ⁓ a CEO at the time. He now runs a fund ⁓ named Anjne Mida. ⁓ and Anjine, ⁓ and before we started Infinitas, I remember running our our pitch by him. I thought he was one of the best storytellers that came through through Gradient Stores. and he said, Unkit, every pitch deck needs one slide that is critical. Like slide three, right? Slide one is your title slide, slide two is your team. And slide three is the world slide. And the world slide has two parts. On the left, it shows the world today. On the right, it shows the world of the future. And the role of this company is to take from the world today to the world of the future. If you're not clear on what that is, you don't have a company. You might have a product, you might have some business, but you don't have an enduring company. ⁓ And the best founders, the best best visionaries imagine that world of the future. And I think it's important to to break it down. And that and there's very few that do that. Many people just kinda go through the motions of the ten ten slide deck. ⁓ but they're not telling you a story about the world of the future. speaker-1: What's the impact on a startup's ability to ultimately survive when the founder believes or doesn't believe fervently enough in that future vision, in that story? speaker-0: I think it comes across. I think it comes across in fundraising. It comes across in hiring. It comes across in selling. The entire job of founders is to storytell. The entire job. The way you get your first customer is storytelling. The way you get your first hire is storytelling. The way you get any money is storytelling. You're constantly painting pictures. So if you don't believe in it, it can you can look right through. speaker-1: Now you saw like twenty five hundred pitches, right? And and and it sounds like from what you're saying, storytelling was one of the major skills. What other maybe two skills would you say are absolute must-haves for successful founders? speaker-0: One is fearlessness, this kind of muck that's thrown your way on a day to day basis. You need to have a lot of grit, a lot of resilience to make it through that. So just being able to say, I will handle it. I never knew that I would have a ⁓ a meeting with, you know, my people operations leader who comes in and says, Hey Ankit, we had someone whose camera was on while they were changing and they didn't realize it was. How do we deal with that given that a hundred and twenty people saw that person without clothes today. Like I I throw that example out there because ⁓ my God. Again, like as a CEO, that's not what you go into your day thinking is gonna happen, right? ⁓ yeah. Or on other days, you you know, there's days when you go, hey, we lost our biggest customer. Like what do you do there? How do you take your team through that and know that tomorrow's going to be okay? and I I think that's you know so fearlessness is Is one. And then the second one, ⁓ I think a founding team has to have ⁓ tech technological brilliance, ⁓ the ability to solve hard technical problems in novel ways. ⁓ I think there's a few companies that are ⁓ truly innovating on business models. The best example of this ⁓ in a non-Silicon Valley world is Zara, ⁓ the clothing company, right? And the way they ⁓ thought about supply chain optimization. ⁓ instead of sourcing their clothes to be made from Asia, instead they said, you know, and that was like a nine month cycle from when the runways happened to when you create it to when you send it to shows. Zara's model was we're gonna have our quote unquote designers actually walk other stores, see what's selling off the shelves, then only ⁓ create the the the garments loc of for the the the localized stores from in Spain and then ship them in three weeks. So everything it's fast fashion. Like that's a true business model innovation. But I think in Silicon Valley companies, the ones that have succeeded have fundamentally been technology breakthroughs, the ones that have really scaled ⁓ you know, in in ways that no others have, which is why so much ⁓ so many people are so excited about the SpaceX and the ⁓ OpenAI and the anthropic IPOs. All three of those companies had massive technology breakthroughs. ⁓ and so This is why I think ⁓ Silicon Valley VCs look for techno technological brilliance and founders. speaker-1: Yeah. So you're you're you're at Grady Inventures for what, about two years? What was the spark that decided it's time to get back to speaker-0: Well I you I I think Gradient was ⁓ was an incredible learning lesson for me. ⁓ but it was clear that the differentiator that existed at Gradient, ⁓ as a fund wasn't large enough to make it a name that forever would ⁓ would kind of make it remembered in the annals of venture history, ⁓ for for a number of reasons. One, ⁓ it's kinda like you're in two thousand ⁓ in 1999, ⁓ saying you're an internet fund doesn't mean anything because every single fund is an internet fund. By 2018, 2019, every fund was an AI fund, ⁓ including our colleagues at G V and Capital G, ⁓ that were like, yeah, we're doing AI deals as well. but the but the most interesting moment for me wasn't actually anything to do with gradient. ⁓ it was to do with the fact that I showed my wife a demo of this thing called Google Duplex, where you could say, Hey Google, make me a reservation at a spa, salon, or restaurant. And if Open Table existed, it would do it instantaneously. If not, the Google assistant would make the phone call and ⁓ and make the reservation. And I was talking to her about the speech recognition, the natural language processing powered by LLMs and the speech synthesis. Again, mind you, this is 2018. And she went, Why do you technologists come up with incredible technology? And then solve first world problems. Like going to the spa is not something that you should care about solving. Now, there's two sides to this one, I was like, how can you not appreciate the marvel of this technology? That was the technologist in me speaking. But then I went, Well, what would you do with it? Yeah, of course. And she's worked her her career in healthcare and she talked about patients on specialty therapies. She she works at Genentech and she's been supporting patients who have multiple sclerosis. And the journey they go through and the number of phone calls that happen between all the different folks that are coordinating care and how grueling it is, how anxiety driving it is. And she said, if someone could automate the healthcare phone calls, it would change the patient journey, the provider journey, and the economics of healthcare in this country that are breaking. And that was the entry to the rabbit hole that became Infinitas. speaker-1: How did you feel when you heard her talk about that problem? What what feeling, what emotion went through your your your body as you heard? speaker-0: I mean, a little bit of come on, can't you see the marvel of this technology? But then complete you the the the reality is the second feeling was interesting. How big is this opportunity? ⁓ again, it wasn't something I was passionate about. ⁓ right. ⁓ so I called Sean, my co-founder. ⁓ he and I went to middle school and high school together, we were college roommates, he was with me at Quetra, and I was like, And after the similar of acquisition, just like I went to Gradient. To start grading it, he went to Snap. ⁓ he had spent a number of years at NVIDIA and Google, but then ended up at Snap on the security side. He said, Shom, I think we have our calling for our next ⁓ next startup. We're gonna build a healthcare company, ⁓ healthcare AI company. And he said, Okay, tell me more. I'm like, we're gonna automate phone calls. ⁓ he said, what kind of phone calls? And I said, benefits, verifications, and prior authorizations. And I acted confident, ⁓ something that I'm decent at doing. And he said, What are those? I'm like, I don't know, I'm gonna ask Shelby and I'll get back to you. she had mentioned those two phrases. ⁓ again, we knew nothing about healthcare. So that was the other emotion, which was this is a world we know absolutely nothing about. ⁓ and ⁓ it was really fun. I mean ⁓ again I was at gradient and I started making phone calls ⁓ to prospective customers and saying hey I'm a VC at Google and ⁓ I'm hearing the picture of a company that says they can automate phone calls ⁓ like the ones your team does. Can you tell me the size of the problem? Can you tell me ⁓ you know, basic market validation? And a few amazing things happen. First of all, a lot of people just take a phone call from anybody at Google because they're like, Google cares about us? And that too, Google AI cares about us? Tell let me tell you everything. ⁓ right. And we realized the first person I talked to said, I've got 4,000 people that do these same kind of phone calls, benefits verifications, and prior authorization related every single day. If you can automate that, it would unlock tens of millions of dollars, but more importantly, it would reduce the time to therapy for these patients ⁓ pretty significantly. Second person, similar story. So in matter of a couple of weeks, this market was very much validated. And Sham and I, I was like, Sean, we gotta build this ASAP. And both of us just started coding. We put in our notice two weeks later, we started ⁓ working on this. So this was February of twenty nineteen. ⁓ I still remember our last day, his at Snap and Mine at ⁓ at Gradient was February first, twenty nineteen. And the reason it was February first is we wanted insurance for the month of February. So if you were employed for one day, you get insurance for the rest of the month. ⁓ you know, and then we started building the company. speaker-1: Now, you know, healthcare, I don't have to tell you this. You've been living this. Healthcare is notorious for being like one of the hardest sectors to work in, especially, you know, in in startups given all the regulations, all the vested interests. I mean, it's something that people complain about endlessly. I continue to complain about healthcare in this country endlessly. After living in 10 other countries, I find the US healthcare system still among the worst that I've had to deal with. ⁓ what, if anything, did you underestimate? about how hard healthcare would be when you got into it. speaker-0: So I'm gonna rewind to twenty ten. ⁓ we ⁓ right after cool was acquired into Google, I did something most twenty-five year olds probably don't do. ⁓ I once I got access to Google chat and the internal t ⁓ tool called Moma, which was the org chart and all the things were cool. I I I I started picking up random VPs and G chatting them and saying, Hey, I'm a new employee. Would you mind joining me for lunch? ⁓ I would love to just learn from your experience here. And there was speaker-1: Look speaker-0: One VP and Patrick, I don't know if you ever worked with him. His name was ⁓ Jim Coloturos. ⁓ so Jim was responsible for Chrome distribution, eventually came on the Android side ⁓ and you know did did a lot of interesting work. But he went to the same high school I did, but you know, a couple of decades ⁓ before me. But Jim and I had lunch at Charlie's cafe, and within about 20 minutes of of l ⁓ our starting lunch, he said, Okay, you have a lot of energy, slow down a little bit. But remember one thing, it takes a year to get a year's experience. And I've thought about that phrase a lot over the years, because the definition of a year's experience is a year, a time that goes on. And I think healthcare is one of those fields that is moving faster than most other fields, which is surprising to most people on the outside. Everyone is aligned. They want to make the patient experience better, but they have different vantage points. The way an insurance company sees it is different than the way a pharma company sees it. It's different than a hospital sees it. They're all trying to improve it, but with the guardrails of their entities and what they're optimizing for from the lens of improving the patient experience. So you have to play that landscape well. Going back to playing the game well, you have to understand what that landscape and the dynamics there are. The second thing is that every year we have spent building Infinitas, I have learned more than the previous year. And so there is a lot to be said about ⁓ the years ex the value of the years experience. And probably the biggest thing that I look back and go, I wish I knew, was how incentives, even as simple as business model, drive decisions. So when you think about, you know, one of the things that we do is automate ⁓ voice phone calls, inbound and outbound, clinical and administrative. If our business model was purely an hourly business model, which is we charge you X dollars per hour of voice ⁓ interactions, then the way I make more money is by having longer phone calls. That's not always good for the ecosystem. ⁓ You know, you want to be empathetic, you want to be present, you want to be available ⁓ to the patient and their fa family when you're going through it. But some of the phone calls we're doing with those benefit verifications and prior authorizations, that's a doctor's office calling an insurance company to see what the coverage for that patient is. You want that to be as short as possible. In in some cases, speaker-1: No, it's like a speaker-0: Have replaced the phone call with an API call, which means it's instantaneous, it's more accurate. But if our business model was X dollars per hour, we would not be incentivized to doing that. So our business model has been outcome driven in those cases. In other cases, it's time driven. And I don't think enough people in healthcare or in technology think about aligning incentives and business models the right way. We try to follow the crowd in terms of the business models that are there. Everyone wants to charge for tokens, but just using more tokens in AI doesn't mean success. Yeah. speaker-1: Very interesting. It's very interesting. And it's like, you know, you you you're in a unique position because you've you've had a pretty front row seat into the development of AI for like some 15 years, right? For for quite some time, way before everybody was talking about AI over the last three to four years, right? From the search infrastructure that you were building at play, you know, to with the companies that you were seeing at Gradient, then building the systems at Infinitas. I mean, what do you think you've been able to see in the development of AI that a lot of people are missing? What's not being talked about? speaker-0: Very early. I think we're promising we are excited by the promise of AI and the thing most people in and and I'm a complete AI optimist. I think this is going to fundamentally change the economy and the world for the better. I think it's very important that we balance what's possible today with what will be possible in the future, right? AI for coding is really freaking good. AI for experimentation around drug discovery is getting really, really good. But AI for everything is not there yet. We don't have AGI. We're not close to it yet. most places that we talk about AI in, it's actually not truly agentic. It is co-pilots. It's helping people be more efficient. Most deployments and successes in AI are places where AI is helping us be more efficient. Harvey in the legal space is helping us, helping lawyers be more efficient at what they do. ⁓ If you look at a company like Writer that helps marketing teams with content, it's helping them be more efficient. We're only starting to scratch the surface in truly autonomous agentic workflows. And that wave is going to be significantly bigger than the co-pilot wave that we've seen over the last few years, but we need to let it develop. speaker-1: Last question before we we go to our lightning round of questions and close out, because I know you've got a hard stop. If you fast forward ten years and Infinitas has done what you believe it can do, what does the healthcare system actually look like? And what does the human role in? speaker-0: I think that human role gets magnified. I think humans will be there to be present for each other. Yesterday I got a ⁓ a text message from an endocrinologist who treated my daughter. ⁓ my daughter was born with a very rare disease called hyperinsulinism. She, you know, went through a a harrowing journey but was was cured of it. But I ⁓ she turned five a month ago, and this was the first time I've gotten a text since we left the hospital, you know, five years ago. Actually, five years ago today. She went in for her surgery that cured her. and I got a text yesterday that said there's another family in the Bay Area that has been diagnosed with the same condition that my daughter was diagnosed with. And they said, Would you be open to talking to them about your journey? And of course my answer was yes. Again, it's a very rare condition. The fact that I this is the first time I'm getting a a a message like that in five years tells you how rare it is. but as humans, we want to be there for each other. ⁓ we want to deliver that experience that is unparalleled. And I think humans will continue to play that role. Even your your physician wants to be there and not be rushed to the next 15-minute appointment. And technology and AI will enable that. We we need technology, AI, and all these systems that we're building to provide all the wraparound services to make the journey as seamless as possible, as ever present as possible. So the humans that are in the loop. the doctors, the nurses, the other families that have gone through it can focus on the parts that they are best suited for. speaker-1: Said, I agree a hundred percent. Lightning round questions, three quick questions, three quick answers. Question number one if you had one superpower, what would you choose? speaker-0: This is not a lightning question. This is a philosophical question. ⁓ The ability to write quickly. Okay. speaker-1: If you could have dinner with anyone in history, alive or dead, who would you pick? Okay. And if you could give one piece of advice to a young person looking for a career of meaning and purpose in one sentence, what would you tell them? speaker-0: My great great grandfather. Find somebody who has meaning and purpose in their own career and apprentice for them for a few years. There's few people focus on apprenticeships, but you learn a lot by just investing in yourself with that kind of a person for five to ten years. Right. speaker-1: so much. I'll get this exactly the kind of conversation we love to have on the show. I think, you know, what what stands out for me now at the end is, you know, you've you've never really let comfort become an identity, right? You've always challenged yourself, reinvented yourself. You've gone to Google, gone down in entrepreneurship, done venture, gone back to Google, gone back to entrepreneurship. And I think, you know, every time that there's a safe door that's wide open, you seem to kind of ignore that and go in a different path, right? Which I think is part of Part of your journey, but it's also very inspiring for others. And so for everyone else listening out there, if this conversation resonated, make sure you subscribe, leave us a comment, leave us a like, and you know, share this with somebody else who, you know, maybe is too comfortable in their own life and who maybe needs, you know, kind of a little kick in the butt to do something different and make an impact in the world. This has been another amazing episode. This one with Ankit Jane. Thank you so much, Unkit. This is Mork Unfiltered signing off. Thanks again, my friend. It's ⁓ it's been awesome.