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
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
The pharma business and our own business at Amgen.
I firmly believe that we canleverage the power of data and
digital technologies to improvehow this amazing innovation our
scientists had done and we hadbrought to market, how we could
drive more impact for patientsand do a better job of having
these medicines work as intendedfor a bigger population, you
(00:22):
know, over the longer term andso that was really the idea
behind Gen Digital Health is howdo we take, you know, the
existing and future technologiesthat were coming and really
wrap those around our drugs todrive better real-world impact?
Speaker 2 (00:38):
Today, I'm joined by Kal Patel, co-founder and CEO of
Bright Insight, a companyrevolutionizing digital health
with its medical grade cloudplatform.
Cal's career spans leadershiproles at Amgen, doctor on Demand
and Flex Digital Health, wherehe's driven innovative
healthcare solutions at theintersection of technology and
medicine.
In this episode, we're going totalk more about Cal's journey,
his insights into the digitalhealth landscape and how Bright
(01:00):
Insight is helping shape thefuture of healthcare.
So with that, let's dive in.
Welcome to Seed to Exit, thepodcast where we uncover the
stories, strategies and insightsthat power the startup
ecosystem.
I'm your host, rhys Keck,founder of MindHire, a talent
acquisition firm specializing inhelping startups build
exceptional teams.
Each week, I sit down withfounders, investors and industry
(01:23):
leaders to explore the journeysbehind iconic companies and
game-changing ideas.
Whether you're building,investing or just curious about
what it takes to succeed in thestartup world, I want this
podcast to be your go-toresource for actionable insights
and inspiring conversations.
Now, if you enjoy the show,please don't forget to subscribe
, leave a review or share itwith your network.
(01:43):
Your support means the worldand 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.
Absolutely so I want to getthings started by going a little
bit deeper into your history.
When I was doing some researchon your background, I saw that
you'd gotten your MBA and yourMD simultaneously.
(02:05):
Other than that soundingabsolutely insane from a work
perspective and studyperspective, no idea how you
pulled that off.
You clearly had somemotivations other than becoming
a doctor by getting your MBA.
So I was just curious what wasyour motivation behind that?
What were your thoughts whenyou were starting your career?
Speaker 1 (02:24):
Yeah, happy to share on that.
And I always had a stronginterest in science and
economics.
I mean credit to all the greathigh school teachers out there,
because that's what sparked myinterest is having two
phenomenal teachers in highschool.
I studied those topics incollege, but I always had this
desire to want to be a doctor,or at least go deeper on science
(02:46):
, and so my plan was to go tomedical school and be a
practicing physician with aninterest in the business side of
things, and what I ended updoing was applying to medical
school.
But I had studied economics asmy 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
(03:08):
might make sense to take a yearoff and get some real world
experience, make some money, dosome travel, and so I was
fortunate enough to get a job inconsulting at Boston Consulting
Group, and that really had aprofound impact on where I took
my career, because theexperience there opened up my
eyes in terms of the importance.
You know that really had aprofound impact on where I took
my career, because theexperience there opened up my
(03:29):
eyes in terms of you know theimportance not surprisingly in
retrospect of businesses andcorporations and the ability you
know at an early age to do workthat can help them make better
decisions and execute better anddrive impact at scale.
So I just kind of got attractedto this notion of like, how do
you help an organization driveimpact at scale?
But I wanted to do that inhealth care.
So I made the decision to doanother year at BCG and then,
(03:57):
when I actually started medicalschool because I deferred my
admissions, I decided to do thatMD because I made that decision
up front.
Even though I did two programsin four years, I probably had
one of the more relaxing medicalschool experiences because,
look, at the end of the day, Ididn't have the unnecessary
stress you know I did fine on myexams and did fine on my boards
but I didn't have that overhangof like I got to get a certain
(04:19):
score to get in a certainresidency program, so so I was
able to learn and pursue and becurious, 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 andlearn a lot along the way and
and yeah, took that then back tothe business side.
Speaker 2 (04:39):
Got it.
So you were at BostonConsulting Group for about six
years, you had a stint atNovartis and then, at a certain
time, you founded the AmgenDigital Health Program.
What was that like?
Speaker 1 (04:50):
Yeah, so just to quickly highlight what you said,
the BCG years were largelyfocused on health care, just
given my interest in my medicalbackground.
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
(05:10):
company and was in their pharmaside of their business in
different commercial roles andand at Amgen you know that
digital role was kind of mythird and last role within the
company so did very differentthings was had a corporate
strategy, was global marketinglead for a major drug called
Enbrel and the whole notion withdigital was and you saw, from
the background we discussed.
I'm not an engineer, I'm not atechnologist.
(05:32):
That was not, frankly, an earlyinterest.
I never thought of myself as anentrepreneur either.
But when I was asked to look atthat space and as I dug into it
and got deeper and deeper anddeeper, what became apparent to
me was that the technology wasway ahead of the real world
impact that it was having inhealthcare, of data and digital
(06:05):
technologies to improve how thisamazing innovation our
scientists had done and we hadbrought to market how we could
drive more impact for patientsand do a better job of having
these medicines work as intendedfor a bigger population over
the longer term, and so that wasreally the idea behind
GenDigital Health is how do wetake, you know, the existing and
future technologies that werecoming and really wrap those
(06:26):
around our drugs to drive betterreal world impact.
Speaker 2 (06:31):
Got it.
So moving forward a few years.
So you founded Bright Insightback in 2019.
And looking at the company now,you have several different
solutions you provide.
You have several differentspecialty or practice areas that
you work within.
I'm assuming those have beenbuilt out, you know,
incrementally over the course ofthe last few years.
So if we were to go back to theorigin of the company, what was
(06:52):
the original problem you weretrying to solve?
How did the original ideacoalesce?
Speaker 1 (06:56):
Yeah.
So the original problem we weretrying to solve came from my
and my co-founders experience atAmgen Digital Health.
So we were building varioussolutions, you know.
For example, we put Bluetoothinto a drug delivery device and
got one of the first earlyapprovals from FDA for a drug
plus device, backend, cloud andso forth.
(07:16):
So the group was working onthat.
We had other things, forexample, in a totally different
disease area, on how to helppatients track how their disease
was progressing over time, soyou can have the real data
instead of just kind of what youmight remember about how your
disease is progressing to helpinform better clinical decisions
.
So we're working on all thesevarious solutions and a lot of
them were POCs.
(07:37):
A lot of them, you know, didnot end up being, you know,
wildly successful.
But one commonality between allof them was that when we wanted
to leverage the cloud, we hadto think about and build
end-to-end how do we not justmanage data privacy and security
, but also the regulatoryrequirements based on what we
wanted to do with that data andthat solution?
Because if you have what'scalled a regulated intended use,
(08:00):
you want the data to, forexample, tell a diabetes patient
how much insulin to take theFDA in the case of the United
States is likely to regulatethat solution, that software,
just like in some ways as if itwere a drug or a medical device.
It's called software as amedical device actually as a
category for the FDA, because ifsomething goes wrong in that
(08:21):
software stack or in thatoverall solution you might put a
patient in a harm's way, justlike if a medicine you know
doesn't work as intended, youwant to make sure it's going to
perform as you know it'ssupposed to, otherwise could
harm the patient.
So as we moved into and we'reexploring these types of use
cases, we really understood thatthere's a market opportunity
(08:42):
for being an infrastructureprovider that try to package, if
you will, in a platform thatprivacy, security and regulatory
side of things and did it at aglobal scale because all the
pharma companies are largelyglobal corporations.
And so how do we not just meetthe requirements of the US FDA
and, let's say, hipaa, but we'redoing similarly for GDPR and
(09:03):
the European Union's equivalentof the FDA or Japan, etc.
So that was the original idea.
It came from our own experienceat Amgen as we were building
and trying to deploy and scalethese solutions in different
markets to say gosh, we can dothis a lot faster, better,
cheaper if we had a commoninfrastructure, and that's what
Bright Insight really endeavoredto do on the outset.
Speaker 2 (09:22):
What were the early days of the company like in
terms of building the products,getting your first few customers
?
Speaker 1 (09:27):
Yeah.
So one thing I'll say thatultimately we were really
fortunate to do is we actuallygot to incubate the company and
part of a bigger corporationcalled Flex, and Flex is a large
contract manufacturer thatworks across many industries and
they're a leading player in thehealthcare space.
So they actually manufacture alot of components or end
(09:48):
products for medical device andpharmaceutical companies and
they saw the same trend we sawaround digitization.
So I came into the companyalmost in an EIR type of role,
brought in my co-founders andthat really gave us a platform
to go talk to global biopharmacompanies with, frankly, a lot
of credibility and backingbehind us, which weren't just
three guys in a garage.
(10:09):
We were three guys with a lotof relevant experience working
under the umbrella and platformof a major corporation that they
already work with and trusted.
So that gave us an opportunityto do a lot of rapid just build
on our own experience but do alot of rapid market testing and
conversations and you knowfeedback from prospects and
(10:29):
conferences et cetera.
So through that, you know, wewere able to both validate the
idea, get input into what youknow our early you know platform
would look like, and then havethe conversations that
ultimately led to our firstcouple of customers.
And what became clear as we gotour first couple of customers
was that this company, thisproduct and this company
(10:52):
ultimately was better suited tobe its own business, which was
one of the hypotheses we hadwhen I took the role.
But as we kind of got markettraction, the CEO of Flex and
the board and I agree that itdid make sense to now make it a
spit out that can still continueto collaborate with Flex but be
(11:13):
able to kind of be off to theraces on its own.
So, yeah, I think we probablyreally got a great break by
being able to incubate within,you know, within a broader
established player like that.
Speaker 2 (11:27):
Yeah, I can imagine that was incredibly helpful
because you know, there's onething I know about buyers within
MedTech Pharma et cetera, isthat they don't move quickly and
they don't trust very quickly,so I imagine that that brand
name was helpful From a fundingperspective.
Did you start out with somefunding from them?
How did the originalfundraising go?
Speaker 1 (11:46):
Yeah, yeah.
So if you want to sort of thinkof it as, like you know, seed
or pre-seed type of money, thatwas really came out of the
budget of Flex itself.
So, you know, I had a budgetand then, as we kind of proved
stuff out, you know, got, youknow bigger and bigger budget.
So I forget the exact numbers,but we probably grew the team
(12:12):
out to be a couple of dozen ormore people under the Flex
umbrella and then we, you know,after we had that early market,
you know product and earlymarket validation, I did a
fundraising process as part ofthe spin out and raised a $25
million Series A, you know,co-led by Eclipse Ventures and
New Leaf Ventures here in theBay Area, and so that really was
the transaction that broughtthe company into its own
separate entity.
That was about five years ago.
Speaker 2 (12:33):
That's five years ago .
So when you were in the earlierstages of building, getting
those first few customers, didthe hypothesis that you
originally had in terms of whatyou felt customers needed.
Was that entirely validated, orwas there feedback from the
market that surprised you thatyou then incorporated into the
product?
Speaker 1 (12:49):
Yeah, a lot of feedback, some surprises, some
maybe things we well, there'salways surprises in the sense of
, in retrospect should have beena surprise or not, I don't know
, but if we knew it we shouldhave done it or would have done
it right.
So for sure, we've evolved ourthinking and what we do quite a
bit over the last five years.
(13:10):
Maybe to highlight a few ofthem so one is our premise
originally was that pharma, eventhough they would move slowly
and cautiously, would in apretty 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 someof the highest value use cases,
(13:30):
and so a couple of our earlyprograms you know we got that
market validation because thoseare the kinds of programs we
were working on.
But ultimately, I think wherethe business is, even today, is
that the industry is doing someof that, but the higher volume
stuff is at a lower risk part ofthe use case world.
(13:53):
So it's much more orientedaround.
How do we engage patients ontotheir disease and therapy?
How do we help them trackthings like disease progression?
Tracking how your disease isdoing is very different than
telling you how you might changewhat you should be doing.
Right, if you just kind ofthink about you know that from a
risk and a clinical perspective.
So a big thing we've learned isthe market is largest today
(14:15):
still in terms of, I would say,kind of lower risk, lower
complexity use cases.
Now how that's translated intothe product is a couple of
important ways.
One is we are positioning ourgo-to-market instead of being at
kind of that high-risk usecases.
We're talking much more aroundhey, how do you get moving,
(14:36):
crawl, walk run right?
So how do you rapidly buildsolutions that are going to
start driving value for thepatient and for the business and
then over time you can bring inright through your product
roadmap.
The pharma company can bring inhigher value, more complex,
higher risk use cases over time.
So we kind of start earlier inthe journey, if you will, of how
(14:58):
we talk to the market.
The second and probably mostimportant thing we've done is we
have taken our experience andinstead of early years where we
had a compliant platform but itrequired a lot of custom
software build, now we've seenenough use cases where we've
been able to massivelyproductize on top of our
(15:19):
platform and so most of the usecases that come to us now we can
do at a fraction of the cost, afraction of the time that we
were doing before, and so thatlets us really be much more of a
product company than sort of aplatform license with a lot of
(15:39):
custom build on top, custombuild on top.
So it's really meaningfullyevolved the business model of
the company.
You know the type of employeesin the company, the use cases
that we do.
You know what our deeds focusedon.
Speaker 2 (15:53):
You know et cetera, and I think it probably would be
helpful context to listenersjust to understand.
I know we talked a little bitabout where things were five
years ago, but where are you attoday, both in terms of
employees, fundraisingoperations, scale, et cetera?
Speaker 1 (16:06):
Yeah.
So we, you know we were justtackling all of those.
So we're about, you know, 160or so employees.
You know we have a reasonablenumber of long-term contractors
as well.
You know we're pretty globallydispersed with that headcount.
We were heavy US and heavycontractors pre-COVID but over
(16:29):
the years kind of spread out andinternalized a lot more of,
certainly, the software andengineering side of things.
Over the years we've done atotal of three finan financing.
So we had a series B that wasled by insight partners.
Series C that was led bygeneral catalyst, um, and you
(16:50):
know we were part of the.
You know the, so the exuberanceof 2021, um post COVID.
In terms of both, um, you knowthe market for you know, on all
fronts, right, the interest fromcustomers, the investment side,
our own belief on how fastthings would grow.
So we had a period of time wherewe certainly were higher
headcount but we've adapted towhat the growth in the market
(17:16):
has been as well as we've,frankly, as we've been able to
productize, that's had a bigshift.
Our customers are our top 20pharmacos, for the most part top
20 to 30 pharmaceuticalcompanies, and the nice thing is
our use cases are largelyfocused on multi-billion dollar
specialty brands that we'resupporting our customers in
(17:39):
their most important marketslike US, europe, japan,
important markets like US,europe, japan.
So we're really building a nicerepertoire of proof points to
really show that the kind ofproblem we solve is really
applicable not just to a coupleof niche disease areas, but it's
really applicable from ultrarare, rare diseases to very
common ones and it's applicableacross markets and patient types
(18:04):
, um and uh, and that when youdo that you can drive massive,
you know clinical impact forpatients and ROI for for our
customers.
Speaker 2 (18:12):
There's a lot to dig into there, particularly with
that level of growth.
Um, what were some of the coreprinciples that you used in
order to guide your team andcompany culture as you've scaled
from, you know, that couple ofinitial dozen to now?
Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1 (18:27):
So I'll highlight a few.
For us to be successful, wehave to have the full trust of
our customers.
So if you think about who ourcustomers are, it's not just
that they're pharmaceuticalcompanies and they're highly
regulated and they're know thesecore, their core assets, right.
And so if you're working withthem on a multi-billion dollar
(18:53):
drug, they're going to beincredibly cautious about
everything that they do there,right.
And then you take that one stepfurther.
We're building solutions thatare helping for the.
In most cases, for the firsttime ever, have a pharma company
collect data about specificpatients in the real world using
(19:13):
their drugs.
Post approval right Pharmacompanies.
They collect a lot of data in aclinical trial setting when
they're doing drug development,but historically they've
collected nothing directly frompatients once you're actually
approved and hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands, millions of
patients are on their therapies.
So you think about the scrutinythat brings from a data privacy
(19:35):
perspective, from a what areyou going to do with this data?
How are you going to keep itsecure?
So all of these things.
Every step of the way we haveto have the utmost confidence
and trust, and that's not justfrom a technology perspective,
it's also from we reallyunderstand the domain we operate
in, but it's also justculturally that we are
(19:56):
prioritizing their priorities,and so we're not going to take
shortcuts on something to dowith security or regulatory or
privacy because it's faster orcheaper 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 theirpatients.
(20:17):
So so I think that sort ofnotion of, hey, we got to always
be solving for, you know, forthe customer, and ensuring that
we're not doing anything that'sgoing to hurt their trust in us,
because if they do, then theprogram goes right and it's a
small world and our reputationgoes, and then it doesn't really
matter what we have behind that.
(20:37):
So I think that notion ofreally being customer first is
really ingrained from the get-goright, and then, of course,
gets into lots of things thatdon't have to do anything with
compliance, right, customersasking for something well,
that's not in the contract, butwe don't think that way, right?
Okay, well, what are theytrying to achieve and what can
we do to help them achieve thatright?
And let's do the right thingnow and then again it'll make it
(21:00):
through in the broader successof the relationship and our
ultimate success.
So I think that's a key pillar.
I think, secondly, from a withinthe company perspective.
You know we have this cultureof everyone, you know, is an
owner.
Everybody has a, not just aright but a responsibility to
(21:22):
behave as an owner, which meanslike, if something's not working
, you know, don't wait forsomebody else to fix it.
You know, try to fix it, raiseyour hand if you need others to
help you fix it.
You know, you know, et cetera,Right.
And so you know I've even justwas it this week, last week like
people will just throw aone-on-one on my calendar and
they'll be like, hey, can I talkto you about something?
I don't understand why we'redoing this.
(21:44):
It's not working.
You know, I've coming to youbecause I'm stuck.
Great, I love thoseconversations because that tells
me that because I can't memyself and the leadership team,
we're never going to know whatall the problems are that need
to be fixed.
Right, like this needs to comefrom, you know, frontline
manager level kind of culture oflike, hey, you know, we're not
(22:05):
going to know or be helpful todoing 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 youknow I should be directly
hands-on fixing, because youknow, for the most part, like,
hopefully, others are experts inthat domain, right, and I'm not
(22:26):
the expert in all the variousdomains of the business.
So so I think that culturecomes 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, wenever will be, but we try to try
to keep that, you know, keepthat, um, that culture going.
And then the third thing I'llsay is, like you know, we truly
believe that everybody thatworks here could have a job that
(22:48):
pays you more somewhere else.
You know that both speaks to thequality of the talent, but also
the fact that, like, you'rehere because you love the
mission, you love the people andyou want to, you know, lean in
and do work that you're going tobe proud of, hopefully not just
today but for the rest of yourlife, right, and be able to have
that kind of impact.
And so, you know, we kind ofalways come back to the mission,
we mission, we always come backto guys.
(23:09):
Why are we, you know doing, youknow got to get a product out
on a monday.
Why is everybody working overthe weekend?
Whatever it might be like itcomes back to?
Well, because we really careabout this and we want to.
You know, we, we're going tolook back and and all of us
hopefully, you know, try topause and look back even now and
say, like you know, we canreally be proud of the progress
we're making and and you know,we're far from being done, but
(23:32):
you know, we want to continue tofeel proud of the impact we're
having and be really driven bythe mission.
Speaker 2 (23:44):
You mentioned that if you're getting hands on to
something, then that's probablynot the best thing, because you
should have good problem solverswithin the org, and that's
obviously that that wholesubject has been the subject of
a lot of conversation recentlyin 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 anopinion one way, but I'd love to
hear you expand a little more.
Speaker 1 (24:00):
Yeah, look.
So first of all, I thinkthere's an inherent personality
side of things.
Different CEOs leaders aredifferent in kind of what they
bring to the table.
Ceos leaders are different inkind of what they bring to the
table.
My personal view and experienceis there's so much work for me
(24:21):
to do on ensuring that we haveclarity of vision, clarity of
priorities, you know, clarity ofessentially a framework of how
people can make decisions, andyou know, one of the hardest
lessons for me to learn was,like it, just because I have
said something once, even ifI've said it in all hands or to
20 people in this 20 millioncompany, that's great.
Now everybody knows it and hasinternalized it and understood
(24:45):
it, and that's just not the case, right?
So so much of the time has togo into bringing clarity, and I
think that's something that, tome, is a unique part of founder
mode, if you will right, whichis you got to have to repeatedly
.
You know, do that Now.
If you do that, I think youactually resolve a lot of the
problems that aren't gettingresolved.
(25:06):
Meaning to say it another way,if you were to.
You know, when I dissect whysomething is broken, it comes
back to my failure on providingclarity around, like you know
where are we going, what's theconstruct?
You know why are we doing it.
You know what's kind of theframework on how people should
be thinking about aligning andsolving and progressing the
business right.
(25:26):
And a lot of problems alignbecause one department thinks,
you know, this is a priority andanother problem department
thinks this is the priority.
It's probably because I didn'tthink about it enough or I
probably said one thing one timeand something else another time
, or I, you know, or I myselfwas hedging and wasn't clear.
But it usually comes back tosome root cause of lack of
(25:47):
clarity.
So I think you know, if yousort of accept my hypothesis or
experience, a large part of theproblems come from that.
And then others come from youknow some folks that just don't
want to align to that.
Then it is your job as theleader to drive that replacement
.
And sometimes somebody who'sworking for one of somebody on
(26:11):
the leadership team and it's myjob to bring that back to that
leader and say, hey, look,there's an alignment issue, it's
not a clarity issue, you got tofix that, or you know, and
usually that you know then theywill fix that, um, and then you
see what problems are left afterthat and I think those are the
true founder mode problems,right.
So we've made important you knowknow strategic decisions in the
business.
(26:31):
You know, whether you call thempivots or you just call them
other.
You know important decisionsthat that clearly, you know fall
at the level of founder and ora small group of group of people
who you know kind of have toelevate 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 bigdecisions, um, but I think a
(26:55):
lot of that other stuff.
It just, yeah, I struggle withthe scalability of that and and
and I think back to like when Iwas in different roles, like I
just don't think most peoplelike to be told what to do, uh,
and you know they want to knowwhat you're trying to do, and
then they want to.
You know they want to know whatyou're trying to do and then
they want to.
You know they get satisfactionand learning and feel great
about figuring it out Right andjust like you know you and I
(27:17):
were talking about before we goton about our kids, and so you
know it's the same thing.
Kids don't want to be taughtwhat to do, but, you know, they
feel great when they figure itout themselves.
Right, you got to provide themsome framework and construct.
So it might not always be themost efficient way, but I think
it's a better way to build abusiness over the long term.
And look, there's going to beexceptions.
I'm not Elon Musk, I'm sure.
(27:40):
Look, you know, he's a uniquecharacter.
I could see why he wouldoperate 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 youknow talent.
Speaker 2 (27:48):
Well, I think the other thing, too, is that you
also mentioned.
You want to hire really smartpeople who want to take pride in
their work and figure out howto solve the problems.
And if you dictate ormicromanage how to solve the
problem, as opposed to justsaying here is the problem,
figure out how to solve it,you're probably turning off some
of your most effective peoplebecause you're no longer giving
them the creativity to workwithin that framework.
Speaker 1 (28:09):
Yeah, exactly Exactly .
I think the part that is mostimportant is to ask the right
questions, right?
So if you, because you knowwhere could things go sideways?
Well, they go sideways becausepeople get too buried, they get
lost in the trees, right.
And so if you come in as aleader, as a founder, and you're
like, oh, oh hey, this isinteresting or great or it
(28:32):
doesn't make sense to me, or youknow, 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'reright, we hadn't thought about
that.
So really, the right answer isthis, not that.
Or you pull them out andthey're like, yeah, we thought,
we thought about that.
Then, as a founder, you're aleader, you're like, oh great,
like I asked three toughquestions and you know their
(28:56):
answers.
Give them, and I confidencethat this is the, you know the
path we should be trying.
So so, yeah, I'm with you.
I think the other thing thathappens is if people believe
that their work and theirempowerment is only good until
you show up, they're just notgoing to do their best work,
right, cause they're like whocares?
(29:17):
Like, you know, next week, whenwe talked to Cal, he's going to
tell us what to do anyway.
So, like, why should we spendall this time figuring out what
the right answer is?
And that's just I, just that'sjust going to be a horrible
subpar weight around the company.
Because then you have all thesetalented people that are not
doing great work because they'rejust kind of waiting for you to
tell them what to do, right?
Or you get them in a meetingand you they're not going to
(29:39):
argue, and you want them toargue with you, right, and you
want them to argue with eachother with the desire to find
the best answer.
So, again, if you're kind oflike, well, I'm the founder,
here's what we're going to do, Ithink that's just not a
personally, I don't think it'san inspiring way to lead, but I
also don't think it's the bestway to get the best decisions
and the best output from people.
I think you, you know, I lovebeing wrong.
(30:00):
Love being wrong, you know, andand because that just tells me
that I things are going wellbecause people who are, you know
, are making better decisionsthan I would have made which is
the way to scale.
Speaker 2 (30:16):
I think that's a great point when you say that
your primary job as a CEO is toensure the clarity and alignment
.
How?
Speaker 1 (30:18):
do you?
Speaker 2 (30:18):
actually go about delivering that.
Let's say, you'veconceptualized the idea, you
know where you need to go.
How do you then get the rest ofthe company on the same page at
this level of scale?
Speaker 1 (30:28):
Yeah.
So I'll say it's not easy.
I'm not saying I'm doing agreat job, and every time I have
a conversation like this Ileave being like, okay, I really
got to make myself moredisciplined, on, on, on, on
doing a better job here.
So there's the things like youwould expect, like all hands.
You know, one thing we've donethat I think works well is we
(30:50):
follow up every all hands withinoffice hours, because we were
always like, oh, we'll doquestions and we always run out
of time for questions so.
So now I always have officehours, anybody can come in and
ask about anything that theywant.
So I think that's like anopportunity, you know, again,
people to ask whatever questionthey want.
That can help me learn wherethere might be confusion or
what's on people's mind, buthopefully drive clarity right.
Second, obviously, is in thevarious meetings, right, so I
(31:12):
probably spend, you know, athird to half my time in
discussions with folks, right?
So there's a an importantlistening element to that.
But then just recognizing that,you know I got to keep
repeating and repeating.
But looking for is thereunderstanding?
Is there passive acceptance?
You know, is there excitementand you know engagement, right,
(31:42):
massive acceptance, you know, isthere excitement and, you know,
engagement, right, but there'sa kind of continuously reinforce
the key things you know, whichI think would go a long way to
really force myself and theleadership team to say, okay,
like let's put this in writing,at least as of today, what we're
saying and what we believe, andyou know on important topics of
course not necessarily all ofthem and then to make that
(32:03):
available for everybody, right,so that so then you aren't
playing a telephone game.
So that's, I think, somethingthat I've thought about and
haven't really operationalized,that I think actually would help
a lot.
So, yeah, so it's those thingsyou know.
I think it's.
You know I can't kind of besitting in my office just
talking to myself all day, right, like it's the making sure, you
(32:26):
know the connection ishappening, 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 whereI've made that more structured.
And again this conversation ismaking me think that there's
probably benefit into me atleast analyzing the calendar but
, if nothing else, you know,potentially bringing some of
(32:47):
that structure back to that.
So so it's not getting biasedtowards certain parts of the
business, you know, at theexpense of others.
Speaker 2 (32:55):
Well, hey, if anything, you came out of this
conversation with some some newnext steps, and I do love the
office hours tactic.
That's not something I've I'veheard of other companies doing,
but I do think that's a greatthing to implement because
you're right, as you know,generally everyone has some sort
(33:17):
of questions in all hands orthey don't feel comfortable
asking the thing they'rewondering in front of 160 people
, but there's probably a lot ofother people wondering the same
thing.
When it comes to the hiringperspective you mentioned
earlier, you were pretty heavyUS centric and then offshore
contractor, and then that modelhas sort of evolved over the
years and I even noticed now alot of the engineering hiring
you're doing is is overseas ornear shore.
How has that approach changed?
(33:39):
What was the thinking behindthat?
Was it purely just it's COVIDand things are remote now?
What?
Was there something else?
Speaker 1 (33:46):
Yeah, so part of it is involved with the business
model I mentioned earlier, wherewe had the platform.
But each customer project hadits own custom development
effort that we typically alsokind of owned and ran for them.
So we started with a verycontractor heavy model, partly
(34:06):
because we were incubating andso we couldn't necessarily do
all the hiring we wanted to.
Partly it was also when you'reproject driven right, you kind
of have to have your headcountbe flexible to go up and down.
So you know we had that.
What we learned from that washaving you know a set of
(34:27):
contractors for kind of at theplatform level.
Over time we got to a goodplace and, frankly, like some of
those people are with us todayso they've been working with us,
you know, half a dozen yearsand so, whether you call them an
employee or a contractor I'mactually going to pay a visit to
many of these folks in Vietnamlater this month, earlier this
year.
So it worked well there.
(34:48):
But at the project level itjust didn't work well because
you'd have people coming in.
They didn't know anything aboutthe space, what we were doing
or the use case or obviously ourown SOPs and, as I mentioned,
we work in a very regulatedspace.
So we spent so much time tryingto train them on how to do
things and then the quality ofthe work et cetera.
We just weren't very successful, frankly, and that translated
(35:11):
into not just cost overruns anddelays but obviously customer
satisfaction et cetera.
So post-release series C, wehired a CTO from the outside and
he had a lot of enterprisesoftware experience doing this
and part of his remit was to say, ok, both productize the
company.
But in that process remit wasto say, okay, both productize
(35:32):
the company, but in that processgave him the keys to figure out
the most effective way to buildengineering.
He had a very clear view of weshould internalize and then, of
course, have a small group ofplaces we can contract but be
able to do that.
It's played out and it's playedout great.
It's played out great both interms of what the first thing he
(35:55):
did was actually build our.
You know, as we productized theproduct was built by our own
employees, largely in India, butthen, when the customer use
cases, those deployments alsothen over time moved from
external parties to us doing itourselves.
Right, and now we have a reallynice feedback loop.
(36:16):
Right, are building the product, know that they're going to
also have some or a lot ofresponsibility on its
configuration and deployment,and so you create a team that
really has full accountabilityand isn't throwing stuff over
the wall or thinking of it as aproject, and then they're off to
their next, to their next thing.
So, yeah, it really played out.
(36:36):
The learnings played out in thefirst couple of years, the
operationalizing of this, youknow, has happened over the last
few years.
Speaker 2 (36:42):
Yeah, I mean there's a lot of startups that prefer to
hire here for on engineeringspecifically, for a few reasons
you know.
One is there's the obviousthings like the you know less
time difference.
But then there's also often aconsideration, for you know that
the talent bar here that youfind can be better than
necessarily what you'd find inIndia.
How do you keep your talent barhigh when you're hiring
(37:04):
offshore?
Speaker 1 (37:05):
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 inIndia that are leading there are
people who have directexperience with other leaders at
Bright Insights so not with me,but either CTO or head of HR et
(37:27):
cetera.
So we've kind of put in placefolks that have kind of been
there, done that before with us,with people on my team, so they
can bring both their networksand their experience recruiting
et cetera.
So that's one.
The second is we have peoplecome through San Jose on a
pretty regular basis, especiallythe leadership team there in
(37:49):
India.
So they're both staying veryclose to you, know the product
and engineering leadership teamand are, you know, whiteboarding
and solving problems et cetera,and so in that you know you
both close some of thecommunication, you know time
zone and otherwise gaps, but youalso are going to see quality
in those discussions directly.
(38:09):
Right, if someone's with youfor a week whiteboarding and
solving problems and havingbreakfast, lunch, dinner, you're
going to get a good sense oflike, hey, you know to my
earlier point around you knowmission alignment, clarity, you
solve all those things but alsolike, hey, is this person, you
know the kind of quality we need?
And then then vice versa, whichis, you know, leadership here,
(38:30):
going to India and doing therounds there, meeting directly
with people, and not just like,hey, let me show up, shake hands
, have a meal and take off, butmore like hey, we're going to be
(38:52):
here for a week and we're goingto roll up our sleeves and
tackle important things we'reworking on the product roadmap
or problems that need to besolved, or, you know, figure out
, you know kind of the next stepin the technology journey, etc.
So trying to really collapsethat geographic and time zone.
And look credit to my cto.
He is up late at night and inthe mornings, like very
regularly, like it's just,that's just how he operates,
right, like you, there's alwaysa 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
(39:12):
coming from him.
You know, past midnight, and soI think that's just kind of his
cadence, of how he operates.
So he's, you know, he's, Igotta imagine probably you know
I wasn't saying almost dailybasis, probably actually a daily
basis having conversations with, with, you know, with leaders
and team in India.
Speaker 2 (39:27):
Got that.
Yeah, that that in personcomponent is so important, even
when you're remote, so it'sgreat to hear that you're doing
that.
When we look forward a littlebit, you've done really well on
the fundraising side.
Like you mentioned, you raisedthe Series C, which was 101
million, led by General Catalyst, and that was a couple years
ago.
How are you thinking aboutfuture fundraising efforts, if
(39:48):
at all?
Speaker 1 (39:49):
Yeah, right now we're largely heads down focus on
execution and I kind of alludedto this earlier.
But as we've productized theplatform, we've been able to
accelerate our ability to bringon and deploy use cases.
So we're in a period where wewant to keep doing that and
bring proof points to market sothat we can walk into our
(40:11):
prospective customer and most ofour prospective customers
they've never done what we sell,so it's not like they're like
we were doing it this way andnow we'll do it with Bright
Insight.
They just haven't.
We're creating a market, sothat's what we're now focused on
Keep scaling, deploying,scaling these use cases, get the
data and the proof points sothat we can come in to a brand
(40:32):
manager of any pharma companyand really compellingly make the
argument of why they should bedoing this and why they should
do it with us.
So I think once we keep, we'llkeep doing that and then maybe
in the future, if it makes senseto kind of put more fuel on the
fire, we would think moreproactively about a fundraise.
(40:52):
We're deploying a secondproduct line right now and that
might be the trigger point.
Once we're in market and havemarket validation with this new
product line, then we may say,okay, should we bring on more
capital to accelerate productdevelopment and go to market for
that second product line?
So so nothing, nothing kind ofyou know proactively in the
(41:15):
works or on the calendar rightnow.
Speaker 2 (41:18):
And when you think, of course, about the next couple
of years.
Obviously, you work withpharmaceutical 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 potentialchanges to legislation and the
larger healthcare market from agovernmental perspective playing
into your plan at all, how areyou approaching that?
(41:38):
Yeah, that's a good question.
Speaker 1 (41:40):
So I'm sure, as most of your audience knows, the
United States is the largesthealthcare market in the world.
We spend a higher percentage ofour GDP on healthcare than, I
think, any OECD country,probably any country in the
world, and that percentage hasbeen going up.
And I'll tell you, we weretalking about this when I was a
consultant 20, x years ago andsaying this is an unsustainable
(42:01):
chart and nothing's reallychanged.
The chart's still going up intothe right and I think we're you
know, we're probablyapproaching 20% of GDP going
into healthcare.
The issue to me is notprimarily how much money we're
spending, but it's the lack ofvalue that we're getting from
that spend.
Right, and that's all of usright.
(42:24):
It's not about whether it's allof us as citizens of the
country, and there's a lot ofreasons for that.
But I think there's a real, notjust opportunity, but I would
say personally, a need forgovernment to really step back
and rethink its role inhealthcare.
They spend you know thegovernment is the biggest
spender in the biggest country,biggest market, you know, of
healthcare, right?
So the US government,single-handedly, you know that
(42:45):
largest player and they'relargely spending most of their
money on sick care.
Right, the money is gettingdeployed after folks are sick
and then they will throw a lotof money at that and it's kind
of can it have a heroic impact?
Absolutely, and should wecontinue to do that much of it?
Yes, but I think if youactually went upstream, right,
(43:09):
most significant part of diseaseand you know, and ultimately
death could be meaningfullydelayed.
So you extend both quality oflife and deploy you know and
push back the end of life atscale by, in my opinion, going
upstream, not by looking forinnovation.
You know at the, you know aftersomebody has disease, and
(43:31):
that's a paradigm shift that Idon't think.
At least you know Republicans,democrats, whoever that at least
you know in any sort ofmeaningful way anybody's talking
about.
So all the healthcare you knowkind of rhetoric or reforms or
suggestions that you hear, youknow in kind of, you know,
mainstream media is largely, inmy opinion it's important, but
it's really, you know, on themargin ultimately of the big
(43:55):
picture of you know how muchwe're spending, what kind of
health do we actually have inthe country and ultimately, like
you know, what kind of valueare we getting for all that
spend.
Speaker 2 (44:05):
Yeah, well, I mean, if we all, you know, if we all
ate our vegetables and stoppedsmoking and drinking and got
eight hours of sleep at night,then healthcare spending would
plummet because we would all bein much better shape.
But is that the role of thegovernment to regulate?
Or is that even something thegovernment could regulate in
some way, either through, youknow, call it increased taxes on
things that are unhealthy, orsomething else along those lines
(44:27):
?
Speaker 1 (44:28):
Yeah.
So it's a great question, soI'll give you a couple of
responses.
So, from a pure regulationperspective I mean you already
gave examples the governmentregulates certain things already
, right, like tobacco, likealcohol, like other drugs,
(44:48):
conversation about the role ofultra-processed foods around,
the role of, you know, sugar,and and again, it's you know,
you can don't have to go to muchof a google search to figure
out what percentage of caloriesour children get from
ultra-processed foods and sugars, and even adults in this
country, etc.
Right?
So so you know I'm not giving aspecific answer, but I think
you know there certainly is.
(45:10):
At least we should have adiligent exploration of the role
of government and saying, okay,like, are we discouraging or
are we frankly encouraging?
You know, the wrong kind ofconsumption, you know, in our
diets, as, as one example, right, I think, when you get into
things like what we're doingwith you know, you know, in
terms of exercise or sleep andother things like that,
(45:32):
personally, for me, I think it'sless about regulation, it's you
know, I don't think educationfixes it, because I think most
people would say the same thingyou said around, like, oh, I
should eat more veggies andsleep more and be less stressed
out and be on social media less,et cetera.
And then it gets into the notionof, like other behavior changes
, like, what can we do from anincentives perspective?
Right, right, what can we dofrom a carrot and stick
(45:53):
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 youshift dollars, uh, you know, in
a way that uh, incentivizesmore of what will ultimately be
good for them, at least from ahealth perspective, right, and,
and of course, just like smoking, at the end of the day,
somebody can choose to, not, tonot go down that path and make
(46:17):
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 athird, you know smoke for 30
years and everything else, andnow you know they're in this
precarious, you know, cancer,lungs, et cetera situation.
(46:38):
What are we going to say?
We're not going to treat themat that point.
You know, I don't.
You know, certainly, you knowthat's not the kind of society
America is.
I don't think it's anywherenear that.
I'm not advocating for that,you know.
I think the question becomescan you shift resources so that
you minimize the number ofpeople that end up in that
situation?
Right, because you, you know,through education, through
(46:58):
incentives, throughdisincentives, you know, et
cetera.
You know, hopefully have morefolks you know on a different
trajectory than that one.
Speaker 2 (47:09):
Yeah, yeah, I mean I think you can guide behaviors,
but certainly, yeah, you can't.
Your government mandated 20pushups per day, or what have
you?
Speaker 1 (47:18):
I go back to my economics days here, where
there's so many misalignment ofincentives and so a lot of
(47:38):
physicians are incentivized forvolume, not outcomes.
We've been talking about quoteunquote something called
value-based care.
If any of your listeners wantto Google that again, since when
I got out of college and wasdoing my first years at BCG,
very little of the country'shealthcare dollars go into these
value-based contracts.
30 years later, and the notionof the whole concept there is
(48:00):
how do we incentivize thehealthcare system to keep you
healthy versus get paid for sickcare?
But the reality is most of thedollars go to people who are
incentivized and make more moneywhen 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, themore money I'm going to make.
(48:21):
I don't make more money becauseI've kept people healthy and
they've never needed thatsurgery, 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 stocksof Novo Nordisk and Eli Lilly.
They've become household namesnow because of the GLP-1s that
they developed.
(48:41):
Well, look, I know people inboth of those companies.
They are incrediblymission-driven, amazing people
that are trying to do their bestwork.
So I'm not challenging anybodyI've met at any of those
companies.
But the point is that the systemis set up where they were
incentivized to innovate thereinstead of innovate, let's say,
for a different disease, right?
So they are responding to theproblem society has created,
(49:05):
which is what you expect arational, compassionate person
to do, right?
The surgeon is going to say Ispent all these years trading,
I'm going to go in and I'm goingto fix this problem over and
over.
But no one's kind of sayingwell, how do we just get less
people with that problem so thatyou don't have to operate on?
You know people with lungcancer, you know there's just
not enough of that shifthappening, right?
(49:25):
And those incentives are ladenthrough the entire healthcare.
So if you're a hospital, guesswhat?
If everyone in yourneighborhood is healthier and
you have 10 or 20 percent ofyour beds empty on a given night
, that hospital is going to gobankrupt.
That hospital is going to needgovernment subsidy to stay open
because they've built out thesebeds.
And you go into any part of thecountry, how much of the new
construction you're seeing islike new health care facilities
(49:48):
going up.
So the whole incentive systemis responding as you would
expect it to respond, so youkind of have to go.
You know you got to go back tosome of these first principles
in order to address some ofthese things.
Right and and.
Again, I don't blame anybody.
I think people are all tryingto do their best.
But you know, obviously I havetons of friends from medical
school that work their butts off, um, but they're a cog in the
wheel.
(50:08):
Uh, in the sense of you knowthe system right, that that
we're all operating in, you know, myself included, right, yeah,
well, and it's also so.
Speaker 2 (50:17):
There's like there's this huge equilibrium where we
we need a certain amount of sickpeople and ideally we'd have
less, but then, like you said,if we get less sick people, then
the system collapses becausethe hospitals run out of money.
So bigger problem than we cantalk about here on the podcast.
So I want to wrap by talkingabout you a little bit more.
So just two final questions.
(50:38):
One you're obviously very busy.
You run a big company, you havethree kids.
How do you manage your time?
How do you yourself become aseffective as you can?
Speaker 1 (50:46):
Yeah, that's a good question and that answer has
also changed a lot over theyears.
So this is not how I wascertainly four or five, even
three years ago.
But I've learned through greatadvisors and folks who I work
very closely with, who've kindof helped me both evolve my
thinking and build a skill setthat I try to implement
(51:09):
regularly.
So, first of all, I genuinelybelieve that if I don't feel
healthy, I don't feel good, it'sgoing to have a negative impact
on everything around me.
And that's again, it's notrocket science, but I keep
reminding myself, if I'm shorttempered with the kids, why is
that?
Well, it's because I probablydidn't get a great night's sleep
or I was on the red eye flightor you know something else was
(51:31):
you know else is leading, or I'mjust stressed out, bringing
stress from work into the homeand vice versa, when I'm looking
like, hey, if I was short in ameeting or I made a bad decision
or gave a bad like, where's thesource?
So I have enough data points inmy own life to know that, like,
foundationally, if I'm notphysically healthy and mentally
healthy, I myself don't have agreat day and I, and that I sort
(51:54):
of multiply that negativity inmy interactions around me.
So, so I very muchfoundationally focus, focus on
that right, and it's the thingsthat you would expect you
already mentioned.
I mentioned sleep is is key, sofoundationally key, key in that
.
Secondly, you know, for meanyway it's, it's working out
right.
So I now schedule into my weekone once a week, yoga once a
(52:16):
week, a personal trainer um tryto find obviously other times
around that get on a Peloton.
My wife and I do a lot ofthings together, um, meditation,
um, you know, I have a coachwho, um can tell when I've
dropped off.
She doesn't even ask me.
She's like oh, you know, Ithink we should get back on to
you know, reconfirming that.
(52:37):
And you know what, as soon as Iget back on that boat, I
immediately see the positivefeedback loop on that right.
You know, I'm veryconscientious, I would say,
about what I eat as well, but Ithink that foundation is just a
big part of it and when I havethat, that just gives me the
fuel to work through the hardstuff, you know, and kind of you
know, the rest of the rest ofthe hours.
The other thing I'll point outis and again, none of these are
(52:59):
black or white, right, and youkind of have to keep investing
in them, is to just have, is toultimately have some amount of
perspective on the challengesthat get thrown at you know, me
or any of us on a given day, aswell as the amount of work that
needs to be done.
And just having some element ofperspective, like, hey, at the
end of the day, you know how amI going to look back at this in
(53:20):
a day, in a week, in a month, ina year?
Like, am I going to be asstressed out about this as I am?
You know, right now, you knowwhether it's going well or not
going well and, frankly, it'sthe same thing for the wins,
right, it's like okay, this wasgreat.
Wait, wait, how much does thismatter?
Right?
And I think that helps kind ofkeep a level of of calmness and
perspective.
(53:41):
So, without having kind of, youknow, getting super down or
getting super excited and beingable to, you know, have that
sort of perspective of that Ithink ultimately enables again
better decisions.
You know, have that sort ofperspective of, uh, that I think
ultimately enables again betterdecisions.
Um, you know, cause again oncewhen your blood pressure goes up
(54:01):
and your sympathetic nervoussystem kicks in like nobody
makes good decisions.
You know, unless you're runningaway from a lion, you're not
making good decisions there,right, and so so it's not.
You know, it's not to bemistaken with like, oh, how do I
get perspective?
And I don't really care whathappens.
It's the opposite of that.
It's like.
You know, caring means beingable 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
(54:23):
you're done.
Um, yeah, and, like I said, allthose things, you know, are you
kind of need, need reminders.
And last thing I'll say forthose that have kids is you do
like, you know, there's justsomething so special about
spending time with them, andI've worked a lot on trying to
(54:44):
really turn off the work brainwhen I'm with them, and not just
because they deserve it andthat's what I want to be doing,
but honestly, that makes mebetter at work.
You know, if I, you know, ifit's just a half hour playing
catch or goofing around, doingwhatever you come back with, oh,
I have just had a great ideaabout work.
You're like well, how did thathappen?
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.
(55:05):
Feel so much better about thetime I spend with them, feel
refreshed, recharged, but thenI'm able to be more effective at
you know, on the work side.
Speaker 2 (55:13):
Yeah, I love that.
I mean the, the physical andmental 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 gotto go, you know, work out from
six, 30 to seven, 30, and try tocome home and crash by you know
nine to get a decent night ofsleep, and everything in me is
screaming like no, that's anadditional like three hours of
(55:33):
work you're losing that youcould be putting in.
But yeah, you really, you reallyhave to to segment things,
cause it's it's like you know,should you operate at nine to 10
hours at a hundred percent, orwork 12 to 13 hours at 60%?
The math just just doesn't mathout.
So so, last question then youknow there's a lot of talk
always about the founder journey, and it's something that's very
(55:54):
, very personal to every founderand very unique.
What have you learned aboutyourself over the course of the
last five years in terms offounding?
Bright Insight.
Speaker 1 (56:05):
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 asense of confidence and
conviction that I'm on thejourney that I want to be on.
I don't have self-doubts aboutthe path that I've taken.
(56:30):
I think early on, you know,there was a lot of that like, oh
, you know, should I be doingthis?
You know, I was in a bigcompany, had a nice paycheck,
you know all that kind of stuff,and you have those doubts.
And now, regardless of whereBright Inside ends up, you know
I'm not going to have any doubts.
I'm like I should have pursued adifferent path and I think
that's a very freeing and Iguess you know, let's say,
(56:59):
freeing, rewarding, but alsojust like it brings a lot of
gratitude for me that I havethat perspective.
You know that this is exactlywhat I want to be doing and
where I want to be doing itright now in my life.
And, you know, almost regardlessof outcome.
Again, I'm not trying to say Idon't care about the outcome,
but you know, I'm actually ableto be better at driving to the
right outcome by having, youknow, having that sense of
(57:19):
knowing that I'm doing what Iwant 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 whatcareer they're in right Is, you
know, when you can kind of belike is this what I want to be
doing now and what I want to bedoing?
Maybe tomorrow or six monthsfrom now or five years from now
(57:39):
might be different, but this iswhat I want to be doing now and
if you can have a calmness and aconfidence in that, it's very
freeing then to, you know, focuson that versus kind of having a
voice in your head being like,you know, whatever that voice is
, that's distracting you fromenjoying the work and doing the
work.
Speaker 2 (57:57):
Love that Cool.
Well, Cal, this is an awesomeconversation.
Thank you so much for coming on.
I really appreciate it.
Speaker 1 (58:03):
Yeah, I really enjoyed it.
Thanks, Rhys.
Speaker 2 (58:05):
Thank you for tuning in to this episode of Seed to
Exit.
I hope you found today'sconversation insightful and
valuable.
If you enjoyed the episode,please take a moment to
subscribe, leave a review andshare it with your network.
Your support means the worldhelps us continue to grow and
bring more incredible guestsonto the show.
Now for more content andupdates, follow me on LinkedIn
(58:25):
or Twitter, or you can check outMindHire, where we help
startups build exceptional teams.
No-transcript.
The pharma business and our own business at Amgen.
I firmly believe that we canleverage the power of data and
digital technologies to improvehow this amazing innovation our
scientists had done and we hadbrought to market, how we could
drive more impact for patientsand do a better job of having
these medicines work as intendedfor a bigger population, you
(00:22):
know, over the longer term andso that was really the idea
behind Gen Digital Health is howdo we take, you know, the
existing and future technologiesthat were coming and really
wrap those around our drugs todrive better real-world impact?
Speaker 2 (00:38):
Today, I'm joined by Kal Patel, co-founder and CEO of
Bright Insight, a companyrevolutionizing digital health
with its medical grade cloudplatform.
Cal's career spans leadershiproles at Amgen, doctor on Demand
and Flex Digital Health, wherehe's driven innovative
healthcare solutions at theintersection of technology and
medicine.
In this episode, we're going totalk more about Cal's journey,
his insights into the digitalhealth landscape and how Bright
(01:00):
Insight is helping shape thefuture of healthcare.
So with that, let's dive in.
Welcome to Seed to Exit, thepodcast where we uncover the
stories, strategies and insightsthat power the startup
ecosystem.
I'm your host, rhys Keck,founder of MindHire, a talent
acquisition firm specializing inhelping startups build
exceptional teams.
Each week, I sit down withfounders, investors and industry
(01:23):
leaders to explore the journeysbehind iconic companies and
game-changing ideas.
Whether you're building,investing or just curious about
what it takes to succeed in thestartup world, I want this
podcast to be your go-toresource for actionable insights
and inspiring conversations.
Now, if you enjoy the show,please don't forget to subscribe
, leave a review or share itwith your network.
(01:43):
Your support means the worldand 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.
Absolutely so I want to getthings started by going a little
bit deeper into your history.
When I was doing some researchon your background, I saw that
you'd gotten your MBA and yourMD simultaneously.
(02:05):
Other than that soundingabsolutely insane from a work
perspective and studyperspective, no idea how you
pulled that off.
You clearly had somemotivations other than becoming
a doctor by getting your MBA.
So I was just curious what wasyour motivation behind that?
What were your thoughts whenyou were starting your career?
Speaker 1 (02:24):
Yeah, happy to share on that.
And I always had a stronginterest in science and
economics.
I mean credit to all the greathigh school teachers out there,
because that's what sparked myinterest is having two
phenomenal teachers in highschool.
I studied those topics incollege, but I always had this
desire to want to be a doctor,or at least go deeper on science
(02:46):
, and so my plan was to go tomedical school and be a
practicing physician with aninterest in the business side of
things, and what I ended updoing was applying to medical
school.
But I had studied economics asmy 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
(03:08):
might make sense to take a yearoff and get some real world
experience, make some money, dosome travel, and so I was
fortunate enough to get a job inconsulting at Boston Consulting
Group, and that really had aprofound impact on where I took
my career, because theexperience there opened up my
eyes in terms of the importance.
You know that really had aprofound impact on where I took
my career, because theexperience there opened up my
(03:29):
eyes in terms of you know theimportance not surprisingly in
retrospect of businesses andcorporations and the ability you
know at an early age to do workthat can help them make better
decisions and execute better anddrive impact at scale.
So I just kind of got attractedto this notion of like, how do
you help an organization driveimpact at scale?
But I wanted to do that inhealth care.
So I made the decision to doanother year at BCG and then,
(03:57):
when I actually started medicalschool because I deferred my
admissions, I decided to do thatMD because I made that decision
up front.
Even though I did two programsin four years, I probably had
one of the more relaxing medicalschool experiences because,
look, at the end of the day, Ididn't have the unnecessary
stress you know I did fine on myexams and did fine on my boards
but I didn't have that overhangof like I got to get a certain
(04:19):
score to get in a certainresidency program, so so I was
able to learn and pursue and becurious, 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 andlearn a lot along the way and
and yeah, took that then back tothe business side.
Speaker 2 (04:39):
Got it.
So you were at BostonConsulting Group for about six
years, you had a stint atNovartis and then, at a certain
time, you founded the AmgenDigital Health Program.
What was that like?
Speaker 1 (04:50):
Yeah, so just to quickly highlight what you said,
the BCG years were largelyfocused on health care, just
given my interest in my medicalbackground.
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
(05:10):
company and was in their pharmaside of their business in
different commercial roles andand at Amgen you know that
digital role was kind of mythird and last role within the
company so did very differentthings was had a corporate
strategy, was global marketinglead for a major drug called
Enbrel and the whole notion withdigital was and you saw, from
the background we discussed.
I'm not an engineer, I'm not atechnologist.
(05:32):
That was not, frankly, an earlyinterest.
I never thought of myself as anentrepreneur either.
But when I was asked to look atthat space and as I dug into it
and got deeper and deeper anddeeper, what became apparent to
me was that the technology wasway ahead of the real world
impact that it was having inhealthcare, of data and digital
(06:05):
technologies to improve how thisamazing innovation our
scientists had done and we hadbrought to market how we could
drive more impact for patientsand do a better job of having
these medicines work as intendedfor a bigger population over
the longer term, and so that wasreally the idea behind
GenDigital Health is how do wetake, you know, the existing and
future technologies that werecoming and really wrap those
(06:26):
around our drugs to drive betterreal world impact.
Speaker 2 (06:31):
Got it.
So moving forward a few years.
So you founded Bright Insightback in 2019.
And looking at the company now,you have several different
solutions you provide.
You have several differentspecialty or practice areas that
you work within.
I'm assuming those have beenbuilt out, you know,
incrementally over the course ofthe last few years.
So if we were to go back to theorigin of the company, what was
(06:52):
the original problem you weretrying to solve?
How did the original ideacoalesce?
Speaker 1 (06:56):
Yeah.
So the original problem we weretrying to solve came from my
and my co-founders experience atAmgen Digital Health.
So we were building varioussolutions, you know.
For example, we put Bluetoothinto a drug delivery device and
got one of the first earlyapprovals from FDA for a drug
plus device, backend, cloud andso forth.
(07:16):
So the group was working onthat.
We had other things, forexample, in a totally different
disease area, on how to helppatients track how their disease
was progressing over time, soyou can have the real data
instead of just kind of what youmight remember about how your
disease is progressing to helpinform better clinical decisions
.
So we're working on all thesevarious solutions and a lot of
them were POCs.
(07:37):
A lot of them, you know, didnot end up being, you know,
wildly successful.
But one commonality between allof them was that when we wanted
to leverage the cloud, we hadto think about and build
end-to-end how do we not justmanage data privacy and security
, but also the regulatoryrequirements based on what we
wanted to do with that data andthat solution?
Because if you have what'scalled a regulated intended use,
(08:00):
you want the data to, forexample, tell a diabetes patient
how much insulin to take theFDA in the case of the United
States is likely to regulatethat solution, that software,
just like in some ways as if itwere a drug or a medical device.
It's called software as amedical device actually as a
category for the FDA, because ifsomething goes wrong in that
(08:21):
software stack or in thatoverall solution you might put a
patient in a harm's way, justlike if a medicine you know
doesn't work as intended, youwant to make sure it's going to
perform as you know it'ssupposed to, otherwise could
harm the patient.
So as we moved into and we'reexploring these types of use
cases, we really understood thatthere's a market opportunity
(08:42):
for being an infrastructureprovider that try to package, if
you will, in a platform thatprivacy, security and regulatory
side of things and did it at aglobal scale because all the
pharma companies are largelyglobal corporations.
And so how do we not just meetthe requirements of the US FDA
and, let's say, hipaa, but we'redoing similarly for GDPR and
(09:03):
the European Union's equivalentof the FDA or Japan, etc.
So that was the original idea.
It came from our own experienceat Amgen as we were building
and trying to deploy and scalethese solutions in different
markets to say gosh, we can dothis a lot faster, better,
cheaper if we had a commoninfrastructure, and that's what
Bright Insight really endeavoredto do on the outset.
Speaker 2 (09:22):
What were the early days of the company like in
terms of building the products,getting your first few customers
?
Speaker 1 (09:27):
Yeah.
So one thing I'll say thatultimately we were really
fortunate to do is we actuallygot to incubate the company and
part of a bigger corporationcalled Flex, and Flex is a large
contract manufacturer thatworks across many industries and
they're a leading player in thehealthcare space.
So they actually manufacture alot of components or end
(09:48):
products for medical device andpharmaceutical companies and
they saw the same trend we sawaround digitization.
So I came into the companyalmost in an EIR type of role,
brought in my co-founders andthat really gave us a platform
to go talk to global biopharmacompanies with, frankly, a lot
of credibility and backingbehind us, which weren't just
three guys in a garage.
(10:09):
We were three guys with a lotof relevant experience working
under the umbrella and platformof a major corporation that they
already work with and trusted.
So that gave us an opportunityto do a lot of rapid just build
on our own experience but do alot of rapid market testing and
conversations and you knowfeedback from prospects and
(10:29):
conferences et cetera.
So through that, you know, wewere able to both validate the
idea, get input into what youknow our early you know platform
would look like, and then havethe conversations that
ultimately led to our firstcouple of customers.
And what became clear as we gotour first couple of customers
was that this company, thisproduct and this company
(10:52):
ultimately was better suited tobe its own business, which was
one of the hypotheses we hadwhen I took the role.
But as we kind of got markettraction, the CEO of Flex and
the board and I agree that itdid make sense to now make it a
spit out that can still continueto collaborate with Flex but be
(11:13):
able to kind of be off to theraces on its own.
So, yeah, I think we probablyreally got a great break by
being able to incubate within,you know, within a broader
established player like that.
Speaker 2 (11:27):
Yeah, I can imagine that was incredibly helpful
because you know, there's onething I know about buyers within
MedTech Pharma et cetera, isthat they don't move quickly and
they don't trust very quickly,so I imagine that that brand
name was helpful From a fundingperspective.
Did you start out with somefunding from them?
How did the originalfundraising go?
Speaker 1 (11:46):
Yeah, yeah.
So if you want to sort of thinkof it as, like you know, seed
or pre-seed type of money, thatwas really came out of the
budget of Flex itself.
So, you know, I had a budgetand then, as we kind of proved
stuff out, you know, got, youknow bigger and bigger budget.
So I forget the exact numbers,but we probably grew the team
(12:12):
out to be a couple of dozen ormore people under the Flex
umbrella and then we, you know,after we had that early market,
you know product and earlymarket validation, I did a
fundraising process as part ofthe spin out and raised a $25
million Series A, you know,co-led by Eclipse Ventures and
New Leaf Ventures here in theBay Area, and so that really was
the transaction that broughtthe company into its own
separate entity.
That was about five years ago.
Speaker 2 (12:33):
That's five years ago .
So when you were in the earlierstages of building, getting
those first few customers, didthe hypothesis that you
originally had in terms of whatyou felt customers needed.
Was that entirely validated, orwas there feedback from the
market that surprised you thatyou then incorporated into the
product?
Speaker 1 (12:49):
Yeah, a lot of feedback, some surprises, some
maybe things we well, there'salways surprises in the sense of
, in retrospect should have beena surprise or not, I don't know
, but if we knew it we shouldhave done it or would have done
it right.
So for sure, we've evolved ourthinking and what we do quite a
bit over the last five years.
(13:10):
Maybe to highlight a few ofthem so one is our premise
originally was that pharma, eventhough they would move slowly
and cautiously, would in apretty 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 someof the highest value use cases,
(13:30):
and so a couple of our earlyprograms you know we got that
market validation because thoseare the kinds of programs we
were working on.
But ultimately, I think wherethe business is, even today, is
that the industry is doing someof that, but the higher volume
stuff is at a lower risk part ofthe use case world.
(13:53):
So it's much more orientedaround.
How do we engage patients ontotheir disease and therapy?
How do we help them trackthings like disease progression?
Tracking how your disease isdoing is very different than
telling you how you might changewhat you should be doing.
Right, if you just kind ofthink about you know that from a
risk and a clinical perspective.
So a big thing we've learned isthe market is largest today
(14:15):
still in terms of, I would say,kind of lower risk, lower
complexity use cases.
Now how that's translated intothe product is a couple of
important ways.
One is we are positioning ourgo-to-market instead of being at
kind of that high-risk usecases.
We're talking much more aroundhey, how do you get moving,
(14:36):
crawl, walk run right?
So how do you rapidly buildsolutions that are going to
start driving value for thepatient and for the business and
then over time you can bring inright through your product
roadmap.
The pharma company can bring inhigher value, more complex,
higher risk use cases over time.
So we kind of start earlier inthe journey, if you will, of how
(14:58):
we talk to the market.
The second and probably mostimportant thing we've done is we
have taken our experience andinstead of early years where we
had a compliant platform but itrequired a lot of custom
software build, now we've seenenough use cases where we've
been able to massivelyproductize on top of our
(15:19):
platform and so most of the usecases that come to us now we can
do at a fraction of the cost, afraction of the time that we
were doing before, and so thatlets us really be much more of a
product company than sort of aplatform license with a lot of
(15:39):
custom build on top, custombuild on top.
So it's really meaningfullyevolved the business model of
the company.
You know the type of employeesin the company, the use cases
that we do.
You know what our deeds focusedon.
Speaker 2 (15:53):
You know et cetera, and I think it probably would be
helpful context to listenersjust to understand.
I know we talked a little bitabout where things were five
years ago, but where are you attoday, both in terms of
employees, fundraisingoperations, scale, et cetera?
Speaker 1 (16:06):
Yeah.
So we, you know we were justtackling all of those.
So we're about, you know, 160or so employees.
You know we have a reasonablenumber of long-term contractors
as well.
You know we're pretty globallydispersed with that headcount.
We were heavy US and heavycontractors pre-COVID but over
(16:29):
the years kind of spread out andinternalized a lot more of,
certainly, the software andengineering side of things.
Over the years we've done atotal of three finan financing.
So we had a series B that wasled by insight partners.
Series C that was led bygeneral catalyst, um, and you
(16:50):
know we were part of the.
You know the, so the exuberanceof 2021, um post COVID.
In terms of both, um, you knowthe market for you know, on all
fronts, right, the interest fromcustomers, the investment side,
our own belief on how fastthings would grow.
So we had a period of time wherewe certainly were higher
headcount but we've adapted towhat the growth in the market
(17:16):
has been as well as we've,frankly, as we've been able to
productize, that's had a bigshift.
Our customers are our top 20pharmacos, for the most part top
20 to 30 pharmaceuticalcompanies, and the nice thing is
our use cases are largelyfocused on multi-billion dollar
specialty brands that we'resupporting our customers in
(17:39):
their most important marketslike US, europe, japan,
important markets like US,europe, japan.
So we're really building a nicerepertoire of proof points to
really show that the kind ofproblem we solve is really
applicable not just to a coupleof niche disease areas, but it's
really applicable from ultrarare, rare diseases to very
common ones and it's applicableacross markets and patient types
(18:04):
, um and uh, and that when youdo that you can drive massive,
you know clinical impact forpatients and ROI for for our
customers.
Speaker 2 (18:12):
There's a lot to dig into there, particularly with
that level of growth.
Um, what were some of the coreprinciples that you used in
order to guide your team andcompany culture as you've scaled
from, you know, that couple ofinitial dozen to now?
Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1 (18:27):
So I'll highlight a few.
For us to be successful, wehave to have the full trust of
our customers.
So if you think about who ourcustomers are, it's not just
that they're pharmaceuticalcompanies and they're highly
regulated and they're know thesecore, their core assets, right.
And so if you're working withthem on a multi-billion dollar
(18:53):
drug, they're going to beincredibly cautious about
everything that they do there,right.
And then you take that one stepfurther.
We're building solutions thatare helping for the.
In most cases, for the firsttime ever, have a pharma company
collect data about specificpatients in the real world using
(19:13):
their drugs.
Post approval right Pharmacompanies.
They collect a lot of data in aclinical trial setting when
they're doing drug development,but historically they've
collected nothing directly frompatients once you're actually
approved and hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands, millions of
patients are on their therapies.
So you think about the scrutinythat brings from a data privacy
(19:35):
perspective, from a what areyou going to do with this data?
How are you going to keep itsecure?
So all of these things.
Every step of the way we haveto have the utmost confidence
and trust, and that's not justfrom a technology perspective,
it's also from we reallyunderstand the domain we operate
in, but it's also justculturally that we are
(19:56):
prioritizing their priorities,and so we're not going to take
shortcuts on something to dowith security or regulatory or
privacy because it's faster orcheaper 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 theirpatients.
(20:17):
So so I think that sort ofnotion of, hey, we got to always
be solving for, you know, forthe customer, and ensuring that
we're not doing anything that'sgoing to hurt their trust in us,
because if they do, then theprogram goes right and it's a
small world and our reputationgoes, and then it doesn't really
matter what we have behind that.
(20:37):
So I think that notion ofreally being customer first is
really ingrained from the get-goright, and then, of course,
gets into lots of things thatdon't have to do anything with
compliance, right, customersasking for something well,
that's not in the contract, butwe don't think that way, right?
Okay, well, what are theytrying to achieve and what can
we do to help them achieve thatright?
And let's do the right thingnow and then again it'll make it
(21:00):
through in the broader successof the relationship and our
ultimate success.
So I think that's a key pillar.
I think, secondly, from a withinthe company perspective.
You know we have this cultureof everyone, you know, is an
owner.
Everybody has a, not just aright but a responsibility to
(21:22):
behave as an owner, which meanslike, if something's not working
, you know, don't wait forsomebody else to fix it.
You know, try to fix it, raiseyour hand if you need others to
help you fix it.
You know, you know, et cetera,Right.
And so you know I've even justwas it this week, last week like
people will just throw aone-on-one on my calendar and
they'll be like, hey, can I talkto you about something?
I don't understand why we'redoing this.
(21:44):
It's not working.
You know, I've coming to youbecause I'm stuck.
Great, I love thoseconversations because that tells
me that because I can't memyself and the leadership team,
we're never going to know whatall the problems are that need
to be fixed.
Right, like this needs to comefrom, you know, frontline
manager level kind of culture oflike, hey, you know, we're not
(22:05):
going to know or be helpful todoing 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 youknow I should be directly
hands-on fixing, because youknow, for the most part, like,
hopefully, others are experts inthat domain, right, and I'm not
(22:26):
the expert in all the variousdomains of the business.
So so I think that culturecomes 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, wenever will be, but we try to try
to keep that, you know, keepthat, um, that culture going.
And then the third thing I'llsay is, like you know, we truly
believe that everybody thatworks here could have a job that
(22:48):
pays you more somewhere else.
You know that both speaks to thequality of the talent, but also
the fact that, like, you'rehere because you love the
mission, you love the people andyou want to, you know, lean in
and do work that you're going tobe proud of, hopefully not just
today but for the rest of yourlife, right, and be able to have
that kind of impact.
And so, you know, we kind ofalways come back to the mission,
we mission, we always come backto guys.
(23:09):
Why are we, you know doing, youknow got to get a product out
on a monday.
Why is everybody working overthe weekend?
Whatever it might be like itcomes back to?
Well, because we really careabout this and we want to.
You know, we, we're going tolook back and and all of us
hopefully, you know, try topause and look back even now and
say, like you know, we canreally be proud of the progress
we're making and and you know,we're far from being done, but
(23:32):
you know, we want to continue tofeel proud of the impact we're
having and be really driven bythe mission.
Speaker 2 (23:44):
You mentioned that if you're getting hands on to
something, then that's probablynot the best thing, because you
should have good problem solverswithin the org, and that's
obviously that that wholesubject has been the subject of
a lot of conversation recentlyin 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 anopinion one way, but I'd love to
hear you expand a little more.
Speaker 1 (24:00):
Yeah, look.
So first of all, I thinkthere's an inherent personality
side of things.
Different CEOs leaders aredifferent in kind of what they
bring to the table.
Ceos leaders are different inkind of what they bring to the
table.
My personal view and experienceis there's so much work for me
(24:21):
to do on ensuring that we haveclarity of vision, clarity of
priorities, you know, clarity ofessentially a framework of how
people can make decisions, andyou know, one of the hardest
lessons for me to learn was,like it, just because I have
said something once, even ifI've said it in all hands or to
20 people in this 20 millioncompany, that's great.
Now everybody knows it and hasinternalized it and understood
(24:45):
it, and that's just not the case, right?
So so much of the time has togo into bringing clarity, and I
think that's something that, tome, is a unique part of founder
mode, if you will right, whichis you got to have to repeatedly
.
You know, do that Now.
If you do that, I think youactually resolve a lot of the
problems that aren't gettingresolved.
(25:06):
Meaning to say it another way,if you were to.
You know, when I dissect whysomething is broken, it comes
back to my failure on providingclarity around, like you know
where are we going, what's theconstruct?
You know why are we doing it.
You know what's kind of theframework on how people should
be thinking about aligning andsolving and progressing the
business right.
(25:26):
And a lot of problems alignbecause one department thinks,
you know, this is a priority andanother problem department
thinks this is the priority.
It's probably because I didn'tthink about it enough or I
probably said one thing one timeand something else another time
, or I, you know, or I myselfwas hedging and wasn't clear.
But it usually comes back tosome root cause of lack of
(25:47):
clarity.
So I think you know, if yousort of accept my hypothesis or
experience, a large part of theproblems come from that.
And then others come from youknow some folks that just don't
want to align to that.
Then it is your job as theleader to drive that replacement
.
And sometimes somebody who'sworking for one of somebody on
(26:11):
the leadership team and it's myjob to bring that back to that
leader and say, hey, look,there's an alignment issue, it's
not a clarity issue, you got tofix that, or you know, and
usually that you know then theywill fix that, um, and then you
see what problems are left afterthat and I think those are the
true founder mode problems,right.
So we've made important you knowknow strategic decisions in the
business.
(26:31):
You know, whether you call thempivots or you just call them
other.
You know important decisionsthat that clearly, you know fall
at the level of founder and ora small group of group of people
who you know kind of have toelevate 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 bigdecisions, um, but I think a
(26:55):
lot of that other stuff.
It just, yeah, I struggle withthe scalability of that and and
and I think back to like when Iwas in different roles, like I
just don't think most peoplelike to be told what to do, uh,
and you know they want to knowwhat you're trying to do, and
then they want to.
You know they want to know whatyou're trying to do and then
they want to.
You know they get satisfactionand learning and feel great
about figuring it out Right andjust like you know you and I
(27:17):
were talking about before we goton about our kids, and so you
know it's the same thing.
Kids don't want to be taughtwhat to do, but, you know, they
feel great when they figure itout themselves.
Right, you got to provide themsome framework and construct.
So it might not always be themost efficient way, but I think
it's a better way to build abusiness over the long term.
And look, there's going to beexceptions.
I'm not Elon Musk, I'm sure.
(27:40):
Look, you know, he's a uniquecharacter.
I could see why he wouldoperate 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 youknow talent.
Speaker 2 (27:48):
Well, I think the other thing, too, is that you
also mentioned.
You want to hire really smartpeople who want to take pride in
their work and figure out howto solve the problems.
And if you dictate ormicromanage how to solve the
problem, as opposed to justsaying here is the problem,
figure out how to solve it,you're probably turning off some
of your most effective peoplebecause you're no longer giving
them the creativity to workwithin that framework.
Speaker 1 (28:09):
Yeah, exactly Exactly .
I think the part that is mostimportant is to ask the right
questions, right?
So if you, because you knowwhere could things go sideways?
Well, they go sideways becausepeople get too buried, they get
lost in the trees, right.
And so if you come in as aleader, as a founder, and you're
like, oh, oh hey, this isinteresting or great or it
(28:32):
doesn't make sense to me, or youknow, 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'reright, we hadn't thought about
that.
So really, the right answer isthis, not that.
Or you pull them out andthey're like, yeah, we thought,
we thought about that.
Then, as a founder, you're aleader, you're like, oh great,
like I asked three toughquestions and you know their
(28:56):
answers.
Give them, and I confidencethat this is the, you know the
path we should be trying.
So so, yeah, I'm with you.
I think the other thing thathappens is if people believe
that their work and theirempowerment is only good until
you show up, they're just notgoing to do their best work,
right, cause they're like whocares?
(29:17):
Like, you know, next week, whenwe talked to Cal, he's going to
tell us what to do anyway.
So, like, why should we spendall this time figuring out what
the right answer is?
And that's just I, just that'sjust going to be a horrible
subpar weight around the company.
Because then you have all thesetalented people that are not
doing great work because they'rejust kind of waiting for you to
tell them what to do, right?
Or you get them in a meetingand you they're not going to
(29:39):
argue, and you want them toargue with you, right, and you
want them to argue with eachother with the desire to find
the best answer.
So, again, if you're kind oflike, well, I'm the founder,
here's what we're going to do, Ithink that's just not a
personally, I don't think it'san inspiring way to lead, but I
also don't think it's the bestway to get the best decisions
and the best output from people.
I think you, you know, I lovebeing wrong.
(30:00):
Love being wrong, you know, andand because that just tells me
that I things are going wellbecause people who are, you know
, are making better decisionsthan I would have made which is
the way to scale.
Speaker 2 (30:16):
I think that's a great point when you say that
your primary job as a CEO is toensure the clarity and alignment
.
How?
Speaker 1 (30:18):
do you?
Speaker 2 (30:18):
actually go about delivering that.
Let's say, you'veconceptualized the idea, you
know where you need to go.
How do you then get the rest ofthe company on the same page at
this level of scale?
Speaker 1 (30:28):
Yeah.
So I'll say it's not easy.
I'm not saying I'm doing agreat job, and every time I have
a conversation like this Ileave being like, okay, I really
got to make myself moredisciplined, on, on, on, on
doing a better job here.
So there's the things like youwould expect, like all hands.
You know, one thing we've donethat I think works well is we
(30:50):
follow up every all hands withinoffice hours, because we were
always like, oh, we'll doquestions and we always run out
of time for questions so.
So now I always have officehours, anybody can come in and
ask about anything that theywant.
So I think that's like anopportunity, you know, again,
people to ask whatever questionthey want.
That can help me learn wherethere might be confusion or
what's on people's mind, buthopefully drive clarity right.
Second, obviously, is in thevarious meetings, right, so I
(31:12):
probably spend, you know, athird to half my time in
discussions with folks, right?
So there's a an importantlistening element to that.
But then just recognizing that,you know I got to keep
repeating and repeating.
But looking for is thereunderstanding?
Is there passive acceptance?
You know, is there excitementand you know engagement, right,
(31:42):
massive acceptance, you know, isthere excitement and, you know,
engagement, right, but there'sa kind of continuously reinforce
the key things you know, whichI think would go a long way to
really force myself and theleadership team to say, okay,
like let's put this in writing,at least as of today, what we're
saying and what we believe, andyou know on important topics of
course not necessarily all ofthem and then to make that
(32:03):
available for everybody, right,so that so then you aren't
playing a telephone game.
So that's, I think, somethingthat I've thought about and
haven't really operationalized,that I think actually would help
a lot.
So, yeah, so it's those thingsyou know.
I think it's.
You know I can't kind of besitting in my office just
talking to myself all day, right, like it's the making sure, you
(32:26):
know the connection ishappening, 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 whereI've made that more structured.
And again this conversation ismaking me think that there's
probably benefit into me atleast analyzing the calendar but
, if nothing else, you know,potentially bringing some of
(32:47):
that structure back to that.
So so it's not getting biasedtowards certain parts of the
business, you know, at theexpense of others.
Speaker 2 (32:55):
Well, hey, if anything, you came out of this
conversation with some some newnext steps, and I do love the
office hours tactic.
That's not something I've I'veheard of other companies doing,
but I do think that's a greatthing to implement because
you're right, as you know,generally everyone has some sort
(33:17):
of questions in all hands orthey don't feel comfortable
asking the thing they'rewondering in front of 160 people
, but there's probably a lot ofother people wondering the same
thing.
When it comes to the hiringperspective you mentioned
earlier, you were pretty heavyUS centric and then offshore
contractor, and then that modelhas sort of evolved over the
years and I even noticed now alot of the engineering hiring
you're doing is is overseas ornear shore.
How has that approach changed?
(33:39):
What was the thinking behindthat?
Was it purely just it's COVIDand things are remote now?
What?
Was there something else?
Speaker 1 (33:46):
Yeah, so part of it is involved with the business
model I mentioned earlier, wherewe had the platform.
But each customer project hadits own custom development
effort that we typically alsokind of owned and ran for them.
So we started with a verycontractor heavy model, partly
(34:06):
because we were incubating andso we couldn't necessarily do
all the hiring we wanted to.
Partly it was also when you'reproject driven right, you kind
of have to have your headcountbe flexible to go up and down.
So you know we had that.
What we learned from that washaving you know a set of
(34:27):
contractors for kind of at theplatform level.
Over time we got to a goodplace and, frankly, like some of
those people are with us todayso they've been working with us,
you know, half a dozen yearsand so, whether you call them an
employee or a contractor I'mactually going to pay a visit to
many of these folks in Vietnamlater this month, earlier this
year.
So it worked well there.
(34:48):
But at the project level itjust didn't work well because
you'd have people coming in.
They didn't know anything aboutthe space, what we were doing
or the use case or obviously ourown SOPs and, as I mentioned,
we work in a very regulatedspace.
So we spent so much time tryingto train them on how to do
things and then the quality ofthe work et cetera.
We just weren't very successful, frankly, and that translated
(35:11):
into not just cost overruns anddelays but obviously customer
satisfaction et cetera.
So post-release series C, wehired a CTO from the outside and
he had a lot of enterprisesoftware experience doing this
and part of his remit was to say, ok, both productize the
company.
But in that process remit wasto say, okay, both productize
(35:32):
the company, but in that processgave him the keys to figure out
the most effective way to buildengineering.
He had a very clear view of weshould internalize and then, of
course, have a small group ofplaces we can contract but be
able to do that.
It's played out and it's playedout great.
It's played out great both interms of what the first thing he
(35:55):
did was actually build our.
You know, as we productized theproduct was built by our own
employees, largely in India, butthen, when the customer use
cases, those deployments alsothen over time moved from
external parties to us doing itourselves.
Right, and now we have a reallynice feedback loop.
(36:16):
Right, are building the product, know that they're going to
also have some or a lot ofresponsibility on its
configuration and deployment,and so you create a team that
really has full accountabilityand isn't throwing stuff over
the wall or thinking of it as aproject, and then they're off to
their next, to their next thing.
So, yeah, it really played out.
(36:36):
The learnings played out in thefirst couple of years, the
operationalizing of this, youknow, has happened over the last
few years.
Speaker 2 (36:42):
Yeah, I mean there's a lot of startups that prefer to
hire here for on engineeringspecifically, for a few reasons
you know.
One is there's the obviousthings like the you know less
time difference.
But then there's also often aconsideration, for you know that
the talent bar here that youfind can be better than
necessarily what you'd find inIndia.
How do you keep your talent barhigh when you're hiring
(37:04):
offshore?
Speaker 1 (37:05):
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 inIndia that are leading there are
people who have directexperience with other leaders at
Bright Insights so not with me,but either CTO or head of HR et
(37:27):
cetera.
So we've kind of put in placefolks that have kind of been
there, done that before with us,with people on my team, so they
can bring both their networksand their experience recruiting
et cetera.
So that's one.
The second is we have peoplecome through San Jose on a
pretty regular basis, especiallythe leadership team there in
(37:49):
India.
So they're both staying veryclose to you, know the product
and engineering leadership teamand are, you know, whiteboarding
and solving problems et cetera,and so in that you know you
both close some of thecommunication, you know time
zone and otherwise gaps, but youalso are going to see quality
in those discussions directly.
(38:09):
Right, if someone's with youfor a week whiteboarding and
solving problems and havingbreakfast, lunch, dinner, you're
going to get a good sense oflike, hey, you know to my
earlier point around you knowmission alignment, clarity, you
solve all those things but alsolike, hey, is this person, you
know the kind of quality we need?
And then then vice versa, whichis, you know, leadership here,
(38:30):
going to India and doing therounds there, meeting directly
with people, and not just like,hey, let me show up, shake hands
, have a meal and take off, butmore like hey, we're going to be
(38:52):
here for a week and we're goingto roll up our sleeves and
tackle important things we'reworking on the product roadmap
or problems that need to besolved, or, you know, figure out
, you know kind of the next stepin the technology journey, etc.
So trying to really collapsethat geographic and time zone.
And look credit to my cto.
He is up late at night and inthe mornings, like very
regularly, like it's just,that's just how he operates,
right, like you, there's alwaysa 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
(39:12):
coming from him.
You know, past midnight, and soI think that's just kind of his
cadence, of how he operates.
So he's, you know, he's, Igotta imagine probably you know
I wasn't saying almost dailybasis, probably actually a daily
basis having conversations with, with, you know, with leaders
and team in India.
Speaker 2 (39:27):
Got that.
Yeah, that that in personcomponent is so important, even
when you're remote, so it'sgreat to hear that you're doing
that.
When we look forward a littlebit, you've done really well on
the fundraising side.
Like you mentioned, you raisedthe Series C, which was 101
million, led by General Catalyst, and that was a couple years
ago.
How are you thinking aboutfuture fundraising efforts, if
(39:48):
at all?
Speaker 1 (39:49):
Yeah, right now we're largely heads down focus on
execution and I kind of alludedto this earlier.
But as we've productized theplatform, we've been able to
accelerate our ability to bringon and deploy use cases.
So we're in a period where wewant to keep doing that and
bring proof points to market sothat we can walk into our
(40:11):
prospective customer and most ofour prospective customers
they've never done what we sell,so it's not like they're like
we were doing it this way andnow we'll do it with Bright
Insight.
They just haven't.
We're creating a market, sothat's what we're now focused on
Keep scaling, deploying,scaling these use cases, get the
data and the proof points sothat we can come in to a brand
(40:32):
manager of any pharma companyand really compellingly make the
argument of why they should bedoing this and why they should
do it with us.
So I think once we keep, we'llkeep doing that and then maybe
in the future, if it makes senseto kind of put more fuel on the
fire, we would think moreproactively about a fundraise.
(40:52):
We're deploying a secondproduct line right now and that
might be the trigger point.
Once we're in market and havemarket validation with this new
product line, then we may say,okay, should we bring on more
capital to accelerate productdevelopment and go to market for
that second product line?
So so nothing, nothing kind ofyou know proactively in the
(41:15):
works or on the calendar rightnow.
Speaker 2 (41:18):
And when you think, of course, about the next couple
of years.
Obviously, you work withpharmaceutical 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 potentialchanges to legislation and the
larger healthcare market from agovernmental perspective playing
into your plan at all, how areyou approaching that?
(41:38):
Yeah, that's a good question.
Speaker 1 (41:40):
So I'm sure, as most of your audience knows, the
United States is the largesthealthcare market in the world.
We spend a higher percentage ofour GDP on healthcare than, I
think, any OECD country,probably any country in the
world, and that percentage hasbeen going up.
And I'll tell you, we weretalking about this when I was a
consultant 20, x years ago andsaying this is an unsustainable
(42:01):
chart and nothing's reallychanged.
The chart's still going up intothe right and I think we're you
know, we're probablyapproaching 20% of GDP going
into healthcare.
The issue to me is notprimarily how much money we're
spending, but it's the lack ofvalue that we're getting from
that spend.
Right, and that's all of usright.
(42:24):
It's not about whether it's allof us as citizens of the
country, and there's a lot ofreasons for that.
But I think there's a real, notjust opportunity, but I would
say personally, a need forgovernment to really step back
and rethink its role inhealthcare.
They spend you know thegovernment is the biggest
spender in the biggest country,biggest market, you know, of
healthcare, right?
So the US government,single-handedly, you know that
(42:45):
largest player and they'relargely spending most of their
money on sick care.
Right, the money is gettingdeployed after folks are sick
and then they will throw a lotof money at that and it's kind
of can it have a heroic impact?
Absolutely, and should wecontinue to do that much of it?
Yes, but I think if youactually went upstream, right,
(43:09):
most significant part of diseaseand you know, and ultimately
death could be meaningfullydelayed.
So you extend both quality oflife and deploy you know and
push back the end of life atscale by, in my opinion, going
upstream, not by looking forinnovation.
You know at the, you know aftersomebody has disease, and
(43:31):
that's a paradigm shift that Idon't think.
At least you know Republicans,democrats, whoever that at least
you know in any sort ofmeaningful way anybody's talking
about.
So all the healthcare you knowkind of rhetoric or reforms or
suggestions that you hear, youknow in kind of, you know,
mainstream media is largely, inmy opinion it's important, but
it's really, you know, on themargin ultimately of the big
(43:55):
picture of you know how muchwe're spending, what kind of
health do we actually have inthe country and ultimately, like
you know, what kind of valueare we getting for all that
spend.
Speaker 2 (44:05):
Yeah, well, I mean, if we all, you know, if we all
ate our vegetables and stoppedsmoking and drinking and got
eight hours of sleep at night,then healthcare spending would
plummet because we would all bein much better shape.
But is that the role of thegovernment to regulate?
Or is that even something thegovernment could regulate in
some way, either through, youknow, call it increased taxes on
things that are unhealthy, orsomething else along those lines
(44:27):
?
Speaker 1 (44:28):
Yeah.
So it's a great question, soI'll give you a couple of
responses.
So, from a pure regulationperspective I mean you already
gave examples the governmentregulates certain things already
, right, like tobacco, likealcohol, like other drugs,
(44:48):
conversation about the role ofultra-processed foods around,
the role of, you know, sugar,and and again, it's you know,
you can don't have to go to muchof a google search to figure
out what percentage of caloriesour children get from
ultra-processed foods and sugars, and even adults in this
country, etc.
Right?
So so you know I'm not giving aspecific answer, but I think
you know there certainly is.
(45:10):
At least we should have adiligent exploration of the role
of government and saying, okay,like, are we discouraging or
are we frankly encouraging?
You know, the wrong kind ofconsumption, you know, in our
diets, as, as one example, right, I think, when you get into
things like what we're doingwith you know, you know, in
terms of exercise or sleep andother things like that,
(45:32):
personally, for me, I think it'sless about regulation, it's you
know, I don't think educationfixes it, because I think most
people would say the same thingyou said around, like, oh, I
should eat more veggies andsleep more and be less stressed
out and be on social media less,et cetera.
And then it gets into the notionof, like other behavior changes
, like, what can we do from anincentives perspective?
Right, right, what can we dofrom a carrot and stick
(45:53):
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 youshift dollars, uh, you know, in
a way that uh, incentivizesmore of what will ultimately be
good for them, at least from ahealth perspective, right, and,
and of course, just like smoking, at the end of the day,
somebody can choose to, not, tonot go down that path and make
(46:17):
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 athird, you know smoke for 30
years and everything else, andnow you know they're in this
precarious, you know, cancer,lungs, et cetera situation.
(46:38):
What are we going to say?
We're not going to treat themat that point.
You know, I don't.
You know, certainly, you knowthat's not the kind of society
America is.
I don't think it's anywherenear that.
I'm not advocating for that,you know.
I think the question becomescan you shift resources so that
you minimize the number ofpeople that end up in that
situation?
Right, because you, you know,through education, through
(46:58):
incentives, throughdisincentives, you know, et
cetera.
You know, hopefully have morefolks you know on a different
trajectory than that one.
Speaker 2 (47:09):
Yeah, yeah, I mean I think you can guide behaviors,
but certainly, yeah, you can't.
Your government mandated 20pushups per day, or what have
you?
Speaker 1 (47:18):
I go back to my economics days here, where
there's so many misalignment ofincentives and so a lot of
(47:38):
physicians are incentivized forvolume, not outcomes.
We've been talking about quoteunquote something called
value-based care.
If any of your listeners wantto Google that again, since when
I got out of college and wasdoing my first years at BCG,
very little of the country'shealthcare dollars go into these
value-based contracts.
30 years later, and the notionof the whole concept there is
(48:00):
how do we incentivize thehealthcare system to keep you
healthy versus get paid for sickcare?
But the reality is most of thedollars go to people who are
incentivized and make more moneywhen 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, themore money I'm going to make.
(48:21):
I don't make more money becauseI've kept people healthy and
they've never needed thatsurgery, 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 stocksof Novo Nordisk and Eli Lilly.
They've become household namesnow because of the GLP-1s that
they developed.
(48:41):
Well, look, I know people inboth of those companies.
They are incrediblymission-driven, amazing people
that are trying to do their bestwork.
So I'm not challenging anybodyI've met at any of those
companies.
But the point is that the systemis set up where they were
incentivized to innovate thereinstead of innovate, let's say,
for a different disease, right?
So they are responding to theproblem society has created,
(49:05):
which is what you expect arational, compassionate person
to do, right?
The surgeon is going to say Ispent all these years trading,
I'm going to go in and I'm goingto fix this problem over and
over.
But no one's kind of sayingwell, how do we just get less
people with that problem so thatyou don't have to operate on?
You know people with lungcancer, you know there's just
not enough of that shifthappening, right?
(49:25):
And those incentives are ladenthrough the entire healthcare.
So if you're a hospital, guesswhat?
If everyone in yourneighborhood is healthier and
you have 10 or 20 percent ofyour beds empty on a given night
, that hospital is going to gobankrupt.
That hospital is going to needgovernment subsidy to stay open
because they've built out thesebeds.
And you go into any part of thecountry, how much of the new
construction you're seeing islike new health care facilities
(49:48):
going up.
So the whole incentive systemis responding as you would
expect it to respond, so youkind of have to go.
You know you got to go back tosome of these first principles
in order to address some ofthese things.
Right and and.
Again, I don't blame anybody.
I think people are all tryingto do their best.
But you know, obviously I havetons of friends from medical
school that work their butts off, um, but they're a cog in the
wheel.
(50:08):
Uh, in the sense of you knowthe system right, that that
we're all operating in, you know, myself included, right, yeah,
well, and it's also so.
Speaker 2 (50:17):
There's like there's this huge equilibrium where we
we need a certain amount of sickpeople and ideally we'd have
less, but then, like you said,if we get less sick people, then
the system collapses becausethe hospitals run out of money.
So bigger problem than we cantalk about here on the podcast.
So I want to wrap by talkingabout you a little bit more.
So just two final questions.
(50:38):
One you're obviously very busy.
You run a big company, you havethree kids.
How do you manage your time?
How do you yourself become aseffective as you can?
Speaker 1 (50:46):
Yeah, that's a good question and that answer has
also changed a lot over theyears.
So this is not how I wascertainly four or five, even
three years ago.
But I've learned through greatadvisors and folks who I work
very closely with, who've kindof helped me both evolve my
thinking and build a skill setthat I try to implement
(51:09):
regularly.
So, first of all, I genuinelybelieve that if I don't feel
healthy, I don't feel good, it'sgoing to have a negative impact
on everything around me.
And that's again, it's notrocket science, but I keep
reminding myself, if I'm shorttempered with the kids, why is
that?
Well, it's because I probablydidn't get a great night's sleep
or I was on the red eye flightor you know something else was
(51:31):
you know else is leading, or I'mjust stressed out, bringing
stress from work into the homeand vice versa, when I'm looking
like, hey, if I was short in ameeting or I made a bad decision
or gave a bad like, where's thesource?
So I have enough data points inmy own life to know that, like,
foundationally, if I'm notphysically healthy and mentally
healthy, I myself don't have agreat day and I, and that I sort
(51:54):
of multiply that negativity inmy interactions around me.
So, so I very muchfoundationally focus, focus on
that right, and it's the thingsthat you would expect you
already mentioned.
I mentioned sleep is is key, sofoundationally key, key in that
.
Secondly, you know, for meanyway it's, it's working out
right.
So I now schedule into my weekone once a week, yoga once a
(52:16):
week, a personal trainer um tryto find obviously other times
around that get on a Peloton.
My wife and I do a lot ofthings together, um, meditation,
um, you know, I have a coachwho, um can tell when I've
dropped off.
She doesn't even ask me.
She's like oh, you know, Ithink we should get back on to
you know, reconfirming that.
(52:37):
And you know what, as soon as Iget back on that boat, I
immediately see the positivefeedback loop on that right.
You know, I'm veryconscientious, I would say,
about what I eat as well, but Ithink that foundation is just a
big part of it and when I havethat, that just gives me the
fuel to work through the hardstuff, you know, and kind of you
know, the rest of the rest ofthe hours.
The other thing I'll point outis and again, none of these are
(52:59):
black or white, right, and youkind of have to keep investing
in them, is to just have, is toultimately have some amount of
perspective on the challengesthat get thrown at you know, me
or any of us on a given day, aswell as the amount of work that
needs to be done.
And just having some element ofperspective, like, hey, at the
end of the day, you know how amI going to look back at this in
(53:20):
a day, in a week, in a month, ina year?
Like, am I going to be asstressed out about this as I am?
You know, right now, you knowwhether it's going well or not
going well and, frankly, it'sthe same thing for the wins,
right, it's like okay, this wasgreat.
Wait, wait, how much does thismatter?
Right?
And I think that helps kind ofkeep a level of of calmness and
perspective.
(53:41):
So, without having kind of, youknow, getting super down or
getting super excited and beingable to, you know, have that
sort of perspective of that Ithink ultimately enables again
better decisions.
You know, have that sort ofperspective of, uh, that I think
ultimately enables again betterdecisions.
Um, you know, cause again oncewhen your blood pressure goes up
(54:01):
and your sympathetic nervoussystem kicks in like nobody
makes good decisions.
You know, unless you're runningaway from a lion, you're not
making good decisions there,right, and so so it's not.
You know, it's not to bemistaken with like, oh, how do I
get perspective?
And I don't really care whathappens.
It's the opposite of that.
It's like.
You know, caring means beingable 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
(54:23):
you're done.
Um, yeah, and, like I said, allthose things, you know, are you
kind of need, need reminders.
And last thing I'll say forthose that have kids is you do
like, you know, there's justsomething so special about
spending time with them, andI've worked a lot on trying to
(54:44):
really turn off the work brainwhen I'm with them, and not just
because they deserve it andthat's what I want to be doing,
but honestly, that makes mebetter at work.
You know, if I, you know, ifit's just a half hour playing
catch or goofing around, doingwhatever you come back with, oh,
I have just had a great ideaabout work.
You're like well, how did thathappen?
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.
(55:05):
Feel so much better about thetime I spend with them, feel
refreshed, recharged, but thenI'm able to be more effective at
you know, on the work side.
Speaker 2 (55:13):
Yeah, I love that.
I mean the, the physical andmental 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 gotto go, you know, work out from
six, 30 to seven, 30, and try tocome home and crash by you know
nine to get a decent night ofsleep, and everything in me is
screaming like no, that's anadditional like three hours of
(55:33):
work you're losing that youcould be putting in.
But yeah, you really, you reallyhave to to segment things,
cause it's it's like you know,should you operate at nine to 10
hours at a hundred percent, orwork 12 to 13 hours at 60%?
The math just just doesn't mathout.
So so, last question then youknow there's a lot of talk
always about the founder journey, and it's something that's very
(55:54):
, very personal to every founderand very unique.
What have you learned aboutyourself over the course of the
last five years in terms offounding?
Bright Insight.
Speaker 1 (56:05):
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 asense of confidence and
conviction that I'm on thejourney that I want to be on.
I don't have self-doubts aboutthe path that I've taken.
(56:30):
I think early on, you know,there was a lot of that like, oh
, you know, should I be doingthis?
You know, I was in a bigcompany, had a nice paycheck,
you know all that kind of stuff,and you have those doubts.
And now, regardless of whereBright Inside ends up, you know
I'm not going to have any doubts.
I'm like I should have pursued adifferent path and I think
that's a very freeing and Iguess you know, let's say,
(56:59):
freeing, rewarding, but alsojust like it brings a lot of
gratitude for me that I havethat perspective.
You know that this is exactlywhat I want to be doing and
where I want to be doing itright now in my life.
And, you know, almost regardlessof outcome.
Again, I'm not trying to say Idon't care about the outcome,
but you know, I'm actually ableto be better at driving to the
right outcome by having, youknow, having that sense of
(57:19):
knowing that I'm doing what Iwant 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 whatcareer they're in right Is, you
know, when you can kind of belike is this what I want to be
doing now and what I want to bedoing?
Maybe tomorrow or six monthsfrom now or five years from now
(57:39):
might be different, but this iswhat I want to be doing now and
if you can have a calmness and aconfidence in that, it's very
freeing then to, you know, focuson that versus kind of having a
voice in your head being like,you know, whatever that voice is
, that's distracting you fromenjoying the work and doing the
work.
Speaker 2 (57:57):
Love that Cool.
Well, Cal, this is an awesomeconversation.
Thank you so much for coming on.
I really appreciate it.
Speaker 1 (58:03):
Yeah, I really enjoyed it.
Thanks, Rhys.
Speaker 2 (58:05):
Thank you for tuning in to this episode of Seed to
Exit.
I hope you found today'sconversation insightful and
valuable.
If you enjoyed the episode,please take a moment to
subscribe, leave a review andshare it with your network.
Your support means the worldhelps us continue to grow and
bring more incredible guestsonto the show.
Now for more content andupdates, follow me on LinkedIn
(58:25):
or Twitter, or you can check outMindHire, where we help
startups build exceptional teams.
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