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Quick Pulses, Soundbites, & Tachyons from show, Unedited & unscripted, real……….
Diverse Applications of AI Require Different Ethical Standards
…..The thing I would say is it's one thing for us to say, these are the guardrails. Our enemies will not produce the same guardrails, and we cannot be naive to that. So as an AI ethicist, I would say the following. Number one, and I said the same thing, I was having a conversation with the Secretary of Labor, Julie Su, at CES earlier this year. You cannot say healthcare AI. Oh, guess what? Hansa, Andy, guess what? You have to follow the same rules as Mark Zuckerberg does for Instagram. That's ridiculous because that is going to prohibit advancement and actually saving lives. We can't hold our DOD to the same standards of AI use. that we would other applications of AI. So we have to look at the different applications……..
Creating an AI of My Dad
……..So it was back-to-back NFL games on Sundays and basically raised as a child of an engineer with an engineering brain. And so losing my dad was a gut punch because it was like losing my mom and my dad in one day. So I decided to make an AI of my dad, Tom. And because before he got sick last year, I would call him and he would always give just the best advice. And I felt this void. So my dad, fortunately, he had created his own YouTube channel in front of a green screen. You have to picture this 80 year old guy. So we had the video and I fed a GPT I built his resume, a sample of his writing, and then I had it create his final life lessons. And then we took the video from the green screen, we made the video AI, and he spoke at his own funeral. And he gave his three parting lessons. And it was so beautiful. And I still have that. So I can talk to that GPT. And it's not my dad. And I know it's not my dad. But it's comforting to me just to be vulnerable as a Gen X woman………….
Driving Value with Hyperscaler Partnerships and MDF
Andy, I love what you said about driving the value together. And going back to the granularity of startup dollars, as we've all shared, as a founder, your most valuable commodity is time. But you're always raising money. There's always resources. So with these partnerships, whether it is, you know, compute resources or MDF. So for those who are watching, don't know MDF are the marketing development funds. So all of these hyperscalers have them. And so for us, we've been very, very fortunate with, especially with our partnership with HPE, where they've put a significant amount of MDF behind us. And that includes things like I'm leaving for the Women in AI event in New York for Fashion Week. And we have top women from all of the hyperscalers coming in. So they're throwing marketing behind us, videos behind us. They'll put me on stages, Women's Health Innovation Summit in Boston that gets me out in front of VCs……..
Trends and Disruptions in Healthcare and Health Tech
Healthcare has been in a crossroad for a while, but we're seeing a lot of interesting things uniquely right now where it's like collaboration across sectors, right? You have traditional players like providers, payers, et cetera. And then you have like new tech companies like Best Buy, et cetera, like that are entering, you know, this and kind of disrupting, you know, how a lot models have traditionally operated. And then you also have like more broad scale kind of partnerships, like ecosystems rather than, and like platforms rather than like just traditional one-off partnerships that have really driven, you know, how healthcare and health tech have operated in the past few years. And then again, you know, to bring it back to AI is like a lot of these are going to be AI driven for the next few years until until a clear winner has kind of been determined out of this health tech arms race. So it's like companies kind of think of their strategies. You know, it's important to kind of layer in all the things that everyone else is talking about, but like really think of it…….
Leveraging Partnerships for Startup Exposure
So when your startup is very limited in funds, one of the best ways you can be exposed to new clients is if your partner puts you in their booth at National Retail Federation or puts you in their booth at HIMSS, which is the big healthcare conference, whatever it is. And to be able to say to your partner that, what KPIs do we need to meet in order for us to be one of your featured startups in your booth? Because to be able to have that opportunity is worth a significant opportunity in terms of deal flow. And Tom, I spent six years in Edge. Not many people can say that. I'm more familiar with Edge than Gen AI, like, you know, all day, every day. But from the partnership piece of it, be willing to ask the tough questions because where you want to get to the holy grail is when that partner has their sales force out there selling for you………
The Core Values of a Startup
And as a startup, you want to be very clear on what your cultural values are. Right. So so for us, we have two core values. That's it. trust and wow and so whether we're working with an external vendor or a partner that the trust has to be there right and and our objective is to deliver both to our users and and become the most trusted menopause platform that exists so if you're firstly my advice would be get clear on what your core values are and don't just pay them lip service but really own them walk them One of my engineers said to me the other day, just to level set for everyone, we're preparing to deploy our product in the next few weeks. She said to me for this one feature, Susan, do you want it to yield trust or wow? Another engineer said, that's like asking Susan to choose between her children. The answer is always both all the time………
The Essentials of Building Successful Partnerships
Building partnerships is about building trust and about building that better together story. And so those things take time. They really do. And it's not like a typical sales cycle. These things take time and effort and resources and cross functional resources most of the time. And so the thing about building a partner program up, just have realistic expectations and then make sure to give the individuals that you put in those plays, just make sure that they're also working well cross-functionally because you, if you think of partnerships, we are BD, we are sales. We work hand in hand with product. We work hand in hand with technology. We work really closely with marketing……
Practical Applications of AI in Healthcare
What I would say in terms of AI is the following, and this is maybe my vanguard opinion. I think there's room for generative AI applications within any company that is building a data set because how are you going to sort through the data? Sure, you'll use machine learning, But how are you going to actually be able to sift through the data to find out something predictive that illustrates that you're on the right track for what you're trying to offer for your end users? So that's the first thing. Another thing in healthcare, just coming from my nerdy background in computer vision, I think that we're gonna see, I'm not doing any computer vision right now personally, but we're gonna see a lot of opportunities in computer vision and I just wanna cast the vision there. So think about interim patient monitoring where I can have maybe a single wide GPU on a stand and a camera and I can put it in a patient room and suddenly one nurse can monitor 30 rooms at one time, and we can build in those models for things like fall detection, gaze analysis. When the physician changes the medication, we can see how often that patient is, say, up out of their bed, their movement patterns, and then using generative AI to be predictive, right?……..
The Essentials of Building Successful Partnerships
Building partnerships is about building trust and about building that better together story. And so those things take time. They really do. And it's not like a typical sales cycle. These things take time and effort and resources and cross functional resources most of the time. And so the thing about building a partner program up, just have realistic expectations and then make sure to give the individuals that you put in those plays, just make sure that they're also working well cross-functionally because you, if you think of partnerships, we are BD, we are sales. We work hand in hand with product. We work hand in hand with technology. We work really closely with marketing………..
Strategic Partnerships and Ego
And the other thing I'll say, investor hat, and I'm sure you all will agree with me on this one. When I talk to a startup, I say, what is your exit strategy? And if unwell is the first two words, I'm not investing in them. But the partnership should also be strategic to say from a competition standpoint, it's okay to be acquired by your competitor. And that happens all the time. So why wouldn't you want to be that person who's out there building those strategic partnerships? Because if your collaborator, your competitor, what was the word, Andy? The- I mean, I need another coffee. If you're a competitive collaborator, let's call it, if they're a larger startup than you are, you know, that's okay. Go out there, get acquired, be part of the winning team. You know, like, why wouldn't you? But don't let your ego get in the way…..
Evolving SaaS Models
So we're now viewed as a capability area rather than having to be the full SaaS platform. Also running in tenant, I think there's another value to that from a procurement perspective, from a technology and security perspective, from a cost perspective, if the tenant is deployed by the client, then you as a company, you're not absorbing all of that compute cost. That's huge, that can help you get a price that's gonna make sense and scale and there's no rate limiter on scaling the number of users because you're not incurring that cost. So we're starting to see some of those models emerge in terms of a partner perspective. I think we're only gonna see that start to increase over time…..
The Importance of Specialization for Startups
….If you try and be everything to everyone, you're going to be no one to no one. And the going back to what Andy talked about and Tom talked about and Hamza, you talked about about the competition. You want to take a look at who is out there in your market and say, how can I be really world class at this one piece of the ecosystem? Because that is going to open you up to more VC funding as a team player, as I started the conversation with. Looking at where the VCs have made other investments, how you can collaborate with those companies…..
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123 Leveraging Strategic Partnerships in HealthTech with Thomas Kluz, Susan Sly, Andy Harlen, Humza Raees