The Exchanges

Q I'm sorry to be, and this may be a total tangent, but is it not like totally fucked that doctors get incentivized by drug companies?

A Yeah, the whole thing is totally fucked, right? If you look at the existing system in the US, almost nothing has to do with patient outcomes or patient happiness, right? So many people make money, everybody makes money, but none of them make money in any way that's actually reflective of success of the customer or patient. Um, and I think that's where our model is most powerful. Like we only make money at him's and hers if you are happier and healthier. Period. Because you pay us, you pay us to be healthier. If you don't feel healthier, if you don't feel happier, you stop paying us. And so our incentive is only aligned with, with you. And we then fight behind the scenes, the drug companies, we fight the diagnostic companies, we fight everybody and we work with them, but we apply pressure to them to get the best stuff at the best price to bring it to you. But ultimately we only succeed if you succeed.

AI assessment note: “Yeah, the whole thing is totally fucked, right?”

Q When you speak about the explosion of the business, that explosion is driven largely by GLP ones and weight loss. How much of that is the core business today? Is it like, 80% weight loss, 20% everything else? What does that look like?

A No, no. I think that's one of the funny things about our business is we are constantly in the headlines as a single category business. When we first launched, when you and I first met, we were the erectile dysfunction business, right? And it was, you know, front page of the New York times and it was, uh, uh, fun and silly and provocative. And all we did from everyone's perspective was ED. Uh, and then we launched hair and then all of a sudden it was like, we're a hair loss business. Uh, and then we launched the hers business and everyone said, oh, hers is never going to work. You're just an ED and hair loss business. Uh, you know, and then eventually we launched GLP ones and everyone said, oh, now you're just a weight loss business. And, you know, a year from now, people will say, oh, you're just like a peptides business probably if I were to take a guess. Right. And, and so I think the, the reality is under the hood is that you have a dozen completely different clinical categories, completely different businesses, each scaling with very solid, robust growth, which is why this business is interesting. Like that's why I run this business is the durability of it is quite strong because you have 10 different businesses with completely different customer segments. So weight loss is actually, you know, nowhere near the majority of this business. Um, um, and, and I don't think ever w…

AI assessment note: “weight loss is actually, you know, nowhere near the majority of this business.”

Q How should I think about the preventative healthcare companies that I'm pitched every day, whether it's your pre-Novos or your Necos in the UK, which is expanding to you. Is that the future? Some are much deeper, some are much shallower, some are much more expensive. How do you understand, analyze that space? Is that something that HIMSS would do?

A We spend a ton of time looking at that space and, and I've actually, we did a partnership with Pronovo that was announced just a couple of weeks ago. Um, I, I think where there's a lot of interesting companies right now is in highly specialized levels of testing for clinical areas that are, that are, um, meaningfully unmet, right? So you look at things like Uh, cardiovascular disease. Um, right. Still one of the number one killers. Most dads die of a heart attack. Um, yet a statin is, you know, two cents for me to manufacture. And if you take a statin every day, um, then you won't die of a heart attack or you're meaningfully less likely to die of a heart attack. Yet nobody does it. And so there's, there's, you know, biotech companies right now working on therapies where a single injection quarterly Or a single injection annually can absolutely obliterate your cardiovascular risk. And if you can do something like that, you meaningfully, you know, curve that rate of death and you get ahead on prevention for cardiovascular disease. Pronovo, I think is, is another interesting one, right? It's, it's how do we get ahead of detection for things like cancer and early tumor detection? You know, my, my dad, you know, had stage four colon cancer when he was 39. It then cost the healthcare system, you know, hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars, if not millions of dollars to Have s…

AI assessment note: “where there's a lot of interesting companies right now is in highly specialized levels”

Q The lock-in and power of Epic is just mind boggling. Does that progress or prevent innovation in the healthcare industry?

A I don't think it's relevant, actually. When you look at the patients coming to hims and hers today, the patients starting their healthcare journey, the majority of them do not have legacy data and systems within all DMR platforms. Right. They, they moved to a new city. They moved to New York and they're 22 and they're like, I don't have a doctor yet. I'm feeling a little sad. What do I do? Right. And their, their first time entry into the healthcare system is hims and hers. And so the, the wave of, of healthcare for the future, for the next 20 years, for the 50 years after that is going to be a patient population that's starting today. Um, and that's why I think Uh, you know, you have to, you have to build a relationship early. You have to have an assortment of care that starts young for people so that you can give them an example of what grade looks like and then build with them over many, many years.

AI assessment note: “I don't think it's relevant, actually. When you look at the patients”

Q Can I be a dick, why do we see, like, negative connotations with you and not Roe? It seems like the world likes to dunk on you more than Roe.

A Yeah, I think when it comes to HIMSS as a disruptor, we are actually Disrupting. I think we are pushing buttons that structurally change how people get access to care in this country. If you look in the last 18 months, like we were talking about, um, the most important medicines of the century got cut by 80%. Not only did they get cut in cost, but now they're available through consumer channels at prices everyone can afford. Um, I think we played a part of that. Intentionally, right? We applied massive pressure, regulatory pressure, consumer pressure. We leveraged, you know, hundreds of thousands of patients to raise their voices to say, hey, these medicines could save our lives. Like, let's actually get them to us in ways we can afford. And coverage is now expanding dramatically and the prices are tanking. And so I think our willingness to be at the, at the forefront of disruption and push on behalf of consumers, I think causes friction, right? Um, and I think we're comfortable with that friction. I think people understand why we're doing it is, is super important because, you know, we, we like to push where it's important to customers. And I think ultimately that is going to benefit how the ecosystem works.

AI assessment note: “our willingness to be at the forefront of disruption and push... causes friction”

Q And so you need to deliver it with the same passion and gusto that you did. I also think not enough for opinionated enough. If you look at the HIMSS and HERS brand today, where would you say you are not opinionated enough?

A I think HIMSS and HERS will increasingly have a stronger perspective of what great healthcare looks like. And I think as we grow, you know, we are building an understanding of patients at a scale that I don't think most have, right? When you think about the fact that we're treating 10, 20,000 patients a day, like the largest health systems in the world are not treating 10 to 15,000 patients per day. So there's an immense amount of knowledge that's being built around different types of patients, their demographics, their risk factors, Their biomarkers, what medicines and treatments work, why, what side effects they have, how much they feel better, um, combination therapies that are beneficial. Like, there's just an immense amount of knowledge base growing where I think we're going to be able to start having stronger perspectives of what excellence looks like in healthcare. What do we believe the gold standard in preventative care is? Like, if you, Harry, want to be the absolute healthiest twenty-nine-year-old, right, and be ahead of the curve, Right. What are the 10 things you should be doing? What are the tests you should be doing specifically for you? What are the, the treatments, whether they're holistic supplements or maybe sauna, right, that you should be doing? Um, and what's that exact regimen and get ahead of it. And there you go. You just, you're gonna be a, you're gonn…

AI assessment note: “we're going to be able to start having stronger perspectives of what excellence looks like”

Q Can I be a dick, why do we see, like, negative connotations with you and not Roe? It seems like the world likes to dunk on you more than Roe.

A Yeah, I think when it comes to HIMSS as a disruptor, we are actually Disrupting. I think we are pushing buttons that structurally change how people get access to care in this country. If you look in the last 18 months, like we were talking about, um, the most important medicines of the century got cut by 80%. Not only did they get cut in cost, but now they're available through consumer channels at prices everyone can afford. Um, I think we played a part of that. Intentionally, right? We applied massive pressure, regulatory pressure, consumer pressure. We leveraged, you know, hundreds of thousands of patients to raise their voices to say, hey, these medicines could save our lives. Like, let's actually get them to us in ways we can afford. And coverage is now expanding dramatically and the prices are tanking. And so I think our willingness to be at the, at the forefront of disruption and push on behalf of consumers, I think causes friction, right? Um, and I think we're comfortable with that friction. I think people understand why we're doing it is, is super important because, you know, we, we like to push where it's important to customers. And I think ultimately that is going to benefit how the ecosystem works.

AI assessment note: “our willingness to be at the, at the forefront of disruption... causes friction”

Q Um, in the last- Do you have the elasticity and budget to do that? I don't mean that really-

A It requires verticalization. It requires two tangible things. So last year we acquired Uh, your bio health, which is one of the, the few at home blood collection devices. I have it right here on my desk. Um, and this device costs just a couple of bucks to manufacture, and you can click it on your arm, and it's got 30 micro needles in time, inside of it. Each of the micro needles smaller than an eyelash. So if you feel nothing, you click a button, you feel nothing, and then a small tube of blood gets extracted from your arm in about a minute or two. You can then peel that off, and you can mail it to New Jersey. Which is where we have a lab processing facility, and we'll have a couple others in the next year and two, um, and run a full panel, you know, 50 biomarkers, and it will cost us like almost nothing. Now, today, if you go to, to Quest or LabCorp and try to get that panel, uh, cash pay, maybe it costs you a thousand bucks or 2000 bucks. If you, you know, uh, go online and go to different competitors, maybe it costs like 300 or 500 bucks for that panel. Um, uh, and, and my, my goal, my vision is like very quickly, I want to give that away as a part of the hims and hers membership for free. Um, because if you can get a sense of those metrics, and, and I'm not talking about just like baseline metrics, like, You know, your cholesterol and the things that I'm actually talking ab…

AI assessment note: “and it will cost us like almost nothing.”

Q And so you need to deliver it with the same passion and gusto that you did. I also think not enough for opinionated enough. If you look at the HIMSS and HERS brand today, where would you say you are not opinionated enough?

A I think HIMSS and HERS will increasingly have a stronger perspective of what great healthcare looks like. And I think as we grow, you know, we are building an understanding of patients at a scale that I don't think most have, right? When you think about the fact that we're treating 10, 20,000 patients a day, like the largest health systems in the world are not treating 10 to 15,000 patients per day. So there's an immense amount of knowledge that's being built around different types of patients, their demographics, their risk factors, Their biomarkers, what medicines and treatments work, why, what side effects they have, how much they feel better, um, combination therapies that are beneficial. Like, there's just an immense amount of knowledge base growing where I think we're going to be able to start having stronger perspectives of what excellence looks like in healthcare. What do we believe the gold standard in preventative care is? Like, if you, Harry, want to be the absolute healthiest twenty-nine-year-old, right, and be ahead of the curve, Right. What are the 10 things you should be doing? What are the tests you should be doing specifically for you? What are the, the treatments, whether they're holistic supplements or maybe sauna, right, that you should be doing? Um, and what's that exact regimen and get ahead of it. And there you go. You just, you're gonna be a, you're gonn…

AI assessment note: “increasingly have a stronger perspective of what great healthcare looks like”

Q I'd love, I'd do it with you. There you go. Um, you said there about kind of the best. What did you do that with the benefit of hindsight you wish you hadn't done?

A For us as a business, I think it's important to constantly be in a customer's mind, the mind share of the new evolving health and wellness categories. And so I think in many categories we've been, um, quick to market and in many categories we've been kind of like, uh, you know, patient to market. And in retrospect, I constantly am kind of evolving my perspective on like how fast we should be there. My net net takeaway is I don't think we actually need to be first ever in market. Um, I want to be best in market. And so when I think of new categories, peptides, for example, right, you know, a lot of conversation about 10, 15 peptides going from class to category two to category one compounding so that people can actually get access to things like BBC, one 57, TB, 500. This is an incredibly interesting category. You won't see us be first to market in this category. Um, you'll see us when we launch it, feel extremely confident in the clinical protocols, extremely confident in the guardrails, make sure that the supply chain and the quality is done to a level we are, you know, feel as bulletproof from a pharmaceutical standpoint. So, you know, there's a lot of, a lot of introspection, uh, in my, in my brain around Speed and prioritization of which categories to enter. But what I always come back to is not being first, but being best. So that from a brand standpoint, people know hims …

AI assessment note: “I don't think we actually need to be first ever in market.”

Q The lock-in and power of Epic is just mind boggling. Does that progress or prevent innovation in the healthcare industry?

A I don't think it's relevant, actually. When you look at the patients coming to hims and hers today, the patients starting their healthcare journey, the majority of them do not have legacy data and systems within all DMR platforms. Right. They, they moved to a new city. They moved to New York and they're 22 and they're like, I don't have a doctor yet. I'm feeling a little sad. What do I do? Right. And their, their first time entry into the healthcare system is hims and hers. And so the, the wave of, of healthcare for the future, for the next 20 years, for the 50 years after that is going to be a patient population that's starting today. Um, and that's why I think Uh, you know, you have to, you have to build a relationship early. You have to have an assortment of care that starts young for people so that you can give them an example of what grade looks like and then build with them over many, many years.

AI assessment note: “I don't think it's relevant, actually. When you look at the patients coming to”

Q I'd love, I'd do it with you. There you go. Um, you said there about kind of the best. What did you do that with the benefit of hindsight you wish you hadn't done?

A For us as a business, I think it's important to constantly be in a customer's mind, the mind share of the new evolving health and wellness categories. And so I think in many categories we've been, um, quick to market and in many categories we've been kind of like, uh, you know, patient to market. And in retrospect, I constantly am kind of evolving my perspective on like how fast we should be there. My net net takeaway is I don't think we actually need to be first ever in market. Um, I want to be best in market. And so when I think of new categories, peptides, for example, right, you know, a lot of conversation about 10, 15 peptides going from class to category two to category one compounding so that people can actually get access to things like BBC, one 57, TB, 500. This is an incredibly interesting category. You won't see us be first to market in this category. Um, you'll see us when we launch it, feel extremely confident in the clinical protocols, extremely confident in the guardrails, make sure that the supply chain and the quality is done to a level we are, you know, feel as bulletproof from a pharmaceutical standpoint. So, you know, there's a lot of, a lot of introspection, uh, in my, in my brain around Speed and prioritization of which categories to enter. But what I always come back to is not being first, but being best. So that from a brand standpoint, people know hims …

AI assessment note: “In retrospect, I constantly am kind of evolving my perspective on like how fast”