Adrian Aoun
Founder & Investor, aoun.net. On 2 shows, 2 appearances. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
founderinvestorexecutive@adrianaoun ↗LinkedIn ↗aoun.net ↗
Adrian Aoun founded the AI-driven primary care startup Forward and previously founded natural language startup Wavii, which was acquired by Google. He is a prominent angel and institutional investor who has backed over 300 startups, including Stripe, Uber, OpenAI, Anthropic, and Anduril.
2shows
2appearances
36statements
3resolved
2supported
0contradicted
67%fully supported
12said about them ↓ Everything Adrian Aoun said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Aoun: Healthcare technology adoption only occurs in service of billing
“Technology adoption in healthcare only really goes in service of billing.”
Aoun: Silicon Valley needs more arrogance, not less
“I think we need more arrogance in Silicon Valley, not less. And by that, what I mean is not this outward obnoxious be an asshole kind of arrogance, but look, it takes a special kind of arrogance to sit down, look at something like healthcare and be like, well,…”
Adrian Aoun: Systems startups require an MVP covering the entire vertical system
“And the truth is that you can't go after systems problems until your MVP, your minimum viable product, is a version of the whole system.”
Levchin backed Aoun's NLP startup provided it avoided neural networks
“I remember pitching Max Levchin to invest and Max goes, I'm totally in. I'm all for this company. As long as you tell me you're not using neural networks, because those things don't work. And I'm sitting there thinking all we're using is neural networks. And I…”
Aoun: Purely virtual healthcare companies like Teladoc will not succeed
“All these virtual care companies that took off during, call it, you know, 21 during COVID all those Teladocs of the world, I said, they aren't going to be able to succeed in the long run. Because fundamentally, healthcare is physical, right? Like, you can't de…”
Aoun: Physical healthcare clinics are not a venture-backable business model
“And frankly, what we learned is you can make clinics like a reasonable business. They're not really a venture backable business is what we found. These are not like, this is not, you're not going to go find a tech company building clinics everywhere everywhere…”
Aoun: Almost all recent retail acquisitions of primary care clinics failed
“Well, over the last kind of call it 12 months or so, pretty much every single one of those has failed. Right. And so Walgreens just completely wrote down village MD CVS. Well, you know, they just fired their CEO. You can go look at their stock Walmart, shut th…”
Aoun: Primary care is the front door to healthcare, like Google to search
“The insight is you go to Google as kind of the front page of your experience to the internet. And so any kind of downstream thing you want to do, you type restaurants, they can capture those queries. You type travel, they can capture those queries. And so that…”
Aoun: Concierge medicine ($15k–$40k/year) should not be venture backed
“I think that you can kind of bifurcate the market and you can say,
You can say, Hey, I want to go super expensive, 15, 20, 30, 40,000 dollars a year per person.
Don't venture back it.
and say, I'm going to build a nice, like slow growth, reasonable business.
…”
Aoun: Continuing to lead people after hope is lost is unethical
“When you're asking investors, when you're asking customers, when you're asking employees to follow you and believe in you, The second you don't believe that you have a chance of success, you're being unethical and having all these people follow you.”
Aoun: Forward burned $500M and investors immediately offered next checks
“We just burned, you know, not quite half a billion dollars on an idea, and every, no, I shouldn't say everybody, but a lot of people's reaction is, What are you doing next? Let's do it again.”
Aoun started his next company immediately due to investor demand
“Tuesday morning after this all happened, I said, I'm taking a break. And by Wednesday morning, because the investors said they want to come in and the employees said they want to come in. I said, I'm starting a company like without, and not only am I starting …”
Aoun: I would have quit Forward rather than run a zombie company
“If you had told me to just sit in that company, I would have quit that company. Like, there's no way I wanted to sit in a company where I already don't believe in the future, but I've somehow managed to get it to continue for in perpetuity.”
Aoun: Trump and Musk will be less close in four years
“I'm going to go with less because I think at some point he's going to have to Roughly, you know, screw Elon, and that will create some real tension.”
Aoun predicts JD Vance has a serious chance of winning next presidency
“JD Vance is going to become president in the next election, which I think has a very serious possibility”
Aoun: Routing routine care to automated pods is highly scalable
“A doctor fundamentally doesn't need to be dealing with like your colds, your rash, your flu, your normal checkup. Like you should save the doctors for the most important complex things. And if you kind of detach them from the doctor's office where you start wi…”
Benioff urged Forward to drop hardware and sell pure software
“Benioff is one of our big investors. And I and I've known for many, many years and Benioff was like, just take this damn software. He's a software guy, right? He's a SAS guy. Take this damn software and sell it.”
Aoun: Forward intentionally avoided becoming experts on legacy healthcare systems
“The industry of healthcare, we have never chosen to become experts on it. And kind of intentionally, right?”
Aoun: Healthcare peers cut burn but have no technology or future
“The amount of peers in our space that did that, that have no tech story, have no future is pretty real. Some of them have continued because they're like, well, we don't need a bunch of money, but they're not interesting businesses.”
Aoun: Vertically integrated startups cannot easily cut burn through layoffs
“If you're in a vertically integrated business like us, like employees are a cost. Don't get me wrong, but they're not 80% of your cost, right? They're 30 or 40% at best. And so, you know, we have everything from leases to AWS contracts to you name it, and we c…”
Forward built a functioning physical doctor's office 90 days after launch
“90 days into starting forward, we had a full doctor's office up and running with real doctors, real patients.”
Adrian Aoun: Tech founders dismiss regulation prematurely due to online freedom
“We are so used to just being able to do whatever we want online that any sort of regulation we look at, and we honestly throw our hands in the air and say, ah, screw it. This is dumb. Before we even seek to understand.”
Adrian Aoun: Regulation is less prohibitive for startups than founders think
“I don't think it actually is as prohibitive for startups as people would imagine.”
Adrian Aoun targets unsexy sectors like energy, education, and healthcare
“As an angel investor myself, frankly, I love those. I'm not looking for the Get rich quick scheme. More what I'm looking for is things that are going to have massive, massive impact on the world. What are the next Google, the next Apple, but let's go after the…”
The other half of the tape: Adrian Aoun's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 10 times in 4 episodes across the shows. 2 statements on the record name them. every mention, with the transcript →
Who brings them up most Harry Stebbings 8Ted Blosser 1Fritz Lanman 1
Statements about Adrian Aoun, by other people (2)
Adrian Aoun raised Forward capital from Marc Benioff and Eric Schmidt
“To date, Adrian has raised funding from some of the true greats of the business, including Mark Benioff, Eric Schmidt, Joe Lonsdale, Aaron Levy, and Josh Kushner, just to name a few.”
Every mention by year
tap a year for its mentions
20VC 10
2018 8 mentions in 3 episodes 3 per episode
- 20VC: ClassPass CEO Fritz Lanman on Betting His Career Facebook Would Be A $10Bn Company, Lessons From Travis and Uber on Scaling A Global Marketplace & Whether Growth and Capital Efficiency Are Mutually Exclusive
- 20VC: GOAT's Eddy Lu on Pivoting From Failing Social Dining App To The World's Largest Sneaker Marketplace, How The Best Founders Pick Their Investors & Why It Is Better To Be Hated than Unknown
- 20VC: Why The Days of Spray and Pray at Seed Are Over, How To Compete In A World of Sequoia Seed Funds & Why Price Doesn't Matter with Dan Scheinman, Angel Investor @ Zoom & Arista Networks
- every mention in 2018, scene by scene →
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Adrian's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 MORE OR LESSLEDGER | Founder & Investor, aoun.net | 1 | 22 | — | full record on More or Less → |
| 20VCLEDGER | Founder & Investor, aoun.net | 1 | 14 | 67% 2/3 | full record on 20VC → |