Insight
Aoun: Healthcare technology adoption only occurs in service of billing
“Technology adoption in healthcare only really goes in service of billing.”
Opinion
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,…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
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…”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
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…”
Insight
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…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
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…”
Insight
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…”
Insight
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.
…”
Insight
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.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
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.”
Disclosure
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 …”
What-if
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.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
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.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
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”
Insight
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…”
Disclosure
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.”
Disclosure
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?”
Opinion
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.”
Insight
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…”
Opinion
Aoun: Spinning Forward's CarePod assets into a seed startup is viable
“And so I think if you took those care pods, if somebody wanted to go buy those assets, maybe me or somebody else and spin that into a new company, that's not what I'm working on right now to be clear. But if you did, I actually think that would be a good idea.…”
Disclosure
Aoun: Forward raised $225 million in 2021 at super high prices
“We raised two hundred twenty five million, super high prices. And you got to remember the world has corrected from there.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Aoun: I made 150 phone calls to inform investors of Forward's shutdown
“I had to make a 150 phone calls. Literally. That's not an exaggeration. One five zero phone calls to our investors to inform them.”
