Adrian Aoun discusses the shutdown of his $400M healthcare startup Forward and defends founder audacity after journalist Jessica Lessin raises criticisms about Silicon Valley arrogance.
Insight
Aoun: Healthcare technology adoption only occurs in service of billing
“Technology adoption in healthcare only really goes in service of billing.”
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…”