Zach Teiger retweetledi
A few years ago, calling yourself a consumer health company in front of VCs was a virtual death sentence... but now, not only is consumer health being taken seriously, there are also some very serious consumer health businesses being built in the wild. This, plus other hot takes from @hollsmaloney, @ryu_alison, @KGSeidensticker and I at the inaugural Stanford Consumer Health Summit:
⚡ It's certainly possible now to build a large business purely based on cash pay + DTC acquisition. But playing nice with "The System" (e.g. B2B2C distribution, referrals from trad providers, taking reimbursement risk) still has its merits in helping one achieve even more durable scale and unit economics.
⚡ Sequencing of GTM motions matters: if you go "B2C first", you have the gifts of being able to fully control your product roadmap and swiftly acquire users - but it will be more expensive and potentially take longer to acquire them on your own. Going "B2B2C first" means you'll get access to large chunks of users in one fell swoop, but you'll have to pay a "product tax" to appease your B2B partner's requirements, not to mention needing to survive through long enterprise sales cycles. This sequencing choice informs your capital raising strategy in the early days.
⚡ A year ago, everyone was scared to say "AI Doctor", and now everyone is claiming to be building an "AI Doctor"!
⚡ To that end, will healthcare be dominated by an AI Doctor SuperApp as the front door, or will we continue to have fragmentation of apps by use case / condition / demographic? A large portion of consumers who don't have a PCP will find one in the form of an AI Doctor, and the best AI Doctors WILL be SuperApps that connect into a network of specialists and IRL clinical services through a single front door.
⚡ This necessitates a SuperData layer that allows for context sharing across all apps - and not just trad EHR data, but also wearables, genomics, non-traditional biomarker tests, information gleaned through ongoing engagement with AIs, patient-reported outcomes, health plan benefit design data info, etc.
The buzz in the room felt a lot like the early versions of the Health 2.0 conference in the late 2000's, BUT with companies that are really working and scaling this time around. Congrats to @ZHTeiger and his organizing team for bringing this community together - it's time to build in consumer health!
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