Big Picture Medicine

Guillermo Vela is the CEO and Co-Founder of NeuScience, a VC-backed TechBio company using AI to discover novel cancer biomarkers.    0:00 Intro  0:55 Eroom's Law  5:37 Contrarian View of Cancer  15:54 AI Will Not Make Drug Discovery Fast, Better or Cheaper  26:14 Failing is Not a Good Thing  26:38 TechBio Funding  34:07 Habits    He went viral, in the techbio scene, with his 'Five TechBio Myths That Must Go' article in which he explained why it doesn’t take $2.5bn to develop a drug and why technologies like AI wont’ make drug discovery faster, better or cheaper.  We discuss that article, we discuss Guillermo’s contrarian view of cancer, why we’re doing more science than ever but not seeing results and how his ADD brain is a superpower.   I hope you enjoy.   You can find me on Twitter @MustafaSultan and subscribe to my newsletter on www.musty.io

Dr Ivan Beckley is the Co-Founder of Suvera Health, a Google-backed virtual clinic which has raised over £6M in funding.   0:00 Intro  0:42 Ivan's Story  5:14 Making Cash?  7:07 Building Suvera  10:19 Clinician-Product Fit  11:58 Growing  14:11 Experience of Feedback  16:56 Lessons from Google  19:47 Being Black in Tech  23:20 Further Growth  25:36 How Can Someone Move Faster Than You?  28:45 Habits That Have Helped You?   Ivan started Suvera whilst in Medical School at UCL — and has since expanded it from a basic app which could help GPs (Primary Care Physicians) complete medication reviews for their patients, to a full fledged virtual care platform for people with chronic illnesses.   We dig deep into the lessons and habits that have helped Ivan grow Suvera — like how the obstacle is often the way — and how he leans into discomfort as a signal of future success. We speak about how he changed the minds of people who were sceptical of him, how someone building in healthcare today could move faster than him and what it’s like being a black man in healthtech.   You can find me on Twitter @MustafaSultan and subscribe to my newsletter on www.musty.io

Dr Daniel Kraft is a Stanford and Harvard-trained physician-scientist and inventor.  He serves as faculty chair for Medicine at Singularity University, is founder and chair of Exponential Medicine and has given four TED and two TEDMED talks.   He’s also the inventor of the MarrowMiner, an FDA-approved device for the minimally invasive harvest of bone marrow, and founder of RegenMed Systems, a company developing technologies to enable stem cell-based regenerative therapies.   He’s also served as an officer and flight surgeon with F-15 & F-16 fighter Squadrons. He has conducted research on aerospace medicine that was published with NASA, with whom he was a finalist for astronaut selection.   We discuss why — despite reaching the fourth industrial revolution — healthcare seems to be stuck in the third or second. Dark horses in healthcare and some of the magic that has helped Daniel get to where he is today.    I hope you enjoy. You can find me on Twitter @MustafaSultan and subscribe to my newsletter on www.musty.io

How do you spend £16 billion to improve the world’s health? That is the job of Sir Jeremy Farrar, the Director of the Wellcome Trust. In 1936, British pharmaceutical magnate Sir Henry Wellcome left his fortune to improve the world’s health. Now Sir Jeremy must work out what to do with £16 billion over the next decade — and where to most effectively spend it. 0:00 Intro  0:47 The Third Role of Philanthropy  2:53 Appetite for Risk  5:38 What's Broken in Science Funding  8:16 Generalism vs Specialism  10:12 Why Are You Slow?  14:49 Sexy vs Incremental  17:04 How Much of Your Job Is Not Messing Things Up?  19:35 Metrics for Philanthropy  22:10 Playing the Long Game  23:20 How Do You Know You're Doing a Good Job?  28:05 First Become a King, Then a Philosopher (?)  30:00 Habits That Have Helped In Your Career  31:52 What's It Like Being Famous?  33:28 Book Recommendations By background he is a medical doctor and researcher, he has been named 12th in Fortune’s list of the world’s 50 greatest leaders, served in the UK’s SAGE group and was knighted in 2019 for his services to Global Health. I ask him about how he spends that money, how to measure philanthropic impact, problems and opportunities within research funding and just how much of his job is just not messing things up. You can find me on Twitter @MustafaSultan and subscribe to my newsletter on www.musty.io

Dr Imran Mahmud studied Medicine at Oxford, before studying Public Health at Harvard on a Fulbright Scholarship. He then ranked first in the country entering the Ophthalmology training programme — promptly leaving and joining McKinsey. In 2018 he co-founded NYE Health, raising over £4M. He is now a startup advisor, angel investor, digital health consultant and content creator. We speak about angel investing — which was traditionally a way in which high net worth individuals could invest in small startups — but is now becoming possible for many more people. We speak about the digital nomad post-economic lifestyle — and whether doing whatever you want, wherever you want actually makes you happy. And one of my favourite one of Imran’s principles: To be interesting, do interesting things. I hope you enjoy. 0:00 Intro  0:49 How to angel invest  06:47 Can anyone angel invest?  10:46 To be interesting, do interesting things  12:43 Does money buy happiness?  16:40 Does freedom make you happy?  19:47 Is homeschooling weird?  23:52 Why are successful people making content?  29:20 Content creation as a competitive advantage  32:07 Better to know how to code or know how to make content?  33:19 Managing your ego  35:43 Habits that have helped you in your career? You can find me on Twitter @MustafaSultan and subscribe to my newsletter on www.musty.io

After missing out on getting into Medical School, Ahmed studied Computer Science — later completing his PhD at Cambridge University. As a student, he launched his own health AI startup — which diagnosed rashes on intimate body parts. This didn’t work out and he pivoted and launched a data AI company called Catalyst AI. This company was later acquired by Farfetch; the luxury online fashion retail platform to help optimise their fashion supply chains. He now sits on the Prime Minister of Pakistan’s Science and Technology task force, on the Development Council of the Woolf Institute and is the Co-founder of a sustainable fashion enterprise. We speak the about the unlikely overlaps between fashion and healthtech — no seriously there are lots of them, we speak about how to find your ultimate purpose and how when building relationships — the ultimate form of self-serving is being a giver. I hope you enjoy. You can find me on Twitter @MustafaSultan and subscribe to my newsletter on www.musty.io

Thanks for listening.

Dr Sandeep Bansal is the Founder and CEO of Medic Bleep; a pager replacement which raised over £3M. On top of that, he recently co-founded Carebyte Health — which offers personalised on-demand healthcare to Indians. He is also Faculty at Harvard Medical School and Barts. This is a super interesting conversation in which Sandeep explains how he has partnered with some of India’s largest companies, to pay Indians to be healthy, how crypto fits into that mission and the fascinating new HealthTech/FinTech fusion model hitting emerging markets. I hope you enjoy. You can find me on Twitter @MustafaSultan and subscribe to my newsletter on www.musty.io

Dr Molly Gilmartin is an Investment Manager at AlbionVC who manage over $1bn in assets and have invested in companies like Arecor, Healios and Pando. She studied Medicine at Oxford, was a founding team member of Pando, Chief Commerical Officer of Induction Healthcare, a Consultant at McKinsey and now an Investor at AlbionVC. We talk a lot about the psychology of communication, about strength-based feedback and radical candour, about how being inquisitive can get you very far, how energy is Molly’s superpower and lots of other frameworks that Molly finds useful in her career. We finish off by discussing her thesis on the emerging B2C2B model in healthcare. This is a really value packed interview — I hope you enjoy. Video Interview on Youtube. You can find me on Twitter @MustafaSultan and subscribe to my newsletter on www.musty.io

Joe Stringer is a Partner at Octopus Ventures, one of the largest European Venture Capital firms with £1.8 billion under management. He was Partner at Ernst & Young for 10 years, before leaving his cushy position to launch his own venture fund TenX Health. He then led Google Health in the UK before becoming Partner at Octopus Ventures. We talk about his thesis on the future of health, the importance of hard work, grit and resilience, as well as building and managing relationships — in particular, trying not to be too British. You can find me on Twitter @MustafaSultan and subscribe to my newsletter on www.musty.io