A New Model for Achieving Health Moonshots: Collaboration
StartUp Health founder letter #5
Over the past decade, the Krein and Stoakes families, the StartUp Health team, our partners, and a community of hundreds of Health Transformers have worked tirelessly, investing our financial resources and entrepreneurial spirit into what many believe is an impossible dream: improving the health and wellbeing of everyone on the planet. Beginning in 2011, we started sharing our long-term plan with the world via this simple equation: Health Transformers x The Network Effect = The Transformation of Global Health We set out to build a global platform to invest in and unite thousands of Health Transformers – the world’s entrepreneurs dedicated to health moonshots – so together we could impact billions of people’s lives. It’s been both challenging and rewarding. There have been roadblocks and surprises at nearly every turn and every hill we climb reveals another valley with a higher peak just behind. Healthcare conglomerates move too slowly and innovation often equates to ‘marketing’ rather than leapfrog transformation. And so called risk takers and financiers – VCs and traditional investors – are incentivized by short-term returns more than investing on the time table required to achieving health moonshots. Legacy players may want change – just not too much nor too fast. You know you’re at a breakthrough when you’re totally exhausted, yet somehow more energized than ever
In spite of the challenges, we are more energized than ever. First, because of the way global tech platforms have matured over the past decade. Companies like Apple, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and Tencent have helped lay a critical foundation that empowers entrepreneurs to transform global health. Combine this with the democratization of access to technologies like artificial intelligence, machine learning and quantum computing, and we believe what’s next will far exceed the linear logic of most ‘industry experts.’ The second reason we are energized is because there is now broad agreement on global health goals. The UN’s Sustainable Development Goal #3 codifies evidence-based metrics for how global health needs to improve by 2030. These align perfectly with our 11 Health Moonshots like ending cancer, driving cost to zero and preventing disease. Thanks to organizations like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, there is a financial will to see these global goals and health moonshots through to completion.
Finally, we’re energized because we see the accelerating real world impact being made by our global army of Health Transformers. After investing in more than 500 entrepreneurs and 300 companies, our plan is no longer just an equation based on an idea. It’s a scalable platform and community we are proud of, and from which we can keep improving health for all. With the right mindset, a moonshot vision and the spirit of an entrepreneur, anything is possible. But goals and financial will are just the foundation. To solve the greatest health challenges of our time, we have to invest in health’s problem solvers. Thousands of them. Tens of thousands of them. These entrepreneurs understand the pain points at the ground level because that’s where they, and their families and friends, live every day.
In the 1970s, the economist Muhammad Yunus began work on a concept that he believed could help break the cycle of poverty in his home country of Bangladesh. He created an unconventional bank that gave out small loans – lots of them, mostly to women – in order to augment the borrower’s earning power. The principles at play with micro-lending are, like so many great ideas, elegantly simple. Invest small amounts in everyday entrepreneurs at scale, add in contextual accountability, and the rising tide will lift all boats. By finding and investing in the entrepreneurs – even those at the earliest stages – we grow the world’s problem solvers. Invest in these people, and we invest in the future. These ideas improved financial mobility and ultimately changed the world. Vinod Khosla, founding CEO of Sun Microsystems and venture capital firm Khosla Ventures, called micro-lending “one of the most important economic phenomena since the advent of capitalism.”
In 2006, Yunus was given the Nobel Peace Prize. The inspiring possibilities and lessons learned from the micro-finance revolution give us tremendous confidence that there is a leap forward opportunity with a model we call Health Moonshot Investing. Today, we have an opportunity to build on the legacy of Mohammad Yunus, investing in health’s most innovative entrepreneurs – an index of Health Transformers at scale – while also creating the networks, partnerships and accountability necessary to improve complex health systems. Health Moonshot Investing: An improved equation for a new decade We realized early on that our initial plan would need to constantly evolve; it needed real world experience and feedback loops. So quarter after quarter and year after year – through brute force, ongoing experiments and non-stop recalibrations – we worked to continually improve our model and create a flywheel that accelerates growth. The result is a new model for transforming global health, and a new equation that includes critical variables for building momentum: Invest x Unite x Broadcast x Connect x Collaborate = The Transformation of Global Health What’s essential and novel about our Health Moonshot Investing model is it requires so much more than just investing capital. It requires several integrated steps of investing, and is driven by collaboration around health moonshots.
StartUp Health’s platform is comprised of five key steps: Investing seed and growth capital in vetted health entrepreneurs at scale; investing in uniting the entrepreneurs into a coordinated global army; investing in broadcasting their stories of progress; investing in connecting them to a network of support and finally growing a “collaboratory” of long-term partners who care as much as we all do about achieving health moonshots. Each step in the StartUp Health flywheel strengthens the others: financial commitments from our collaboratory members provide ongoing access to capital for investing in more great entrepreneurs, which means more talented Health Transformers uniting to solve global health moonshots, which leads to more stories of progress thus inspiring more customers and investors to commit resources to the movement and so on and so on. Through Health Moonshot Investing, StartUp Health is changing the equation. We are still early in our plan, but we are investing in a generation of Health Transformers committed to achieving health moonshots. And now, we’re inviting the world’s leading organizations, governments and wealthiest families who care as much about impact as financial return, to join the movement too. We’re asking these organizations to commit to Health Moonshot Investing, so that we can support more entrepreneurs in more countries tackling more of the world’s biggest health challenges. We’ve created a platform to invest in hundreds – ultimately thousands – of transformative health entrepreneurs in order to improve health for all. We believe in the economic power of entrepreneurship, not just in the world’s biggest cities, but in every community and village on the globe. Investing in Health Transformers at scale, connecting the dots between the financiers and a global army of Health Transformers, is how we’re going to achieve what previous generations deemed impossible.