1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Anshu Sharma (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: What did you do in the healthcare space?

Anshu Sharma: In healthcare, I started a company along with other founders. They’re still in stealth mode. People can learn more by googling RobinAI. We are attacking a huge problem in healthcare where doctors spend way too much time interacting with their EHR systems and not with their patients. We have a unique way of attacking that problem. When we come out of stealth, we’ll talk more about it.

Sramana Mitra: But you will be selling to doctors?

Anshu Sharma: Yes, the healthcare providers are the target market.

Sramana Mitra: Interesting. This is an area that we keep talking about from just the persepective of pure consumers. There’s such bad service and so little data. This is an area that I would like to see get automated vastly. I would much prefer either a pure AI doctor or a doctor that is highly enhanced with AI as opposed to the kind of imprecise muck that we see these days.

Anshu Sharma: There’re a lot of legal challenges to truly automate a part of the doctor’s job. There are a couple of startups in China that are beginning to do this because of their legal framework. In the US, the systems are so heavily regulated. I can’t even legally build a web conferencing system that allows a patient in California to ask help for what a medication does from a doctor in India. Even that’s not allowed. You are not allowed to import from Canada which has good quality controls.

There is a system that has been created mostly to help protect the patients. The net effect of that is that almost anybody can build a $100 million business as part of this multi-trillion dollar market by changing things by 1%. If you try to change things by 2x, it bumps against the system. The system basically rejects it.

Given that you have a lot of entrepreneurs listening in from geographies like India, the chances of an AI doctor that actually helps patients are much more likely to come out of a country like India or Nigeria. I would love to invest in a company like that. It’s really hard to build that with the primary market being one of these regulated markets.

Sramana Mitra: Any other comments that you want to add to address that audience that you are speaking with here right now?

Anshu Sharma: My main message is, we spend way too much time thinking about technology breakthroughs. At the end of the day when people get narrowly focused on the technology, they almost always end up forgetting the user experience. The user and the buyer are often opposing forces in a system.

Take an example of a company that we just invested in, which is doing expense management. The CFO really wants to enable the processes to be automated. If you really think about it, a lot of CFOs want to make it harder for you to file all your expenses. If I can make it more difficult for you in some ways, wink wink. I have a positive impact on my bottom line. You can’t build a disruptive company if you’re the 17^th version of Concur.

You can only build a disruptive company if you say, “This is how things need to change not just because I’ve invented a new AI but because now I can apply this thinking from the perspective of the end user. If you do it the following way, it will be easier for the end user. By the way, you also get more efficacy and positive impact to your goals.” Everybody talks about it and almost nobody does it, because it gets harder and harder to apply these constraints.

It’s very easy to say, “I’ve thought about this thing with NLP and I’m going to apply it to something.” It’s harder to say, “I have this innovation but I’m going to find a buyer.” If you add a third constraint which is, “I have to find a user who’s going to love this,” that’s how companies fail or don’t achieve their full potential.

Sramana Mitra: Excellent. This was a superb conversation.

This segment is part 5 in the series : 1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Anshu Sharma
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