266. Meet the Brit Scaling A Health Tech to £4M Revenue in the US w/ Dr. Ashish Mandavia | Sohar Health

0:00We went from 150 to 600k to now 4 million in the space of like a two and a half year time rising. And now we handle around, back then I think we were handling around half a million transactions on an annual basis. Now we handle around 12 million transactions on an annual basis. Right now we've helped 5 million American citizens to access care, particularly in the mental health space that they weren't able to access before.

0:23Amardeep Parmar:That's Ashish, co-founder of Soar Health. they're transforming how American patients access health. He's had quite the journey, having originally been on track to become a psychiatrist. I think there's always the funny bit is that people, when things are going well, they're like, oh, it's going to get well. They didn't notice all the things that went before that to get you through a yard, right? I was assaulted by a patient who kind of punched me in the face because he was having a delusion at the time. My wife's grandmother unfortunately passed away and I took some time off in a month to like a half day to attend the funeral.

0:58So then I was sort of in limbo. I was forced to take time to reconsider.

1:03Amardeep Parmar:He shifted to his other passion in business and has thrived. Medics just don't realise that they have transferable skills because you're told that these are the skills that you need just to do one specific job. Doesn't mean that you've not developed so many talents that are so relatable to other spaces. Find the five out of five burning platform issue for a company that's also a five out of five in terms of complexity for their engineering team. And if you can plot that out onto a graph like with four chondrons and you find the option that sits in that top right, you're going to find something you can build a venture-scale business around.

1:37I got a phone call to say, you need to be on a plane to San Francisco next week for YC.

1:46Amardeep Parmar:So great to have you on today. I tried to listen to what your company does and I'm not sure I fully understood it. So can you tell us about what your company does in a way that we can understand? Yeah, I think it's not an easy one, right? And the elevator pitch that I give to people in the space probably makes it sound really simple. But for those who aren't in the space, it still could be any other language, right? So the tagline is Soho Health automates front end revenue cycle management for doctors and doctors' offices. What does that actually mean? well okay let's get let's give the analogy because a lot of the audience here will probably be european or uk based so if you turn up to your doctor's surgery your gp there's never the question in your mind of do i need to pay for this or will my insurance cover me for this gp appointment i'm about to have but it's completely different in the us where we have maybe only four large insurers here in the uk who provide private medical insurance and they may have like 10 insurance plans that you can be on that you sign off for the start of the year you know you could just call up your insurer and say hey can i go to a physio or can i go and see a specialist for this in us that process just doesn't exist there's a thousand insurers and there's unlimited number of healthcare plans that a patient could be on and often the analogy that i kind of hear when i go over to the us is like it's kind of like filling up your car with petrol but if you turn up at the to the petrol station has like a pound 50 for a liter of fuel right you start filling up and then as you're looking at the fog the amount per liter of fuel just keeps on going up and up and up by the time you finish it's like a hundred pounds per liter of fuel and that's like the surprise that can hit average American anytime they go and see a clinician or a or a doctor or a specialist and so being able to work out what their insurance is and what it actually covers them for and do that in an automated way quickly is exactly what my company does.

3:51And it's amazing that two naive British European founders could go over to the US and realize that probably needs to be solved for and that should be better. But I think there's a lot of acceptance like over in the US that the system can't get any better. And that's just what's to be expected. And you take a gamble every time you go into a doctor's office. And yeah, we really want to kind of level up that playing field for the patient.

4:15Amardeep Parmar:what's interesting there like you said because you're two british guys doing this yeah you have that external perspective yeah and you're different and because you're not i guess institutionalized by you've grown up in that way you've grown up through that system then it's a classic immigrant mentality right because it's new to you it's like why does it work that way there must be a better way i mean i i often like use the analogy that if you like if you go and shop on amazon you know you go to the checkout at the end and you make a payment like that's how much you pay like it's a very slick consumer-like experience and I feel like healthcare should be something similar even if you do have to pay for it and yeah I often find that I'm looking at things like with a fishbowl lens and I think it just prompts us to ask questions and always ask why I mean I have a three-year-old toddler who continuously asks me why and I kind of apply the same mentality when when I go to work and I go and speak to people who have been in this space for like 15-20 years because that's how long it's been around for and obviously you didn't start off trying to become an entrepreneur right right so there's quite a journey there and obviously is the reason why we're in the healthcare space so talk about that please um you say i didn't start off trying to be an entrepreneur i'd say that like i've always been very entrepreneurial like similar immigrant story to other guests that you would have had on the podcast like my parents both came over to the uk in the in the in the 70s found it difficult to study ended up in my dad's case starting up his own estate agent business mainly because in the area that he was working in in Hounslow like there weren't any estate agents that really served the Asian population and so he really found and carved out a niche where he was able to kind of sell you know guys who were working at Heathrow airports houses or rent them houses and and kind of built up his his business from there my mum joined him in the business they worked together on it for 40 years So I think there was always that kind of like undercurrent there that I was going to do something that was business related.

6:10It just happened that I loved. And this is my interview answer for med school. But I happen to love biology and chemistry and how the inner work of the human body happens and therefore naturally gravitated towards medicine. But it actually wasn't really as simple as that. Around that time, I was also really in love with like economics. and like understanding more about management and business and starting up companies. But the 2008 crash came about. And I think that's like a very like kind of inflection point for a lot of folks where actually if you speak to your parents about what am I going to do next?

6:50Am I going to become an investment banker who are, you know, being demonized or ridiculed in the news? Or should I go for something safe like a vocational degree as a doctor? probably leaned lean a bit more towards a vocational degree and again I don't think that was the pure reason I think ultimately what it came down to is it was competitive it was competitive to get into a degree in medicine and I naturally gravitated to be doing things that were competitive in nature and so I found that to be like a big driving force not the best driving force to go into a career like medicine but but a good driving force to get me there um I really

7:24Amardeep Parmar:like that as well because I think I'd say there's a lot of the same thing that I think about things is like I like doing things that are difficult. And I don't know if it's a healthy mentality, but it's a challenge. That's where I feel alive. Like, okay, how do I figure this out? How do I get into that? Yeah. And I think I was a year below you, but my A-levels were biology, chemistry, maths, economics. Right. So same thing. It's like a doctor, dentist or economics, what do they go down? And I threw in a curveball there by doing art. So I think my parents had no idea what I was up to, to be honest, and what was going on in my mind.

7:54But yeah, I mean, and that entrepreneurial kind of feel or that sense like went through into straight into university with me and I was that guy who like I went on a family holiday for for a family wedding to India that first year like that first Christmas holiday from university and ended up realizing that actually every textbook that I had to buy and spend a ton of money on at the beginning of uni is being printed here in India in Delhi and I just called up the factory and said can I get 20 copies of each of these books they gave it to me at like two quid or three quid per book and uh and then i came back in the new term and i sold those books like and i used to go door to door to lecture halls and like write up the on the on the whiteboard like i'm selling this book um amazon retail price 50 quid my price 10 quid like a ridiculous margins undercut heron this undercutting of amazon uh and i you know i was always doing stuff like that and like yeah sometimes it worked and these weren't sustainable businesses sometimes it worked like that one you know other times you get a lecturer coming into the lecture hall say don't buy this from ash he's a con artist the next edition of this book is coming out tomorrow and i know because i'm the author on it so i say you know all sorts of stories like that i did the same approach with stethoscopes so i worked out that everyone pretty much in the whole of the uk are told to get the same type of stethoscope so you have 450 candidates at each university coming in every year to buy their one stethoscope and uh so i just went to the factory in germany litman to factory and then asked them to sell me a thousand stethscopes and they gave it to me at a very good price and i was able to then sell those on so i was always doing things like that and i think that that really kind of attracted me to to going over to imperial so i was at bristol for med school went to imperial for a degree in management and suddenly i was alive like i was learning about marketing entrepreneurship um as dull as it may sound healthcare it systems and and and and where they've gone wrong and they've gone terribly wrong throughout the throughout history whether it's on european side or us and i and i really felt like i was learning things that i that i enjoyed and i and i really thoroughly cared about um and yeah eventually i went back into into med school and suddenly you seem a bit like an alien to your peers because they're asking you questions like so are you going to be an nhs manager now or like you know are you sticking around yeah some of my friends from that degree they left they went and did something else and uh but i was really adamant that i still wanted to become a doctor that was still truly what i was what i was attracted to and i was able to find kind of parts of clinical medicine that i absolutely loved just as much as the as kind of more business and entrepreneurial things was that some of that

10:39Amardeep Parmar:drive from following through like you did the competitive process you wanted to make sure you would actually follow through or what was that drive to still become a doctor even though you knew you also really loved business um i mean like seeing things through to the end like from start to finish is definitely i'd say like a big part of who i am my character and and and my approach to things but in all reality it was it was the patients like actually learning how to look after a patient talk to a patient uh and treat one um was just great and it's still to this day like for me that's the best part of the job is actually being able to help people um so that was very much kind of the motivating factor to complete med school become a doctor and at that point like three years of of hard graft and actually studying and actually doing medicine rather than trying to do side hustles um yeah it really had geared me up to okay let me really focus in on this of course i had one distraction which is i did an internship at a strategy consulting house and uh i absolutely hated it so you know it's uh it was it was a breath of fresh air to know that okay actually maybe maybe medicine is actually what i'm really really keen and passionate about and i don't want to go and build slide decks uh day after day every day um and so yeah i went into to the clinical world had a great first year as a doctor made some good friends and um really started like kicking into gear in terms of thinking about my future career as a medic um second year came about and it was a it was a complete curveball i like through various kind of administrative errors and issues i ended up in a hospital working in a hospital in southeast london that i had no idea that i was going to be working at i think when you ended up in a hospital it's like oh what happened even you're working in this obviously yeah yeah exactly and then um uh yeah i ended up working in a hospital there it could have been either way um and and i was yeah i was i was working with some some quite disturbed and quite challenged uh young guys from from southeast london who was suffering a paranoid schizophrenia or bipolar affected disorder and um there just seemed to be like instant utter incident that took place that wasn't comfortable particularly i was uh i was assaulted by a patient um who kind of punched me in the face because he was having a delusion at the at the time i just i just found myself feeling less and less kind of in love with looking after the patients but not getting very much support from seniors and um and just more and more kind of starting to fall through the cracks like i i didn't have much mentorship at the time i didn't have many people to provide me with support and i really was just finding solace in the fact that i was able to do a little bit of side work of like helping students to get into into medical or dental school across the uk and that was funding me buying an engagement ring for my now wife and and like it just it seemed like those sorts of things I was doing outside of the actual day-to-day seemingly were again bringing me more joy than my day-to-day role and actually in the end it was it was the case that I had a really challenging situation where my wife's grandmother unfortunately passed away and I took some time off in a month to like a half day to attend the funeral and because I'd taken that half day to attend the funeral and the way the rotors are set up, I could then not take a half day to do a certain exam to get me to the next leg on the kind of conveyor belt towards your next step as a doctor.

14:12So then I was sort of in limbo. I was forced to take time to reconsider. And of course, I went and tried to get internships and workplaces and stuff like that. And there were no bites. There was no one willing to kind of take me on, which I found like really frustrating given that how much time and effort I'd spent on it. So naturally, then I gravitated to, well, what do I do well? And that's, I do, I do tend to work well in a startup sort of environment, or at least I didn't even know what the term startup was back then. And there was a medical buddy of mine who says, oh, well, I've just raised a little bit of money.

14:48We're building out some cool softwares like triaging software for A &E departments back before the term AI co-pilot or any of these buzzwords come out. and we were building something quite interesting. I was able to impart my clinical knowledge into a tech product. And I was starting to get the feel for it and the flavor for it. But in reality, it meant traveling up to Hull every single weekend and then working in Hull days on end in the A &E department, but not so much delivering care, which I was really like actually quite enjoying. And instead like training up members of staff on how to use our IT systems.

15:24and I felt like this wasn't really like something that was for me and actually the company ended up folding and I'd kind of jumped ship before it had done and actually found myself back into that medical education space. The side hustles keep on coming up, but I hope HMRC aren't watching this. But back in med school, I used to be like an interviewer and an examiner and review students' applications. I wrote a book about how to get into med school and kind of get through the interview process. And so, yeah, I just started channeling that in a company that was an up and comer in that space and very quickly became like number two in the organization.

16:07And, yeah, I started prep work to to turn us into a company that could be an ed tech company and then could become something that could raise money because at that point we were bootstrapping. And yeah, three years later, I learned a lot about how to run a company, how to deal with people and most importantly, how to kind of like sell and work commercially. But yeah, at that point, you have a founder who's kind of gone completely MIA and has not got that same intention that she initially had of wanting to raise a lot of money and build a unicorn business. And so it became a natural point to, okay, let's get out of here and figure out what the next step is.

16:48Amardeep Parmar:Hello, hello. I hope you're enjoying the show so far. I'm Amarit Parma, co-founder of BayHQ and the host of this show. For those of you who don't know, BayHQ is the community for high growth Asian heritage founders and investors in the UK. Over 7 ,500 people have attended our events, 200 people have been for our impact programs, and obviously there's been over 250 episodes of this podcast. If you want to join us and take part in the programs and come to the events, go to bayhq.com forward slash join. We also just released our first ever book called Startups for Outsiders, which you can get on Amazon now and the link is in the bio.

17:29Amardeep Parmar:Hope to see you soon at our event. Hope you enjoy the rest of the episode. Yeah, as I said, like you mentioned about kind of a situation forced you to rethink, cry as well right because of your options but one thing i find interesting is a lot of people i know who went into medicine who maybe then decide okay maybe there's other things i want to do it's how identity beats could you introduce yourself as a doctor right and as soon as you say that people oh okay you get instant respect and like how is that transition about like not necessarily about what other people's perceptions of your own perception yourself is that when doctor me quite really integra some of those personalities i think the thing that most medics kind of don't quite understand and let's not to we don't have to spend too much time on this but like medics just don't realize that they have transferable skills because you're told that these are the skills that you need just to do one specific job it doesn't mean that you've not developed so many talents that are so many so relatable to other spaces I often found myself like any any doctors who are looking to move out of the industry um and I'm doing mentoring for them I am often saying well you know that that does have a place either in corporate world or startup world or whatever it may be I think the other thing is that often doctors especially if you've kind of made that decision went back when you were like 14 or 15 years old that you're going on this conveyor belt for the next 20 years and you get to that end of that conveyor belt and realize oh god like this is not what I hoped for um there's like a sense of the next step has to be the most important one the next step has to be the one and I hope that something out of my story is I didn't know I churned through multiple companies I went back to strategy consulting because I was like I I've spent time as a doctor I've spent time in startup land I just don't know how I benchmark like compared to people who went and did an economics degree and then ended up like climbing the corporate ladder and where you know what stage are they at and you know I always used to moat and and be mindful of the fact that like my friends who didn't do a six-year degree and did a three-year degree and perhaps a master's on top were like you know really getting on in their career they were earning good money and i was earning a junior doctor's salary which yeah is not comparable so um so i i felt compelled to kind of to kind of um work out where i sit and by that point i mean we fast forwarded a lot of time but i was living in denmark in copenhagen My wife had been headhunted during the pandemic to move out to Copenhagen.

19:55And yeah, so I was finding it super challenging to, one, translate my skills in startup land to a potential corporate role. Myself as a British guy living in Denmark for some reason, wanting a job at a Danish company or a Danish consulting house. and then thirdly being a brown guy in an environment that was just completely yeah a very very different typical kind of western european sort of working environments and so yeah learned a huge amount about myself along that way and and ultimately developed skills and for good or for bad but like or being like a real chameleon right like being able to kind of converse with anyone of kind of any backgrounds and try and kind of let the other stuff wash over And, you know, if we were to get deep into it, I had senior colleagues telling me that, yeah, Ash, you've got this title, but no one's going to take you seriously because you're brown.

20:51And that coming from like a German co-worker, like it's hard to hear. This is a German headquartered company. and so I recognized that at that point like I really did need to sort of start surrounding myself with a with a network of people who had similar trajectories but also had kind of got to a pinnacle in their career despite a lot of that adversity and I was so fortunate to have a kind of senior partner and head of health tech at this shop firm who was based in Denmark and was born and raised there but happened to be a brown Pakistani guy like by background and um and yeah for all his funny quirks and and mannerisms I I felt like yeah okay maybe I can see myself being in this space that I could essentially like take on leadership and be taken taken seriously um of course that's when some opportunities come knocking on the door and I was in that situation where my wife had had our little boy who's now three so this was this was going back three years ago um and I was just about to go on paternity leave and I got a phone call out of the blue from uh a friend of mine and the and the first hire at my previous company who's their CTO Lucas and uh he's like Ash I have some business ideas I want to talk to you and you can see like those like that that like classic thing that I naturally navigate towards like oh okay this is a idea maybe maybe this is something worth looking into uh we sparred for like about 30 minutes on the phone he had one idea which was lovely and caring and and and socially was a great thing to do but i said because this is not going to make you money uh if that's what you want to do then another idea that was a lot closer to home it was a sas company that was focused on digital health um and digital health industry and i said yeah look this is interesting this is how i would go about it didn't think much over went on my paternity leave just enjoying being a new father next phone call i got was like uh ash uh i want you to be my co-founder and uh i think i looked over at my wife at the time uh who was you know three months postpartum and and thinking uh oh god is he going to take this risk at this point is this this could be the the worst time the worst potential time to do it but actually there was some niggle about it that was like well it's very very rare that you're in a situation where a tech founder actually comes like someone with a tech background and an engineer is such a strong engineering background who like as a person you like their family and you've worked with before um comes knocking on the door to say do you want to join and uh so i i just thought it was too good an opportunity to to to turn away and at that point i was uh i'd recently been promoted in the strategy consulting role i was they were aware that I had a child but of course they've still put me on four projects simultaneously and uh zero resourcing for those and I was having to travel left right and center across Europe to be able to kind of and the US to be able to manage those so yeah the idea of like stepping into startup land but actually having full autonomy suddenly became so much more appealing in that context and you know when they talk about the stars aligning and luck happening that really felt like one of those moments I didn't manifest that one that time and yeah I'm so so fortunate for it been on the been on the journey since so obviously explain the beginning what the company

24:17Amardeep Parmar:does right right but then when you're okay so you've worked in strategy consulting you worked as a doctor you've worked on the different roles yeah how do you then go about okay you know your cto your friends are your cto you like them but how do you actually get this started off the ground yeah so that's that's an interesting one and it really does go back to it's it's amazing on the way and this is what i would say to anyone who's like a young person in the audience of this podcast that sounds really boomer I'm not that um you're only a year older than me yeah but like um it's amazing the contacts that you make on the way and I think that's something that I've been I've been generally quite good at maybe like really probably most likely subconsciously but like I don't know whether I was doing it consciously or not but like um yeah just maintaining those conversations that you have and like I was telling you a bit about this before but But at university, for some reason, I ended up as president of Asian SOC, which meant that I met some people.

25:16One of those people happened to be brother of a friend of mine. And he happened to have been an early investor in a couple of fast-growing startups. And that guy turns out to then raise the UK's largest pre-seed fund. His name is Rhys, Rhys Chowdhury. and over the years, Rhys has sent me a ton of decks to take a look at and said, hey, what do you think of this? Do you think that I should invest in this healthcare company? And so this time around, Lucas and I, whilst we were kind of putting, banning together this MVP and this idea for this company, I put together a deck and I sent it to Rhys and I said, hey, what do you think of this one?

25:53Like, not thinking anything of it. I just thought he would give me some pointers about how to build out a decent pre-seed deck. And he said, Ash, I think I want to invest in your company. And, you know, three weeks later, after a relatively intense due diligence process on a company that hadn't yet existed and didn't just about added MVP, Rhys and his team signed off on a big check for us. And that was that we were at the races then. And, you know, it was amazing sort of amazing whirlwind experience of we got a check signed by Rhys. we were talking with other VCs at the time and that kind of were from our past life but also we should introduce us to and we had a term sheet starting to come in really based on just Lucas and I and who we were and our ambition and at the time but actually we threw in an application into Y Combinator and yeah just so happened to out of all of that get it get interviewed and I remember this so vividly because something strange happened in my life which was my wife unfortunately had a retinal detachment literally that week of the YC interview and was in surgery that day so she came out of surgery I did the interview that night I got a phone call to say you need to be on a plane to San Francisco next week for YC and uh and so my wife's there in recovery we have a little tiny baby uh who's crawling around around the place and I'm like god I could this is this is the moment right i've got to i've got to somehow make this work um and so very fortunate lucky that we have families super supportive and we're able to kind of come out to a different country and stay with my wife for for a period of time whilst i went and got wined and dined by silicon valley folks in in napa valley and and that was a lovely experience but it was certainly was the the kind of stake in the ground of okay now now you're at the races now you now you need to do something and And in our case, the first thing that we were told when we got to YC was go and speak to your customers.

27:59Like, it's all well and good. You've got this great idea and you kind of built out something which looks really good and would work well for your previous company. But how many people have this issue? And it was a good question. So we went and two weeks spoke to about 50 potential customers or like actual customers. And we realized, oh, no, like no one has this issue. Or if they do, it's like a three out of five for them in terms of trying to solve it. And so we were kind of scratching our heads and looking at each other, being like, what have we done? We need a hard pivot, like pretty quickly.

28:33And we had one good conversation with an investor called Danish Muneer. Again, Pakistani guy, built a mental health technology company in the US. And like very friendly at that time, just to kind of give us this advice. But his nugget, which I really hold all the time, is, Ash, go and find the five out of five burning platform issue for a company that's also a five out of five in terms of complexity for the engineering team. And if you can plot that out onto a graph, like with four condiments, and you find the option that sits in that top right, you're going to find something you can build a venture scale business around.

29:08And so that's what we did. We went back through our notes. We realized there was a common thread throughout what everyone was talking about, which is I keep on getting hit by claim denials because I don't know if my patient's eligible or not. And that was the start. And yeah, we landed a really big deal to begin with, which was super lucky, involved a lot of delicate negotiations and trying to palm off that company, trying to take warrants to us and holding our code in escrow in case we decided that we're not gonna do this anymore three months down the line. But yeah, that was it. Again, we were like building momentum at that point.

29:47And that gave us a great platform to then raise a solid seed round at a time where people were kind of advising us, don't take too much money, you know, just take what you need, keep going, because the money will keep on coming. But actually, I think it was the best decision that we made to bring on a strategic investor in Kindred Capital here in the UK. But actually, they are Americans themselves. So they had a really in-depth understanding of the problem that we were trying to solve for, but they really understood European founders. So, yeah, it was, and again, that relationship that we built with them.

30:23So I was out in Silicon Valley talking to investors left, right and center. And, you know, they're all scratching their head as to why is this British Asian guy trying to solve this problem for us Americans? And, you know, you spoke about the title of being a doctor. Like that meant nothing to them.

30:40Amardeep Parmar:They really, really didn't mean anything. so so it was it was reese again who made that introduction to layla my lead investor here at kindred and and that was how that that kind of relationship built and they had that conviction to be able to give us some really good check at seed round to then catapult our growth which we've had over the last year so two years yeah it's my co-founder used to work at kindred get it yeah he might have been there at the same time and they might have been working on that deal behind the scenes there you go yeah it's always that funny small world thing going on right it really is and i think um you know i know one of the things that you really like hone in a lot about um about you know do asian founders or asians in general help each other out like to to go and like you know i look a lot at like parallels in time like our perhaps our family's generations who may have come over to this country in different waves like 30s um 60s 70s and then and then perhaps more more recently but like a lot of what made them successful as a generation was yeah they had that mentality they're going to work that you know that that that's that kind of migrant mentality but they also had community like there was no one else around so you know where we have awkward conversations about oh why do I need to invite so-and-so's child to my wedding sort of thing I've never met this person well back then that was their only way to connect to the community and have that feeling of safety and security.

32:04And, and so, yeah, I'm, I'm extremely fortunate from the fact that like, those connections that I was somehow building over time, consciously or subconsciously, were then willing to chat to me when I actually had something to talk, talk to them about rather than just asking them questions about their career. And, and that they were able to kind of then help me. And I wouldn't say like, it was all, you know, all easy, of course, it was, incredibly difficult um in in that part of the journey but um knowing that those folks were able to kind of make those inputs for me i this story would just be completely different if i didn't have those people so uh in that sense uh it's been yeah it's been a great great journey until now and then yeah with that financial platform that we had from raising that seed round about two and two and a bit years ago we've been able to grow infinitely since so um yeah back then i think we about 150k in revenue so really very minuscule but actually like it was the dream that we were selling on the potential that we that we were selling on so people were willing to take that risk and then we went from 150 to 600k to now 4 million in the space of like a two and a half year time rising and now we handle around uh back then i think we were handling around half a million transactions on an annual basis now we handle around 12 million transactions on a on an annual basis so huge amount of growth over a very short period of time which would be fun but also a ton of work.

33:34Amardeep Parmar:I think there's always the funny bit is that people when when when things are going well they're like oh it's going to get well because like they didn't notice all the things that went before that to get you where you are right? Right. You mentioned about some of the challenges as well so what was one of the hardest things that you didn't expect and how did you then manage to get through that? I mean I should have expected it I should have expected that the US healthcare system was as complex as it possibly was. And that's definitely one of the biggest challenges, like wrapping your head around this incredible beast.

34:04The challenge that I envisaged in my mind, which actually has turned out not to be as challenging as I thought, was, oh, well, we're focusing on an entirely US use case. All my customers are in the US. I'm going to have to be there all the time. Like I'm going to maybe even have to relocate my family there. And with that comes the whole decision-making process about family, extended family, your mum and dad. My dad's unwell with Alzheimer's. So do I make that decision to relocate us? But actually, I've been surprisingly relieved that actually people have been willing to chat over Zoom, over video call, and that we really tip our hats off as maybe a silver lining from the global pandemic, that people are willing to have conversations with other people across the world.

34:54And so that's been surprisingly smooth. Obviously, it means working late nights in Europe, but that's definitely a sacrifice worth making and having to completely uproot your family and go out there. So I'd say, yeah, those are the challenges. One has not been such a challenge. The other was very, very challenging. And we're still learning. It's like continuous learning about that system.

35:19Amardeep Parmar:So you said 4 million reviews a day, right? so what we're doing is every two years so 200 episodes later we'll get you back on again right right so we've had some people do it so far so 250 episodes whatever it is okay so if you're sat here in two years time we're gonna have a little tv up here and it's gonna like play this little clip now and then we can see so what would you love to say in two years time that you've been able to achieve or you're proudest achievements over the next couple of years um yeah i know i'm not gonna say the the thing that vcs want to hear you say which is like an arr number of like you know ridiculous number tens of millions of dollars that then means you're valued as a unicorn or something like that um i think so right now we've helped five million american citizens to access care particularly in the mental health space that they weren't able to access before and so if i can take that number up to something like 15 or 20 million people who've got access to care where they wouldn't have had access to care before i think that's everything really and you know that going back to that that that story arc of wanting to go into medicine to help people often people use the narrative of wanting to come out of medicine to be able to have an impact on a larger scale because when you're in it you're actually dealing with that individual face to face um or the family around that individual um here i can really hold my hand up and say that actually I impacted people's lives on a scale and that would be my proudest achievement it's also just my too it's like by going out of the system and being able to do things you're doing you're also helping all of the people like you who are struggling in the system itself and like those other doctors and being able to make their lives a bit less stressful too right yeah yeah and I think back when I did it the path was not well trodden right you know you heard my story I I was going to whatever angle, whatever direction the kind of tide was taking me in.

37:12I'd say that now things are slightly different. There are medics out there who recognize that medicine is a pathway into actually another career setting. And whether that may be going into pharma or biotech or consulting roles or even into the banking industry, you can carve out niches by having a medical background. I guess I would say that the crucial thing is to speak to people. And I think more and more people have trodden this path or made these changes that it should be within your network, one or two connections away to be able to kind of find someone who would be willing to chat. I'm always there.

37:52So, yeah, happy to help.

37:54Amardeep Parmar:And just for the end of the quick five questions, what have you enjoyed most about this new chapter of your life? with ah the i mean there's it's it's it's provided me a ton of autonomy uh in terms of life balancing life between family life my my little boy who i've been able to kind of see growing up and just the very nature of working in europe but actually dealing with u.s folks means that the first couple of hours of my day actually can be spent on family time and uh and uh and enjoying that and really relishing that um the other thing has been just i mean i've really enjoyed speaking to healthcare teams out in the US because they just move with such ambition and pace.

38:35Their expectations are super high, and that's natural, I would expect that. But it also means that they're willing to take risks and take chances on companies that perhaps haven't been around for 20, 25 years and don't have those kind of credentials that you would hope for. And that's been really awesome to see and be part of, just having a really interesting team around me folks who are based all across the us now we have team members over in dubai and then we also have team members out in india and philippine so we we are like truly multi multi time zone global organization that works remotely and i kind of love that i've been able to kind of stitch that together to work around me so really enjoyed

39:14Amardeep Parmar:hearing your story today but i also know you got to get to the transport museum yeah so i'm going to move you on to the uh quickfire questions now sure so who are free asians in britain you think you're doing incredible work right now and you'd love to shout them out yeah so i think i've mentioned reese quite a bit so he's had a fair bit of air time but he gets one more shout out so reese chowdhury just raised europe's largest pre-seed fund at concept ventures doing amazing things and actually backing incredible founders so um yeah hats off to him second is very close to home my uncle amish manek who has really knocked down barriers and walls in the uh in the sports industry for Asians, which notoriously been very hard for Asians to tap into.