303. Meet the Doctor Who’s Taught 200,000 Clinicians Through His EdTech w/ Azeem Alam | BiteWorld

0:00Great to have you on today. Can you tell us who you are and what you do? Sure. Thanks for having me on, Amar. So my name is Azeem. I'm a medical doctor by background. I founded a tech company called Byte World, which is in the healthcare ed tech space around four or five years ago. I've done some work in policy and mainly work both clinically and scaling the business now alongside a couple of other hats in angel investing and in venture as well. So a few different bits and pieces at the moment.

0:26Amardeep Parmar:So the classic thing, right, for many people from Asian backgrounds is to go into medicine or dentistry and sometimes it's societal pressure or family pressure, whatever it is. And we've got the stat that that's the most overrepresented part of the tech ecosystem, right? So what made you go from, OK, you're on the path of being a doctor, you did your training, to then be like, let's build a business on the side and let's do something different? I mean, I think kind of what you alluded to there is that when I was younger, medicine was not the first thing on my mind to do. I actually always wanted to be a songwriter.

0:58That was kind of my aim when I was kind of 14, 15 years old. And, you know, I signed a publishing deal when I was 15 and my plan was to go and work as a professional songwriter. But having two Asian parents, both who are doctors, I ended up stumbling into medicine. So I think those were the early roots of me kind of being a little bit contrarian in my approach to even approaching a career. So I enjoyed medical school, but I think kind of nearing the end, I realized that although I enjoyed the problem-solving components of it, I've really missed the creative parts of what I used to do when I was younger.

1:31So I had a couple of options. I said, you know, either continue in medicine or continue in medicine and try and do something on the side or leave medicine altogether. So I was nearing the end of medical school. And at this point, I thought, you know, if I'm going to stay in medicine, you know, I like the idea of being a surgeon. My dad is a surgeon. His dad is a surgeon. you know ad infinitum essentially and that was kind of the track that I was I was heading down becoming an academic surgeon in London and I was doing the academic foundation program in London in preparation for surgical training and it was during my first year of working in London as a doctor where I met one of my co-founders Schwabe and we were chatting at the Costa Coffee in the hospital and he said Azeem you know I really miss being creative I was like why you sound sound a lot like me.

2:16And we started thinking, how can we leverage this itch that we had to do something a little bit more impactful and kind of, as I said, a little bit more creative. And that's kind of where we start that the initial grassroots of the business started in that coffee shop at St. Thomas's Hospital. And we started building the business during our kind of F1, F2 kind of foundation years alongside night shifts and long calls. And we slept in the library and and all sorts of great stories from those times of trying to build the business or at least get it off the ground whilst working full-time clinically.

2:51And then I think once I had both of those going at the same time, I started recognising actually, where do I feel more fulfilled? And what am I doing when I feel a little bit more fulfilled as well?

3:02Amardeep Parmar:And can you tell us a bit about Byte World as well? Where has it got to today? So Byte World today, we have three main arms of the company. We are an edtech company that is kind of our roots but we largely work in the healthcare space so the first part of the business was a product called Byte Medicine which was an ed tech platform which we scaled during the pandemic and we've trained around 250 ,000 students during that platform using that platform across across the world so that was the first part of the business we then used some of the money that we generated through that and through our very basic kind of freemium business model to build The next part, which was part of the business called Bite Paces, which is most of the work we do alongside guys at St.

3:42Thomas' Hospital running our postgraduate medical school examinations. And the part of the business that I work on predominantly is called Bite Labs. And this is, in my opinion, the most exciting part of the business. And this is basically trying to train the next generation of clinicians. The premise behind the business or this part of the business is that we believe that the next generation of clinicians will practice medicine through the products they build, not just the patients that they see. So ByteLabs itself has trained over a thousand clinicians over the past couple of years, helped them raise around 20 million pounds of funding over the same time period.

4:20We've placed them into roles at leading tech companies. The products that they build impact around 50 million patients a month now. and we've had our first acquisition actually last week from a fellow who went through our program. So things from the Biolabs perspective have grown very quickly, which is wonderful. We have a small, very lean team of I think now six employees, but around 75 contractors who work with us throughout the business. So we're lean, we move very quickly, we're very agile, and now we're exploring more work with the public sector and with government, particularly across NHS trusts at the moment.

4:55Amardeep Parmar:So obviously it's great that you've taught 250 ,000 students, but as you said, probably the bit that interests us the most with the overlap is that BiteLabs part two. So with the 1 ,000 people you've trained, how does that kind of work? If somebody is listening now as a clinician who wanted to come to BiteLabs and learn from you, what's the process? So the process, I guess maybe I'll start with how BiteLabs even came about, because the The process is essentially based upon the frustrations that I had. So I worked in tech for a couple of years in the health tech space at a company called Sarah Care.

5:27And this was after we started the first part of the business, which was Byte Medicine. And transitioning as a doctor into tech was remarkably challenging because there's no blueprint, there's no training program, there is no real network that you can tap into immediately. You're learning a whole new set of phrases and buzzwords. And I had a little bit of an advantage in that I'd come from a startup background, but most people or particularly most clinicians don't. So over a weekend, I brought another friend on board called Rydian, who was also a doctor working in tech. And we said, why is there no program for clinicians who really want to be more impactful, be more creative, and essentially treat as many patients in one month as they would do in their entire career?

6:06And literally over a weekend, we put together an eight-week curriculum to upskill clinicians in the foundations of what they need to know to be an effective non-technical hire at a leading digital health company. So the eight-week part-time curriculum is taught by essentially friends and colleagues of ours who have been clinicians, have gone on to raise money for their own startup, or they've joined companies like Google Health or AWS or Microsoft, and they're training across the whole suite of the basic foundational skills to be successful in tech as a clinician. So things like clinical product management, commercialization, lean canvas, regulatory and compliance, and working on real world problems that we give people to solve, and then actually presenting a real world solution they've built at Demo Day as part of their portfolio, to either to raise money, and they receive mentorship throughout that process as well.

7:00So we're trying to give people like the skills, the network, the experience, we're a regulated educational body. So if they want to get a full blown diploma, they can do that as well. We have a footprint in the UK and the US, so we essentially do transatlantic transfers of talent as well. We have a recruitment side of the business, so we actively help people get recruited into roles. But I think the main thing here is we're not trying to cause a brain drain within the NHS. That's not why we started. We want people to feel fulfilled in the careers they do and have a really unique impact using their clinical knowledge that they've probably never had before.

7:36So if that sounds exciting, then that's the kind of clinician that we look for.

7:40Amardeep Parmar:Awesome. And then like, we're obviously doing that kind of scale is always to a thousand people in just a couple of years. How did that work? Did you start with a big cohort to begin with? Or have you ramped up over time? Cohorts have always been relatively small. They've definitely grown in size over time. Our competition ratios are still around one in 10. So it's still a competitive process. Our cohorts initially, I think our first ever cohort was around 15 people. and that was all fully hybrid. So remote learning plus in-person demo days and events. Our last cohort was around 100 people and that's just because the demand is so great.

8:16You said only increase a little bit. Then you go 15 to 100.

8:19Amardeep Parmar:That's quite a big increase. Yeah, I mean, very humble. Yeah, I think it has increased. I think operationally it's required a lot of, I guess, just learning how to adapt to that increase in size as well. And we've run two cohorts in the UK a year. We run two cohorts in the US a year. And then that's alongside some of the upcoming work that we have in policy and career coaching and things. And especially for this little period here as well, you've also still been working as a clinician. Yes. So how is that thought process? Because I always imagine something like that seems to be going very, very well.

8:51Amardeep Parmar:But then to also maintain that side of things, how do you strike the balance of knowing when is it the right time to go full time into something you seem to be very passionate about? But yeah, I get asked this question a lot. And I've still, over the years, still not come up with a good answer to this question. I took a few years out after medicine, after F2, to help build the business, to help build some of Sarah's use case and kind of moving towards a tech company. And those experiences I loved. But I never took that time out of medicine without thinking I'd at least come back at some point.

9:25And right now, I'm a radiology trainee. I'm a few years into my training. and I had a few friends before I was applying for specialty training, also radiology trainees, building businesses on the side or at least doing other things and having a little bit of a better, I guess, work-life balance in many ways. So I thought if I'm going to try any specialty, I'll probably try radiology. And I was talking to a friend of mine who also works in tech and is far more talented and in a better place than I am right now. But he said something that resonated with me that he kind of has this little itch every three years of wanting to do something new and I think I worked on the business almost full-time for three years alongside my work at Sarah and then I was like okay I'm going to try clinical training I've now been in clinical training for three years and pretty much bang on three years I thought you know actually I want I miss being creative full-time I'm building something with a far greater upside than the clinical work I'm doing and to be perfectly honest being a radiologist is not I mean it's not my my life's dream and it is a very pragmatic specialty to be in but I think I've just I've missed it and I think when when I'm at work I started noticing this shift of when I'm doing the clinical work that I'm doing what am I actually wanting to be doing instead and when that needle moved too much in one direction that's when I said actually you know what I need to kind of give in to this desire a little bit more and that's why I'll be spending at least kind of one to two years

10:48Amardeep Parmar:out to do that. It's really cool how you've done these different things in Byte World and the different programs. How do you think you're able to do it so successfully having, obviously, a medicine background? What was the transferable skills? Is it things you've done previously? Or is it just very much learning on the job and iterating and learning then? It's definitely a lot of it is learning on the job. I think any founders listening would totally, and yourself as well, totally appreciate that when you start a business, you are literally a workhorse and doing a little bit of everything and a true generalist more so than than you would ever be as an employee so doing a bit of operations you're doing a bit of growth i'm managing the accounting and screwing it up all the time uh you know doing the marketing like the the the breadth of skills you need to develop over a short period is is huge and i think at that point you then start recognize where i started recognizing actually where a where what what what are those areas do i enjoy doing and be one of those areas that I'm good at doing.

11:45So I guess as I started recognizing that, that's kind of where I started going a little bit deeper. To be honest with you, most of my experiences of getting a business off the ground were because I had a great group of people around me. And this art of networking that you're so great at as well is so, so invaluable when you're building a business. Like you cannot build a business in a silo. You cannot hire people unless they want to join your company. And that I probably learned at a relatively young age. I think like wanting to go into the music industry at 14, 15 years old, the only way I got my foot in the door there was like cold emailing a thousand people at 14.

12:22And that's how I kind of got my first mentors in the music industry. And I think that is a transferable skill, whether you're trying to build a career in tech or trying to build a business. A lot of it is who you know, not necessarily what you know and how you brand yourself and how you build those really meaningful, authentic relationships. I think some of that was from when I was a kid. A lot of it is the kind of Asian or ethnic minority chip on your shoulder that you have something to prove, which is a whole other story. And a part of it is just, I think, being generally curious and leaning towards action rather than thinking, like, I'm not, you know, when I think too much, I won't act.

12:59And I've started to learn actually that you learn a lot more by doing and failing than by thinking about something for far too long and never acting at all. So it's probably a combination of those things.

13:10Amardeep Parmar:I think it's one tool when you do something new is that you can think about it for ages, but in reality is that you just need to react to the feedback. And one of the hard things, I think, as you scale, obviously, is being able to know that flip, when you switch the flip between how much you're following plans and what you plan to do versus how much you're reacting. Because you keep reacting forever. It's a very stressful environment and you don't plan forwards enough. And obviously, as you're scaling now, you're going to have to plan better when you've got a thousand alumni compared to right at the very beginning of the first cohort.

13:37Amardeep Parmar:And managing 100 people in a cohort of S-managing 15. Two very different jobs there. And with the songwriting career, right? So now that you're stepping away from medicine, is that going to take up any part of your future time? Yeah, that's another question I get asked quite a bit. I would love for it to do that. I think the issue, once again, is I'm wary of trying to do too much and being pretty adequate at everything and not particularly good at anything. so you know I loved you know I lived in LA for a year after my my foundation years because I wanted to go all in on music and I was working with a publishing company out there and I was living in the palm trees and I was working with incredible artists and that scratched that edge for a while I you know I don't I'm not in a publishing deal now life's a lot more flexible I play guitar I try and make it be a little bit more cathartic rather than trying to contact the manager and trying to get the song placed but I think I'll continue doing music alongside the business as a means of stress relief and maybe when I get to the point you know maybe there's a liquidation event with the business but we exit whatever that might look like and then maybe that itch will come back and I think I've learned to not plan too far ahead and just literally take a month at a time because I'm not really sure where I'm going to be next month in terms of what I'm feeling and also being less feelings driven as well is important and like you know like I said that though every three years something does change a little bit for me internally and being a little a little bit more receptive to that.

15:02But probably for music now, keep it as a little bit of a hobby and then see where we're at in a few years.

15:08Amardeep Parmar:You mentioned about liquidation up in there as well, right? It's the way you've built Fightworld. Have you built it with that in mind someday? Are you structuring it in a way or maybe someday there's been acquisition or how are you kind of thinking about your future relationship with that as well? It's a, yeah, that's a good question. We probably wouldn't be able to sell the business off as essentially three subsidiaries within one. Although they're all broadly within EdTech, they're all quite disparate in the work that they do. So biomedicine would be a pretty easy sale in terms of it is an edtech platform, been there, done that.

15:41There are huge international platforms with a billion pound valuations that would value the content and the audience that we have. So we'd probably essentially end up selling the business in parts if we went down the acquisition route. Biolabs is a challenging acquisition and that's not really something we would look to get acquired anytime soon. so much longer term play because there are several businesses within Biolabs like you've got the training side which is a wonderful means of revenue generation and a lot of the work we do is actually funded via the NHS at the study budget so it is a great business any education business is a great business because it's got good margins and when you have someone like the NHS supporting the work you're doing the business just runs very smoothly so education like we will continue that part.

16:27Now, the thing where things get interesting is recruitment and also the venture side of things. If we have people going through our program that are raising capital, that are being acquired within a year and a half of founding, there is clear signal there that there is something we need to be doing in that space. And that's why Biolabs as an entity is a more challenging acquisition. And the PACER side of the business, which is in-person clinical training. Once again, it's not a challenging business to run because every year there'll be clinicians needing to do these exams. Every year they will tap into their study budget and we get that funding.

17:04So once again, that would probably get acquired by a larger player within the NHS that runs similar courses. So it's hard to say what an acquisition would look like for the whole business, but we have never really tried to reverse engineer the whole process. I think we're doing things that we love doing, that provide value to people, and then see where we get to.

17:23Amardeep Parmar:So obviously on the venture side, it's probably the most aligned part of what we're doing, right? And you mentioned that about 20 million has been raised so far, right? Yeah. And how is that going to go about? So what are you seeing in those people who are able to raise in the medical industry, or I don't know if they were even building the medical industry, from that program? What are you seeing in them that means that those people are then going on to raise capital and build something in that space? Well, so when we were selecting people for the program, the main discriminator that we look for is what we describe as the evidence of challenging the status quo in some kind of way.

17:56And we don't mean that in healthcare necessarily. We mean, you know, you are a chess grandmaster at 11 years old. That's wonderful. Like that is evidence of doing something off the beaten track a little bit. So everyone that comes to our program has demonstrated some kind of ability to do that.

18:13Amardeep Parmar:So that is inherently, we've got a great group of people. So how do we know which people are going to go on to build amazing businesses, raise capital, and then, you know, I know it's N equals one, but essentially exit that business as well. It's hard. I think, you know, running where we are not built as an accelerator, but anyone who runs an accelerator, I think they'll be lying if they say, actually, you know, we can tell there's this one thing in all these people that there are common threads within these individuals, which are, you know bias towards action we've talked about already with this concept of actually almost this complete belief in themselves that whatever they do they will be successful at it so if they say I'm going to build a company there is no world or alternate dimension in which that company or what they do will not be successful and I'm not talking about ego or arrogance I'm saying that deep self belief.

19:06That is pretty much seen across any successful founder, I would say. And in addition to that, I think it is the ability to storytell. And any successful company that's gone through our program has had the ability, or those individuals, the founders anyway, to tell an incredible story about where they've come from, about why they've built what they've built, and why what they've built is going to change the world. And if you don't have the ability to do that, you're not going to raise funding. Like, you know, raising venture funding, particularly at pre-seed and seed stage, is largely the founder and the story that they're telling, or the founders or the core team, essentially.

19:45So if one of those aspects is missing, you're not going to raise funding. And I'm not saying you need to raise funding to build an impactful business, but that ability, that kind of bias towards action, challenging the status quo, you know, being able to tap into a network, being able to storytell and having this undying belief in yourself, that's five things. But like I said, you cannot select all five of those things from an individual. It's super challenging.

20:12Amardeep Parmar:Hello, hello. I hope you've enjoyed 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 through 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 bahiehq.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 hope to see you soon at our event hope you enjoy the rest of the episode then on the flip side what are gaps you're seeing when people who are when they join the program maybe they need a bit of work on it and through the program able to learn those skills which maybe has helped them to then build their companies what's the things that a bit more raw on the the caveat here is that the vast majority of people that join our program are clinicians by background with no or very little alternate experiences outside of their their hands-on clinical experience so the things that people are generally raw on not even those who are building companies but those anyone who comes through our program is this real discomfort of networking and building professional relationships something i still struggle with you know i post on linkedin but i find it deeply cringe and it's mainly just because the board are like, you know, you have to post a link, now you're going to build an audience.

21:44But it's little things like that is going through that discomfort of cold outreach, building relationships, which start off professionally, and then often build into kind of more mature relationships, and then leveraging those relationships in a mutually beneficial way, without it being purely transactional. That is a very unique skill set, where you have to kind of sell yourself in a non arrogant and slightly British way, and that you don't want to come across too boastful. But to build genuine relationships, which are then beneficial for both parties, is a skill set in and of itself because it's something, you know, from an economics background, it's probably something that was drummed into you slightly earlier on, that networking and the people that you know are so, so important.

22:25For us as clinicians, who you know is somewhat irrelevant to progress in your clinical career. Everything is pretty much done nationally. Everyone is scored against each other on a pretty much national basis. so why do you need to know some professor in X hospital? It's very unusual for you to actually be able to or need to develop that skill but because clinicians are inherently pretty good at interpersonal relationships and talking to patients and multidisciplinary teams over eight weeks if you can teach a group of people that actually to learn and that this is a teachable skill suddenly they leverage that and then it opens all these doors for them.

23:03You know we don't help them we don't give them the funding they still go out and raise their own funding sometimes we'll make introductions but they've learned to build those relationships and of course we teach them a lot of foundational skills in terms of raw knowledge but i think that experience of building those relationships is probably the hardest thing that people find and i don't know

23:22Amardeep Parmar:if it's like a classic asian thing as well about a lot of people building silos they don't want to tell people they're building and that holds people back so much right yeah and part of what we do part of what you do is when you bring people in a room together it's the whole like loneliness aspect kind of gets attacked a bit it was like actually you don't need to be all secretive about what you're building because other people are going for the same thing and you can learn from their experiences and is it part of that cohort themselves by just being on that cohort together sharing their experiences and realizing actually we think quite similarly we don't need to be against each other we don't need to i guess think about it's like this is my lane that's your lane it's like actually maybe i can help you maybe you can help each other as well that the element of community there.