Engineering an AI-powered doctor’s office with Forward CEO Adrian Aoun | E1848

15 Nov 2023 · 52 min

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In short

Podcast Notes: This Week in Startups - Engineering an AI-powered doctor’s office with Forward CEO Adrian Aoun | E1848

Episode Overview In this episode, Jason Calacanis interviews Adrian Aoun, CEO of the healthcare startup Forward, which is innovating the concept of a doctor's office with AI-powered technology. The conversation covers the current challenges in healthcare, the Forward Care Pod, and the future of health technology.

Key Sponsors

  • .Tech Domains: Offers startups a chance to get featured on the podcast.
  • Vanta: Helps startups achieve compliance with ease.
  • Arising Ventures: Acquires and revitalizes tech startups facing difficulties.

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Episode Highlights

Introduction

  • Adrian Aoun's background as an angel investor and his experience at Google, working with Larry Page.
  • Transition into healthcare after a personal family experience with sudden health issues.

Challenges in Healthcare

  • Current healthcare systems are outdated and inefficient.
  • Less than 2 billion out of 8 billion people have access to quality healthcare.
  • The need for scalable solutions to address healthcare problems globally.

Forward's Vision

  • Forward Care Pod: An AI-powered doctor's office designed to deliver preventative care through advanced technology.
  • Features: Real-time health monitoring, blood tests, scans, and more, all accessible via a mobile app.

Product Demo Highlights

  • Scanning and diagnosis via the Forward Care Pod.
  • Integration of multiple health management apps for personalized care.

Business Model

  • Subscription-based service for consumers at $99/month.
  • Aims to reduce the overall cost of healthcare while improving access and quality.

Role of Technology and AI

  • Forward utilizes AI to enhance the capabilities of doctors rather than replace them.
  • AI assists in developing health applications and analyzing patient data while human oversight remains crucial.

Expansion and Future Plans

  • Current operations primarily focused in the U.S. with plans for future global expansion.
  • Targeting regions with high population demands and low healthcare access, e.g., India and Rwanda.

Discussion on Wearables and Health Monitoring

  • Addressing the inefficiencies of wearable technology in healthcare.
  • The need for a comprehensive health operating system that connects various health devices and applications.

Conclusion

  • Emphasis on the potential of Forward to revolutionize healthcare access and delivery globally.
  • Call for a mission-driven approach and smart talent to help further the vision of accessible healthcare.

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Key Takeaways

  • Healthcare is ripe for innovation: Adrian points out that the current state is inefficient and that there are substantial opportunities for disruption through technology.
  • AI in healthcare: Emphasizes the importance of using AI as a tool for doctors rather than a replacement, focusing on patient-centric solutions.
  • Vision for the future: The goal is to scale affordable healthcare solutions to billions, making quality care accessible to everyone.

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Quotes

  • "If it works, man, are we happy." - Adrian Aoun on the potential impact of Forward's technology.
  • "We’re not going to grow a million doctors tomorrow so what we really want to do is make sure that each doctor can serve more and more people." - Adrian Aoun on the role of technology in healthcare efficiency.

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Follow-Up Resources

  • Forward: [Website](https://goforward.com/)
  • Adrian Aoun: [Twitter](https://twitter.com/adrianaoun) | [LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/in/adrianaoun/)

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This episode provides a comprehensive overview of how Forward seeks to innovate healthcare delivery and the challenges that lie ahead in creating an AI-driven healthcare ecosystem.

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Transcript

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0:00I used to think that I was a big thinker and I don't think I was a big thinker until I really work for Larry. I'll tell you, Larry told me something once. He's like, you know, and I'm going to paraphrase, but he's like, it's just as hard to work on easy things as it is to work on hard things. He's like, pretend you want to build the world's best spoon. What are you going to do? You're going to raise a couple million bucks, get 20 people in a room, work on it, come out with a product a year later. Let's say you want to, I don't know, go to Mars. You're going to raise a couple million bucks, you know, get 20 people, come out with a product a year later.

0:29Like at some point you realize like your first steps are always kind of the same. You might as well work on something that's enormous, right? Like at least like, look, what we're working on at Ford's really damn hard. Like I don't have any pretense about it. Like we know that our probability of getting healthcare to a billion people is a rounding error to zero. But you know what, man, we get to wake up every day and be like, yeah, but you know what, if it works, like look at the world we live in. Yeah. And to me, that's the ball game. This Week in Startups is brought to you by.techdomains has a new program called startups.tech, where you can get your company featured on This Week in Startups.

1:05Go to startups.tech slash Jason to find out how. Vanta. Compliance and security shouldn't be a deal breaker for startups to win new business. Vanta makes it easy for companies to get a SOC 2 report fast. Twist listeners can get$1 ,000 off for a limited time at vanta.com slash twist. and Arising Ventures is a holding company that acquires tech startups facing setbacks. Arising Ventures knows what founders care about because they aren't bankers, they are tech founders themselves. Go to arisingventures.com slash twist today to learn more and connect with the team. Hey everybody, welcome back to this week in startups today.

1:49You're in for a treat because we have somebody who's an angel investor in a lot of notable companies including ones i've invested in like robin hood and uber but also coda i love coda open door air and bb bunch of great companies i also worked for larry page at google did some work for president obama related to science and technology but most importantly he's working on a company called forward which you can go see at goforward.com which is setting the goal to make health care more preventative and uh basically revolutionize the space his name is adrian Aoun and he is the CEO of Forward. Welcome to the program, Adrian.

2:28Not at all. Thanks for having me. Good to see you, man. Good to see you. We see each other all over the world. We're just talking about it recently. We ran into each other in Riyadh at FII. Very interesting. Which is funny when we don't run into each other in San Francisco, but we do in Riyadh. You know there's definitely something happening over there. it does seem to me like the whole region i just you know i've only i've been to riyadh once i've been to abu dhabi dubai doha uh i think that's it actually um but it does seem like they have come to participate meaningfully in the technology and capital allocation business and the reforms over there and how the society has changed has been very dramatic in riyadh and obviously dubai's been on a 20-year journey this way.

3:17What do you think founders and capital allocators should know about that region and their intent, what they're trying to get out of this relationship? Well, I think one of the most interesting parts about them is they're particularly intelligent at realizing that they are flush with cash and not flush with other industries aside from oil. And so, they're very strategic in that they're not just going to deploy the capital, but they're getting really wise at like, we're going to deploy capital to help our region. And some of that just means diversifying, you know, your sources of wealth and income.

3:48Okay, great. The more interesting thing is the amount that they want to partner. And, you know, when you live in the US, one of the things that kind of is always top of mind is democracy, democracy, democracy is fantastic. And democracy, I'm a fan of democracy, but democracy has its pros and cons. And the thing about rulers is that they can get done really, really fast, pardon my language, but they can. And so when you have good rulers, wow, do things happen over there. And when you're bad rulers, obviously things go south really, really quickly. But one of the interesting things for startups is they kind of run their country much more like startups, right?

4:19Somebody at the top says, this is going to happen. And quite honestly, it happens whether you like it or not. And sometimes it's good. Sometimes that's bad. But if you can align your interests with the region, I think it's an incredibly interesting place to work. Yeah, the Gulf monarchies are really interested in participating in the creation of the future and having a seat at the table. and they're going to. So then the question becomes for people who are operating businesses or geopolitically, which is beyond the scope of This Week in Startups, obviously, are you going to participate or not?

4:50Are you going to talk to them and do business with them or not? Are you going to try to build businesses together? And while I don't have any announcements to make yet, I'm thinking about doing a series of episodes of This Week in Startups or maybe my founder university from over there. And I've been talking to a bunch of people there. I think building businesses together is like a really great peace dividend and a way to move society forward and culture forward. Yeah, if nothing else, I think just learning the culture and learning kind of the pros and cons on both sides and what we can learn from each other is definitely there is there's something there, right?

5:24There's a there there for sure. Yeah. And it was interesting when we both ran into each other there how business is so different. Like here, everything's very transactional. Oh, you have a deal. I have a deal. Let me look at your deal. Okay, you got these two deals. Okay, I'll take this one. I'll take A and C. You want D? Okay, we'll do D. Great. Send the paperwork. We're done. And then, hey, maybe we'll hang out or not. Over there, it's all relationship building, relationship building, relationship building. Maybe a deal happens. Maybe it doesn't. But the relationship portion is the predicate.

5:54The 80%. It's 80%. By the time you come around to saying, here's the deal, you kind of know it's already going to happen because you're close to the person. And again, I think there's some pros and cons to this like everything. But the pro is you're probably going you're going into business for the long term with people who you really know, as opposed to us where it's like, Hi, I just did my roadshow. I'm about to get in bed with Sequoia. I've known them for three minutes, they've known me for three minutes, and yet they're going to sit on my board and be able to fire me for the next 10 years.

6:22And all of a sudden, you're like, Whoa, that's that's it. Yeah, you know, like, that's a pretty serious relationship, you know what I mean? And there, there's is obviously, you know, again, pros and cons, they they might spend, I don't know, less time diligencing a company and understanding it but more time understanding the person and we like to say this is a people business maybe their idea is like not that bad actually um given ftx it sounds like people could have done more diligence and more understanding and relationship building of the person and and we've got a long list of those here from the last boom and bust cycle theranos ftx i mean there's there's been a bunch of them and then before that obviously So we had Madoff and Enron and Worldcon.

7:02And I'm sure, sadly, they'll never stop. We'll always have something. You know, but it does seem like we forget some lessons, right? Like diligence, governance. That was a very weird moment. I also think that the one that we forget almost the most is just slowing down sometimes and trying to deeply understand things from first principles. Like one of the kind of things that Silicon Valley is built on is hype, right? um and the whole thing of hype is it just engages this fomo reaction and whether that's the party whether that's the deal whether that's the hot startup to join etc and the reality is that the most valuable things in the world didn't happen in a in a day right like they happened over the course of years and years and a lot of hard work from a lot of people yeah and so it's just worth kind of getting to know like you know whether it's the business the people but like slowing down to the technology understand yeah i mean i think with crypto i think a lot of people didn't slow down and just ask fundamental questions like okay it's an immutable blockchain okay so we'll translate that into a database you can't change yeah nobody's in charge of yeah okay when you frame it like that and it's pretty freaking dangerous to me that i can put a bunch of stolen information into an immutable database that and not get it out yeah and not be able to take it down it's like well i guess we could find the servers and then demand people take them down i guess but maybe not and maybe there's a technology to make it not immutable i'm like yeah this sounds incredibly you know yeah it's the whole the whole tech industry is built on you know this this this kind of age-old like move fast and break things and honestly in some places that makes a lot of sense but you know look at me i'm in health care like you don't want to move fast and break things those things are humans don't move them you know yeah we we saw that with Theranos, but we'll get into that later.

8:51Okay, we're back with another segment of Pitch It to JCal. .tech domains is giving twist listeners the chance to show off their startups on this week in startups. Go to startups.tech slash Jason to apply. It's only one rule, you need to have a.tech domain to get featured in this ad. This week, I'm going to tell you about handprint.tech. Handprint.tech connects companies with environmental projects. How cool. And this helps brands increase their impact while boosting performance by associating with planet positive projects. Here's an example. You ever go to one of those websites and you see a counter ticking up how many trees have been planted from purchases?

9:27Well, that's handprint.tech. It's really simple. Companies select their impact campaign, then they can track and display their progress in public. Just a win-win-win. The company wins, they hit their goals, the customer wins, they feel great, and the environment wins, obviously. If you want to be featured on This Week in Startups like handprint.tech it's very simple go to startups.tech slash jason and apply today that's startups.tech slash jason and fill out the form to apply so when did you decide you wanted to get into healthcare because in venture capital in our industry there's a couple of industries that you really want to steer clear of yeah healthcare the music industry and education are three industries where startups go to die because they're regulated they move slowly and and uh they they sometimes are resistant to change so so when did you decide yeah and i'm not sure i disagree with any of those so so look i didn't want to get into health care i didn't wake up one morning and be like health care is my thing you know i was i was at google you mentioned this i was i was working for larry i was building a bunch of the alphabet companies like think of what my life was like i was literally a kid in a damn candy store every idea i'd have pitch larry get a few billion dollars go build it before that I was building a bunch of the AI stuff at Google.

10:40Like I was literally like living the dream, honestly. And then I've got an older brother who lives in New York and he had a heart attack. And so I kind of went from like not paying attention to healthcare to overnight being super focused on it. And honestly, Jacob, like think of my experience, right? On a Monday, I'm like at Google trying to solve AI. And on a Tuesday, I'm like, you know, in my brother's exam room standing over him with like, like there's doctors standing over him with like post-it notes in their hand and I'm just sitting here and I'm like, are you kidding me? But like, what the hell?

11:09Like, how'd we end up here, right? Like, where's the AI? And you quickly realize, honestly, that healthcare is just a pile of crap. But what's worse, it's not even an evenly distributed pile of crap, right? There's 8 billion people on the planet, less than 2 billion of them have access to anything you and I would call like a real form of care. So, I'm sitting here and I'm like, just trying to figure this out. I'm like, how do we end up here, right? I'm an engineer. We got we got smartphones to the whole planet why can't we get basic healthcare there and when you kind of just think about it it's like fundamentally healthcare is based on doctors and nurses doctors are awesome like they're great but you're never going to scale doctors to billions of people like there's not enough of them you know they cost too much so at some point you realize you need some other solution and you know being a tech guy like i'm sitting here and i'm like well we build products healthcare is a service but we build products so then you kind of have to click and say, well, wait a minute, maybe healthcare could be a product, not a service.

12:03Maybe we can take every single thing that kind of the doctors and nurses are doing and just kind of migrate it over to hardware and software. Because if you can, look, it's hard, but if you can, like, oh my God, like you can scale healthcare to the whole planet. You can apply all the AI you want. It's going to be, it's going to be absolutely awesome. Now you said, well, hold on, like startups, startups in the healthcare space are really hard. And like, yeah, that's the understatement of the day. because you know what? You know, like most startups, you start with this naivete of like, oh, it can't be that difficult.

12:35I'll just go solve it. It'll take me a year and I'll be done, right? It's a necessity to have that naivete because if you did know how hard it was going to be, I wouldn't do it. By the time you're like pot committed, now you're like, oh, now I realize it, but whatever, I'm already in. So look, here's what we did. We basically, I don't know, when you want to boil the ocean, you got to start somewhere, right? Elon starts at the Model S and goes to the Model 3. So you ask a little like, well, what's our Model S? Our Model S is basically that we built a high-tech doctor's office. I think you've seen one of them.

13:05We built one in SF. It did pretty well. We've scaled it up to, I don't know, 20 cities or so. And so that's really awesome. But obviously, you're like, okay, Adrian, but a high-tech doctor's office is never going to scale to billions of people, never bring about your AI future. But in essence, it kind of has because what we're doing is just looking at what's happening inside of those clinics. And like, you come in, you sit in the exam chair, and you talk to your doctor about the flu. And I go, wait a minute, why JCal come in? Let's just build that into the mobile app. Next guy talks to the doctor about skin issues, I build a skin scanner.

13:34Next guy talks to the doctor about heart issues, I build a body scanner. And slowly but surely, what I've been doing is just migrating every single thing from kind of doctor and nurse to hardware and software. Until what you realize is at the limit, we are only building hardware and software. Like, we don't even believe the doctor's office should exist. We kind of think that's a thing of the past. and that's kind of what we're that's kind of the the thing that we're announcing now so i just shared my screen with you i think you can probably see this beautiful yeah we have to describe this because majority will be listening but totally okay i see a blue beautiful oversized so this is called the forward care pod and let me kind of describe so so here's the way to think about it if elon has like the self-driving car well this is the autonomous doctor's office and if you're you're trying to imagine the aesthetics here's all you need to know i was a huge nerd as a kid I watched a lot of Star Trek.

14:22And so if you remember the Med Bay, I'm basically just trying to build the damn Med Bay, right? Love it. So it's awesome. You walk up to it, you unlock it with your phone. It's super futuristic. It's like, hello, J-Cow, welcome to Forward. And as you step inside, it basically just loads, it's got this huge screen on the wall, and it basically loads a bunch of different apps for you to play with. And so when those apps come up, you can choose whichever one you want. Let's say you choose the body scan app. This is cool. Like, please stand still. And then it rotates you in a circle, takes a whole bunch of readings, shows you the results on the screen, explains them to you.

14:58And then again, like helps you with whatever treatment you need. Maybe you need a prescription, maybe you need some other plan. Let's say you choose heart health. This one's awesome. It actually opens a tray and hands you a sensor. It's pretty cool. You hold that sensor against your heart. It shows you how, takes the readings, shows you the results on the screen again gives you a treatment plan etc like probably the best way to think about it is almost the same way that you think about like an atm and by that what i mean is an atm doesn't do everything that a bank does it does maybe 90 95 you know you lose your credit card you can still call the teller well for us the same thing we still have doctors but now the doctors they're not doing the 100 of the care they're just there for kind of that final five or ten percent like the complex or or frankly you just want to kind of talk to the doctor you got some weird exception, things like that.

15:43And so, this is a little what we built. I actually have, I've got like a video we can play and maybe just the first few seconds of it. And you'll get a good sense of what we're building. But in essence, what we're trying to do is we're trying to say like, what would the future look like? This is not a doctor's office. it's forward beautiful the world's first ai doctor's office it all starts with the care pod an entirely new approach to health care with prevention at its core with health apps in every category to choose from we're here to treat the issues of today and prevent the issues of tomorrow.

16:28We'll start by establishing a baseline of your health, diving deep into all aspects of your health, past health history, current health state, future wellness goals, body scan, biometric monitoring, blood testing, genetics, and more. It's all about understanding where you are today, where you want to be, and how to get there. After establishing a baseline of your health, you're able to personalize your care with health apps curated for you. Like our Heart Health app, proven to lower blood pressure in 90 days. Powered by in-person and remote biometric monitoring, you'll be able to detect murmurs and other irregularities and lower your risk of a heart attack or stroke.

17:10With a focus on keeping you healthy, you and your care team will be equipped to make the right decisions for your long-term health. Or our Skin Cancer Scan app, to track and monitor things like mole growth, skin lesions, and discolorations over time. Or our mental health app to monitor anxiety and depression with ongoing guidance and support. Whether it's weight management, diabetes screening, or everyday care, like a routine blood draw, COVID-19 testing, or kidney and liver health, there's something for everyone. Because health isn't just about seeing a doctor when you're sick. It's about continuous comprehensive care that addresses your health concerns today and prevents those of tomorrow.

18:00Wow. Yeah, it's not bad, right? It's a crazy vision. The world's first AI doctor's office. So take a step back, right? And just like think about why this is so profound when you go in this direction, right? Like I told you earlier that we have, oh, I don't know, about 20 locations. And you're like, okay, that's real. But like, obviously, that's because you're thinking of construction, not hardware, right? If I told you I had 20, 25 iPhones, you'd be like, whatever. Like, you know, you bought that at the Apple store 10 minutes ago. Well, you've seen how hardware goes, right? You launch 25, then you launch 50, then you launch 100, 200, 400, 800, 1600.

18:33Just imagine that like, we're going to put more healthcare on this planet than the world's ever seen. It'll just be like all around us, right? And then obviously, you've seen how a world of apps goes, right? You just, over time, open it up so that anybody can build apps on top of you. So the same way that Apple ushered in a mobile computing revolution, what we want to do is usher in the healthcare computing revolution. We want to power the new wave of healthcare. So that starts to give you kind of, hopefully, a decent sense of what we're going after, yeah? Feels like a super app with a physical manifestation of it.

19:06So with Uber, you can order food or you can get a ride. And then there's other things that have been added to it. or if you use some of the super apps, Kareem in the Middle East, you can click a button, have somebody come clean your house. Uber is testing like task rabbit kind of assistant. You get the idea. So here, if I really want to check my heart rate, you give them that piece of hardware, you're making that. If I want to do my skin, which I have the mole issue now that I'm 50 and I get checked because I had skin cancer in my family, I had a mole removed that wasn't cancerous, but it was just, you know, gotten, it had grown.

19:39that doesn't require like reinventing the wheel this is a very basic simple thing you need to take a picture of it and then you have to monitor if it gets bigger track it over time yeah exactly over time and then i just did pronovo and then i've been doing uh blood tests so some of these like you're going to need a phlebotomist to do the blood test so so actually you know this sounds really crazy we do blood um in the care pod and i know this sounds wild but we actually don't use a phlebotomist have you seen these kind of like self-serve blood draw things no i gotta show you this okay hold on i'm gonna uh i'm gonna take my jacket off and i'm gonna show you so this isn't from us but if you think about what we're doing we're just kind of looking out there and saying like what is the latest technologies that we can kind of bring to bear to consumers and so obviously one of the kind of cool technologies out there that you're probably familiar with in fact you might have used them is like the freestyle libre continuous glucose monitor yeah i've tried that yeah yeah we have an investment company called nutrisense that okay yeah awesome that does this yeah and awesome and there's there's a bunch of these companies now well basically you can almost think of like the next generation of that as being something like this and there's a few companies that make these and don't worry they're fda cleared and all that but in essence what i'm gonna do is just pop this off this is just double-sided stick tape and then i'm just gonna go ahead and you know lift my arm my my nice like farmer's tan uh farmer's tan arm over here and just pop this on.

21:02And then this little white chamber, this is a vacuum chamber. And so, what I'm going to do is I'm going to puncture the vacuum chamber. I'm not puncturing my skin. I am not. There's no needle. There's no, there's no lancet. There's nothing cutting me. But what it does, if you see this little kind of tube down here, it now basically has enough suction ability that it can literally like suck the blood out of you, which I know sounds ridiculous. It's like, it's like, you know, but if you've ever had a hickey, like this is kind of what a hickey is or okay if you've ever done the like 15 years old but yeah okay well you know maybe you should have more fun in life um i'm just saying so so in essence what it's doing is it's just sucking the blood maybe you've had cupping have you ever had that weird massage cupping thing no but i've seen gwen paltrow do it okay yeah yeah okay i actually haven't had or sorry no i did have it once i think it's weird but anyway but the point is okay so now do you see how this blood is like filling up right there yeah that is wild yeah yeah yeah totally so you get a little mini blood draw through this it's actually not that many self-administer it's not that many you'll get about 500 microliters i'm gonna stop this merely because honestly i demo this a lot and i don't like my blood um kind of you know fully leaving but you can kind of see like you know yeah and so that's the future yeah that's well maybe it's not the future maybe it's the present my man yeah so like but but the point is you can do that you can just pop it right back in that tray and then forward will process it for you right so amazing so this is kind of the point the point is when you when you look like there's a lot of technology that actually exists or i'm just putting a band-aid on yeah there's a lot of technology that exists for the purpose of of providing better health but that tech doesn't really make it to you today as a consumer mostly because like frankly the insurance company has no incentive to deliver better and better care it just cost them more so we took a slightly different approach and said well there's a bunch of cool stuff out there maybe we can bring it all together under one roof and if you think about what we're doing we almost look a little like the iphone right like they launched the iphone in the next year they're like oh now let's add 3g and 5g and lidar and gps and gyroscope for us yeah exactly it's like they add capabilities and then apps get built on top of the capabilities and that's what we're doing we're like great how many capabilities can we add you know pernuvo a caveat i'm an investor in them, but like they've got some cool tech, like maybe we should be building that in, right?

23:21And so you just look at everything that's out there and say, can we build it? And then every single kind of like healthcare provider, whether that's a doctor, whether that's a startup, whether that's a who knows, you know, an academic, they can all sit there and be like, I can use all the technologies. In essence, what you're doing is you're kind of creating the the healthcare operating system that needs to exist. And to us, that's pretty exciting. if you're a SaaS or services company that stores customer data in the cloud then you need to be uh SOC 2 compliant you knew that from a third party and you need that third party to close big deals and if you want to get compliant easier and faster you need to use Vanta V-A-N-T-A Vanta makes it so easy for you to get and renew your SOC 2 on average Vanta customers are SOC 2 compliant in just two to four weeks prepare that to three to five months without Vanta and Vanta can save you hundreds of hours of manual work and up to 85 % of compliance costs.

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24:50So how do you make money from this? How does this become a long term sustainable business? Yeah, totally. So we charge consumers. It's this age old, very confusing thing in the world of healthcare, but you pay us and we deliver you better health. It's a good deal. So we charge 99 bucks a month. And that includes everything from your blood test to your genetic sequencing to you know chatting with our doctors to all the apps etc and if you think about it like when ford started you know we were 149 a bunch now we've cut a third of that now we're down to 99 right like and like we're just going to keep going it's the classic moore's law right we're just going to kind of keep lowering our price to 79 59 49 39 and like our real mission is we want to get health care to as many people as possible so so maybe if we're lucky and we you know and we do the right things maybe one day we can deliver these in the middle of india and rwanda for like pennies on the dollar and like that to me is a pretty cool idea here in america let's just say for people who are insured yeah they're spending on average thousands of dollars a year on insurance i don't know what the exact number is i'm going to pick a number four thousand dollars a year for the average american i think it's more but honestly i don't know the exact number sorry go with five let's say five thousand american yeah so let's say out of that care they use up some percentage of that like 80 of it with actual care i don't know because it's got to be some profit margin there but okay so let's say we're back down to four thousand dollars to spend per person in the health care system okay on average what percentage today and by the end of next year let's say somewhere in that range would you with forward be hovering yeah yeah it does seem like a lot of the visits i do are a complete utter waste of time yeah that i could have just filled out an online form i could have just answered a text message but yet i have to go into my doctor my doctor my dentist everybody wants me to come see them for a stupid prescription that's how they get paid that's the problem it's so infuriating i know the waste of their time waste of my time waste of office space so of the 4 000 if we're going to say that how much would we yeah yeah it's a good question so like if you think about it we we can already do like kind of all the primary care stuff and then we can already do some specialties right so basically what we're doing just to kind of give you the strategy is we're just like watching every time we refer somebody outside of our system and then saying why did we refer them out like why didn't we just do that ourselves and so like we don't do all of cardiology but we do we do the frequent parts of cardiology we don't do all of dermatology but we do the frequent parts of dermatology and so we're kind of just continuing to add right it's like again the first iphone had i don't know 10 apps now there's a million right now it does basically everything except i think my house keys and like my driver's license and even that they're about to get, you know, like, so, so the way I think about it is, you know, every day it's climbing up more and more.

27:31I'd say today, like easily for it is like cheaper and easier than using your literally your own healthcare plan. And you're like, what are you talking about? I paid for my healthcare, but not really because you've got a deductible and we're cheaper than your deductible almost always. So like, that's wild for me to think about, right? We are cheaper than using the thing you already paid for, like what the hell? And so, so, you know, we're covering like most things you don't need to leave our system too often you know occasionally you do but like we're trying to cut that down every day in the you have physical storefronts now these pods are the next manifestation yeah that's right cheaper and easier to deploy because you got a storefront yeah you got it exactly we're like our whole thing is we're just like how can we make like healthcare super damn scalable and super good just increase the quality like you were talking about uber earlier well um let's just take a step back and let's ask ourselves like why is the iPhone so valuable?

28:24Well, it's because every single one of these icons is like a 10 to $100 billion company, right? Like Uber at, I don't know what they are, 50, Spotify at 80. Like, why? Because there's thousands of people working on each one of those prompts. Thousands of people at Uber working on just transportation, thousands of Spotify working on just music. Well, now ask yourself the question of like, imagine you walk into a carapod and you're like me, you got a little hair loss and you're like, you know what? There's a$10 billion company working on just that. You have a rash,$20 billion company. You want to prevent breast cancer,$100 billion company.

28:54Like, holy crap, like that's an insane world, right? You'd be excited. Like no single doctor without a bunch of technology is ever going to compete with that. Like that's the world that we need to get to where we go super deep in like understanding and solving each and every problem. And, you know, I'm not a healthcare guy. I'm much more of your standard Silicon Valley tech nerd, right? So I can't come up with what is the next healthcare, you know, innovation, but I can come up with like tools to help these researchers and doctors go deeper and deeper at solving problems and that's what that's what we're trying to do there is a nice part of this which was a silver lining of covid was we forced remote and we forced kind of self-care to a certain extent where you had to take some directional ownership of your health care and so people would start using what are the online services hymns there's one for women roman totally a bunch of these and so people started doing remote prescriptions a little dangerous i guess it could be abuse on the margins but people did realize oh you know it's really kind of awkward for me to get this type of prescription i don't want to talk to anybody i'd rather do it through an app i'd rather chat through an app and so i do think that you know getting a body scan or doing your scanning your moles and stuff like that it's a little invasive i would rather just stop by the pod i would rather just go to the med bay do it myself be anonymous let somebody look at my moles check them out etc i don't mind stripping down and getting my 3d scan and my skivvies or whatever it's cool um that's just gonna i think that's gonna be part of the appealing part for young people so is there a difference between how young people approach this versus old people how they will look at the pod yeah but you know what it might be actually the total opposite of what you where you intuitively would go.

30:38So here's the deal. Like if we look at our customer base today, it's a skews a lot older than you'd imagine. Right. Because you know what, when you, you look at this and you're like, Oh, 20 year olds are going to love this, but you know what? 20 year olds don't give a shit about their health. They give a shit about burritos. You know what I mean? Like you remember when we were 20, like 97 years ago and we were like, we were like, we're invincible and now we're getting a little older. Right. And now we're like, Oh God, we got to monitor our health. Oh God, our backs ache, you know? And like you start, your body starts breaking after, after a while if you're going to be totally candid right and so i think what you find is that this notion like oh but the young people adopt tech i mean not really dude like you know everybody's grandparents have iphones at this point you know it's like so yeah it's kind of for everyone interesting yeah and also you know i have to i think what's one of the things that's happening is the last generation that didn't grow up with the internet is almost gone so you know like boomers yeah they're like our parents i guess are they're sadly going to be gone soon um a lot of us are dealing with that 80 year old parents totally then you go to gen x you know we kind of remember the birth of the video game and the internet so we're like yeah it's normal for us we barely remember not having it and we do remember it but you know barely um so yeah maybe it's a moot point everybody kind of likes technology now so we didn't talk about two topics i'll take it to whichever order you like artificial intelligence and wearables because i just got this new apple watch um i got it yeah you got the you got the new ultra 2 i got the ultra 2 phenomenal like where this is going what they're tracking okay so let's talk about the wearables thing so the wearables thing is awesome and at the same time useless right so let's just take a step back um like if you think about it you remember when we were growing up how there was like what was that like sharper image that store sharper image in the brookstone yeah Yeah, okay.

32:27And we would buy all these gadgets, we'd use them for like, I don't know, three weeks a month, and then we throw the damn gadget away. Like it turns out the connected toaster was stupid. But in some ways, it wasn't stupid, because these days, I've got the connected lights, the connected garage, connected everything. But what's changed? Why am I not throwing them away? And it's that today, all these things connect to my iPhones, my iPhone, like kind of turn them into being like valuable. But in healthcare, we haven't done that yet. So like, I've got the the aura ring and in some ways i love this ring in some ways this ring is the dumbest thing ever because it's like i wake up every morning and it's like adrian you slept terribly i'm like no shit i slept terribly i don't know what like you know it's like it's not changing my diet it's not changing my exercise it's not right so what you realize is like like you you need that what is the iphone for health care you need it to radio back so everybody says great have it radio back to the doctor it's like really do you think your doctor is going to sit there and watch your metrics all day like that's not what they're being for some health coach who's you're paying thousands of dollars a year exactly and that's not scalable exactly so then we said well maybe we just create the healthcare os that everything plugs into we use that data in your apps and now all the apps can use all the capabilities and all the data and that's an awesome world because now some random new developer can come out tomorrow and be like hey that aura ring data we think that data is pretty valuable we actually think it's valuable in helping you with something else i don't know your posture i'm making this up right whatever it happens to be and like that's a pretty cool world so i think that the wearables are almost like before their time by that what i mean is in technology we almost always hub and spoke things we had servers servers allowed us to have desktops desktops allowed us to have laptops which allowed phones which allowed watches which allowed right like wearables but if you forget the chain before like how useful is your laptop without a server pretty damn useless right like go on a go on a plane with no internet you put your laptop away right um and what you realize is in healthcare we've forgotten the hub and spoke model we forgot to build like the care pod and instead we went straight to you know the ring and it's like cool but that makes them incredibly limited in what they can do i mean no doctor has said can we have your apple watch data we have your eight sleep data can we have your aura ring data can we have your peloton data like i'm really waiting for the med bay to kind of pull this together and when if I came in and it was like, hey, by the way, take out the app, sync it, boom.

34:48Would you like, you know, somebody to review this? So then talk to me about what is the role of a doctor in your world? Are they going to pop up on the screen in the med bay and say, hey, you know, great job. Let me ask a couple of questions here. There's arguably like three things that doctors kind of are at their core. A doctor is hands, heart, and brain, right? It's the hands as we do physical things. It's the heart. We're just a caring, empathetic person. When you're in a tough spot, you probably don't want the screen to be like, by the way, J. Cal, you've got cancer. That kind of sucks. And then it's their brain.

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35:24It's the algorithms. Well, the reality is our brains are not incredible calculators. We should probably let AI do that. And on the hands, sometimes you need the doctor, but pretty rarely. They're actually a really expensive version of hands. I don't know. If you crash your Tesla Model 3, do you take it to the, I don't know, Doug Field or whoever is the head of engineering of the Model 3 program at Tesla. No, you take it to a mechanic, right? The mechanic's cheaper, right? So, you just get specialists that can do it or you do it yourself. And then it's this notion of the heart. And I think that's really valuable.

35:54I'm not sure it needs to be a doctor. If you're going through a tough time, maybe your sister, your brother, your girlfriend, wife, whomever it is, can be the one to help you through them. But the point is that I think that we're almost kind of decomposing what a doctor is into these various constituent parts. For us, I mean, we have a lot of doctors at Ford, and we have some of them that are like building out the applications, and we can talk about how we use AI there. But then we also have some that are just kind of there for the exception case with what the computers aren't good at, or, or just there to kind of coach people through their tough times, right?

36:26And I think each of those is a valuable thing. But the key is you want to rely less and less on doctors on a ratio basis, like you're not going to grow a million doctors tomorrow so what you really want to do is make sure that each doctor can serve more and more people they can have more and more impact like look i'm an engineer i was at google i was working on search like i could write code that went out to three billion people later that day like that's wild yeah now ask yourself like you know can a doctor do that can a doctor affect three billion people later today no they affect one at a time that's crazy like they're highly educated they're like let's let's build them better tools could be in some central location and then servicing pods across you got it across the border that's how it works yeah yeah and and then where do you place these pods in the image you showed it looked like the lobby of an office building so i'm assuming that's a lot of these companies are self-insuring i understand which i think is a fancy way of saying they just pay for the some x amount of health care per person you nailed it yep this would be super affordable to put in the you know on a college campus or in a you know ibm or google campus or facebook campus yeah yeah we have so we've started rolling them out in malls and office buildings um and then we'll go from there we'll go everywhere i want to be in airports sports stadiums i want to be i mean you name it i want to be on cruise ships one day you know every random place you can think of i want to be right um my goal is to get to the middle of india the middle of rwanda right like for us this is just the beginning right and so so yeah we know it's a long journey and we'll we'll work hard to get there but you can just imagine that like when you think of an atm you're kind of like they're just always all around me there's always one somewhere you know within a few minutes you can rely on it exactly and that's kind of what you want your health care to be you're like oh i got to deal with something insurance companies think about you the doctors obviously some doctors are going to be drawn to this and think it's amazing other doctors are like i got my own practice okay so i'm sure it's a split decision there i'm correct yeah yeah yeah yeah i think most doctors look at us and say hey this is clearly like, you know, you're in the right direction.

38:28I think, you know, some small number think we're crazy. But like, mostly, once they once they kind of look at it, they go, okay, that's cool. But you're right, some some want to make the transition into the new world, some don't right. And that's not going to be easy on everyone. I acknowledge that insurance companies, it's interesting, mostly, they've kind of wanted to partner, we've actually had some try to buy us in the past. Problem is, I think, like insurance causes a lot of problems in our healthcare system, right? The average person's with their employer for usually about two and a quarter years, which means you're with your insurance for about two and a quarter years.

39:01And so what that means, if you think about it, is they're pretty short-term oriented. You ever notice your employer doesn't walk up to you and say, hey, let's sequence your DNA to understand the cancer you're going to have in 30 years. Why would they? They don't want to incur the cost. That's the next guy's problem. But they do walk up to you and say, hey, get your flu shot. Why? Well, because you might miss work next month, right? And so we've created an entire healthcare system that's really focused on keeping you at work, not keeping you alive. And like, I kind of hate that incentive. I think it's a pretty rough incentive, you know?

39:34Yeah. All right, building a startup is really hard and things, oh, they can turn on a dime. You can do everything right. And let's face it, you can still fail. Well, that's where Arising Ventures comes in. Arising Ventures is a holding company and they acquire tech startups that are facing setbacks. Let me tell you about one of a rising venture success stories. Jive is a talent platform that matches retail stores with in-person workers. COVID totally crushed Jive's business, and the company was forced to shut down in 2021. Then, a rising ventures bought it out of liquidation. They brought back a couple of the key team members, and they restarted the business, and they went from zero to one million in ARR in just five months.

40:13Now the company is serving some of the world's biggest brands. Now listen, Arising Ventures knows what founders care about. Because they aren't bankers, they are tech founders themselves. So here's your call to action. You can learn more about Arising Ventures and connect with the team at arisingventures.com slash twist. After submitting your information, you'll hear directly from the founding team within 24 hours. That's arisingventures.com slash twist. And so AI's role in all of this. Yep. people are having an interesting time uploading their blood tests and all kinds of other diagnoses or reports and then saying hey tell me about this sometimes it hallucinates sometimes it finds interesting things so clearly we're on the cusp of this could be certainly really helpful for people who don't have a health care system you mentioned like 70 of the planets doesn't have health care the way we think about it so for them it's going to be all upside totally totally um So where is this all headed?

41:06Do you trust it or not? Yeah. So I'm going to tell you something counterintuitive. No, I don't really trust AI touching consumers yet. And so not on something like this where the stakes are really high. So what we do is we use AI to give tools to our doctors. So let me give you an example. Like we've got some, we've got a cool AI that kind of, you know, goes out to the internet, looks at like what the latest guidelines and research says about a condition, and then extracts that out and kind of helps us build out an app inside the care pod. But the first thing it does is it shows that to one of our doctors here.

41:40And our doctors on our central medical team look at that and they say, okay, this is right, this is wrong. I kind of want to, you know, solidify it, test it, good. Now ship it off. So we're not one of these companies, we're not like, hey, user, just go talk to the LLM. Because, you know, right now, as you mentioned, the accuracy of these LLMs is not high enough for this use case. You know what I mean? Like, it'd be pretty scary. So we shouldn't do that. Maybe one day they'll get there. I don't know. You know, I hope so. But no, we don't do that. In fact, even when you're in the pod, anything that the pod's doing, actually, we've got a doctor or a nurse practitioner, depending on your geography, like sitting at home watching the data kind of in real time and being like, hey, you know what?

42:19Yeah, like this is the prescription I want to give. This is the diagnosis I want to give. So again, you really, really want to kind of, there's a lot of companies in healthcare that are like pure service. And there's a lot of companies that are like pure AI. And that's great. But like, actually the best of both worlds is where you want to be. So what we do is like use computers and what they're good at and use humans at what they're good at. So what success for you? What are this, like, if, how do you know you've kind of gotten this to where it needs to be? Look, my goal is I want to get healthcare to billions and billions of people.

42:50I want to be the first healthcare system that scales to a billion users. By the time we've got these care pods in the middle of India, in the middle of Rwanda, I'm gonna say, okay, we did what we set out to do. Like, that's an awesome world. And what's kind of crazy is if I told you like, hey, I wanna go get, you know, go build Kaiser in 50 countries and get them to a billion users, you'd look at me like I'm crazy. Be like, good luck. Once you kind of see this, you can kind of just be like, okay, I kind of get it. Like I've seen this path. There was an$800 iPhone. Now in the middle of India, I can buy a smartphone for 20 bucks.

43:18Like I get it, right? And so for us, it's like the path from here is incredibly well understood and well trodden, but it's hard execution. That's on us. we got to go execute how many people do you have at the company now i know you've raised a couple hundred million for this this is a vision yeah oh yeah we're uh we're not small i don't know more probably still less than a thousand but not far from it my friend we got we got a decent amount of people overall yeah incredible and then uh hundreds of thousands of thousands of members so far oh it's it's a it's a bigger number than that but uh but we don't give exact numbers but it's it's healthy it's healthy no pun intended it's just an incredible vision and obviously we're all rooting for you to make this work you're super kind super kind so you're this is primarily u.s right like you just started here u.s for now but obviously if i want to get to a billion you know as well as i can't stay in the u.s so so we're we're not gonna you know go go international immediately but we will sooner rather than later yeah i mean there's got to be some countries that have money and a large population and could see this as a very strategic thing i'm thinking like india pakistan i'm thinking about people with hundreds of millions to and and then need it because they have no solution like what's crazy is you know we complain about our health care in the u.s but like we have doctors i can show you like hundred square mile areas in in sub-saharan africa where there's no doctor around and you're like what are you talking about like that's insane you know what i mean so so yeah i get really excited to get to these places that need us most would be incredible if a government actually you know government of india pakistan i don't know pick some country with hundreds of millions of people who yeah they don't have enough doctors to go around man what a great front line of just and it's got to be a massive cost statement what what does the pod cost to make a couple hundred grand we we don't we don't share the number but it's a lot less than most people think it's it's not it's not that much like it's just tens of millions i mean it's not tens of millions no no no but you're doing the full are you doing that body scan in there i know we're not so so we're not yet doing the like call it the pernuvo cubio style we want to get there the the cost right now of that's still pretty high and we're kind of honestly just waiting for those guys to like optimize and lower their costs and as soon as they do like let's build it in you know right that would be a lot easier and the yeah the uh daniel ak is doing his back some yeah i think we're i think we do everything i need to fully confirm this but i'm pretty sure we do everything that his does his is his is much more like the kind of like us the scalable he's doing a body scan like a 360 body scan yeah i think he's just doing like what i think are just time of flight sensors but honestly i don't want to speak out of turn i could be wrong on this yeah those are those full body scans helpful or not my doctor was like uh you know you may find stuff that you don't want to check out and it just creates anxiety but you can do it if you want but so here's anxiety yeah so what you're mentioning is a real issue so here let me give you the way to think about it whenever it's like let's pretend we looked at every cell in anybody's body and said, we're going to go see if you have cancer.

46:20Well, I hate to break it to you, pretty much everyone has some cancerous cells. And so you might say, well, if I know, should I remove them? Well, maybe not. See, some of those cancerous cells are going to become something bad. Some of them are never going to cause you any harm. So actually just removing them is causing you more harm. And so the problem is that when we do these full body scans, we don't know as an industry, like in the world of health, like we don't have good priors good data to say well these are the ones you should remove these are the ones you shouldn't right like and when you don't have that data it kind of means i don't know we might be harming people and so what happens is you know there's this line in in medicine um when you go fishing you find fish like you're gonna find something and you might harm somebody so the reality is that the people doing it today are kind of actually really helpful because we're all the guinea pigs and i've done it myself like we're all the guinea pigs um for the people in the future so that we can go all collect the data and be like this is the one you should have removed this is the one you shouldn't have removed you know what i mean and that's that's kind of the reality now generally i'm an engineer so like you know i learned in i think second grade knowledge is power like you know more data can't can't hurt but it's really important that once we get that data we figure out responsibly what what do we do with it and we can't just say oh i have cancer ergo i must do something because you know what maybe you shouldn't maybe there's different grades of cancer maybe there's different levels yeah it's complicated uh it's great to have somebody with a product vision working on this and we saw it up close and personal with uber you know just you can build a global business like this you do get network efficiencies and when like you said you know there are a hundred thousand of these out here and one module gets upgraded and 10 people can visit it a day i mean you got it that means you know every day a million people can benefit from that more than 10 can visit yeah i mean now you got it exactly that's the thing hard work and amortize once you turn health care into an infrastructure problem man is it a good world yeah awesome this has been amazing i wish you continued success you're hiring i know that who do you need to work on this crazy vision and help you get over the honestly anybody who we only look for really two things wicked smart and you care to help others you care to help others so much that you put that in front of yourself if you want to live your life in service of others and you're wicked smart great you don't have either of those maybe not i think that's the thing we all learned about hiring is like there's people who are talented and then there's people who are mission driven and man if you get somebody who's just mission driven passionate about it and they're talented you got it it's just going to be great for everybody and then talented people who are not mission driven they're okay for a time and then people who are not talented are just you know just useless so you got it i love it it's like you can kind of go from i hate to say it's a brutal yeah yeah yeah go you know refine your skills yeah there are people who are mildly talented right and then that's always the problem you know like i would rather have sometimes there's people who are just like talented enough there are seven of ten and And they're just so mission driven.

49:22It's like, it's nice to have them around. It's hard. You flip that around. Somebody's really talented, but they're not mission driven. They're just a mercenary. They're going to cost chaos at some time. Yeah. Ain't that the truth. Ain't that the truth. At least they mean well. At least they mean well. What's your favorite moment working for Larry Page? Favorite moment. You got to have a great story that you can tell. He's a very iconoclastic individual. Yeah. Nobody hears from him anymore. He's kind of very quiet. Sergei's back involved. we know that there he is he's engaged nobody knows the extent to which larry page is engaged in in our last in our i have many i'm not sure i should say most but here's what i'll tell you i'll tell you the one yeah the one i'll give you a lesson from larry not a story because that'll get me in trouble i'll give you a lesson in our last in our last two minutes but okay i used to think that i was a big thinker and i don't think i was a big thinker until i really worked for for Larry.

50:19I'll tell you, Larry told me something once. He's like, you know, and I'm going to paraphrase, but he's like, it's just as hard to work on easy things as it is to work on hard things. He's like, pretend you want to build the world's best spoon. What are you going to do? You're going to raise a couple million bucks, get 20 people in a room, work on it, come out with a product a year later. Let's say you want to, I don't know, go to Mars. You're going to get, raise a couple million bucks, you know, get 20 people, come out with a product a year later. At some point you realize like your first steps are always kind of the same.

50:45You might as well work on something that's enormous, right? Like, at least like, look, what we're working on at Ford's really damn hard. Like, I don't have any pretense about it. Like, we know that our probability of getting healthcare to a billion people is a rounding error to zero. But you know what, man, we get to wake up every day and be like, yeah, but you know what, if it works, like, look at the world we live in. Yeah. And to me, that's the ball game. Yeah. I mean, I think that's the right way to look at startups is, you know, what if it works? and we saw that with uber we saw with airbnb chances are low of success what if it does work if it does work man are we happy man are we happy well listen we're rooting for you everybody uh the domain name is goforward.com a pretty good domain name goforward.com i don't know who's got forward.com but a hundred year old jewish newspaper that did not want to sell it to us i will tell you that okay respect yeah it's hard to argue it was hard to argue yeah hard to argue yeah so goforward.com it's got more it's more active go yeah that's right everybody check it out go sign up 100 bucks a month and uh this is the future of health care continued success and we'll see you all next time on this week in service bye-bye

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Today’s show:

Forward CEO Adrian Aoun joins Jason to discuss how his startup creating the first AI doctor's office (13:55)! The two dive into how Forward's AI technology operates (15:55), the challenges with modern healthcare (9:52), and how Forward plans to revolutionize the healthcare service (40:36).

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Time stamps:

(0:00) Forward CEO Adrian Aoun joins Jason.

(1:46) VC in the Middle East and the lack of diligence in the last boom and bust cycle

(8:51) .Tech Domains - Apply to get your startup featured on This Week in Startups at https://startups.tech/jason

(9:52) Challenges in healthcare and Adrian’s journey to Forward

(13:55) The Forward “Care Pod”, an AI-powered doctor's office providing scans, monitoring, blood tests and more

(15:55) Adrian demos Forward’s product

(23:44) Vanta - Get $1000 off your SOC 2 at https://vanta.com/twist

(24:50) Forward’s business model and target customer

(28:08) Figuring out how to make healthcare scalable

(30:29) Reactions to the Care Pod and thoughts on wearables

(34:51) The role of a doctor in Forward’s ecosystem

(37:28) Forward’s rollout strategy

(39:35) Arising Ventures - head to http://arisingventures.com/TWIST to learn more and connect with the team

(40:36) AI’s role in Forward’s technology

(43:27) The size of the company and plans for expansion

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Check out Forward: https://goforward.com/

Follow Adrian:

https://twitter.com/adrianaoun

https://www.linkedin.com/in/adrianaoun/

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Great 2023 interviews: Steve Huffman, Brian Chesky, Aaron Levie, Sophia Amoruso, Reid Hoffman, Frank Slootman, Billy McFarland

Check out Jason’s suite of newsletters: https://substack.com/@calacanis

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Follow Jason:

Twitter: https://twitter.com/jason

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jason

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasoncalacanis

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Follow TWiST:

Substack: https://twistartups.substack.com

Twitter: https://twitter.com/TWiStartups

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/thisweekin

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Subscribe to the Founder University Podcast: https://www.founder.university/podcast

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